By T. Austin-Sparks
I want to bring just three fragments of Scripture together as basic or background to what I feel the Lord wants to say to us this morning. In the prophecies of Isaiah, turn to chapter 6, verse 1: "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord." I want to take that last fragment, "I saw the Lord." Then, in the Letter of Paul to the Galatians, let us turn to chapter 1 in verses 15 and 16 and see this clause: "it pleased God, to reveal His Son in me." And then in the Book of the Acts, chapter 26, verse 19, Paul says: "Wherefore, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." I saw the Lord, it pleased God, to reveal His Son in me, and I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.
We are getting very near to the end of this time together, and those of us who have had responsibility in ministry are asking the question, "I wonder what the people have seen this week?" What have they really seen, and what are they taking away in them? What have they seen with "the seeing" about which the Bible, and especially the New Testament, has so much to say.
I am not so much concerned, dear friends, with addressing you. You know the difference between being addressed and being talked to. I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you about this matter of spiritual seeing. I am quite sure that even a small gathering like this one represents different degrees of spiritual seeing. Whether it be the early beginning of seeing, or whether it be the most advanced that a company like this may represent, this matter of spiritual seeing is the most governing thing in all life.
I think you will agree with me that although we think of our time as being perhaps more important than any other time, that is, we think that things have advanced in our time to such a degree as they never were like this before, there have always been times (if this is a time when things have become more developed and advanced), there have always been times when this matter of spiritual seeing was the only hope of the situation.
We are in a time of unspeakable confusion in Christianity. It is in the world, of course, but we are not at the moment concerned with the confusion in the world. We know about that, but in Christendom I think that there never was such a degree of confusion as there is today. There is such bewilderment and almost countless, strange, perplexing developments in Christianity. There is a defeating and defying of every attempt to either explain or cope with them - to understand what they mean.
We have found it here this week - a tremendous amount of confusion. You would not believe what comes from personal conversation. There are questions, endless questions. From the moment you begin to speak and finish your first word, people are asking questions. There are questions about this and that and another thing and all the things that are going on; and even if you have not had their questions, you know quite well that the atmosphere is full of this intrameeting, intrahearing of, intraseeing. There are these questions concerning the things that are going on amongst Christians. This is true, is it not? And the one great paramount necessity is spiritual sight. Shall I use another word, a New Testament word, spiritual discernment.
This was so at the end of the apostolic age. The Letters of John are written because of this confusion and the defeat of the Christian mind to be able to comprehend, understand, define, or explain what was going on. John is saying that there are many antichrists - many antichrists - many false spirits, and many false prophets gone into the earth. The situation was developing then as it has developed so much more in our time. John made it his business in writing his letters to try and indicate to these Christians in their perplexity, the way (the only way) in which they were going to be able to get through all this perplexity without becoming involved, defeated, and led away, led astray.
You know, multitudes of dear Christian people today are just being led away, and I think led astray, by the things that are happening, strange things. It is as in the days of David when his treacherous son, Absalom, rose up to capture the throne and the kingdom. He sat in the gate, and he resorted to all the make-up, polled his wonderful hair and I do not know what else he did to attract attention to himself; and then he put on artificial smiles and words and language, and it says that he captured, led away, the simple people - the simple, the poor simpletons of that day - with disastrous consequences. That was the method, and even Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Very often, unless you have discernment, you cannot tell the difference between various things. Surely, in these days, the great need of the Lord's people is spiritual discernment, spiritual perception, or what I am speaking of as spiritual sight.
Now let us come back to two of the passages which we have quoted. In Acts 26, the Apostle Paul is reviewing the whole of his Christian life and ministry. It only lasted thirty years - thirty years of Christian life, experience and ministry - but what a thirty years. Thirty years not exhausted in two thousand, and we have not got to the bottom of him yet. We have not exhausted him yet.
But here, he is reviewing those thirty years since the Lord apprehended him unto the day that he was standing in the presence of the Roman governors. He is reviewing the thirty years and all that he had learned, all that he had been shown and taught, all that he had come into since he came into Christ, all that the Lord had given him to give unto others. How great! How full it all was in a span of thirty years. Why, some of us have been Christians a good bit more than that, and we have not got a fragment of what he had.
