I hope that we have the energy necessary, both from the giving end and the receiving end, that we will be able to have some profitable time in the Lord’s presence.
When I talked with Mark a while back about the possibility of our coming, he asked me if there was anything on our hearts that we felt the Lord might want us to share. I could not say dogmatically that there was, but this matter of life—which our Lord Jesus mentions in the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel—came into my heart, and I mentioned it to him.
It really has to do with our experiencing life on the level that God initially intended for man to experience life.
If you will turn with me to John 10, we see our Lord Jesus as the Good Shepherd making a statement that I trust will help introduce this matter that is in our hearts.
It is great to have the young people with us this morning. I wonder if some of you would mind reading some of the Scriptures for us as we go along. Who all has Bibles here this morning? Good. Maybe you can borrow one if you do not have one.
Adam, would you mind reading John 10:10 for us this morning?
Very good. So that we can get it recorded on the tape, it says:
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.
Most of you are familiar with the fact that what we call the New Testament was written in the Greek language. It is a beautiful thing when you look at the sovereignty of God regarding the timing in which the Scriptures were written.
Someone has put it this way: if you can feel it or think it, you can say it in Greek. Language is restricted in many ways. Have you ever had a set of feelings and found yourself without words to express how you felt? The Greeks worked at having a word that would express anything you could feel, think, or have inside of you. It is a very thorough language.
When Jesus said, “I came that they might have life,” there are three Greek words that can be translated by the one English word life: bios, psuchē, and zōē.
From bios we get the English word biology. From psuchē we get psychology. From zōē we get zoology. The interesting thing is that when Jesus says, “I came that you might have life,” He uses the word zōē.
To put this whole thing in perspective, I think it would be helpful to go back for a moment to the process of God creating man.
When we go back to the Genesis account, we are told the process whereby God created man. What was the first thing He did? He formed man’s body out of the dust of the ground. In other words, He took some dirt and some water, put it together, and formed a physical body.
What was the second thing He did? He breathed into man’s face the breath of life. The result was that man became a living being, or a living soul. In Hebrew, he became a nephesh chayyah—a living being.
God created man’s body, and then He breathed into the body He had created. When man received this breath that God breathed into him, something came into being that had never been there before: a living being, a living soul, a personality, a self—an independent self that had life of its own.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Paul prays that the Thessalonian believers might be wholly sanctified: spirit, soul, and body. So we have an explanation of the result of God’s creation. God created man with three distinct parts: body, soul, and spirit.
When God addressed Adam and Eve regarding their responsibilities in the garden, He called attention to two trees: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.
God told Adam and Eve that in the day they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would surely die. There would be no question about it. Death would settle in upon them.
We know the story. Adam and Eve ate of the tree under the temptation of the serpent. Eve ate of it and gave it to her husband, and he did eat. God’s word came about. Because of their action, they died.
What part of them died? Their spirit. How do we know they did not die physically? Cain and Abel came afterward. How do we know their soul did not die? Because they continued to think, feel, and make choices.
When they ate of the tree, their spirit died in terms of its ability to communicate and relate to God.
It would be helpful for us to realize that when God created Adam, he was not everything God intended for him eventually to become. He was perfect in the sense that there were no flaws in what God had created, but he was not yet complete or mature.
In a month or so, fruit will begin to come out on the trees. You can take an apple at a certain stage and say it is a perfect apple according to that stage, but it may not yet be complete or mature. In the same way, Adam and Eve—and all their descendants—would not become what God intended for them to become until they received of the tree of life.
What was the tree of life representative of? The very life of God Himself. God created man so that man would be able to experience the very life that God Himself has.
Man will never become God. Satan promised Eve that they would become like gods, knowing good and evil. But God had not promised man that he would become God. He promised that man could experience the same life that God has.
God created man so that he could receive the life of God and enter into complete fellowship with God because God’s life was within him.
When the Lord Jesus said, “I came that they might have life, and might have it more abundantly,” He was saying that His mission was to make it possible again for human beings to experience what God had intended from the very beginning in the garden.
The writers of the New Testament reserve this word zōē for the life that God Himself has. God’s life is eternal. It never had a beginning, knows no end, and cannot be affected by death. Nothing created can affect the uncreated life of God.
It was in God’s heart that we, as mortal created beings, would become recipients of His uncreated, eternal life.
