Morning, brothers and sisters.
I have about seven Scriptures I want to read before we begin. I am going to try and go from left to right—one out of order. Starting with Ecclesiastes, probably your favorite book in the Bible.
Ecclesiastes 3:11. Solomon writes:
He hath made every thing beautiful in its time:
also He hath set eternity in their heart.
And then, if we go backwards—the only time we are going backwards—Psalm 8. This is David.
Psalm 8:3-4.
When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers,
The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
And then in the New Testament, Matthew 1.
Matthew 1:1, 16.
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.
And then the Gospel of John, chapter 1.
John 1:4.
In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And then in Romans, chapter 3.
Romans 3:23.
For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.
Then Ephesians, chapter 1.
Ephesians 1:7.
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.
And two more. In Hebrews, chapter 2, verses 9 and 10.
Hebrews 2:9-10.
But we behold Him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God He should taste death for every man.
For it became Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
And the last verse: 1 John 3.
1 John 3:2-3.
Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.
We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is.
And every one that hath this hope set on Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.
Let us pray.
Father, we thank You this morning for the call to us that anyone who thirsts may come to You. He that has no money can come to You to buy and eat. Lord, that is what we want to do this morning.
As we have feasted at Your table, we know our redemption is sure. We come and ask that You would reveal Your Son to us in a way that will draw us even closer to You and help us to be the very ones You want us to be.
Only You can do in us a work that satisfies You. Lord, only You can speak to us in a way that catches our ears and goes beyond our ears into the very depths, the core of our being.
Lord, we humble ourselves before You and ask that You would do this for us because You love us, and because of Your Son, Jesus, who gave up His life for us, whom You raised from the dead.
Lord, we thank You again for Your Word. We ask that You would minister it to us in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I do not understand why you have to have titles for these things, okay? They are always hard for me to do. So I am going to give you a title, but I do not want you to use this title. I will tell you later on. You with me on that?
I was talking with my wife last night about this, and I said, “What do you think about this title for my ministry: The Purpose of Eternal Life as Seen in Jesus Christ?”
That is really spiritual, isn’t it? And that is what my wife said. She goes, “Yeah, that sounds real spiritual, Jim.”
Now, to preface, that is not going to be my title, but it really has something to do with this. I want to tell you why it is not my title.
I was bad in math, okay? I was good in arithmetic. There is a difference between arithmetic and math, right? One has numbers, and one has letters. I am good with the numbers. Letters are for spelling. Letters are for words. Amen, right?
Every January when I was a kid, I would get bronchitis—almost pneumonia. It would cause me to miss a week of school. The only reason I would drag myself to school was because there was a basketball game that night, and you could not play if you did not come to school that day.
At that time, the highest math you took in college prep was algebra and geometry. If you took algebra and geometry, you were on college prep; you did not have to take any more math. I know the rest of you guys who are in high school are going, “Oh, if we had only lived in those days.”
I teach at a math and science high school, and these kids, as sophomores, are taking trigonometry. There was a kid last year, a freshman, taking beginning calculus. Get the guy out of here.
But the thing was, after that week of missing school and coming back into class, it was like they were talking a different language. They were talking about tangents and stuff like that, and you are going, “Where did that come from?” I was lost—just lost.
My C for the first semester always finished up as a D in the second semester because they would give you the homework. I had the same math teacher for two years. He would just give you the homework: “Here is the book. Here are the pages you do. Here is what you read.”
Now, how many of you guys read math books? You know why? Because you do not understand them. Even the examples they give you, you are trying to figure out, “How does this work?” So you just put it away.
The funny part is, I had to teach math one year. I had a class of fifteen junior high kids who got kicked out of the regular classroom, and I got them. I will not tell you why they got kicked out, but I got them—all fifteen of them.
I had to teach fractions. It was like rocket science to these kids. Now, not for me, because I get numbers. I get reciprocals, and I am like, “That is cool. I like numbers.” But I was speaking a different language.
The reason I am saying this is that I think, in our assembly, we have those who have come in who were not there from the start. We have our kids who have been raised up, and we know the language, but we do not understand stuff.
So what I want to do is talk about the eternal purpose of God—not in a way that simplifies things, but just in a different way, that maybe light will come concerning these things.
It is eternal. I think today we have no concept of eternal. A long time—eternal, okay?
We have no concept of eternity because we live in a day in which everything is instant and here. We do not see further down the line, and we do not even realize that, even now, we are living in eternity.
We need to understand that. Eternal life is not something that is by and by—pie in the sky by and by. It is right here and now. What does that mean? What is this purpose? That is what I want to address.
