Dear brothers and sisters, will you turn with me to a few Scriptures? First of all, the Scripture that we have begun with in a number of these sessions: Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 16.
I am reading from Matthew 16:13.
Now when Jesus came into the parts of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?”
And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”
He saith unto them, “But who say ye that I am?”
And Simon Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus answered and said unto him, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.”
Then, if you will turn with me to 1 Corinthians, the first letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, Chapter 1. I will read from 1 Corinthians 1:18.
For the word of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the power of God.
For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning will I bring to nought.”
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom knew not God, it was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.
Seeing that Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling block, and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
Then I would like to add to that Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 8. I will read from Mark 8:27.
And Jesus went forth, and His disciples, into the villages of Caesarea Philippi: and on the way He asked His disciples, saying unto them, “Who do men say that I am?”
And they told Him, saying, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.”
And He asked them, “But who say ye that I am?” Peter answereth and saith unto Him, “Thou art the Christ.”
And He charged them that they should tell no man of Him.
And He began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
And He spake the saying openly. And Peter took Him, and began to rebuke Him.
But He, turning about, and seeing His disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, “Get thee behind Me, Satan; for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men.”
And He called unto Him the multitude with His disciples, and said unto them, “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall save it.”
Beloved Lord, we are so thankful that You are with us this evening, that we are gathering unto You. Our prayer now is very simple: beloved Lord, we need You.
Dear Lord, You know that without that anointing, it will just be words. It will be truth, but without the anointing that You have won for us at Calvary and made a living reality in the presence of the Holy Spirit, that Word will not dwell in us.
You will open our eyes. You will give us an understanding of what is ours in the Lord Jesus, and the power and ability to follow Him whatever the cost. So, Lord, make this time this evening very special to every one of us. Do not let it pass, Lord, just with words.
We stand in that anointing grace and power by faith, both for the speaking of Your Word and for the hearing of it. Lord, do something in every one of our hearts. We ask it in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus.
As you all know, the theme of this conference is preparing the way for the Lord’s coming again. My responsibility has been the way of Christ. I am not going to go over what I said last night, only to say this: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
There is absolutely no manner in which you and I can prepare the way for the coming again of the Lord without the Lord Jesus. He is the key to our preparation. He is the key for our being ready. He is the means by which you and I can go on into more and more of the fullness of God.
Well, I spoke last night about that, and I am not going to dwell any more upon it, except to say this. When the Lord Jesus asked those disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” Peter, without hardly waiting for anyone else to say a peep, said, “Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
The Lord Jesus immediately replied, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for My Father in heaven has revealed this to you.” It is a tremendous blessing when the Holy Spirit opens the eyes of our hearts—when we begin to see what is the hope of our calling, what the glorious riches of His inheritance in the saints is, and what the exceeding greatness of His power is toward us who believe.
Last night we spoke about salvation. We spoke about eternal life. Jesus is that life. And we spoke about the church. That is the glorious riches of His inheritance. Our inheritance is salvation to the fullest extent. Our inheritance is Jesus. He is our Bridegroom. He is everything.
But we, as the church, are His inheritance. That is something tremendous. As I said, I am not going to go over that again, except just to underline it.
What did Peter really see when he said, “Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God”? I do not really know how much he did see, but Jesus said, “You are blessed, because My Father has touched the eyes of your heart, and you have seen something.”
There is absolutely no doubt that, as Peter went on, he saw more and more of what that simple declaration of faith really signified: “Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In that one statement, all sixty-six books of the Bible are summed up. It is almost as if the whole Bible, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, is encapsulated in that one statement of faith.
That is why the Apostle Paul said that to us who are being saved, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Everything that we need of ability, of power, is in Him; and everything we need of wisdom, of understanding, is in Him.
It is a tragedy when our love grows cold, when we become lukewarm, when there is no longer the fire of His love in us.
The problem of sin has been totally met by Christ—the power of God. Christ crucified: the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Every time I think about this, I am awestruck that God could have conceived a plan. Only the wisdom of God could have done it: that Christ crucified should be the way that our sin, our iniquity, our transgression, and our alienation from God should be met.
You and I, through the death of our Lord Jesus—the crucifixion of the Messiah—have been reconciled to God. That is far more than just being on speaking terms. It means we have been made one with Him. There is a union that has been established and created through the finished work of the Lord Jesus at Calvary.