But here, he is reviewing it all, and he is attributing the whole thing to one thing. What happened to him? There was a tremendous revolution that took place right there on the Damascus road, with all that opened up to him at that time, all that began to break upon him and has been breaking on him ever since, the ever growing expansion of Divine revelation. All the traveling and ministry that has been done, he is attributing it all to one thing - to one thing - "It pleased God, to reveal His Son in me." It does not say just to me: it was not just the objective thing on the road to Damascus. You think about that! "I saw a light from Heaven, above the brightness of the sun." That is the objective. But when he is speaking about it in the light of what issued from it, what began then and has continued and grown and grown, he does not say it was that "God revealed His Son to me." In essence he says, "Something was done in me. On that day, He started something which has resulted in all this" - "It pleased God, to reveal His Son in me." - When you think of what you have in the Bible throughout, you see it is the result of the same kind of thing.
What do we have from Abraham? "The God of Glory appeared unto our father Abraham." Abraham could say at the beginning of his career, his course, his history, at the beginning and with his going on and growing until his seed was as the sand of the seashore and the stars of the heavens, he could say that at the beginning of this immense thing, "I SAW THE LORD. You ask me how I came into this. You ask me for the explanation of my life, my history, my knowledge at the beginning, I SAW THE LORD."
So did Moses. It says that Moses went up into the mount and "saw the God of Israel" and the Glory; and under his feet it was as "a sapphire stone." "I saw the Lord": that accounted for Moses. "...he endured, as seeing Him Who is invisible." A tremendous life, that of Moses. The principle beneath and behind and over it all was that he "saw the Lord."
Thus, we can go on through the Old Testament and come to the Prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel begins with, "I saw visions of God." I SAW, and so everything in Ezekiel as a representative prophet is "I saw the Lord." Isaiah, you have read it: "I saw the Lord." And so you can go on because the very name " "prophets" was "seers." Seers were men who saw, the seers of Israel, the men who were the eyes of Israel. They were the SEEING for Israel, and that explains all the prophets.
Now we come over into the New Testament. For some time, the greater part of three years and perhaps a little more, there were men in company with Jesus of Nazareth, physically in company with Him. They were at His side, hearing Him, seeing Him walk, and feeling His influence, that magnetic influence of His; and yet, they were not seeing Him. See how near you can get, how much there can be; and yet, there not be a seeing of Him?!
You can go to Palestine today, if you like, you can go to Israel and see it all and not see Him (I do not mean physically). But the disciples were with Him, and they did not see Him until after His resurrection. Then there is a new note, a new excitant note, when you hear them after His resurrection meeting others of their company. "We have seen the Lord. We have seen the Lord." There is something here that was not there all that time before, and that accounted for everything afterward.
Now, you come to this Apostle Paul, and, as we have said, you explain and account for everything in that man as God's servant, as the greatest of His apostles, you account for everything on this one thing as he did, "It pleased God, to reveal His Son in me." He could say, "I saw the Lord." Everything stems from that kind of seeing, an inward revelation of Jesus Christ.
When the apostle said this, that it pleased God, to reveal His Son in him, he was implying that up to that time he was blind. Oh, yes, he had inherited what? He inherited not only nature's blindness, for by nature all men are blind in this sense that they do not have spiritual sight, but he had inherited the curse which Isaiah was commanded to pronounce upon his race. "Go to this people and say to them, seeing you shall not see, hearing you shall not understand: make this people's eyes closed, ears stopped," and Saul of Tarsus had inherited that. "Blindness," he later said, "has happened to Israel." He was a great Israelite - so blind. He was content with his blindness as was Nicodemus; and then the Lord said, "except, except, except something happen to you which gives you an entirely new constitution, with a new faculty of seeing, you shall not see - you shall not see - and you cannot see the kingdom."
That is where Saul of Tarsus was. Let the force of that come to us because we are in a conference, dear friends, where we have had a lot of Bible teaching. From day to day a lot from the Bible has been presented. A lot of doctrine - I do not know how much theology, but I suppose it may be that some of you are going away with your hands fuller of Bible knowledge than when you came.
