And that song we sang, “Come, Meet with Me”—do you notice in that song that everything has a small m in “meet with me”? It is like it is all our desire. Have you ever looked at it this way? The first line is God speaking, saying, “Come.” You know, that should be a capital M. That is actually God speaking. Then there is a response by us: “I’ll come.”
Then the second one is, “I’ll meet you there.” That also should be God speaking, and then the response is, “Hallelujah.” You know, it is not just that we want Him; it is that He wants us. That is why He says, “Come commune with Me.”
Lord, You have called us here. You said, “Come to this place.” And so, Lord, we come. We have come here because we want to meet You, and You have set up this time that You could meet us.
So, Lord, we present ourselves to You, and we say, “Here we are.” We want to meet You as much as You want to meet us. So, Lord, we give our time to You, in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.
This morning, going back to our verse, “I want to be occupied,” or apt to be occupied, “with My Father’s business,” I want to look at that.
In this, “I want to be occupied with My Father’s business,” we want to look at three verses that explain being occupied in My Father’s business. “With us” is not really the right word, but there are three descriptions of being occupied with My Father’s business that have to do with the time we are in.
Really, the verse I want us to look at is, “What is My Father’s business?” It is in Luke 2:52. Dana read it last night and commented a little bit on it. Everybody has read it because it has been part of the section of Scripture we have been reading.
And Jesus advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.
I want us to look at this as a way that we are occupied in our Father’s business. We are going to look at three verses that help explain how this is being occupied with My Father’s business, or how God is saying, “This is My business that I want you to be occupied in.”
We are going to look at Luke 2:52, 1 Peter 2:2, and 2 Peter 3:18. The first thing we want to understand is this increase in wisdom and stature and favor with God.
Dana mentioned last night that the word is not really “increased.” A better word would be “advanced.” The idea of advance is not merely that I am going forward a step; it is to cut one’s way forward.
I think we have a tendency to feel that our walk with the Lord is passive, that everything comes to us. But we have to understand this: our walk with the Lord is an active thing. It is not as if we are sleepwalking. It is not as if we are being carried somewhere. We are cutting a path through.
There is an activity for us to do. There are things that we are to do. We get the idea of grace—that everything is given to us—but that is really not grace. Grace also has in it a response to what has been done for you.
As we are looking at these things, that is what we want to understand: this is an act of being occupied. I am doing something. The things we are going to see that we are doing, you might say, “How is that doing?” But we will look at it anyway.
The first thing we want to look at is food. For any organism to advance or to grow—and I would look at this as, “He grew”—for anybody to grow, you need food.
We know this is the best kind of food, right? Now, I know some of you are saying, “Well, this is the greatest food,” so I have to entertain you, or humor you. This might make some of you feel more comfortable. But if you are Canadian, this might make you feel more comfortable. Have potatoes every meal, don’t we? That is the staple of Canada. Really, it is the staple of Poland, so that is why I put it there.
Now, the idea of growth. In 1 Peter 2:2, it says:
As newborn babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby.
The Lord wants us to grow. He does not want us to remain babies, and so He says, “I want you to eat.” This verse is not necessarily saying that you are a newborn baby. It is saying that you should be like a newborn baby in its hunger for milk.
Whatever age you are spiritually, you should still be like a newborn baby in its hunger for milk, and that milk is the Word of God.
Now, in looking at the Word, if the Word is our food, there are three Greek words that are usually used for “word”: graphe, logos, and rhema.
Graphe, really, is just the written Word. Brothers and sisters, we are to be occupied with the written Word. Sometimes it is hard to be occupied with the written Word.
If you are like me, you get up for your devotional time and say, “Well, I am going to read a chapter a day.” You know the way we are. You open up your reading, and your reading for the day is Isaiah 4. You look at it: six verses. You go, “Hallelujah!”
Other days you wake up and you have something that has eighty verses. Your heart sinks. But, you know, we are to be occupied with this Word. This Word is here for us; it is to be our food.