Eternal life does not simply mean that we will live as long as God lives. That is what most of us think about: “I am never going to die. I am going to live forever and ever and ever.”
I tell you what: I do not want to go on living forever and ever and ever the way I am now. First of all, you would have to live with me the way I am forever and ever and ever. You had better stop praying that some improvements are made in me if that is all we are talking about.
God’s intention is not merely that we live forever. The quality of life, the character of our life, is to become the very character of the life that God Himself has. God has given us His life not merely so that we will live forever, but so that we will become like Him.
Both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, God says to His covenant people, “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” Have you tried that? Have you sought to put it into practice? Have you discovered the impossibility of it?
How is it possible for us to fulfill this commandment from God: “Be holy, even as I am holy”? It is impossible unless we become recipients of the same life that God Himself has. The only way we can be like God is to have God’s life.
Paul tells us in Romans 6:23:
The wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
God gives us, as an absolutely free gift, this life that will cause us to become like Him.
When we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, when we are brought face to face with the reality of our lost condition and what sin has done to us, and when we see the Lord Jesus Christ as God’s payment for our sin, a wonderful transaction takes place.
Not only are our sins forgiven, but God takes His life and, as a gift, gives it to us. He puts it inside us. It is called being born again, being born from above, being regenerated, being converted, and being saved.
God has taken His own life—the life that has never been created, the eternal life whose character expresses who He is—and has given it to us as a gift.
In 1 John 5:11-12, we read:
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.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we need to be freshly aware that when we receive the Lord Jesus Christ, we receive the very zōē of God—the very life of God, the life that God has in Himself and by which He expresses Himself.
Notice one other thing Jesus says in John 10:10: “I came that they might have life, and might have it abundantly.”
There is no limitation to the life that God makes available to every one of His children. Can I put it this way? I hope it does not offend anyone: there is no reason for any of God’s children to live on spiritual welfare.
God has made provision in His Son for you and me to experience life, and to experience it abundantly—not merely in the age to come, but beginning now.
Certainly, there has to be a beginning, but there ought to be a growing and an increasing of this life within every child of God.
This is really the glory of God. Nothing thrills the heart of God more than to see the life of His Son increasing in the lives of His people. This is the glory of God: this life we have received as a gift from God increasing, growing, and influencing every fiber of our being.
The word soul can also be used to translate the Greek word psuchē. Jesus said, “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” He must deny his soul-life.
When man sinned, he died spiritually, but he did not die psychologically. His soul did not die. His personality did not cease to exist. He was still a living being. He could communicate with other living beings. He had the capacity to talk about God and think about God, but not to know God in terms of knowing the life of God.
Man began to live independently of God—to live his life without God in the picture.
My understanding is that the body and the soul joined in conspiracy against the spirit. Imagine Adam and Eve facing the temptation to eat of the tree. They had already received God’s word to their spirits: “You shall not eat of this tree.”
The fruit was there, and there was something within them saying, “Do not eat it.” But Eve saw that it was pleasant to the eyes, good for food, and desirable to make one wise.
The appeal of that fruit was not to the spirit but to the soul. The mind, the emotions, and the body were involved in making a decision to eat the fruit against the warning of God.
The body and soul joined together and said, “We want this thing.” When they did, mankind became what we find in Genesis 6 called flesh. Flesh is the combination of the soul and body.
Sometimes flesh refers simply to our physical bodies, but it also describes this makeup of body and soul together. In the flesh, it is impossible to please God because it is centered upon itself. It is alive independently of God.
In Genesis 6, God says that man had become flesh. He was living his life independently of God. From that moment onward, it has been a downhill slide for the human race. Humanity does not have within itself the capacity to heal itself. We have tried, but the farther we have gone, the worse things have become.
But in the fullness of time, God sent His Son, born of a woman and born in flesh. He accomplished redemption for us, paying the penalty for our sins and making it possible for us to be reinstated into fellowship with God and to experience the life God has in Himself—and to do so abundantly.
That is the thrust of my heart for these sessions together: that we will not merely accumulate information, but that this will become our experience and the direction of our lives.
We are not only going to have this life that Jesus came to bring; we are going to have it abundantly. We are not going to make excuses for ourselves. We are going to discover experientially how to enter into this abundant life that Jesus said He came to bring.
