The general subject, then, is what it means to be a Christian.
I think we might be quite safe in dividing this company, generally, into three categories.
One: those who would not claim to have had a definite experience in relation to Christ—what the New Testament calls the new birth, of being born anew.
Another group are those who have perhaps more recently had such an experience, and who might be called poor young Christians—not necessarily young in years, but young in Christian life.
And the third group: the people who know all about it.
Now, it will be necessary for there to be quite a bit of give and take in what is being said. That is, if there is that being said which does not fit your group, your category, you must remember that it may just be what someone else needs. In that way, be cooperative, so that we are working together.
And the mature, experienced people who know all about it must realize that I am also speaking to those who have no experience at all in this matter, or whose experience is very immature.
Having said that, we can come to our subject: what it means to be a Christian.
I think that we all need to have that made more fully clear to us, whatever our category.
There are many misconceptions and misapprehensions as to what the Christian life really is. There is quite a bit of confusion, quite a lot of mistaken ideas, and certainly a greatly limited apprehension of what a Christian really is.
I am not going to speak very much about the negative side—that is, what is mistaken, confused, or inadequate. I think the best way of dealing with all such difficulties is to get right on to the positive line and seek to state the thing in its fullness as we are able, leaving the comparisons to be made by those who hear.
The corrective for all mistakenness is always best on positive lines, and not in trying to deal with all the faults, weaknesses, and imperfections. So, we are going right away onto the positive side of what it means to be a Christian.
Our first phase of this matter is, as you see, the immense significance of the Christian life.
When we put it into such a phrase, we are saying something of very great importance. It is this: we shall never really appreciate anything until we see it in its full setting. If it is just something in itself, we miss a great deal. You have got to get its great background and its great setting in order to feel the full impact of its significance.
That is what we are going to seek to do, as we are divinely enabled to see something, at least, of the immense significance of the Christian life.
I think we shall all be on the ground of common agreement when I say that Christian life begins with Christ. But that means a great deal more than it sounds.
To say that Christianity began with Jesus is true, if you put Jesus in His right setting. It is just at that point that an adjustment may be necessary in order to grasp the immensity of this matter.
You see, neither the Christian life nor Christianity began with the historic Jesus. They did not begin when Jesus was born, when Jesus lived here, or when Jesus died and rose again.
It is just there, I say, that we need to make an adjustment. We must know what it is that the Bible shows as to our Lord Jesus Christ.
You take up your New Testament and open with the Gospels. You find that Matthew traces the genealogy of Jesus to Abraham. Luke takes Him back still further, to Adam. Mark begins his life of Jesus with Jesus at thirty years of age, at the time of His baptism.
But John outranges them all. Through the thirty years, beyond Bethlehem, back beyond Abraham, and beyond Abraham to Adam, he does not stop there. He still goes further back:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
That is a statement—a true statement—as to the Person of our Lord Jesus. But that, with one or two other sentences, is all that John gives us.
However, we have in the New Testament, through another apostle, a very great deal more concerning Jesus right back there in that dateless time. Through the Apostle Paul, we are taken back there and shown a very great deal about God’s Son before times eternal—not only before He came into this world, but before this present world order came into being.
It is the custom to begin a biography with the ancestry of the person in view, leading up to his or her birth. The whole thing is an account of the human and earthly history of this person.
But the biography of Jesus Christ goes right back, not only long before His own birth into this world and beyond His human parentage or ancestry. A large section of the biography of Jesus Christ in the Word of God relates to that which is called “before times eternal.”
Here are some fragments of Scripture. We hear Him pray. He is praying to His Father, and He is saying:
Father, glorify Thou Me with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.
That is a bit of biography, or autobiography: “The glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”
Then the Apostle Paul, in that magnificent description of Him, gives us just one clause—one mighty clause, of only five words:
He is before all things.
“The glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” “He is before all things.” So it is right back there that we travel to find the meaning of the Christian, the Christian life, and Christianity.
Let us contemplate, then, some definite statements in Scripture as to His Person—what He was like then.
Here it is:
God hath spoken unto us in His Son,
Who being the effulgence of His glory,
and the very image of His substance.