All food is not necessarily to our liking. I remember my oldest daughter. We did a bad thing: we started her on juice. Not just milk—she got milk—but we gave her juice. Then, when there were times we were out, we would try to sneak water into her bottle. She would take a couple of sips and go, “No water. Juice.”
Sometimes we think, “It is boring. I want something more exciting.” But it is the written Word. Food is not always exciting. Not everything we eat is exciting. But what is the purpose of eating it? It is to nourish us.
Did you hate it when you had to eat vegetables? I did not learn to like them until later. Oh, I hated vegetables, except for corn. Corn was good. But there were other things you did not like, and the thing was the nourishment you gained by eating them.
So we are to be occupied with the written Word—not to despise it, so to speak, but to be occupied with it.
Now, logos, on the other hand, is where we really get the revelation of Who God is to us. Remember, this is the word used in John 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.
But there is no logos if there is no graphe. You see, logos will come out of the graphe, but if you are not reading graphe, you will not get logos. It is hidden in there. It is kind of like “Where’s Waldo?” You know it is in there, but you have to look for him. He appears.
Then rhema, which was the word Dana used last night, I look at as being the sword of the Spirit, which is talked about in Ephesians 6. The sword of the Spirit is more like the word that is personally meant for us. It is something spoken right to our hearts.
It could be for correction. It could be for discipline. It might be a timely revelation of something to us. It might be a word in season to give to someone else, to help share the gospel. It might be a word in season as encouragement to you.
But again: no graphe, no rhema. The Lord has given us His Word to read, to memorize, and to hide in our hearts. It is out of that graphe that we hide in our hearts that these other revelations come.
The revelation of God is in His Word; the revelation is in graphe. To despise graphe, to despise the written Word, is to despise the revelation that is in it. It is to despise the word that is meant for you in it. So we have to eat.
If you will indulge me a little bit, every part of the Word has a different characteristic. While we are on the idea of food, let us look at the characteristics of some of the Word of God.
For example, if you look at the Old Testament, from the Pentateuch through the history books—Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Nehemiah, Ezra, Esther, and do not forget Judges and Joshua—that is kind of like the Passover meal. It has all the Jewish things.
The good thing about this meal is that you have the focal point: the roasted lamb. The grace of God is in the Old Testament, in these books. The Old Testament is not just judgment. In it is the grace of God: that Passover Lamb, the central point of the feast.
But then you also have all the other things, especially the bitter herbs, because they tell not just of slavery, but of the failure of things. Yet the focal point of the history of Israel is the Passover and the Lamb.
Then some of us get past that and go to the Psalms. You know why people go to the Psalms? Because the Psalms are full of comfort. The Psalms are like comfort food.
When we feel down or something like that, we go for the things that make us feel good. God has provided that for us. He has provided us comfort food. It is in there for the time that we need it.
Then there are the prophets. The prophets are hard to read because most of the prophets are about correction. So the prophets are roughage.
I know I should have used a bran muffin, because this looks good, does it not? But roughage gets out the crummy stuff that is in you. It helps your digestion to eliminate the wasted, bad stuff in you. That is what the prophets do.
The prophets are the roughage. They speak to us and say, “Hey, this is wrong. It needs to get out. This is wrong.” We need things like that. We need food like this as we go on.
Then we have the Gospels. The Gospels are like Chinese food. See, I hit it right, did I not? Chinese food.
Some of us here, the Totos and the Sotos, they take care of us. You go and get these huge feasts. We were at a restaurant the other day and we were counting: “What course is this?” I had counted something like eight.
They said, “Well, the rice does not count as a course, and the noodles do not count as a course, and the soup does not count as a course.” But you eat them anyway. They do not count.
The reason I am saying this is that in the Gospels we see the Lord Jesus, and there are so many facets of the Lord Jesus. We finish one and think that is all, and then another one comes. We finish that one, and another one comes.
