There are countless men and women whose lives were impacted by Norman Grubb in his eighty years of sharing the Life of the One in Whom he had believed, and took as his Saviour as a young man – Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit took Norman into depths far beyond his salvation mainly being for a future eternity, and on to a present-day living Christ…revealing the truth of Gal 2:20 to him…that he was not left on his own efforts to ‘try’ to live the Christian life, but that it was Christ who lived his life! He wrote many books during his lifetime, about this fundamental truth of the gospel, each one with greater light and understanding. He also traveled worldwide to churches, conferences, and homegroups sharing what he had been given with all who asked him to come. The following stories are from a few of those who knew him as a beloved and trusted friend, teacher and mentor.
Esther
| It was not so in these days and the nation of Israel was preserved from His enemies because it was in the temporary phase of a special flesh revelation to prepare the world for the universal revelation. Today we have no enemies, for we now know everyone to be a form of God. We are all gods. That is why our human longing is for completion. We want to be completed, fulfilled, perfected, effective. We are human expressions of the divine Person. We may be distorted, prodigal sons, but we tend to major on the prodigal instead of the Son. We have no enemies when we see through everyone to the real person who is a son seeking to find the answer and thinking he will find it in self-distortion. Christ, representing the human race, took the whole distortion into death – that spirit of error which had captured humanity. Christ died for sin and to sin and we die to sins and to sin in Him. We participate in what He did for us and what He is now in us because faith always participates in that to which it attaches itself. We participate in that to which we are inwardly attached because inwardly we are universals, ground in our inner selves to Him in our fourth dimensional risen relationship. Now we are the human negatives expressing the positive to whom we have become re-attached. It is the same as the branch expressing the vine, the same as the body expressing its head. We become God expressers and because God is love, we become love expressers. But Israel did not know these things in these days. When they needed power they did not have it because they were inwardly attached to self interest, self resources, and self sufficiencies. It is easy to relate ourselves to some ally which is visible, not realizing it is just some empty thing which will be like a spear through your hand if you lean on it. When Israel’s leaders turned away to these allies, they found it was like a spear through their hand. What they relied on turned around and seized them. The Israelites who began to rely on the allies around them soon found that they became the captives of Nebuchadnezzar and then were an exiled nation. There were always some who knew the Living God and light shined here and there among them, but they were exiles. They were the possessions of Persia, a great world kingdom. They were exiles as a nation under this outer power until there could be a means by which God’s power could be manifested in delivering them. The king of this great nation was Ahasuerus, whose other name was Xerxes. The kingdom stretched all the way from India, through Babylon, over to Ethiopia and included the Promised Land. Though the Jews were exiles, they were not bondsmen in the same sense as the Egyptians had made them. Still, they had all the homesickness that an exile will have, especially when your home is the Promised Land and should be preserved as a free nation, delivered from her enemies as God had promised. This homesickness is expressed in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song… How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” This great kingdom, and its king, was tremendously luxurious and full of self-display in ways we do not admire today. Once the king put on a magnificent feast which lasted 180 days. He had 127 provinces and he called these leaders together to this great feast. On the last two or three days of the feast he put on a special citywide feast in the palace grounds with all kinds of hangings of fine linen, purple and green, hung on silver rings on marble pillars. This was the feast to his own people, in the capital Shushan, which is like Washington. It was attended by many of the people who had some official attachment to this city which was the center of his empire. |
Esther
“We have been looking, in these sessions, to see how God manifests Himself in His human agencies, which are God in human form. In Old Testament days, when the time had not yet come for His final revelation of who He truly is – love and nothing else – He manifested Himself in holiness together with His presence in prosperity and mercy by which those who obeyed and trusted Him in a personal or national way could see the kind of Living God that He is. These men and women of the Old Testament were great because, in different ways, they were manifestors of the Living God in His greatness.
We now center our attention on one man, less known by name, Mordecai, the foster father of Esther. The book is given the title of Esther. It should have been given the title of Mordecai. Esther was wonderful, but God through Mordecai was more wonderful. However, that is only a detail.
The Jewish nation was going through one of their periods of seemingly external desertion by God. Actually it was the other way around because they had turned their backs on Him and sought earthly alliances, even to the point of having other gods. God’s power is always in operation but if we are utilizing another power we are linking our faith and cooperation to some apparently strong, but really weak, human resources. Then God leaves us in the power of those human resources until, once again, He comes through in deliverance when those concerned relate themselves back to Him in His love and power, which in those days were particularly centered on His own people.
