Discipline in the School of God:
Jeremiah and Paul – and other
Ministry by J. B. Stoney
– Part Four

• "in the house of the Lord, in the presence of the priests and of all the people, saying, Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two full years will I bring again into this place all the vessels of the Lord's house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place, and carried them to Babylon: and I will bring again to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah, with all the captives of Judah, that went into Babylon, saith the Lord: for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon".

It is a most trying, anxious moment, when a servant is opposed by a false teacher who commands the sympathies of the people, who with arrogant assumption panders to their carnal hopes,

• so that the servant of the Lord is reduced to the most isolated position toward those whom he would serve in his testimony.

From verse 6 to verse 9 Jeremiah states the test of a true prophet of peace. But when Hananiah took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah's neck, and brake it, and said in presence of all the people,

• "Thus saith the Lord; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years;"
  • then the prophet Jeremiah went his way. It is always wise to accept the lowest place, even in the Lord's service, and to be as the one beaten, just as Jeremiah here retires in silence.

But subsequently, "the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah, saying, Go and tell Hananiah, saying, Thus saith the Lord, Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron".

• "Hear now, Hananiah; The Lord hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will cast thee from off the face of the earth: this year thou shalt die, because thou hast taught rebellion against the Lord".

• Thus it is when we retire in self-abasement, and as reduced by man, then the Lord makes known His mind to us, and the opposer is confounded.
  • "So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month".

In chapter 29 we have, "the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem unto the residue of the elders which were carried away captives, and to the priests, and to the prophets, and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon – after that Jeconiah the king, and the queen, and the chamberlains the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, and the carpenters, and the smiths, were departed from Jerusalem".

• We have the word of the Lord to all those of the captivity whom He had sent from Jerusalem to Babylon, and also verses 24-32, what the Lord of hosts spake and would do to Shemaiah, the Nehelamite,
  • "because he hath taught rebellion against the Lord".

In chapter 30 Jeremiah is directed by the Lord God of Israel,

• "Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book".

In chapter 32, Jeremiah being shut up by Zedekiah in the court of the prison, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying,

• "Behold, Hanameel, the son of Shallum thine uncle, shall come unto thee, saying, Buy thee my field that is in Anathoth: for the right of redemption is thine to buy it".

In buying this field, when he was assured that all was passing away into the hands of the king of Babylon, Jeremiah believed God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.

• He against hope believed in hope – Romans 4: 17-18 – and could thus in a moment of the greatest depression and hopelessness reckon with the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel.
  • "Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land".

In a prison, deprived of liberty by man's coercion, sensible of terrible ruin, impending and inevitable, he is led by the word of God to see in a future day all the present misery ended and a full blessed restitution of all things.

• He insists on the present ruin as inevitable, but he is called to see in faith the day of restoration.

Now before Jeremiah can rise to simple faith and find enjoyment in the future thus presented to him, he has to pray to the Lord concerning it. Verses 17-25.

• It is very important to note this, that the mere communication of the word, however distinctly conveyed or received, is not enough.

• The servant requires to wait on God about it, as Jeremiah does from verses 16 to 25. Then in verse 26, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah,
  • "Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh, is there anything too hard for me?"

• The Lord explains His purposes to him, even the present utter destruction of Jerusalem, but also the future restoration of His people.
  • "Behold, I will gather them out of all countries, whither I have driven them in mine anger, and in my fury and in great wrath;

    "and I will bring them again into this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God".

• Then, in verse 41, we read,
  • "Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul".

The servant has to press inevitable uncompromising destruction, where there is self-reliance, self-dependence, and the assumption of being able to retain by human tenacity the position that has been given of God.

• Then there must be unsparing judgment, but on the other hand, there will be a full restoration, a complete restitution out of the wreck.

In chapter 34, when the king of Babylon and all his army have fought against Jerusalem, Jeremiah is sent to say to king Zedekiah, that the city shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, but that his life should be preserved.

It is worthy of note that the servant is taught to temper judgment with mercy.

It is a most serious thing and entails the severest judgment when we sin against our convictions. This is just what Zedekiah now fell into. The king had made a covenant with all the people to enforce the divine rule, and keep the sabbatical year,

• "That every man should let his man-servant, and every man his maid-servant, an Hebrew or an Hebrewess, go free, that none should serve himself of them, of a Jew his brother".

• And all the people at first consented and obeyed, admitting the right and truth of it, but afterwards they regretted the sacrifice which it entailed, and resumed possession of the servants that they had let go free.

• Thus their immediate acts justify the heavy retribution which now Jeremiah pronounces upon them as detailed in the end of this chapter.

Chapter 35. Jeremiah learns from the fidelity of the Rechabites to the commandment of their father, how children can be faithful to their father in nature, and yet the children of Israel have not hearkened to their God. Faithfulness to any rightful claim entails blessing here; hence

• "Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever".

Chapter 36. We are recalled to what occurred some eighteen years previously to chapter 34. This word then came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,

• "Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee … It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them, that they may return every man from his evil way".

It is very interesting to note the reason, and occasions, for committing to writing the oral communications of the prophets.

• We gather from Moses, in Deuteronomy 32, that the reason for writing this song, and teaching it to the children of Israel, putting it into their mouths, was,
  • "that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel"

• – a record of God's patient and faithful care of His people.

• In Jeremiah it is to awaken the people.

• In Luke it is to set forth a declaration that
  • "Thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed".

  • With John it is, "These things are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, ye might have life through his name;"

  • or as in his epistle, "That ye may know that ye have eternal life, who believe on the name of the Son of God".

• With Paul it is to correct or check errors, or to communicate truth, as to Ephesus, when he was shut up in prison.

• Now this book was burnt by the king, when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, verses 22-26.
  • "Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, Thus saith the Lord, Thou hast burned this roll …

    "Therefore thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim king of Judah; He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David …". See verses 30-32.

Chapter 37. Zedekiah, Josiah's son, succeeds Coniah, the son of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, made king in the land of Judah; but neither he, nor his servants, nor the people of the land, did hearken unto the words of the Lord which He spake by the prophet Jeremiah.

The king sends to Jeremiah, saying,

• "Pray now unto the Lord our God for us".

• Pharaoh's army had come out of Egypt, and the Chaldeans that besieged Jerusalem, having heard tidings of them, had departed from Jerusalem.
  • "Then came the word of the Lord unto the prophet Jeremiah, saying, Thus saith the Lord, Deceive not yourselves, saying, The Chaldeans shall surely depart from us: for they shall not depart.

    "For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Chaldeans, yet should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city with fire".

Now in verse 11 a very remarkable thing occurs, that when the army of the Chaldeans was broken up from Jerusalem, for fear of Pharaoh's army, then Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem to go into the land of Benjamin, to slip away [margin] thence in the midst of the people.

• Because of his faith in the word of the Lord which he had announced, he fears to stay in the city, but this is misunderstood by the princes of the people, who, crediting the charge of the captain of the ward that he was falling away to the Chaldeans, were wroth with Jeremiah, and smote him and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan the scribe.

The servant exposes himself to the enemy when he seeks his own safety. Jeremiah was better off when he continued at his post than when he retired for security. He remained in the dungeon many days;

• "Then Zedekiah the king sent, and took him out, and asked him secretly in his house, and said, Is there any word from the Lord?"

When there is any conscience, there may be a craving to hear the word of the Lord, though there is not purpose of heart to obey it, yet there is disquietude of heart because of it.

• Then, when Jeremiah entreats not to return to Jonathan's house, lest he die there, Zedekiah the king commanded that they should
  • "commit Jeremiah into the court of the prison, and that they should give him daily a piece of bread out of the bakers' street, until all the bread in the city were spent. Thus Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison".

Chapter 38. Jeremiah had not a long reprieve, for the princes instigated the king against him that he should be put to death. And the king yielding,

• "Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into a dungeon. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire".

• Jeremiah in a double way is taught how vain is the help of man.

1. His own efforts to escape had exposed him to the calumny of his enemies,

2. and now the king, who had just listened to his words, and at his request had mitigated his imprisonment, allows him at the word of the princes to be consigned to a terrible dungeon.

• Here the Lord interferes for him through the Ethiopian Ebed-melech. It is most blessed and encouraging to mark the unexpected instruments which are used of the Lord for the help and succour of His servants in trial.

• Jeremiah is to all human appearances without any prospect before him but a painful lingering death, when Ebed-melech begs the king to permit him to rescue the prophet.

• This new suffering, so peculiarly afflicting to an Israelite, whose hopes were so connected with the earth, prepares Jeremiah for the great services that are now before him.

• He enters upon them as one risen from the dead, or at least as one who had come to the termination of everything of man's side.
  • "He abode in the court of the prison until the day that Jerusalem was taken".

Chapter 39: 2. "In the eleventh year of Zedekiah the city was broken up".

• After years of patience and personal suffering the words of Jeremiah are fulfilled. Nebuchadrezzar now befriends him.
  • The king of Babylon "gave charge concerning Jeremiah to Nebuzar-adan the captain of the guard, saying, Take him, and look well to him, and do him no harm; but do unto him even as he shall say unto thee", verses 11-12.

• So the captain of the guard and all the princes sent and took Jeremiah out of the court of the prison, and committed him unto Gedaliah, that he should carry him home: so he dwelt among the people. See also verses 15-18.

Chapter 40. He is loosed from his chains and let go. Then went Jeremiah unto Gedaliah to Mizpah, and dwelt with him among the people that were left in the land.

• He connects himself with the poor remnant left in the land under the governor the king of Babylon set over the cities of Judah.

Chapter 41. A new and great experience is now entered on by Jeremiah. He had connected himself with the remnant left in the land, but in consequence of the treachery of Ishmael, who slew all the Jews that were with him and the Chaldeans, and all the remnant of the people who had been recovered from Ishmael, departed, verse 17, and dwelt in the habitation of Chimham to go to enter into Egypt, because they were afraid of the Chaldeans.

• Then they come to Jeremiah, chapter 42: 2, and say,
  • "Let, we beseech thee, our supplication be accepted before thee, and pray for us unto the Lord thy God, even for all this remnant, that he may shew us the way wherein we may walk, and the thing that we may do".