When we were at this conference, Dana Congdon, before one of his messages, talked about the WCCC and the brother who led the high schoolers. I think it was David Peng, who goes to the Alhambra fellowship. I am well acquainted with him, and he has a real heart for young people.
At the end of a conference, they always ask, “What can we do? What should we do?” He said, “We have all these kids. We had 150 high schoolers. They know some stuff, but they do not know. What are we doing for them in our assemblies?”
They are going out to colleges and things like that. They need to have a good foundation. So when we say that the eternal purpose of God is wrapped up in Christ, how many of us know what that means?
Is it just that thing where we say, “Oh yeah, we accept that,” but we really do not know what it means? It is like that word tangent—or was it sine and cosine? I thought you did that with checks. But it was a math term, okay? So I was lost.
I want to begin with the eternal purpose. What is the eternal purpose? What is eternity? Ecclesiastes says that God has placed eternity in our hearts. What does that mean?
We say, as a good evangelistic thing, that we have a God-shaped vacuum in our heart. But I think it is more than just that.
I would like to define that term, “eternity in our heart,” this way: God made man with a purpose in mind. When God created us, He created us with a purpose in mind for us.
Man will never be fulfilled apart from that purpose—from being in that purpose for which he was created. I think that is what it means that we have eternity in our heart.
So we want to know: What is that purpose?
When David asks in Psalm 8, “What is man?” think about the setting in which he wrote that psalm. Many people say he was really young when he wrote it, probably out on the hills as a shepherd, seeing the sky night after night.
When I lived in the Los Angeles area, you did not see a lot of stars because we had so many lights—streetlights here and there. But we used to backpack in the Sierras, which are real mountains. Here in Virginia, we just have hills, okay? But those were real mountains.
One night we were backpacking and had settled down for the night. It was just gorgeous. All the stars—it was like you could see millions of miles into the universe. It was incredible.
Another time we went up there, we were sleeping and were awakened by the brightness of the moon. It was a full moon that night. It was like two o’clock in the morning, and the brightness of the moon woke us up. It was incredible.
As young men in our twenties, we were just astounded by the stars and the moon. You would see shooting stars. The heavens were alive. It was incredible.
I think David, being out as a shepherd, had that type of experience night after night. Instead of just saying, “Oh yeah, it is just the stars,” it filled him with awe and wonder.
When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers,
The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;
What is man?
When God made the heavens and the earth, and He made the stars and the moon, He made them with a purpose in mind. You can find that in Genesis 1:14-15. They are lights for seasons and for direction. Sailors use stars to get direction and things like that.
But God had a purpose for making billions of stars. They all had a purpose. David was saying, “I am looking at these things, and there are so many of them, and they are so great. They all have a purpose. Looking at them, I feel so dwarfed. What is man? What is the purpose for man?”
That is what we want to see: What is the purpose for man? To answer that, we have to look at man as he was intended to be when God created him.
Genesis 1:26 says:
Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.
What does that mean? God is Spirit. How can He make man according to His image? What are You going to make—invisible?
I think it means that man was made in God’s image, and that man had the ability to have communion, or fellowship, with God. When I say communion or fellowship, I mean more than merely being able to communicate.
I can communicate with my dog, okay? My dog can somewhat communicate with me through grunts, squeals, and whines. But there is no fellowship there. I cannot really share what is in the deepest part of my heart with my dog.
The dog is just going to think, “Does that mean you are going to feed me? Are you taking me for a walk?”
God made man so that man could relate with God and relate with one another. That is what fellowship is: we share one another.
Not only was man able to relate to God, but he was also able to convey the image of God to all creation through that communion and fellowship with Him.
G. Campbell Morgan put it this way: being made in the image of God means that we are like His shadow. A shadow does not convey everything about a person, but it can convey something about him.
Creation should be able to see what God is like by looking at man. It can see His shape, so to speak—His movement, how He acts, what is on His heart—through the way man acts and what man does, because man is in fellowship with God and doing the will of God.
Unfortunately, that purpose was lost. It is gone.
Man fell. Man sinned in the garden. He lost all fellowship with God and was cut off from that fellowship. Since he was cut off, he could no longer convey the image of God to creation or to other people. Man was lost as far as the purpose God had for him.
Man was like an arrow that is just slightly bent. If you were in an archery competition and using that arrow, you would never hit the bull’s-eye because that arrow is just slightly off.
That is what sin means: you miss the mark. You miss the mark as far as what you were created for. Your whole being misses the mark of what you were created to do.
Or think of those weird mirrors at a carnival. A guy like me comes out really short and squat, or a guy who is short and squat comes out really long and elongated. Some are wavy.
