"This is the Testimony"

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 6 - Divine Love

"He that loves his brother abides in the light" (1 John 2:10).

"In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever does not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loves not his brother. For this is the message which we have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another" (1 John 3:10-11).

"We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren" (1 John 3:14).

"My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth" (1 John 3:18).

"This is His commandment, that we should... love one another" (1 John 3:23).

"Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is begotten of God, and knows God. He that loves not, knows not God; for God is love... Herein is love... that He loved us... Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another... if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:7-12).

"We love, because He first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar: for he that loves not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen. And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loves God love his brother also... Whosoever... loves Him that begat loves Him also that is begotten of Him. Hereby we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous" (1 John 4:19-5:3).

"Jesus Christ... unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by His blood; and He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father" (Rev. 1:5-6).

"I John, your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience which are in Jesus" (Rev. 1:9).

"And madest them to be unto our God a kingdom and priests, and they reign upon the earth" (Rev. 5:10).

"Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: over these the second death hath no power; but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years" (Rev. 20:6).

Our governing fragment of Scripture from John's letter is: "This is the testimony". And now we come to the third of the three great inclusive things which cover the whole ground of the testimony of Jesus: the first, Light; the second, Life; and now: Love.

As we have said, John, by the Spirit, was seeking to set forth in a very concise and precise way those basic features of Christianity in its absolute purity as it came forth from God in Christ, and, writing at an end-time, his whole object was and is to recover those thoughts of God in fulness of expression.

Fulness the Original Thought of God

So we come at last to this fact, that, seeing that God will not accept at the end anything less than He revealed and projected at the beginning, and still stands by His original intention and determined to have it at the end, one word expresses that Divine intention, and that word is: fulness. I do want to emphasize it, because it must be set over against a great deal today that would yield to something less and be prepared to accept something less than fulness.

There is a fatalistic thing that has come in: 'Well, it may have been all right at the beginning, it has all gone wrong now, everything has broken down now, and we cannot accept again what there was, therefore we must be content with something less.' Now, through these messages we have sought with great emphasis to protest against that, and as you look carefully and thoughtfully at the end-time words of God, you will find that they protest against that. And if there is one thing which is right on the face of things when you come to the messages to the seven churches in Asia, surely it is just that: that the Lord Jesus is absolutely uncompromising with a situation which has come into being and is demanding no less than the original full thought. His command and challenge, on pain of removal of the very vessel of testimony, is, "Repent, and do the first works." Fulness is the original thought of God from which He does not depart, and therefore He will bring it out at the end. That is not only a statement of fact, that is a glorious encouragement, but it is very important to know what is meant by fulness.

We begin with this thought, that fulness is the end and aim of God, but that with God fulness is not necessarily bigness. Although at the end the City may be very great, and it will be very great - twelve thousand furlongs - nevertheless, God's mind is to have fulness more in the sense of value than in the sense of bigness. Take the very walls and the twelve precious stones in the walls. Take the one great thoroughfare - it is of pure gold. The whole thought which governs is rather the greatness of quality than of quantity, and fulness is that with God. Fulness is not just a great big thing. Fulness is the quality and value, the preciousness of the thing.

Fulness and Love

When we touch the matter of fulness in the Scriptures, we usually come to the matter of Love. I wonder if you have noticed that. Look into this matter, and you will find fragments jumping up from everywhere, "made perfect in love" (1 John 4:18), and the word 'perfect' there means full, complete, absolute, final, nothing lacking, made complete, made full, in Love. Love makes the law full. All the law is gathered up into this one thing, and without it the law is not full. It is Love which is the filling full (fulfilling is our way of translating the word) it is the filling full of the law (Rom. 13:10). Love is the carrying out of the law fully and finally; fulness in the matter of Love.

In His great prayer, the Lord Jesus addressed the Father like this: "That the love wherewith Thou lovedst Me may be in them, and I in them"; "Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:26,24). That is eternal Love, the Love of God outside of time, that is full Love, and "having loved His own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end" (John 13:1), the idea of fulness. I could go on quoting Scripture from everywhere showing that when you have touched the matter of Divine spiritual fulness, you are bound, sooner or later, to find yourself dealing with love.