    Jeremiah replies, "I will pray unto the Lord your God according to your words; and whatsoever thing the Lord shall answer you, I will declare unto you".

• After ten days the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, and he tells them,
  • "If ye will still abide in this land, then I will build you, and plant you. Be not afraid of the king of Babylon, for I am with you to save you, and to deliver you from his hand.

    "But if ye will say No; but we will go into the land of Egypt, where we shall see no war, nor have hunger for bread, etc. Then the sword, which ye feared, shall overtake you, and there ye shall die".

• The Lord's mind is thus declared to them by Jeremiah, but the result is that they refuse to accept it, as they had undertaken to do, verses 5-6, and it is thus proved that they had
  • "dissembled in their hearts",

• when they had asked Jeremiah to inquire of the Lord for them. Verse 20.
  • The "proud men" reply, "Thou speakest falsely".

• So they came into the land of Egypt, for they obeyed not the voice of the Lord; chapter 43. Then came the word of the Lord to Jeremiah,
  • "Take great stones in thine hand, and hide them in the clay in the brick-kiln, which is at the entry of Pharaoh's house in Tahpanhes, in the sight of the men of Judah; and say unto them,

    "Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will send and take Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will set his throne upon these stones that I have hid and he shall spread his royal pavilion over them".

The attempt of unbelief to escape the difficulties in the path of obedience always entails the same kind of difficulty in an aggravated form.

• As it was fear of Nebuchadnezzar induced them to disobey the voice of the Lord, and go down into Egypt, so should Nebuchadnezzar reach them there, and array himself with the land of Egypt, as a shepherd putteth on his garment.

Chapter 44. Jeremiah is instructed as to the judgment which would fall on the remnant that in heart cling to Egypt.

• It is not easy to measure the sorrow and disappointment of a servant like Jeremiah, who had for many years watched over and warned the people of God of coming judgment, now to find himself removed from Jerusalem and associated in Egypt with the once happy remnant,
  • and there to have to announce to them a greater judgment than even at Jerusalem.

• A most painful experience for the servant to live long enough to see the break-down of the work he had so earnestly sought to build up.

• Thus Stephen saw the break-up of Israel. Paul the break-up of the church, as the one faithful company for Christ on earth.

The effect on Baruch we see in the next chapter [45]: when he had written this book at the mouth of Jeremiah he had said,

• "Woe is me now! for the Lord hath added grief to my sorrow; I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest".

• Now the words which Jeremiah had spake to Baruch set forth the mind in which he must walk himself.
  • "Thus shalt thou say unto him, The Lord saith thus; Behold, that which I have built will I break down, and that which I have planted I will pluck up, even this whole land.

    "And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek not: for, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh, saith the Lord; but thy life will I give thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest".

And hence his testimony closes with prophetic notices of the judgment of Egypt, the Philistines, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, Hazor, Elam, and Babylon

• – save that afterwards shall Egypt be inhabited as in the days of old, saith the Lord, and He will bring again the captivity of Moab, in the latter days, and in the latter days will bring again the captivity of Elam, saith the Lord.

Chapters 50 and 51 is the word that the Lord spake against Babylon, and against the land of the Chaldeans by Jeremiah the prophet. And so Jeremiah wrote in a book all the evil that should come upon Babylon.

• "And Jeremiah said to Seraiah, When thou comest to Babylon, and shalt see, and shalt read all these words; then shalt thou say, O Lord, thou hast spoken against this place, to cut it off, that none shall remain in it, neither man nor beast, but that it shall be desolate for ever.

  "And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of the Euphrates: and thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the judgment that I will bring upon her: and they shall be weary"; chapter 51: 60-64.

"Thus far are the words of Jeremiah". A very fitting close to his long and faithful testimony.

Jer. 1. Jeremiah is established in his office, to which he had been sanctified from his birth as prophet to the nations, Israel having been set in the midst of the Gentiles as the direct centre of God's government in the earth.

• He was in great fear, but was assured of God's presence. He saw a rod of an almond tree – which is the first tree to blossom – signifying that God would hasten to perform what He said. The prophet also saw a seething pot, and its face towards the north, answering to Chaldea.

Jer. 2 — Jer.6. This section is an appeal to Jerusalem, with exhortations to repentance, and warnings as to what had befallen Israel. It was given in the days of Josiah, when there had been a reformation, but they had not turned to God with the whole heart: backsliding Israel had justified herself more than treacherous Judah. Jer. 3: 6, 11.

Jer. 7 — Jer. 10. This section is respecting the temple. The people boasted of possessing the temple, but there was insincerity and idolatry. Touching exhortations are made, and judgements declared.

Jer. 11 — Jer.12. The responsibility of the people is pressed: they had entered into covenant with God, yet they had gone into idolatry, so that the Lord asks,

• "What hath my beloved" [people] "to do in mine house?"

• Judgement must follow; but here and there future blessings are spoken of. There is deep grief that judgements are needed. Jer. 12: 14 shows the prophet's office against the nations — "mine evil neighbours".

Jer. 13. The destruction of the pride of Jerusalem is foretold under the figure of a marred girdle which Jeremiah had buried, the great sorrow being that though as a girdle cleaves to the loins of a man, the Lord had caused all Israel to cleave to Him for His glory, yet they had left Him: compare Luke 19: 41

• [Some objectors consider it very improbable that Jeremiah would be told to go from Jerusalem to the Euphrates to hide the girdle, and then again to fetch it back. Some judge it to have been a vision only, and others that Ephrath – that is Bethlehem – is meant instead of the Euphrates. Jeremiah may however have gone but once, and it would have been a striking lesson of obedience to Jehovah to go such a long distance on such an errand.]

• The parable of the bottles of wine follows, with exhortations to repent of the abominations

Jer. 14, Jer. 15. A grievous famine occurred: the Lord would not be interceded with for them, yet Jeremiah takes up the sin of the people, and acknowledges it; but the answer – Jer. 15 – is terrible.

• The false prophets were no excuse: they were utterly rejected. Jeremiah, though he loved the people, was hated by them. He had stood before the people for the Lord, who now identified him with the remnant. It should be well with them. Meanwhile Jehovah's words were the joy of his heart. Jehovah would deliver him.

Jer. 16, Jer. 17. The prophet is told to take no wife: the children of the place should only come to death: compare Matt. 12: 46, 50. God would drive them out of the land, but there was mercy in store for the future. The prophet was mocked by the people: he had to call them to the observance of the Sabbath.

Jer. 18 — Jer. 20. God was the potter and the people were the clay: He could do as He pleased with them, or with any nation — either pull down or build up; but they determined to walk after their own devices. He would fulfil His word concerning them.

• The people laid plots against Jeremiah: he was put in the stocks, and smitten by Pashur, upon whom a doom was denounced. Jeremiah bemoaned his lot.

Jer. 21: — Jer. 24. When Nebuchadnezzar came against Jerusalem, Zedekiah sent to the prophet to know whether the Lord would appear for them. Jeremiah had to utter the dreadful news that God would Himself fight against them.

• To the people it was said that if they would surrender to the king of Babylon they should live; if not, they should die. They were exhorted to repentance, and the prophecies against Shallum, Jehoiakim, and Coniah are detailed.

• Woe to the shepherds, but there was a day of blessing coming, when the true Son of David, the righteous Branch and King, should reign and prosper. A lamentation was made against the false prophets.

• The people carried away with Jeconiah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar are compared to good figs; but those left in the land under Zedekiah to bad ones.

Jer. 25 gives a summary of God's judgements by Nebuchadnezzar, with a seventy years' captivity for Judah: then Babylon and all the nations that surrounded Palestine should come under God's judgements, but judgement begins with the city called by God's name.

Jer. 26. In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah exhorted to repentance, but the priests and prophets demanded his death. The princes however protected him, and the elders reminded the people that Hezekiah did not put Micah to death. To this it was apparently responded that Jehoiakim had put the prophet Urijah to death. Ahikam however shielded Jeremiah.

Jer. 27. Most probably the name Jehoiakim in Jer. 27: 1 should be Zedekiah; but it may be that the prophecy was given to Jeremiah in the days of Jehoiakim though not related till the days of Zedekiah. The king is exhorted to submit to the king of Babylon.

Jer. 28. Hananiah prophesies falsely, and is opposed by Jeremiah, who foretells his death.

Jer. 29. Jeremiah wrote to the captives in Babylon, urging them to make themselves homes there, and God would bring them back at the end of the seventy years. The false prophets are condemned.

Jer. 30, Jer. 31. The captives should surely return; but these chapters apply to the future, and this restoration will be after the 'time of Jacob's trouble,' a tribulation such as has never been cf. Matt. 24; Mark 13.

• The new covenant blessings concern both Judah and Israel. God will appear for them, and the restoration will be full and complete with universal blessing.

Jer. 34. All who had Hebrew bondservants had made a covenant with Zedekiah, and had set them free, but afterwards they again made bondmen of them. This is denounced by Jeremiah and its punishment foretold.

Jer. 35. The faithfulness of the Rechabites is held up as a worthy example: God would bless them and their posterity.

Jer. 36. Jeremiah caused Baruch to write his prophecy against Jerusalem in a roll. On this being read to king Jehoiakim he burnt it, and sought to arrest the prophet and Baruch; but God hid them. Another roll was obtained and the prophecies re-written.

Jer. 37 — Jer. 39. The taking of Jerusalem was at hand. Jeremiah was about to leave the city, but was arrested, beaten, and put into prison. Zedekiah gave him some relief; but on foretelling the fall of the city he was put into a dungeon, where he sank in the mire. He was delivered by Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian, on whom a blessing was pronounced.

• The city was taken. Zedekiah was captured by the Chaldeans; his sons were slain before his eyes, and he himself was blinded and taken to Babylon. Jeremiah was protected by Nebuchadnezzar.

Jer. 40 — Jer. 45. These chapters give the history of the remnant left in the land under Gedaliah, Jeremiah being with them. Gedaliah was murdered by Ishmael, sent by the king of the Ammonites, and the people were carried away.

• They were however rescued by Johanan, and Jeremiah was requested to inquire of God for them, the people promising obedience. God bade them abide in the land; but they, refusing to obey, went into Egypt, carrying Jeremiah with them. There they persistently practised idolatry, though warned by Jeremiah. The end of Jeremiah is not recorded.

