Would you turn with me to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 3? I am going to read from verse 3.
For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God, and glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh:
though I myself might have confidence even in the flesh.
If any other man thinketh to have confidence in the flesh, I yet more:
circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee;
as touching zeal, persecuting the church; as touching the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless.
Howbeit what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ.
Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord:
for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ,
and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith:
that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death;
if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold: but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before,
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Just a word of prayer.
Beloved Lord, we are so thankful that we are found here, gathered in Your presence this evening. We are thankful, Lord, that when we are in Your presence, anything can happen. With You, nothing is impossible; nothing is too complex, too difficult, or too bound.
We praise You, Lord, that You can break through anything, and You can work in our hearts. Lord, we do not just want this to be a conference meeting, as we have wanted all the others in the same way not to be conference meetings, but a meeting with Yourself.
We want to meet You, Lord. We want You to meet us. We want You, by Your Holy Spirit, to touch us. Therefore, Lord, You know that we are in ourselves nothing. We need that anointing, grace, and power if You are going to fulfil Your design and purpose in this evening.
Lord, we stand by faith in that anointing. Let it be upon me as I speak. Let it be upon the one who translates, and let it be upon every one of us who hears, from the youngest to the eldest. Lord, meet us, and we shall be careful to give You all the glory, all the praise, and all the thanksgiving of our hearts.
We ask all of this in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, I do not think there is any need to say that the theme of this conference is this: pressing on toward the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
I have read quite a few verses of this chapter because I consider this testimony to be the most remarkable testimony among many testimonies in the Word of God. I can think of no testimony of any other child of God that reaches the heights and plumbs the depths as does this testimony of the Apostle Paul.
It is as if he opens a window into his inner being, and we see something that has captured this rabbi, this Saul of Tarsus—so convinced of the rightness of his cause, arresting, apprehending, and being part of the sentence of death upon many believers in the Lord Jesus.
Something happened to him that turned him from a religionist into a child of God. A fire came into his being that never went out. It is in this testimony that you catch something of the fire.
It is an extraordinary testimony. What does he mean: “I have not already obtained. I am not already made perfect. I do not count myself yet to have laid hold”? What in the world is he talking about?
This man had already been used by the Lord to write some of the most vital letters that we have in the New Testament. He had already written the letter to the Galatians. He had written the first and second letters to the Corinthians. He had already written the first and second letters to the Thessalonians.
It is extraordinary that he says, “I have not already obtained.” I would have thought, from what he had already written and given to us, that if there were one person in the whole universe who had obtained the prize, it was the Apostle Paul.
I would have said that if there were one person who had laid hold on that for which Christ Jesus had laid hold on him, it was the Apostle Paul. How can we explain this?
Unless we can say this: when you have a small Christ, you can encompass Him. You can trap Him in a few words. You can explain Him in a few words. But when the infinity of the Lord Jesus has captured a man or woman, they are lost in a fathomless depth.
Somehow or other, something has happened that has caught this man, and he cannot be the same again. Now, it is not as if the Apostle Paul had no faults. I think they are quite apparent, even in some of his letters.
It is interesting that in the inspired Word of God, the Holy Spirit has left some of the weaknesses and failings of this incredible servant of God. But the fact remains: basically, the Holy Spirit is really saying to you and to me, we are all quite ordinary people. We all have failings and weaknesses. We have a temperament.
When the Holy Spirit can unveil something of the beauty and glory of the Lord Jesus, something of the purpose of God centred in the Lord Jesus, we can never be satisfied with anything less than the Lord.
We suddenly see that the world is tinsel—that it is superficial, it is a façade, it is skin-deep. As our brother said this morning, you can build buildings, produce great schemes, have letters before your name, titles before your name, and letters after your name. You can have all the pleasure you want in this world. You can build magnificent buildings and businesses, and in the end, it is nothing.
You are left with nothing. It is this that goes to the heart of this testimony of the apostle. He has seen something that makes sense of life. He has seen something that makes sense of suffering and affliction. He has seen something that is somehow or other to do with salvation.
