Morning, brothers and sisters.
Let’s read a couple of Scriptures, and then we’ll take a time to pray. Go to John 17.
Jesus was giving that prayer that Bill spoke on the last two weeks. Let’s take one verse out of it—verse 3:
And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.
Then in 1 Timothy 6, verse 12:
Fight the good fight of the faith, lay hold on the life eternal, whereunto thou wast called, and didst confess the good confession in the sight of many witnesses.
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we want to thank You that You did not leave us in the dark, that You did not leave us to ourselves to find out who You were. But You sent Someone. You sent us Jesus Christ.
Lord, we are praying this morning that we would understand why You sent Him and what that means for us, and that You would illuminate and glorify Your Son, that He would become greater in our eyes, and that He, Lord, would do what He was meant to do: bring us to You, that we might live forever in Your presence.
Lord, it is only Your Spirit that can illuminate. It is only Your Spirit that can really give us sight and reveal who Christ is.
Lord, we just tell You how we need Him, because we want to see Jesus, because we want to be able to live before You. We want to be pleasing to You, Lord. We ask that You just show us. Show us Your Christ. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This morning, I’m not going to touch on the things Bill touched on in the Lord’s prayer for unity. There’s one part that really stood out to me in this prayer, and that was verse 3. It talks about eternal life.
One of the things that caught my eye—or the Lord impressed more upon me—was something I heard on Christian radio. Every once in a while, I listen to Christian radio. I do not do it very often; it is not one of my things. But, I’m sorry to say, when the sports talk isn’t inviting, I switch over to the religious channel.
Every once in a while I hear some things. There are some people I like to listen to—Alistair Begg, Ravi Zacharias—but a lot of times you turn it on and just get commercials and stuff like that.
There’s this one guy—I don’t know his name—who comes on around four-thirty or five o’clock on 590 AM. He has brought up a couple of times that kids growing up in the church, as they go out into the world and into college, may still believe in Christ and His substitutionary death, but they no longer believe that He is the only way to the Father.
That just struck me. Why is that? Why don’t we believe that anymore, in that sense?
Here we have, in this very Scripture, something that tells us about Jesus Christ and links Him to eternal life. Listen to the verse:
And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.
Whenever I have read this verse, I have always focused on the part that says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God.” I have kind of stopped there and said, “Well, that’s what eternal life is: that we know God.”
But I think it is so interesting—arresting to me—that the Lord Jesus Himself did not stop there. He did not put a period after, “that they should know You, the only true God.” He put the little word and.
He put that word and, and He added to it. It is not merely that you know God, because there are many people who say, “All you need to do is know God.” Well, who is God? It depends on who is telling you about God.
If you look at Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, God is just some force in the universe, and you want to get to nothingness. That is who God is. Or if you look at Muhammad, he is saying that God is rules and regulations. It depends on who you talk to.
So the Lord made a qualification. He did not say merely that you know God. He said that you know God, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He sent.
Now, why would He say that? What is the matter with this?
I’m here to say that I think this is the mind of the Lord. He is saying, “You have to know Me in order to know God, because God sent Me as the revelation of Himself.”
He sent Me as a prophet. He sent Me as a priest. And He sent Me as a king. You need to know Me as God’s Prophet, as God’s Priest, and as God’s King in order for you to know God. There is no knowing God without knowing Me.
That is why He could say to the disciples:
I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by Me.
That is really dogmatic, isn’t it? But the thing is, it is true.
Your knowledge of God will be limited; it will be generic, without your knowledge of Jesus Christ whom He sent. And by generic, I mean one-size-fits-all. It is anybody’s revelation of God, and that is not who Jesus presented to us.
Jesus presented to us a specific God: a God who was specific in who He was, what He was like, what He thought, and what He wanted to do. He gave us specifically this One.
Another thing about generic: today we think, “Oh, that’s a value buy.” It is another way of saying it is cheap. “Oh, they’re just beans.”
But do you know what value really means? With all this generic stuff, we have lost what value really means. Value is not how much I can get for my dollar. Value is worth.