Well, you will never, never beat Saul of Tarsus on that line. You can never catch up with him on that line, and you will never, never measure up to Nicodemus on that ground. "Art thou a teacher in Israel." A TEACHER IN ISRAEL - if you knew what it required to produce a teacher in Israel - a rabbi was in training from infancy, and how thorough-going that training was in the Old Testament. Well, you say, one had to go a long way in the religious education and a long way in the knowledge of the Bible, the Scriptures; but when you have got there with Nicodemus, Saul of Tarsus, who was a rabbi, and many others of the same class and category, when you have got there, you are still blind - blind, as we say, as bats.
What I am saying is that we must get to this business of spiritual faculty before we finish this conference. We really must face the issue that we have had a lot of Bible teaching. We have had a lot here, and perhaps you have had a lot of it for years. How much of this teaching is in the line of "God has revealed His Son in me?!" Not, "I have got Bible knowledge from the Bible or from the schools or in any way that I have read or heard", but in isolating myself from all that and from all others we should be able to say, 'I am a man, I am a woman, in whom God has revealed by Divine Act, a supernatural act, has revealed His Son in me.'
We should ask ourselves, "How do I know the Lord Jesus? How do I know the Bible? How do I know? Can I say I know perhaps through the Bible, perhaps through a messenger, or perhaps through a book?" Yes, but that was only a vehicle. "Back behind that, I know because God Himself has revealed His Son inside of me: He has done something inside. I have seen beyond - beyond the vehicle, beyond the means employed. I have seen beyond the sacred page: I seek Thee, Lord. My spirit pants for Thee. Oh, not just the written Word, but the Living Word." This is spiritual faculty. This is a wonderful, amazing thing, this spiritual faculty. It is a miracle thing, and nothing but that will have upon us the effect that it had upon this man, Paul, and these others. Nothing but that - and the test of whether it is that act of God in us is how it effects us. Nothing at all but a spiritual seeing would ever have made that revolution in Saul, Paul, that was made.
What a revolution! Think of him again. We have never yet sensed the immensity of that transaction. This man was a rabid, utter, uncompromising devotee of Judaism and of the earthly Israel and all connected therewith. He was so devoted. It tells us that he was zealous above anyone of his own age. For it, he would persecute unto far cities; and he did not stop with men, but women and children he would hurl into prison. He would stand by while that grand, that wonderful, young man, Stephen was being battered to death, broken by the rocks. He would stand by and say, "Go on. Go on. That is it. Finish that work. Have done with that man." This revolution turned that man to be just as Stephen was, to be just as utterly, uncompromisingly committed to the Jesus of Nazareth Whom he was persecuting. Paul was committed in all that he would suffer for that new position afterward. I tell you nothing, nothing on earth, in heaven, or hell would bring that about, but a revelation in him of Jesus Christ. That is what did it - that did it!
Only such a revelation to our hearts will precipitate such tremendous issues, make those revolutions, bring about such an emancipation, and set us on a new, utterly new course. It will do that. It will do that if you have really seen the Lord.
I must press on and get nearer to the happy, blessed side of this, because there is a blessed side as well as the tremendous challenge of it, but we must be challenged. You see, I know what I am talking about. I am not giving you an address this morning, but I am talking to you out of a little bit of experience of this. It is not the doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ is His Eternal Sonship. Yes, we believe in His Eternal Sonship. His incarnation, God incarnate. Yes, we believe in it, in His incarnation, in His good life, perfect and sinless life. Yes, we believe in His atoning death: He was the atonement. Yes, we believe that and so on - all the doctrine of the Person of Christ, but it is not that that I am talking about. You can have all that and not have a revolution. You can be the uttermost fundamentalist on the doctrine of the Person of Christ and not ever have this that I am talking about happen in you. That is the weakness of Christianity today - it has got the doctrine, got the fundamentals, got the teaching, got it all, and, then, what they will do for it!!
Paul had the revelation of Jesus Christ in his heart, and that was his support, his confidence, his strength. That carried him on and carried him through and carried him on to us. No, dear friends, it is not the doctrine of the Person of Christ: it is the revelation of Jesus Christ inside, inside!