Jer. 46 — Jer. 51. Judgements are pronounced against the various nations that had been in contact with Israel. God had used some of them as His instruments; but their pride, malice, and cruelty had afterwards to be punished.

• Judgements were to fall upon Egypt, the Philistines, Moab, the Ammonites, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, Elam, and Babylon.

• The prophecy against Babylon was written in a book, and given to Seraiah, 'a quiet prince,' to carry to Babylon, to be read there; then he was to bind a stone to the book and cast it into the Euphrates. Babylon was to be desolate for ever.

Babylon has a special place in the prophecy of Jeremiah: Israel and Judah had been unfaithful, and the government of the world was entrusted to Babylon; but Babylon failed and its destruction was the setting free of Judah to return to their land.

• This was a sort of type of the judgement of the last empire in a future day when Israel will be fully restored and blessed. This is foreshadowed in some places, as in Jer. 50: 17-20, which speaks of both Judah and Israel being pardoned. Jer. 51: closes with "Thus far are the words of Jeremiah."

Jer. 52 is historical and nearly the same as 2 Kings 24: 18 – 2 Kings 25: 30.

The prophet's name occurs in the N.T. in Matt. 2: 17; Matt.16: 14; Matt.27: 9 under the forms of Jeremias and Jeremy.

It is important to bear in mind the condition of a soul before conversion. Paul tells us that he lived in all good conscience to that day. He had no sense of sin, because he had not openly broken the law;

• and the more he vaunted in his moral excellence, the more he depreciated and opposed the teaching that salvation was through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ.

• Saul must have heard Stephen's defence; but the more the light of Christianity came before him, the more his self-righteousness was assailed, the more incensed he was, and the more determined was his resistance.

Thus was it with Saul, for the next time we hear of him his opposition is at its height.

• "And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem", Acts 9: 1-2.

• In his rage he leaves the land and journeys to Damascus – a strange city. It is deeply affecting to mark the course of "the chief of sinners" at this moment. He is on his way to Damascus breathing out cruelty, intolerant in his purpose to waste the church of God.

• Who could form any adequate idea of Saul's rage against Christ at this crisis? The will of the human heart in self-righteousness has culminated to the utmost; and then,
  • when the religious man is at his worst, in opposition to God's chief interest – at this moment, the grace of God shines forth in all its brightest lustre.

• A light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shines round about him; not the light of the glory to demand righteousness, but the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, to disclose to the "chief of sinners", in the height of his wilfulness, that he has a Saviour in the glory of God.

• The self-righteous man has no place before the glory of God; he falls to the ground, and then hears the voice of the Son of God, in the ever memorable words,
  • "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest".

• Surely no one could describe the moral revolution which is now at work in Saul's soul; his vaunted religiousness all goes for nothing.

• He falls to the ground before the light of God's glory; and yet in that very light his ears are opened to hear that the selfsame Jesus,
  • who was the life and the rest of Stephen, to whose death he had consented because of his faith in Christ,

• is his own Saviour and that, religious and morally upright man as he was, the great aim of his life had been to persecute him through His members here on earth; for now was divulged the secret that Christ's body was on the earth.

• Thus Saul, whose conduct was most exemplary, as far as the natural conscience could see, and though he had not done any moral wrong by which he would have seen the corruption of his heart, now discovers himself to be the chief of sinners, because he had wrought diametrically opposite to God's will, and by every means in his power, in contravention to the chief interest and will of God at this time.

• What a humiliation to the self-righteous Pharisee! If the best conducted man is the chief of sinners, surely it is easy to say,
  • "In me (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing".

• Surely such an one does not require to learn by transgression the evil of his nature, when by his will, and not by breach of the law, he is condemned as the chief of sinners.

May our hearts be able to follow him into the region of light into which he now enters; he is sensibly blind to everything in this world; existing in it, but with no ability to apprehend or enjoy anything in it, excluded from everything here by the "glory of that light" –

• he spends three days "without sight, and neither did eat nor drink".

• It is deeply interesting to us to trace the course of education which this great servant is brought through, and to bear in mind that the same grace is for us as for him. We can form some idea of the exercise of soul which he passed through during those three days.

• We all, in our measure, pass through a like experience when the heart is exclusively occupied with our Paschal Lamb; when shut in under the shelter of His blood, we appropriate, to our intense relief, what He bore in His death, as Israel ate the lamb, roast with fire and with bitter herbs.

• To Paul were concentrated in those days the exercises which are often spread over years of our lives; so intense was the hold on his heart that his very bodily necessities are forgotten – he neither did eat nor drink.

• At length the exercise is over; he scales the height to which the work of Christ entitles him; he is accepted; he prays; he is in the day of salvation, now is the accepted time. The proof that one is in the accepted time is that he prays.
  • "For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found".

• Ananias is now sent to fit him for this new sphere. He comes and says to him,
  • "Receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost".

• Saul is now in divine power, able to enjoy his Saviour in the glory of God; and forthwith he goes into the synagogue, and preaches that Jesus is the Son of God – the first time I suppose that this great truth was so fully presented.

• This ends what I may call the first chapter in this eventful history.

After this public declaration in the synagogue, that Jesus is the Son of God – the great source and pivot of the present ministry – it appears that Saul went into Arabia for two years; Galatians 1: 17.

• It had pleased God to reveal His Son in him, and from this Person, outside and above every one, he derives everything.

• In general we are not sufficiently conscious that He is Son of God, we believe it but we do not realise it, and yet it is only as we apprehend Him in the dignity of His Person that we apprehend the divine nature of either our position or our state. Believing on the Son of God, I am consciously a living stone.
  • "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?"

  • "He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself", 1 John 5: 5, 10;

    and to this all ministry tends –

  • "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man …".

I have dwelt long on this because the greater the knowledge committed to a servant, the more necessary and important is it that he should be much alone with God about it, in order that he may realise the nature and effect of it on himself before he undertakes to make it known to others.

• This rumination is of the deepest importance. We have no clue to the way in which Saul spent these two years in the isolated region of Arabia, but we can apprehend and learn from it the nature and effect of such a discipline.

• It rebukes the haste and readiness with which many now enter on the ministry, attempting to impress others with a measure of the truth which they have not proved for themselves. Surely the servant should ever be able to say:
  • "I have believed and therefore have I spoken".

• The Joshua – the Spirit of Christ – is always the leader now; or, as it was with Moses forty years in the wilderness before he was called to lead Israel through it.

• It is sometimes thought that it would be a loss of time if a servant were to spend two years in solitude before entering on public service. Evidently the Lord did not think so with respect to Saul, even though the exigencies of the time were very great, and there was great need of his services.

• It is better to lose time as to work in preparing for service than to lose time in repairing one's mistakes in undertaking a work for which one is not competent.

Saul afterwards returns to Damascus, and he was so fervent and faithful to the Lord, that the Jews watched the gates of the city day and night to kill him. The governor Aretas joined the Jews in their wicked purpose.

• Thus it is, that all who live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. The more you are for the Lord, the more will the enmity of man be armed against you. The self-righteous Jew, nominally the people of God, and the power of the world in heathen darkness, combine together to destroy the light of God, and the man in whom it shines.

• He escapes from Damascus in a most humiliating way, a great contrast to the way he had journeyed to it a few years since; and now he proceeds to Jerusalem.

• In his solitude in Arabia he was confirmed in "the mark" – the goal where Christ is, and he has also tasted in his own person the bitter hatred of man to the exalted Christ.

Thus prepared in mind and practice he goes to Jerusalem to see Peter; Galatians 1: 18. There he was subjected to very peculiar discipline.

• He had doubtless come, as we can easily conceive, with a longing to see Peter, and to be with the assembly, at Jerusalem; but the disciples were all afraid of him; Acts 9: 26. What a check and pain to him!

• He who was called to be a master builder in the temple of God must experience in himself the godly jealousy which hesitated to receive him. He had to be commended. Barnabas effects this happy service for him.

• He had come to Jerusalem the very opposite to the accredited persecutor of the church as he once was – a marvellous contrast! He now preached the faith which once he destroyed, he spake boldly there in the name of the Lord Jesus, disputing with the Grecians who went about to kill him.

But this is not all: we find that it was at this time, that praying in the temple, he was in a trance, and the Lord appears to him, saying,

• "Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem: for they will not receive thy testimony concerning me", Acts 22: 17-21.

• His own people will not receive him. The word to him –
  • "Depart: for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles",

• must have been a sore trial to him. He had been more successful as a persecutor than as a preacher of the gospel of God. How varied and peculiar are the exercises by which a servant is prepared for his Master's pleasure!

• He escapes from Jerusalem, and comes to Tarsus – his native place. The servant of God is bound to make known to his own house and to his neighbours and friends the great things the Lord hath done for him. It is considered that he remained there some years; Galatians 1: 21.

• But when the gospel went out to the Greeks – not Grecians – Acts 11: 19, 30, Barnabas having been sent from Jerusalem to Antioch,
  • "who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad",

  departed to Tarsus to seek Paul.

• "And when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch", verse 26

After a year there, a significant period, Barnabas and Saul go to Jerusalem. See Acts 11: 19, 30.

• How beautiful is the course in which the servant of the Lord is led! Saul returns to Jerusalem, to be the bearer, conjointly with Barnabas, of temporal relief to the brethren which dwelt in Judea – a lovely testimony to grace.

• The Jews had rejected heavenly blessings, and now the Gentiles who had received the heavenly blessings minister to them in earthly things.
  • "And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem, when they had fulfilled their ministry, and took with them John, whose surname was Mark", Acts 12: 25.

We now come, Acts 13, to a very important epoch in the history of this servant of Christ.

• It is supposed, that now, consequent on his being sent forth by the Holy Ghost in the assembly, his rapture into paradise occurred. I cannot assert it with authority, but it tallies with the time given in 2 Corinthians 12. It appears to be very probable that it occurred at this time.

• We find in this chapter, 13: 1-3, that the assembly was in great vigour. There were prophets and teachers, and
  • "As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them"

• It is deeply interesting that these servants, and especially Saul, should receive his direction in the assembly. He had been called for a special work, but now he is directed by the Holy Spirit in the assembly, not by the apostles in Jerusalem, to enter on it.