Another thing about this is that you finish that feast, and in two hours you are ready for another one. But is that not like seeing the Lord Jesus? You see Him, you think you are full, and then you start longing for Him again.
The Gospels are there for us to show us the Lord and all that He is, and to make us want to come back.
Then you have the Apostle Paul’s letters. Now, the Apostle Paul’s letters are like Mexican food. This looks really good, does it not? You have all these different colors, and it looks really good. Then you look at this one and go, “It is not very colorful, is it? It does not look very appetizing, does it?”
This is my favorite meal, incidentally. It is just chili there. You have the chili, pork in this green chili sauce, rice, and refried beans. Oh, I tell you, since I moved to Virginia, I miss this.
The reason I say it is like Paul’s letters is that this is a heavy meal. You start eating this, and you are hungry. You get halfway through, and it is just starting to sit there in your stomach. You have to box the rest up and have it another day.
It is not like you are saying, “It did not satisfy me.” You are saying, “I need time to digest this.” Paul is like that. Paul is full of so much stuff. You cannot just read him and say, “Oh yeah, I got it.” You have to take time to digest.
You almost look forward to the next day or two because you say, “I still have it in the fridge.” You just nuke it up and it is there. So this is like the letters of Paul.
Then you have the letters of John and Peter. John is always talking about things like, “We handled Him, we touched.” So he is like finger food. You handle, you touch.
You get to take it up. You can take it in small pieces, you can take it in big pieces, you can dip it in this or anything, but you handle it. You get to handle Him.
With all this food, we are not to be selective eaters. In other words, we are not to say, “Well, you know, I like Jesus, but Paul is so hard. I will just eat Chinese food.” Or, “God, I am always discouraged, so I will just eat comfort food.”
But God has given us the whole gamut of these foods. He has given us a full revelation, and we are to take the full revelation. We cannot just take parts of it, because otherwise we have an unbalanced view of Who the Lord Jesus is and Who God is.
We are not meant to have an unbalanced view. We are to take the grace and the discipline, the comfort with sorrow. All these things are meant for us, and so we are to take it all. Revelation is full; it includes all of these.
Now, some of us look at these things and say, “Once in a while, we want to put a little something on it.” So we have condiments. What would the world be like without condiments, right?
Condiments, to me, are the things that enhance the taste of food. They enhance the taste of the food. I know some people, like with ketchup, put so much ketchup on something that the only thing they can taste is the ketchup.
I know some of you do that on purpose because you do not like the taste of the regular food—like putting ketchup on broccoli because you just do not like the taste of it. No, you guys put cheese on it, right? Not ketchup.
But condiments are not to cover up the taste. They are to enhance it. To me, condiments are others who write about the Scriptures and enhance what you get out of the Scriptures.
They do not change the Scriptures, and they do not take the place of the Scriptures. But they may cause you to say, “Oh, I had not seen that.” They enhance it; they bring it out.
Dana mentioned G. Campbell Morgan last night. There are things that, when you read G. Campbell Morgan, you have read passages before and you go, “I have never seen that.” It enhances what has been in the Scripture.
Or take Andrew Murray—the depth of Andrew Murray, a depth that is so simple. Or my favorite, F. B. Meyer. He is a little flowery, old English and all that, but when you read some of the things he says, you go, “I never realized some of these things before.”
Or Watchman Nee, or A. W. Tozer. Tozer is like Paul: you have to take a little bit of him at a time. But he is good.
The whole thing about these condiments is that they enhance the flavor. They are never supposed to take the place of the food. Never. We are not meant to have a meal of condiments.
When we go to lunch today, they are not just going to set out mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise, then give you your plates and say, “Okay, go on through.” We would be saying, like the old commercial in the eighties, “Where is the beef? Where is the good stuff?”
Condiments are never meant to do that. If you are going to have your life built on condiments, you are really going to miss the Lord Jesus. You are going to start saying, “I like mustard. I like ketchup.”