Take the letters of Paul, and look at the matter of love, and see how everything is headed up into that or takes its rise from that. In the great Roman letter the whole point upon which everything turns is: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:35-39). No one needs me to quote 1 Corinthians 13. It is just a tremendous overflow of Love; look at its first chapters again. See the book of Ephesians. And so you go through, and you find everything is turning upon this matter of Love, and it represents the fulness of spiritual life which the Holy Spirit, through the apostle, is seeking to bring to all believers, because all these letters are written with one object: to perfect the saints, to build up the Body, to make faith complete, to bring into spiritual fullness. And when you look at it, that great object is always based upon Love and takes its rise from Love, is governed by Love, and in effect it says, if only you can come to fulness of Love, you come to all spiritual fulness.

But we mentioned Ephesians. Ephesians is the letter of fulness. Look at the word itself in Ephesians. You know the great object in view: the Body coming to the fulness of Christ. You look again and see fulness in Ephesians, but what is the fulness? "That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God" (Eph. 3:17-19). You could not have stronger evidence than that, and what leads up to that is the building up of the Body. Spiritual fulness is this: the breadth, the length, the height, the depth, the knowledge-surpassing Love. That is one great example.

I think perhaps we shall have to revise our ideas of what spiritual fulness is in the light of this.

But take another illustration, not such a happy one, but one of tremendous forcefulness - that is the Corinthian position. Here you have it by contrast with Ephesians. Here it is not fulness, but just the opposite. It is smallness, meagreness, poverty, weakness, defeat, failure, and everything that makes you sad because of such a low spiritual level - divisions and quarrels and lawsuits and all that sort of thing. This is not spiritual fulness, but the Corinthians have an idea that they have got spiritual fulness! That is the trouble, because they come behind in no spiritual gift, so the apostle says (1 Cor. 1:7). All the gifts were there: tongues and miracles, healing and all the rest. They were all there, and yet with them all you have this low level of spiritual life. And the apostle takes up the whole position (and it is a tremendous implication) that gifts, even tongues, are no sign of spiritual maturity; they may be just a mark of spiritual infancy.

Let me say that tongues never were the proof of the fulness of the Holy Spirit. The fulness of the Holy Spirit may work in that way, but in themselves they are not the proof. Now that is the argument of Paul here, 'You have them and all the other gifts, but you are very small. What do you need, what is the thing that will bring you into enlargement, what will make you spiritually full?' "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels" - have all power to communicate with terrestrial and celestial beings, a wide range - "but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal" (1 Cor. 13:1). And so he goes over all the things on which these people were priding themselves and which they were thinking to be marks of great spirituality, and he sets over against that: them, minus love, equals nothing! If with all spiritual gifts Love is absent, it is nothing. They are not getting very far so far as God's thought of spiritual fulness is concerned. Love it is that makes full.

Of course, Love does not rule out these things. That is not the argument at all, that Love dispenses with these things necessarily, but these things without Love are nothing so far as real spirituality is concerned. It is a tremendous argument that Paul uses here. It is all on this matter of spiritual fulness, and what is spiritual fulness? Not that you can do this or have that, not that you have great faith, not that you have this power and that power, and this gift and that gift, but spiritual fulness is that you have Love and this kind of Love. It is this Divine Love which he delineates here so marvellously; "love which suffereth long and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up," and so on. This is spiritual fulness. Will any of us here today say that we are mature in the light of that? I doubt whether ever a day passes but that we fail in one of these points, if not in many of them. We have a long way to go yet, but the point is that fulness is bound up with Love.

Love the Hallmark of Kingliness

Therefore, if that is true, Love is a supreme feature. And when I say that, I am just again enunciating one of those principles which we have been following through these messages in the other two things. Love is, according to God's mind, the hallmark of kingliness. Light is the function of the prophet. Life is the function of the priest. Love is the function of the king. Perhaps you have not thought of that.

Turn to 2 Samuel 12. It is about the birth of Solomon; you remember the story of Bathsheba. "The Lord loved him; and he sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet; and he called his name Jedidiah, for the Lord's sake". Jedidiah - "Loved of the Lord" - for the Lord's sake. In a sense, the prophets and the priests have been leading up to this. Moses was a prophet. "The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet, like unto me" (Deut. 18:15). Samuel was a prophet. Priests - well, you have the whole story of priests there leading on. There must be Light, there must be Life, leading to the Throne. The Throne must embody the Light and the Life. You see how it points to the Lord Jesus, and when you come to fulness, you come to the Throne. David, the peak of Israel's monarchy, passed into sonship. "He shall be my son" (2 Sam. 7:14). Solomon is born, and in him all the glory of kingship, all the fulness of kingship, the highest thing that ever was in kingly representation in the first years of Solomon's life embodied in him, and the Lord loved him, and sent by the hand of the prophet Nathan, and he called his son "Beloved of the Lord" - for the Lord's sake. What a name! That is kingliness.

