The Divine Anointing - Part 2 — T. Austin-Sparks

The Anointing of Christ and the Church’s Vocation

I'll bring you back again to the words in the Gospel by Luke, chapter 3, at verse 21. Now, it came to pass when all the people were baptized, Jesus also having been baptized and praying, the heaven was opened, descended in a bodily form as a dove upon him, voice came out of heaven, Thou art my beloved Son, in Thee I am well pleased.

Chapter 4, at verse 17, He opened the book and found the place where it was written, The Lord is upon me because he anointed me. We'll stop there, what follows will occupy us later. I just want to add to that from the 2nd letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1, at verse 21.

Establisheth us with you into Christ, and anointed us is God, who also sealed us and gave us the earnest of the Spirit, of this great and important matter of the anointing with the Holy Spirit. This afternoon we are going to focus our attention upon one most important feature of this matter, and that is that the anointing always relates to one thing, and that one thing is vocation.

When the anointing came upon the Lord Jesus, he himself declared why the anointing had come upon him, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach. The anointing of the Holy Spirit concerns vocation. If you would like to change the word to ministry, you can.

But ministry is too often a conception of it, a more comprehensive. I'll point out here again that we have many others who could be added to make it quite clear that what was true of the Lord Jesus was true of the Church.

I take it that Paul's message was to the Corinthians on a message to the Church. While it was the Church in Corinth, it covers the whole Church, because in between his own personal anointing of the Jordan and 2 Corinthians, we do have the Day of Pentecost, the Day of the Anointing of the Church, for its great mission.

Quite simple, self-evident. Grasp this thing, not as something said, but with realization. There's a lot of difference between knowing a thing in a way and realizing that you have got or you know that thing.

You have a lot of things without realizing exactly what you have and the value of what you have. And it's this realization beyond the things that I trust will come to you. Dear friends, and I, if we are in Christ supposed to have the anointing, establish it, ask with you, and anointed are supposed to be anointed people.

Isn't what you feel like the moment the divine fact answered to them? If that is true, you have been brought into the anointing which is on Christ. You inherit that anointing which came on him after his baptism.

You are an anointed person. What we have said earlier is nothing greater of which we can conceive than that we should be people anointed with the Holy Spirit if only we knew what that means. However, here is the truth.

The New Birth and Divine Purpose

If the anointing which is upon us in vocation, in view, the governing factor of the anointing is vocation, it brings us into divine purpose. It means that every one of us in Christ, for a purpose, there should be one person in Christ with a purpose in life by the Holy Spirit.

What it is that I am for the moment taking pains to underline and emphasize of the fact, altogether with us and the interpretation, raises the question of no lesser thing than your place in Christ. The meaning of being in Christ is not so difficult as it may sound as I see it.

Being to the Lord. By having come to the Lord. If you have not had begotten in you a sense that life has taken on a new meaning, that there has come into your consciousness a meaningfulness in life, just as a sense, just as something that you realize has happened, then there is something wrong about your new birth.

For this goes with your union with Christ. That could be put in various ways. Now there is something for which to live. Now you are under constraint to do something. Now there is a goal toward which you have to move.

See it can be put in many ways. But they all amount to starting on a line which has a meaning. The very spirit of vocation. You find that you are under some constraint. Spirit of the anointing. This inseparable from vocation.

We have commenced. It is important to begin there. But we make a personal matter of this. We are not. We are not things to be carried along by some machine, institution, organization. Small cogs in the hole, in all the works.

The whole thing would be thrown out if we didn't fulfill our function. We've got to realize that. I think there are far too many who have not this sense of being the Holy Spirit. I want to carry that beyond the personal and the individual.

Pentecost and the Church’s Corporate Mission

Because we as individuals receive it in a larger setting. If we come to the New Testament, a lot of individuals were involved. They came into their presence of divine initiative and drive. Because the church came into a mighty compulsion and propulsion by the Holy Spirit.

First of all, the church was taken up in this matter. And it is very difficult not to see that tremendous invocation came with the Holy Spirit. On that day and from that day is a thing with a purpose and a motive.

Tremendous driving force. And all the individuals derived their own personal sense of meaning from that hope. And we've got to come back to that presently. But now in between that, here is a word. What is essential, the indispensable justification for the existence of churches, local expressions of the whole?

Why should the people of God gather together in smaller or larger numbers and companies in any given? What is it that justifies their existence? What is it that really is the basis of their being there at all?