Through the Holy Spirit, the Father has positioned us in the Messiah, in the Lord Jesus. There we have union with God: union with the Father, union with the Holy Spirit, in the Messiah Jesus. What wisdom!
Wisdom, you know, is not knowledge. Wisdom is all to do with how to handle facts. Knowledge is all about facts; wisdom is how to handle them. God did not just tell us that we were sinners, alienated from Him, divorced from Him. Christ crucified is the wisdom of God.
It is the ability of God to cancel our sins, to make sins that are as scarlet white as snow, to take our sins and cancel them, blot them out, as far as the east is from the west. It is the wisdom of God: Christ crucified.
Christ crucified is not only the wisdom of God—how to handle this situation of sin, iniquity, transgression, and divorce from God—it is the power of God. Christ crucified is the ability of God to take a person lost in sin and wickedness, as evil as a person can be, cancel his sin, create living faith within him, and join him to the Father in Him. That is the power of God: Christ crucified.
But if you have followed me so far, I want to confuse you. It is not only sin that is the problem in this world. It is self. Did you hear me?
It is not only sin. You can have all your sins blotted out, all your sins forgiven, washed away, but you still have a self-life. And it is that self-life which is as much a problem as sin.
That self-life has an agenda—its own agenda, a self-interested, self-advancing agenda. That self-life has a will, and generally speaking, that will is opposed to the will of God, out of sorts with the will of God.
“Oh,” you say, “what a miserable person you are, talking about ourselves. They are beautiful. Ourselves are beautiful. God loves us.” He does love us. But that confused, proud, self-willed, self-advancing self-life is an enormous problem.
Our brother this morning spoke about Adam and Eve—or perhaps it was yesterday; I cannot remember. I am getting old now, and I do not remember what happened just an hour ago. But I believe he spoke about Adam and Eve. He spoke about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.
He said both those trees were planted by God. Now, he did not say this; I am saying this. God chose those two trees to define a human constitution: either a God-centred, God-conscious, and God-dependent constitution, represented by the tree of life; or a self-centred, self-conscious, self-interested life, represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
That is why Satan sinned. “Did God say that if you eat of that tree you will die? You will not die. But you will become as God. You will become a demigod, just like God, equal with God. You will have the centre in yourself.”
Now, dear folks, if you are following me, and you are not too shocked by what I am saying, the history of this world is the expression of that self-life that Adam and Eve chose. By eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they chose a self-centred constitution.
Every one of us, no matter who you are, has been born with a self-centred constitution. We cannot get away from it. When we are babies, we grab the things we want. It is quite clear, even when we are just a few months old, that we are so self-interested.
The whole of this world history is the expression of this constitution that Adam and Eve chose. We are all born with it in us.
The amazing thing is this: when the Lord Jesus died, He died as the last Adam. He took that constitution and He crucified it. It died with Him on the cross. He is the second Man—the Man that the first Adam and Eve should have been if they had only chosen to eat of the tree of life.
This constitution that you and I have is expressed everywhere in history: the great despots of history, the great dictators of history, the geniuses of history, the architects of so many incredible buildings. It is all the expression of self-grandeur, of something that comes out of our fallen constitution.
The League of Nations was the perfect expression of self-interest, and the United Nations is the collection of a whole number of self-interested nations, self-advancing nations. It is all there. Every ideology that has hit this world has had this fallen constitution at its heart, no matter what it has been.
Do you follow me? I hope I am making myself clear.
You see, God, when He created man, made him a tripartite being. Theodore Austin-Sparks used to always say, “If you do not understand the tripartite nature of the human being, you will be destined to go wrong.”
But when Adam and Eve—listen carefully to me—chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their spirit died. Their soul became the supreme part of their being. Their soul took the dominant place.
I always explain that when our spirits are dead, they are like an electric light bulb that is disconnected from the electricity. It is there, but it is dead; it is inanimate; it cannot give light. Only when the bulb is fixed into the socket does the power go through it; then it gives light.
So it is with the human spirit. It is only when it has been made alive unto God, when you have been born of God, that in your spirit, for the first time, divine light shines—all the ability to begin to understand the things of God, to understand the heart and mind of God, to read, as it were, the Lord Jesus as the alphabet of God.