It is like Paul says in 1 Corinthians: “I am of Apollos,” “I am of Cephas,” “I am of Paul,” “I am of Christ.” All of a sudden, we are splitting up and getting away from the Lord Himself.
These people, if they knew that was happening, would never have written the things they wrote. They wrote as an enhancement: “This is what I got, and I want to share it with you.” But it is not for us to take that and just run with it. It is to enhance what we have been given.
We are not to neglect the reading of the Word or the studying of the Word, just like none of us purposely neglects mealtime. Unless we are busy with something, or maybe we are fasting, basically speaking, we do not neglect eating.
Sometimes we are saying, “I am hungry. Where is it?” We would not miss it. But how often we will miss our spiritual time, our spiritual food, our spiritual eating. So we are not to neglect it.
I am not just talking about reading the Word, but also studying the Word. I want to put in a plug for that. Reading is good because you get to know the Word. Studying deepens it.
Learn to study the Word. You do not have to learn Greek, but there are little helps that enable you to understand what a word is, and that opens up meaning to you.
I am so glad for Alan Alloway and for his opening up the meaning of Greek to me. I began to look at it, and now I have bought myself an interlinear. When I am looking at something, I can ask, “What is the real Greek word?” Then, when you find out what the word is, you can look at what it really means.
For example, in English, I love. Well, I love my wife, but I also love ice cream. Is there a difference? Well, yes, there is. If it were Greek, there would be. It deepens our understanding of what the Lord is saying to us and of the pictures the Lord is trying to create for us.
God has provided us food, just like He provided manna for the Israelites in the wilderness. But it is for us to eat the food.
I was fellowshipping with a sister—this happened at a meal. She is grown, she has children, she has a job, and she was talking about having family quiet time. But then she has to take her kids to school, go to work, and things like that. She said, “I do not have quiet time for myself.”
A lot of us would say, “Well, I will try to read something before I go to bed.” But she said this: “So I went to the Lord. I said, ‘Lord, I just do not have the time. Will You provide me the time?’”
Something happened in carpooling the kids to school. Someone said, “I can take the morning if you can take the afternoon, because the afternoon is hard for me.” It was like the Lord saying, “Hey, I am not just going to provide you food; I will provide you time to eat it.”
That is so important. What army is not provided with not just food, but time to eat it? We try to find the time ourselves, and we do not. Then we are discouraged or pass it up, but we never think, “Lord, I cannot find it. Will You find it for me? Will You provide it for me?”
How gracious He is to say, “Do you think I would provide you food and not want you to eat it? Do you think I would just like you to look at it, or just smell it? No, I want you to eat it too.” He provides that for us also.
Another thing in this idea of growing is found in 2 Peter 3:18:
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
I want to split this up. First, I want to deal with this: grow in grace. Grace is given to us, but how do you grow in grace? Sometimes we look at grace as just being a thing. It is almost like an umbrella. How do you grow in an umbrella? You might grow under an umbrella, but you do not grow in an umbrella.
So what is this grace that we have to grow in? Grace is many-faceted, just like our Lord Jesus is many-faceted. Remember, it says of our Lord Jesus that He is full of grace and truth. As He is many-faceted, grace is also many-faceted.
We know, first of all, grace is unmerited favor. It is something we do not deserve. We looked yesterday at the picture of the prodigal son. That is a great picture of grace.
He ran away according to his own will and spent everything. But he came back, and he was received. Now, that is grace. That is unmerited favor.
The father could have said, “No, you got what you wanted. Live in it. Sorry. There is nothing left for you here.” But that is not grace. Grace allows us to come and to keep coming.
That is a very important thing. It allows you to come and to keep coming, because, brothers and sisters, we are going to have times when we fall. Just because of the sin nature that is in us, we are going to fall.
But you know what it says in Proverbs: though a righteous man falls seven times, he gets up. That is what grace does. You can fall seven times. You can fall seventy-seven times. You can fall seven hundred seventy-seven times. But grace allows you to get back up.