Meet together, have nice fellowship, put one another along, be some nice little thing in that place, happily going on or miserably going on. Occupied with themselves, ministering to one another, nursing one another.

Is that it? May come into it. But dear friends, local companies are after all only parts of the one church universal. The purpose and nature and justification of the church universal which passes to the church local is vocation.

There'll be no doubt about this. And any local company that is not really fulfilling a vocation is not there. With an anointed vocation is not justifying its existence. The Lord brings these into being not to be something in themselves, not to be an end in themselves, and not just to look after themselves, but with a vocation in the world that is around them.

Possibility on themselves, this sense of a mission beyond themselves, sense of vocation. The whole Bible could be taken to show that that is true. What follows is a purpose. Because the Lord hath anointed me to something.

Having said that, we have to come to this vocation. We have to depart from that without making quite sure that you have really got your hand upon this matter. If your life, dear friends, is really under the government of the Holy Spirit, it will not be a dead end.

If any company of the Lord's people is under the government of the Holy Spirit, it will not be a dead end. Because the Lord has led you there, and that's how it ought to be, you are there with a vocation, a divine vocation, for the fulfillment of which you can count upon the anointing.

In your profession, in your business, a part of it, this is, there is something more than the thing itself. You are called into a vocation if you have received the Holy Spirit. That can give meaning to life.

We take ourselves out of the hands of the Holy Spirit and choose our own way and go where, decisions and these things very often we get into a backwater. We are just out of the way, coming of it. We ought to be very, very sure that we seek first the Kingdom of God.

There is only another way of saying that we move by the Spirit in what we do, or we might find ourselves just out there with no more meaning than what we are doing day by day for time of the anointing.

The Anointing as Dependence Upon God

But what about this anointing? What is it? The Bible quite naturally into three aspects of the anointing. These three aspects are in the divine conception, inherent in the very creation of man. This creative vehicle and instrument of divine vocation.

And vocation, we pause, let it go. The divinity of Adam is lost. Divine meaning here might be even dangerous. Try and fathom. A tremendous thing in this matter. The Bible reveals an anointed cherub, Lucifer, son of he now known as Satan, before his fall.

Strong hints that his vocation had to do with this creation. He forfeited it by taking it into his own hands, out of the anointing. Because if anointing means one thing, it does mean dependence upon God.

It means that everything comes from God and not from the person concerned. It means that God is most jealous to keep things in his own hands. That's the meaning of the anointing. Things can only be as God maintains.

The overall, the anointing was violated in that way and into the anointing. Great purpose. He had not failed and missed the anointing, the adoption. As a last Adam, God brings him and anoints with that very object.

Along these three lines. First, with the creation of man and the object of his creation. Then the development to be the object, lesson, lesson of what the anointing means as the vocation. Failure again, in all three senses.

His body brought in God's success. Being inherent in the creation of man from the beginning. What is the vocation? First of all, it is dominion. It is rulership, to take the Old Testament title, kingship in a divine sense.

It has not been sufficiently recognized that the anointing of the Lord Jesus on the Jordan side had this threefold vocation included and involved and the first aspect of it was government. Authority, dominion.

We saw yesterday, it was that that the enemy was trying to undercut. One of the major lines of the Old Testament is not something official. It is not something that is temporal. Understand it in the temporal realm.

It is a spirit. Royalty is a nature. Dominion, I can explain that. But first of all, you do recognize that the Old Testament naturally opens up along that line. One of its three lines. It begins with Adam.

Thou madest him to have dominion. Thou madest him to have dominion. You find that before the thing assumes the form of official position, it has already existed in a spiritual and moral way. It is tremendously impressive.

Dominion, Kingship, and Spiritual Dignity

Abraham, as we have seen, is spoken of as one of the Lord's anointed. In Psalm 105, the Lord's anointed. Very well. Abraham stands in the presence of kings of this earth. Abraham is superior. Absolutely superior.

Kings of the earth are cringing before Abraham, are bowing to Abraham, morally and spiritually. He is, so to speak, head and shoulders above them. He really, in the presence of these men, is the king.

From the standpoint of this world looking on, we know quite well what the nations thought of Israel. Naturally. What about? By daylight, thinking that this people, subjugated, brought under, despised of Israel there and then, with all that they were or were not, weaknesses and imperfections and faults, they rise to commend the statue at that very point.

He hath not beheld iniquity in the moral standard in the midst of the nations imparting the principle of the anointed. Dominion. Kingship. It's there. Before there's anything official, it's moral and spiritual.

