It is probable that
some of you were not here with us last evening. I would like
therefore, to say that what we are going to think about this
afternoon is following on what we were doing last evening. You
will understand that there has been something before this, but I
will do my best to link you on with that so that we can just
continue.
The thing that the
Lord has laid on my heart for this time is that which has come in
with the Lord Jesus. That is, what it was that came into this
world with the Lord Jesus; what He brought in with Him, and
therefore what we as Christians have come into in the Lord
Jesus. It is just the crisis which was reached when Jesus
came into this world. It was a crisis for all time. I
am more and more convinced as I travel about the world that there
is a very great need of recovering the true meaning of
Christianity. Even Christians everywhere do not understand
what they have come into. I believe that ninety percent of
all our troubles are due to that. If we went to the Lord
with many of our troubles and asked Him to tell us why it is we’re
in this trouble, He would just say, “Well, this is just
exactly what I told you; you have not understood what I told you.”
Now, let me
illustrate it in this way. When we were young (of course
that’s a long time ago for some of us!) there was a game
that we used to play at our Christmas parties. All the
people present would be formed into a big circle and then one
person at the beginning of the circle would whisper in the ear of
the next person something. You know this game? And that
person would say it to the next person, and so it passed right
round the circle. And then the last person would have to say
out loud what they had received. And of course there was a
great deal of laughter. The thing had gathered a lot of
other things as it went on, or it had lost a lot of things. And
when it comes out at the end you hardly recognize what was said
at the beginning.
Now evidently you
know that game. I think that’s like
Christianity. Of course Christianity is not a game. It’s
a very serious business. But it’s been passed on around
great circles through many generations and as it has gone on, it
has lost something. It has gained a lot of other things and you
can hardly recognize now that that is the original
thing. People have just said what they thought they
heard. Men have given their own interpretations and here
today we have a Christianity that is not the original. Indeed,
many Christians have a Christ who is not the original
Christ.
Now I am not saying
that that is true about you; of course, you are all right! Are
you all right? Do you not need to be put right about your
Christianity? Do you not need to have Christianity explained
to you? Is there not something to be recovered? Is
there not something to let go? But it’s just that that
we’re occupied with in these days. And if you think
this does not apply to you, I can tell you that the one who is
speaking to you knows how true it is, I’m always getting
into difficulties with the Lord. Does that sound very
terrible? Sometimes I almost have a quarrel with the Lord, “Now
Lord, are You quite sure You’re right in what You’re
doing with me? Are You quite sure that You’re right in
the way You’re leading me?” And He just says, “Go
back to My Word.”
Shall I give an illustration? A few weeks ago I got very discouraged in ministry. Oh, how
difficult this work of the Lord is! What a lot of difficult
people! What a lot of difficult problems. And all our
teaching seems to get such a little way... And so I went to the
Lord, I said “Lord, I think it’s time I retired. I
think I have done enough. Now Lord, will You excuse
me? Pass it on to others and let me finish my days quietly.”
Well, of course you may say, “Well, poor chap. He’s in
a bad way.” So I talked to the
Lord with my trouble. Then early in the morning I opened my Bible
and what did my eyes come on? There it was, straight between
my eyes: “Preach the Word! Be instant in season
and out of season. Reprove, rebuke and exhort with all long
suffering.” There it is in the Word. We get into
our troubles because we get away from the beginning. When we
come back to the original Word, the Lord has the answer for all
our problems.
Well now, having
said that, let us come back to our subject. You know last
night we were in the Gospel by John, we’re going to say a
few more things about this Gospel. Of course I expect that
people who come to conferences know their Bibles so that it is
not necessary for me to tell you what is in the Bible. My
work is to try to explain what is in the Bible, because you know
your Bibles I have the ground laid for what I have to say.
Now, to begin with
you know that the Gospel by John is the eternal Gospel.