That is so wonderful. Here this young man comes back with the thought, “You still have to accept me.” The thing is the reaching out to accept. It is not just that we come to our senses and say, “Oh, I have been wrong.” We come to our senses and come back, but once we get back, we find the hand extended to us.
That is grace. It picks us up. It helps us back up.
Grace allows us to meet Him, not in the light of the law, but in the light of Jesus Christ. There is so much difference in that.
Have you read Pilgrim’s Progress? When Christian comes to the Hill of Legality, he meets Moses. Moses pushes him down. He gets up, and Moses pushes him down. He gets up, and Moses pushes him down again. He cries, “Mercy, mercy,” and Moses says, “I do not know what that is.”
The law does not know mercy. In the light of the law, when we are trying to live in the light of the law, there is no mercy. There is nothing like that there.
But God, in the light of Jesus Christ, is full of grace. Grace allows us to see God and to meet God in the light of Jesus Christ. Grace shows us there is an open heaven, and that open heaven is calling us to come in.
So we are to grow in unmerited favor. But unmerited favor is not all that grace is. We lessen grace when we think that is all it is.
Last night, Dana brought up that Jesus grew in the grace and favor of the Lord—grace being the beauty of God. Grace is beauty.
Have you ever watched ice skating in the Olympics? You see those people moving so gracefully. They are sliding on ice. To me, that is incredible. You have that little blade, and you are sliding. It is not a sharp blade; if it were sharp, it would cut right into the ice and be easy to skate. But it is a flat blade going over the ice.
We say they are graceful, but really what we are saying is that there is a beauty in their balance, their movements, and the way they flow with the music. There is a beauty there.
In the same way, we see the beauty of God in Jesus Christ when we open up the Word and see Him come to us. We see Christ in all His grace, in the way He acts with human beings. His beauty.
It is not a physical beauty that we see, although He must have been physically strong. I am not talking about facial beauty or anything, but physically speaking, He was a man’s man. I am not saying He was buffed out and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or something like that. But He was not a weak-looking guy.
Some of these Jesus movies make Him look so wimpy. He is pale and looks like he needs to eat some liver, get some iron and color into him. It just seems like less of a man.
But, you know, He was a carpenter. My older brother Mike is a carpenter. He is not muscly, but the guy is strong. He is deceivingly strong because he does not have big bulging muscles, but he lifts stuff and carries boards. He is a strong man.
He is a man’s man. I am wimpy compared to my brother, and that is okay. Why are you laughing? As I tell my wife, I am cerebral. I am like Jacob. I do not have hair—not the hairy one, not the hunter. I am the cerebral one. That is why I am a teacher.
But we see Him in the beauty of the Lord Jesus—the wonderful pictures we have of the Lord Jesus dealing with humanity and fallen humanity, which is us.
You open up the Word and look at the people He touched and healed, the people He talked to and how He talked to them, the gathering of children who would not even understand Who He was and bringing them to Himself, the forgiving of the adulteress when people wanted to stone her, and the healing of the leper who said, “If Thou wilt.”
In all those things, the beauty of God is seen. That is why Jesus could say to the Pharisees, when they said, “Why are You eating with sinners?” “Go and learn what this meaneth, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”
You see, in your reading of the Word, you have missed the person of God. You have not seen Him. All you have seen is the law.
Jesus says later in John 5, “You search the Scriptures, thinking that in them you will find eternal life, but they are they which testify of Me, and yet you will not come to Me.”
The Word is not just to make us intelligent; it is to draw us to Him. That is why He has given it to us. He has not given it to us and said, “Here, go memorize this and go out and clobber people with it.” He has given it to us so that we might be drawn to Him.
It is like that song: “Between the wings of the cherubim, I’ll meet you there.” He says, “I have given you My Word. I will wait for you there. I will meet you here.” It is up to us to come and meet Him there.
