I want to read from Jeremiah 2:13, and then from a couple of portions in the Gospel of John.
For My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
To hew them out cisterns, broken cisterns,
That can hold no water.—Jeremiah 2:13
In John 20, the final verses tell us:
Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book:
But these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
And that believing ye may have life in His name.—John 20:30-31
And then John 10:10:
The thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy:
I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.—John 10:10
Our gracious Lord, we thank You once again for the invitation that You have extended to us to come one more time to Your table, to sit there, to remember You, and to express our gratitude, worship, and appreciation for Who You are and for what You have done.
Lord, we thank You that You have this desire in Your heart to meet with us. We pray that You will increase our desire to have these meetings with You as well. Thank You for being with us and helping us as we sought simply to express our worship to You this morning.
Now we come to this time in which we have opened and read portions of Your Word. We thank You that the Holy Spirit is here this morning to help us. We pray that He will breathe upon these words and cause them to come alive in our hearts.
For we know that You are a living Lord. You are a Lord Who loves us very, very much, and a Lord Who wants to speak to us. We are asking this morning that You would do exactly that. Take this time and what is shared, and use it as a means of communicating Your heart about the matters You want to speak to us about today.
We commit to You this time, our hearts, our ability to hear, and our ability to speak. May it all be energized out of Your life. We ask it in Your name. Amen.
When we begin reading our Bibles, we do not get far into the record before we discover that God is involved in the act of creating. We do not get too far into that first chapter of Genesis before we hear God making this declaration: “Let Us make man.”
I do not know what you have thought about that, or whether you have ever stopped to give serious consideration to what must have been in God’s heart and mind when He made such a statement.
We must remember that God is an all-knowing God. That is, He knows everything that is ever going to happen. It does not take a great deal of thought to realize that man has created some very big problems for God.
Why would God take such a risk? Why would He risk creating a being that could rebel against Him—a situation that would require God the Son to become a human being and, as a human being, become the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world?
There must be something deep in God’s heart, a deep, deep desire, that would cause Him to do this work of creating man, knowing the difficulties He was going to face because of me.
I think we get something of an answer when we turn to Revelation 21.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more.
And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His peoples, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God.—Revelation 21:1-3
If you want some understanding of what motivated God to say, “Let Us make man,” I think we find it in this third verse of Revelation 21. What God designed was to have a people in whom and among whom He could take up His residence.
Recently, the Lord has been merciful and faithful to speak to us clearly about His eternal purpose. Yet this morning I would like us to consider God’s purpose from the standpoint of seeing that what God wants is a place where He can deposit Himself, where He can tabernacle Himself.
In His great wisdom, He has chosen human beings to be the place of His residence—a place where He could dwell.
After God created man, He placed him in a garden. The record tells us that God caused many trees to grow there: trees pleasant to look at and trees good for food. Yet there were two special trees, two distinct kinds of trees, in that garden. One was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the other was the tree of life.
Very simply, as I understand it, those two trees represent man living independently of God or man living dependently upon God. God designed and created us so that He Himself could impart His own life to us, and we would learn to live dependently upon that life.
But we all know that the choice was made, and it was the wrong choice. Rather than eating of the tree of life—choosing to live dependently upon God’s life—the choice was made to live independently of God, simply out of human ability.
Man, in his original state, was a fine specimen of a creature. He had the capacity to know things, feel things, make decisions, and do things. But God always wanted man to do whatever he did out of a life of dependence upon Him.
We do not get very far into the Word of God before we discover that this ended in a very sad state of affairs. In Genesis, God says, in effect, “I am sorry that I ever made you.”
I do not think we always understand what God suffers when man chooses to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and live independently of Him. This is why humanity has had a head-on collision: humanity has chosen to go the wrong way.
But because He is God, He has not given up. There ought to be a hallelujah arising from our hearts this morning, because He would have been absolutely justified had He simply said, “It is not worth it.”
Yet here we are this morning, believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is evidence that God has not given up. When we come to Jeremiah 2, it seems to me that the Holy Spirit takes a highlighter pen and highlights the problem that has resulted from man choosing to live independently of God.
Even after God brought the Jewish people into covenant relationship with Himself, covenanted to be their God, and promised to be everything they needed, they still turned away.
God said that His people had committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And have hewn them out cisterns, broken cisterns,
That can hold no water.—Jeremiah 2:13
The Hebrew people were insignificant among the nations, yet God chose them to be His covenant people. Through them, He intended to continue His work of bringing fallen humanity back to what He originally wanted humanity to be: a dwelling place for Himself.