As our Good Shepherd, He longs for every one of us, as His children, to have this life and to have it abundantly.
There are four things that I feel would be good for us to look at during these sessions:
John 1 speaks of grace upon grace. Romans 1 speaks of faith unto faith. Psalm 84 speaks of going from strength to strength. And 2 Corinthians 3 speaks of going from glory to glory.
When Jesus said, “I came that they might have life, and might have it abundantly,” He was speaking in terms of these kinds of experiences: grace upon grace, faith unto faith, strength unto strength, and glory unto glory.
The outcome of the work of His life in every child of God is to glorify them. We need to know what that means, and we need to have it in our hearts that this is what we want to be our experience.
Let us look first at 1 Peter 5:10. Amy, would you read that for us?
Let me read it again for the tape:
And the God of all grace, who called you unto His eternal glory in Christ, after that ye have suffered a little while, shall Himself perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you.
I want us to look first at Peter’s statement: “the God of all grace.” Do we know Him, brothers and sisters, as the God of all grace?
That is some statement for Peter to make: the God who has made Himself known to us in the Lord Jesus Christ is a God of all grace. Everything God does is a manifestation of grace. By His very being, His character, and His makeup, He is grace.
Let us look in Romans 5:6-8:
For while we were yet weak, in due season Christ died for the ungodly.
For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: for peradventure for the good man some one would even dare to die.
But God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Of all the Scriptures I know, this comes closest to describing what grace is. We do not have a single exhaustive definition in the Word of God. Grace is one of those words that we have difficulty fully explaining. You may think you have a thorough definition, and then you discover something else about grace and have to broaden it.
But this passage comes close. While we were sinners, helpless, hopeless, lost, and enemies of God, He sent His Son to die for us. That is grace.
Very simply, my definition of grace is love in action. It is not some Fourth of July explosion of a definition, but it is simple. The grace of God is God acting out His love.
When Peter speaks of the God of all grace, he is speaking of a God who is love. God’s love requires that He act according to what He is, and grace is the result of God’s love being expressed.
We need to know our God as the God of all grace. He will never act independently of His grace. His grace motivates, directs, and determines His actions. Everything He does is motivated by His love—even when He judges.
Sometimes we think the wrath of God and the love of God are opposites. No, they are two sides of the same thing. God’s wrath is the expression of the love of God toward someone who refuses to accept His love.
Everything God does is motivated by love, and the way that love is expressed is through what the Scriptures call grace. He is the God of all grace.
Paul refers to Him in 2 Corinthians 1 as “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” It is interesting to see how the writers of the New Testament discovered God. Peter reminds us that He is the God of all grace.
How did we initially become members of the family of God? Was it not an act of God’s grace? What He wants us to understand is that not only the initial experience, but all the way through to the end, is an expression of the grace of God.
I hope one thing that can happen in our hearts this morning is that we settle this issue: I never want to live my life independently of the grace of God. I do not want to be able to live without God’s grace operating in my life.
You may say, “Well, Ernie, I thought I had already made that decision.” But if we look more carefully, we may discover that this is not what has happened. Many of us had a wonderful beginning, but we adopted the erroneous idea that after God got the process started, He expected us to carry it out.
We think that now God has given us this new life by His grace and love, from that moment forward we are responsible to see that it turns out right. But that kind of thinking originates in our old Adamic nature. It is independence.
Our flesh still wants to live independently of God. It may want to be religious, but it does not want God.
Therefore, it is very important that we understand and settle in our hearts that this God of all grace wants to supply all the grace we need for any situation and every situation we will ever encounter as children of God.
Let us look in John 1. Stephen, would you read verses 14 and 16?
Listen to it again:
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us
(and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father),
full of grace and truth.
For of His fulness we all received, and grace for grace.
John says that we beheld the glory of this One, the Word—the pre-existent Christ who took on human flesh. The disciples spent three and a half years with Him. Their eyes beheld Him; they studied Him; they looked upon Him.
Their conclusion was that He was full of two things: grace and truth. Grace, in the sense that everything Jesus did was an act of grace; truth, in the sense that everything Jesus spoke was reality.
Then John says, “Of His fulness we all received, and grace upon grace.” In the Lord Jesus Christ, God has made total provision—full and adequate provision—for every situation that we as children of God will ever encounter.