That should be the purpose, really, of reading the Scriptures: “Lord, I want to meet You.”
Another thing we have is in Hebrews 4:16. Let me make sure I read it right.
Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need.
What is this way of looking at grace? Andrew Murray, when he was commenting on this verse in his commentary on Hebrews, The Holiest of All, said that grace is the divine strength working in us, strengthening the inner life in us.
We have been provided with an inner life. That is grace to us. We have an idea that when the Lord redeemed us, when the Lord saved us and forgave our sins, then it is now up to us to be like Him.
We are funny when it comes to that. “Imitation is the best form of flattery,” right? So we try to imitate the Lord. We go so far as to wear those little bracelets: “What would Jesus do?” We try to do what Jesus would do.
But the thing is, we cannot, because we have a fallen nature. So we try, then get frustrated, and do nothing for a while. Then we get renewed, hear somebody speak about something, and say, “Okay, I will get up again. I will try harder.”
Then we fall harder because we tried harder. We go into a funk for a little while, then come back and hear something else. “Oh, okay, I will try harder this time.” We are like hamsters in little wheels.
I do not see why people get hamsters. What do hamsters do? You do not pull them out and pet them. You do not take them for a walk or anything like that. But you get these little beasts, and during the day you watch your hamster and it does nothing.
Then in the middle of the night, it is running in that little circular thing and wakes you up. But it is not going anywhere. For some of us, that is our Christian life. We are hamsters.
We do not realize that we have been given a different life. This is grace: an inner life, a strong life, even the life of Christ in us.
To show this life in us, the Lord also lets us go and face different circumstances. When we become Christians, it is not that life becomes a bowl of cherries and we say, “Ah, life is great.” We run into hardships.
Paul spoke in 2 Corinthians 12 of a thorn in the flesh. For him, many people think it was a physical illness, perhaps with his eyes. Some people say that he was going blind.
That would be a horrible thing to think about: “I am going blind. I am going to lose my sight.” His thought was, “Lord, this will hamper my work for You. If I go blind, how can I serve You? How can I do these things I have been called to do? Take it away from me.”
It says that he sought the Lord three times to take it away. I heard a sermon when I was at my in-laws for a weekend. The man gave a sermon on the thorn in the flesh and Paul beseeching the Lord three times.
The way we look at the three times is that we come today and say, “Oh Lord, take it away from me.” Then we come tomorrow and say, “Oh Lord, take it away from me.” Then we come the next time and say, “Oh Lord, take it away from me.”
But that is not what it is saying. It is not as though he went three separate times and said this little prayer. The idea was that each time he besought the Lord, it was like one of those thirty- or forty-day fasts, where he was really trying to get to the Lord and saying, “Lord, what is this all about? Take it away from me.”
Then again. Think about that: that is really seeking the Lord to take it away. It is not some little trivial, “Lord, take it away. I have got to get rid of this. I am so upset by it.” It is, “I am going to beseech the Lord for days, and I am going to do it for days three separate times.”
The Lord said, “No.” Paul says “thorn,” but actually the translation is more like a stake—not the kind you eat, but a stake driven into him, driven into his flesh.
It was not a little thing, like, “Oh, I have a sliver. I have to get it pulled out of me.” It was something that nailed him, that immobilized him.
Some of us get saved and then get into hard circumstances. Maybe our family is not saved. Maybe it is our school situation, where we are the butt of all jokes because we are Christians, and at school we have no solace from anybody.
Or maybe it is at work, with our boss. Maybe it is the circumstances of our lives. Maybe we have to take care of an ailing father. Or we have a child who is paraplegic, or has had something happen to him in that way.
It is a stake. It is not something that leaves. It is there with you, and the Lord says, “It is not going to go.”
I was reading a book by Alan Redpath about 2 Corinthians, Blessings Out of Buffetings. He said that the Lord said to Paul, “It is going to be with you for the rest of your life.”