If something is valuable, what does that mean? Costly. It is very costly.
To know this God—even for the Lord Jesus to reveal this God to us—is costly. It was the greatest cost ever paid. But it was paid. So we have this value in Christ.
We want to look at these three matters: Jesus needs to be known by us as God’s Prophet, as God’s Priest, and as God’s King.
I read a nice little book by Andrew Murray. I would advise any person to pick up Andrew Murray. He is a little flowery sometimes, like F. B. Meyer, but I would also suggest you pick up F. B. Meyer.
Andrew Murray wrote Jesus Christ: Prophet, Priest, and King. Just as a sidelight, if you get this little book—I do not know if it is still in print—read the last chapter before the Lord’s Table. Read it the night before the Lord’s Table. It is really good. It talks about the Lord’s Table in a wonderful way.
But I want to read a quote out of this book. It is not by Andrew Murray himself, but he quoted a man named J. G. McVicar. I have no idea who that man is, but he must be somebody Andrew Murray respected.
This is what he says about a prophet:
A prophet is a spokesman of God, one who does not speak at his own will, one who does not utter his own sentiments, but who speaks the words that God gives him to speak.
He says that is from Jeremiah 23:22. If you read Jeremiah 23:22, God is coming down on false prophets. He says, “If you were a real prophet, you would be in My counsel.”
That was the work of a prophet: to stand in the counsel of the Lord and make the people hear His words. God was the speaker, and the prophets were but the mouthpiece of God.
So, according to McVicar, a prophet is God’s spokesman. In Christ, we see God speaking to mankind—to fallen mankind. We see God speaking.
If we looked in Hebrews 1, the first three verses, it says that God spoke at various times and in various ways through prophets, but He has spoken at the last in His Son—or in Son. Verse 3 says that the Son is the effulgence of His glory.
In the same way, we see that in the beginning of John’s Gospel. John said, “In the beginning was the Word,” which is what the prophet has. Then it says the Word became flesh.
A prophet is not only one who speaks and then lives however he wants to live. His life also shines out what is in God’s heart. You cannot separate the man from his message.
If he is preaching holiness, you should see holiness in his life. If he is preaching victory, he should have victory in his life.
So we see this in Christ as Prophet. In Christ, we see God speaking to us; in Christ, we see God acting toward us.
In looking at the ministry of a prophet, first of all, a prophet lifts up God’s standard. If you read the prophets, they always have the law in there—the law and the prophets go together—because the prophet lifts up the standard of God and stands it before the people, saying, “This is the standard. Where are you?”
That is what a prophet does. The ministry of a prophet is threefold. First of all, it is corrective in nature. This is corrective ministry.
If you look at the Lord Jesus, when He came onto the earth, what was His message? “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
A lot of people look at the generic Jesus: “Oh, He is full of love.” Yes—He is full of love, and He says, “Repent.” Because He is full of love, He says, “Repent.”
If you look at the Sermon on the Mount, what does Jesus say? “You have heard that it was said.” You know, “Thou shalt not commit adultery; but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Corrective.
Or look at Matthew 15:8-9. He quotes Isaiah and says to the people:
This people honoreth Me with their lips;
But their heart is far from Me.
But in vain do they worship Me,
Teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.
He is correcting them. Or look at Matthew 23:16-17:
Woe unto you, ye blind guides, that say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor.
Ye fools and blind: for which is greater, the gold, or the temple that hath sanctified the gold?
Corrective. He corrects actions. He corrects misconceptions. People have misconceptions about God, and He corrects them.
“Oh, if You only knew what kind of person You are hanging around with, Jesus, You would know that person is a sinner.” The misconception is that God will have nothing to do with sinners.
But what does He say? “God sent Me to save sinners.” There is a big misconception there.
Secondly, a prophet’s ministry is revelatory in nature. In other words, it reveals; it gives revelation. It reveals spiritual truth.