God has not limited His grace so that we must struggle through and scratch through by our fingernails. The grace John beheld in Christ was a full grace, and of that fullness we have received.
The picture John paints is grace upon grace, upon grace, upon grace, upon grace—for the rest of our lives.
This present life is not all that God has planned for us. He is going to launch us into a whole new realm of being with Him. Even in the age to come, it is going to be grace.
Look at Ephesians 2:4-7:
But God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us,
even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ
(by grace have ye been saved),
and raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus:
that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
When will He show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus? In the ages to come. Isn’t that marvelous?
When you and I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, God launches us into a whole new way of living: living according to the grace of God and letting God Himself become the resource of our lives.
That is something that will go on for eternity. So one of the things God desires to bring about in our lives while we are here is to teach us how to live according to His grace and in His grace.
You would think it would be no problem at all. You would think we would be willing to receive what God is so willing to freely give. But one of the big problems God has is getting you and me, as His children, to live according to His grace and appropriate His grace.
We get to a certain point and begin living on our own steam again, living out of our own soul-life inherited from Adam, rather than living out of the life God has given us in His Son—the fullness of which we have received.
Daniel, would you read Ephesians 1:5-8?
Let me read it again:
Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,
to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved:
in whom we have our redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace,
which He made to abound toward us.
Notice first of all that He has freely bestowed this grace upon us. It would be good for us to think our way through this and settle it in our thinking.
The reason God loved you was not because of who you were or because of who you were not. You know why God loves you? Because He loves you. There is no other explanation.
Do you think He loved you because you were such a rotten sinner? Or do you think He loved you because you were not such a rotten sinner? Neither one. He loves you because He loves you.
God does not look down and say, “Now I want some kids, so I am going to have this whole mass of humanity and pick this one but not that one.” No. He freely bestows His grace.
There is not one thing you and I can do to earn the grace of God. Grace cannot be earned. It is an absolutely free gift. God shows His favor upon those who do not merit it.
Notice also Ephesians 1:7: “According to the riches of His grace.” Let me use a silly illustration. Suppose I have a keg of rusty nails and a little box full of pure gold. Which would you consider the riches of what I possess—the keg of rusty nails or the gold? The gold.
What has God given us of His grace? The riches of His grace—the best He has. Think about that. God looked at all He had and chose the best, the richest, and gave it to us.
Sometimes, when I read Hebrews, I have to ask myself what would cause people who have come to know the grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ to turn their backs and say they do not want it anymore.
In Hebrews 6, it says that if God has done all these things and then they fall away, it is impossible to renew them again unto repentance. My understanding is this: when God gives His best and it is not good enough, there is nothing more God can do.
When God gave us His Son, He gave us the best He had. How can we refuse it? We should not.
Notice also in Ephesians 1:8 that He has lavished His grace upon us.
Before I came to know God, my understanding of who God was—that is, what He was like—was that He was an angry old man with a big stick and a long beard, and you had better never ask Him for anything. I do not know where that idea came from, but that was my understanding.
Praise be to God, I found out He is not anything like that. I found in experience that He not only gives me the riches of His grace, but He lavishes them upon me.
Some of us still think God dispenses His grace with an eyedropper. We think He tells the angels, “Now, make sure you do not lose any of that. Make sure every bit of grace gets on that person.”
But that is not the picture. He lavishes it upon us. He takes the whole container and pours it out. He holds nothing back.
We need to be careful what adjectives we use to describe God and His actions, but I do not know another English word that comes closer than extravagant. Our God is an extravagant God.
Do you hear me? He is extravagant. He lavishes it out. He pours the whole thing out.
If He is an extravagant God, willing to give Himself fully to us, what ought to be our response? We ought to be just as extravagant and give ourselves fully to Him.
Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 12 of being given a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him.
Because of the revelations Paul had received, God was aware of Paul’s makeup. He knew that Paul could allow these revelations to go to his head and begin to think of himself in a way that would be detrimental to him.
To keep this from happening, God gave him what is translated as a thorn, though the original language carries the sense of a stake driven into his side.
We do not know exactly what this was. There is all kinds of speculation. Some say his eyesight was bad. Some think someone was out to get him. Others believe he had malaria or some other horrible disease. We simply do not know.
All we know is that he described it as a stake driven into his side. Why did Paul say God gave it to him? To keep him from exalting himself beyond measure.