Matthew, Mark, Luke are the Gospels of history. They begin
with the birth of the Lord Jesus, or in the case of Mark, the
beginning of His earthly ministry. They are historical
Gospels. When you come to John, you get outside of
history. You’re going to come into history, but you
begin outside, right back in the eternity past, “In the
beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God.” Then
history, “Through Him, by Him, all things were made” but
John’s Gospel from beginning to end is set in the
eternal. Please try to remember that as we go on.
We were saying last
night that the name given to the Son of God as “The Word”
is an eternal thought. A word begins with a
thought. That thought was in the mind of God then the word
is an expression of that thought. Here in this Gospel behind
all that is written we have eternal thoughts. You must
always, when you’re reading this Gospel, look behind
the thing that is written. You will see how important that
is as we go on.
Here we have in
this Gospel then, the eternal thoughts of God. To
what does that eternal thought of God relate? It relates to
people whom He desires to have as His children. In other
words, the eternal thought of God relates to a kind of being
called “man”. You notice how the Gospel goes on
– He, the Word, came to His own things, which He had made,
of course, “All things were made by Him” John has
just said. He came to the things which He had made, which were
His own things, but the people who were His own received Him
not. He had made man, He came to man, and man received Him
not. But to as many as did receive Him, to them
gave He the right to be children of God.
I’m tempted to
stay with that word “right”. In the Greek it is
“authority”; a legal authority. To be a child of
God is to have conferred upon us a legal authority. We are
not illegitimate children, we are true sons with all the
rights of true sons. Do you see what that implies? No
one but these born of God have divine rights. All the
children of Adam have lost their rights, they have lost all that
they ought to have as God’s children. As children of
Adam we have no claims upon God whatever. But those who receive
Christ have all those divine rights restored to them. Later on an
apostle will put it this way: “We are heirs of God and
joint heirs with Jesus Christ.” That means that all our
rights as sons of God have been restored in Christ. That is
something of what we have come into in Christ. That is
something of what has come in with Christ. But that is only
by the way... let us go on!
This eternal
thought of God which took expression in Jesus Christ is the
thought of “not” to an old kind of man. Jesus
Christ says “No!” to a certain kind of man. All the
children of Adam now lie under the great “No!” of
God. I’m speaking to your experience. If you know
anything about having the Spirit of Jesus Christ, one side of
your spiritual education is just this: inside of you the Holy
Spirit says “No!” to a lot of things. You speak in
a certain way... do you get away with it? Or do you not
very soon feel something inside of you saying, “No, not that
way.” Of course it is not all negative, but
for the moment we’re dealing with the negative. The
Spirit of Jesus Christ says “No!” to a whole kind of
man and what we have to learn in Christianity is that to which
Christ says “No!”.
Jesus Christ
crucified is the end of a kind of man. Of course,
that is representatively as representing this kind of
humanity which He came to put away. So the coming in of
Jesus Christ says “Not!” to a whole kind of man but in Himself,
in Himself He is God’s “But!”. He is God’s
great “Yes!” as to man. I suppose it is not too
often that we enjoy the “Yes!” we have a lot of
experience of the “Not!” I find a lot of
Christians who seem to enjoy the “Not”! I wonder if you
know what I mean... Oh, how difficult it is to get a lot of
Christians to forget themselves! They’re just about as
miserable as anybody could be but they’re always hugging
their miserable selves. They seem to love to talk about
their misery. When they pray they’re always telling the
Lord what miserable people they are, “Oh Lord, what a poor
thing I am. Just look at me Lord. I’m no good”. And
they just cling to that – you can’t get them to give it
up. They almost love to be miserable.
And so the Lord
doesn’t do anything. If He does anything at all He
says, “Well, you know that’s what I told you two
thousand years ago and I have never changed My mind about
you. It is your miserable wretched self that I put to the
cross because I knew how miserable it is!” We do not enjoy
the “But” enough. But it does work this way, if we do
something that pleases the Lord, we know it inside. We know
that the Spirit of Jesus Christ is saying, “Yes, that’s
right.” That is the way of peace. That is the way
of joy. It’s this Christ Who is the difference in us.
