Letter from Mrs C. A. Markham
1963 - 1964
My dear Grandchildren, and others
It was a joy to hear that you wanted to remember the Lord Jesus in His Supper because you love Him. You have now come ‘into fellowship', as we say, so that you are now not only my grandchildren, you are my brothers and sisters in Christ. We are brethren. But as some of you are quite young brethren, I have asked the Holy Spirit to help me to say something plain and simple to you about this wonderful new path.
What you have come into is really a -
Partnership
You know what partners are: they are people who do everything together. That is just what we do when we are in fellowship. Before you started to break bread, you loved the Lord Jesus and you wanted to please Him, but it was just you yourself. And if you did something that did not please Him, it was just you yourself who had grieved Him and brought in a cloud.
But things are different now. By coming into fellowship, you have joined hands with the Lord's people who are in fellowship all over the world. You are not one alone any longer. This is a most happy thing, but it is most serious too; because whatever one partner does, good or bad, brings in all the other partners as well. Let us never forget that. A young sister slipped into the 'movies’ once, but a brother saw her coming out, though she did not see him. The next day he said to her, ’I did not want to go to the pictures yesterday’. She looked amazed and said, ‘Did you go, Mr. Gill?’.‘Yes’, he said, ‘you took me'. She never forgot, I am sure, that lesson about partnership.
But we are closer together than even being partners, for all those who are in the fellowship are bound together into -
One Body
The Holy Spirit is dwelling in each one, and ‘we are all baptised by one Spirit into one body’. How close this brings us to each other. We are all members one of another, just as your hands and eyes and feet are members of your body. You know that if you hurt your finger or your foot it makes your whole body hurt. It is the same in this wonderful spiritual body: if one member is sick or in sorrow, we all feel the sadness; and if anyone is joyful, it makes us all glad.
One thing that the loaf at the Lord's supper suggests is this one body. You have often come into the meeting and looked at the bread and the cup, and perhaps they did not mean much to you. But now they speak to you. The loaf speaks of the precious body of the Lord Jesus given for His own, and the cup speaks of His precious blood shed for them. That makes us love Him. That is why we break bread, to show our love for Him.
But the loaf speaks of something else too and that is the one body that is made up of every one of His own bound to Him by the Holy Spirit. ‘We being many are one body’, Paul tells us. So that when we eat the Lord's supper, we are not thinking just of the few in the meeting room, or even those in all the meeting rooms; we are thinking of all those all over the world who belong to Christ. Most of them do not know they are part of the one body; they have never heard of the assembly. That is why we are not all together.
You have often heard those words -
The Assembly
but I wonder what they mean to you? What could you say about the assembly? You are part of it so you should be able to say something. Sometimes it is called the Church. People in the world think of the church as a building made of stones and mortar; but that is not what God means by the church.
His church - the assembly - is built of living stones. You are one of them, and so is every believer who has the Holy Spirit. Indeed the Holy Spirit, Who is God, lives in this wonderful building, the assembly. It is the house of God.
I remember hearing of a dear old sister who was putting on her hat to go out one Lord's day morning, And a neighbour said to her, ‘Are you going to church?’. ‘No’ she replied, ‘I am a bit of the church going to the meeting’. She was one of the living stones.
So, dear children, we come together on the Lord's day with others who belong to the assembly to eat the Lord's supper and to remember Him. As we do this we look for Him to come in Himself and be with us. We cannot see Him with our eyes as the disciples did, but He comes just as truly.How reverent and attentive we want to be so that we may be ready to welcome Him and to give Him our praises; He loves His assembly. He loves it so much that He gave Himself for it. He calls it -
His Bride
In answer, we give Him our love as our glorious Bridegroom. Our praises go out too to the blessed Holy Spirit who is with us to help us in the service. He is God, and the Lord Jesus is God, - we must never forget that.
And yet, though the Lord Jesus is so great, He is not ashamed to call us -
His Brethren
That is a great honour. He loves to take His brethren into the presence of His Father, and lead their praises to His Father and our Father, and to His God and our God. His brethren are all -
Sons of God
and God delights to hear His sons giving Him praise and worship.
There is nothing more wonderful than this service to divine Persons on the Lord's day. But Monday morning comes and we have to go back to school and work, with people who do not love our Lord. The brethren are not with us now, they cannot see what we do. But we are still in fellowship, we are still part of the body, and we must be true to the Lord in -
The Place of Testimony
That is a long word but "testimony" means what we are and what we show in the world outside. Here in this cold world we are to show that we belong to Christ. He was a Stranger here, and we cannot be friendly with a world that cast Him out. We need to ask the Holy Spirit for courage to be true to Him.
I am sure you would like to hear what Mr Taylor said a good many years ago to a boy of nine years old who asked to break bread. In those days the very young ones did not ask for fellowship as so many are doing today. Mr Taylor said something like this - ‘I hear, William, that you have asked to remember the Lord. I do not say that you should not ask, but I do say that if you break bread when you are nine you should behave like a boy of twelve; and when you are twelve you should act like a lad of sixteen; and when you are sixteen you should behave like a young man of twenty’.That boy took Mr Taylor's words to heart. He is grown up and married now, and has children of his own, but the Lord has kept him true to the partnership all the way through, as I long that He may keep each one of you.
It will not be easy. There will be reproach and you will be laughed at for being 'different'; even some of the young people in the meeting who have not much love for Christ will laugh at you, and that will be hardest of all. When they want you to cut your hair shorter, or whisper in the meetings, it is harder to say ‘No’ but the Lord will be with you. He suffered for you far, far more than you can ever suffer for Him, and He says that if we confess Him and are true to Him before men, He will confess your name (think of the glory of that) before the angels of God!
One of my little grandchildren of seven years old said a very wise thing to me one day. She was finding it a little hard not to be doing the things that the children around her were doing, but she said, 'It will be alright to be worldly when we get to heaven, won't it, - because it will be our world!’ We want to learn about 'our world' now. Do not think these things are too hard for you. If you are old enough to break bread, you are old enough to understand something about God's great things. So read your Bible, read simple ministry; pray about everything, ask your parents many questions, especially about the assembly; and ask the Holy Spirit to help you to understand.
With love to you, my dear grandchildren, and many prayers that you may grow 'by the true knowledge of God’!
Affectionately,
Your grandmother
(Who is also your sister in Christ)
Mrs C. A. Markham (Westfield)
PS Will you read this letter two or three times, or ask someone to read it to you? If you read it again in a few days, perhaps you will notice something the second time you did not notice at first.