It is to do with the glory of God and the fulfilment of God’s eternal purpose. I find, therefore, this testimony extraordinary.
I look at some of these verses: “That I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.” The exact word is “the out-resurrection from among the dead.” Just so that you understand, it is a special resurrection. What does he mean?
Why does he say in verse 8, “That I may gain Christ”? Surely, of all people, the Apostle Paul has gained Christ. He actually saw Him. The Lord appeared to him and knocked him out. His whole ministry began with that vision.
We do not want to make too much of physical visions, but we should also not devalue or debase them. Within that vision—what we would call an ecstatic vision—was the seedbed of the whole ministry of the Apostle Paul.
When Jesus said, “Why persecutest thou Me?” somehow or other, at some point, the Spirit of God revealed to the Apostle Paul that those believers he had been persecuting were part of the Messiah. They were the body of the Messiah. They belonged to Him.
They were in the Messiah, and the Messiah was in them, in such a way that Jesus did not say, “Why are you persecuting My disciples?” but, “Why persecutest thou Me?”
Out of that vision, as I say, the seedbed of his whole ministry, came this tremendous ministry that we have in the letters of the apostle. Why does he say, “That I may gain Christ”?
Does he really mean that Christ is to be gained? Is not Christ the free and unspeakable gift of God? Is He not given to us by the grace of God—not because we merit it, not because of our good works, not because of our devotion, but simply because we are sinners saved by His finished work?
What then in the world does the Apostle Paul mean when he says, “I count all things but loss, and count them but refuse, that I may gain,” and then qualifies it, “and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own”? In other words, it is all to do with grace. It is all to do with justification. But somehow or other, there is a gaining of Christ.
Now, my responsibility in these days is the little word, the prize. Of course, we are all overlapping each other. They seem to do it in every one of these conferences. There is no way that I cannot really steal from Brother Stephen or from Father Dana, or they from me, in what we are saying.
But my responsibility is the prize. What does it mean?
I press on toward the goal, unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
What does that mean? We have this word prize twice more in the New Testament. We have it in 1 Corinthians 9:24:
Know ye not that they that run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?
Even so run, that ye may attain.
Then in Colossians 2:18:
Let no man rob you of your prize.
Now, will you please notice? I am treating this as if it were Sunday school, but forgive me. I want to be as simple as I can on this tremendous subject. This prize is only in Christ Jesus.
In other words, this prize is directly related to the Lord Jesus. It is something to do with the Messiah Jesus. Let me quote again the sentence:
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
So, this prize is in Christ Jesus. It is to do with the Lord Jesus. Please let this sink in. Some people will reduce this to rewards, and they will say, “That is all a question of rewards. Jesus rewards, so the prize is just a reward.”
But it is clear that it is not a reward as something apart from the Lord Jesus. It is something to do with Him—something to do with His Person, with His destiny, with the fulfilment of the whole purpose of God from eternity to eternity.
We know that that eternal purpose of God is centred in the Lord Jesus. He is called the heir of all things. So the whole purpose of God is centred in the Lord Jesus.
Here is the first thing I want to underline: this prize is something to do with the Lord Jesus. It is not something apart from Him, something which you receive and walk away with. It is something to do with His Person, something to do with His destiny, something to do with His being the heir of God—of all things.
Have I made it clear? Here is the second thing: it is the high calling of God.
Unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
God, in Christ Jesus, is calling us to a prize. In the Lord Jesus, every single born-again human being—man or woman, old or young—everyone who has had a saving experience of the Lord Jesus, is called.
We are the called of God. We are the ecclesia, the called-out ones. We are called out of the world. We are called to Christ, to be in Him, to be part of Him. As the Lord Jesus said, we are to abide in Him. We are to remain where God has positioned us: in the Messiah, and He in us.
We are called to the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Think.
Now, if you have followed me so far, at least you will have got something. Otherwise, if you want to sleep, you can do so. I always say it, as you know, but it is part of my ministry. I seem to be able to send some people into the glory of sleep, both by my tapes and by my speaking.