The whole thing is distorted. The image is not giving what is true. It gives whatever that mirror receives. However that receptacle is, that is how it produces the image. The receptacle is broken.
Man is now left to himself. In looking for God, he creates a god in his own image. Throughout the history of ancient peoples, they are always making gods—making all sorts of gods.
We make gods in our own image. We are not made in His image; we make God in our image. Sometimes that god is cruel, like Moloch. Sometimes those gods, like the Greek and Roman gods, were great-looking gods and goddesses—buffed out, six-pack abs, smart, really smart—but flawed characters.
The beauty and ideals we see in man, we want to project. But we cannot project more than an image that shows forth beauty while the character is flawed. In the flaw of the character, you see man.
Modern man goes back to the Greeks, but he says, “It is not the gods we need to see. We need to see man as he is.” This is where humanism comes up from the time of the Renaissance: the idea that man is something special. And he is. He is the crown of creation.
What makes man special? “Look at the abilities that I have.” Who was the perfect Renaissance man? Leonardo da Vinci. Why was he perfect? He was not a great-looking guy—I have seen his self-portrait—but he was an inventor, a painter, and a scientist. He had all these talents and used them to the full.
Then we say that man is created to glorify God in the talents he has. But when we come into the Age of Enlightenment, reason replaces God. We no longer need God because we can figure things out. We figure out the laws of nature, and we get the idea of deism, where God sets everything in motion. We learn the laws, so God does not need to be around anymore.
In the Renaissance, God is moved to the back seat. In the Enlightenment, we find God is out of the car because we do not need Him anymore—we have reason.
Where has reason led us? Reason has led us to the philosophies of the twentieth century, where we are not created; we are people by chance. Everything has happened by chance.
You could say that we are fatherless now. We are orphans of our own making. Since we are made by chance, for what purpose were we made? Well, there is none. There is no purpose. The only purpose we have is whatever we can make out of our lives.
That is where you get into existentialism and nihilism. The famous existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said, “It is amazing that I just do not commit suicide. That is the only question I cannot answer: Why do I not commit suicide?” Because there is no purpose to life. Why even live? Why not just end this misery now?
Or we can go the opposite way, like the Greeks in that sense, and become like the Epicureans: “Since there is no purpose to life, why does it matter how I live? Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow I am going to die.” So it really does not matter.
We come to the conclusion Solomon came to in Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
Even if I live a good life, a purposeful life in my own eyes, when I die, what happens to what I have done? My son or children, to whom I give all my stuff, might be real dolts, and everything I built up is lost. We can see that in the history of empires and countries, cannot we?
Things do not last forever. We are finding that out even here in our country. Empires do not last forever. They are not eternal. A rude awakening, would you say?
Even with God’s help, man still gives a distorted image of Him. For example, the Jews were given a law. Through this law, they were to be made different from all other peoples.
It gave them what we teach in our schools: Judaism is ethical monotheism. It is not just that we believe in one God; it is that God has commanded us to be ethical, moral people. He has given us these commands.
These commands were to show that we are a different people. But instead of using them to show forth, “This is what God is like,” we use them to create our own righteousness—an outward righteousness.
When Jesus came and ministered on the earth, His biggest complaint was this: “You are whitewashed on the outside, but on the inside you are filthy.” You are still giving a distorted image of God.
You are giving an idea of what righteousness is, but you will not submit yourself to the righteousness of God. That is what it says in Romans 10.
Today, I wonder how many Christians—even here, though I know they have heard it—know that God has an eternal purpose.
Most of us as Christians, and even I growing up as a Christian, heard the Campus Crusade message: “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” That is true, but it individualizes everything, does it not?
You do not see the plan for man. We see it as a plan for my individual life. It is like getting a retirement plan with my 401(k): they have a plan for my life—how much money I am going to have. It is all planned out so I can plan out my retirement.
For most Christians, our view of God’s purpose has been reduced to a purpose for our individual lives. Mostly we see God’s purpose for us as our worldly vocation, sanctified by our being Christians. That is God’s purpose.
I am saying that we err in that way, because none of us are looking at what the purpose is for all of mankind, and then asking, “How do I fit into it?” We have lost that. We have lost that eternity in our heart.
We are looking for something that satisfies us in this world: “I am in God’s will because I am in this job, and my sins are forgiven.”
There is an eternal purpose of God for mankind and for all creation. This purpose is not only an individual matter; it is a purpose for all mankind.
What is man? What is this purpose that God has for man? Where do we find it? Man has fallen. Where do we look to see what God meant for man?
The answer is wrapped up in Christ, right? That is the key phrase. We all know that. “Oh, it is wrapped up in Christ.” But the question we have to ask is: What does that mean?