Love is found at its full expression in kingliness, or kingliness is manifested supremely in love. Love is the great governmental thing. It is a great power, there is no power like love, there is nothing which governs like love. God's own supremacy, so far as humanity is concerned, is His Love. You say, His grace. Well, what is grace? It is only Love in action. So you come to the King and you find, to use a phrase which we often sing - "The King of love my shepherd is".

We are in [the book of] Revelation; we are at the end. Where do we get to almost at the end? We get to Laodicea. Where did we start? In Ephesus. "Thou didst leave thy first love" (Rev. 2:4), and nothing justifies your going on unless you repent and do the first works. The end - Laodicea - "neither cold nor hot... I will spew thee out of My mouth". "To him that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne" (Rev. 3:14-22). Overcome what? This lack of Love, this coolness, this survival of an Ephesian state at the end; lost first love. And the Throne comes into view when Love is recovered. Love and the Throne are always united. That is not imagination. You cannot get away from spiritual principles, there they are. The Holy Spirit knows what He is talking about all the time. Well, the Revelation is just that. "Unto Him that loves us, and loosed us from our sins by His blood, and He made us a kingdom..." (Rev. 1:5-6). That is why we read those fragments. A kingdom - one with Him. "Unto Him that loves us". Love issues in the highest place - that is the point. Whatever you think about thrones, it is the high place, the exalted place, the place of power and influence, and there is no higher place than His Throne.

Now we travel a long way back again. We said that Adam, before ever the official designations came in, was a prophet, because he stood here on this earth to reveal God's mind concerning man. We said that he was a priest because the custodianship of life was entrusted to him. He was intended to transmit an unsullied life to his generations. He failed as prophet; he failed as priest. In function he was to be a king. "Thou madest him to have dominion" (Psa. 8:6). The kingliness for him in its full realisation and outworking depended upon whether Love triumphed, and the one thing about the first Adam is this: the lack of love. You have to head it right up to that.

"If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments" (John 14:15); obedience is the proof of love. Adam was disobedient and did not keep the commandment; therefore he proved he was without love for God. He could not have so behaved if he really had had love. That is the first Adam, and with that lack of love he lost his throne; he lost his potential throne as well as what measure of it he already had morally. He lost his throne, and the race is a humbled slave race. Who will look out at the race of Adam at any time since and take it as a whole and say that it is a glorious, reigning, magnificent, kingly race? The devil is trying to say that about man. Nebuchadnezzar thinks that of himself, but it is a poor show and not God's idea. In the race of Adam, man has lost his high place and he has never attained unto the place for which God made him.

There comes a last Adam, a second Man, to step into the place of that first. Does He gain the Throne? Indeed He does. "We see Jesus crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2:9). "God highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow" (Phil. 2:9-10). "Being at the right hand of God exalted" (Acts 2:33). "I see... the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56), says Stephen. Yes, He has reached the Throne. How? Through the obedience of love. "He became obedient unto death" (Phil. 2:8). The one great fact about the Lord Jesus was this: that He loved the Father unto death. He was beloved of the Lord, the true Jedidiah, the greater than Solomon that is here, beloved of God for the Lord's sake as it was never true of Solomon. But in the opposite direction - love for the Father! His love for the Father governed everything, always swearing to His own hurt to the glory of the Father, right up to the Cross.

It was the love of Christ for His Father that took Him to that Cross, just that, the love which worked out in such marvellous loyalty, for do not forget that loyalty is a true expression of love. It worked out in obedience unto death because of the utterness of His love for us, the Shepherd Who loved the sheep and gave Himself. It is love leading to obedience, and obedience to death, the death of the Cross. "Wherefore God also highly exalted Him" (Phil. 2:9). Everywhere you see Love and the Throne linked.