Now I want to make a statement: the prize is Christ.
It is as simple as that. The prize is Christ. There may be other rewards that come in Him and through Him, but the prize is Christ.
Therefore, if we do not get to know Him, we can lose the prize. If, in some way, we are blind to the purpose of the Father for the Lord Jesus, we will lose the prize. We can be in Christian work, we can be in Christian things, we can work ourselves to the bone; but if we do not recognise this simple fact, the prize is Christ.
Now do you begin to understand something? Do you understand why the Apostle Paul said, “That I may gain Christ”? He was just putting this word prize in another way: “That I may gain Christ.”
There could be nothing, in my estimation, clearer. Of course, it is always clear when the eyes of your heart have been opened. When they have not been opened, it is all so complex and difficult to understand. But when God touches the eyes of our heart, we think, “Why did I never see this before?”
You know, all the great truths are utter simplicity. You do not have to go into great complex convolutions. Theology often does it—I mean false theology. True theology is simple.
There is an utterly simple truth here: the prize is Christ.
Now, if you have followed me so far and you are still awake, think. You ought, if you do not see this, to say in your heart that God has given us the Lord Jesus. He is God’s unspeakable gift to us. It is the free gift of His grace. How can you talk about Christ being the prize?
Let me try to explain it a little more. Christ the Saviour is God’s unspeakable gift to you. Christ, as the One who saves you to the uttermost, is God’s unspeakable gift to you.
The One who brings you into the salvation of God in all its completeness, in all its fullness, covering every single need that you may have, turning a depraved sinner into a saint—it is God’s unspeakable gift.
Christ as Deliverer is God’s unspeakable gift. On the basis of the finished work of the Lord Jesus, and the fact that through death He brought to nought the one who has the power of death, even Satan, whatever bondage there is in your life is broken through the finished work of the Lord Jesus.
That is God’s unspeakable gift to you. It is not deliverance you need; it is the Deliverer you need. He is both Saviour—you do not just need salvation; you need the Saviour. You need the Deliverer.
He can step into our situations and break the sin, break the habit, break the curse, break us out of a straitjacket, as it were.
Christ as Deliverer—oh, it is so wonderful when you hear the words:
Who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.
Sometimes we carry Egypt with us. We may be out of Egypt, but Egypt is in us. The bondages are still there—the encumbrances and the weights that pull us down, the sins which so easily entangle us. But He is the Deliverer.
I will not spend time on that. He is not only the Deliverer; He is life. He is our life. He is God’s unspeakable gift to us as eternal life.
Eternal life is not a thing; it is a Person. You and I discover and experience eternal life now, not after the grave. We do not have to wait until we are buried, with all those hymns that people sing and the weeping that goes with it, and then we have eternal life. We have eternal life now.
That is why that kind of death is only a shadow. For the child of God, death is just like the shell of a chrysalis falling away from the butterfly. You are coming through something into something else.
He has beaten death. He has destroyed it. He is our life, and in that life is everything we need: all the grace, all the power, all the energy, all the gifts. Everything is there in that life. It is overcoming life—God’s unspeakable gift to us.
God is not the God of death. He is the God of life.
He is not only life, eternal life; He is the Baptiser with the Holy Spirit. That is how John the Baptist described Him:
I indeed baptize you in water unto repentance:
but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear:
He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire.
That baptising with the Holy Spirit simply means that when the Lord Jesus came to the right hand of the Father, fifty days after Passover, He poured out the Holy Spirit. He linked it with the Passover, with His death—fifty days later.
I am almost sad when people devalue the Holy Spirit, because it is impossible to get anywhere without the Holy Spirit. You quench the Holy Spirit, you grieve the Holy Spirit, and you can get nowhere. A shadow comes on your Christian life. The life just drains away and becomes routine.
It is important, this matter. I know people who think that the only way they can get the fullness of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit is by doing all kinds of good works and hoping that the Lord will say, “Well, well, well, how well you are doing. I must pour out the Holy Spirit upon you.”