Paul says that when this happened, he began to seek the Lord about it. That is the key. He asked the Lord three times to remove the stake from his side.
Apparently, the first two times God did not say anything. But the third time, He answered him:
My grace is sufficient for thee: for My power is made perfect in weakness.
Brothers and sisters, I think it is very healthy if we begin to get a proper perspective on life as we experience it here on this planet.
There are those among us as the people of God who would have us believe that God never wants His children to go through difficulties. They are supposed to have three cars, five-hundred-dollar suits, four wardrobes—everything the world can offer.
But that is not what I find in the Word of God. Christians are not exempt from the problems that happen to human beings living on this planet.
Christians are not exempt from tragedy, sickness, failure in business, losing their jobs, or any other experience that human beings can have. I do not find a solid foundation in the Word of God where God says, “You will be exempt, as My children, from all these things.”
As a matter of fact, if you look at 2 Corinthians 12, whose idea was it for Paul to have a stake in his side? It was God’s idea. Certainly, it was a messenger from Satan; Satan was the agency. But it was God’s idea.
What did Paul learn from this experience? He learned that the grace of God was sufficient for any experience that might ever come his way.
If you go back to the earlier chapter of 2 Corinthians, you find that Paul had some experiences. Some Christians have difficulty getting out of bed to go to a meeting on Sunday morning when it is raining. Listen to what happened to Paul:
Five times received I of the Jews forty stripes save one.
Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep;
in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren;
in labor and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.
Besides those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches.
And on top of that, God said, “I am not going to take the stake out, Paul, but I am going to bring you into knowing that My grace is sufficient.”
A brother once told us that sometimes, when a ship is blocked by a boulder or rock, God does not always move the rock. What does He sometimes do? He causes the water to rise, and you go over the boulder.
His grace is always sufficient.
Oh, that this would register in our hearts as children of God: there are no accidents in the lives of God’s people. God permits certain things, and sometimes God engineers experiences that come our way with something wonderful in mind.
What does He have in mind? He wants us to know how to appropriate a greater measure of His grace.
Can any of us say beyond a shadow of doubt that the rest of our lives will go smoothly, with never any problems and no difficulties? None of us can say that. We might like to talk ourselves into it sometimes, but that is not reality.
No matter what happens, no matter how difficult the situation becomes, God’s word to us is that this grace which was in His Son, of which He was full, and of whose fullness we have received, is sufficient.
We will discover it experientially. It will not merely be something for somebody else to tell about. We will have a testimony that says, “I know the grace of God is sufficient for the situation that I am in.”
May our hearts be encouraged that if and when the inexplicable comes, and difficulties that we do not know how to get through make their way into our lives, an opportunity is given to us.
We can sit and bemoan our state. We can complain to God, accuse God, or even get angry with Him.
Or we can turn our hearts to Him, knowing that He loved Paul with an indescribable love, and say, “Lord, how about this stake that has been driven into my side? Would You please remove it?”
The Lord is not upset for us to ask. Let us not be self-made martyrs. Let us not hesitate to ask.
But when the word comes back, “The stake remains, but My grace is sufficient,” take the grace and go on with the stake.
Some of us have heard our brother Lance Lambert over a number of years share concerning the eternal purpose of God. One of the things he mentions is that the New Jerusalem is composed of three materials: gold, precious stones, and pearl.
I have been particularly impressed with this matter of the pearl. The twelve gates in the city of the New Jerusalem are each one pearl.
How are real pearls brought into being? A little piece of sand gets down into the fleshy part of an oyster or clam. It irritates the life out of the creature.
The oyster has a mechanism within itself by which it secretes a pearly substance and coats that little grain of sand. Through the irritation, it continues to secrete this substance, and out of that comes a pearl.
What do you think is God’s method of creating those twelve pearls on the twelve gates in the city of New Jerusalem? Irritation, difficulties, and problems among His people.
I hope you see that the New Jerusalem is really the people of God. It is the Bride of Christ. The angel said to John, “Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” He took John up onto a high mountain, and John saw the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven.
The irritating work that is done in the lives of God’s people, when it is responded to by God’s grace, is God building those twelve gates.
There is no experience that can come our way that causes the grace of God to be insufficient. God’s grace will always be sufficient for anything that comes our way.