For example, Jesus’ ministry in parables was to reveal the kingdom of God. In John 4, when He talks to the woman at the well, He is revealing worship to her. It is not where you worship. God is looking for those who worship in spirit.
So it is revelatory. It reveals to us the things we need to see.
Finally, it is meant to awaken and recover. It does not just leave you by correcting you. It does not just leave you with some kind of knowledge. All of this has a purpose, and the purpose is to awaken and recover.
It is meant to awaken the deepest part of man. The deepest part of man is not physical. It is not mental. It is spiritual.
What does Ecclesiastes say? I think it is Ecclesiastes 3:11:
He hath made everything beautiful in its time: also He hath set eternity in their heart.
God made man. He made him for eternity, and He put eternity in his heart. The deepest part of us is that eternity. That is what He seeks to awaken in us—that deep, deep thing.
That is why it says, “Deep calleth unto deep.” The depths of God call to the depths of man. This is not just the veneer of God. This is not just the generic God. This is the depth of God.
The longings of the eternal God are calling to the depths of eternity in man, calling him out, calling him to awaken.
The words and actions of this Prophet are this deep calling. From the beginning of Christ’s ministry, He sought to bring all to see that they were poor in spirit.
The opening words of His first sermon that we have recorded in Matthew are addressed to the poor in spirit. Really, it is to tell you that you are poor in spirit. If you read the Sermon on the Mount, you cannot read through it and say, “Yeah, that’s me.”
How many times have you read the Sermon on the Mount and just gone away beaten in your breath? You go away asking, “How can I ever do those things?” Or you go out and think, “Okay, I’ll try to do these things. Oh, please, God.” How long is it until you find yourself coming up short?
For some of us, we can go a long time because we are really unaware of ourselves. But as we get older, we find out those times get short. We just say, “Oh no, not again.”
They needed to see, in the Sermon on the Mount, that they needed a righteousness that surpassed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.
He was not saying that the Pharisees and scribes were so righteous. He was really saying, “You need more than an outward righteousness.”
God is not looking for an outward righteousness. He is calling to the depths of you and saying, “You need righteousness in the depths.” The outward righteousness was just a veneer.
Later on, what does He say to the scribes and Pharisees? “You are like whitewashed tombs.” You look really pretty on the outside. You have nice flowery sayings: “He was a servant of God. Oh, he gave to the poor.”
But you go under that tombstone, and what do you find? Dead men’s bones, worms, rotted flesh. That is all you have. He said, “You need something better than that. You need something better than that.”
Even at the end of the Bible, in Revelation, the Lord Jesus comes as Prophet. He comes to the church at Laodicea, and He says to that church, “You are poor, and blind, and naked, and wretched.”
On the outside, perhaps, but you have not let Me get to the inside. You have not heard My calls to the inside. I am not after the outside. I see beyond, and I see inside. This is what you are. This is what you are like.
But He does not just stop with revealing that we are in a bad condition. That is not the prophet’s job: not simply to reveal and say, “You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad.” What hope is there for us then?
If He just leaves us there—“You’re bad. God doesn’t want you. You’re bad.”—there is nothing. But all these things are to recover us.
All these things are to recover us. He does not just awaken us to our condition and our bankruptcy of spirit and show us that we are poor in spirit. Then He awakens us to grace.
We cannot be awakened to grace and have grace mean anything to us until we see our condition and see that there is no remedy for our condition.
If we do not see that, who needs grace? The Pharisees and the scribes certainly did not need grace; they thought they were okay. But it is the poor in spirit who start to believe, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do?”
Then you find out there is grace. How do we know that there is grace for them? We see the actions of Jesus Christ as Prophet.
We see His actions. He allows the poor to come to Him, like the leper in Matthew 8. “I am leprous, but You can heal me. I cannot do anything about myself. I am a leper. There is no cure for this. But if You are willing, You can make me well.”
What is the action of the Prophet? He touches him and says, “I am willing; be thou clean.” That is grace.