And I repeat: our whole spiritual education is to learn those two
sides of Christ, to learn what Jesus says “No”
to.
I must stay here a
minute. The thing that is surprising me so much today is how
very little many Christians know of this speaking of Jesus
inside. It’s not true here, but it is true very largely
especially in our young Christians in these days. They can
behave; they can dress; perhaps I ought to say not dress! They
can get themselves up and in the Word of God there is a definite
statement about that and yet these young Christians don’t
seem to know what is in the Word of God. Shall I cite a
Scripture? Here is the Word of God: “Let your women
adorn themselves in modest apparel.” You know, I think
modesty has left this world very largely. Of course this doesn’t
apply here, but I’m speaking about a principle. I look
at many of these Christians and I say, “Where is the Lord in
them? Why is not the Lord putting His finger upon this and that
and saying: Not?” That is what He came into this world
for - to bring in an altogether new order, an entirely new order
of consciousness.
Now we come to the
Cross of the Lord Jesus and we were saying last night that the
Cross of the Lord Jesus stands between two distinctly different
orders. On the one side the Cross says “No” to a whole
creation. I do not think it was just a happening when Jesus
died that darkness came over the face of all the
earth. Heaven closed its light. What did that mean? Or
do you just read it, you say, “Well when Jesus died, the sun
hid its face. There was darkness over all the earth until
the ninth hour.” But what did it mean? You have
gone back before the creation. What do we find before the
creation? “And darkness was over the face of the deep.” The
work of God had not begun in creation. In the death of the
Lord Jesus, we’ve gone right back. The work of God in the
new creation has not yet begun until Jesus rises from the dead.
Everything is put
back into darkness with the death of the Lord Jesus. Everything
will come up into light and life when He rises from the dead. It
is not a very clever observation that the Gospel by John begins
with exactly the same word as the book of Genesis begins with,
Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God”; John 1:1,
“In the beginning the Word” God. In the beginning God.
Therefore, John is the spiritual counterpart of Genesis. What
Genesis was in the natural creation John is in the spiritual
creation. So that when we come to John’s Gospel, we are
on the line of a new creation. What is the crown of this
creation? The crown of the old creation was man. The
crown of the new creation is Christ. A new Man.
Now I’ve got
out into a tremendous realm, and I must somehow break it
up. We’ve already been here nearly an hour. So I
come to one very important point. I think I yet have a
little time in this conference to say some more.
I’m going to
ask you a question. Now you'll have to think hard, you'll
have to put a cold towel around your head: What is the supreme
issue in all the Bible? What does the whole Bible amount to
in one thing? Of course there are thousands of things in the
Bible, but what does the whole Bible relate to? There is
such a thing. What is it? [Interpreter says:] The
new creation is it? No. The birth of Christ in the
church? No. The glorification of the Father? These
are all related... Now He has received the promise? No.
That is Christ? No, they're all related! The Cross? No.
That’s related, it’s a part of it. The whole
world full of people who all know the Life of the Lord
Jesus? That’s a part of it. The New Jerusalem?
Well I think you're all over the place! Of course all these
things are right, but you have not got to the point yet.
What is the one all-governing thing through the whole Bible? Now I’ll tell you:
Right standing with God! How can man have right standing
with God? We have a word for it, haven’t we? It’s
the great word, it’s the word “righteousness”. Of
course that’s a theological word. That’s a word of
Christian doctrine. Oh, but it is infinitely more than that!
From Genesis to Revelation the one question is: right standing
with God. There is God, He is over all. God... perfect in
holiness - perfect in every way! How can man stand in God’s
presence on right ground and say, “I have a right to be here
before God”? That is the meaning of righteousness, it
is right standing with God. Is not that your
concern? Every day this question arises - being right
with God, being able to stand up before God and say “I am
quite right. There is no fault that God can find in me.”