He did not say, “It is going to be there with you the rest of your life; now deal with it.” That is not what He said. What He said was, “You know something? This will not stop Me—or this will not stop you, because of Who I am in you—from being occupied with My business.”
Even though it is as bad as it looks, it does not have to stop you.
Just to read a little bit from Redpath, he said:
The Lord Jesus watches because He allows the pressure to continue, in order that, in the severest moment of testing, it may drive you to His wounded side and teach you that, for overwhelming pressure, there is adequate grace.
Oh, would it not be wonderful if that experience could be yours today? Stop praying for the removal of the thorn and understand the transforming power of the cross.
Lastly, there is a transformation of misery into happiness:
Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
That is what Paul said. “I am so thankful,” he says, “for this thing that keeps me humble and dependent, trusting God and believing as God’s trusting and believing child. I am so glad of it all, for if God does grant me blessing and success in any measure, it drives me constantly back to Him.”
It is a very interesting thing that, if you read the Old Testament when Moses is giving the law, he warns them in Deuteronomy: “When you get full, when you are eating well and are clothed, do not forget Me.”
When things go so well for us, we think we do not need Him. I am not saying that God says, “Well, I am going to do these things so you need Me.” That is not it. Really, we need Him in everything.
Paul said later that he had learned to be content in everything, even in good things. “I have learned that it is not that I do not need God anymore, but I have learned that it comes from God and is for me for this season.”
“I have learned how to deal. I have learned how to accept this from God. But I have also learned how to accept the other from God.”
Just to hammer home the point, here is a hymn written by Margaret Barber. It is a wonderful hymn, and it points out this idea of grace. Remember, it says that we go to God for grace in time of need, and grace is provided for us.
Wrecked outright on Jesus’ breast,
Only wrecked souls thus can sing;
Little boats that hug the shore,
Fearing what the storm may bring.
But when the storms have done their worst,
And the soul, surviving all,
In eternal arms is nursed,
They are to find that naught can move
One embosomed in such love.
Wrecked outright, no more to own
In the craft to sail the sea;
Still a voyager, yet now
Anchored to infinity.
Nothing left to do but fling
Care aside and simply cling.
Wrecked outright to us purest gain;
Henceforth other craft can see
That the storm may be a boon,
That, however rough the sea,
God Himself doth watchful stand,
For the wreck is in His hand.
Other boats, other crafts—so that the other crafts can see. Why am I going through this? So that others can see the grace that God gives you, and they can take courage.
We are to grow in this type of grace, this grace that enables us to do these things, that gets us through, that finds God in these things. We are to grow in the knowledge of Him in that grace: that grace is provided and that He is all-sufficient for us.
Then in Titus 2—I know this is one of your favorite verses, because Titus is probably your favorite book in the Bible. Some of you are going, “I did not know there was a Titus. What kind of name is Titus?”
For the grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men,
instructing us, to the intent that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world;
looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory
of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.
We find out that grace is a teacher. It teaches us not just the negative things—to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts—but to live soberly and righteously.
The whole thing in Titus is that it is the inner life that teaches us. It is this life that God has given us in Christ that teaches us. We come across something that we enjoyed before, and it may not have seemed very sinful, but we did not realize it was sin.
God points it out. There is a conviction of the Spirit. Where does that come from? That is from the inner life that has been put in you. It is that inner life that says, “No, we cannot touch this.”
We may go ahead and say, “Well, I will touch it anyway.” But as the lessons go on, if we really learn as the inner life teaches us, we begin to say, “I found out that I cannot do it.”
What has made me find out is not just reading Scriptures, but that inner life in me that testifies, “This is not for you.” Or that inner life says, “Let us draw near.” It is that inner life that draws me somewhere else and says, “I need to put this away.”
It teaches us. God has not left us to ourselves to try and figure it out. He has given us this grace.