• The start is always important. The beginning has a great effect on one's course. What a blessed way to enter on service, and service for the assembly! In the house of God to be openly called upon by the Holy Spirit to enter on his work; a moment surely that he could never forget during all his service.

• It is too much overlooked in this day that it is in the assembly and by the Holy Spirit the servant should be directed to any special line of service. I know how fallen we are, alas! but still I believe that
  • if the Lord's servants were more in heart in the assembly as the centre of Christ's interests on earth, they would receive – though less openly than Barnabas and Saul – distinct direction from the Spirit of God, and would go forth like them, commended by the assembly, though not in the same conspicuous way.

• I say this, because while we should justly shrink from being conspicuous where we have failed, yet the intrinsic power remains, because the Holy Ghost is here, and Christ is in the midst of His own gathered together to His name.

They go forth to Salamis in Cyprus, and having passed through the whole island – there is always an exercise of patience in service – they encounter a remarkable sample of the obstruction of the enemy.

• A Jew, a magician, is with the chief man of the place – a Gentile, but intelligent. He called Barnabas and Saul to him and desired to hear the word of God, but Elymas opposed them, seeking to turn away the proconsul from the faith. But Saul – "who also is Paul" – is by the Lord's power equal to the occasion.

• This is a very fine lesson for him just as he had entered on his service: he is confronted with a nature of opposition, the greatest which lay in his course. The Jew instead of helping the Gentile to "the right way of the Lord", endeavours to turn him away from the faith.

• Paul filled with the Holy Spirit exposes his terrible wickedness, and in inflicting blindness on him for a season indicates the moral blindness of the Jews. This event was no doubt a great confirmation to the apostle in the service to which he had been appointed.

How little one may see the way in which each servant has to be led in order that he may be fitted for the Lord's service! As obstacles arise, as surely they must, in a world of evil, the exercised servant learns in the strait the sufficiency of the Lord; and then he can say,

• "By the strength of my God I have leaped over a wall".

• The efficient servant, as a rule, first learns for himself the path, and the power in which he has to lead the saints.

• Faith is always tested, and as it is, experience follows. Moses was forty years in the wilderness before he was called to lead Israel through it. The apostle is, however, cheered by the conversion of the proconsul.

He then comes to Perga. Here Mark, who had accompanied them from Jerusalem, leaves them.

• Though we are not told the reason, we gather from other scriptures that it was from some Jewish predilection, for subsequently, when Barnabas insisted on taking Mark – his kinsman – with them, Paul refused,
  • "And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other".

• I note this especially, because it shews that the help and support we may receive and be very thankful for at a particular juncture, may entirely fail when we least expect it. We can see what a gain all these exercises are to the servant, as has been said – "God wants life and not habit".

• Hence, no sooner have we learned the grace suited for one set of circumstances, than we are placed in totally new ones. But thus the servant is in measure, as was our apostle, fitted to comfort others as he himself was comforted of God.

• Every occurrence, as the servant walks with the Lord, makes him more fitted for service.

After this lengthened missionary tour we find our apostle at Antioch in Pisidia – chapter 13: 14, a most important stage in his mission. Here in the synagogue he includes in his address,

• "Israelites, and ye that fear God".

• The burden of his discourse is the remarkable way in which God has favoured Israel, winding up with the warning from Habakkuk:
  • "Beware therefore, lest that come upon you, which is spoken of in the prophets; Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you", chapter 13: 40-41.

It is an important moment. The Jews reject their testimony; the Gentiles receive it. Paul and Barnabas shake off the dust of their feet against them, and turn boldly to the Gentiles.

• It is very interesting to note the way the true servant is led. With all Paul's natural feelings for the Jews, how graciously and distinctly is he led on to see, as Stephen had declared,
  • "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost".

I pass over the labours of the apostle recorded in Acts 14, and turn for a moment to his return to Antioch, from whence he had started, being commended by the grace of God, a season of particular satisfaction to the servant of God.

• "And when they were come, and had gathered the church together, they rehearsed all that God had done with them, and how he had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles. And there they abode long time with the disciples", Acts 14: 27-28.

Now in Acts 15: 1-2, occurs a great crisis in the apostle's history.

• "And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.

  "When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question".

• Now the opposition is from within. The servant must always be the first in suffering, in the place of Christ's rejection. He must learn to overcome each varied form of hostility before he can be able to teach others the grace of God which only can support one at such a juncture.

• Paul confronts this new opposition. Directed by revelation he goes to Jerusalem, and there he had a conference privately with Peter, James and John. What a remarkable time it was! They recognise that as the gospel of the circumcision was committed to Peter, so was the gospel of the uncircumcision committed to Paul, and they gave him the right hand of fellowship.

• At the centre of all Jewish interests the matter is discussed by the apostles and elders, and their judgment was then agreed to by the whole church:
  • "That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well. So when they were dismissed, they came to Antioch: and when they had gathered the multitude together, they delivered the epistle", verses 29-30.

• This decision is of great moment; it is the dawn of a new day for Christians. They are freed from the law of Moses, and they are restricted only by divine and fundamental principles.

But this great prosperity – as doubtless it was regarded by the apostle – as always, was the opportunity for new and unexpected suffering and opposition.

• Peter had, it appears, accepted the new line so fully that he was quite social with the Gentiles – he ate and drank with them, until certain came from James; then he withdrew, fearing them of the circumcision.

• Paul had to withstand him to the face because he was to be blamed. What a painful duty for the apostle, and this with reference to one he had regarded as a pillar!

• But sad as this was in this bright moment for the church, there was a deeper sorrow concurrent with it, even that Barnabas, his loved companion, was drawn away by Peter's dissimulation, and, as is always the case when legality works, there is a yielding to one's own predilection more than to Christ's interests; consequently Barnabas insisted on taking his kinsman – Mark – with him, and sailed to Cyprus.

• Paul thus chequered, and with a new companion – Silas – departed, being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God.

According to the decree at Jerusalem the Gentiles were not to be subjected to the Mosaic ritualism. A great yoke had been removed.

• Paul himself had been acknowledged by the chiefest apostles as the one to whom the gospel of the uncircumcision had been committed – Philippians 2.

Thus favoured of the Lord, he pursues his work. Forbidden to preach the word in Asia, he is called in a vision by night to come into Macedonia. The servant is to be ready for any orders, whether they involve a circuitous route or any other inconvenience.

Paul enters Europe, a fact of great significance. He was urged to come by a man of Macedonia in the vision, but no man appears to receive him.

• He had assuredly gathered that the Lord had called him to preach there, but for a long time there is nothing or very little to prove that he was doing the Lord's pleasure.
  • "On the sabbath we went out of the city by a river side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither", Acts 16: 13.

• Here the Lord opened the heart of Lydia of Thyatira – one of the proscribed territory – and
  • "she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us", verse 15.

• Thus the apostle had found a home in the place. There was no appearance of any opening among the Macedonians. At this juncture,
  • "a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying: the same followed Paul and us, and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God, which shew unto us the way of salvation".

• Consequent on the apostle's refusal to accept the countenance of Satan, a terrible commotion occurred.

• It is worthy of note, that it was in Europe that the church openly accepted the support of the world. Paul not only refuses this proffered support, but in the name of Jesus Christ he drives out the evil spirit.

• Consequent on this, every power in the place – the multitude, the mob – rose up against them, and the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them. Eventually they were cast into prison, and the jailer thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks.

• The opposition seemed to have succeeded. The jailer retires to rest. Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises to God, and the prisoners heard them. For the Lord's sake Paul had refused all countenance from the world, and then the world was determined to crush him; but the Lord now proves that
  • "them that honour me, I will honour".

  • At midnight, "suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed".

• The blessed God not only vindicates His faithful servant, but the man of Macedonia, in the person of the keeper of the prison, is before him seeking salvation. Paul directs him to the Saviour. The word is blessed to him, and he believes, and rejoices in God with all his house.

Blessed discipline for the servant of God! May it be better known. The world's cooperation is absolutely refused, though severe persecution is thereby incurred from the selfsame world;

• but this night of sorrow and suffering was broken in on by a marvellous manifestation of the mighty hand of God – a table prepared in the presence of his enemies; his heart reassured.
  • "If God be for us, who can be against us?"

Acts 17. Paul having left Philippi reaches Thessalonica, the capital of Macedonia. There he went into the synagogue, and

• "three sabbaths reasoned with them out of the scriptures",

  with such an effect that

• "some of them believed, and consorted with Paul and Silas; and of the devout Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a few", verse 4.

• We shall find that, in this chapter and the following ones, Paul is being taught the utter depravity of the Jew. We read,
  • "the Jews which believed not, moved with envy",

• raised a great disturbance. They troubled the people and the rulers of the city, so that the apostle says in 1 Thessalonians 2: 14-16, that they
  • had "suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost".

• Paul in this passage declares the judgment he has arrived at, which he had been acquiring by degrees during his ministry.

• It is to be remarked that as the heart is set by the Holy Spirit on the right object or purpose, it is not only that the purpose is more explicitly before the soul, but circumstances ordered of God conspire to convince you that you are right, so that any temptation to waver is removed.

Paul was sent away by the brethren by night to Berea. There many believed,

• "but when the Jews of Thessalonica had knowledge that the word of God was preached of Paul at Berea, they came thither also, and stirred up the people", verse 13.

• The Jews again hinder the work of the Lord. Little can we apprehend the painful impressions thus day by day growing in the apostle by the unrelenting enmity to Christ of His own people after the flesh.

• Paul's heart, by the Holy Ghost, was set on Christ, but doubtless God allowed the malicious hatred of the Jew to wean him from the natural love he had for his nation that he might be undistractedly given to the circle of Christ's heart.

Paul next goes to Athens, where his experience is quite new. It is interesting to note how the apostle is subjected to such a variety of circumstances, emptied indeed from vessel to vessel. The things that we try are made a trial of us.

• Here in the centre of learning of the pagan world the apostle discovers the true state of the pagan. They, after their natural wisdom, lest they should leave out the god of any nation, had erected an altar "To the unknown God".

• This affords the apostle an opportunity when he stood in the midst of Mars' hill, to deliver the most compendious summary of God's ways towards man: not the gospel simply, though it includes the gospel, but what we may term the Proclamation, as used in 2 Timothy 4: 17.