Or He goes out and finds the poor, like the paralytic in John 5, who had been sitting there for thirty-eight years. He goes up to him and asks, “Wouldest thou be made whole?”
It seems like the stupidest question, and yet the answer is, “Well, there is nobody here to help me.” The Lord just says, “Arise. I am your help.” That is grace.
So, you see, the Prophet points us to God. First of all, He lets us see. He is honest with us, saying, “This is the standard that God expects. This is the standard, and this is you against it. You do not measure up.”
“I weighed thee in the balances, and art found wanting.” But He does not leave us there. He brings us to grace.
If we do not know Christ the Prophet—the One who speaks into the depths of our being and lets us know who we are, and then does not leave us there but lets us know that He wants to bring us out of that place, that He wants to touch us—then we do not know God.
We have to know God as a holy God. Otherwise, there will be no turning from Him. There will be no fear of Him. To approach a holy God with this generic idea—“Oh yeah, God is not really a judge. That is Old Testament”—no, brothers and sisters, that is God. He is holy. You cannot approach Him.
But then to see that He makes provision—that is grace.
Some of us have made grace generic. We have made it without cost. We have made it without Christ. Grace is costly. Grace cost something, because it cost God His beloved Son.
It cost Him. It is costly. It is valuable. And this is the only coin of the realm that can save you.
Therefore, do not harden your heart if you hear the voice of the Prophet. If you reject Him, you reject everything that would benefit you from listening to Him.
Look at Naaman the leper. Naaman the leper is one of my favorite characters in the Old Testament because he is so much like us.
When the leper comes to Elisha, Elisha does not even go out to him. He just says, “Go wash yourself.” Naaman is so upset with that. He does not want to wash himself because he thinks it is beneath him. “Why couldn’t I wash in one of the Syrian rivers?”
But remember, he had two servants who came up and said, “If he had asked you to do something hard, you would have done it without question. But here he is asking you to do something simple. Just go wash.”
If he had not washed, he would never have been clean. It is the same with us. If we do not listen to the Prophet and respond to Him in a positive way, we forfeit all that could be done for us.
Everybody who rejects Christ in this way forfeits all the benefit of this grace. They forfeit it.
You cannot get this grace through Muhammad. You cannot get this grace through Buddha. You cannot get this grace through Joseph Smith. This grace only comes through Jesus Christ.
Secondly, He has the ministry of a priest. A priest’s ministry is to bring us into the grace of God.
There are three ways that he does this:
This is what a priest does. Jesus Christ is our Priest. He is our High Priest. Stephen’s last message was talking about Hebrews 10, right? He was talking about this High Priest.
What does this High Priest do for us? How does He get us into the grace of God? First of all, He offers sacrifice.
In other words, He brings us into the fellowship of God. He takes us to God, and He does this through His own sacrifice—through the sacrifice of Himself, His body on the cross.
He does not give us a substitute; it is Himself who is our substitute. He gives us access to God.
In giving us access, He gives us the same access to God that He has, because He is bringing us to God. The access that He has is the access that we have, because we come by Him, with Him, and in Him to this holy God.
He appropriates the things that His offering has accomplished for us. He brings that before God: “This blood was shed for these.”
That is why I love some of those hymns about the blood, such as “Arise, My Soul, Arise”:
Five bleeding wounds He bears,
Received on Calvary;
They pour effectual prayers,
They strongly plead for me.
They strongly plead for me. He appropriates them for us before God, and then He brings them to us and applies them to our hearts. We go into God’s presence clean.
He not only takes us into the presence of God, but He is able to keep us in the presence of God. I read that in this whole book, and that was the most amazing thing I read.
Because, brothers and sisters, tell me: how do you keep in the presence of God?
Do you want to know how I do it? I try to be as good as possible. I try to make sure I am reading my Bible, saying my prayers, being kind to everybody, and going to meetings. If I can do that, I can stay in the presence of God.
But that is not what gets us into the presence of God, and that is not what keeps us in the presence of God.
I hope I see this in a way that sets me free from that. It is Him—this Priest—who keeps me ever before God.