The Holy Spirit is given to you on the basis of the finished work of the Lord Jesus.
But as Bridegroom, Christ is to be gained. When it comes to His being the Bridegroom, it is a question of gaining Him.
Is that too much for you to take in? I will put it as clearly as I can.
The Lord Jesus, in all His fullness, is given to us freely. We have to gain Him as the Bridegroom.
It makes sense. Do you believe that the Father believes in child marriage? Do you mean to tell me that the Father is interested in some immature young children of God who have never grown, never got beyond the kindergarten stage?
In fact, some of them are not even beyond being babes in arms. They have to be mollycoddled and fed. They have to have dummies and pacifiers. They have to be rocked backwards and forwards all the time. You mean to tell me that God is going to marry His Son to such a bride? It makes sense.
No wonder the Apostle Paul caught something of this and said, “I count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. I count all these things but refuse, that I may gain Him and be found in Him through the grace of God.”
I wish I could make it more simple.
When I was saved, just before my thirteenth year, I had never read the Bible and never been in a place of worship—neither Jewish nor Christian. I understood that the Bible was full of myths, legends, and exaggerations.
I came to the Lord in a wonderful way. The Lord apprehended me. I am now seventy-seven, and I have searched the Scriptures for all these years to find these legends, myths, inaccuracies, and exaggerations. I have not found them.
What I have found has completely changed my life. I thank God that He began, when I was only fourteen or fifteen years of age, to show me that the Bible has a design.
I suddenly discovered that the first chapters of the Bible and the last chapters of the Bible correspond minutely and precisely. There was a tree of life in the beginning; there is a tree of life at the end. There was a river of life in the beginning; there is a river of life at the end. There was a garden in the beginning; at the end there is a city.
There were two people to begin with; then there became a multitude that nobody could number. Everywhere you turn, it is the most incredible thing. I thought to myself, then the Bible has a design, and if there is a design, there must be a Designer. So this must be God speaking.
From that moment, I began to look at the Word of God. I do not say I understood everything, of course. I began to read it with questions galore, but I read it always with an understanding: this Bible has a design.
It begins with a human marriage and ends with an eternal marriage. It begins with a marriage between two human beings, Adam and Eve, till death parts them; but it ends with a marriage between the Lamb and the wife of the Lamb, which is forever.
I found that amazing. I could not believe that the Bible ends with a marriage. For some people, a wedding is the end. For other people, it is the beginning. But I think it is the end of one phase and the beginning of another.
In other words, it is almost as if God, from the very beginning, had this in His heart. He used Sunday-school language—the language that the simplest person could understand. Everybody understands a wedding. Everybody understands marriage.
He takes this extraordinary matter to illustrate something that was in His heart from the beginning. Why did He create this universe? Why did He create man? Why did He go to great lengths to bring this all into being out of nothing? And when man fell, why did He persevere? Why has He persevered in such a way, when He could have finished it all and started again?
You hear the most wonderful words in those last chapters:
He that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.
Death, mourning, crying, sickness—the parenthesis is completed. It is gone. “I make all things new.”
Then we hear the words:
He that overcometh, I will be his God, and he shall be My son.
He that overcometh—listen—shall inherit these things. What are these things? The wife of the Lamb, the bride of Christ, the city of God.
Some of you have heard me say this before, but for the sake of those who have not, I am going to say it again. This is an extraordinary combination of two ideas that are never normally associated: a bride and a capital city.
I have gone all over the world, travelled through many, many countries. I have been introduced to wives galore by loving husbands—and sometimes not so loving husbands—all over the world. Never, at any single point, has anybody introduced their wife as, “My capital city.”
“This is my capital city.” Looking at some of them, I could have understood if they had said, “Fortress,” or, “Wall.” The wife is produced out of gold, precious stones, and pearl—some of them loaded with it, but not produced out of it.
But I do not think anybody would naturally associate a bride with a capital city. A capital city is a place where all the national policies are defined, carried out, and administered. It is the place of government. It is a place of reigning and ruling.