Paul now comes to Corinth, Acts 18. It is not easy to describe or even to apprehend all that this great servant has acquired by the varied phases through which he has passed, but it is extremely interesting to us to know, that as they were ordered of God, they were conspiring to make him a more efficient servant to the church.

• Here Paul, "pressed in the spirit, testified to the Jews that Jesus was Christ. And when they opposed themselves, and blasphemed, he shook his raiment, and said unto them, Your blood be upon your own heads; I am clean: from henceforth I will go unto the Gentiles", verse 6.

• This was a great step; he has so far learned that the church is entirely distinct from the synagogue of the Jews. The Lord, as we see from verse 8, encourages him in a very special way.
  • "And Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, believed on the Lord with all his house; and many of the Corinthians hearing, believed, and were baptised".

• The Corinthians were a very voluptuous people. The grace of God was exceeding abundant to them, but their nonconformity to the truth disclosed to the apostle how the flesh evades the word of God, and the deplorable excesses men highly gifted of God may descend to, when the cross of Christ, in its practical effects, is overlooked.

• Paul's epistles to them are of the deepest interest. They tell us on the one hand of the blessing in which they were set,
  • "come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ";

• while, on the other hand, in every circle at home and abroad, in the church and in the world, they had been selfish and unholy.

We next hear of Paul "having shorn his head in Cenchrea: for he had a vow".

• He is not yet emancipated from the rites and rules of the law. We are too insensible of how very gradual is the way in which any one of us is set free from our ruling tastes, and, still more, of any religious prejudice, because it has laid hold of the conscience.

Paul now comes to Ephesus, but he did not remain.

• "When they desired him to tarry longer time with them, he consented not; but bade them farewell, saying, I must by all means keep this feast that cometh in Jerusalem: but I will return again unto you, if God will. And he sailed from Ephesus", verses 20-21.

• It is to be remarked here that when Paul did not remain at Ephesus, Apollos came there; and, as it appears from the next chapter, he was blessed there, for Paul finds certain disciples there. They receive the Holy Ghost; the number of the men was about twelve. Here Paul is more decided than at Corinth.
  • "When divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus", chapter 19: 9.

• He is definitely separate now; and Ephesus becomes the great centre of his work in Asia, as also the assembly most highly favoured of God. It had a most interesting start; the devotedness of the saints is very marked, and they truly received the "manifold more", as we see from the Epistle to the Ephesians. The apostle was there in great power. See verses 11-12.

• We gather from 1 Timothy the special interest Paul took in the saints at Ephesus. There he was confronted with the violent opposition incited by Demetrius. The whole city was filled with confusion. Demetrius had appealed to their bigotry in order to prevent his trade being damaged. Thus the apostle adds to his experience a painful sense of the nature of pagan intolerance.

Probably about this time Paul wrote to the Galatians. As he had to correct the Corinthians for their laxity, to whom all grace had been vouchsafed, so now he has to expostulate with the Galatians for turning to the law to repress the flesh; after having begun in the Spirit, seeking to be made perfect in the flesh.

• Strange and inveterate are the efforts of the flesh to give itself a place. It is literally with it, "Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life".

• What blessed discipline for the apostle to be not only confronted with these devices to vitiate or neutralise the work of God, but that he should be taught to annul them by a special word from the Lord.

• If the Corinthians had to learn the death of Christ with which they were identified here at the Lord's table, so also had the Galatians to learn that the Spirit of God lusteth against the flesh, and that if you walk in the Spirit you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh; Galatians 5.

In Acts 20: 16 we get a touching instance of the apostle's interest at Ephesus.

• "From Miletus he sent to Ephesus, and called the elders of the church", verse 17.

• The apostle reminds them of his labour and teaching among them – and this before he wrote the epistle to them – and also tells them that they should see his face no more.

Now we come to the deepest and saddest discipline to which the apostle was ever subjected. He is on his way to Jerusalem; he stays at the house of Philip the evangelist, and there the prophet Agabus

• "took Paul's girdle, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, Thus saith the Holy Ghost, So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. And when we heard these things, both we, and they of that place, besought him not to go up to Jerusalem.

  "Then Paul answered, What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? for I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done. And after those days we took up our carriages, and went up to Jerusalem", chapter 21: 11-15.

• Paul insists on going to Jerusalem: this is a very remarkable occurrence affecting the service of the apostle. It is not a precedent, but peculiar to Paul that he should persist in going to Jerusalem.

• The Lord evidently allowed that His servant should learn for himself that the people who had rejected Christ when on the earth, and had committed the unpardonable sin in resisting the Holy Ghost in the stoning of Stephen, were as inveterately opposed to the free grace of God as ever. Paul learns this for himself.

• He comes to Jerusalem. James counsels him,
  • "Do therefore this that we say to thee: We have four men which have a vow on them; them take, and purify thyself with them, and be at charges with them, that they may shave their heads, and all may know that those things, whereof they were informed of thee, are nothing; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, and keepest the law".

    Paul did so. See verse 26. "And when the seven days were almost ended, the Jews which were of Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the people, and laid hands on him".

• The chief captain rescues the apostle out of the hands of the mob, who were about to kill him, and eventually from the stairs of the castle he addressed the crowd in the Hebrew tongue.

• He recounts how the Lord had called him, as it is recounted in Acts 9, but here he makes especial additions to affect his audience – the Jews – as in chapter 26 he relates it as especially affecting the Gentiles.
  • We read, "And they gave him audience unto this word, and then lifted up their voices, and said, Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live. And they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air …", chapter 22: 22-23.

• That is the result; nothing but deadly hatred is evoked. And the chief captain, the representative of the power in man's hand, was but too ready to co-operate with them.

Paul, in chapter 23, is placed before the council, the same great tribunal before which Stephen stood and suffered. The issue was as recorded in verse 10.

• "And when there arose a great dissension, the chief captain, fearing lest Paul should have been pulled in pieces of them, commanded the soldiers to go down, and to take him by force from among them, and to bring him into the castle".

• They could not agree among themselves. The executive rescued Paul from their hands.
  • "And the night following the Lord stood by him, and said, Be of good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome", verse 11.

• The Lord thus in the most gracious way acknowledges His suffering servant. But the Jews, with unrelenting hatred,
  • "banded together, and bound themselves under a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul".

• More than forty of them, a conspiracy in which the chief priests and elders are implicated, nay more, they act deceitfully; they prostitute truth to malice. They are ready to use their influence with the chief captain to give effect to their diabolical plot, but they were defeated, and Paul escaped. But what a heart-break to him to have learned of their malice through one of his nearest of kin!

• Paul is now handed over to the Roman governor, and, as he had appealed unto Caesar because of the unjustifiable trimming and connivance of the Roman governor to the chief priests, he sails for Rome.

• The shipwreck in Acts 27, portrays the thorough break-up of everything of an earthly order for safety on earth, while those who sail with Paul escaped safe to land. And so it is now in the higher or spiritual way.

Paul comes to Rome; a prisoner in the hands of the Gentiles in whom the power which God gave man was now vested. Here he is cut off from everything he valued on earth.

• Now, doubtless, unhinderedly as to aught here, his whole attention is directed to the glorious time that he spent years before in the third heaven.

• The perfection and beauty of that scene could not be increased, but for years, many years, he had been subjected to every kind of discipline to dissociate him from all earthly tendencies, and to render him in every way consistent, and in correspondence with the heavenly calling of "a man in Christ;"
  • and we shall see farther on how fully and clearly he presents what he had learned then; and how the discipline to which he had been subjected, fitted him for the service; so that he was in full accord in mind and manner with his teaching; not only enunciating heavenly sentiments, but he was personally heavenly.

It is not easy to conceive the mind of the apostle when he realised before the Lord all that he had passed through. It is very peculiar the discipline he had endured.

• Attached to Israel, not merely as a man would be to his own family, but attached to them as the people of God of whom Christ was born, he clung to them to the last, in hope that Jerusalem would be the great christian centre, and in his own person he was allowed of God to prove that all hope was over.

• But now all hope of the coming in of Israel at Jerusalem being dispelled, to him – a prisoner in Rome, the capital of the Gentile power – the beauty and magnitude of the church as the body of Christ is opened out.

• The discipline was effectual; it had removed the thing which in any degree barred or clouded the great mystery that was committed to him.

• Surely as the natural desire for Israel's blessing was quashed, and as his heart was directed to the great disclosures made to him in Paradise, no one who has not experienced something of the kind can comprehend the effect produced when an object which could claim a great amount of attention, and one at the same time most naturally attractive, has been so completely removed out of sight, that you are quite free to contemplate the only object in the ascendant, and which now has no rival.

• If Paul had longed that his nation should share in the blessing of the church, he has now most painfully learned that it was inveterately opposed to Christ, and that consequently he is a prisoner at Rome, now contemplating in a cloudless atmosphere the full beauty and grandeur of the great mystery.

It is very interesting to see the effect of the discipline in our apostle. There are no expressions of disappointment that we hear of, but now a prisoner in Rome, he writes the Epistle to the Ephesians.

• Some would say that this was a circular letter; whether it was or not is of secondary importance; the great interest to us is that in this epistle we have the fullest opening out of the great mystery – Christ and the church.

• If Israel, God's earthly people, were once the centre of all His ways here, now, the church, the body of Christ, is infinitely more so.

• The apostle, severed from every link that would connect him with Israel, is now conducted by the Spirit to apprehend fully, and in practical detail, the secret of God, which had been kept secret from the foundation of the world.

There are two great things peculiar to the mystery:

1. one is that we all – Jew and Gentile – are raised together and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ; the first thing is that we are heavenly;

2. and the second is, that in the same power which raised Christ up we are raised up.

• That is a power entirely outside and beyond everything of man; and consequently on this, or resulting from it, there should be, because of this power working in us, a growing up to Him, the Head in all things;
  • and this with absolute and decided victory over all the power of the devil, so that it is not merely the height to which we are raised out of all here, but the immense moral superiority in which we are placed here on earth, the place of our alienation from God.

• Brought to the greatest height – heaven – by the greatest power, the power which raised Christ, and because we are heavenly, competent to be descriptive here of Christ, from the highest circle – the assembly, down to a slave, and at the same time superior to the wiles and the power of the devil.