That certainly does not belong to the days of His humiliation. That goes right back, as we shall see in a moment, in the very context of those words. The express image of His substance, the effulgence of His glory—that is what He was like before the world was.
What was His position then? Here it is:
Though He was equal with God,
He counted it not a thing to be grasped at
to be on an equality with God.
Equal with God. On an equality with God. That was His position then.
Then, as to His appointment, here again is the Scripture in the context of the words we have quoted just now:
God hath spoken unto us in His Son,
whom He appointed heir of all things.
Appointed heir of all things. When did that happen? That was not done in time. That was not at the time of His death, or subsequently. That was right away back there in eternity past.
There was something done in the counsels of the Godhead whereby the Son of God was appointed heir, when it was determined that all things should be the heritage of God’s Son.
His rightful inheritance as God’s Heir was not, of course, to come into it on the demise of God. But God bound up all things with His Son and made Him their inheritance.
These are things that we know through the Scriptures. How the men who stated them came to know, well, they tell us. Paul, who says most about this, tells us definitely that it was given to him by revelation. God made it known to him.
It was then, through that before-times-eternal relationship with God, out of that fellowship with God, and out of that appointment of God, that there came the next movement: the creation of the present world.
Not the creation of the present world conditions, but this present cosmic order. Again, we are given a lot of information and light as to the relationship of Christ with the creation of this present world order.
First of all, He was the Agent of it—God’s Agent in creation.
All things were made through Him;
and without Him was not anything made that hath been made.
Or again:
For in Him were all things created,
in the heavens and upon the earth,
things visible and things invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things have been created through Him.
There is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom are all things. Through Whom are all things: the Agent in creation.
He is also the object of creation.
In Him were all things created.
All things were created through Him and unto Him.
And another statement:
Of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all things.
A further movement is indicated, or a further constituent of this creative activity. It is found in that little clause which completes what we have just read:
He is before all things,
and in Him all things consist.
The Agent, the Object, the Integrator. In Him all things hold together—integrate. He is, therefore, the very reason for the creation. Remove Him, and the creation disintegrates.
When they crucified Him, and He committed His spirit to God—“Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit”—there was a great earthquake, the sun was hidden, and darkness came over the face of the earth.
The very Object of the creation had been put out of His place by man. The creation knows that its very Integrator has been rejected. These are the tokens of a great fact.
Jesus Christ is the meaning of this creation. Without Him, the creation has no meaning.
Some of you who are thinking people may be saying, “Well, these are tremendous things. They are ideas. They may be a wonderful theory, a system of teaching, but are they facts? How can you prove them?”
My dear friends, you are all yourselves the proof of them.
You see, we are moving toward the meaning of the Christian life. You have no meaning in your own creation until you find Jesus Christ. The first thing that is livingly true about anybody who finds Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour is that they are conscious that they have found the meaning of their very being—why they are alive. Life then takes meaning.
These are not just great, wonderful truths suspended in an abstract way for our consideration, acceptance, or rejection. They are borne out in the creation, and you and I are a part of it.
There is no unification of our own individual lives until Jesus becomes the centre. There is a marvellous integration when that happens. Until then, we are divided, scattered people. Life is not in order at home; it is a chaos.
But that is a statement, of course, to which we shall have to come back presently. At the moment, we are occupied with Jesus Christ, away back before the world was, and then as the Agent, Object, and Integrator of the creation. Through Him all things were created.
Out of these three wonderful, simple things, I think, clearly arise: first, His likeness to God.
His likeness to God—the very image, or impress, as the word is, of God’s substance; likeness to God; oneness with God; and agency of God.
I want you to hold those things, because they are carried over, and they come very much into this matter of the Christian life.
With all this, we have to recognize a uniqueness and exclusiveness about Him. I want to underline that as many times as I can, for presently it might look as though I am on very dangerous ground.
I want you to recognize those three things: likeness to God, oneness with God, and agency of God’s purposes and God’s work. But in His case there is something unique and absolutely exclusive, gathered into the words:
Very God of very God.