You may go through an experience and afterward almost feel guilty that you do not feel worse about it than you do. I need to be careful, but Zola and I have just gone through a very difficult time because her mother died.
I am not speaking for her; I am speaking for myself. There were times two or three days later when I felt guilty that I did not feel worse about it than I did. The reason was that God’s grace was there.
It was not that we did not miss her deeply. But God’s grace was there, and it was sufficient just for me to be myself.
We need to know that we are never to be caught off guard. God is not caught off guard, and we should not be. When these times come, we need to know how to go into that throne room once again.
Sometimes we need to learn to do it as desperate people. I do not think Paul dealt with this matter in a laid-back way. I think he was desperate.
But whether there is a time of desperation or a time of calm, God’s word to us is: “My grace is sufficient. Let Me handle it. Let Me be to you what you need. Let the life that I put in you be what you need for that situation.”
Let us look at Zechariah 4:6-9:
This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain; and he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings of, Grace, grace, unto it.
Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it.
I was struck by the statement that the top stone will be put in place with shouts of “Grace, grace.” The hands that laid the foundation will finish it.
Let us look at this first in light of our personal lives. Most of us, if we honestly evaluated our experience with God, would have to say that the work God has begun and has been doing is a great work—in spite of us.
Paul said to the Philippian believers:
He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.
But I hope we can give thought to the finishing work God desires to do in our lives as His children and among us as the church.
What is God’s ultimate aim in all His working in us? Let us look at Romans 8:28-29:
And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to His purpose.
For whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son.
When God has finished His work in us, what will be the result? We will have been conformed to the image of His Son. God is working to form the character of the Lord Jesus Christ in the lives of every child of God.
It is as if God took His Son and said, “This is the model. This is what pleases Me.” Remember when Jesus was baptized? He came up out of the water, and a voice from heaven said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Jesus is the image, the model. When the Holy Spirit is working on us, God is looking at the model and forming us according to what He sees.
His hand is at work on us, but His eyes are on the model. If He continues to work, you know what the outcome will be? You are going to be like Jesus.
The writer of Hebrews speaks of the Lord Jesus bringing many sons unto glory. Glory is not merely a place. Forgive me if that bursts your balloon, but it is not a place; it is a state of being.
It is being conformed to the image of Christ. That is glory.
God is working to form every one of His children into the image of His Son.
The hands that laid the foundation will finish it. The top stone will be put in place with shouts of “Grace, grace unto it.”
Our God is a perfectionist. I have friends who have either bought an old house and tried to fix it up, or built their own house, and then gone halfway through it without ever doing the trim work or putting up the molding.
That may be all right for them, but God is not satisfied with that. He is not prepared to stop halfway through the process.
I do not know how long we still have in what God is doing in our lives, but it is wonderful to realize that no matter how far we have to go, it is still grace all the way to the end.
God does not bring us to a certain point and say, “From here on out, you are on your own.” No. He takes us through whatever processes are necessary for the polishing and the trim work to be done.
The shouts will still be, “Grace, grace unto it.”
“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” What is the name of that song? “Amazing Grace.”
It will be grace all the way, brothers and sisters.
There is a real danger in becoming an old Christian. There is a danger of becoming old in the Lord: we somehow arrive at a point where we adopt a retirement mentality.
We think, “I have gone far enough. I have been through enough. God is going to have to take me the way I am.” We pull back from really appropriating the grace of God daily.
Instead of taking grace and going through whatever is before us, we throw up our hands and let things meander along.
But at the end God has something wonderful in view.
There have been times when I tried to do some woodworking. What little I have done has taught me that it is often at the end of the process, when you have to cut the corners and make things fit properly, that there is a real danger of becoming sloppy.
You have been at it a long time and want to get it finished. You want to hurry through it. There is a real temptation there.
I am glad our God is not like that. He will take whatever pains are necessary to see that the work is finished.
Let me mention something about the corporate dimension of God’s work. It is true that when we look at our own lives, we need to see God’s work as a work of grace. But what about the work the Lord is doing among you, building you together as an expression of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you see that as a work of grace too?
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.” Who is responsible for building the church? Who was sent on the day of Pentecost? The Holy Spirit.
He is the Lord’s representative on the earth. The Lord said, “I will build My church.” Certainly, He is in charge of the building process, but the actual work is being done by the Spirit in the lives of the redeemed people of God.
