What is Christianity?
By J. B. Stoney. 1814-1897
Divine Resources Remain For Faith.
I have read these verses because they set forth the power which remains with us. These two verses are in as much force today as they ever were. The resources from God are the same. It has been said that John’s gospel was written after the ruin which we find in 2 Timothy; and this is very interesting, because it shows how, notwithstanding the ruin, God remains; that His Spirit remains here on earth, not in the same demonstration, but in the same power. These two verses which I have read, remain in all their force and efficacy. I do not say they are appropriated. The sun shines, but a man who is asleep is unconscious of its light. The Holy Spirit is on earth, and in the same power today as ever He was; and He is here for this double purpose: one, to comfort each believer personally (chapter 14: 26); the other, to “testify of me” (chapter 15: 26). You cannot separate these two any more than you can separate light and heat from the sun; they come from the same source. It is important to see that they go together. The Holy Spirit is here in these two distinct ways. We have gone over it often enough in this place, but I just call attention to it again.
I should like briefly to sketch in a measure what Christianity is. I know I am undertaking a very large subject, but I do not intend to dwell on it much, only to set forth certain things in connection with these two verses. Properly, Christianity is established by the descent of the Holy Spirit. It begins consequent on the resurrection of Christ. When He rose He said, “Peace be unto you”. That is our side; all is cleared. On the first day of the week a new order of things begins, but it is not brought into efficacy till the descent of the Holy Spirit. When our Lord rose, He breathed on His disciples and said, “Receive ye Holy Spirit”. When He ascended, the Spirit was sent down in this double way; and what I would press now is that the resources of God are on the earth during the absence of Christ; and that for faith nothing else is required, nothing from man. What you have really to learn is that there is nothing for you from man, and nothing from the place where man is. I know the practical difficulty of learning it, but learn it you must, that there is nothing for you from the place where you are. The Lord tells them in John 13, If you are not clean, you cannot have part with me; that is, in the place where He was going. He goes to prepare a place. We are in the place where Christ was rejected; we are connected with the man that rejected Him, but we are to be morally apart from both. That is the first great point of Christianity. I am apart from the scene in which I am, and apart from the man in it, but I have another place and another Man. You must keep the two together, the Man and the place. You will see presently, I trust, how the Man will command your attention, because Christ is the testimony, not the place.
I would not speak of this if I did not understand something of it. No man ought to speak of what he has not touched on himself in exercise of soul, because, if he does, he is propounding an unreality as to himself. It may be that one has touched it very faintly, for who touches it deeply? but I trust I can say that, though found on the earth, yet in some measure I am able to say, I do not belong to this place, or to the man that is here; I belong to the place where Christ is, and to the Man who is there.
If we do not know Him as He was, the Man down here, we shall never be the expression of Him as the Man up there. I think we make a mistake sometimes in making Christianity too easy for people. The Lord turns and says unto those that followed Him, If you do not forsake all that you have you cannot be My disciple (Luke 14:33). He says, as it were, I am not going to offer you a bed of roses. I know very well the reluctance that is in the heart to accept it, but if we do not accept the path of His rejection here, we have not the sense of what the Comforter is to us in His absence. The Holy Spirit is here, the Comforter, in the absence of Christ, and He has come from heaven where Christ is. Christ was rejected here, the Holy Spirit is sent here, and He comes in these two aspects; one, to sustain us personally, the other to testify of Christ.
Before I go into that, I must show how the sense of this has been lost to the church. It is ever good to faith. Our danger is knowledge without faith; I see it on every hand. Knowledge is assumed to be faith. In paradise God was first distrusted, and the point of departure is the point of recovery. Everything now is to faith. If I turn to the Acts of the Apostles what do I find? The first failure that came in was the non-recognition of the Holy Spirit in the assembly, in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, who, seeking credit for a devotedness that they were not entitled to, lied to the Holy Spirit. Do we not see this now? It is one of the crying sins among us. It was exposed in a minute then, because it was a day of power; now, perhaps twenty years may elapse before it is condemned.