Having said that, we can pass on to what the Bible has to say about man. Oh, what a comprehensiveness, profundity, and powerfulness there is in what it says about Jesus Christ before He came into this world. We pass to the next phase of things: what it says about man.
What does the Bible say about man as the very first thing that it says? There is a great deal about man, but what is the first thing that the Bible says about man?
And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.
“Let Us make man after Our own image.” Likeness: that is the conception, the divine conception; that is the divine idea.
What does that amount to? Surely it amounts to representation of God. Any image of a thing is supposed to be the representation of that thing.
The idea, the conception of man in the divine mind, was that man should represent God.
No, not in that exclusive sense of which I have spoken—Deity. That does not come into it with man at all. But this matter of being an expression of God, bearing the likeness of God, means that if you should meet a man who answers to the divine idea, you have a very good idea of what God is like.
Oh, that that were more true. But in its very limited way, we do know. Very limited—far too limited. In a limited way, sometimes we meet what we call a godly man. And “godly” is only “God-like” abbreviated.
Sometimes we are able to say, in a little way, when you meet that man, you seem to meet the Lord. You seem to find something of the Lord. You seem to touch what you think the Lord would be like.
Now, that was the divine intention, idea, and conception as to man. But it was the intention that it should be in a full way—that man’s very being and existence should contain the knowing of what God is like in His moral character and in the beauty of His personality.
You should touch God and be led back to God by that expression of God. Therein is a principle. We ought to take that into this matter of what a Christian is and what it means to be a Christian.
All our talking about God or Christ is utterly worthless unless God and Christ and this our Lord are found in us. That is the best thing, and sometimes that does its work without any talking, whereas a vast amount of talking will do nothing unless there is a touch of the Lord there.
The conception of man in the heart of God is just that He should be found in a creation and in a manhood.
That is the conception, then: the relation to God in God’s intention was likeness in nature. Likeness in nature—not deity, not Godhead, but God’s nature.
The Lord Jesus, when He was here, was always trying to convey by different means—sometimes stories or parables—an impression of what God is like. He was speaking to people of very small spiritual apprehension. He could not go beyond illustrations, pictures, and figures.
Sometimes they ask, “Is it a parable, or was it a life story?” known as the prodigal son. I think they are far better to call it the story of a father’s love, and you get to the heart of what the Lord Jesus was after.
He was saying, “When you have contemplated that father—his broken heart, his marvellous forgiveness, and all restoration, even smothering considerations and lavishing upon that renegade son all he has—you have got a faint idea of what God is like.”
Man was intended to be endowed with the divine nature. Peter even uses those words:
There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises,
that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature.
Leave deity out. You have got enough when you come to the divine likeness without aspiring to deity: likeness in nature, oneness in life. That was God’s thought concerning man.
Man was to become an inheritor of the very uncreated life of God. He was put on test, on probation, and this was there in the symbolic form of the tree of life. It had one condition.
But they missed it. So man, all the children of Adam right up to our own time, including ourselves, never possessed that divine life outside of Jesus Christ.
But that is the gift, as we shall see later—perhaps next week, if God will. That is one of the great things that happens when we become Christians: partakers of God’s own divine, eternal, uncreated life.
I will not dwell upon that at present. But then again, not only likeness and oneness, but fellowship in purpose. That was God’s idea for man: that he should be brought into a working relationship with God in His great, vast purposes in this universe.
The statement of Scripture is:
Thou madest him to have dominion
over the works of Thy hands.
Fellowship with God. Here again, we have a vast amount in the New Testament. I think we could say that ninety percent of the New Testament is occupied with this cooperation with God in His great purpose on the part of Christians.
The apostle is so fond of using that very phrase, “called according to His purpose.” Fellowship in the purpose of God: that was in God’s mind in making and creating man—partnership.
All this—likeness in nature, oneness in life, and fellowship in purpose—is related inseparably with God’s Son, Jesus Christ. None of it is apart from the appointed Heir.
We are said to be joint-heirs. That is, we come into things by union with Christ. The Apostle Paul has his abundant phrase, everywhere—two hundred times in his writings—“in Christ, in Christ.”
