The odor that filled the house that day in Bethany still fills the church today; Mary’s fragrance never passes. It needed but one stroke to break the flask for the Lord, but her action—that unreserved giving and the fragrance of that anointing—abides.
We are speaking here of what we are; not of what we do or what we preach. Perhaps you may have been asking the Lord for a long time that He will be pleased to use you in such a way as to impart impressions of Himself to others. That prayer is not exactly for the gift of preaching or teaching. It is, rather, that you might be able, in your touch with others, to impart God, the presence of God, the sense of God. Let me tell you, dear friends, you cannot produce such impressions of God upon others without the breaking of everything, even your most precious possessions, at the feet of the Lord Jesus.
But if once that point is reached, you may or may not seem to be much used in an outward way, but God will begin to use you to create a hunger in others. People will scent Christ in you. The most unlikely people will detect that. They will sense that here is one who has gone with the Lord, one who has suffered, one who has not moved freely, independently, but who has known what it is to subject everything to Him. That kind of life creates impressions; and impressions create hunger, and hunger provokes men to go on seeking until they are brought by divine revelation into fullness of life in Christ.
God does not set us here first of all to preach or to do work for Him. The first thing for which He sets us here is to create in others a hunger for Himself. That is, after all, what
prepares the soil for the preaching.
If you set a delicious cake in front of two men who have just had a heavy meal, what will be their reaction? They will talk about it, admire its appearance, discuss the recipe, argue about the cost—do everything in fact but eat it! But if they are truly hungry, it will not be very long before that cake is gone. And so it is with the things of the Spirit. No true work will ever begin in a life without first of all a sense of need being created.
But how can this be done? We cannot inject spiritual appetite by force into others; we cannot compel people to be hungry. Hunger has to be created, and it can be created in others only by those who carry with them the impressions of God.
I always like to think of the words of that “‘great woman” of Shunem. Speaking of the prophet, whom she had observed but whom she did not know well, she said, “Behold now, I perceive that this is a holy man of God, that passeth by us continually” (2 Kings 4:9). It was not what Elisha said or did that conveyed that impression, but what he was. By his merely passing by, she could detect something; she could see. What are people sensing about us? We may leave many kinds of impressions; we may leave the impression that we are clever, that we are gifted, that we are this, or that, or the other. But no, the impression left by Elisha was an impression of God Himself.
This matter of our impact upon others turns upon one thing, and that is the working of the cross in us with regard to the pleasure of the heart of God. It demands that I seek His pleasure, that I seek to satisfy Him only; and I do not mind how much it costs me to do so.
The sister of whom I have spoken came once into a situation
that was very difficult for her; I mean, it was costing her everything. I was with her at the time, and together we knelt down and prayed with wet eyes. Looking up she said, “Lord, I am willing to break my heart in order that I may satisfy Thy heart!” To talk thus of heartbreak might with many of us be merely romantic sentiment, but in the particular situation in which she was, it meant to her just that.
There must be something—a willingness to yield, a breaking and a pouring out of everything to Him—which gives release to that fragrance of Christ and produces in other lives an awareness of need, drawing them out and on to know the Lord. This is what I feel to be the heart of everything.
The gospel has as its one object the producing in us sinners of a condition that will satisfy the heart of our God. In order that He may have that, we come to Him with all we have, all we are—yes, even the most cherished things in our spiritual experience—and we make known to Him, “Lord, I am willing to let go all of this for You—not just for Your work, not for Your children, not for anything else at all, but altogether and only for Yourself!”
Oh, to be wasted! It is a blessed thing to be wasted for the Lord. So many who have been prominent in the Christian world know nothing of this. Many of us have been used to the full (have been used, I would say, too much) but we do not know what it means to be “wasted on God.” We like to be always “on the go”; the Lord would sometimes prefer to have us in prison. We think in terms of apostolic journeys; God dares to put His greatest ambassadors in chains.
“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor
of His knowledge in every place” (2 Cor. 2:14).
“And the house was filled with the odor of the ointment” (John 12:3).
The Lord grant us grace that we may learn how to please Him. When, like Paul, we make this our supreme aim (2 Cor. 5:9), the gospel will have achieved its end.
1
. John 1:7, Darby translation, marginal reading.