Otherwise, you are left with your soul. It is all music, whether it is beautiful classical music or jungle music; architecture, magnificent; literature, magnificent. It all comes out of the soul—the ingenuity of fallen man, the creativity of fallen man. It is all there.
I think I have said enough about this problem. Christ crucified is both the power of God and the wisdom of God to answer this problem of the self-life.
When the Lord Jesus died, He did something. He took that constitution of yours and mine and He nailed it to His cross. Christ crucified—not just Christ, Christ crucified—is the power of God for that self-life of yours to be laid down: the divinely given ability to let go of your self-life.
In the Greek word psuchē, we get our English “psychology,” “psychiatry,” everything to do with the psychological. That is the Greek word for the soul. It is much easier to understand it simply as our self-life: our emotions, our will, our reasoning.
When we are not alive to God in our spirit, there is no possibility of God ruling our soul, ruling our emotions, our will, and our reason. I just hope I am making sense.
Christ crucified is God’s answer not only to sin that is blotted out. You and I have been declared righteous, justified in the sight of God the Father through the work of the Lord Jesus on the cross. But we still have a self-life.
In some Christians, that self-life is rampant. It is very much alive, very dominant. It is the problem. Let me explain: it is “I, I, and I.” Simple—just “I.” “I think. I feel. I know. I will.”
And you have someone else saying, “I think, I feel,” and it is not what you feel or think. “I, I, I.” Do you know, in English—forgive me, you dear people from China, India, and elsewhere—for one moment, sin is three letters: S-I-N. Did you get it? S-I—“I” in the centre.
I am in the dominant place. “I” as the beginning and the end. Now, it is entirely possible to make our Christian life literally begin with “I” and end with “I.”
Your Christian life will be a total mess if your self-life is in charge. It will be run by your emotions, by your will, and by your reason, without regard to the Lord. Oh, you will sing hymns about Him. You will sing worship songs about Him. You will study His Bible and His words. You will pray even in His name when you are in trouble.
For you, the Lord is a glorified char lady who cleans up all the messes after you have made them, always available to clean you up and make life a little more comfortable for you.
There is no answer other than Christ crucified—the power of God and the wisdom of God—to your self-life. Let me tell you: it will wreck you. If you are not prepared to really follow the Lord wholeheartedly in this matter, it will wreck you.
It will wreck your family life, because your wife will say, “I,” and you will say, “I,” and the children will say, “I,” and you will all say, “I.” What a mess.
Your business will be wrecked. You may be very wealthy; you may even get to the very top. There was a wonderful hymn: “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.” A marvellous old Welsh hymn.
When Sankey published the first edition of his hymnal, they discovered a dreadful mistake in that famous hymn. It says in the original, “Land me safe on Canaan’s side.” But one single letter was wrong. It said, “Land my safe on Canaan’s side.”
There are many people who have been so successful in business and in their careers, and they would love to land their safe on Canaan’s side. But there is no possibility. You came in naked; you will go out naked. You leave your jewellery, your money, the things before your name, the letters after your name—you leave it all. Even your clothes. Everything you leave.
Do I have to say anything about church life? This self-life is the destroyer of church life. It wrecks it. If you get a whole collection of people saying, “I, I, I, I, and I,” what are you going to do?
There is going to be division, faction, jealousy, rivalry, gossip, backbiting. It all comes from this simple origin.
I remember when I was in Egypt. I went to one mission station manned by three lady missionaries. They had not spoken to one another for three years. They lived in the same small house. They had Muslim servants who all knew that the three missionary ladies never spoke to one another, never prayed together.
It was “I.” You can multiply that a thousand times. It wrecks the work of the Lord, this self-life, when it is left as that fallen self-life.
I said every human being born with this old constitution has an agenda. Now, we always think a lot of that agenda is not wrong: want to get married, want to have children, want to get on, want a good job, want a career. But we have an agenda.
Very often, our understanding of the Lord is that He stands behind our agenda. He supports our agenda. He helps us to forward it. This is not the gospel.
Let me put it another way: until your will is surrendered totally to the Lord Jesus, you will always be in danger.
I preached a few—I think now it must be two years ago—in Melbourne Hall, in Leicester, in England. It was founded by Dr. F. B. Meyer. The place was full, and I spoke on the subject that was given me.