We live in an age when supposedly there are such advances in human ability that men feel God can now do a quick and wonderful work in building the church.
Many of God’s people do not hesitate to take Madison Avenue techniques and bring them right into the church, trying to use them to build the church. But that is not grace.
When Zechariah said, “Not by might, nor by power,” whose might and whose power was he talking about? Theirs—human might and human power. “But by My Spirit, saith the Lord.”
Let us look at Ephesians 5:25-27:
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself up for it;
that He might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word,
that He might present the church to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing;
but that it should be holy and without blemish.
Please understand that this is the kind of church the Lord Jesus is coming back for: the church in all her glory.
The question remains: how is she going to become like that? It does not take great insight to see that she is not in that condition today. Is she without spot, wrinkle, or blemish? Is she holy and without blame? No, she is not.
How will she get into the condition necessary for the Bridegroom to return? The hands that laid the foundation will finish it. The Lord Jesus, by grace, is going to do it.
When we speak about building the church, we are not merely talking about adding numbers. There is nothing wrong with the Lord adding numbers, but we are not simply talking about numerical increase.
We are talking about an increase of Christ. Do you know what He is coming back to be united with? He can only be united with that which is like Himself. He cannot be brought into union with something outside His nature.
What we are talking about is an increase of Christ among the people of God.
Let me share with you my own understanding of what the Lord is doing at this particular time. From the first century of Christianity onward, things began to enter into the church that well-intentioned, good people brought in of themselves.
The church began to become something not according to the design the Lord Jesus had in His heart. For nearly two thousand years, men and women have brought things into the church that have brought ruin to it.
How does the Lord react in the face of these situations? Does He throw up His hands and say, “That is it—forget it”? No.
My understanding is that the Lord sends out a message to every one of His children. It would be wonderful if every one of His children heard and responded, but for whatever reason, not everybody hears.
“He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” If you do not have ears to hear, you cannot hear. But that does not mean the Lord has not spoken.
To those who have ears to hear, there is a special work He wants to do in their lives. He wants to do in those who hear what He desired to do in the whole, but the whole would not listen to Him. They wanted their own way.
The Lord has therefore found Himself involved in what we might call a recovery work—recovering the reality of the church according to the way He wants it to be, in its simplicity, purity, and devotion to the Lord Jesus Himself.
It seems to me that in this hour the Lord has been sending out a message to those who have ears to hear. As they respond, He brings them into fellowship with others and begins to teach them how to know Him as Head over all things to the church.
He brings them into an experience of knowing Him and loving one another. He begins to impart more and more of His own life. What He does in them, He takes as a token for the whole.
It is my understanding that those who allow Him to do this work have a special reward. They will reign with Him for a thousand years.
Some people are afraid of the profit motive. They are afraid to say that the Lord has special rewards for His children, but He does.
In my opinion—and it may be heresy to you—everyone who puts faith in Jesus Christ will end up in heaven. But I do not believe every one of His children will be in the kingdom.
There is a kingdom coming. The Lord Jesus Himself is going to come and set up His kingdom here on this planet. We are told in Revelation that the overcomers will reign with Him for a thousand years.
For those who respond and say, “Lord, do in me what You want to do in the whole,” He rewards them by saying, “Reign with Me for a thousand years.”
Someone told me a few months ago that they were not interested in reigning. I suppose they thought it was too much trouble. But that is a misunderstanding.
The reason God wants us to reign with Him is not so that we can sit around and parade ourselves as rulers, kings, and queens. The Lord Himself needs a means by which He can express the fullness of Himself.
The kingdom of God is the rule of God being perfectly done. He has chosen to do it through a human agency.
The kingdom of God is not finally for us; it is for Him. We inherit the kingdom, and He gives us the kingdom, but it is for Him, not for us.
We are not going to walk around like drill sergeants giving orders to people. The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
The Lord is going to finish His work. He is going to have a bride—a glorious bride, a bride in all her glory, adorned with Christ Himself.
There is going to come an hour when the wedding feast of the Lamb is announced. It is going to happen. It may take another two thousand years—I do not think it will—but the finishing work is going to be done.
In one sense, there is nothing we can do about the timing. When the apostles asked the Lord Jesus in Acts 1 if He was going to restore the kingdom to Israel at that time, He said, “It is not for you to know times or seasons.”