A bride is a picture of union and communion, of first love, of the kind of sensitivity that comes in a real and good relationship. These are two extraordinary things, almost as if the Lord is saying, “This is the end, and he that overcometh shall inherit this.”
I do not know if I have made myself clear, but I am trying to get something over to anyone here to whom the Bible is a boring book. You have heard it from childhood. It does not really mean much to you, frankly.
You know, this Book is life. Once you begin to see what God is saying, what God is driving at, it becomes thrilling.
Let me take another text. If you open your Bible in the Christian arrangement—the Jewish-Greek arrangement, we call it the Septuagint—you will discover, at the heart of your Bible, two little books. Stephen spoke about one of them this morning.
One of those books is called Ecclesiastes, the Preacher. The other book is the Song of Songs. Both of them have been the focal point of enormous debate and controversy.
The rabbis always said that Ecclesiastes really should not be in the canon of Scripture. They said it does not talk about the temple, it does not talk about the Word of God, it does not talk about all kinds of things. It is all, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
The word vanity comes thirty-eight times in this little book. In Hebrew, it means vapour. Vapour. Vapour. All is vapour. You could put it another way: utter futility. All is utter futility.
As our brother said, you wonder really what this book is. Some have even said—for those of you who know some philosophy—that this is an ancient form of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: “Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die.”
There is another little phrase that comes eight times, and it is “a striving after wind.” A striving after wind. The whole fallen human life is described as a striving after wind.
All that you do, whether it is sex, pleasure, business, religion, whatever it is, it is a striving after wind. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
There, in my estimation, in the heart of that little book, in Ecclesiastes 3:11, there is an extraordinary statement that revolutionises the whole book:
He hath set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end.
I think that takes that little book right out of hopelessness into a new dimension. It is almost as if the Spirit of God is saying, “Do you not understand? Everything is utter futility because God has put a God-shaped blank in the human being.”
It cannot be filled with sex, pleasure, academic learning, or whatever else. If you fill it with that, you are still empty. At the end, you wonder, “What is all this about? What is it for? It has got me nowhere.” It is utter emptiness, utter futility.
That blank is a God-shaped blank. It calls it eternity—in Hebrew, olam. God has put this in the heart of man so that he will never be satisfied with anything else than God.
Now we are back to the Apostle Paul’s testimony: “That I may gain Christ.” I count everything—and he had a lot to talk about—I count it all like refuse, that I may gain.
Not only be saved, not only be delivered, not only know the Spirit of God within, not only know life—I want to gain Him as Bridegroom.
Then we come to the second little book, the Song of Songs. This is another one over which there has been enormous controversy. Liberal theologians call it a bawdy Middle Eastern poem.
In the Jewish tradition, it was a dream-vision that Solomon had in the night, when God revealed to him the enormous love that He has for His redeemed. It is a little, simple, humble shepherdess taken from cottage surroundings in the country to be the wife of the Sultan, of the King.
Then begins her whole training. Now it is not emptiness, emptiness, all is emptiness; futility, futility, all is futile. It is not a striving after wind. Now it is purpose, purpose, all is purpose; meaning, meaning, all is meaningful.
Then you see the way the Lord takes a child of His and takes them through successive stages of discipline and education, until finally they come to a new place.
At the beginning she says, “My beloved is mine, and I am his.” Everything he has is mine. You have to be a shepherdess to feel like that, being introduced into the wealth of Solomon’s palace. “It is mine. It is all mine.”
I know many Christians like that: “Mine, mine, mine. Everything is mine. All is mine. I first and I last. Oh Lord, of course, of course, I am my beloved’s—but that is secondly. It is what He has got. He is mine.”
You know the kind of thing: “My pulpit, my church, my prayer meeting, my everything—it is mine. Oh, mine.”
Then comes another stage. The Lord leaves her. It is a terrible shock to her. She is quite stunned. “He has left me.” When she saw Him fiddling with the latch, she was very slow in getting up. “Why, I do not have to worry. He belongs to me.”