Nothing apart from Christ, nothing outside of Christ. It is all in Christ, inseparably bound up with God’s eternally appointed Heir of all things.
Well, we can follow that through into the Christian life. We have to look at what we may call this tragic interlude: the failure of man.
We know the story, how it is written and how it is put. I often, at risk—of course at risk—of being interpreted wrongly, say, “You need not worry so much about the story as to how it is put. What is important is to get hold of the laws, principles, and truths lying behind which create the story.”
I know the difficulties and problems. There may be many students here tonight who have their difficulties, their intellectual difficulties, about the Bible and all this. Well, you know, after all, I am not saying that it is not true or that it does not matter. I am saying that, after all, it is the result and the implications that matter.
If you and I can get hold of what the Bible embodies as a matter of principles, and not allow the framework of those principles to become the primary thing, the all-important thing, we shall get to the message; we shall get to the meaning.
Well, we know the story of what is called the Fall. You want to get into that man’s failure. Where did it come from? The Bible tells us about the source of that failure.
Here again, marvellously, we are taken right back before the creation. The veil is drawn aside. We are shown something happening outside of this world, somewhere.
The counsels of God had become known—His counsels concerning His Son and the appointment of His Son as Lord of creation, as Heir of all things. It had become known amongst the angels, the hierarchy of heaven.
There is one there, the greatest created being of all: Lucifer, son of the morning, who becomes acquainted with this divine scheme.
How into that realm iniquity should enter is a mystery. We do not know the origin of it, but what we are told is that iniquity was found in him. Pride was found in his heart.
Pride immediately works out in jealousy, does it not? In a pride-ridden being, it always immediately shows itself in jealousy and rivalry. “I cannot stand either a superior or an equal.” It will always lead to trying to go one better, in whatever realm it is.
With all the jealousy and all the rivalry, there sprang into that heart this attitude. We are told in Scripture that that one said:
I will be equal with the Most High.
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.
Jealous of God’s Heir, a rival to His appointment.
And heaven was rent. That one was cast out. He was cast out of his estate with all those who entered into that conspiracy with him against God’s Son—the angels which kept not their first estate.
The next thing we see is the appearance of this one in beautiful guise—not horns and tail and pitchfork, but beautiful guise—coming into the realm of God’s creation and finding man, His partner.
You know the story. There is the origin: pride, jealousy, rivalry. What was the method? We shall never understand the meaning of the Christian life until we get these things.
What was the focal point of the great archenemy’s attack upon the man that God had created to come into fellowship with His Son in the great purpose of the ages?
The focal point was man’s selfhood.
I doubt that the man had any consciousness of a selfhood until Satan touched him on that point and said, “Hath God said? God is keeping something from you that you might have. He is limiting you.”
“God knows that if you do this thing which He has forbidden, you yourself will have the root of the matter in yourself. You will have the capacity and faculty in yourself for knowing—knowing, knowing.”
“At present, under this embargo of God, you have got to depend entirely upon Him. You have got to consult Him, refer to Him, defer to Him. You have got to get everything from Him. But you can have it in yourself, and God knows that.”
“You see, God is withholding something from you that you might have, and you are less of a being than you might be. So God is not really favourable to you and your interests.”
This maligning of God. But the focal point was this: “You, you, you can do something. You can do something. You can be in the know about things.”
You see: self-centredness, self-interest, self-realization, and all the other host of aspects. The “I” awoke.
That “I” which had brought the enemy out of his own place: “I will exalt myself above the stars; I will be equal with the Most High.” Now, to awaken the “I” in man.
Instead of man having his centre in God, deriving everything from God, he aspired to have the centre in himself. Instead of being God-centred, to be self-centred. That was the focal point.
Man was led into the same pride, leading to the same act of independence—making a bid for personal freedom from God.
The results? Well, we know them. The older this world becomes, the greater the development of this race, the more and more terrible is the manifestation of this original thing.
Man trying to get on without God; man saying that he can get on without God; man seeking to realize himself, to get everything to himself, and himself to be the centre of everything—not only individually, but collectively. That is the story, is it not? That is history.