• How entranced the apostle must have been as all this by the Spirit came by inspired words before him. Surely he justified God for all the discipline to which he had been subjected in order to make him a vessel fit to impart the greatest communication ever made to a man.

• We little understand all the pains, as I might say, which the Lord takes with us to render us in any measure suited for His work. He only knows what is fitting, and that this fitness could not be procured by any other means but by the discipline which He who knows behind and before administers.

• It is most touching to hear the apostle writing
  • "to make all men see the economy of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God";

• and in which the angels now learn the manifold wisdom of God; Ephesians 3: 9-10.
  • "And to make all men see what is the administration of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God".

The remainder of the apostle's life seems to have been divided into two parts:

1. one, in which he was led into the height and blessedness of the mystery, and his own experience as entering into it as detailed in Philippians;

2. and the other, the terrible declension – 2 Timothy – how he was deserted, as we find in chapter 4, and how he helps us in such a time.

It is very interesting and helpful that we have in the Epistle to the Philippians the experiences of the apostle at this time. There are, as it seems to me, two parts:

1. the first, the beginning of his imprisonment, when he was enjoying the blessed results of God's calling, as described in Ephesians;

2. while at the close, when the departure from the truth was almost overwhelming, when all in Asia had turned away from him, he was peculiarly supported and cheered by the Lord, and thus a guide to us.

• Each is of deep interest to us. The one to shew us the sublime happiness which is ours in the most trying circumstances.

• The prisoner at Rome not only sees and writes of things of infinite magnitude, but he tells us also – led to do so by the Spirit – his own experiences at the time. In Philippians 1,
  • "To be with Christ, which is far better",

• is the first desire of his heart; but as it is good for the saints that he should remain, he knows that he will remain; but his expectation now, as always, is that Christ should be magnified in his body by life or by death.

Chapter 2. To be like-minded to Christ, to be a servant as He was, would fulfil his joy.

In chapter 3 Christ is his object; he surrenders all that was naturally of gain to him for Christ, and forgets the things which are behind, pressing on to the goal – the high calling of God in Christ Jesus

• a citizen of heaven, looking for Him to come to change this body of humiliation into a glorious body like Christ's own glorious body.

And finally, in chapter 4, he has learned that in whatever state he is to be satisfied in himself, and he can do all things through Him who strengtheneth him. Thus his desire is –

1. First, to be with Christ;

2. secondly, to be a servant like Him;

3. thirdly, Christ is his sole exclusive object;

4. and lastly, Christ is the power to carry him over everything here.

• These four great experiences are generated from the two sides of the calling.

Before we pass from the first part of his imprisonment, we cannot overlook the important allusion he makes in Colossians 2: 1 to the conflict he had for the Colossians.

• It unfolds to us his inner life, and how he, a prisoner, was pleading for the blessing of souls, and how he was led of the Lord to expose the beginning of a leaven which has permeated the church everywhere;
  • and at the same time to set forth the blessed and only way by which they could be preserved from it.

• It is very encouraging to place oneself as it were beside the apostle in his chains, and apprehend in some degree the deep conflict through which he was passing in order that the saints might be preserved from this great leaven – a compound of religiousness and mentality.

• What a contrast are his life and times with the Lord – so blessed and so bright – with his circumstances in the eyes of men! Most blessed to know that holding the Head – Christ everything and in all – clears and preserves us from all this leaven.

THE SECOND PART

The close of his imprisonment discloses to us a very different state of things from that at the beginning of his imprisonment.

• It is thought by some that 1 Timothy was written after the first imprisonment, and there is much to corroborate this view; but it is very evident that there is a very marked change between 1st and 2nd Timothy.

• In the former the apostle is occupied with order, writing to Timothy at Ephesus; and in the latter he is occupied with disorder, and how the man of God should behave in such a time.

• It is to be remarked that in the first epistle, in connection with the proper ordering of the assembly, he sets forth the two great evils which were impending, namely,
  • Romanism in chapter 4, and radicalism in chapter 6;

  • or Christianity without Christ – religion with independence of God on the one hand, while on the other, gain was godliness or whatever exalted man.

• One was exalting man under the form of the christian religion, the other making human advancement everything.

Now in 2 Timothy, which describes the state of things at the close of Paul's second imprisonment, we see the apostle in quite different times from those at the beginning of his first imprisonment, when he wrote,

• "I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel", Philippians 1: 12.

• This epistle – 2 Timothy – was written after his first answer, chapter 4: 16, when none of the saints stood with him. He begins by saying,
  • "God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind";

    and in the same chapter announces

  • "that all they which are in Asia be turned away from me; of whom are Phygellus and Hermogenes".

• When we bear in mind that Asia was the country where he had chiefly laboured, we can form some idea of the grief and distress which their alienation must have given him. How touchingly his heart clings to even one there, as he writes,
  • "The Lord give mercy unto the house of Onesiphorus".

But Paul is not discouraged. If in the Epistle to the Ephesians he led us to the glorious heights of God's calling, so now, when disaffection and the utmost obstruction prevailed in the assembly, he having unfolded to us its glory with God, is now the one to support and to guide us in the direst confusion, when

• "instead of a girdle there is a rent, and burning instead of beauty". See Isaiah 3: 24.

• In a few sentences pregnant with divine blessing he instructs Timothy and through him all who would be faithful to Christ what is to be done at such a time. His instructions may be classed under two heads:

1. one, that being strong himself in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, Timothy was to commit the things that he had heard from the apostle
   • "to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also";

2. the other, that he was to be most absolute in his separation from the vessels to dishonour.
   • "If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work", chapter 2: 21.

As our apostle had been prepared of God to be the fit vessel of communicating the beauty and glory of God's chief interest on the earth, so also now is he instructed to warn us of the difficult times which were coming.

• "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come", chapter 3: 1.

• The aim of the opposers will be the same as Jannes and Jambres; as they withstood Moses, so do the opposers in the last days withstand the truth. Their character is
  • "Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof",

    and then follows,

  • "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth",

• which would indicate who they are.

Now Paul's doctrine with his example, "manner of life" – see verses 10-11 –

1. is firstly our resource; not only the doctrine, which had been abandoned by all in Asia, but the very discipline through which he had passed would be an evidence of being in the right course.

2. Secondly, "Continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

   "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works", verses 14-17.

Our apostle having prepared us for the last days, intimates that his course is finished. He says,

• "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing", chapter 4: 6-8;

• a blessed finish to his great service. And then in the calmness and confidence of one perfectly subject to the will of God, he can think of having the profit of Timothy's company:
  • "Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me".

  • Also, "Take Mark and bring him with thee".

  • Nothing is unthought of: "The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments".

• Thus this dear and honoured servant closes his course. If his beginning in Acts 9 was marked by the light out of heaven shining down on him, so, as he disappears from this scene, there is a beauty and a moral grandeur about him which has never been surpassed except by the perfect Master whom he served.

• Tribulation had worked patience with him; indeed, patience had its perfect work, for he was
  • "perfect and entire, wanting nothing".

• How blessedly effectual the divine discipline, so that Christ was magnified in his body, by life or by death!

While we thank the Lord for having given such a servant to the church, may we learn from that servant to be cast entirely on the One who only can lead us on in the same path of faith. Amen.

After three years he went up to see Peter at Jerusalem, where he spoke boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus.

• The Jews again seeking his life, he was conducted to Caesarea, and sent to Tarsus, his native place. From thence he was fetched by Barnabas to go to Antioch, where the gospel had been effectual, and there they both laboured.

• After having, in company with Barnabas, taken supplies to Jerusalem – his second visit – on occasion of a dearth, he commenced his first missionary journey to Cyprus and Asia Minor. He and Barnabas returned to Antioch, where he remained 'a long time'.

• On a dispute arising as to Gentile converts being circumcised, he went with Barnabas to Jerusalem concerning that question, and returned to Antioch.
  • This city had become a sort of centre of the activity of the Spirit. Being far from Jerusalem it was less influenced by Judaising tendencies, though communion with the saints there was maintained.

Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece were the sphere of Paul's second missionary journey. Having differed from Barnabas, because the latter wished to take John with them – who had left them on the first journey – Paul selected Silas for his companion, and departed with the full fellowship of the brethren.

• During part of this journey Timothy was one of the company. He abode a year and a half at Corinth, where he wrote the two Epistles to the Thessalonians.

• He now visited Jerusalem at the feast, and returned to Antioch. He took his third missionary journey through Galatia and Phrygia. When he visited Ephesus he separated the disciples from the synagogue, and they met in the school of Tyrannus.

• At Ephesus he wrote the First Epistle to the Thessalonians and probably the Epistle to the Galatians. After the tumult raised by Demetrius he went to Macedonia, and there wrote the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. He again visited Corinth and wrote the Epistle to the Romans.

The Jews seeking his life, Paul went through Macedonia, sailed from Philippi, and preached at Troas. At Miletus he gave a solemn parting address to the elders of Ephesus, and took his leave of the disciples at Tyre, where he was cautioned not to go to Jerusalem

• At Caesarea also he was warned of what awaited him at Jerusalem, but he avowed that he was ready not only to be bound, but also to die for the name of the Lord Jesus.

Paul arrived at Jerusalem just before Pentecost. In order to prove himself a good Jew he was advised by the brethren to associate himself with four men who had a vow on them, and to be at charges with them.

• But while carrying this out he was seized by some Asiatic Jews, and beaten, but was rescued by Lysias, the Roman chief captain. After appearing before the council, and again being rescued by him, he was for safety sent off by night to Caesarea. There his cause was heard by Felix, who kept him prisoner, hoping to be bribed to release him.

• Two years later, when superseded by Festus, Felix, to please the Jews, left Paul in bonds. On appearing before Festus, to save himself from being sent to Jerusalem, there being a plot to waylay and murder him, Paul appealed to the emperor.
  • His case having been heard by Agrippa and Festus, he was finally remitted to Rome. The ship, however, was wrecked at Malta, where they wintered, all on board having been saved.

On his arrival at Rome, Paul sent for the chief men of the Jews and preached to them: some of them believed, though the majority rejected God's grace – thus fulfilling Isa. 6: 9-10 – which should henceforth go to the Gentiles. He, though still a prisoner, abode two years in his own hired house.