But in Jeremiah we find God’s covenant people—whom He had blessed, to whom He had extended mercy and love again and again—now hearing this declaration: “They have committed two evils. They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
God had not changed. He had not failed in fulfilling His commitment to His people. As a matter of fact, He had blessed them abundantly. Yet, in the midst of all that, they chose to forsake Him, to forsake the fountain, and to go about building cisterns.
I hope you see the contrast between a fountain and a cistern. A fountain is always providing fresh water. With God, that means there is an endless supply. It will never, ever, ever run dry.
A cistern, on the other hand, is basically a large container. When there is a supply of water, it stores the water so that it will be available later. God says His people chose, rather than a living supply of water, to build a container with their own hands in an attempt to contain the water they needed.
It seems to me that this is the same issue we find in the garden: either the tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; either God or ourselves.
Brothers and sisters, that choice still faces us every day. It will remain our choice throughout our lives. Are we going to choose Him, or are we going to choose ourselves? Are we going to choose the fountain or the cistern? The tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
It is healthy and wise for us to see in the Scriptures that, in virtually every generation, God’s people have ended up making the wrong choice. We always think that we will be the exception. We think that we have learned from other people’s mistakes.
But do you know what we learn from history? We learn that we do not learn from history. That is what we learn from history—whether it is history in the world or history among God’s people.
We are always in danger of forsaking the living fountain and building our own cisterns—things that we make. These things are not necessarily bad, evil, or sinful. Usually, even the materials are supplied by God. But they can become things in which we rest and trust rather than maintaining total reliance and dependence upon the living God.
When we build cisterns rather than going to the living fountain, we are usually more concerned about outward appearance than inward reality.
The sad thing is that we can put on a pretty good show for almost anybody. As they say in the world, you can fool most of the people most of the time. Guess what? In the church, we can fool most of the people most of the time.
But there is One Whom we cannot fool. His eyes are as a flame of fire. They penetrate beyond the façade. They get behind all the actions and detect what is going on in the innermost part of our being—what motivates us and what is behind our words.
That is why we fall into the trap of building cisterns: we are more concerned about outward appearance than inward reality.
We read two portions from John’s Gospel this morning. John was facing a situation in his day that caused him to write his Gospel in the way he did. It does not take a genius to discover that the Gospel of John is different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke in virtually every way.
What was in John’s heart? What motivated him? It seems to me that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ was in a state of decline.
Remember, when we speak of the church, we are speaking of a living organism made up of individual people. You cannot have the church without people. You can have individual Christians without the church being expressed properly, but you cannot have the church without individuals.
Therefore, when we say that the church is in a state of decline, we are saying that the people who make up the church are causing that decline. That is what happened in John’s day.
John had been there. He was part of the inner circle. If there was an inner-inner circle, John was in it. He was the one closest to our Lord. He was present through the first thirty years of the church’s history.
He was an eyewitness to the Holy Spirit coming on the day of Pentecost, taking those few believers, filling them with the life of God, and enabling them to go throughout the world bearing the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But John was also there to witness something very sad: the church began to become something other than the church. He had seen the glory of what the church could be in the opening chapters of Acts. Yet he lived another thirty years and witnessed decline—the new covenant people of God forsaking the fountain and hewing out their own cisterns.
John was seeking to address that situation. When he came to write his Gospel, it seems to me that he had one great burden: a burden for spiritual reality.
He was not interested in giving us merely more information. Matthew, Mark, and Luke give us adequate information concerning the historical works of the Lord Jesus. John was not trying to outdo the other Gospel writers. He had a particular burden: that the people of God would once again discover spiritual reality.
That is why he tells us:
But these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
And that believing ye may have life in His name.—John 20:31
The choice made in the garden was, in one sense, a choice between two kinds of life. Why would God offer life to somebody who was already living? Adam and Eve were alive, yet they were offered the tree of life.
The same question arises in Jeremiah 2. The people were alive, yet God said they had forsaken Him, the fountain of living waters. What is being said?
John is concerned that God’s people would know experientially—not merely theoretically, through teaching and doctrine—the indwelling life of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Apparently, something had happened to that second generation of Christians. They were going through the motions. They were satisfied to observe how things had been done previously and simply followed the footsteps without the living reality.
In my estimation, form was replacing reality. You sing the song. You offer a prayer. You do this and you do that. It may all be outwardly correct, but behind it there is no reality.