So we could go on. How true it was of the Lord Jesus to humiliate this man spiritually and morally, whatever they do. He's over them all the time. Is that true of the church? Under the anointing, it's like that.

That's all objective. What about you? What about any believer? Is this not true, dear friends, that when a man or a woman Christ into the life, speaking of receiving, is it not true that immediately that happens, without any reasoning or calculation or thinking about it at all, a new spirit of elevation begins to work in that life?

You've seen it? I've seen it. In utter rags, never having worn a decent collar, in utter rags, a decent creature dragging himself about couldn't be called a... a wife and children in the most deplorable state poverty and misery because of his sin, I've seen that man born again.

Born again. Ah, yes. Within the... Coming to the meeting, first step, a nice, clean, white bit of scarf tied round his neck. And I've seen that go on until he got a decent collar and suit clothes to wear and his home beginning to change and his children, his wife.

No one ever said anything to him? Not a word. No one would have done. It's happened. It's happened from within. And I want to say that that's the spirit of royalty, spirit of heavenly aristocracy at work in the heart.

Glory. For that's what belongs to kings. It's glory. And the Holy Spirit is called the spirit of glory. The Holy Spirit in the light, now that may be an extreme illustration but it's a very true one. It happens again and again.

It's what does happen. And blushing because of certain things, perhaps ways of speaking, old habits and so on which are slow to fall off but a sense of shame and blushing coming in that was never there before never conscious of the thing.

Three cases you see is a principle and a law of the spirit-governed life and the anointing. You cannot be slovenly. You cannot be careless in your life and habits and dress. You cannot have a disorderly state of things for which you are responsible.

It just cannot be. And you ought not to need anybody to point out that that is wrong and that is not right. The spirit himself, says John, dwelling in you, teacheth you. You have no need that anyone teach you.

The anointing teacheth you all things and this is one of the things that the anointing teaches. It makes of a disorderly life an orderly thing and that's what you expect to find in king's households. It makes of a disreputable life a reputable thing.

It tidies up life all round does the Holy Spirit a spiritual and moral thing, you see. The point is that the anointing means elevation. It means elevation and it always does work that way to elevation.

It lifts. It ennobles. It refines. It makes for God's gentlemen of kingship. And this is the law of spiritual government and ascendancy. Ah, better to have it like this than to have the office and the title and for the conditions to be just a contradiction.

No princes in Israel are first of all spiritual and moral before they are official. The anointing means that. It means that. Just amazing how Jesus fit into any situation. Fit into any situation. Poor and rich ignorant and lax.

He fitted right in. But it was the anointing. Have I said enough? His anointing was for kingship. But first of all first of all in this dispensation the kingship of Jesus is a spiritual and a moral thing.

It's the mighty power of elevating. Taking them from the downhill and setting them a mountain. The anointing should mean for us a growing refinement. An increasing sensitiveness to what is fitting. What is becoming.

What belongs to the palace. That can be viewed in two ways. It can make you feel uncomfortable a legal imposition again is going to make life difficult. Well if you take it like that of course you've missed the whole point.

The law of the word of God is always positive. Walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. That is if you live by the spirit it will happen. This is what will happen. Won't you?

What happens or what does not happen shows how much we are being governed by the spirit. Kingship with all its wonderful meaning making an impression by our own. But just being. Being different. Being different.

Spiritual Kingship as Christian Vocation

Anticipating the other aspects of the anointing. The vocation. Have you grasped the point that what I have been saying is a vocation. It's a ministry. It's a service. It's something that really is ministry.

I believe you know that it's far far more effective in this world to be a person with spiritual dignity and character like this than it is to go around with your bible preaching and taking meetings. A person like this walking in the spirit that will not descend to a mean thing.

Will not contemplate anything that is like me and my should such and one as I see that's the spirit of the king. If you are such a person as that and this dignity is found in your home. Your home is a dignified place.

Wherever you are in the orderliness and the refinement put it the other way around and see how the Lord is let down when it's not like that. Or the Lord lose it. This is vocation to be. You recognize I'm speaking very largely to responsible people.

You recognize that the law of the word of God is always in all matters that the person has got to be the thing before they get the name and the title and the office. You've got to be an elder before you can be made an elder.

You've got to be a prince before you can be called a prince. That's the law of the word of God. You've got to be this. The anointing which makes for reality. You can pass quite easily to the second aspect of this vocation which is that of the priesthood.

