Yes I Am 33 - From Disciples To Apostles

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 33

FROM DISCIPLES TO APOSTLES

But what does this actually mean to us individually? It means that we recognize that we never again have any other meaning to our lives except His loving others by us. For as He is the God of love and thus the total self-giver for His universe, so are we. We no longer regard our lives from the aspect of our own convenience, or pleasant or unpleasant situations or relationships, not even our physical well-being. This is the outcome of what was settled within us on our discipleship (learning) level. Jesus had to speak of that in drastic terms to awaken us from any comfortable tendencies to drift along with the tide. He had to say it shockingly: "If any man... hate not his father, mother, wife, children, brethren, sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:26). Hold hard! What can that mean? How could Jesus say that? He said it like that to shock us into thinking it through. It seems so wrong, and even ridiculous, that we are forced to ask, What did He mean? It can’t mean that! But when we do think it through, we see that all that ever motivated us in our unsaved days was self-love. Our love of others was really only to satisfy our self-love. My father, my mother, my wife, my children. The "my" was the real thing to us, not the "them." The me, my, mine is all I had. And it is "me" - not the loved ones - that I hate when I come to Christ. Then when I have come, and He to me, the miracle is that the me, my, mine is changed to you and yours. I am now a you-lover, not a me-lover. And now I have the kinsmen all back - to love them, rather than to be loved by them.

But wait a minute - something has happened! Though we do have them back to love and serve them, an inner cutoff has taken place in which we really love only One and are joined to One, and our loves for others are secondary expressions of our one love. It is no longer God first and others second. No, it is God only, and all others we love as forms of Him. There is a detaching here which will certainly bring opposition, and maybe persecution, from some loved ones who feel - and rightly so - that they are replaced in the center of our hearts by our Eternal Lover. But during our disciple days, let’s be careful. Again, it is not by works: it’s not that we "try" to cut ourselves off from anything or anybody.

No! He does the cutting off, and all He does is always beautiful; and, of course, it does not result in less concern for our loved ones but in more total concern for them to become the total people they really will be in Christ once they come to know Him, though meanwhile our attitude may appear to them as hate or neglect. Neither do we cut ourselves off from the normal way in which God provides our material security, by our jobs or investments. But in His own way He does an inner cutting off, by which we know Him as our true source of supply. Even if our employment or financial securities are taken from us, we only praise Him because He is giving us our chance of proving His faithfulness according to His Matthew 6:31-33 word about taking no anxious thought about food or clothing, but rather, "seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." Many of us have proved that through the years. But again, remember, it is He who lovingly loosens us from all earthly ties... until by the Spirit we’ve taken that "flight from the alone to the Alone." He will certainly do it, because He must have us for our eternal destiny as sons expressing the Father in His Father-nature of love, and in which alone you and I can find our heart and life’s delight. But He always has His own clever ways, so that what we might fear turns out to be a joy and blessing. For all is "for His good pleasure," and what He enjoys He will see to it that we also enjoy.

You should read the life of Rees Howells, the Welsh intercessor, to see a perfect example of how God turns a disciple into an apostle. He got Rees Howells point by point, to the place where the Holy Ghost had no rival in his life, until He had him finally fitted-out for his great life’s ministry of intercession.

So we see that there must be a serious weighing-up of our position on the third level, just as there has been on the first and second. We "count the cost," as Jesus said. We need to face the fact that it means that we don’t assess life any more on the grounds of What do I get out of it? What happens to me? or Will I achieve what I’m meant to be? And when things "happen" to us in life, we no longer may say "Why this?", as if implying we have been hardly done by. No! We see it all in terms of His fulfilling some love and saving purpose for others through it, even though at the moment we cannot see that in it.

While that is the negative side of this third-level life, the positive is tremendous - so tremendous that is appears fantastic to our human sight. The positive is what Jesus taught about the Spirit’s filling. It is not simply that we thirsting ones may fully drink of Him and remain filled, but Jesus says, "Stretch your believing further. The Holy Spirit didn’t come merely to fill you; but from your fullness others will be filled." In other words, He is in you now as rivers of living water flowing out from you. This is Jesus’ fantastic statement in John 7:38: "He that believeth on Me… Out of his inmost center shall flow rivers of living water." John, in verse 39, points out that because Jesus spoke this before the Spirit was poured out on all believers at Pentecost, therefore the "shall" has been fulfilled and now is!

But out of us will never flow these rivers if we forget our union reality and look at ourselves in our humanity. It then becomes a joke. "Rivers - through me?" But once again, there is only the one way - faith. "He that believeth on Me." So we are right back where we started. Of course, again that "takes the heat" off us. "Jesus can save me, a sinner?" Yes! Just transfer your believing to Him and you are saved. "He can deliver me from the efforts of my striving self?" Yes! Just reckon yourself as dead to sin and risen in Him, and now He replaces that spirit of error in you. "There can be rivers of living waters flowing through me?" Yes! Drop your negative believing in your weak little self, stuck away in your small, local situation… and look to Him who said that rivers are flowing through those who are believing.