Teaching and tradition can become valued above life. When we first enter into an experience, it is glorious. Yet it is not long before we put that experience into the form of teaching and assume that, because we have the teaching, we have the life.
Traditions are usually developed because life was present. As life was expressed, people learned to express it in a certain way. But then others observed the outward expression and became concerned only with copying that form. They learned to mimic the practice without possessing the life.
Thus, teaching and tradition become valued above life.
Another thing that happens is that uniformity wins out over unity. Rather than finding our own unique expression of the life of Christ, we copy the way someone else does things. It becomes a uniform practice.
We may even hear the same words and the same tone repeated in our prayers. People who are alive and outgoing in the hallway can enter a meeting and suddenly undergo a transformation. Their voices lower, and their language changes. What has happened?
As I have looked at this issue of tradition and uniformity, one thing that has struck my heart is how much God loves variety.
If you could stand in my place and look out at all the faces I see this morning, you would have to conclude that God loves variety. We all have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two ears, but God has arranged them in such a way that every person has unique features.
I do not think you could ever mistake me for someone else. God loves variety.
Look around everywhere. Look at the trees: not only different kinds of trees, but different varieties of oak trees, maple trees, and apple trees. There are thousands of varieties. What does that say? It says loud and clear that God loves variety.
Variety is the spice of life, and that is true in the body of Christ. When God created you, He created you as a unique person. Even if you are an identical twin, you are not absolutely like another person. There is nobody else in the whole world exactly like you.
When God calls you to Himself and imparts His life to you, He does not want you to become like anybody else. He wants you to be you—to be real as to who you are. That ought to show up in the way you do things. There ought to be a particular flavor in the way you express the life of Jesus Christ.
Another thing that happens when the Lord’s people forsake Him is that we become spiritually proud rather than poor in spirit.
If we could see with the eyes of God, we would realize that there is no reason at all for us to be proud. What are we going to be proud of? Our sin? That is all we have in ourselves.
Even when God begins to work in our lives and produces something, if He produces it, how can we be proud of it? Yet it happens.
John’s burden was to communicate the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ in such a way that the spiritual reality of Who Jesus is, and what He wants to do in the lives of people, would be clear.
The solution John offers is found in John 20:31. These things have been written so that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we may have life in His name.
Through the apostle John, the Lord gives us directions back to the fountain. John is concerned that we first believe that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the Son of the living God.
There may be many things said about the Lord Jesus Christ. He was a great teacher. He was a perfect human being. Yet John wants us to be clear about one central truth: Jesus is God’s anointed Messiah, and He is the Son of God.
Then John takes us further. Not only are we to believe that He is the Christ, the Son of God; by believing, we are to have life in His name.
Spiritual reality—Who God is—is revealed in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Our Lord Jesus could say, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).
That needs serious thought and meditation. In the Lord Jesus Christ, we see Who God really is. We behold His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Not only do we find in the Lord Jesus Who God is; we find in Him what God wants man to be. We can look at the Lord Jesus and find God’s model human being.
In Him we have a perfect blend of God and man. We have God dwelling in man. God dwelling in man did not prevent Jesus from being a real human being, and His humanity did not hinder God from expressing His life through Him. He is the perfect blend of God and man: the incarnation.
This spiritual reality is found in none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. John would have us be clear about that, and then he would have us take another step: believe in Him, and by believing in Him, have life in His name.
John is concerned not only that we would be clear about Who the Lord Jesus is, but also that we would be people experiencing life. That is John’s issue.
As you read John’s Gospel and his epistles, you discover three matters that concern him deeply: life, light, and love. The latter two can only be experienced if we first possess the first. You cannot have light and love without first having life.
When God looks at us, He is looking for the measure of the life of His Son that He finds in us—not merely how religious we are, nor even how moral we are.
It is possible to live morally, at least by our own standards, without the life of Christ. God expects morality in our lives, but He wants it to be morality that results from our living out of the life of Christ.
John points us to the solution. He gives us directions to the fountain. It is found in a person: the Lord Jesus Christ.
As we read John’s Gospel, we find him using the word life repeatedly. The word itself is used at least thirty-eight times in the Gospel, not including the words live and living. That should tell us something about what John would have us understand: the life God offers us in the Lord Jesus Christ.
I do not want to become mechanical or merely academic, but it is important that we understand what John and the Lord Jesus mean when they use the word life.
In English, we have one word for life. In Greek, there are several words. There is bios, from which we get the word biology. There is psuchē, from which we get the word psychology. There is pneuma, referring to spirit. But there is another word: zoe.
