We now come to the fourth of the five major features of Christ as
the Way - His walk.
There are two fragments to which I would like to refer - one in
the Gospel by John, the other in the first letter of John. "Then
Jesus again spoke to them, saying, 'I am the light of the world;
he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the
light of life'" (John 8:12). Here is a walking in the Way, and the
Way is Christ. "The one who says he abides in Him ought himself to
walk in the same manner as He walked" (1 John 2:6). We can just
look at that last clause - "as He walked".
When we quietly consider and meditate upon the life of the Lord
Jesus during the three and a half years of His walk in the midst
of men, there are certain things about Him which are quite evident
and quite impressive. Those things are the things which must be
carried over into our own lives if others are to have indicated to
them the way to God.
Christ's Consciousness
We will begin by noting one thing that is so very evident and
always present and noticeable about the Lord Jesus in His earthly
life, and that is His consciousness. In a greater or lesser way
every life that is really alive is marked by a consciousness, and
in a very marked way this was true of the Lord Jesus. His
consciousness was that of His relationship to heaven. You just
cannot fail to recognize that. He is constantly speaking about it,
and His speaking of it so frequently and so much is because that
is the ever-present and uppermost consciousness with Him, His
relationship to heaven. Just as a man's native country is in his
blood, so heaven was in the spirit of the Lord Jesus. Perhaps you
know what that is. You of course do not know very much what that
means unless you have been away from your native country, and then
you know after a time that that country is not so far away after
all, it is in your very blood. There is a pull and a call and a
remembrance, the consciousness of where you belong, where you came
from, which rises up and asserts itself. I think some of you know
what I mean. If I may make a personal reference, there was a time
years ago when I spent years in London and was not able, neither
was there the demand then, for going to Scotland so often as there
has been in recent years. At a certain time in the year Scotland
made such an appeal that I just had to go, that is all. If it were
only for a weekend, not with any object at all, not for any work,
but I just had to go and come back again. Something would not let
me rest until I had just gone and come. The pull was there.
Now what is true in the natural was true in the spiritual with
the Lord Jesus. "I am come down from heaven" (John 6:38). And He
even said that He was still in heaven while He was here (John
3:13). Strange, strange speaking! The Son that came from heaven
and is in heaven! It was this strong deep consciousness of His
relatedness to heaven, and that had various meanings for Him.
It meant that heaven was the source of His life. His life came
out from heaven, and He was all the time living out from heaven by
that heavenly life. He could find nothing here to answer to the
life that was in Him. Everything here just failed to give what
that life in Him demanded and required. He just could not live
here except in so far as life was constantly ministered to Him
from heaven. Heaven was the place of all His resources. For every
demand He went back to heaven to have it met. That is, He got away
in spirit, He got away in prayer, to draw what was required for
the situation, the need, the next move, for every crisis and for
His whole life. Heaven was His source of supply.
Heaven was the seat of His government. In everything He went to
heaven for direction. You know what I mean, He got His Life from
heaven, He refused to be governed by things here, He refused to be
governed by the world, what the world expected, what the world
demanded. He did not allow the world and its mind and its way to
influence or affect Him at all. He refused to be governed by
religious tradition, by the established religious order. He
refused to be governed by religious expectation and religious
precedent. Often they tried to impinge that upon Him and tell Him
that was the thing expected, that was the thing done, that was how
it was usually and He refused it all. He stood back and got His
direction from heaven. The oft-repeated phrase indicated this
heavenly life - "My hour has not yet come" - the phrase which He
used in so many different connections, at so many different times,
not meaning as He used it that final hour, His hour, but meaning,
'The time has not come just at this moment for Me to do that, I
have not got it from heaven; it may be your hour, it may be the
hour of circumstance, it may be the hour of seeming demand, but
that does not weigh with Me; My hour is the hour when heaven says,
"Now!"' Heaven was the place, the seat, of His government.