2
. The author uses “the cross” here and throughout these studies in a special sense. Most readers will be familiar with the current use of the expression “the cross” to signify, first, the entire redemptive work accomplished historically in the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Himself (Phil. 2:8–9), and second, in a wider sense, the union of believers with Him therein through grace (Rom. 6:4, Eph. 2:5–6). Clearly in that use of the term, the operation of “the blood” in relation to forgiveness of sins (as dealt with in chapter one of this book) is, from God’s viewpoint, included (with all that follows in these studies) as a part of the work of the cross.
In this and the following chapters, however, the author is compelled, for lack of an alternative term, to use “the cross” in a more particular and limited doctrinal sense in order to draw a helpful distinction, namely, that between substitution and identification, as being, from the human angle, two separate aspects of the doctrine of redemption. Thus, the name of the whole is of necessity used for one of its parts. The reader should bear in mind what follows.—
Ed.
3
. The expression “with him” in Romans 6:6 carries of course a doctrinal as well as a historical (or temporal) sense. It is only in the historical sense that the statement is reversible.—W.N.
4
. The quotations are from
Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission
by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, Chapter 12, “The Exchanged Life.” The whole passage should be read.—
Ed
.
5
. The verb
katargeo
translated “destroyed” in Romans 6:6 (
KJV
) does not mean “annihilated,” but “put out of operation,” “made ineffective.” It is from the Greek root
argos
, “inactive,” “not working,” “unprofitable,” which is the word translated “idle” in Matthew 20:3, 6 of the unemployed laborers in the market place.—
Ed.
6
. Greek
sumphutos
“planted or grown along with,” “united with.” The word is used in the sense of “grafted” in Classical Greek. In the delightful illustration which follows, the analogy of grafting should perhaps not be pressed too closely, for it is not quite safe to imply, without some qualification, that Christ is grafted into the old stock. But what parable can adequately describe the miracle of the new creation?—
Ed.
7
.
long-ien
(
Euphoria Jongama
) is a tree native to China. Its fruit resembles an apricot in size and has a round central stone, a dry, light brown, papery skin and a delicious white, grape-like pulp. It is eaten either fresh or dried, and is prized by the Chinese both for its flavor and for its food value.—
Ed.
8
. Whatever question medical men may raise as to the account of this unusual incident, the statement which follows is not open to challenge—
Ed
.
9
. Two Greek verbs
paristano
and
paristemi
are translated in these verses by “present” in the
RV
where the
KJV
has “yield.”
Paristemi
occurs frequently with this meaning,
e.g.
in Rom. 12:1; 2 Cor. 11:2; Col. 1:22, 28 and in Luke 2:22 where it is used of the presenting of the infant Jesus to God in the Temple. Both words have an active sense for which the rv translation “present” is greatly to be preferred. “Yield” contains a passive idea of “surrender” that has colored much evangelical thought, but which is not in keeping with the context here in Romans.—
Ed
.
10
.
The Holy Spirit, Who He Is and What He does,
by R. A. Torrey, D.D., pp. 198–9.
11
.
The Life of Dwight L. Moody
, by his son, W. R. Moody, p. 149.
12
.
Autobiography of Charles E. Finney
, chapter 2.
13
. The author has in mind the Greek preposition
ek
, the sense of which is not easily conveyed by any single English word.—
Ed
.
14
. “Resident Boss”—The author’s own rendering of
li-mien tang-cia tih.
—
Ed
.
15
. The two apparent exceptions to this are found in First Corinthians 11:28, 31 and Second Corinthians 13:5. But the former passage calls upon us to discern ourselves as to whether we recognize the Lord’s body or not, and this is in particular connection with the Lord’s table. It is not concerned with self-knowledge as such. The strong command of Paul in the latter passage is to examine ourselves as to whether or not we are
“in the faith.” It is a question of the existence, or otherwise, in us of a fundamental faith; of whether, in fact, we are Christians. This is in no way related to our daily walk in the Spirit or to self-knowledge.—W.N.
16
. This is one of several references by the author to the late Miss Margaret E. Barber of Pagoda Anchorage, Foochow. See also pp. 93, 228, 244, 253–54.—
Ed.
17
. 1938.—
Ed.
18
. The author here takes the fairly common view that the “house of Simon the leper” was the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, Simon presumably also being a relative of the two sisters.—
Ed.