The results? Well, it is a terrible thing. You look at the world and all this terrible, terrible suffering—all the misery, all the horror.
We would never have believed, had it not become an actuality in recent years, what man is capable of doing because of his breach with God. We will not dwell upon that. It is too awful.
The point is: why? Why should all this suffering and misery and wretchedness go on in the world?
Surely the answer is this: God can never remove from man the consequences of this act of pride and disobedience, independence, and complicity with His archenemy. He could not remove the consequences without letting man go on in his independence.
All this is God’s way—the way God is compelled to say, “It is an awful thing, an awful thing, to be without God, to be in a state of breach with God. It is an awful thing.”
Oh, you come into the Christian life, you see, and you do not remove all the misery and suffering in the creation. You do not remove the suffering from yourself. But there is a difference—a mighty difference—between those who are outside of Christ and those who are in Christ.
All suffer. But the one suffers unto despair and hopelessness, and in the sufferings of the other there is the grace of God turning it all to account to make them God-like again.
The sufferings of a Christian make that one like their Lord. It is just marvellous to see the likeness of Christ coming out in His own through their sufferings, while the others suffer without hope and die without hope.
That, by the way, is the result. Now, just for a few minutes, let us get to this next stage of things: the incarnation of our Lord Jesus.
It is just at that point that all that was appointed by Him, all the divine design and conception of God’s Son in this universe, all the creative activity through Him and by Him and unto Him—it is at that point that all the meaning of man’s creation, as we have been showing, is taken up in a definite way for realization.
First of all, there is something to be undone in the human. Oh, this incarnation, the coming of the Lord Jesus into this world, is a far, far greater thing than anyone has yet appreciated.
The Word of God makes a great deal of this coming into the world. You know, we have recently been talking all the time about the birth of Jesus—Jesus born in Bethlehem. There has been so much about that in carols and in talk: all about the birth of Jesus, Jesus born.
You know, the Word of God uses that phrase: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem.” But the Word of God says far more about His coming. That was not the beginning of Jesus; that was the coming of Jesus.
He definitely, deliberately, and consciously, in the full knowledge of His eternal existence with God, made a decision about this matter—a deliberate decision to come.
Coming in that form had its own meaning. We dare not stay with all the details of this, but it was a coming.
What the Word of God says about that coming, first of all, is that it was a mighty, mighty renunciation on His part. Listen again:
Who, being in the form of God,
counted it not a thing to be grasped at
to be on an equality with God,
but emptied Himself,
taking the form of a bondservant;
and being found in fashion as a man,
He humbled Himself,
becoming obedient unto death,
yea, the death of the cross.
There is an inference, an implication, in that sentence in His great prayer: “Father, glorify Thou Me with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” I had it; I let it go; I gave it up.
That mighty renunciation: the Son of God, His heavenly throne of glory, and His descent.
Down to what? Servanthood. The form of a bondservant—a bondslave.
You and I cannot grasp all that, because we cannot grasp what it meant for Him to be equal with God. We cannot understand all that He was and had in eternity past. We know so little about that; we understand less.
Here it is: it is all renounced. He is now here in incarnation, not as a master but as a servant.
The Son of Man, He said, “is come not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” “I am among you as He that serveth.” He took the towel, girded Himself, poured water into the basin, and washed the feet of His disciples—the work of the slave, the bondservant.
Not an angel, but a man, assuming responsibility for this state of things and for the recovery of what was lost, and reinstating what had been forfeited: the Redeemer, a man and creature.
That He became in incarnation, and then went straight to the cross. Straight to the cross. He had come for that. He had no illusions about this.
The temptation—one of His great imperatives—was always related to the cross: “The Son of Man must be crucified.” That imperative was within His heart, overruling and overriding everything else.
He knew it. He repudiated and rejected the cheap offer of the kingdoms of this world at the hands of the devil. He came not to have them as they were, but to have them as God ever intended them to be. That could only be by the cross.
So the cross was the great repudiation of the world as it was and is; the great repudiation of man as he had become.