Now let us pass this over as we go along, that is, in that
threefold way: the essential consciousness of the true Christian
and of true spiritual Christianity and of the only Christianity
which, as we have repeatedly said, will go through the ordeal of
fire. That is something which is implanted in us at our spiritual
birth and if we are not able to sense that, we ought to attend to
it, for it is an essential feature of being born from above that
immediately - not in its fulness - but immediately we are aware
that we are related to another world, we are related to heaven. To
put that round the other way, immediately we have become strangers
here. The true Christian from very birth has a
stranger-consciousness in this world. It may be a simple
beginning, but what is true of every Christian going on in the way
of Christ is that that strangerhood grows and grows and deepens
all the way along until it becomes, on the spiritual side, almost
impossible to live in this world. We have got to do it, it is no
use trying to get out until the Lord takes you out, but you know
spiritually it is becoming more and more difficult to accommodate
yourself to this world, to find anything that you can call home
here.
Forgive the simplicity of this, but it is an important factor. It
is the very witness of the truth of our Christian life, but the
fact is so apparent that a vast amount of what is called
Christianity has no such consciousness. It can accommodate itself
to this world, and it is doing so, and moreover, it thinks hardly
of those people who do not do it. The 'Christianity' that really
does not understand Christians who cannot accommodate themselves
to this world is a false and an illegitimate Christianity. If ever
there was a stranger here, He was that stranger. His consciousness
was altogether other and we "ought to walk as He walked".
Again, it should be true of Christians that all their resources
are in heaven, not as a fact but as an experience, that they really are being supported
and sustained out from heaven, and further, that their seat of
government is in heaven. We put it before in this way, that the
church has no headquarters on earth, its headquarters are in
heaven, and all government is to come from heaven by the Holy
Spirit. That is how He walked, and unless that is true in our case
and in the case of Christians, there is something fundamentally
weak and wrong and lacking, and only in so far as that is true
shall we be able to stand up against the world. We have got to
settle that. Is it strange to you that the world knows you not and
the world is against you? Is it strange to you that you have no
place here? Well, if it is, you have missed the point. It should
not be strange. It is native, it is natural, it is just a part of
a true position, and it is quite false to be otherwise.
Then a second thing about the Lord in His life here is what we
will call His balance. What a balanced life was His, what a
balanced walk! He was marked by a total absence of fear. He was
utterly fearless and what we may call self-possessed; so steady,
so rock-like, so unmoved. All the forces which ought to have
broken Him broke upon Him. There is a calm serenity and
tranquillity about Him that is very marked.
Then again there was no civil war inside of Him. He was a unity
not a duality. There was no conflict in Himself, no internal
conflict; a very important thing, a tremendously powerful thing
that is spiritually.
And then, His universality; how comprehensive He was. He had no
partialities, no biases, no prejudices. Everyone was at home with
Him except hypocrites. All nations, all temperaments, all
dispositions, all languages and all the ages found in Him an
answer. He belonged to no one particular age. You cannot say that
of other men. They were men of their own age. Sometimes they lived
before their time, but the Lord Jesus has compassed all time. So
it does not matter in what age you live, whatever may be the
characteristic of that age - and how different are the ages! How
different, for instance, in this part of the world, is the present
century or part of the century from what we call the Victorian
era. In the Victorian era, things were of a certain character, and
now that has practically gone. It is all so different that people
today, if they want to use some kind of phrase to indicate that
you are out-of-date they say, 'You are Victorian.' And so the ages
change their nature, their constitution, their manner of life,
their complexes, but strangely and wonderfully the Lord Jesus
meets every age; He just fits in to every situation. He is the
same, yesterday, today and forever (Heb. 13:8).
