Wherever Christians set up to be a
testimony they get full of
themselves...
The question is to my mind a profound mistake, that the testimony they bear is the governing object of the mind of saints. It is no new thought to me, but what I have insisted on. I know not how long-some 30 or 40 years—that wherever an assembly, or those in an assembly, are set 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 and yet 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, and so we are a testimony: but seeking or setting up to be a testimony does not. Moses did not seek to have his face shine nor even know when it did, but when he had been before God it did so.
Wherever 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 [full of themselves], and fancy that it is having much 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.
J. N. Darby