5. The Consummation of the Way

The Missionary’s Way

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. John 14:6

However far we may drift, we must always come back to these words of our Lord: “I am the way”—not a road that we leave behind us, but the way itself. Jesus Christ is the way of God, not a way that leads to God; that is why He says—“Come unto Me,” “abide in Me.” “I am . . . the truth,” not the truth about God, not a set of principles, but the truth itself. Jesus Christ is the Truth of God. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.” We can get to God as Creator in other ways, but no man can come to God as Father in any other way than by Jesus Christ (cf. Matthew 11:27). “I am . . . the life.” Jesus Christ is the Life of God as He is the Way and the Truth of God. Eternal life is not a gift from God, it is the gift of God Himself. The life imparted to me by Jesus is the life of God. “He that hath the Son hath the life”; “I am come that they might have life”; “And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee the only true God” (rv). We have to abide in the way; to be incorporated into the truth ; to be infused by the life.

1. The Conditions of the Way

Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:5)

Paul goes on to state the characteristics of the mind which we are to form, viz., the mind which was in Christ Jesus when He was on this earth, utterly self-effaced and self-emptied; not the mind of Christ when He was in glory. We receive the Spirit of Christ as a gift, but we do not receive His mind, we have to construct that, and this is done in the same way that we construct the natural mind, viz., by the way our disposition reacts when we come in contact with external things. Mind, or soul, is the way the personal spirit expresses itself in the body. We have to lose our own way of thinking and form Jesus Christ’s way. “Acquire your soul with patience.” It takes time and discipline. When we are regenerated and have the life of the Son of God in us, God engineers our circumstances in order that we may form the mind of Christ.

(a) Of Exaltation

Who, being in the form of God, counted it not a thing to be grasped to be on an equality with God. (rv mg)

Our Lord’s exaltation was His equality with the Father. In the Christian life there are stages of experience that are exalted; times when we know what it is to live in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, when we seem to be more on the mount than anywhere else. But we are not made for the mountain, we are made for the valley^††; we are made for the actual world, not for the ideal world; but to be so in communion with the ideal that we can work it out in the actual and make it real. There is no life like the life of a missionary for bringing the ideal and the actual together. “Come unto Me, . . . and I will give you rest,” said Jesus; “I will bring the ideal and the actual into one.”

(b) Of Subordination

But emptied Himself. (rv)

Our Lord annihilated Himself from His former exaltation and took “the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; . . . He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross” (rv). Our Lord by His own choice emptied Himself of all His former glory; and if we are to enter into fellowship with Him, we must deliberately go through the annihilation, not of glory, but of our right to ourselves in every shape and form. Our Lord’s former condition was one of absolute equality with God: our former condition is one of absolute independence of God. “Let him deny himself,”^†† says Jesus. It is easy to do it in theory, easy to count all things but loss. Paul says he not only counted all things but loss, he “suffered the loss of all things” that he might win Christ. It is a sad thing to only come the length of counting the loss and say, “Oh yes, I see it will cost me my right to myself, it will cost me the world, it will cost me everything; but I do not intend to experience the loss. These things sound all right in the ideal, but they hit a bit too hard in the actual.”

“And for their sakes I sanctify Myself.” The idea of sanctification as Our Lord here uses it is the separation of holiness to God’s use and for God’s purpose. Our Lord separated His holy Self to God. This idea of sanctification worked out in a missionary’s life means more than the fact that he is personally identified with his Lord, it means that he deliberately sets apart his sanctified self for God. The experience of sanctification is usually presented as a personal identification with Jesus Christ by which He is made unto us sanctification; the sanctification Our Lord refers to is the sanctification of that sanctification. Beware of the idea of sanctification that makes a man say—“Now I am sanctified I can do what I like.” If he does, he is immoral. Even Christ pleased not Himself. If our experience of sanctification ends in pious sentiment, the reason is that it has never dawned on us that we must deliberately set our sanctified selves apart for God’s use as Jesus did.

2. The Commission of the Way

As the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. (John 20:21 rv)

Our Lord’s first obedience was not to the needs of men, not to the consideration of where He would be most useful, but to the will of His Father. “Lo, I am come . . . to do Thy will, O God”^† (rv). And the first obedience of the missionary is to the will of his Lord. “Ye call Me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am”; but does it mean any more to us than the mere saying of it? “If I then, the Lord and the Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet” (rv), and we cannot do it by sentiment. It was in the hour when Jesus knew “that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto God” (rv) that He began to wash the disciples’ feet; and it is when we realise our union with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Master that we shall follow His example. It takes God Incarnate to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done. When Jesus touched things that were sordid and ordinary, He transfigured them.

(a) The Witness (John 8:18-19; 15:27)

Just as Our Lord was a witness Who satisfied His Father; so a Christian witness is one who satisfies his Master. “Ye shall be My witnesses” (rv); “not witnesses to what I can do, but witnesses who satisfy Me in any circumstances I put you in. I reckon on you for extreme service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on Mine.” Being a martyr does not necessarily involve being a witness, but being a witness will involve martyrdom.