I took my first step into that third level (of John 7:38) as a young man, when starting out on my call to the Congo. I was so hesitant, and it seemed so absurd that rivers of the Spirit could flow out of me, that, though I did believe, I was a bit like the man who said to Jesus, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief." So I said, "Lord, I believe this word, at least for a muddy trickle to flow out!" But I did believe! And He has surely done more than I asked or thought! So BELIEVE - which is not one whit different from the believing in John 3:16 for salvation and in Galatians 2:20 for oneness. Stand there, laughing, maybe - as I did - at the absurdity of its ever being fulfilled. But remember: faith is substance!

I hope that I have made it plain that the full entry by faith into this apostleship level is definitely a crisis experience involving a fixed inner knowing, as with the other two. Even so, it is true that when we came to Christ we began to be other-lovers and intercessors and witnesses, from our new birth onward. We might say that was the "muddy trickle" stage!

But we are now, again, speaking of something total, from which we don’t look back, which becomes as fixed in us as did the other two. We are now fathers, apostles, bondslaves, co-laborers, co-saviors, intercessors - and the Spirit seals it to us. It requires of us that kind of serious "counting the cost" that Jesus spoke of in Luke 14:28. It is the taking up of our cross voluntarily (and for keeps), just as there was our coming to the cross, and then the taking of our place on the cross. This is now the cross-bearing for others.

I thank God that it was serious for Pauline and me. In our engagement days He was working in my heart in that direction, and He had to work on hers to seal it to us both. She got frightened when, perhaps unwisely put, I told her on one occasion, after I had been stirred by reading Charles Finney’s Revival of Religion, that I had a battle and was alarmed about whether I loved her more than Jesus. So she gave me back the ring, and that really hit me, because what had seemed so clearly of God in our six-month engagement seemed to be completely broken in pieces. But the Lord kept me faithful to my Congo calling, even though in those days we were really only a "family mission" with half a dozen of us living in the Ituri Forest... and I had to face it, now our engagement was broken, that a friend of mine had his eyes on Pauline and I might find myself in the Congo forest living side by side in the next hut to Pauline and her husband! Then an uncle of mine suggested that I drop going to the Congo and take an opening he offered as a missionary in India. It was a temptation, but I knew God’s voice well enough to know that He had called me to the Congo, so I could not turn back. When this news got back to her, she realized that we did love each other and sent an invitation to me to return. I say she proposed to me this time! So we went - and thank God we went! But the main point is that what had bothered her was now settled for both of us. Apparently she had at first said to herself, "If I marry that man, God will be first, God’s work will be second, and I’ll be third; and I’ll be third in no man’s life!" But she still is, after sixty years, and I am third in hers. That settled our "apostleship" calling, and it was so serious a settlement that by God’s grace we have never gone back on it, and have often renewed it together.

So by one means or another, the Lord will get us fixed as firmly into this third level as He has in the second. If you see this as God’s highest and ultimate calling to you, then MOVE IN BY BELIEVING - as you did when you first reckoned on the union, before the realization came. So believe and He will confirm.

There is one other precious word which fits in with John 7:38. It is Galatians 2:8, where Paul says the Lord is "mighty in me toward the Gentiles." He is in you and me, but now He is mighty, not for our interests, but with a power which will establish Him in others. Mighty - toward the Gentiles. TAKE IT!

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Yes I Am 21 - How Do I Get This Inner Knowing?

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 21
HOW DO I GET THIS INNER KNOWING?

Have you grasped what I’m saying? We must have inner knowing. Nothing can be a substitute for that. Remember how I said that faith is only completed faith when it has been replaced by conscious assurance - "substance," as Hebrews 11:1 tells us. We have several times emphasized this, and do it again. Throughout life, faith in its initial form is placed in something external, available to me, and desirable... and by inner decision of my mind, heart and will I then say, "I’ll do that. I’ll go there. I’ll make that." On the human level, I then put that inner word of faith into action. I take my car and go there. I use my hands and make that. I take that fruit and eat it. And then what happens? When it reaches out to something, that first inner form of faith is dissolved and replaced by outer facts. It is no longer "I’ll go to that home." No! Now I am in that home. Not "I’ll eat that." No! It is food in me. Not "I’ll make that." No! Here it is, made. The taker’s taken! My bodily actions have turned the faith into substance.

But now we are talking about a faith-leap into the real dimension - the kingdom of God - the invisible realm of reality with Father, Son and Spirit; and we who are born-again know that when our faith became "substance" we came to a new kind of assurance - ridiculous to the world - in which the Spirit, not human actions, was the agent which brought faith into substance; and that new-birth certainty is nothing but inner knowing - a nonrational knowing. We just know that we know, and neither man, heaven nor hell can move us. Just as Paul almost shouted to the Galatians, when beginning his letter to them: "I so know this new revelation (of the inner union of Galatians 2:20) in my inner being that if an angel from heaven, or I myself, preach to you any other gospel, let him be accursed!" That, surely, is inner knowing.