What is your idea of reigning with Christ? "We shall reign with Him" (2 Tim. 2:12). Some of us, of course, have long since abandoned foolish ideas or even ambitions to sit on a literal throne reigning, but there is something here that the Lord means, that eventually there will be a position to be occupied which does just what the Lord Jesus did: first of all serves the Father to His fullest and deepest desire, "And His servants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face" (Rev. 22:3-4). There is going to be that through the ages which is serving God. It does not mean running about doing errands for God. We do not know what the real meaning of spiritual service is, we only have glimpses of it, but there it is, a fact for eternity, and the real service of God is bringing satisfaction, answering to His heart's deepest desire. What a privilege lies ahead for us for eternity, to answer to God's deepest and fullest desire and satisfy Him, even as Christ has done. Spiritual service is for God as well as to God, at any rate.

Yes, we have to enter into rest. What is your idea of rest? Doing nothing? It is not mine! Rest is work that brings absolute satisfaction. To be able to do something that is worthwhile for which you can see clear results and of which you can see the full value and no small value at that, that is rest, inward rest, and there is going to be service for God. It is a position of value to God and value to others: service, influence, usefulness, and all that is what we mean by power, being able to effect something for the Lord. That is power, that is reigning, that is the Throne. We shall only come to that in the measure in which it is possible here to serve the Lord and to serve His interests in His people on the same principle, here in the limited measure in which it is possible, and then in fulness. We shall only come to that place of influence and real spiritual power along the line of Love, as He came that way.

Love is a kingly thing. Well, let us try love. We have tried everything else, let us try love, and see what happens, it will not often fail.

The Terror of Love Rejected

And there remains just this closing word. You see, when the great appeal of love has been made to the churches, then it passes out to a wider sphere: the judgment of the nations. Here is a strange thing. You have talk about the wrath of the Lamb (Rev. 6:16), and "these shall war with the Lamb" (Rev. 17:14), and the Lamb makes war – a strange image taken in the realm of nature, perfectly ludicrous - the wrath of the Lamb. But here is presented the most terrible thing that you can think of. This wrath of the Lamb is an awful thing, terrific in its power. This is Love turned round the other way, not Love for you, but Love against you.

It is a terrible thing to find that the mighty Love of God which could have saved you and would have brought you into glory, is now no longer on your behalf. You have turned it to your own undoing, and you realise that there is no passive position about this, to have closed the door to such a Love, to have made yourself the enemy of such a Love, such proffered and offered Love, and to wake up to realise all that is meant by that, that is awful. That is the Love of God becoming a terrible thing to you. Why, that realisation is able to disintegrate your whole being, bringing about your very hell. It is not that the Lamb goes out literally to strike and fight and make war. It is the outcome of this Love and your realisation of what you have brought on yourself by not apprehending the Love of God, and now it is no longer possible. Would to God there had never been any Love at all, we may say, than that we should realise how terrible that Love is to us in view of our having robbed ourselves of all its glorious possibilities!

The Love of God is something in God's universe which is terrible. It is not that He turns round to hate us, it is that we realise that there was Love, with unspeakable possibilities in it, and it is no longer possible to enter thereinto. We have shut the door on it and the very thought of it makes that Love awful to us. You might illustrate it in human life. You might dread to think about a certain person who loved you and you knew they loved you with a great love, and you spurned it, rejected it, turned upon it, and you hardened yourself against it. You dread to think of that person. "Do not remind me, do not let me ever see that person again!" But that is a very feeble shadow of what is here in the book of the Revelation. The wrath of the Lamb is just that. It is what you have lost by losing Love and realising it.

Coming into the Love of God, you are in the very height of all possibility, while rejecting it, you go to the very depths of despair. How great is the Love of God! What fulness, then, is bound up with this Love!

There is more that I would like to say. You see, we talk so much about spiritual maturity and spiritual fulness. Let us try to grasp it, and to dwell upon the fact that, after all, the measure of our spirituality is the measure of our love, the measure of the Love of God in us - not our cleverness, not our capability. It is not our knowledge of truth; nothing of that. You may have it all and Paul may have added many other things to 1 Cor. 13, and he covers a good deal of ground. It is not that, it is not that, it is not that, but it is Love that is spiritual fulness.

Love a Corporate Thing

This Love is a corporate thing essentially, otherwise it has no meaning. Put yourself on some desert island and live in isolation and hug yourself. It does no good to you or anybody else. Love is, by its very essence and nature, a corporate thing, and so the perfecting of Love demands that we shall be in fellowship and be tried very severely along the lines of fellowship. We do not like that, none of us like it. These awkward, difficult people! That is where Love is, it is a corporate thing; just as Light for its fulness is corporate, and Life for its fulness is corporate, so is Love. Then let us pray for that in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.