Q. What would be sufficient to deprive the assembly of the testimony of God?
A. The question is to my mind a profound mistake,-that the testimony they bear is the governing object in the minds of saints. It is no new thought to me, but what I have insisted on, I know not how long-some thirty or forty years-that wherever an assembly, or those within the assembly, set out to bear a testimony, they will be a testimony to their own weakness and inefficiency; because the object of their walk cannot be one which efficiently forms a Christian. When they have a right one, they will be a testimony; but to be one is never the first object.
To have Christ-I mean practically, to walk with Him and after Him, to have communion with the Father and the Son, to walk in unfeigned obedience and lowliness; to live in realized dependence on Christ and have His secret with us, and realize the Father's love; to have our affections set on things above, to walk in patience, yet in confidence through this world,-this is what we have to seek. If we realize it, we shall be a testimony, whether individually or collectively, but in possessing the things themselves; and they form us through grace, so that we are one (i.e. a testimony). But seeking or setting up to be it does not. Moses did not seek to have his face shine nor even know when it did; but when he had been with God, it shone.
Whenever Christians, as far as I have seen, set up to be a testimony, they get full of themselves, and lose the sense that they are so (i.e. full of themselves), and fancy it is having mach of Christ. A shining face never sees itself. The true heart is occupied with Christ; and in a certain sense and measure self is gone. The right thought is not to think of self at all-save as we have to judge, it. You cannot think of being a testimony save of your being so, and this is thinking of self, and, as I have said before, it is what I have always seen to bring declension.
J. N. D.