Sit

And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. EPHESIANS 2:6

Among all Nee’s books, the shortest is arguably the most perfectly constructed. Sit, Walk, Stand takes the letter to the Ephesians and finds in it three words that mark its three movements: our position before God, our life in the world, and our attitude towards the enemy. And the order is not negotiable. Everything hangs on beginning in the right place.

Christianity begins with a chair

The natural religious instinct is to begin with walking — with conduct, effort, duty. Nee’s contention is that the Christian life begins with sitting down.

Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. EPHESIANS 2:5–6

Sitting, he pointed out, is the posture of one whose work is done. We do not sit down to a task; we sit down after it. And the striking thing about Ephesians 2 is that the sitting has already happened, and it happened to people who were at the time dead in sins and contributed precisely nothing to it. He drew out a comparison with creation. Man was made on the sixth day and his first full day of existence was the seventh — the day of God’s rest. Man did not work six days and then rest; he began in a rest that God had already entered. So the believer begins his Christian life at the point of God’s completed work, not at the beginning of his own.

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. HEBREWS 4:9–10

Not resting from work, but working from rest

Nee was quick to guard the point against the obvious misreading. To sit is not to be idle. The Christian works — Ephesians itself is full of instruction about conduct, family, labour and warfare. The question is not whether we work but where the work starts.

The difference is between working towards a position and working from one. A man who is trying to earn his acceptance labours under an anxiety that never lifts, because there is always more to do. A man who has been seated labours out of a security he did not create and cannot lose. He was fond of the picture of a man on a boat. If he tries to push the boat along, he exhausts himself and it barely moves. If he sits down and lets the current carry him, he arrives. The strength required to be carried is nil, but one must actually sit.

The gift and the giving up

There is a cost to sitting, and Nee did not hide it. It is the cost of abandoning the satisfaction of having contributed. We would rather help. There is something in every one of us — and it is the oldest thing in us — that would prefer a salvation we had a hand in. To sit down is to admit that the whole thing was done without us, and there is a humbling in that which many believers avoid for years by staying busy.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. EPHESIANS 2:8–9

Where the chair is

One more detail Nee would not let pass: in heavenly places. The believer’s seat is not on earth. It is above — in the place where Christ is, at the right hand of God, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion (Ephesians 1:21). This matters enormously for what comes later. The Christian does not fight his way up to victory; he views the battle from above it. He does not struggle to reach a place of authority; he is already seated with the One who has it. Every question of warfare in chapter six will be settled by what was established in chapter two.

Sit is the first word, and it is the one that most of us skip. If your Christian life is marked by chronic tiredness — not the honest tiredness of labour, but the grey exhaustion of never having arrived — the problem is almost certainly here. You have been walking without having sat down.

Martha’s kitchen

Nee was fond of the scene at Bethany, and used it to make a distinction that cuts across most of our assumptions about Christian service.

But Martha was cumbered about much serving …But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. LUKE 10:40, 42

The striking thing, he observed, is that Martha was not doing anything wrong. She was serving Jesus. The meal needed cooking; somebody had to cook it; the guest was the Son of God and the hospitality was genuine. If we are honest, most of us would rather have Martha in our congregation than Mary. What was wrong was not the work but its source. Martha was cumbered — the word suggests being dragged about, pulled in several directions. And the symptom appeared, as it always does, in her speech: she complained about her sister, and she reproached the Lord for not noticing. Service that comes out of restlessness reliably produces resentment towards those who are not serving. Nee’s application was uncomfortable for active people. A great deal of Christian work, he said, is Martha’s work: undertaken for the Lord, but not out of rest, and therefore carrying an undertone of strain, comparison and self-justification that everyone around can feel. The alternative is not idleness. Mary is not commended for being lazy; she is commended for having chosen the one needful thing, and the order matters. Elsewhere in the Gospels Mary of Bethany is the one who anoints the Lord for His burial — an act of service so costly that it was criticised, and so perceptive that He defended it. The woman who sat became the woman who understood, and the woman who understood gave the most. Sitting, in other words, does not reduce service. It changes where service comes from, and it changes what service is worth.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. PSALM 127:2

Nee’s test was simple, and it is worth applying honestly. Does your service leave you resenting the people who are not doing it? If so, the problem is probably not their idleness. It is the place your own labour is starting from.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself plainly: am I working towards God’s acceptance or from it? Your answer will show in how you feel after a day of failure. 2. Take Ephesians 1 and 2 and mark every verb whose subject is God. Notice how few of them have you as the subject. 3. Name one activity in your ministry or service that you are doing out of anxiety rather than rest. Consider whether God asked for it. 4. Practise a deliberate sitting: take fifteen minutes to receive rather than to petition. Say nothing. Simply consent to what has been done. 5. Where you are facing opposition, remind yourself where your seat is — above it, not beneath it.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have been trying to reach a place You have already given me. I have been labouring towards a rest You entered without my help.

Forgive the pride that would rather assist than receive. I lay down the satisfaction of having contributed.

Teach me to sit — not in idleness, but in the finished work of Christ. And from that seat, let all my labour begin. Amen.