To complete that verse in 2 Peter 3:18: “Grow in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
When we think of Jesus Christ, a lot of times we limit Him in our thinking because we generally think of Him as He was when He was on the earth. After He left the earth, we act as though there is nothing more about Jesus Christ. He is up there in heaven, just sitting on a throne waiting.
That is where we get the idea, “What would Jesus do?” We look back here and try to do what He did, but we think He does not do anything else. He is looking down and saying, “Oh, he did not do it exactly the way I wanted it.” But He does not do it that way.
The knowledge of Jesus Christ does not stop with Him being a man on the earth. He rose from the dead. It is not that He just rose from the dead and went around here. He was here for forty days. But then what did He do? He ascended into heaven.
Do we know the Christ Who ascended into heaven? He still has a ministry to us, even though He has ascended into heaven.
What is His ministry? He intercedes for us. He intercedes for us before the throne of God. He is our Advocate. When the enemy comes up and brings charges against us, He is our Advocate.
Revelation talks about Him walking in the midst of the churches, looking at them with His eyes of fire, speaking to them, trying to draw them back up to Himself, to walk with Him afresh and know Him afresh.
He is trying to get us off of the earthbound and into the heavenlies. That is where He is. That is why Paul says that our minds should be in the heavenlies. We died with Christ and are risen with Him. He is in the heavenlies, and that is where our thoughts should go.
We also have to know the Christ Who is in us, because Christ has come to live in us.
In Matthew 11:28-30, it says:
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart:
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
The way this applies to us is like when we talked about the inner life being a teacher, that grace for us. This is the same thing: we have been yoked up.
Any good farmer, when he had oxen, would take an experienced ox and team him up with one who was not experienced, so the other one could learn how to do things.
Since the experienced one knew what he was doing, when the other one was trying to tug there and go there, he just held steady and said, “I know the way to walk. I know the way to walk.”
It is just like us. “I know the way to please My Father. Let Me lead. I please Him.” His witness is, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.” He says, “I know how to please Him.”
We try to please Him, and He lets us. He lets us do these things, but He says, “Just join with Me. Yoke with Me. I will bring you to the place where the Father is pleased.”
Now, in closing, I want to say this. In John 3:30, John the Baptist is talking, and he says:
He must increase, but I must decrease.
I have always looked at the verse this way: I need to give the Lord more place in my life, and then I try my best to give Him more place.
But something happened to me this summer. Dana spoke in Richmond, and in one of his messages he was talking about beholding the glory of the Lord.
I cannot quote him word for word, but this is the gist of it. He said, “If we only knew how big the Lord Jesus is, if we only knew how immense He is, we would see that the immensity of Who He is swallows up all of our failures and shortcomings to nothing.”
It would be like comparing yourself to this. What are you in comparison to this? And you know this is not the actual size. This is from a telescope. These are light-years away. Compare yourself to these things here.
It made me look at this verse differently. It is not that I must try to make myself smaller. It is that I need to have new eyes to see that Christ is so much bigger. He is so much bigger than I ever thought.
That swallows me up. Oh, my failures come to nothing in Who He is. They are nothing.
When we begin to see the immensity of God, how can we say that my circumstances or my faults are greater than that? You are swallowed up.
I think this really is what the Lord is saying to us. He is saying, “See, I am providing you all things. I am providing everything for you.”
“I am giving you My Word as food. I am giving you My grace as help and strength. And I am giving you My Son, not as just something for you, but as your very life.”
“Take My gift. It is for you personally. It is only then that you will be able to offer yourself to Me. You must take what I give you first, and then you will be able to give back to Me.”
Our Father, You are so great. We worship You. You are so big and immense. You have given us such a great gift.
Lord, we want to take that gift in its entirety. We do not just want to take a part of it. But, Lord, it is hard for us to take it. Some of us feel that we are just not worthy to have it.
Some of us feel that it is going to do something to us that is going to make us odd. But, Lord, we all know in our heart of hearts that we want this gift.
We ask You to help us take it from Your hand as You hand it to us. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.