When the word zoe is used in Scripture, it refers to the life resident in God Himself. It is a totally different kind of life. It is the life represented by the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. It is the life that caused God to offer Himself as the fountain of living waters.
The life John would have us enter into is none other than the very life of God Himself. We may have heard this many times, but just because we hear it does not mean we are living in it.
The Lord offers us none other than His own life.
When John says, “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4), and when Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), He is using this word zoe.
We find the same truth in John 3:16:
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,
That whosoever believeth on Him should not perish,
But have eternal life.—John 3:16
This life is, first of all, divine life. Many of us would be satisfied if God simply took us in our present condition and adjusted our lives a little, making them somewhat better. But God is not satisfied with that, and that is not His way.
When Jesus spoke with Nicodemus in John 3, Nicodemus may have wanted simply to understand Jesus’ teaching. But the Lord would not allow him to remain there. He told him that he must be born again. He had to be begotten of God. God had to take His uncreated life and place it within Nicodemus so that he could see and enter the kingdom of God.
This life is divine life. Secondly, it is eternal life.
Among evangelical Christians, we have sometimes done ourselves a great disservice by making going to heaven synonymous with having eternal life. If you have eternal life, you are going to heaven. But you can have eternal life while still waiting to go to heaven.
God is interested in eternal life becoming your life here and now, enabling you to live as you make your journey through this world. The result is that you will enter eternity, but eternal life is not merely a life that never ends. It is a totally different quality of life.
It is the same life that God possesses. It is divine life, eternal life, uncreated life, resurrection life, and the life God would have you and me, His children, live out of.
Paul says in Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me:
And that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God,
Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.—Galatians 2:20
Often, when I think of that verse, I focus on the words, “I have been crucified.” Certainly, we need to understand that. But I think Paul wants the emphasis here: “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
Something marvelous has happened to every person who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ. God has taken His own eternal, uncreated, divine life and placed it inside of you. He wants that life now to become your life.
Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature:
The old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.—2 Corinthians 5:17
You cannot take human life and train it to become divine life. The only way you can become like God in character and conduct is to have God’s life indwelling you and to allow that life to become your life.
What is the purpose of this life? John 17 tells us:
And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God,
And Him Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.—John 17:3
If you have a hunger or desire to know God, this is how God would have you know Him: by experiencing eternal life. Having eternal life and knowing God are inseparable.
God does not want you merely to know about Him. He wants you to know Him. He wants you to know Him experientially by coming to dwell in you, revealing more and more of Himself, and expressing Himself through you.
This life not only enables us to know God; it enables us to live. Some people think that when you become a Christian, that is the end of real life—that from that point onward, everything is a bore.
Oh, brothers and sisters, Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” We ought to be teaching the world how to live—not only how to live, but how to enjoy living.
This life is given to us to enjoy. The Lord Jesus said:
These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy may be in you,
And that your joy may be made full.—John 15:11
I think He means that our joy ought to be so full that it flows over and spills over onto other people. Yet I do not find that often enough among us.
The Lord Jesus endured pain, disappointment, hurt, rejection, and all the rest. Yet He enjoyed life. He was a real person, and He wants us to be real people who enjoy living out of the life He has given us.
This life is also for serving. When you have God’s life in you and are true to that life, it will always lead you to serve—first to serve Him, then to serve your brothers and sisters, and then to serve people in the world.
We see this demonstrated in John 13, when the Lord Jesus girded Himself with a towel and washed the dirty feet of the twelve disciples. That was the lowest position, but He was demonstrating what this life does: it enables you to serve.
This life is also an overcoming life. We are more than conquerors in Christ. We are, in effect, super-overcomers. How? In Christ. His life is enough, and living out of Him enables us to overcome and to win in the midst of difficulty.
It does not mean we will escape every difficulty. It means that we will find our way through as we discover Christ being our life.
This life also enables us to testify. The Lord Jesus tells us in John 13 that the world is to identify us as belonging to Him by the way we love one another.
How can we love one another in the way He loved us? His love was sacrificial and unilateral. He did not wait for us to ask Him to love us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
This kind of life, expressed in sacrificial love, is the way the world is to identify those who belong to Him. This life is the foundation of our testimony.
Very simply stated, the life John is talking about is the life resident in the Lord Jesus Christ. God the Father has given the Son to have life in Himself. Therefore, not as a religious system but as a living Person, Christ has been offered to us as a free gift.
For the wages of sin is death;
But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.—Romans 6:23
Do not stop with the phrase “eternal life.” Notice where it is found: in Christ Jesus. That is its location. That is the only place you will find it.