• There he wrote the Epistles to the Colossians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, and also to Philemon.

The history of Paul is thus far given in the Acts of the Apostles, but there are intimations in the later epistles that after the two years at Rome he was liberated.

• His movements from that time are not definitely recorded; apparently he visited Ephesus and Macedonia, 1 Tim. 1: 3; wrote the First Epistle to Timithy; visited Crete, Titus 1: 5; and Nicopolis, Titus 3: 12; wrote the Epistle to Titus
  • – the early writers say that he went to Spain, which we know he desired to do, Rom. 15: 24, 28 –

• visited Troas and Miletus, 2 Tim. 4: 13, 20; wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews; and when a prisoner at Rome the second time, wrote the Second Epistle to Timothy, when expecting his death.

• Early writers say that he was beheaded with the sword, which is probable, as he was a Roman citizen.

Paul received his commission directly from Christ who appeared to him in glory, and this source of his apostleship he carefully insists on in the Epistle to the Galatians.

• New light as to the church in its heavenly character came out by Paul, who was God's special apostle for that purpose. To him was revealed the truth that the assembly was the body of Christ, and the doctrine of new creation in Christ Jesus, in which evidently there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile.

• To him was revealed the truth that the assembly was the body of Christ, and the doctrine of new creation in Christ Jesus, in which evidently there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile. This caused great persecution from the Jews and from Judaising teachers, who could not readily give up the law, nor endure the thought of Gentiles having an equal place with themselves. This Paul insisted on: it was his mission as apostle to the Gentiles.

• To Paul also was committed what he calls "my gospel": this was 'the gospel of the glory' – Christ in glory who put away the Christian's sins being presented in it as the last Adam, the Son of God. 2 Cor. 4: 4. It not only brings salvation, great as that is, but it separates the believer from earth, and conforms him to Christ as He is in glory.

Paul was an eminent and faithful servant of Christ. As such he was content to be nothing, that Christ might be glorified.

• To the Thessalonians he was gentle 'as a nurse cherisheth her children', 1 Thess. 2: 7.

• He was severe however to the Corinthians when they were allowing sin in their midst, and to them he had to assert his apostolic authority when traducers were seeking to nullify his influence among them.

• To the Galatians he was still more severe: they were in danger of being shipwrecked as to faith by false Judaising teachers, who were undermining the truth of the gospel.

In the epistles we get a few glimpses of the inner life of Paul. After having been caught up into the third heavens, he prayed for the removal of the thorn in the flesh which had been given him lest he should be puffed up, and was told that Christ's grace was sufficient for him, he could say,

• "most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong',' 2 Cor. 12: 9-10.

  He also could say,

• "To me to live is Christ", and

• "This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus", Phil. 3: 13-14.

• As a martyr he reached that goal.

The catalogue he gives of his privations and sufferings in 2 Cor. 11: 23-28 discloses the fact that but a small part of his gigantic labours is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.

The education of the servant is as John said,

• "He must increase, but I must decrease", John 3: 30.

• It was right for Paul to deprecate the thorn in the flesh, and yet he was a better and a greater servant when a reduced man than he was before. It is no easy lesson to learn
  • "when I am weak, then am I strong", 2 Corinthians 12: 10.

• It is very interesting to see that our weakest moment as a man, is our strongest divinely… As the outer man perisheth the inner is renewed day by day.

• The deepest struggle is when, in the life of Jesus and in His feelings as to the things I am passing through, I part company with my own naturally approved feelings or abilities, because they are not His but merely my own. Martha would not part with her own. Mary exchanged her own for His, and was abundantly consoled.

Every exercise is only a preparation for a greater exercise. If you get over the present one with the Lord you are prepared for the next. It is a race here, or rather a steeplechase. You are no sooner over one obstruction than another is before you, but if you do not clear the one before you, you are, as they say, 'pounded'; there is no progress.

• The Lord is as much for us in the least as in the greatest. If I know the good of dependence in the present I need not think of the future. His support in the present step prepares me for the next… The more you are exercised the better you will be.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 2

As to all the sorrow, I can only say that when life has been in any measure learned, death must be learned, and that in a different way by each of us, but it has the bitterness of death in it, or it is not really death.

• The night must be endured; the ascent of Mount Moriah must be traversed; but they that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

• I have felt much for you, and I have desired to press on you before the Lord that you should not be hindered by these things, but the rather that you may seek greater grace from the Lord to edify and help His people.

• Where there is opposition to one's ministry, as I have found, if one is simply cast on the Lord, either one of two things will happen: either the opponent will be won by the truth, or he will be manifested to all as of no weight.

• May much blessing accrue to you, and indeed to us all, from this heavy affliction laid on ———, and may you be so supported and encouraged by the Lord Himself that you may be a more efficient servant according to His pleasure.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 3

I cannot now say all I would like to say, and the blessing I am looking to the Lord to grant you as exercised by your present discipline.

• I am the more interested in you, and desire that the Lord may give you a higher line of service, and that you may be assured by Him that He wants you to be more His friend.

• It is not great acts which convey the assurance of the greatest love. The greatest love of all can say,
  • "The very hairs of your head are all numbered", Matthew 10: 30.

• The more minute the attention the greater the true love and interest.

The end of all discipline is that God is more before me.

• "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee", Job 42: 5.

His discipline is the sure evidence of His present interest in us – to make us partakers of His holiness.

• In the examples given in Hebrews 11 they were all suffering for Christ's sake. Yet it was for their own benefit. One in one way and one in another. Our hope is only in God.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 4

• I have said that Jonah was at college, but that Paul was a graduate in Philippians 1.

• There are two kinds of discipline – one to correct you, the other to help you. Jacob is corrected at Shalem, and he is helped at Bethel. It is only oneself who can distinguish them. Hebrews 12 is the latter.

• I hope you will continue to see ——— I daresay that there is an unsatisfied desire there – the light received not acted up to.

• The is altar at El-Elohe-Israel indicates a heart not in the "large place". Bethel is the altar where you are in His circle of things.

• I am more and more convinced that the real check to our spiritual growth is from some defect in infancy – an imperfect apprehension of the gospel.

• The death of Christ and all involved in it must be entered into before the value and greatness of the resurrection can be estimated.

I feel much for ——— . Deep indeed is his affliction, but the Lord has been leading him on in so marked a way that we must not be surprised if He calls him to ascend Mount Moriah

• "We who live are always delivered unto death".

• Death here is the only setting of life in Him.

The better we submit to the discipline of the prison the sooner are we set at liberty. We must be much inside with God when He would use us much outside, and it is really from inside that we must come to be of any use outside.

• It is in abstraction from all here near the Lord that we are truly and rightly influenced to act for Him where everything tends to distract.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 5

The great thing in service is coming fresh from the Master. ——— has had a very marked course of discipline.

• It is most interesting to see the variety of the ways in which the Lord leads us in order to fit us for Himself and things that He suffered us to enjoy at one time are now denied us, or removed, if we are ready to die to them.

• The marvel is how little we comprehend His meaning; we are more occupied with relief than exercised as to the way we receive it from Him; and often possibly too anxious to find out the cause of it, while the real exercise is being cast upon God in it.

• Finding compensation in Him for our sufferings, as Jacob, when he left Shalem for Bethel: or better still, Paul learning
  • "My grace is sufficient for thee".

• It is a new thing for dear ——— to be an invalid. I trust she may learn much of the Lord to the joy of her heart in this new experience.

• I consider Jonah's will was broken when he was in the depths of the sea, but in the loss of the gourd his heart was softened, or at least he had to learn that when the gourd was gone, there was no one to comfort him but God.

• It is a great thing for the soul when it is in such utter bereavement of every natural attraction that it has nothing nor any one but the Lord. The Lord is one and His name one. What a thing it is to find one's all in one Person.

About twelve were at the breaking of bread here, and they say there were seventy at the preaching in the barn, which was half filled with hay! I gave them the difference between "goodness" and "love".

• Goodness, according to its means, does everything that its object requires. Love does all it can for its object to its own satisfaction. My need is the measure of God's grace in one; and in the other, blessed be His name, His own heart is the measure.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 6

However the Lord may work blessing out of this sorrow, the sorrow is a present reality. It is grievous, but the gain intended by God from it is only acquired through exercise, not to find out the reason for it, but to cast you upon Himself.

• I do not refer now to Christ's sympathy, but that you can have no rest but in spreading it out before Him, and thus you will be brought into such a consonance with Him that you will have obtained a deeper knowledge of God, and your ministry will be more helpful.

• My great desire for you is that you may be more and more fitted by Himself for His service. No servant of the Lord knows his work before he is employed. A man of the world would not hire as a coachman, a man who had never driven a horse.

• The Lord empties us, and thus teaches us the true way to fulfil the service to which He has appointed us. We may sometimes think that He is hard on us, in subjecting us to sorrow and loss in various ways, and often when we least expect it, but He has to make His servants to His hand. The assurance that this is His purpose with you will be a great solace to you.

• In the light with Him everything is seen in divine reality; that which is of the flesh is condemned, and that which is of the Spirit is confirmed. Where there was any pride of life it will be exposed and withered up, and you will be so self-diminished that you will be able to say: When I was weak then was I strong.

• It must ever be a losing on man's side when it is a gaining on Christ's side. Paul in prison and John in exile were very low in the sight of men, but greatly favoured of the Lord.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 7

I know you do not take lightly this affliction. The Lord does not like us to take an affliction lightly. A rebuke entereth more into a wise man than a hundred stripes into a fool.

• But the more you take it to heart the more you reach His "holiness", that, so to speak, is the goal. The Father's discipline is intended to effect the greatest gain that could possibly be acquired – even to be "partakers of His holiness", the only time this word is used.

• The mere thought of reaching up or arriving at any apprehension of the separateness in which He is, is a great delight and encouragement to the heart, and it has very great practical effect.

• Once any of us have, in any degree, partaken of His holiness, we become correspondingly sensitive to everything contrary to or inconsistent with it. It is the superior thing which ever enables us to refuse the inferior, and this in a wonderful way works all round.