(b) The Word (John 14:10; 17:8)

Our Lord says that His word was not His own, but His Father’s. Jesus never spoke from His right to Himself. “The words that I say unto you, I speak not from [rv] Myself.” Jesus Christ is the Word of God in His own Person; He spoke the words of God with a human tongue, and He has given to His disciples the words the Father gave to Him. The disciple has not only to speak the words of God with his tongue, but to bear the evidence of being a word of the Son, as Jesus was the Word of God. To “confess” Christ means to say, not only with the tongue, but with every bit of our life, that Jesus has come into our flesh.^†† The Son was the exact expression of the Father, and the saint must be an exact expression of the Son.

“We must work the works of Him that sent Me” (rv). According to Our Lord, the need is never the call. The need is the opportunity; the call is the call of God. The call of God is like the call of the sea, or of the mountains, or of the ice-fields; no one hears those calls who has not the nature of the sea or of the mountains or of the ice-fields in him; and no one hears the call of God who has not the nature of the Almighty in him. If we have received the nature of God then we begin slowly to discern what God wants us to do. Never have the idea that your discernment of the need is the call. The need is the opportunity which will prove whether you are worthy of the call. Because you realise a need you have no right to say—“I must go”; if you are sanctified, you cannot go unless you are sent.

3. The Conflict of the Way

If the world hateth you, ye know that it hath hated Me before it hated you. (John 15:18 rv)

Our Lord told His disciples over and over again that they must lay their account with the hatred of the world.

(a) Of Contrast (Matthew 10:16)

In this verse Our Lord gives the vivid contrast of sheep and wolves, of doves and serpents, and He uses the contrast in a particular connection, viz., that of proclaiming His Gospel.

(b) Of Contumely (Matthew 10:17-20)

If these verses are unfamiliar to us to-day, it is because we are out of the centre of identification with Our Lord’s purposes, and are seeking to bring Him into our enterprises; but as surely as we are in fellowship with Him, we shall find the terrible and unpalatable truth expressed in these verses to be a very actual portion.

The courage Our Lord alludes to here is that born in a heart in vivid relationship to Himself, compelling the body to perform the will of God even at the cost of death. Our Lord makes little of physical death, but He makes much of moral and spiritual death.

4. The Consolations of the Way

I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you. (John 14:18 rv)

The consolations of the ways are not the sympathies of human sensibilities, but the great sustainings of the personal Holy Ghost.

(a) Of Love (John 17:26)

The first mighty name for the consolations of the way is love—“that the love wherewith Thou lovedst Me may be in them” (rv). It is the Holy Ghost Who brings this consolation, He sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts, the nature of God as exhibited in Jesus, with its impenetrable reserves. No human being can pump up what is not there. The consolation of love is not that of exquisite human understanding, it is the real nature of God holding the individual life in effectual rectitude and effectual communion in the face of anything that may ever come.

(b) Of Joy (John 15:11)

Joy is not happiness, joy is the result of the perfect fulfilment of the purpose of the life. We never want praise if we have done perfectly what we ought to do; we only want praise if we are not sure whether we have done well. Jesus did not want praise; He did not need it, and He says “that My joy may be in you” (rv). The joy of Jesus Christ was in the absolute self-surrender and self-sacrifice of Himself to His Father, the joy of doing what the Father sent Him to do—“I delight to do Thy will,” and that is the joy He prays may be in His disciples. It is not a question of trying to work as Jesus did, but of having the personal presence of the Holy Ghost Who works in us the nature of Jesus. One of the consolations of the way is the fathomless joy of the Holy Ghost manifesting itself in us as it did in the Son of God in the days of His flesh.

The peace Jesus refers to here is not the peace of a conscience at rest, but the peace that characterised His own life. “My peace I give unto you.” His peace is a direct gift through the personal presence of the Holy Ghost.

5. The Consummation of the Way

We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him. (John 14:23)

Jesus says that the relationship between the Father and the Son is to be the relationship between the Father and the Son and the sanctified soul.

(a) Oneness (John 17:22)

“That they may be one, even as We are one.” Are we as close to Jesus Christ as that? God will not leave us alone until we are. There is one prayer that God must answer, and that is the prayer of Jesus.

(b) Sovereignty (Matthew 19:28-29)

Peter in his Epistle says that we are to be “a royal priesthood.” The sovereignty alluded to by Peter, and by Our Lord in these verses, is ultimately to be a literal sovereignty, as well as a spiritual sovereignty.

“The glory which Thou hast given Me I have given unto them” (rv). What was the glory that Jesus had when He was Son of Man? It was not an external glory; Jesus effaced the Godhead in Himself so effectually that men without the Spirit of God despised Him. His glory was the glory of actual holiness, and that is the glory He says He gives to the saint. The glory of the saint is the glory of actual holiness manifested in actual life here and now. There is a glory which the saint is only to behold, “that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me” (John 17:24). What is that glory? “The glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” That glory we are not to share, but to behold. The word “glory” here must be understood in the same sense as the word “form” in Philippians 2:6. It refers to the absolute relation of Deity which the Son of God had before He became Incarnate.

The consummation of the missionary’s way is centred in John 14:23. “We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him”—the Triune God abiding with the saint.^†††

↑ Back to top