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While he was still
speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came
out of the cloud, saying, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Hear Him!" And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their faces and were
greatly afraid. The following day Jesus wanted to go to Galilee, and He found Philip and said to him, "Follow Me" (John 1:43) “Hear Him”! Oh how this is the need of the hour, my friends. How we so desperately and urgently need to submit ourselves to hearing the One sent down to us by the Father! Oh that we would hear Him amidst all the noise and distortion emanating from so many of our gurus these days! Oh that His voice and His voice alone would be all that we hear! And that we would follow Him wherever He goes, in His ministry and work! As Christians, we sincerely desire the blessings of God but we often want them on our terms, don’t we? Yet the Heavenly Father has once and for all declared that all heavenly blessings, without exception, will flow through His beloved Son. “Hear Him!” thunders the Holy Voice from above, reducing the disciples (and us if we are paying attention) to quivering floor mats. Life in the Spirit has not been pretty for me lately, I am sad to confess. So much of me wants to go deeper into Him and His life, and yet so much of me resists also. Oh what faith we need to release ourselves vicariously into His loving care! To go deeper, to loosen our grip on our own lives and this world! Oh that He would be increased in this vessel, and everything that I am reduced – that I would simply believe Him, and Hear Him, and Follow Him! So much unbelief. So little trust. So many man-sized and earth-bound thoughts. I have been discovering (quite painfully in fact) that it is not enough to fill our heads with the works of those who have ventured deep into spiritual reality – the Murray’s, and Nee’s, and Tozer’s, for example. They can certainly offer us their own insights from beyond the veil, but we must apprehend it for ourselves before we can experience true spiritual life, and kiss the hand of the King. Even further study of God’s scripted word means little until we abandon all that we are, that we might believe and hear and follow further and deeper! My friends, by my very nature I am hard-core pragmatist, a doer, someone who wants to instantly grab hold of something and go with it. These are my instincts – how I am hard-wired! I am a problem-solver and a man of action, accustomed to taking life by the reigns and steering it this way or that. This is engrained in me, and runs deep into everything I am, think and do. All of my life I have learned to trust such instincts - for survival and self-protection in this world, for success (albeit worldly success), and for that feeling of control that I have always thought I needed. But here again thunders this Voice from heaven, piercing into the very heart of everything I am… “Hear Him”. Oh that I would and that I could. So many voices in my head. So many experts offering this or that advice. So many men of God telling me to listen to them, to follow them! Oh Father – silence them all that I would hear only Your Beloved Son! That I would follow Him to the cross and beyond, into the very heart of You and Your kingdom! "How do we work the works of God" asked the people of our Lord in John 6 – I have asked Him this same question myself many times: "How indeed does it actually work?", this sanctifying, this shedding of earthly things, this taking on the mind and nature of the Son of Man? Our Father’s answer is still the same - "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent." And that we hear and follow Him! Hmmm... I can work the works of God be merely believing in His Son? There are not steps to be taken, activities to be engaged in, disciplines to be developed and cultivated, theology to learn, things to do in fact? Here is the wonder of John's Gospel (my favorite by far), the mystery of godliness summed up in this awesome Being known as the Christ, the Light that came into this dark world. But what about me? What about my need to contribute something? Surely these are worth something! No, my friends, they are not, and until we get our minds around this then all we will have is our earthbound, man-sized religion. We will not experience the life of God coursing through our beings. We will not glimpse heavenly things. There will be no peace, nor victory, nor any other God-size blessing we can name. First comes believing, then hearing, then following! These are the Father’s terms for all those who would have true life, for those who want so desperately to experience the reality of the Spirit. But again Lord - Nothing in and of me that actually seems to help me in this world will advance the works of God? But, but… Our Lord’s very first recorded miracle was to turn water used for ritualized washing (the outside of the cup) into wine (life) that gets inside the cup. And to think the people at the wedding feast were merely thrilled to have more and better drink to satiate the flesh even more. Here were many of them, dead drunk, when He was illustrating dramatically how man would be restored to life in Himself! And throughout John's Gospel we are confronted with this Life spilling out and over into people's lives - the only true thing the earth has ever known, the Life that was the Light of the world, the Light of men, come down from heaven. This was what John was compelled to remember in the Spirit when he wrote down his impression of those events. And by so many ways and forms and words, our Lord kept repeating this mysterious fact that the Life must get inside us somehow; only then will we be able to work the works of God. No amount of washing or tending to physical things will achieve this. Nothing that we bring with us from the old life can serve us here. We need the wine inside of us, flowing through us, flowing with His very life! Here is the wonder of the New Covenant – that the life of God must get within us.
'Within you ! ' Within you
! This twice-repeated word of our text is one of the keywords of
the 'New Covenant. ' I will put my law in their inward parts,
'and in their heart will I write it.' I will put my fear in
their hearts, that they shall not depart from me.' God created
man's heart for His dwelling. Sin entered, and defiled it. Four
thousand years God's Spirit strove and wrought to regain
possession. In the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ the
Redemption was accomplished, and the kingdom of God established.
