T. Austin-Sparks · 1 of 3

Spirituality the Key to All That is of God

"So also it is written, The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam a lifegiving spirit.... The first man is of the earth earthy: the second man is of heaven" (1 Cor. 15:45,47) "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 5:24). "He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit" (1. Cor. 6:17). "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God... Ye received the spirit of , whereby we cry, Abba, Father" (Rom. 8:14-15). "Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?" (Heb. 12:9). "Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man" (1 Cor. 2:14,15).

A fragment from that last passage will do as the key to our consideration. "He that is spiritual." A spiritual state is the key to all that is of God. Spirituality is the door, and the key to the door, beyond which lies everything that relates to God. Without spirituality, there is no way through, the door is closed. The word "cannot" stands written as an impassable barrier - "cannot understand or receive the things of the Spirit of God." In reality, our lives are set in a realm of things spiritual. God is Spirit, therefore the supreme Reality, the supreme factor, the ultimate environment of this universe - God - is Spirit. Man, in the deepest and truest nature of his being, is spirit. He has a soul and a body. Evil forces in great power encircle man on this earth, and they are spiritual forces. But more, the entire temporal order is constituted upon spiritual principles and meanings. The visible things are but symbols of spiritual things; the seen things are types of unseen things. God has constituted this whole universe, in every aspect and detail, upon a basis of spiritual principles; they are tokens of something more than themselves. If God, Who is Spirit, makes anything, He makes it with a meaning, and that meaning is given to it by the mind of God. It takes its deepest significance from God Himself, therefore its deepest significance is spiritual. It is unnecessary, I am quite sure, and would take a very long time (although it would be tremendously profitable as well as interesting) to follow that out, and look at this seen, tangible, temporal universe and track down its spiritual significance; but it is a very simple line of consideration. We know how, right through the Bible, these things of creation are used to represent spiritual things. The sun, the moon, the stars, and every other created thing embodies some spiritual thought, meaning and law, so that, when we come to the revelation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, we find a whole comprehensive and detailed counterpart, in a spiritual realm, of what we have in the temporal realm; a new creation in Christ Jesus with its initiation by God, Who said, Let light shine out of darkness, and who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Here is the new creation act, the new fiat for bringing in a spiritual order, which, in a spiritual way, reproduces all the laws which lie behind the creation of the natural order. We cannot follow that through now, but bear it in mind. It is a very strong and very full realm by which we can recognise really what God is after through and in and by all things.

If we were only to come down to our own personal physical makeup, and had we the knowledge of our own physical bodies sufficiently, we should be able to trace spiritual laws operating through and through in almost every part. I am almost tempted to yield to the fascination of such a consideration, but I will leave that to more expert people. But there it is; God has constituted our very bodies upon spiritual principles; we are, in ourselves, a material representation of spiritual laws, and when the Holy Spirit, through the Apostle, speaks of the Church as the Body of Christ, He is not only using an illustration, He is saying that a whole system of spiritual laws which operates in the physical body of an individual, operates in a spiritual way in the spiritual Body of Christ, the Church. Just as the violation of any one of those laws or principles of the physical brings about an unbalanced state which will lead to disintegration and finally to death, so in the Church the same laws obtain: violate any one of those laws, and you render the Church unbalanced, it will move to disintegration and out of its realm of vital things. I must not be detailed.

I am stating this, that the key to everything that is of God is spirituality. Here in 1 Cor. 15, the Apostle is saying much about the spiritual side of things, and amongst those statements he says concerning the body that not that which is spiritual is first but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. We might observe, by the way, that when he used that word "natural" he really used the word "soulical." That which is first is the soulical body and afterward that which is spiritual, indicating that the ultimate and final thought of God is the spiritual. The Apostle leads on very clearly to show that this body, this soulical body as such, is going to be changed. But there is a germ - the spirit is the germ - of a new body, and that spirit will be clothed with a spiritual body. It is something that we cannot wholly understand, but we can see something of what it is like when we remember that the forty days after the resurrection of our Lord Jesus were used precisely for this very purpose - to demonstrate and establish the nature of a spiritual man in his final and full constitution, visibly, as well as spiritually. There is no doubt that in those forty days the Apostles were convinced that Jesus was alive, that they had seen the Lord; they were left without a shadow of doubt - nothing could shake them on that matter. But what a Lord, what a difference! - an absence altogether of some things with which they were familiar. He was there, and He was there in a positive presence - not a ghost, not a disembodied spirit, but a full Manhood; and yet how different! He was using the forty days to show what the end of God is for man, the nature of things when God reaches His end. "Afterward that which is spiritual." God's final, ultimate thought is the spiritual, and I want to emphasize that for this purpose - that I am not talking about vapours and shadows and spooks and ghosts, and things floating about in the air. I am not talking about atmospheres, but about something very real - if I may use the word, very concrete - when I talk about spirituality. It is something very practical. The Lord Jesus sought surely to show that after His resurrection. "Children, have ye any meat?" He can make a fire of coals, He can cook fish on it, He can break the food and distribute it and He can eat with them, and yet in a moment can be out of sight. Dismissing time and geography, He is in one place and then in another far off, but He is real. Do not let us think we are talking about spirituality as something unpractical, mythical, abstract. We are going to see that it is a very practical matter; first that which is natural, and afterward, as the final thought and the goal of God's activities, that which is spiritual. The end and the eternal will be spirituality; we shall be in the full sense spiritual. Well, that is a general statement.