What a weight will fall off of me when I see that in a deeper way. How free would we all be when we understand that it is not our works that keep us before God, but the High Priest who bears us daily before God.
He keeps us in the presence by virtue of what He has done, by His sacrifice. That is what keeps us in the presence of God.
When we find ourselves straying from God, we no longer say, “I have to do some kind of penance.” We come to Him and say, “Oh my God, I have been out of Your presence. I did not even realize it. How can I get back in? Oh Lord, I come to You. Bring me in.”
“You are the One who brings me, and You are the One who keeps me here. Let me trust in You for that, and let me be free forever from this yoke of bondage.”
“Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Not through works of the law—through Jesus Christ, through a Man, through God’s Man, through God’s Priest.
That is how I lose the body of that death: as Christ works as Priest and keeps me near to God.
Secondly, He is the Mediator of a new covenant. Mediator means He is the go-between.
He has gone up to God to bring us to God, but He has also brought God down to us.
The new covenant is not like Moses, who went up on the mountain and brought down tablets of stone. The new covenant is mediated by Christ coming, through the Holy Spirit, into our very lives—into that deepest deep in us—and writing there, with His finger, His law.
That is how the covenant is mediated. It is Him coming into me—God coming into me—not me going up to God. God comes down to me and writes His law in my heart.
It is His work for me to let Him come in and do it, but it is His work. It is the work of this Mediator. It is the work of this Priest, who sent His Spirit to do this for me, that I might be pleasing to God.
So now, it is not merely that we have access to God; God has access to us. Oh, what a blessing that is. God has access to me.
Let’s throw down the walls. Let’s throw down the barbed wire, the bricks, and let Him come in, because this is the very dwelling that He wants. The very dwelling that He wants is in us.
It is not something built with hands. It is something He created long ago that He wants back, and He can have that through the ministry of Jesus Christ as Priest.
As Priest, He also keeps us through the ministry of intercession.
I do not know about you, but how many of you know there is a letter from Jude in the New Testament? How many of us quote Jude? “Oh yeah, that’s in Jude.” We quote John 3:16 and Ephesians 2:8-10.
But, boy, this is one you ought to memorize: Jude 24.
Now unto Him that is able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of His glory without blemish in exceeding joy.
Man, can you believe that? There is One who is able to present us faultless and to keep us from stumbling. It is the work of His intercession for us.
He is forever interceding for us, bringing us before the presence of God so that the purpose of God might be fulfilled in us. We have been called according to that purpose.
His intercessory prayers are what keep us. What is that verse in Philippians? Philippians 1:6:
He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.
How does He complete it? Through His intercession. He intercedes for us so that we are able to be what He wants, what He bought us for, what He purchased us for.
All that He does for us would be lost if we were not one, if people did not know that God sent Him. It is all there in His intercession for us.
He pronounces God’s blessing on us. So how are we to respond? Hebrews says, “Let us draw near.” Because this is so, let us draw near.
It does not only say, “Let us draw near”; twice in Hebrews it says to draw near boldly. That is not presumptuously—“Oh yeah, He is going to forgive me anyway.”
It is knowing His holiness, but despite knowing His holiness, I can enter boldly because I know His Christ. Because I know that priestly sacrifice, I can enter boldly before Him and find help, find grace in time of need.
Oh Lord, Buddha does not give you grace. He just says you have to give up your desires. Muhammad does not give you grace; he gives you law. Christ gives you grace, and grace enables us.
Finally, He is our King. He is God’s King for us.
In the King, we see the power and sovereignty of God seen in a Man. It is not merely this generic glory or power—“I’m going to zap you,” kind of thing. We actually see the power of God exercised through a Man.
When you read the Gospels and look at Jesus Christ and the things He does, what do you see? He has power over sickness.
He has power over Satan. Look at all the demons that He cast out. Remember the man who had a legion of demons? That is thousands of them. With a word: gone.
He has power even over death. “Lazarus, come forth.” He has power over men, so that they could not take Him before His time.