The next thing, which has become an ecclesiastical crime, we see in Simon Magus, who thought to obtain spiritual eminence by money, that is, human means. Do we see nothing of that now? Paul presses the importance of the Old Testament scriptures on Timothy. Someone asked me lately, Why did Paul press upon Timothy the Old Testament? Because I learn there, what man, such as I am, is; I learn there also, what God is in His ways; I see traces of my Lord in His servants. Every bit of good in any one is Christ. Every man, when he was right, was a figure in his measure of what Christ was on earth. In the end Jesus Christ comes out as the full expression of what God delights in. Christendom sets up man on earth in place of the Holy Spirit; and for power they seek the support of the world. Romanism sets up a man and calls him the vicar of Christ. You say: That is very bad! but have you no touch of it in yourself? Is there no ignoring of the Holy Spirit in you? You know very little of yourself if you do not know that there is. It is true that man set up in a religious position by the power of the world, is Christendom; but you will be affected by this leaven unless you are preserved from it. The church generally has given up, has lost faith; and as to ourselves, I think faith is very weak amongst us. We know much of the word of Scripture, and we take that for faith; but that is not faith. Do you know what faith is? Faith is you do not seek anything but God. You are looking entirely out of this scene. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith”. In faith you are outside everything here. I will show you examples of it presently.
The Holy Spirit is invisible. He could only be given to the church. He is only visible to faith. We are where He is. Christ when here was God manifest in the flesh; and now He has sent the Holy Spirit, who is invisible except to faith. We have to face this terrible opposition here in the place where Christ was rejected. I often wonder at myself, at the hardness of my own heart, that I have not more the moral sense of His rejection. If a relative or friend were badly treated here, should we not resent it? The Lord was crucified and slain here by my fellow-men; by man, by myself as to nature; and if a person offers me a little distinction here, I accept it, and think it an honour! Why, it is a disgrace to me! How little we have a moral sense of Christ’s rejection! Man broke down in the garden of Eden because he lost faith in God. He was influenced by what he saw. Eve “saw that the tree was good for food”. Take care of what you see! Beware of your natural eyes. “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity”, Psalm 119:37. Faith does not look for support; it endures, “seeing him who is invisible”.
I think we do not really see that everything now must be by faith; whatever it may be, it is “according to your faith, be it unto you”. If you minister, you must minister according to your faith. You have to do with the Lord; you cannot see anything, no evidence. Faith is not providence. If that were the case, Paul was all wrong in the shipwreck (Acts 27), he besought them not to sail from Crete. But the south wind blew softly; providence was against his counsel, and they thought they had gained their point. But what happened? Not long after a mighty wind arose; the tempest came upon them, confirming Paul’s counsel. Faith is not being led by providence. Do not misunderstand me: I do not make little of providence. If I am going right, providence may help me, but I am not to be guided by providence. We are, as to temporal things, to be content with such things as we have. The prophet was not to despise the little the widow had, one pot of oil; she was to go on faith and to borrow empty vessels not a few; 2 Kings 4. When the Lord fed the multitude, He did not despise the five loaves and two fishes; He went on with them, and by divine power made them enough. To the human mind there was not enough; but God is enough. That is faith. Faith looks outside everything here, and only sees God. I do not know what to compare it to, except to a sailor in a storm. If he can see the sun he is all right; he can take the bearings of the ship. It is said of Moses, “he endured, as seeing him who is invisible”. That shows you what faith is in its character.
Faith has three characteristics. Firstly, what is outward is that it obliges me to take a new course. Secondly, it is always accompanied with exercise of soul; that is inward. If you lose it for a moment you are like a bird with a wounded wing, you are worse off than if you never had it. The third characteristic is you do a work. That is the “work of faith with power”. There is always exercise with faith. Take the case of Abraham, the “father of the faithful”. He believes God, he sees the skies, the stars; God says to him, “So shall thy seed be”. “And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness”, Genesis 15:6. Paul quotes that, and says he was justified by faith. Forty years after was, as James states, the work of faith; he goes up mount Moriah. God tells him to go up, and with his own hands to put out the light, to cut off the one whom he had received from God, and in whom all the blessing was to be. That is the exercise of faith. God says it: God told me that this son of mine was to be the parent of all; He tells me now I am to put him to death. I will! I have faith in Him. Any one who understands faith can understand what an exercise that was. How he was cast upon God, who was able to raise him from the dead, from whence also he received him in a figure! Three days Abraham was going up mount Moriah. Have you gone up that road? It is exercise that forms you; the exercise of faith is divine formation.