It is not the doctrine of the Cross. I have got to the place where I am almost heartily sick of the doctrine of the Cross, just as such. In some places that I go, they have people talking about the Cross; and they think that I move about this world with the idea of teaching the doctrine of the Cross. Identification with Christ in death, burial, and resurrection: that is the doctrine of the Cross; and when Christ died, we died with Him. You can have the doctrine of the Cross, the teaching of the Cross, of "identification," and still be so tremendously alive yourself. You can be so touchy, so touchy, so ready to react to any provocation, any disagreement, any criticism. Have the doctrine of the Cross? No, it is not the doctrine of the Cross: it is the revelation of the Cross.
You can have all the doctrine of the Church. The Church, the Church of Ephesians, you know, the Body of Christ - "very wonderful, very fascinating, captivating, marvelous." The doctrine of the Church - people are talking about it in the churches. The churches, the churches - what are the churches if they are not fragments of the Church?! And what is the Church, the Body of Christ? The Body of Christ is a crucified Body, bearing the scars of Jesus Christ.
You can have all the doctrine of the Church: I had all that. As a member of The Bible Teachers Association, I could take a long blackboard and outline any book of the Bible that you liked, including Ephesians. I could talk about the Church and what is there in Ephesians about the Church, outline it, analyze it, and talk for an hour on it. Dear friends, I tell you quite honestly, I had never seen the Church, and I had never seen the Cross although I could analyze and present Romans so thoroughly and, to my own satisfaction, quite cleverly.
So the day came - yes, The Day came and I have to say that He revealed that in me. What happened? What happened? I shut myself in my room, and I said, "I am finished with the ministry, finished with preaching, finished with teaching. I am finished." I told the Lord that, and I said, "Lord, unless you do something in me that you have never done before, I am not going on." Something happened to bring me there. There was something in the pulpit, in the Bible class, and in the Bible school. You can guess that something terrific must have happened.
What did it result in? Well, you see, I was the minister of a church, and I was paid a salary to preach and to teach; and whether I had a message from God or not, I had to get one and get one up, and make it up every so often, week by week in order to draw my salary. The crisis came: "I will never preach again. No one will ever get me to preach again, for money or anything else unless I have got a Word from God. I resign this professional business all together and will never appear on a platform or in a pulpit unless there has come a Word from heaven into my heart." I meant it, and I took action on that ground. God also took action on that ground - from that day on, over forty-five years ago, I have never had to find the straw for the bricks, I have had what I call my "open heaven."
Am I drawing attention to myself? Forgive me, but I am trying to illustrate what I mean. There is a tremendous revolution that will be made when you "see." I saw the Cross in Romans, and it slew me. I saw the Church through Ephesians, not in Ephesians, but through Ephesians; and my canonicals went, my ministerialism went, my playing at church went. This is so revolutionary because this "seeing" brings you into another realm.
I have been asked here this very week by someone, "Tell me what books you have read in order to get all that you have got. Please put me in the way of getting those books." See where this leads: how far from the mark we can get. No, that is not spiritual sight. "It pleased God, to reveal His Son in me." - "I saw the Lord." This is spiritual seeing that will start a revolution, a revolution that will start something that is to be growing and growing and that we trust will go on growing until we enter into the fullness in His Presence and know as we have been known.
How does this spiritual sight come about? It comes by a great new birth. That is what Jesus said to Nicodemus. In essence, He said to him, "You cannot see. By a new birth from above, you will be able to see. You will get a new constitution which has in it a new faculty of sight by which you will be able to see through to the back of things, through the thing to the meaning of the thing." There is all the difference between the thing, which is the letter, and the meaning that lies behind it. That is a marvelous realm when you see through even what is written in the Bible to what lies behind in the Mind of God there; and if you do not have that, you will often be in perplexity. You will. You will get into trouble with your Bible, and you will get into trouble with the Apostle Paul.
Have you noticed how the Apostle Paul uses Old Testament Scripture? Have you? Have you noticed what the theologians and the textual critics have come up against? - "Paul was using that. He is quoting that. He is citing that. He is applying that, and in the Old Testament it did not mean that at all. It did not mean that: its connection in the Old Testament is altogether different, and yet Paul was using it like that. He is not a safe student of the Bible. You cannot rely upon Paul's interpretation of the Old Testament."