Isn’t that
tremendous? You see, because Adam sinned as he did, he put
the whole race out of God. The whole race in Adam has no
right standing with God. Our New Testament says “There
is none righteous, no not one!” Put it in this
other way: there is not one who has a right standing
with God. That’s the issue of the Bible. How can
that be changed? A tremendous thing, isn’t it? Oh,
what a marvelous thing if you and I were able to say, “Today
I can stand before God without any condemnation!” Do
you think that’s too much, too much even to think of? No,
that is what Jesus came to do! We are made accepted in the
Beloved One.
“Let us draw
near in full assurance of faith.” The whole Gospel is
just this: that the righteousness of God is given to us through
faith in Jesus Christ. Right standing with God is given to us
through faith in Jesus Christ! Then of course you at once
begin and go back to the other side of the Cross again and say,
“But what about my sin? What about all my faults and my
failings? What about all the things that I do wrong every
day? Is that not a contradiction?” Well you don’t
know your New Testament if you think that’s a contradiction!
The Lord has never said anywhere that you and I are perfect in
ourselves. But He has said that we are perfect in
Christ! In Christ we inherit right standing with God and this
becomes the battleground of the whole Christian life. What is
the nature of the battle of the Christian life? The battle
is with the one who wants to get us onto the ground that is not
right standing with God.
The devil tried to
get in between the Lord Jesus and His Father and he will try to
our very last breath to get in between us and the Lord
Jesus. He is the great accuser of the
brethren. You have only got to do one wrong thing and the
devil will jump in at once and he will seek to bring you under
condemnation, to bring you onto the ground of judgment again -
remove you from your right standing with God by faith. This
is a tremendous spiritual battle and the battle of the
Christian is to keep on his own right ground in Christ.
You make a mistake
- you do something wrong - what are you going to do about
it? Well, what about that? You have two things that you
can do. You can listen to the devil and you will say,
“Well there you are, just the same all over again.
Salvation makes no difference!” Something goes wrong
in your life, you get some trouble, you have some suffering, what
is the next thing that happens? You don’t hear a voice,
but you feel a voice, and that says, “That’s because
the Lord doesn’t love you. That is because the Lord has
left you. That is the punishment for your sin.” You
know where that leads, don’t you? The Christian life is
full of cul-de-sacs. You know what that is don’t you?
Somewhere up here that leads nowhere - a dead end. And if
you want to get anywhere you’ve got to come out.
Elijah got up one
of those side streets. He threw himself down under the
juniper tree, and he said, “It’s enough, oh Lord, take
away my life! I’m no better than all the others. I’m
a bad, worthless fellow.” What did the Lord
do? Did the Lord get under the juniper tree with him, saying
“Poor, old Elijah! I’m very sorry for you.” No,
the Lord didn’t do that and didn’t say that. He
said, “Come out of that Elijah. We’re going on! We’re
not going up side streets. We’re not on a dead end.
Come out of your cul-de-sac.”
Now, if you listen
to the devil talking to you about your sufferings or your sins,
that’s where you will be. What is the other thing you
can do? Oh no, you will not say “that wasn’t sin,
I was not wrong.” You will not begin to excuse
yourself. You will say, “That was wrong and Lord, I’m
sorry for it. Forgive me! Put that under the blood of
Jesus.” Then what happens? The Lord says, “All
right, come on, we’ll go on.” Of course you don’t
hear it like that, but you know it’s true. That is the
battle of the spiritual life.
Now there’s so
very much more that I want to say about this, but I think you’ve
had enough for this afternoon. Do you see what has come in
with the Lord Jesus? Are you beginning to see what we have
come into in the Lord Jesus? We have just got on to the line
of the new creation. Where does the new creation
begin? It begins with a man who is now in right standing
with God. We inherit that in Jesus Christ. It is our
birthright - to stand right with God because we inherit His
righteousness. That little phrase does mean so much to me. I
hope it means as much to you; the righteousness of God which
is ours through faith in Jesus Christ!
Don’t you
agree that we Christians need to understand our Christianity
better? The devil is making a lot of trouble for us because
we don’t understand our Christianity. Well this is only the
beginning, may the Lord make this mean something to us.