One remarkable characteristic of faith is that it never grows old. Like Caleb, who could say, “I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me”. You can thus ascertain how far you have walked in faith. The measure of your strength is the strait you have passed through with God, and the faith remains. David is another example of this. He could say, “Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them”. That is the exercise of faith. He encounters the giant, and slays him. That is the work of faith. Faith has, as I said, a new course, and an inward exercise which no one knows anything about but the one who has it. There must be exercise. It may be a very long one, like Noah’s. He went on for 120 years; whatever the scoffers might say, he went on day by day, counting on God. What was the end? What scripture calls “the work of faith with power”. It is a wonderful time for the soul when one counts upon God for anything. Everything must be in keeping with it. It must be a work and walk of faith now. If you have means, take care how you use them. I see our blessed Lord in this world, the dependent Man. He had the means; He could turn a stone into bread, but He would not because He was dependent; He counted upon God. We break down when we do not count on Him.
I return now to the two verses that I read in order to see the difference between the two. In chapter 14: 26 the Holy Spirit unfolds to me Christ when on earth. This I get in the gospels. Commentators say the miracles are recorded to prove Christ’s divinity. No one here would accept that. The gospels were written after the Holy Spirit came down, to set forth what Christ was upon the earth; a Man according to God’s pleasure from the very lowest point, the babe in the manger, up to the mount in glory, and from the glory to the cross. I could not now go into the details of His blessed path, but the declaration of it is that He had while on earth a Father in heaven. He had not a penny in His possession, but He had a Father in heaven, and He was sent by the Father. It is not as people pray to their heavenly Father and ask Him for this or that favour; the great testimony of Christ was that He had a Father, and that made Him superior to all the distressful circumstances He was in. He slept in the storm, He was in divine tranquility and superiority. He never altered circumstances for Himself. He went into death. The more we are in faith the less does God alter our circumstances; He alters us by the power of His grace. Christ on earth declares the Father in heaven. He shows how He can make you superior to every circumstance here. The Lord Himself walked in divine superiority to every circumstance in which He was found here. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head”. Have you learned Christ as the One who can maintain you by the Holy Spirit in the like circumstances in which He was Himself? When the disciples left Him alone, and that in the most trying moment of all, He said, “I am not alone, because the Father is with me”. Thus He could say, “I have declared unto them thy name”.
One might say, I do not see miracles now, I do not see a lame man walk. I reply, I see a greater miracle, I see a lame man so superior to his lameness because of grace, that he comes earlier to the meetings than one who has two legs. Grace makes him superior to the infirmity. Paul says, “that the power of Christ may rest upon me”. Believe me, you will never be descriptive of the glorified Man, Christ in heaven, unless you have learned Christ in humiliation here. Why? Because learning Him as He was here makes you morally superior to yourself. He was in our circumstances; He declared how the Father sustained Him in the circumstances so as to be morally superior to them. Look at Him in the storm. Asleep! That was as much divine power as when He arose and rebuked the wind. We talk of the wonderful mercy when God removed the storm, or trouble. It is mercy; but when you are seeking to be relieved, you are not seeking for the power of Christ as He was on earth. When You are faithful you will find that the Lord does not remove the pressure from off you until you are asleep in it, until you are able to take it quietly. You learn His grace first, and then His mercy. Look at Paul and Silas at Philippi, singing praises. Look at Peter asleep in the prison. People seem to forget Deuteronomy 8, “thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee”. You remember the mercies, you forget the trying of your faith. You are troubled and have no faith; then you cry to Him and He relieves you, for He is full of tender mercy. You may wake Him as the disciples did, when they cry, “Lord save us”, but then you lose His power which would have sustained you in the trial.