This is not a natural sovereignty that He has, but a sovereignty given by God. Man must be given sovereignty. In the beginning, God gave man sovereignty and said, “Have dominion.” But man gave that sovereignty away.
This is not the sovereignty we see in Jesus Christ that was given to Him by the world. Satan, who is the ruler of this world, would have given Him sovereignty, but he would have given Him sovereignty over the world on his terms: “Bow down to me, and You can have all these cities.”
But Christ rejected those terms. Because He rejected those terms, the world rejected Him and crucified Him.
This is not a sovereignty given to Him by man to rule over them: “Well, we want You to rule over us. You are such a good man.”
Man tried to give Him a sovereignty. Remember in John 6, after He fed the five thousand, they all came out and were about to make Him king. But they wanted Him king on their terms: “Give us this bread evermore.”
But Jesus Christ rejected those terms. Because He rejected those terms, man rejected Him. “We have no king but Caesar,” they said in John 18. Caesar is the world’s king.
But it was sovereignty given to Him by God. Let me tell you something about this sovereignty. What does sovereignty mean? How did He get this sovereignty?
The Lord is seeking a free-will offering. In other words, the Lord was seeking in Christ, who is the new Man, the second and last Adam—not merely the second Adam, but the last Adam—a free will surrendered to Him.
That is what gave Him authority and power. That is what made Him God’s King.
If you look at David, who is a picture of the King and a man after God’s own heart, we could say Christ is the Man after God’s own heart.
In Psalm 40:6-8, which is also quoted in Hebrews, it talks about sacrifice and offering. But it comes down to verse 8:
I delight to do Thy will, O my God;
Yea, Thy law is within my heart.
The whole thing is a free-will offering to do the will of another—a free will.
The Lord had a free will because He was free from the dominion of sin. We are not. He was free from the dominion of self.
But when we are crucified with Christ, as Romans 6 tells us, now we are a new humanity. We have a free will that is not under the dominion of sin, and we can freely give that up to God.
That is what Romans 6 teaches us: no longer give your members to sin, but to righteousness.
But it also has to be free from the dominion of self. In other words, it is not what I want, but what God wants.
Because we have that free will surrendered to God, that is why we see the sovereignty of God displayed in Jesus Christ.
How do we get to know the power of this Sovereign? The King leads His people. He does not pontificate. He does not just sit on the throne and say, “You do that. You do that. Bring me my dinner—and not what we had yesterday. I don’t do leftovers. Ask my wife.”
He leads His people. Do you understand that? He leads. He goes through. He goes ahead.
For us to know that power is to follow Him. We are to follow Him through death into life, because that is where He went—through death into life.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” But I have to walk through it. Why? Because that is the way He is leading. He leads that way.
For us to know His sovereignty, we have to take in this verse. In Matthew 16:24, it says:
If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
In another Gospel, it says daily, “Take up his cross and follow Me.” It has to be a free-will offering. It has to be me.
He has taken sin away. He has taken the dominion of sin away. But He will not take the dominion of self away.
God does not force us to do things. Remember when David was made king? He was anointed while he was young, coming in from the sheepfold. But was that when he became king? Was that when he took the throne? No. There was a long time—maybe fifteen years—before he took the throne.
There were two times when he could have just grabbed the throne. One time, he went into Saul’s camp when a deep sleep was upon them, and he could have stabbed Saul right there. He was not going to do it. One of his buddies said, “Hey, I’ll do it for you.”
But David said, “I cannot. He is the Lord’s anointed. I cannot take his place.”
Another time, in the cave, Saul went in to relieve himself, and David could have stepped right in there, done away with him, and grabbed the throne. But David said, “I cannot.”
It is the same way with us. He cannot—He will not—because it has to be free will. He cannot deny Himself by saying it has to be a free-will offering.
For us, we have to offer freely and say, “Lord, take my life.” That is the hardest thing, isn’t it?