But there is another sense in which our heart response to the Lord Jesus affects the timing of when the wedding can take place and when the marriage can be consummated.
I hope we find it in our hearts to say, “Lord, continue Your work.”
I think it is healthy for every child of God, at some point in life, to pull away from all the influences—good and bad, so called—and settle an issue with God.
The issue is this: you have been bought with a price; you are not your own. Give yourself fully back to Him and say, “Lord, no matter what happens down the road, if three months from now or six years from now I start kicking and screaming and complaining about the situation, do not listen to me. Go on doing Your work anyway.”
It is a very healthy thing to do when everything is clear. One of those secular songs says, “On a clear day, you can see forever.” We need to have a clear day, when we are not affected by all the pros and cons, the negatives and the supposed goods.
We need to see down the road, understand what God is after, and say, “Lord, I want that to happen.”
Something of the same thing can happen in the life of an assembly of the Lord’s people. We can say, “Lord, regardless of what we encounter down the road, we want You to continue Your work in us.”
“We want You to form Your Son in our lives individually, and may there be a corporate manifestation of His riches and His fullness expressed among us.”
That is our way of making our contribution toward the great wedding feast of the Bridegroom, the Lamb.
Let me conclude with one other statement from 1 Peter 4:10:
According as each hath received a gift, ministering it among yourselves, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.
God has given us His grace not only as a way of doing His work in us, but also as a deposit over which we are to be stewards.
As members of the body of Christ, there is one overriding thing He wants to happen among us as His people. Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
“This is My commandment,” Jesus said, “that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.”
Have you tried to implement that? Have you sought to be faithful and carry out that commandment? It is not merely a suggestion or a good idea. It is a command.
How can you do that? Can you love one another as Christ loved us without God’s grace? No, surely we cannot.
When He says, “I want you to love one another even as I have loved you,” where are you going to get the wherewithal to do that?
He never requires anything of you without first giving you, in advance, the grace to do it. When He commands us to love one another as He loved us, we can be sure that He has taken of His own grace and deposited it in us so that we can carry out what He tells us to do.
To me, that is what grace is: grace is doing what God says. Actually, grace is doing what God does, and then He gives us the credit. He gives us the wherewithal to love one another, then pats us on the back and says, “You have done a great job.”
Peter says that we are to be stewards of this manifold grace of God. What is a steward? A steward is somebody who has a master. He is not his own boss. Somebody else is in charge of his life.
A steward has something given to him by his master, and he is told, “I want you to do this according to my will.” He is rewarded according to how faithfully he carries out his responsibility in doing his master’s will with what has been entrusted to him.
Then there is a day of reckoning. Remember the parable of the talents. The master gave to each servant according to his ability. He knew what they were capable of doing, and he put into their hands that which they could carry out.
One servant received five talents, another two, and another one. The master went away and later returned, saying, “Now I want a reckoning. I want you to show Me the results of your stewardship.”
The one with five talents came and said, “You gave me five. I put them to work, stewarded them, and here are five more.” The master said, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful.”
The second servant had two talents. He put them to work and came back with two more. Again, the master said, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
But the one who had one talent wrapped it up neatly in a handkerchief, dug a hole, and buried it. When he stood before his master, he said, “Here is the talent You gave me. I am giving it back to You.”
What did the master say? “Thou wicked and slothful servant.” You could have at least put it in the bank and earned interest.
The problem with that servant was that he misunderstood his master, and he misunderstood what life was.
As I understand the heart of God, there is nothing that would thrill Him more than to be able to say to every one of His children, “Well done, thou good and faithful steward.”
We are not only recipients of God’s grace. We are not only the product of God’s grace at work in us. God has taken something of His own grace and given it to us to steward.
If grace is love in action, then there is a matter of loving one another and loving other people who come into our lives. That is really grace. It is love in action.
When you and I stand before our Lord—and we will all do so—judgment does not have to be a fearful experience. It should be a joyful experience.
If we can somehow steward what God has given us, and do so by His grace—because grace is upon grace—the only way you can be a good steward of grace is by God’s grace.
It is only the life of Christ in us that enables us to properly steward the grace God has given us.
Isn’t that great? When the Lord comes into our lives, He increases in us and does His work in us. Then the Father says, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
Grace. Grace unto it.