After I finished, the pastor, who had been there thirty-four years, said to me, “Did you realize that you stood in the very place in the pulpit where C. T. Studd spoke the last time he ever spoke in England?”
He was on his way with the Cambridge Seven to China. Then later he went from China to India, and from India to Africa, to the Congo. He never came back to England.
Then the pastor said to me, “Do you know, when he was in the vestry, Dr. F. B. Meyer was so moved by what he had said, he said to him, ‘Tell me, what is the secret of your life and of your ministry?’”
C. T. Studd thought for a moment, and then he said, “I have surrendered my will entirely to the Lord Jesus.”
Now, C. T. may have had many faults, but there was one thing about him. As he lay dying, he said to Norman Grubb, his son-in-law, who wrote his biography, “I have made many mistakes, caused a lot of problems to other Christians, but one thing I can say: of all that the Lord has told me to do, I have done it.”
That was the secret of a life that produced the greatest fellowship of missionary servants of the Lord in the world. He surrendered his will to God.
My understanding—I know it from my own life, my own experience—is that it is the hardest thing in the world to surrender your will. Because your agenda has all to do with your will. You have a will. You feel safer to be in charge of your life, to will your life, than to surrender to Someone else Who will lead you.
Let me go further. In what I am seeking to say, you see, this preparing of the way of the Lord—there is no way that preparing the way for the Lord to return can be accomplished or fulfilled if your self-life and my self-life remain unbroken.
You can talk till kingdom come. You can preach and preach and preach, work your fingers to the bone. But if you are not prepared for that self-life of yours to be dealt with—your sins have been dealt with, but it is your self-life that is the problem.
Let me put it this way: the gospel is not just to do with sins being forgiven. That is tremendous—tremendous—but it is not the whole gospel.
The full gospel is when you allow Christ crucified to deal with your self-life, when you make Him Lord of your life, when you make His will, when you make His agenda, your agenda. Then, and only then, are you in possession of a full gospel.
Our dear brother Stephen spoke, I think this morning, about the passage I read—though I think his was from Matthew, but I am not sure. I know he spoke about the Lord saying to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan.”
I find it very interesting that the Lord Jesus saw the other disciples. Was there shock on their faces? Was there a little bit of jealousy? Was there a little bit of, “That is Peter again, jumping in where angels fear to tread”?
“Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” It was at that point that, for the first time in those years of His ministry, Jesus began to reveal to the disciples that He was going to die and, on the third day, be raised again, and that the leaders of the nation were going to do it.
Then Peter, having made this declaration and feeling very thrilled that Jesus had said, “My Father in heaven has revealed this to you,” said, “Never! I would rather die myself than You go through with this. This is ridiculous.”
Then Jesus looked into his eyes and said, “Get thee behind Me, Satan.”
Now, Stephen put it much more kindly than I am putting it, because he said Jesus was speaking to Satan. He was speaking to Satan, but He was speaking to Satan in Peter.
Oh, some of you Christians say, “Never. That is impossible for Satan to be in me. Never.” But if you have an uncrucified self-life, if your will has never, ever been surrendered to His will and your agenda transformed into His agenda, Satan—the poison of Satan—is in your self-life.
It will wreck your Christian life. It will wreck your service for God. It will wreck the church life. It will wreck your family life. It will wreck and wreck and wreck. It can do no other.
That is why Jesus used this extraordinary expression: “Get behind Me, Satan.” I have said before in other places here in the States, if I were to look into your eyes and say, “Get behind me, Satan,” I think you would make a speedy line to Kenny, or Jerry, or John, or above all to Brother Stephen, and say, “Never ask him back again.”
Do you know what he did? He looked into the man. It was not that He looked around or beyond him. He looked into Peter’s eyes and said, “Get behind Me, Satan.” But, I mean, that is a terrible thing to say to a Christian, to a believer born of the Spirit of God. You cannot say things like that.
Now, if He had only said, “Satan is troubling you, Peter,” I would have understood. It would have been quite nice. What a lovely thing to say, Lord. Thank You. If He had said, “Peter, you are thinking negative thoughts,” that would have been okay.
But that He should have called him Satan—that is unforgivable. But, dear child of God, there is a poison in the self-life, and only Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God, can deal with it.
I keep on saying, I hope you are following me. That is why I find this passage extraordinary. Listen to it. Listen.
