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 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. 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.