Priesthood and Intercession

Just as the kings were anointed and were kings by the anointing were priests by the anointing another thing right from the beginning inherent in God's thought concerning man priesthood. Before ever there was a necessity for blood sacrifice for atonement before ever the sin question came in requiring certain aspects of priesthood God and his creation mediatorially intercessed was there was created in the sense that here is God and here is his creation and there must be one between communicate from the one to the other stand for the one to the other both ways was intended to be there the spiritual sense again unfolds along the line of priesthood anointed priesthood calling in the whole system of blood sacrifices but the principle remains that the anointing means that there is that between God and others by which he makes himself known communicates himself commits himself and which brings that into knowledge of God.

Priesthood as you know first of all means mediation that is standing between and then standing between to minister for God to man from man to God and then to teach deep lips must keep wisdom must teach knowledge.

The suffering aspect has come in now into priesthood is that with which the priest has to do. But when you have said all these things about Christianity the church is calling to the place of Israel in this whole universe where Adam failed where Israel failed to come in brought his church into being to be a kingdom and priest unto his God he had made us a kingdom and priest unto his God.

It's not our title young Christian, old Christian whoever you are you taking this home to you and his long life born in all households of Israel where the priests in Israel standing in this holy sacred position as truly as that you are that you are that when you come to a meeting for prayer you are coming on the ground of your priesthood may function under the anointing in intercession standing there in your holy vocation to minister from God to others and their needs to God.

And what is true prayer intercession in that way which is the great vocation of the church in many other ways that we are here tremendous vocation. The individual, the local company standing there not as an end in itself but there between high heaven and almighty God and that city and that neighborhood minister God need, oh what we can do if only we recognize our anointing.

Prophetic Vocation and Recovering God’s Purpose

I must leave that there and pass quickly and last these vocation of the anointing that is that of the prophet again bible opens up quite naturally along that third line. These are the three great unfoldings of the bible.

The prophet anointed anointed. Jesus was anointed king first then he was anointed priest and by that anointing that he went in a day great offering him of his royalty his dominion who does mediate between God and man.

In this aspect the prophet he was anointed as the prophet of the Lord gathered up into himself. The old testament line of prophetic meaning a prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you as he raised me up said Moses.

They were all the way through not only their prophets but waiting for the prophet. Then Jesus came and he asked who do men say that I am. Some said the prophet that one of whom Moses spoke a prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you.

This is the prophet. Ah but he was more so than they thought by the anointing he was that. But what is the function of the prophet to recall and to recover all that has been lost of God for his people.

To recall to it to recall the people to that which necessitates and to recover this vocation. Dear friend all that you would realize that you and your local company whether it be here in this place or in the other places from which you come this is what you are supposed to be there for to recall and to recover.

Which means that as a company you must know what it is that God ever meant and that the people of God have lost as it was with the and to get them back. That's a vocation a vocation to proclaim and to enunciate the whole counsel of God.

The prophetic function. If we are to take Jeremiah as any kind of indication aspect of prophetic work to have to root up every plant which my father had not planted shall be rooted up. Look at Jesus doing the uprooting uprooting.

He was uprooting it difficult work to do. But there you are. There is a destructive aspect of the prophetic ministry that will not tolerate that which man has put in the place of God. Those things which have been put by man in the place of God's things got to be rooted up and it's not all destructive to be done.

We are here for this and we are or should be in any place for this that we are anointed. It requires the anointing all this is implicit in the anointing the big thing to be in the anointing of Christ, lesser thing than the fulfillment of the whole divine revelation of the scriptures from Adam to the end anointed for that.

But this is what will happen, this is what makes it simple. If it sounds complex and difficult this will simplify, this is exactly what will spontaneously happen. If we are moving under the anointing, these things will happen.

They will come about, they will be the very nature of our being where we are, how it will work out, there will be a vetoing and a nullifying and a rooting out of things that are not of the Lord, there will be a planting of what is of God.

These things will all happen. I haven't got to set myself to bring all these things about and do them. What you and I have to do is the power of the anointing and they will happen. Then for more anointed individuals or more living in the power of the anointing, more local companies like that these things happening.

Perhaps the Lord is just saying these things to us to remind us to pull us up over this whole matter, show us we are not here just to drag out a painful existence and try to keep going to the end. The anointing means something more than that it does.

It means spiritual and moral assembly of God of supply. It means recall and recovery all that God ever meant.