What are you going to do with this? What are you going to do with Paul and Hagar in Galatians, the allegory of Hagar - "Surely he is going on his imagination. Surely he is reading something into the Old Testament. Surely he is squeezing blood out of a stone. Did it mean that really?" - And so I could cite again and again Paul's use of the Old Testament; and if you looked at it just there as the natural, if you looked in that way by the human understanding, you would stumble. You would be in trouble with your Bible. You really would. But if you have this faculty of seeing through to a deeper than the surface meaning, to a deeper than what looks like the literal meaning, you will find God behind it.
I have said that the Lord Jesus never directly answered questions; and so Nicodemus would come to Him with questions, but the Lord never directly answered his questions. "We know that Thou art a prophet and teacher come from God. No man can do the things that you are doing except God is with him; and now I am going to talk to you about the kingdom, Jesus. I want you to explain the kingdom. You know we Jews are just wrapped up in this kingdom matter. We believe that we are the people of the kingdom: we really believe that we are the elect nation for the kingdom. The kingdom, the kingdom - that is the one thing that absorbs and captivates all of our thoughts; and now, Jesus, can you tell me something about the kingdom?"
Does the Lord sit down and say, "Let us have a study on the kingdom, shall we?" No, He does not answer it that way at all by giving a study of the Bible on the kingdom. He says, "You must be born again." But Nicodemus says, "That was not what I was asking about. I was not asking about being born: I was asking about the kingdom." Well, Jesus gets deeper than that, "You cannot see it. You will not enter it unless you are born from above."
Greeks come to see Him on one occasion. They are up in Jerusalem sight-seeing, having a look at everything that is interesting and seeing people of whom they have heard reports, and Jesus is among them. So they come, find a crowd around Him, and say to one of His disciples, "We would very much like to see Jesus. We cannot see Him out here. Will you introduce us to Him?" That one says to another one, "Here are some men who want to be introduced to Jesus. They want to see Him, and they have come along to the city in order to see Jesus. Will you do something about it?" They go to Jesus saying, "We would see Jesus." What does Jesus do? Does He say, "Oh, that is very nice of them to come and see Me. I will go out and shake hands with them and have a little word." Does He? - He says, "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified... Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth by itself alone: but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit." No, no, no, that is no answer. That is no answer to these Greeks. That is an evasion. Is it?
Are you come to see Jesus? Do you see Him crucified, buried, raised from the dead with this great multitude that sprang up out of His grave with Him - the Church? This is the only way to see Him, but that is not what they wanted or what they were seeking. You see, He did not answer questions in that direct manner. He got behind to the meaning, the deep meaning. He is behind everything.
I know that I am putting a lot into this point, but what I am saying is that by new birth the faculty of spiritual seeing is there. It may be in baby form, baby "measure," but it is there. It is a terrible tragedy, is it not, that after a little watching, parents have to come to the conclusion that their baby is blind. That is so terrible, is it not? But the normal child at birth has a faculty for seeing, even though it does not understand everything. It is not able to explain everything; but it has got the faculty, and at least it knows when mother comes into the room.
This is a mark of the new birth: the faculty is there, and, dear young people, do not think that you have got to at once come into all that I am talking about of the revelation of Jesus Christ; but you have got to have the faculty from the beginning, and, praise God, you can have the faculty. How good it is when we meet a young Christian, almost a newborn Christian, who has had a way of life, a way of behavior, even a way of dress according to the world, and after a very little time in the Christian life, he or she says, "The Lord has been telling me to change my way of behavior. Now He would not have me do this and that, and He has even told me to change my dress."
I do believe that this faculty, just the faculty, will begin to show things and to light up things. We shall see with other eyes what the Lord would have and what He would not have. It begins there very simply, and it goes on and on. A brother told us last night, and he has moved on with the Lord quite a bit, that there comes a time when even in your preaching and in your teaching if you use something that the Lord does not agree with, you know it inside. There is a pause inside. There is something inside that says about that, "No. Oh, no - oh, no. Look again where that came from."