And now it is this second inner knowing we are talking about, which was so plainly demonstrated by Paul himself in his cry of distress turned into shout of praise and assurance (Romans 7 and 8). And I am asking, "Do I know that?" Yes, I do. Do you? Don’t deceive yourself; don’t mistake your first believing of outer given facts for the spontaneous inner knowing. Get it clear. Faith starts off by my attaching myself to something. We have instanced food, a chair, going to a home. But that’s not what makes it real to me. It is the response back, like an echo, from the thing to which I am attaching myself which makes the inner knowing. I take the food; I am conscious of it inside me. I sit in a chair; the chair makes me know it is holding me. That is the knowing. So the knowing does not come from my putting my faith into something, it comes from the something in which I put my faith. I must never mistake my faith in its first form - my attaching myself to something - for the completion of faith by which it has attached itself to me. Do you see this? So the final knowing of my eternal union - that it actually is He inwardly joined to me: that it is now He living in me, and not I - comes from Him the Spirit, and not from me the believer. He turns the faith into substance: absolute certainty.

So don’t try any imaginings on this level, or try to make yourself think you have it. Don’t try anything, for once again that is this old "self-effort stuff" we have died to. No, I keep doing my part, which is constantly affirming that what the Scriptures have said about my union with Christ is fact. I have been and am crucified with Him. I am dead to sin. I am crucified to the world. I now live in His resurrection. No, it is not I, it is He living in me. I have said it, and still say it. But keep this clear: My saying it is not yet Him saying it back to me. That you do not "try" to make up, or feel, or have any scraps of self-effort in it. No, it "comes down from heaven"! How? When? That’s not my business. Keep off the grass! Don’t inquire. Don’t occupy yourself with hoping or waiting. No, remain steadfast in your part of the bargain - affirming the fact on the basis of God’s Word even if it is not yet inwardly confirmed to you as fact. And when and how will you know? Neither I nor an angel from heaven could tell you, because it is the prerogative of God Himself, God the Spirit, to speak that inner word. All we humans can say is "You’ll know when you know!" Sometimes at once, sometimes after a time-gap.

I did not lightly move into my part of the believing. After five night-hours of battling around with it (so little did I understand the ease of faith in those days), I did finally put my finger on Galatians 2:20, or at least on the first phrase of it, and said right out, "I am crucified with Christ." Then I added a little bit of confessing with my mouth, which Paul said confirms the inner believing: I took a post card, drew a tombstone, and wrote, "Here lies N.P.G., crucified with Christ." I had not reached far out into my resurrection by then!

But did I feel different or know anything different? No. My precious wife, Pauline, was with me and did the same. We had those five hours sitting in our little camp chairs in the forest, in the banana plantation of a precious African brother we had gone to visit. But the Spirit responded more quickly to Pauline. Within two weeks she felt what she took to be a touch on her shoulder, beneath the mosquito net on her camp bed. It was the Spirit confirming her word of faith, and she knew and has known ever since. Next morning, as we sat outside the little native hut we had been staying in, breakfasting at our camp table, she began to say to me that she had something to tell me; but I said, "No need, your face shows it" - and her life has showed it all these years since. But for me, perhaps because I was more a "thinker-through" of a thing, and a slower believer, it wasn’t until two years later that the inner light was turned on in my consciousness. During those two years I never went back on that crisis of affirming faith. It had been as serious to me as a wedding ceremony (yes, faith is serious business). So it was background fact to me as I continued my missionary village travelings. But not until I was home on furlough, and speaking with Mrs. Penn-Lewis, a woman of God whose writings had first helped me into this understanding of Romans 6-8 and Galatians 2:20, was this light inwardly turned on in me. I brought some missionary problems to her. But I think she sensed I was the problem, because she answered by what she called her "baptism in the Spirit" - not by some outer sign, but by an inner revelation of Him in her, so great that, as she spoke that day to a group of young women, the Holy Spirit brought them all down on their faces to the ground. But the point to me was not her story but that as she spoke, I knew. How? I don’t know. But I knew, and that was a great number of years ago. And I still know. Just as certainly and clearly as I knew by the inner witness on the day I came to Christ that I was born again. That’s how I know; and you know, or will know in God’s time. He confirms what we have affirmed. That’s all.

But I do know that as He thus became inwardly real to me, as the One living my life, I did move into an inner knowing which was and is equivalent to saying It is He living in me and not I. I was conscious of Him only doing the thinking and speaking. He, not I. Yet of course it was and is I. And I still have that inner knowing of it being He, not I. So it is not difficult for me to say that it is Christ speaking, willing, thinking, acting. It is Christ in His Norman form. It is that Spirit who Jesus said speaks in us (Matt. 10:20) - not to us, but in us and by us: "For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." It is "God working in us, to will and do of His good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13). So He is the willer and doer, and I just as spontaneously express His willing and doing in my actions.

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