But then she got up, smelling of her own perfume, opened the door, and He had gone. Many Christians have had that experience. They suddenly feel, “Where is the joy that first I knew, when first I saw the Lord?”
She goes out searching for Him. She gets beaten up. Well, you know the story. The second thing is, now another refrain comes: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.” The emphasis has changed.
But that is not over. Again, the Lord leaves and there is a time of education and discipline. Then comes the wonderful phrase: “I am my beloved’s.”
There is the beautiful picture: “Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?” Then, for the first time in this little book called the Song of Songs, the bride begins to worry about others.
“I have a little sister,” she says. “What can we do for her?” She has never thought about anyone else but herself. Oh, this is like so many Christians: always myself—self, self, self—how I get satisfied, my will, my life, everything to do with me.
What a beautiful picture. That is at the heart of your Bible. So you have a wedding at the beginning, a wedding at the end, and a wedding at the centre.
But there is something else that I find just as remarkable: the Gospel of John. When I was saved, nobody gave me a Bible. I got a Gospel of John, which I read and read and read—a little paperback Gospel of John which fell to pieces.
I have always been thankful that it was John that I first read and read and read. John’s Gospel is not a history, like Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is an interpretation.
Do you know how John first explains the ministry of the Lord Jesus and the purpose of God in Him? He takes eight “I am” claims—in my estimation, the unmentionable name of God. Then he takes eight miracles, which he calls signs. In other words, they signify something.
Do you know what the first sign was? The first sign was a marriage, a wedding at Cana of Galilee. You know what John the Baptist said of himself? “I am the friend of the Bridegroom.” It is almost as if he was saying, “I am the best man.”
Is this not amazing? John understood that somehow or other the purpose of God was to do with a wedding, with a marriage. We are using Sunday-school language, but the idea is of bringing a people to God who would be joined to Him in union and communion.
They would be old enough, if you understand—grown up enough, mature enough—to be able to share with Him in His throne, to reign with Him, to rule with Him.
Well, I do not know what the time is. I must be careful of myself on time. One can get carried away with something like this. But do you know what John says? That wedding, he said, was a Jewish wedding.
In an ancient Jewish wedding, everybody was invited. I mean, from villages all around; if it was a town, everybody was open. You all came in. Some people nearly went into bankruptcy over weddings.
The most important thing, being Jewish, is wine. I am not talking about grape juice. I mean fermented wine. These Christians try to tell me that is what we are supposed to have at the Lord’s Table. I mean real wine.
The people at the wedding noticed it, and the ruler of the feast said, “How is it that you have kept the best wine until last?” Jesus turned water into the best vintage wine.
Well now, forget the wine side of it if some of you get upset. Let me put it this way: He turned corruptible water into incorruptible wine.
That is why, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, we always drank wine. You always poured water in it. I remember my uncle, when I was a little boy, always pouring a third wine and two-thirds water.
Why? Because they thought the water was bad. A boy could get stomach trouble. They did not read, of course, Paul’s words about taking a little wine for your stomach’s sake. That is what it means. Paul obviously understood the same thing.
The picture is this: incorruptible wine instead of corruptible water. It is Ecclesiastes into the Song of Songs—something corruptible, something empty, something futile, something diseased, possibly, into something that is incorruptible.
Is that not what the Lord does with us? But why a wedding? Think.
Now I must start to finish, which means I am halfway through.
Salvation, tremendous as it is, is not the end of the Lord. Salvation is God’s glorious, powerful means to bring us to His end.
I will repeat this again: salvation, tremendous as it is, is not God’s end—the end. Salvation, with all that is within it for us, is God’s glorious means of bringing us to His end.
In other words, when man fell, God had an original purpose for mankind, for Adam and Eve. They fell, and God had this amazing plan of salvation that He immediately activated.
When you and I are saved by the grace of God, born of the Spirit of God, we are placed back into God’s eternal purpose. We are back in the running, back in the race, back on the course.
Does this make sense to anyone?
Now come back to the Apostle Paul’s testimony. You begin to understand something. Why did Christ lay hold on you? Good question. Knowing some of you, why did Christ lay hold on you? Why did Christ lay hold on me?
