The Testimony of Jesus

Very capable people are not always the people who are most spiritually productive. The Holy Spirit works, on the one hand, to an incapacitation naturally and humanly in order to pave the way for His own witness to the very Sonship of Jesus Christ coming in upon a negative ground, an impossible situation, and giving Life to go through that, perhaps only to go through that, but to go through it and to go through it royally. The result is that Christ has been made known as our Life and God has borne witness by His Spirit to His Son's Sonship, and we know Jesus Christ as the Son of God like that. The first great witness is the Holy Spirit working in the life of the child of God to bring up God's testimony to Christ in terms of Life. That is true individually. It is also true collectively. What is God's witness in a company of His people? God's witness is not that they believe that Jesus is the Son of God as part of their doctrine and creed, nor that they affirm it with great vehemence. "The devils also believe and tremble" (Jas. 2:19). No, the witness of God in a company is that that company in itself as such is to be a dead thing in itself -  lifeless and hopeless and helpless in itself - and yet the throbbing of God's Life is felt when that company is together in the Spirit.