And then remarkably, while some religions and teachings are very
suitable to certain kinds of people and they cannot get on very
well with something that does not fit into their own nationality,
their own national constitution; they must have it of a national
kind. For example, the Eastern cannot get on very well with the
Western in the matter of religion, they must have an Eastern
religion with an Eastern complex; or the Westerner cannot get on
very well with the Eastern, we have our Western complex in
religion. In the case of the Lord Jesus it is not at all like
that. It just fits right in, whether it is China or India or
Timbuktu or America - or even Britain! He fits in. He is of no
specific nationality but of all. He is universal.
Then, you see, we make our gods after our own likeness, and one
of the great problems of religious life is this problem of
temperament, that our religion is so very largely made by our own
temperament. We think God is what we think He is. We think God is
what we feel He is. Other people do not feel as we do about God
and they, therefore, have a different kind of God from ours. Our
God is this one. He is made after our likeness, and so it is
everywhere. Temperament is a very big factor, and it does really
divide into watertight compartments and give particular and
peculiar complexes. The Lord Jesus just fits into every
temperament. Whether you are phlegmatic or practical or artistic
or sanguine or whatever you are in temperament, He just meets your
need. He comes, so to speak, to you just where you are.
He is not the Christ of the rich or the poor exclusively; He is
not the Christ of the learned or the illiterate exclusively. He
can meet the greatest intelligence, the highest intellectuality
and beat it; and He can meet us right down there in our ignorance,
in all our lack of such things. Somehow He fits in everywhere, in
all classes, and so we could go on.
How comprehensive and universal He is. He is not really a Jew. He
was born in Israel and a great deal has been made of the fact that
He was of Jewish birth. Yes, that for specific purposes, but you
cannot tie Him down to that. It does not matter what nationality
it is, He just fits in. He is just as good for us in the West as
He is for those in the East. That is true. That is a mark of His
life here when He was on the earth. These are true things about
Christ.
Oh, does not Christianity need to take on that truth about
Christ, to get rid of its prejudices, preferences, distinctions,
complexes and partialities; to get rid of all its
denominationalisms, all its sectarianisms, and find Christ
comprehensive, gathering all, meeting all? Oh, for a church that
really is after the nature of Christ in that way!
It becomes a very personal matter. We have got to be like that,
we have to have a heart large enough to embrace all. We have to be
much bigger than all these things of this earth - national,
denominational, and all the rest -we have to be enlarged to the
dimensions of Christ.
The Secret of Christ's Walk
Now, what were the secrets of Christ's walk? Can we put our
finger upon any one particular thing that gives us the secret to
this life of His? I think we can, and if you will think about it
even more than I am saying, take it away and dwell upon it, I
think you will see that there is a very great deal more in this
than I have pointed out. The secret of Christ's walk in the sense
in which we have spoken of it was His utter selflessness, His
utter self-unconsciousness. Think about it.
It is this self-consciousness that is the root of nearly all our
trouble. It is self-consciousness that makes life unbalanced. Some
way or other, self-consciousness produces a state that is
unbalanced. If you are not very careful and become too occupied
with yourself, always drawing attention to yourself, you develop a
neurosis which will make you a nuisance. Your life is unbalanced
and a burden not only to yourself, but to everybody else, and
Christ was never that. There was nothing neurotic about the Lord
Jesus. Yes, here is a strange paradox. No one perhaps ever spoke
more about Himself, no one used the personal pronoun more than He
did, and yet alongside of that there is this total selflessness.
How utterly selfless! What a lot of ground there is for us to move
in when we think of that. Oh yes, you cannot find self-interest
there, you cannot find self-occupation there, you cannot find
self-protection there, you cannot find self-assertiveness there,
you cannot find self-importance there, you cannot find
self-sufficiency there, and least of all can you find self-pity.
In the day when He is passing to His cross, knowing exactly what
was immediately before Him, the women of Jerusalem bewailed Him,
and He said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me" (Luke
23:28), 'you need not pity Me'. He was not drawing attention to
Himself, He was not seeking pity, sympathy. No, this was the key
to His balance. And this was the key to His helpfulness to all
classes and all conditions, this complete absence of
self-consciousness in the sense of being occupied with Himself and
how things would affect Him. Oh, it is a great secret! That is how
He walked.