The first great thing I have to learn is, “whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you”. By the Holy Spirit I make acquaintance with that blessed One as He was here upon the earth; how He was sustained by the Father; how He walked in moral superiority to the circumstances He was found in: and there was not a pressure on the human family that He did not remove. He would place you, as He did Matthew (see Mark 2:14), morally superior to every power or influence which would debar you from following Him. You may think that is exactly what you want. Alas! we do not want it. We are glad to be relieved of physical infirmity, but we do not seek the grace that makes us morally superior to the trial. In Mark 5 man as to his whole state is relieved. The unclean spirit is cast out by Christ’s word. The woman who had spent all that she had and was nothing better, is cured by touching Him in faith. The girl is raised from death into life.
I turn now to chapter 15: 26: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me”. Here the Holy Spirit is sent by the Lord. In chapter 14 He is sent by the Father. Now we come to the battle-field. A soldier is preparing for the battle-field in the barracks. Chapter 14: 26 prepares us for chapter 15: 26. In the former, you have learned a Person who was here on earth, who has taught you to be superior to things here with relation to yourself because you have a Father in heaven. That is what I call the barracks; that is where you learn to be a soldier. You must be settled about yourself before you can be a witness of Christ in heaven. No man is a soldier, unless in name, who has not learned to be one. When you go to the battle you come from the barracks. In chapter 14: 26 the Comforter is come, sent of the Father. In chapter 15: 26 the same Person the same Comforter comes, sent by Christ. Thus He comes in a two-fold way. In chapter 15 you come to the battle-field. There is a power here on the earth to testify of the Man in heaven, that same Man whom you have known as on the earth; you have learned Him as He was here on earth; He has taught you His path, how He was here, the full expression of God’s pleasure, and now the Holy Spirit is sent to testify of Him in glory, and we are here now to be descriptive of this exalted Man, the Lord of glory.
Now I turn to Acts 7 to show the nature of the testimony. In the end of that chapter, verse 55, a new action of the Spirit takes place. “He, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God and Jesus”. You have Stephen there as a man of faith; he is on the earth; he sees the Man in heaven by the Holy Spirit who is here. His operation is now to lead Stephen up to the place where Christ is. He sees the glory of God and Jesus. Then he turns round and tells the religious world: “I see .. . the Son of man standing on the right hand of God”. Everything is altered; everything is come out now in a new way; a new order of things. The Man in heaven, the One at the right hand of God, is the centre and power of everything for God. Stephen declares to the Jewish elders what he sees. Instead of receiving it with acclamation they cast him out and stone him. Nothing is so offensive to the religious man as the heavenly Man. Nothing so intolerable to a religious man, because if there be a Man in heaven he is out of court, eclipsed. It was not a wicked mob who killed Stephen; no; it was the elite of the Jewish nation; they murdered Stephen. God shows the infinitude of His grace to one of the witnesses who kept the raiment of them that slew him; and now both the gospel and the church come out together in chapter 9. They come out by the same person. The light of the glory of Christ shines out from heaven, and turns Saul from darkness to light; he hears the voice of the Son of God, who now declares that the saints on the earth are Himself: “Why persecutest thou me?” He says.
The body of the exalted Man is down here on earth, to be descriptive of Him where He was rejected. The members of the body of Christ are to be found here in His power, descriptive of Him as exalted to God’s right hand. I repeat, you must learn first how that Blessed One was morally superior to everything here. You must learn this for yourselves before you can be witnesses of Him in glory.
The Lord grant that each heart may know Christ as He was on the earth, and as taught by the same Spirit may be able to testify of Him here as the exalted Man in heaven.
This is an excerpt from http://www.mcclean.me.uk/mse/jbs/jbs.htm volume 2. Unfortunately there was no contact point to acquire permission, but no copyright either so I trust it is okay to reproduce it.