John says:
And the witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life,
And this life is in His Son.
He that hath the Son hath the life;
He that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.—1 John 5:11-12
There is only one place you can obtain this life. It is located in a Person, not in a religious system and not in the keeping of law. It is found in a living relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
God has simplified this to its simplest form. How much simpler could it be? God takes His own life, places it in His Son, and gives His Son to us. All we must do is receive His Son.
In the garden there were two trees. Once again, God has offered us eternal, uncreated, divine, overcoming life as a gift in His Son. It is all resident within Him.
Paul tells us:
For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,
And in Him ye are made full.—Colossians 2:9-10
Your completeness is found in Him.
Nothing about this is complicated. Now, I am not saying it is easy; I am saying it is simple. It is perhaps the most difficult thing you will ever do, because it requires giving up the self-life.
We would rather spend our time, energy, and resources building a cistern that we can control ourselves than depend upon God.
Brothers and sisters, I am bearing testimony for myself this morning. There is something in me that would rather crawl on my hands and knees from here to California and back again than trust God completely.
We need to get it clear: there is life made available, but it is located in a Person. May God deliver us from all vestiges of religion.
Religion is our way of taking what God has offered us and arranging it so that we do not have to keep coming back to Him. We want a cistern that we can go to and draw our own water from, rather than having to come to Him continually as the living fountain.
Entrance into this life is simply an experience of believing—entrusting yourself, accepting, and receiving.
Yet we must recognize that there is something inherent in all of us that must be dealt with: resistance to life.
He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not.
But as many as received Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God,
Even to them that believe on His name.—John 1:11-12
When you read the Gospel of John, you see how much antagonism there was toward this life as it was manifested in the Person of the Lord Jesus. Religious people, of all people, were most antagonistic toward this life.
Do not be foolish enough to think that this problem has disappeared. Until we are raptured, there is still something in us that needs to be dealt with so that we do not continue resisting this life.
It is a matter of believing. Not merely a one-time act of believing, but a continuous believing. It requires a constant posture of dependence and reliance upon Him.
We cannot allow ourselves to think that we can take a vacation from believing or from faith. The righteous shall live by faith. It is a way of living. It is a lifestyle.
If we expect to experience the reality of this life given to us in Christ, dependence upon Him must become a lifestyle.
The Lord Jesus said it clearly in John 15:
I am the vine, ye are the branches:
He that abideth in Me, and I in him,
The same beareth much fruit:
For apart from Me ye can do nothing.—John 15:5
How often do we need to abide? All the time. It is a permanent way of being united to Him. He is in us, and we are in Him. That is the way He says it needs to be: living out of His life and allowing His life to express itself through us.
Let me conclude by saying a few things about this statement of our Lord Jesus in John 10. He says:
I came that they may have life,
And may have it abundantly.—John 10:10
John explains why he wrote his Gospel. The Lord Jesus explains why He came to this planet. He came so that you and I, sinful mortal creatures, might have life and have it overflowing.
First of all, the supply of this life is unlimited. There is an unlimited supply because it is eternal life. Do not think of eternal life merely as living forever. It is much more than that. It is living totally differently.
I hope you do not want to go on living forever exactly as you are now. I do not want you to go on living forever exactly as you are now, because I have to live with you! And you may say the same thing about me.
Eternal life is not simply eternal existence. It is a revolutionary change. The Lord says there is an unlimited supply of this life. It does not matter who you are, how old you are, or anything else. It is available if you are willing to come and drink.
It is also readily available.
In John 7, the Lord Jesus stood on the great day of the feast and cried out:
If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.
He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said,
From within him shall flow rivers of living water.—John 7:37-38
There are no excuses. It does not matter who you are. This life is available. There is an unlimited supply for every person who is willing to come.
How can we experience this overcoming, overflowing life? First, we have to be honest about the issue of sin.
God cannot impart His life in fullness where something foreign to Him is being held onto. Therefore, the issue of sin and disobedience must be dealt with.
Praise be to our wonderful God, He has done this for us in His Son.
The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin.
—1 John 1:7
He has justified us. He has taken our sins and removed them from us as far as the east is from the west, never to be remembered against us again. We need to know the cleansing of our consciences from evil works and possess liberty before the Lord.
Then we need to be willing to humble ourselves. This is an area where we need to do business with our self-life. Some of us are so stiff-necked that we would rather live out of our old, broken-down life than humble ourselves and admit how desperately we need the life of Christ.