You see what I mean? The faculty is there at the beginning, and it has got to grow and grow; and God forbid that it should ever cease growing, that we should cease to see or come to the end of our seeing. Now, you who have gone on with the Lord the longest, remember that this faculty is capable of giving you a far greater understanding of your Lord than ever all your years have brought to you. You come to the place where you say, "After all, after all, I am still a child, and there is so much to learn."
Well, I am going to close with this faculty. Have you seen like that this week? Have you seen with your head or with your heart? With your soul, your reason, your emotions or with your spirit? How have you seen? Have you seen? This conference will be a tragedy and a failure if we cannot go away in this sense, "I have seen the Lord. I have seen; maybe I have seen only some things, but I can never be the same. That seeing has challenged me, and I have got to adjust."
It must be like that, and if all this is exacting, all this is testing and somewhat disconcerting, let us remember that this is the normal Christian life. According to the Lord and according to the New Testament, this that we have been talking of is not an extraordinary Christian life. This is just how it ought to be, as natural as a normal baby seeing, one whose sight is developed and becomes coordinated, capable of understanding, growing and growing, and being governed by seeing. We will be governed by this seeing in conduct, in behavior, in choice.
You know, the devil captured that faculty at the beginning, and it says that when man "saw that the tree was good," he saw wrongly. I guess he saw the wrong tree. The devil captured his eyes, his faculty of sight, and diverted it from the Tree of Life, from Life. The result was death by blindness. Well, that is only just a flash upon it. The devil is always trying to capture the sight faculty of God's people and divert and attract, but he does not always do so by presentation of the ugly and horrible, the satanic, but by the imitation of Jesus Christ, the imitation of the truth, the imitation of the angel of light.
And how shall we escape? How shall we be safe? Only by what John speaks of: "...the Anointing which you have received... abides in you... and teacheth you of all things." He is saying that alongside of this, there are "many antichrists." How are you going to know which is Christ and which is antichrist in all these imitators? The Spirit in you "teacheth you." The faculty is there: you will have a sense that that thing, wonderful as it may seem, sweeping everything before it as it seems to be doing and having so much truth in it, that thing is a dangerous thing that is going to lead you off to a day of disillusionment and disaster. There is a warning, a warning light within, but I will finish on a positive note.
It is a wonderful thing just to have that faculty. You may read, but your reading does not finish with what you read. You see beyond what you are reading: you can see through to the beyond, and it is a wonderful thing to have that faculty. I cannot explain it. I had hoped that this morning I would have been able to use the projector to throw on the screen a diagram of what I have been saying, but that would only be the objective after all, would it not? But here is this spiritual faculty. It is so true and pierces right through every encompassing realm to our souls, and it pierces right through our souls into our spirits. The Light from heaven brings to birth this spiritual sight so that we are not governed by these outer realms, principalities and the powers in this world with its system and its standards. Also, our spiritual faculty is not governed by our soul, our own self reaction to propositions. This spiritual faculty appeals to the self, our soul: it comes right inside and is governed by the Spirit, not by our own spirits. Be careful about that- I hear people talking about being governed by their spirit. No, no - we are to be governed by the One Who is in the Spirit, the Spirit inner realm. We are to be governed by the Holy Spirit, "the Anointing... which abideth in you" most inwardly. "It pleased God, to reveal His Son" there, "in," IN, IN.
Well, I have said a lot. Do take it to heart; and if you will do just one thing, make it your business, if you are really in quest of God's fullest, to give the Lord no rest until that faculty is constituted in you, until He has revealed His Son maybe in or through His Word or in any other way He might choose. Remember that this faculty in you is the ultimate thing. You have seen, not everything, but in this you have seen the Lord.
"I saw the Lord," said Isaiah. "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision," said Paul. And if this is my last message to you here, I would pray that the results of this week should be either that we have seen, or do see, or that you will go to the Lord about this - that a truly born again, normal Christian has got a faculty that is something more than the natural faculty of apprehension.
Let us pray. We want really, Lord, to be quiet in the presence of Thy interrogation, Thy exaltation, Thy presentation. Save us from noisily dissipating. Give us a solemn quietness before Thee, not only this morning as we go; and give us hearts that are altogether consumed with this seeing, knowing, understanding of the Lord. Please do it: please, Lord, do it in us all. We ask this in the Name of Thy Son, our Lord Jesus. Amen.
