The Calvary Road | Page 7

need of cleansing and no occasion of being broken. In
that condition we are usually in a worse state than we ever imagine. It
will need a great hunger for restored fellowship with God to possess
our hearts before we will be willing to cry to God to show us where the
Blood of Jesus must be applied. He will show us, to begin with, just
one thing, and it will be our obedience and brokenness on that one
thing that will be the first step into Revival for us.
[footnote*:Some may be inclined to question whether it is right to call
such things as self-consciousness, reserve and fear, sins. "Call them
infirmities, disabilities, temperamental weaknesses, if you will," some
have said, "but not sins. To do so would be to get us into bondage." The
reverse, however, is true. If these things are not sins, then we must put
up with them for the rest of our lives, there is no deliverance. But if

these and other things like them are indeed sins, then there is a
Fountain for sin, and we may experience cleansing and deliverance
from them, if we put them immediately under His precious Blood, the
moment we are conscious of them. And they are sins. Their source is
unbelief and an inverted form of pride, and they have hindered and
hidden Him times without number.]
CHAPTER 3
THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP
When man fell and chose to make himself, rather than God, the centre
of his life, the effect was not only to put man out of fellowship with
God, but also out of fellowship with his fellow man. The story of man's
first quarrel with God in the third chapter of Genesis is closely
followed, in the fourth chapter, by the story of man's first quarrel with
his fellow, Cain's murder of Abel. The Fall is simply, "we have turned
every one to his own way."[footnote1: Is. 53: 6] If I want my own way
rather than God's, it is quite obvious that I shall want my own way
rather than the other man's. A man does not assert his independence of
God to surrender it to a fellow man, if he can help it. But a world in
which each man wants his own way cannot but be a world full of
tensions, barriers, suspicions, misunderstandings, clashes and conflicts.
Now the work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross was not only to
bring men back into fellowship with God, but also into fellowship with
their fellow men. Indeed it cannot do one without the other. As the
spokes get nearer the centre of the wheel, they get nearer to one another.
But if we have not been brought into vital fellowship with our brother,
it is a proof that to that extent we have not been brought into vital
fellowship with God. The first epistle of John (what a new light
Revival sheds on this Scripture!) insists on testing the depth and reality
of a man's fellowship with God by the depth and reality of his
fellowship with his brethren.[footnote2:I John 2:9,3:14-15,4:20]
Some of us have come to see how utterly connected a man's
relationship to his fellows is with his relationship to God. Everything

that comes as a barrier between us and another, be it never so small,
comes as a barrier between us and God. We have found that where
these barriers are not put right immediately, they get thicker and thicker
until we find ourselves shut off from God and our brother by what
seem to be veritable brick walls. Quite obviously, if we allow New Life
to come to us, it will have to manifest itself by a walk of oneness with
God and our brother, with nothing between.
Light and Darkness.
On what basis can we have real fellowship with God and our brother?
Here 1 John 1:7 has come afresh to us. "If we walk in the light, as He is
in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the Blood of
Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." What is meant by light
and darkness is that light reveals, darkness hides. When anything
reproves us, shows us up as we really are--that is light. "Whatsoever
doth make manifest is light."[footnote3:Eph.5: 13] But whenever we do
anything or say anything (or don't say anything) to hide what we are or
what we've done--that is darkness.
Now the first effect of sin in our lives is always to make us try and hide
what we are. Sin made our first parents hide behind the trees of the
garden and it has had the same effect on us ever since. Sin always
involves us in being unreal, pretending, duplicity, window dressing,
excusing ourselves and blaming