Jesus could say, 'The kingdom of God is come unto you;' 'the
kingdom of God is within you.' It is within we must look for the
fulfillment of the New Covenant, the Covenant not of ordinances
but of life: in the power of an endless life the law and the
fear of God are to be given in our heart: the Spirit of Christ
Himself is to be within us as the power of our life. Not only on
Calvary, or in the resurrection, or on the throne, is the glory
of Christ the Conqueror to be seen,-but in our heart: within us,
within us is to be the true display of the reality and the glory
of His Redemption. Within us, in our inmost parts, is the hidden
sanctuary where is the ark of the Covenant, sprinkled with the
Blood, and containing the Law written in an ever-living writing
by the Indwelling Spirit, and where, through the Spirit, the
Father and the Son now come to dwell.
Ok, but How then? How to get this life inside us? What to do? Herein is the rub isn't it? Believe. Simply believe in the One sent by the Father claiming to be that Life! Then listen to Him and follow Him in wherever He goes and in whatever He tells you to do. Sounds simple right? No, no cries the pragmatist in me, there has to be more, there has to be something He’s not telling us! My friends and brethren, I have since discovered by His grace (piled upon grace all the way to heaven), that there is no more, that this is all there is, because He is All there is! In the Father's view, there is only His Son, the Christ. He is the Promise and Fulfillment of All Life! Our journey begins and ends with Him, and He is all of our Provision throughout. He is the author and finisher of our faith, as only He can be! He is the Life that forever neutralizes death, and the Light that scatters the darkness! He merely walked among us for a short time and look how he divided and scattered the darkness, how He put death on the tracks. The dividing line is drawn and it is this - that we either believe and know Him, or we don't. We either have Life in Him or we don't! We are either of the Light or of the darkness that still doesn't comprehend Him because it cannot! Have you ever noticed that it really didn't matter what the Apostle Paul started to talk about in his epistles, he ultimately came back time and time gain to the centrality, the absolute wonder, the awesome glory found only in Jesus Christ? And the book of Hebrews, which indicates that even from that fateful beginning, it was all about the Son, and our need of Him, and His central place in the Father’s heart and plan? He has placed His seal on Him! He has sent Him down from that Holy Height! He has invested all of creation’s hope in Him! And He commands that we Hear Him! And Only Him! This clearly does not bode well for most Americans, as we are a nation of independent-minded doers aren’t we. The kind that rolls up our sleeves, sucks in our gut, and goes off to fix the problems of the world. I dare say that there is more works-based, man-sourced, man-serving Christianity being taught and practiced in America today than at any time during the last 2,000 years. So much of our fruits indicate beyond any shade of doubt, that we have stopped believing, and as a result we can no longer hear the voice of the Master, let alone follow Him. The result is nothing less than HUMANISM, the exaltation of the spirit and works of man! I see so many Christians more concerned with "doing" rather than simply "being", when the truth is that the doing springs forth quite naturally from the being. All of God’s terms for salvation and sanctification are bound up exclusively in His Son. We begin with Him, because only in Him do we “live and move and have our being”! Oh how I wish we would get this folks. Me too! We want so much to do something for our Heavenly Father, to glimpse the deeper life even, when all He wants is for us to come to His Son, and drink from His cup. Brethren - let us return wholly in heart, fidelity and focus to this Beloved Son. Let us honor the Father of Life by coming to His Son in simple faith, and hearing Him alone. Then let us follow Him in heartfelt and trusting obedience. He is our way now, and nothing we were before is of any value to us on this path! His is a Living Way, and the way leads directly home to the heart of the Father. This is what we are trumpeting here on this website – this is really all we have to say. I am sorry if it wearies you, but we will not apologize for magnifying Him above all else, for narrowing our vision to the Only True Thing in all the universe. So very many things - so many lesser things - have occupied Christians for so many generations. Today, it seems we are consumed by service and ministry - so much running around trying to single-handedly usher in the Kingdom of God. It’s no wonder growth and results have become an idol to so many groups and individuals. It’s no wonder that humanistic psychology has largely replaced the mystery of godliness found in Christ. It's no mystery why we have reverted to man’s methods and measurements as we carry out what we believe to be His work. We want His blessings on our terms don't we? We want results and we want them now! My brethren, what we need is the Spirit of Christ enlivening us and increasing the Son of God in all the secret chambers of our lives. Only then will we discover how He so wondrously keeps bringing us back to Him. To His Pre-eminence! To the purity and simplicity found solely in Jesus Christ! Can we ever be reminded too much of our need for this? Heavens No! For it is the soulish mind of man and the devil that naturally seeks to usurp the majesty and glory of the Son of God! Can we ever have too much of Him? No, my friends, we can never be truly filled with Him, for He will spill up and over from our lives into the lives of others, ultimately filling all things in this universe with Himself. This is where the story ends, with the Father inserting all created things with the life of His Glorified Son! He is the heavenly leaven that permeates and enlivens all things! Oh Father – Dear Father – we thank you for this most precious gift, come down to us as Life from Heaven. We thank you for all that He represents and embodies for us, that indeed, He is now our life and living! Forgive us for our unbelief, and for our dullness of hearing, and indeed for our disobedience in following other voices. We ask for faith, that we might come to Him. We ask for ears that we might hear Him! And we ask for trust, that we might follow Him all the way back home to You. By your grace alone we stand, and we ask that all these things might be enacted and enabled by your Holy Spirit, that the Lord Jesus Christ would be magnified in each of us, that Your perfect will would be done here as it is in heaven! In Christ’s Name we pray. Amen. Please pray for us here at Living-Walk, that we would watch and see the Master at work, and understand what He would have us do. Your friend in Christ Jesus,
Wayne |
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