It is because we are looking at it through the natural man. For example, remember the rich young ruler? He comes to the Lord and says, “What do I have to do to have eternal life?” The Lord says, “Have you done the law?” “All these have I observed from my youth.”
Then the Lord says, “One thing thou lackest: sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, follow Me.”
How did the young man react? “No problem, Lord. I’m going to do it.” Wrong Bible, huh? It says he went away sorrowful.
He went away sorrowful because he thought about all he had to lose. That is what the old man looks at. The old man—our old self—is clinging to all he can get. “What can I have left? What can I keep?”
Have you ever been witnessing to somebody and telling them about Christ, and they say, “Well, if I become a Christian, what can I keep?” That is the way we are. “What can I keep?”
But how did the King look at it? It says, “For the joy that was set before Him.” He did not look at what He was losing. He looked at what was ahead. He looked at what was the gain.
For the joy set before Him, He endured the valley of the shadow of death, and He could fear no evil.
Here is my embedded hymn. In the fourth verse of George Matheson’s hymn, “Make Me a Captive, Lord,” number 610 in your hymnal, it says:
My will is not my own
Till Thou hast made it Thine;
If it would reach the monarch’s throne,
It must its crown resign.
It only stands unbent
Amid the clashing strife,
When on Thy bosom it hath leant,
And found in Thee its life.
The old life cannot stand. If you are going to follow the Lord, it has to be denied. But the King brings us into life, into this new life, which is really His life in us.
What that means is that He is already living in us, right? When we sense Him moving, when we sense Him saying, “Don’t do that anymore,” or, “You shouldn’t be here; you should be over there,” or, “Why don’t you read this?” then we deny ourselves and say, “Yes, Lord, I want to follow You.”
He who allows this Christ to be his King receives what was said in the last verse of Psalm 91: “I will show him My salvation.”
You see, without knowing Christ, there is no knowing God.
Therefore, let us lay hold of this eternal life—this eternal life of knowing God. How do we do that?
Because God has spoken, let us not harden our hearts. Let us not harden our hearts so the seed just bounces right off. Let us take it into the depths of our being and let it grow.
Because we have this great High Priest, let us draw near. Let us draw near to Him, because it is in His presence that we are changed.
I can talk to my mom on the phone, or I can talk to my boss on the phone, and I can look really ratty. But if I am going to talk to him face to face, I am going to dress up. You know what I mean?
In that same way, when we are drawn into His presence, that is what changes us.
That is what I hate about all these machines, these texting machines. They make communication so cheap. You do not even have to look a person in the eye.
You do not know the countenance of their face or what they look like when they are speaking. You do not know if they are being sarcastic with you. You do not know if they are making fun of you. You do not know if they are really hurt.
You do not know what their affections are toward you because you cannot look them in the face. They can lie to you. Think about that, especially younger people. You can be so lied to.
But you cannot lie face to face, because you see into them.
That is what we have been called to: draw near. It is our drawing near to God that changes us. We are changed into His likeness because we see Him as He is.
We see Him as holy, and we say, “I cannot come like this.” We go to the Lord and say, “Lord, forgive me. Help me get right before You.”
Finally, let us freely make a marking. Let us freely give up our authority and give it to Him, so that He can lead us into His salvation.
That is why it is so important to know that eternal life is not merely knowing God, but knowing God in Jesus Christ. You have to know the only true God, and the only true God is the One whom Jesus Christ shows us.
The only One who can show us the only true God is Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.
Our Father, this morning we just want to thank You for not leaving us to ourselves, but giving us Jesus Christ to show us who You are.
Lord, we tell You that we are, and have been, afraid of You because we know ourselves. But Lord, we want to thank You that You know us too, and that is why You have given us Jesus Christ.
You have not wanted this to be at an arm’s distance—at any distance. You want us to be in Your very presence.
Oh Lord, I pray that as we consider Jesus Christ, we would be moved to draw close to You and find all the benefits that we have in knowing You through Jesus Christ.
Help us, Lord, we pray, to take hold of this eternal life which You have given us. We ask this in Jesus’ name.