Man, as he had become, was a man that God could not accept, in whose heart was this very pride. The repudiation of him, because representatively the judgment and death of Jesus Christ was God saying concerning the whole race, “I have finished with it.”
God turned His face away. The heart of His Son was broken as He cried, “Thou hast forsaken Me,” because He was there as man’s representative, the world’s representative, as it was.
He had repudiated it, died to it, as God closing the door upon it. But by that means, He redeemed. He redeemed man. He redeemed the creation.
In His resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, He reinstated man representatively in the place that God ever intended man to have.
These are not isolated actions on the part of Jesus Christ. This is related all the time. He is the inclusive One, and what happens to Him is what God means to happen to man.
Until man is in Christ, he is repudiated by God. There is no way through, no one coming to the Father. But in Christ, the inheritance which was lost is recovered.
In Christ, personally at God’s right hand as man’s Representative, man is reinstated. He is there as the earnest of what we shall be, and there we shall be by the grace of God.
Oh, this is the setting of the Christian life. Is it not immense? Is it not enough? This is the background of a Christian.
You see, we deal with passages such as Romans 5 to 8. It is so great. All I hope to do, and really all I am trying to do tonight, is to leave an impression on you.
I cannot explain it. I cannot define it. I cannot set it out. I cannot convey it.
All this, which is so poor an expression, surely should leave an impression upon us. This is what we are really getting at: that eternal background is the setting of the Christian.
This little thing of becoming a Christian, getting converted and becoming a Christian—well, it is wonderful. Blessed be God, it is wonderful to be a Christian. But, dear friends, the conception and experience of the Christian life is such a little thing compared with God’s thought.
You have got to get the eternal dimensions of the significance of Jesus Christ, of the setting of the Christian life.
We do not begin our Christian history when we accept Christ. By accepting Christ, we are placed right there in the eternity of God’s thought concerning man. We are only brought into something which has been there from all eternity in the intention of God.
As we shall see later on, it is linked with realizations so wonderful in the ages to come. To become a child of God, to be born again—however you may define or explain it, or speak of it—is to come right into something, first of all, that is not of time at all. It is eternal.
It is not just this little life here on this earth. It is heavenly. It is universal in its significance.
It is a wonderful thing to be a Christian, beyond all our powers of grasping.
If we could only get some conception of the cost of our salvation, the cost of redemption, the cost of recovering the lost inheritance—the cost, the cost to God, the cost to God’s Son, the awful depths of that cross—if only we could get some idea of that, we should see that it is not a little thing to be a Christian.
It is immense.
And so we must close by pointing out that if this is true—and I have not spoken outside the Word of God—you must believe me that I have been keeping closely to the Book. I have not troubled you by turning from passage to passage, but there is a vast amount of Scripture behind what I have said. It is all in the Word of God, and more than I have given you.
If this is true—and I say again, it can be put to the test; that is the important and valuable thing about all that I have said—it can be put to the test, it can be made true in experience, and you can know it now, in this night.
But it is true enough that every truly born child of God knows within himself or herself, “This is true. This is true. This is why I have a being now. I have got the explanation.”
Much more, oh, I could say by way of argument. If this is true, what an immense challenge it is to be a Christian.
What an immense thing it would be not to be in Christ, if all that is the meaning of being in Christ. What an immense thing it will prove to be, not only in this life but infinitely more in the ages to come, to be in Christ.
It is a challenge. I am telling you who are not in Christ: you are not dealing with just your father’s or your mother’s beliefs or faith. You are not dealing with some thing called Christianity and your own conception of a Christian. It may be all wrong, quite inadequate.
You are dealing with a vast, an immense thing.
Yes, the immense significance of the Christian life.
May God help us, from this contemplation—certainly not apprehension, not understanding and grasping, but contemplation—of the setting of the Christian life, to reach out, if we have never done so, to embrace God’s view.
If we have, may He make us sure that we are set upon knowing all that the Christian life means; that we are not going to be content with a little Christian life, with anything less than God’s fullness.
And if we have a lot of experience and knowledge, let it all lead us to a new determination that we shall not stop anywhere short of God’s full and ultimate intention in apprehending us in His Son.
We pray.