The older we become in the Lord, the greater the danger. We can become accustomed to living at a certain level. But those who are older in the Lord ought to display an even greater measure of His life.
We must not merely grow into middle age or old age in the Lord. Let us allow the Lord to work in us so that His life is more evident at the end than it was at the beginning.
We need to learn meekness. We need to be teachable people. Those of us who are older can become set in our ways, even spiritually. That can hinder the life God desires to express through us.
We need to remain flexible, pliable, and open to change and adjustment. God needs to be free to adjust us continually.
Finally, we need to stay attached to the vine. We need to stay in contact with our living Lord. I cannot do that for you, and you cannot do that for me. It is a responsibility that I must take upon myself.
Through prayer, through reading the Scriptures, through fellowship with the Lord’s people, and through daily taking up my cross, I am responsible before God to maintain that relationship.
That is what I feel the Lord is calling us to do: to examine ourselves and allow the Holy Spirit to expose anything that may be hindering us.
I am not speaking merely to those who do not know the Lord. I am speaking to those of us who already know Him, whose lives have been indwelt by Him. Is His life being given liberty and freedom to be expressed in the fullest sense?
I realize there is a growth process. Hopefully, five years from now, more of the Lord Jesus will be manifested in us than there is now. But that means you and I must face something here and now.
Paul says:
Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus,
That the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body.—2 Corinthians 4:10
Daily, we are delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. If we expect this life to be ours abundantly and overflowingly, then we must learn the lesson of the cross.
There is joy that comes as a result of the cross—not necessarily joy while we are undergoing it, but joy afterward. Hebrews 12 tells us that, for the joy set before Him, Jesus endured the cross.
The writer of Hebrews also says that discipline does not seem joyous in the moment, but afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness. There is no joy at the moment, but afterward there is fruit.
Therefore, among us as the Lord’s people, we must learn how to let the cross operate corporately as well as individually.
A number of years ago, I was in a theological seminary class, and we were discussing Christian renewal. In the late 1960s, renewal was a major subject. The class was discussing all the different things churches needed to do in order to experience renewal.
As I sat there, something came to me. It may be a simple illustration, but it seemed that what we need as individuals and as a church is something like an oil filter on a car.
What does an oil filter do? It filters out impurities.
By living, being who we are, and experiencing life individually and together, we bring many impurities into the situation. But God has provided His oil filter: it is called the cross.
What does the cross do? It cancels out all those things that are not of the life of Jesus Christ.
This is what God is after. He wants Christ to be our life. He wants it to be true that when we live, it is not merely us, but Christ expressing Himself through us.
As an assembly of the Lord’s people, we are not merely a group of people. We are to be a manifestation of the living Christ in a way that none of us can express individually.
When we allow things of the world, old practices, traditions, and teachings to take over so that we are merely going through the motions, we are not giving the Lord freedom to express His life.
That is why we need to remain open before Him, flexible, and willing to change. I have discovered that it only takes two times for most of us to form a tradition. Something works once, it works the second time, and suddenly it becomes a tradition.
Thank God He is able to bring forth the richness, fullness, and overflowing life of Christ in terms of love, concern, and the manifestation of Christ through His people.
We each have a responsibility. I have to remain in the vine, and you need to remain in the vine. We need to be willing to allow the Lord to come and do His pruning.
If the branches produce fruit, what does He do? Does He encase them in gold? No, He prunes them. Why? Because He wants more fruit—more fruit, and abiding fruit.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, if in any way we have forsaken the fountain and are seeking to build our own cisterns, may we move away from building cisterns and move our hearts back to a totally dependent life, day in and day out, individually and corporately.
May we know the richness of the Lord’s life in the church, which is His body:
The church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
—Ephesians 1:23
Loving Lord, we want to bless You this morning. You have worked out a way by which we can become what You designed and created us to be.
Lord, we do not have to look very closely to discover that we are far from what we understand You want us to be. We thank You that You have begun a good work in us, and we are trusting You to complete that work.
We understand from Your Word that our responsibility is to cooperate with You in this process. So we come to You this morning in light of what we have found in Your Word.
As best we understand our hearts—and we understand that we can be deceived—we want to forsake the cisterns and not forsake You, our God. We want to come back to You as our living fountain.
Lord Jesus, we want to know You as our life. We want our living to be a living that manifests You.
Hear the cry of our hearts this morning. Take whatever You may have spoken to us, seal it within us, and do a work in all of us and among us, for Your glory and praise, and in Your name. Amen.