God’s people today are universal people – the whole world is His people today, and all are conscious sons who have consciously received Jesus. In those days He had a special nation to whom He gave His first primary revelations of law and grace, a preparation by means of which a nation of the flesh was to be replaced by the nation of the Spirit. God’s Holy Nation today is people with Himself within them, the human spirit indwelt by the divine Spirit, as human manifestations of Him. That’s the Holy Nation!”
Speaking the Word of Truth Pt 2
But,” you ask, “what if the manifestation just doesn’t happen?” That’s not the point. The point is, have you come to see that faith is always consummated in our word of faith? All of life is catching on to the mind of God through our minds in a particular situation and replacing our negative thinking, then boiling it down to a clear specific objective, then stating that objective in its direct practical form by our word of faith, and then believing that it is already in existence, because there is no time factor past, present or future in God’s “fourth dimension.” So we also, as He, call the things that be not as though they are.
Having done that by our word of faith, we never repeat it again in the form of a request; we don’t ask, we thank. We may continue repeating our “thank you” in our inner recognition of what is coming, for our faith has within it a “sense” of the thing anticipated. We already “see” in faith as well as speak that word of faith.
Then never, of all things, do we ask, “Why hasn’t it happened?” We surely give ourselves totally away if, when the answer has not yet come or cannot ever come (since the time for the answer has passed with no answer), we then say, “He hasn’t done what I believed for. It hasn’t happened. Faith doesn’t work.” By that we have implied that the answer depended on our faith, and this has failed, or we have believed amiss, or something. But it was His faith expressed by us, and we were saying He has done it. Not we, but He. Therefore, if it is a done thing by the word of faith, we never say it hasn’t been done. Never, for our word of faith means that we have said it has happened in the Spirit. It has happened, and if we don’t see it happened, we still say it has happened. God will fulfill His own word. It was He who told us to say to that mountain, “Be gone!” and to believe that when we prayed we received. So it has happened. Hold on! It has happened even if we don’t see it except on the other side of the grave, for it was said of the men of faith in Hebrews, “These all died in faith not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, were persuaded of them and embraced them.” But even if they did not receive the fulness, they did have a good slice of the cake en route! I believed God for a solution to a problem in our missionary work forty years ago. I expected the answer which did not come, and was tempted to say, “No answer. I must have been mistaken.” But just now the answer is appearing.
Speaking the Word of Faith
It is always our speaking our word of faith which puts a person into action. But this is not human action. It is God action, Spirit action, and the river will dry up and the people cross. So do we see that all hangs on this spoken word of faith, and that’s all, because it really is God the Father speaking His word by His Son, through whom the Spirit then moves into manifestation?
We did that that morning. We sat together and spoke that word. We calculated our “three days” to be that God would start sending new recruits, the first of a great army, to fill gaps in the Congo as well as going to other lands (and we took no note of the need of the existing workers; we knew that was God’s normal business). So we named ten, and them as the first token of a world-wide advance to begin in the Congo. They would come in a year by the first anniversary of C.T.’s glorification. We said it, named the number, and the day—July 16, 1932—and used that Scripture we have already quoted in Mark 11:24. And we believed we received, as it said.
Next day as we gathered, one of us asked the Lord to remember and send the ten. The Spirit rebuked us. Do you ask for what you’ve got? If you got it yesterday, shouldn’t you thank? So for the rest of that year, no man knowing what was happening, we thanked, watched, and often laughed, as the ten came, called, with Bible school training, financed, and they all went to the Congo. The last one, Ivor Davies, was given the name Kumi, in Africa, which means ten. The last $1000 came three days before the anniversary. We were in Belfast in a prayer conference five days before, watching each mail, and the telegram came from Pauline in London, “$1000 for the ten, Hallelujah.” We heard later that it had come from two old ladies whom we had never met. So thank God for old ladies!
