Living-Walk - Life-Minded Christianity for the Rest of Us?

The Wisdom of the Lamb

Dear saints – as we push further and deeper into the limitless mind and heart of our God; as we seek sincerely to comprehend and internalize the wisdom of His ways and plans; as we commit to laying aside all religious convention and human insight… we inevitably come naked and alone to He who is known pre-eminently as the “Lamb”. All else is eclipsed and marginalized as we gaze upon and ponder He who represents the express sum of all of God’s grace and truth and wisdom. Every false and self-sustaining thing can only attempt in so many pitiful ways to reduce Him, and every fruit that does not spring forth from out of His life and purpose can only fall to the dust and die. Prophets of lies can only fabricate some other thing, some vain counterfeit, some weightless reality so easily revealed for the emptiness it holds. Yet the Spirit of God knows only the Christ of God. The Father of the Lamb – Peter’s “Most Excellent Glory” reveals only His Son.

He alone is the mystery, the truth, the wisdom and the life recorded in the Scriptures and confirmed by the very testimony of the heavens and the earth. He is our only object and only in Him will everything good from the Father flow down to us. Only He was sent to heal the brokenhearted, and to loose the chains of captivity from the human spirit. Only He can comfort those who mourn and lift the spirit of heaviness that bears down on the human condition. Only He can plant trees of righteousness in a forgotten and barren wasteland. Only He can reconcile an entire universe drifting farther and farther apart from the divine intent of its maker.

And so have you come, my brother? Have you stood naked in that most holy place where only you and He stands alone, stripped of all your most sacred notions and arguments, all of your man-sized categories and concepts? Or do you turn away from so weak and seemingly pathetic a thing? Does everything it represents prick and unsettle everything you have learned while living and breathing on this earth? The very survival instinct within you, flowing into you with your mother’s milk, is smashed to superficiality by everything that He represents. Clearly, this is some other wisdom my friends, and please don’t be tempted to reduce it to some generalized martyr’s zeal, for this was no temporal political or social cause for which our Lord allowed Himself to be poured out and consumed. There are, and have been many martyrs but only one Lamb of God. There have been countless causes and wrongs to be righted, but only one universe held bondage to the sin of the serpent.

Consider for a moment that most biting and loathsome language employed in Isaiah’s Suffering Servant...

- despised and rejected by men

- a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief

- despised, not esteemed

- stricken, smitten, afflicted

- wounded, bruised

- “the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all”

- oppressed and afflicted, yet "He opened not His mouth"

- “led as a lamb to the slaughter and as sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth”

- “it pleased the Lord to bruise Him, He has put Him to grief”

- “He poured out His soul unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors”

- “He bore the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors”

Now when John the Baptist laid eyes on Him, he did not declare “Behold your King!” or “Herald the Champion of the People!” Instead, he saw a lamb and cried –

“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

Let that settle in deep for a moment folks; let it stir around and swell up inside you.

Let the “otherly” wisdom of it stretch beyond everything that this faith has become to you, and to so many of us pretenders. Let it assimilate and supplant every vain and peripheral notion that so readily consumes so much of His Body these days. Let it sift, settle and lie where it may, for this wisdom is unlike anything we have known or can know from any created thing, at anytime or anywhere. To call it religious is a mockery! To allegorize it away is practically heresy! And to affirm any other wisdom from any other source is outright apostasy! For here is the Christian Way in a nutshell and a heartbeat! Here is God’s Wisdom and God’s Way! And if we are in any way reluctant to follow after this here and now, then perhaps we were never meant to be here, toying with bible verses and religious things.

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain
To receive power and riches and wisdom,
And strength and honor and glory and blessing! (Rev 5:12)

Whereas the world and its wisdom eschews weakness and esteems the mighty – the true path to glory, honor and power lies elsewhere. The seldom-mentioned thrust of the gospel is that our God accepts us only in the context of our rejection at the hands of this world and its wisdom. We will only truly and ultimately find life in God when we forfeit our lives here and now on this earth. Only by releasing it do we attain it! Only by letting it go do we pick it up again! Here is the faith and testimony of the saints, those who hate their life in this world, and are not afraid to lay it down in the path of the slain!

Let me ask you this – When our Lord asked you to follow Him, what was He asking? What could He have possibly meant? I think you know the answer my brethren. His way is the way of the lamb, of death unto life, of losing to gain, of falling to the ground and being broken so that others may live, of being wrongly accused, of being judged and found guilty for something you did not commit, of the spilling of innocent blood while the Father weeps and the Heavens roar!

Now I dare say this with all boldness - if any preacher, man or angel himself knocks on your door and offers you anything less than this, slam the door and bolt it tight, for the gates of hell have come-a-knockin!

A little different from Friday night socials and Vacation Bible School isn’t it? Oh how we have twisted the message my friends! Oh how we have believed that first lie of easy believism! Oh how we all need to rededicate ourselves to His Way and His Wisdom, regardless of the cost! Please help us Lord!

And before you start assuming that the one typing these words has already attained to this wisdom, and is shouting down to you from atop the mountain - think again dear friends. I confess sadly that my disposition has always been that of a fighter - one who scratches and claws to assert himself in whatever way he can, shaking his little red fists at the world. No, no – like you, I am looking up to He who has ascended, and is forever worthy! My wisdom is perhaps even further from that of our Lord and Master.

Please pray that the Lord’s grace and life will spill out into all of us here in such a measure as to demonstrate the wisdom of the Lamb to a world that knows nothing of it, and indeed wants nothing of it!

Oh Merciful and Beloved Father – Great and Eminent God Above – so pampered and needy are we in this generation! Forgive us Oh Father, and let the sustaining wisdom of your Son shine forth in us as a witness to your Ultimate Glory! Not because we are in any manner worthy, but merely because we are emptied of every other kind of wisdom, Oh Lord! We praise and honor You as God, and by Your grace we will have no other! In the Name of the Lamb we pray, Amen.

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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