Do you notice the little phrase?
That I may lay hold on that for which Christ Jesus laid hold on me.
What did He lay hold on you for? Forget, for a moment, your laying hold on Him. Why did He lay hold on you?
No one can be part of the bride of Christ or the city of God who is not saved. In one sense, the calling of God does include salvation, because there is no way that you can be in the race or on the course apart from the salvation of God.
But the salvation of God is God’s means to bring you to the end. Everything you and I need—power, grace, gift, strength—it is all there in your salvation. Everything.
Sometimes people say to us, when we preach a message like this, “Oh, you are preaching works, not grace.” No, not at all. We are preaching grace.
No one will be part of the holy city, the reign of Christ in the ages to come, or the wife of the Lamb, except by the grace of God. But here is the question: do you lay hold of the grace of God?
Listen again to the Apostle Paul:
That I may lay hold on that for which Christ Jesus laid hold on me.
What did Christ Jesus lay hold on Paul for? That he might reach the prize. That he might reach the goal.
You see, now suddenly the apostle’s testimony makes sense: “That I may gain Christ; that I may attain unto the out-resurrection from among the dead; that I should lay hold on that for which Christ Jesus laid hold on me.”
Now we understand. Somehow or other, there is a prize to be won.
Well, only the Lord can reveal this to us, but it is not as if the Lord is not interested in you winning the prize, gaining the bride. He has made every single thing available to you that you need to reach His end.
Am I clear? Everything. Sometimes people say to me, “Well, you do not understand my difficulties. I have a very difficult temperament.” Other people say they have very difficult relatives. Other people tell me they have very difficult circumstances in which they have to live.
Do you mean to tell me that this is a surprise to the Lord? That the Lord says, “Oh my goodness, when I saved you, I had no idea. I really had no idea that you had these problems. I did not realise you had such a difficult father, a difficult mother, or difficult relatives. I had no idea that you had that temperament you have got. It is a shock to Me.”
I mean, of course, it is nonsense. When the Lord saved you, He knew more about you than you know about yourself. Even now, older in the Lord, He still knows you in a way that you do not know yourself.
You mean to tell me that He has saved you, put you into this race, and said, “I know you are not going to win”? I mean, I am quite clear about it: “I just want to put you there so that I can take glory in the fact that you will not reach the end.” No, of course not. You know the Lord. He is not like that.
In other words, He has made available to you all the grace you need, all the wisdom you need, and all the power you need to reach the end and win the prize.
Well, by the grace of God, if I say any more about this subject, I will talk a little bit about what God looks for. He knows who will reach that end of His. I would like to speak much, on my heart, about overcoming, because in the end there is a lot of nonsense talk about overcoming.
The great key to it is the Overcomer. Do you know who the Overcomer is? It is the Lord Jesus.
When He gets into you, you become like one of those buoys in the sea—B-U-O-Y. You know what a buoy is? It marks dangers. It marks certain channels.
When the rough seas come, the waves crash over the buoy. It sinks right underneath, but it always comes out on top. That is overcoming.
When the Lord Jesus is in you like that, no matter what happens, you will come out, by the grace of God, on top. Dear child of God, do not give up.
This testimony of the Apostle Paul should be yours as well. This pursuit of the prize—may the Lord touch your heart.
May you begin to see how empty the world really is, and how futile everything is that we do unless we are found within the will and purpose of God. Shall we pray?
Lord, we lift our hearts up to You this evening. We are all made from the same cloth. We are failing, ordinary people with weaknesses, besetting sins, and encumbrances that belong to us all.
Dear Lord, will You somehow touch the eyes of our heart and give us a new understanding of this race that You brought us into by Your salvation?
Lord, if You have given all that is necessary to win the prize, we want to be people who win that prize by Your grace and power. Hear us, Lord. Touch our hearts. Do not let us be the same.
Redirect us, Lord. Fill us with a new understanding of life and of everything to do with being a child of God. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.