Where Have All My Children Gone?

                                       
Where have all my children gone?

Look back to Isaiah 49:21, and you see that is made more precise: Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?

To this remnant that came back the Lord is saying, "You have lost all your children, but I am giving you a new family and a great family. 

Thy seed shall possess the nations.

He promises a great expanse in restoration, in resurrection from the dead a great expanse and increase. 

In the first place, that evidently was to apply to Israel literally: cast off for a small moment, forsaken, suffering overflowing wrath, yet gathered again.

Historically that applied to Israel.

But Paul, using that in connection with the church, gives it a second meaning and makes it perfectly clear that it had a double application, and it applies here.

There is a little company of the spiritual, and if you stand truly for God you will lose (it cannot be otherwise; it is inevitable) you will lose a great multitude of merely carnal Christians...

You will lose their fellowship.

They will be cut off; God will have to set them aside.

The true ones will be but a small remnant, and they will feel that they are shorn and bereft, brought down to something very small, and they wonder whether it is worth it...

But the Lord comes in at that point.

This not only works out in the general dispensational application, but it works out in our lives individually and as companies of the Lord's people.

We lose the sympathy, the fellowship of the great mass of those who are merely carnal Christians...

And sometimes we are tempted to wonder what is the real profit and value of being true to the Lord when there are so few who are that.

The Lord says in that connection that He is going to realize through the spiritual a great spiritual purpose.

There is going to be an expanding family of the spiritual.

He is not going to leave it like that.

Thy Maker is thy husband.

The Lord is going to get a spiritual company, an ever-growing company of those who are according to His mind.

The Lord believes in increase, in fulness.

The Lord is not in the end going to have a little insignificant thing as the result of all His labours and His sufferings.

The Lord is going to have a great company who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

The end is not going to be just a little thing; it is going to be a mighty thing.

Here His word says that while there may necessarily have to be reduction, He is only reducing in order to increase...

He is only removing that which does not answer to His thought...

And cutting it off...

And setting it aside really to make way for something more according to His mind.

That is a principle that the Lord is always putting into operation:

Getting rid of the thing which stands in the way of the truly spiritual in order to increase the spiritual.

There is quite a lot of stuff that really does not serve the highest ends of the Lord.

It is going on in us.

Sometimes we feel we are reduced to nothing, and all that is left is a mere germ of spiritual life.

The Lord is making room for the expansion of that germ in us.

Sometimes it is outward, the Lord has to cut off.

As John says, "They went out from us, but they were not of us" (1 John 2:19).

1Jn 2:19  They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

The Lord has cut off that which is not going His way in order to make room for something that is.

This extends right from the inward life of the individual through the smaller companies to the whole church.

The day comes when God comes right down as to the whole thing and spews the mass out of His mouth, but it is only to make room for increase.

These words of Isaiah 54 have a double application, not only to Israel, but to the church.

I will lay thy foundations with sapphires.

Thy seed shall possess the nations.

The Lord makes room for spiritual increase by getting rid of the carnal that is in the way wherever it is and whatever it is.

That is what the apostle is saying here in Galatians. (Galations 4:21-31)

It must go, and he could only see with the Galatians that, if they were returning to a carnal basis, it was the way of being set aside,

You are fallen from grace, you are separated from Christ, you will have to be set aside.

So his appeal is to go on...on the basis of that which is spiritual and wholly according to God's mind...

For that is the way of real increase.

~T. Austin Sparks~