When Jesus said that about Satan, He looked to see the other disciples; He saw they were all there. So He was teaching them something. Then, having said that, He saw the multitude and beckoned to them to come. The great multitude pressed in.
Then Jesus said, “If any man would follow Me, let him give up all right to himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever would lose his self-life”—that is the word psuchē again—“for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall find it. And whosoever shall seek to preserve his self-life, he shall lose it.”
In other words, it was the gospel. It was as if Jesus was saying, “I shall die for the sin of the world. I will die for your justification. But if you want to know the power—My power, the power of God—in your Christian life, in your family life, in your business life, in church life, in the work of God, you have to let Me deal with this.”
No one can follow the Lord without giving up right to himself. It is everywhere in the Bible. You cannot get away from it. It is everywhere.
How can I die? How can I die to self? You cannot. That is the simple answer: you cannot. Only through Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God, can you die to self.
Let me put this, I think, in another way. Very often I travel all over the world. I am rather old now; I am feeling it. But I travel all over the world, and everywhere I have gone, all through the years of my ministry, young people have asked me again and again and again one question: “How can I live the Christian life?”
It seems that young people find it impossible to live the Christian life as it is portrayed in the New Testament. “How can I do it? How can I live?” Then some people think, “Well, at least maybe the Holy Spirit will come upon me and give me the power to live the Christian life.”
But I always say to them—I have said it for what must now be forty, fifty, sixty years—this is not the question to ask. “How can I live?” The question you should ask is, “How can I die?”
Once you have the secret of dying with Christ, your Christian life will take care of itself. It is a spontaneous, organic thing. The Christian life is not that you add something to it, and you go to Bible school and add a bit more knowledge, and then you go somewhere else and get a bit more experience.
The Christian life is something that is spontaneous. It is the life of Christ in you. But the thing that hinders that life of Christ in you is yourself—your uncrucified, unbroken self, your will, your agendas. That is the thing. You can start in the Spirit and end in the flesh.
What then can you do? The Christian life will blossom, will grow, will bear fruit, will be fulfilled, once you learn how to die.
Elizabeth Fishbacher said to me years ago, when I asked how first she came into the experience of the Lord that she had, “Well, really,” she said, “it was through Watchman Nee.” She said there was one thing he said that I have never forgotten: “If you can fall into the ground and die, there will be fruit.”
Dear child of God, this matter is quite simple when your eyes have been opened. It is not simple when they have not been opened. When the eyes of your heart have been illumined, when the light of God has shone upon the eyes of your heart, it is so simple.
When Christ died, you died with Him. When Christ was raised from the dead, you were raised with Him.
Let me put it even more simply. The easiest way for me is to take my Bible. This is something that bothered me when I was in London. I said to some of them, “Look, this Bible is Christ. This is you. God placed you in Christ.”
Wherever that Bible goes, you go. The little tag is in the Bible. Now, the history of the tag is the history of the Bible. Wherever the Bible goes, the tag goes with it. God puts you in Christ. When He was crucified, you were crucified.
That is why the Apostle Paul could say in Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me:
and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God,
Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.
Now, did you notice this? This is not morbid holiness—you know, this kind of teaching where you dress in black, look miserable, are always bowed down, and all the rest of it: heaviness. No, listen: “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
“And the life which I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me.” Live, live, life, live—it is all living. Christ liveth in me.
The thing that blocked the Christian life was the “I.” Once we see that old self-life has been crucified with Christ, the way is open. Dear, dear child of God, is that not amazing?
Christ crucified: the power of God and the wisdom of God. Who but God could have thought of a way to handle our self-life? Who but God could have thought of the way by which we are given ability to die daily, to receive within ourselves the sentence of death, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God, Who raiseth the dead?
Dear child of God, there is no way that we can prepare for the coming again of the Lord unless we allow the Lord to have His full way with our lives.
Will you respond in your heart to Him? Shall we pray?
Lord, we all have a problem with this self-life. It rears its head again and again and again. But we thank You for Christ crucified—Your power, Your wisdom.
In the same way that You have dealt with our sin, our iniquity, our transgression, and our alienation from You, so now You deal with this problem of our will and the agendas we have for our lives.
Lord, touch us this evening. May we never be the same again. Open our eyes to see that in Christ we were crucified, and in Him we have been born of the Spirit and raised to fullness of life.
Hear our prayer. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus.