February
2
To you who believe, He
is precious (1 Peter 2:7).
If you or I claim to
have more light, more revelation – God forbid that we should
ever make claims like that! – but if we should think that it is so, the proof
and the value is – do people see more of Christ in us than others? For God
never moves beyond His Son, He never moves to theories or teachings or
doctrines or things that we call revelations. He only keeps within the compass
of His living Son in manifestation.... Let us ask the Lord to create in us a
passionate ambition to express the Lord Jesus more than anything else. Not to
preach great truths, to be preachers, teachers, or anything like that as such,
but to express the Lord Jesus, that out of Himself, His own presence, His own
measure, His own nature, our opportunities for preaching, if we are going to
preach at all, will come, not because we can talk, but because it is known that
we have something of the Lord.
Do not let us live too
much in the upper stories of the house of God. The house of God is one, and it
has a basement and it has a kitchen. We do not want to always live up on the
top flat, so heavenly, so spiritual, so abstract, so high up in truth that the
practical things of the kitchen are left unattended to. What would you say if
you went into a house and were taken upstairs and shown a very glorious,
wonderfully adorned upper flat, and then somehow you managed to get down to the
kitchen and found the most awful filthy mess, out of all consistency with what
you found upstairs? You’d say, “There is something wrong here, this does not
tally.”
There is the kitchen
aspect of the spiritual life: all those practical, everyday, humdrum things
where the beauty of the Lord must be seen, just as much as up there in the
heavenlies in Christ. Do not let us live exclusively up there. We must live
down here. That is what the Word of God does. That is what aul did in his Ephesian letter. He wrote half
of it about the heavenlies, then, without breaking it into chapters, he went
straight on with his letter: “I... beseech you to walk worthily of the calling
wherewith ye were called,” and then – husbands, wives, children, parents,
masters, mistresses, servants – that is coming down to the kitchen, bringing
the glory of heaven with you. It is a very important side of things.
Preciousness must be found down here. “As in heaven, so on earth.”
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