And do you not feel that if the Cross really does lie at the very
root of a life, if it is true that we have come by the way of
Jordan, by the way of the meaning of His baptism, then we ought to
be crucified to ourselves, we ought to be dead to ourselves, we
ought really to be saved from this accursed self? It is the bane,
it is the root, it is the trouble, it is the core of everything.
Take it to heart.
I take it to heart because we are all so cursed with a self, a
selfhood. It springs in in so many ways. It does affect us, this
self, it really does. Let us ask the Lord about this, because it
is the only way of serenity. If we are going to be affected by
ourselves, we are not going to be very serene for long. It is the
only way of steadiness, it is the only way of that mighty calm in
the midst of storm, it is the only way of meeting situations and
people who naturally have it in their power to do us a lot of
harm, and to meet them, and for them to be rather under our power
than we under theirs - I mean spiritually. If fear is rising, fear
being a betrayal of some self-interest, some self-concern, then it
spoils everything and weakens us.
So I could go round this whole thing, touching numerous points,
but here it is. The secret of our Lord's walk, His mighty,
influential, useful, serviceable life, was very largely because in
that Jordan He had entered into the real meaning of the Cross, and
was able to say, "For I have come down from heaven, not to do My
own will, but the will of Him who sent Me" (John 6:38); "not My
will" (Luke 22:42). That of the personal was set aside. If it is
true, it will be with us as it was with Him - we will have a
wonderful ability to help everybody, to go through all situations.
"The one who says he abides in Him ought to walk in the same
manner as He walked" (1 John 2:6). This is the way of the Master,
this is the way for His servants, for His people.
How untouched was the Lord Jesus by such things as policy,
expediency, diplomacy. The dictionary deals in a hard way with
people who hold those names. It says of policy that it is
statecraft. Craft indeed! The Lord Jesus was untouched by policy,
what was politic. That never touched Him, never entered for an
instant into His consideration - what is the political thing to
do? The dictionary says of a diplomat that he is an adroit
negotiator. The Lord Jesus does not fit in there. Oh, how foreign
to Him was anything like - as we say - wire-pulling, manoeuvring.
Expediency - the dictionary says contriving, and this I find in my
Oxford dictionary against that word 'expediency' - 'more politic
than principle'. That is hard on the people in that realm, but how
untrue of the Lord Jesus that would be. He never resorted to
expedients. He always was governed by principle. Sometimes it
looks as though He was compromising, but He was not. It was a mark
of the greatness of our Lord that He paid His taxes. That is, the
Lord Jesus never gave unnecessary offence. Principle governed Him,
not policy, not expediency, not diplomacy, not anything that would
turn out for His own personal advantage, never!
I think that is something very searching for Christianity as we
know it. We have to say there is a very great deal of expediency
and policy and diplomacy in the Christianity that we know -
manoeuvring, contriving, and doing everything it can in spiritual
politics to gain position, favour and support in this world. Such
considerations never came into the heart or mind of our Lord, and
that is the way. God is not in the other way. You try policy and
see if you find the Lord with you. You never will. Try any of
these things, and you have got to get on with it, the Lord is not
going with you that way. You have got to come back to this way of
utter heart transparency, the transparency of heaven, nothing at
all that is shady or questionable or doubtful, not even in the
interests of Christian work. That is why so much of what we know
by the name of 'Christianity' is going up in smoke in the day of
the fiery ordeal. It will just vanish, it will not stand, and what
we are concerned with in this message is that which will abide. We
do not want to be swept away and our Christianity with us in some
great testing or trial. We want to go through, to abide. Well,
"the one who says he abides in Him ought to walk in the same
manner as He walked", and these were the things that constituted
His walk. The Lord make us walk in His ways!