• We do not feel that we are doing anything. We shrink from the atmosphere, we like to be 'encased' in the armour of light, as the wool grows on the sheep to protect it from the winter cold.

• The process is a very interesting one. Your divine tastes are so advanced that the incongruities in everything here are not only apparent but their real value is disclosed. You do not feel that you are losing – though you are losing the things here – because you are so assured of the highest and greatest gain.

  Three great facts or events have occurred and our faithfulness is proved by the way we are affected by them.

1. The first is, that Christ has come, has died for our sins, and has risen.

2. Secondly, that He has gone into heaven.

3. Thirdly, that the Holy Ghost has come down to be with us and in us.

4. The fourth is our prospect that He is coming again.

• Now every believer knows something of the first – no salvation otherwise.

• The second and third test our faithfulness; Christ is in heaven, do we seek the things that are above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God?

• The Holy Ghost is with us and in us; does He lead and control our hearts absolutely in this scene in the absence of our Lord?

• All knowledge of truth is ineffectual when we are not in correspondence with these great unconditional facts, which remain true, even though we are not true to them; but when we are, all the truth is in its place.

• You are a special interest to the Lord at this time. May He fulfil all His pleasure respecting you, and fit you for His own service in a scene where there can be nothing right because He has been rejected from it.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 8

I have been dwelling much lately on "the body is the Lord's". It is marvellous grace that He should first bear all the judgment that lay upon it and then make it the temple of the Holy Ghost, to be here for Himself, and as here to be with Him in the kingdom to reign with Him.

• There is then the discipline to help us, and the discipline to correct us. Jacob was corrected at Shechem, but he was helped at Bethel. We who live are alway delivered unto death – this is help. The suffering in Hebrews 11 was for righteousness, but we are thereby made "partakers of His holiness".

• There is no expression of light from us greater than the light in us. As the light increases, the check, or the stone before the wheel is removed. As J.N.D. has said, we cannot die ourselves, but as we bear about in our bodies the dying of Jesus,

• God rolls in death to help us. It is deeply interesting to understand His treatment! The Lord bless you much. It is very happy to turn to the Lord for you.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 9

I am daily learning that I must not be surprised by any sorrow in the place where the Son of God has been rejected… When there is much to draw on one and to be most thankful for, there much sorrow might be.

• The Lord preserve you to us and to His service. I have been very much impressed of late, that as the blessed Lord was here for us, we now should be here for Him – that we receive not only grace for ourselves to the fulness of the Father's love, but we receive special grace to be here for Christ.

My comfort is, that this discipline is to help you. We who live are always delivered unto death. We are touched where we feel most, but when you can see it is this – as sent by the Lord, that He should be more and more manifested in your mortal body, you can praise Him while you suffer.

• May this be your blessed experience. The blessed Lord is Jehovah-Jireh. Abraham had to travel a very desolate path before he realised this.

The Lord will satisfy every desire of your heart. The desire comes first and then the preparation. Moses was forty years being prepared for the desire of his heart.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 10

It is very interesting to me the way the Lord allows one to be as water poured on the ground, and then as there is turning to Him, He raises up from the lowest point to the highest, as in Josiah's reign and at other times.

The greater the affection the greater the sorrow; it is the sense of bereavement which makes the sorrow so great, and yet the greater this is, the greater the consolation in the sorrow, because the greater the loss the more is the heart justified for its sorrow.

How the disciples must have felt when our Lord died! How easy it was for them to remember Him in that night! How truly His death was before them!

I have been interested in seeing how the doctrine which is distinctively Christian has been reduced to man's mind instead of being insisted on according to its divine measure.

• While many begin at the beginning – know how sins are cleared, how few know even in word how sin is cleared away, and so on as to every section of the truth.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 11

You are constantly before me in your deep sorrow, the deepest doubtless that you have ever known. May your heart be able to feel how near the Lord is to you at this time, the interest, I may say, that He takes in you in your present exercise.

• It is such a moulding time with Him when you can pass from your sorrow to Him and to the solace His own self can afford that you will gain in a double way, you will not only be relieved of your anguish, but you will have found the Lord in quite a new way. He blessedly fills the blank, the blank which you may have felt almost intolerable.

• But, blessed be God, He turneth the wilderness into a standing water; where the sense of the greatest desolation has been, there is now the sense of the greatest consolation in, and by, and from a Person whom you can never lose.

• It is a most blessed experience to be sustained under great pressure. The sympathy of the Lord Jesus Christ, not relieving me from the pressure, but making me to know that He beside me is bearing up the weight that it may not crush me; and at the same time to be assured of His interest and present care, so that He is daily more and more to me, is most blessed.

• May this winter be indeed the prelude of a great spring time to you.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 12

• If in nearness to the Lord you find compensation for this loss, you will gain immensely, and your gain will be great joy to me. I see in my own history when a trial was endured as Job endured it, that my heart expected some compensation as a balance or set off to my loss, as Job did, and eventually he found
  • "the end of the Lord … is very pitiful, and of tender mercy", James 5: 11;

• but I have found lately that when the sympathy of Christ was realised – drawing me to Himself, that I had a compensation for my loss more than any earthly mercy could be to me. The Lord grant that you may know this compensation in your present trial.

• I hope when the Lord has opened any way for you that you will kindly write to me. Be assured, I shall rejoice in your welfare. May He bless you in nearness to Himself.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 13

My heart is pained for you. The word to comfort me is –

• "I was brought low, and he helped me", Psalm 116: 6.

• It is immense comfort to get near the Lord and to be assured that He is especially interested in you at this moment. Blessed Lord, Thou canst support at this time! He can relieve but He does support. He sympathises. He will be beside you so that the sorrow is a great occasion for Him to prove His love to you.

• I can only turn to Him for you; you have been peculiarly near and dear to me for many years. The Lord greatly comfort and support you. What times of blessing you are passing through though so sorrowful to man's eye.

… The mercy of the Lord endureth for ever. I rejoice in His mercy to you, and indeed to me also. We can sing Psalm 134. But surely it is also a great seed-time. We sow in tears but we reap in joy; thus our very infirmities become an occasion for knowing Him better. Words which we had heard or read of Him are verified to us.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 14

I can well enter into the sense of the blank in your house that you are feeling at this moment. The removal of the dearest from one's side for ever in this scene must cast a shadow on the scene that can never be removed, and yet it ministers blessing to the one thus afflicted.

Though this scene is deeply darkened, the One to whom she has gone is more than ever before your heart. Thus out of the eater comes forth meat.

• I am quite sure that the death of a beloved one here in a peculiar way brings our Lord's death more before the heart. Every fresh sorrow revives all the former sorrows; and surely no death is more affecting to our hearts than His.

• We are indeed pilgrims and strangers where He died, and where death caused Him the deepest sorrow. The Lord be much with you, or rather may you be so very near Him that you may be led by Him aright in the new and more dreary path now before you.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 15

I heard last evening of your great bereavement; my heart is grieved deeply for you. I cannot attempt to console you, but I know that as you are with Christ outside of all the sorrow here, He can and will console you;

• yes, He will not only bear you above your deep sorrow, but He will so endear Himself to you as He did to Mary as He walked with her to the grave of Lazarus, that you will be thinking of your gain in Him rather than on your great loss down here. May you be thus fully consoled.

• I feel so much for you because I know that the dear one removed from your side was everything to you naturally. I do not expect nor wish you to answer this, but when you have light from the Lord as to your future home here, where you will be properly cared for, I shall be glad of a brief line.

May the Lord bless you much and use you more than ever for His own still in the wilderness.

• "My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the bed of spices", Song of Songs 6: 2.

• Is His garden attractive to you? In the gospel He comes to us. In the assembly we leave our own side of things and travel to His side – "Part with me".

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 16

When I heard of your sorrow I wished to write to you. Sorrow draws out the heart – where sorrow is known – more than joy. Our blessed Lord is ever near the sorrowing one, and if subject to Him it is sure to know that He is alongside.

• Until the heart has learned His sympathy in its deepest sorrow, there is not that discovery of His heart and interest which produces the Ruth-devotedness. Naomi became endeared to her in the hour of her desolation, therefore her devotedness exceeded Jonathan's to David.

• How rarely can any one come near you in your sorrow! It is a great time! The poor heart is wrenched, and yet the blessed Lord uses this breach as an opportunity of making His heart for you better known.

• It is a chapter in your history which you will ever look back to. Earth almost a blank, shadowed over as it is, and it is fit that it should be, because Christ has died here, but Himself, as the clear shining of the sun after rain, binding your heart in the closest way to Himself, while life reigning in eternal glory opens out the more to you.

• Death in a family is never forgotten; every new sorrow only revives it. We must be prepared to find nothing after us. The Lord cheer your heart abundantly.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 17

It is very interesting the varied ways in which our God fits us for His own service. The gift is Christ's, and the vessel has to be formed and made fit for it. The Lord give you to see His purpose in this training that you may be not only restored in health, but better fitted for His service.

The body is the Lord's. The keys of death and Hades are now in His hands. I can see no difficulty in Satan assaying to hinder Paul, and the Lord allowing it for His servant's advantage.

As to sickness, etc., when for discipline He may allow one to catch cold, and so on; I do not see where Satan could come in save in persecution, and this, as we see in Hebrews 12, is turned to our own account that we may be "partakers of his holiness".

Sanctification is practically superseding the old man by Christ.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SERVANT NO. 18

It is interesting to connect the two ministries by which sanctification is promoted – the ministry of the word within, and the ministry of circumstances, health or otherwise, outside. Cut off from the external interests to be more exclusively engrossed with the things of our Solomon within.

Dear ———. It is indeed 'grievous', but no servant ever advanced without the Father's discipline.

• "We which live are alway delivered unto death", 2 Corinthians 4: 11.

• It makes a great difference whether it is our idol which is our scourge – our idol is where we have most vitality – or that God in His own way removes it from us by death.

• For instance, a man might be greatly ensnared by singing, and it might become a rod to beat himself, but if he honestly desired to be free from it, God would roll in death on him, and he might become unable to sing.

• The servant must be a sufferer. My kindest love to him. May the Lord comfort him much; we all learn that the end of the Lord is very pitiful. Though He is so great, His mercy endureth for ever. He loves to come down to our weakest point, and then to make manifest the strength of His arm.