God's Use of Human Agency

A portion of Oswald Chambers' spoken ministry at the time of the First World War is transcribed in a book called The Shadow of an Agony. In the chapter titled "The Pressure of the Present" he explains how the Lord Jesus uses our human faculties to express Himself. Our humanity is at His disposal to accomplish whatever He wants:

"Jesus Christ's vision was unmistakable, and His demands from human beings were terrific, but He always took 'things as they are' into account, and He insisted that in order to carry out His demands individuals must have the right 'alloy.' The Incarnation means the right alloy. For God to be of any use to human beings He must become incarnate; that means dust and deity mixed in one. If you have merely an abstraction, the vision without the dust of the actual, you will never make the vision real . . . The vision is right, but you must take things as they are into account. Our life as disciples is not a dream, but a discipline which calls for the use of all our powers.

"There are two worlds--the actual and the real. My personal consciousness is at home in the actual world, but not in the real; it just touches the real, it touches God. There is an inference that there is a world other than the actual, but I am not at home in it; all I can get at by my personal consciousness is a fictitious reality. Neither the actual nor the ideal is the real; according to Jesus Christ the real can only be worked out on the line of personal experience. Our Lord was at home in the ideal as well as the actual, and consequently everything in His personal life was real. . . .

"The religion of Jesus Christ means that a man is delivered from sin into something that makes him forget all about himself. The trick of pseudo-evangelism is that it drives a man into concentrated interest in himself. The curse of much modern religion is that it makes us desperately interested in ourselves, overweeningly concerned about our own whiteness.

"These findings are not part and parcel of the average Christian conception of Jesus Christ, because we do not take our findings from the New Testament, we take them from what we have been taught about Jesus Christ . . . If Jesus Christ is only a teacher, then all He can do is to tantalize us, to erect a standard we cannot attain to; but when we are born again of the Spirit of God, we know that He did not come only to teach us, He came to make us what He teaches we should be."

In 1976, Norman Grubb gave a talk on Galatians in which he further clarified God's use of human agency:

"Now the flesh isn't a bad thing. It's given that connotation because it's through the flesh that there rises up in me these things [enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, etc.]. It's not a bad thing: that's what God's using. It's only the openness the flesh has to respond to those ways. But that's not our nature. My nature is the new nature. That's the only nature I have. I only have one nature, which is Christ. But I'm encompassed in an agency which Jesus Christ was: He was in the flesh. An agency is that through which God operates.

"I've got to learn to be positive, not to see a negative flesh tempting me but a positive flesh by which I operate! It's the members by which I operate. It's only when I get union that I can do that. Until I get union people are suspicious of their flesh, fearful of it, nervous of it, accusing it. They don't move over so it's right. But in the form of it being right there also turns up the other.

"Because I'm a human being in relationship with this world and one who can and has responded, I respond to pride, I respond to hate, I respond to worry, I respond to lust desires. I respond, I respond. But the responding isn't doing it. Responding only is that as a human I'll always live in situations where these things can get at me.

"Now the problem isn't that it tempts me. The problem is how I act in between, how I handle it. That's my problem. So I say, 'That's not my affair. I don't mind that thing. I'm not getting into that. Christ's in me.' I'm living in the Spirit. Then the Law is not there saying, 'You oughtn't to do that.' It's the law of the Spirit."