The next year we moved on to 15, the next 25, the next 50, the next 75, and they came. There would be no point in giving further details, for we are looking to principles; but I thank God that the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, coupled with the Christian Literature Crusade that was born out of them, have some 1500 workers, establishing the Gospel in forty fields, and thank God today for the thousands around the world who have confessed Christ, and are themselves now forming national churches spreading the Gospel witness. And the whole company of Crusaders are still living with enthusiasm on the promises of God, and applying these same principles of faith to all kinds of advances. Millions of dollars now come annually when there was five thousand that first year. Failures there are en route: the, glory of the martyrdom of some who have laid down their lives, objectives of faith not yet in the visible; but with the general overwhelming evidences of the truth of God’s word—that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
| “But,” you ask, “what if the manifestation just doesn’t happen?” That’s not the point. The point is, have you come to see that faith is always consummated in our word of faith? All of life is catching on to the mind of God through our minds in a particular situation and replacing our negative thinking, then boiling it down to a clear specific objective, then stating that objective in its direct practical form by our word of faith, and then believing that it is already in existence, because there is no time factor past, present or future in God’s “fourth dimension.” So we also, as He, call the things that be not as though they are. Having done that by our word of faith, we never repeat it again in the form of a request; we don’t ask, we thank. We may continue repeating our “thank you” in our inner recognition of what is coming, for our faith has within it a “sense” of the thing anticipated. We already “see” in faith as well as speak that word of faith. Then never, of all things, do we ask, “Why hasn’t it happened?” We surely give ourselves totally away if, when the answer has not yet come or cannot ever come (since the time for the answer has passed with no answer), we then say, “He hasn’t done what I believed for. It hasn’t happened. Faith doesn’t work.” By that we have implied that the answer depended on our faith, and this has failed, or we have believed amiss, or something. But it was His faith expressed by us, and we were saying He has done it. Not we, but He. Therefore, if it is a done thing by the word of faith, we never say it hasn’t been done. Never, for our word of faith means that we have said it has happened in the Spirit. It has happened, and if we don’t see it happened, we still say it has happened. God will fulfill His own word. It was He who told us to say to that mountain, “Be gone!” and to believe that when we prayed we received. So it has happened. Hold on! It has happened even if we don’t see it except on the other side of the grave, for it was said of the men of faith in Hebrews, “These all died in faith not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, were persuaded of them and embraced them.” But even if they did not receive the fulness, they did have a good slice of the cake en route! I believed God for a solution to a problem in our missionary work forty years ago. I expected the answer which did not come, and was tempted to say, “No answer. I must have been mistaken.” But just now the answer is appearing. Of course the temptation is to question, Was it my faith at fault? Was my motive right? Was I mistaken or presumptuous in speaking that word of faith? Never accept those questionings which come from our souls. They come from the temptation to move back into separation, as if it is not God speaking by us in our fixed union, and we still have our separate self-condemning selves. Condemnation with darkness comes from beneath. Conviction with light and peace comes from above. Let’s go back to our spirit centers where the word is, “Be still and know that I am God.” Totally trust Him with the single eye, and I shall see that to what appeared to be a mistake or to have had some flesh motivation behind it, God will give the perfect and fully satisfying fulfillment. Such times, when apparently faith does not become substance, are given us to establish us more thoroughly in the fact that we have the mind of Christ, and do not recognize the false possibility that we are back in our old divided, self-motivated outlook. As for presumption, what that really means is that my word of faith has behind it something for my own satisfaction or self-display, regardless of whether it was for the glory of God or the benefit of others, or even to try out for our own benefit whether God is faithful to His promises or not. Don’t be frightened by such a barb. Don’t accept that in our union relationship with Christ our motives are flesh centered. Stand to your launch-out faith, and that God meant it. Sometimes, as with Paul, the exact desire, as first named, is refused, not with a “No” but with a far faster “Yes.” Because if Paul had got the removal of his thorn in the flesh, we should all have forgotten about that as an incident of history. But we never forget the answer he did get—to be an example to the whole church of Christ in all of the pressures of life—that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness (II Cor. 12:7-11). And so inwardly conscious of this did Paul become that he went on to say, “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecution, in distresses for Christ’s sake” and then, no longer mentioning God in it, “when I am weak, then am I strong.” That is union. That is Paul speaking and living as God. A far vaster answer for the centuries than a temporary healing. So here it is. Keep speaking the word of faith, as I do, all the time. Say again and again this has happened, that has happened, as you inwardly see it has happened. Watch for the happening, and enjoy the many times you see it happen. |