The beginning of our knowing the eternal purpose of God for man is answered in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Let us be very specific. The gospel begins with a man. That is why you read Matthew. What does it start with? It starts with a man.
Matthew is the first Gospel in the canon. It was not the first written—Mark was the first written—but when they put the canon together, they put Matthew first. Matthew starts out: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ.”
It begins with a man: Jesus, who is called Christ. It puts the title aside for the time being and says, “Look at the man.”
The eternal purpose of God for man begins with us seeing this Jesus as a man. In seeing this, it unlocks the purpose of God.
There is my title, Jack: Eternity in our hearts is recovered by Jesus Christ.
When we look at Jesus, we see first of all that He was born of man. His mother, Mary, was a virgin, but she was a human being. He was born for men, in the sense that His purpose was to redeem them.
He knew the life that every man knows, except for sin. I am not talking about some mental knowledge. I mean experientially. He experienced the life that all men live, except for sin.
We say, “Oh yeah, He hungered and He was weary.” Those are things about man that we all have in common. But let us go a little deeper than that.
He knew what it was like to be a child and to be under the authority of parents. He knew what it was like to have a job and to have to learn a skill.
You may say, “Wait a minute, isn’t He God?” Yes, He is God. He never laid aside His deity, but He did lay aside some of the attributes so that He could have that experience of man—attributes like omniscience, knowing everything, and omnipresence.
He took the form of man, so He could not be everywhere as God is. He did not use power any way He wanted to, at any time He wanted to. He was totally man in this way.
He knew sorrow.
I fear to say this because I know some of you are experiencing these things right now. But I want you to know that Christ, as man, experienced these things too.
As a Catholic, we called Saint Joseph, Jesus’ foster father, the patron saint of foster fathers. Do you think Jesus had a good relationship with him? I bet He had a great relationship with him. But Joseph died.
Jesus experienced the sorrow of having His earthly father die. He was not immune from it. He was allowed to go through these things.
When His foster father Joseph died, who was responsible for the family? The oldest Son. Jesus knew the responsibility of providing for a family.
Everything that is common to man, except for sin—even temptation—Jesus knew by experience. He was a man in every way like that. But He was also a man like no other man who ever lived.
When you look at Jesus’ temptations in Matthew 4, Luke 4, and Mark 1—boy, you guys are listening too slow. Speed it up. No, the teachers are ready to get to 12:45, so you have to get those people eating.
When Satan said, “Turn these stones into bread,” we find out that this Man was not driven by need.
How many of us are driven by need? Why do you have a job? I am driven by need.
Jesus was not driven by need. “Your friend Lazarus is sick.” He waited three days. He was not driven by the physical need of His friend. Physical need was not His top priority. Even emotional need was not His top priority.
His priority was to do the will of God. Different than any other man. What other man drops all those priorities to a level below?
That is why He could say with authority in His teaching, “Do not be anxious about what you shall eat or what you shall drink. Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of these things. Consider the lilies. Consider the birds of the air.”
Your heavenly Father clothes them and feeds them. How much more are you? Since you know this, you are free to seek first the kingdom of God.
When Satan tempted Him to throw Himself down from the top of the temple, it showed that there was no doubt in Him of His Father’s love. He did not have to make God prove His love for Him.
He was totally confident and secure in God’s love, purpose, and plan for Him. He knew there was no evil in that plan. He knew there was no harm in going and doing that will.
He was always saying, “My time is not yet.” All these people were coming out against Him, but it was not His time yet. He was confident in who His heavenly Father was.
Man, in his reason, has become an orphan. Jesus was never an orphan. He knew His heavenly Father, and He knew His heavenly Father would provide Him all that He needed. He could live in complete confidence of that.
He was a Man completely confident that the purpose God had for Him was good, acceptable, and perfect.
Then Satan said, “Bow down and worship.” What does that mean? Jesus was shown all these things. Here was a Man who knew worship and knew to whom worship belonged.
The world did not have a hook in Him. There was nothing that could hook into Him and say, “Turn this way.”
His life did not have a selling point, so to speak. We have a selling point: “Well, how much will you give me? You want that? How much is it worth to you to give me that?” We are like that.
But this Man had no selling point. In John 14:30, He said that the prince of the world was coming, “and he hath nothing in Me.” In other words, there was no place for him to hook onto Him.
He knew to whom worship was due. He was not a worshiper of God and Mammon. There were no halves in Him. He was completely given up to worship God.
He was a Man without sin. When I say He was a Man without sin, I do not just want to concentrate on the idea that He did not sin or could not sin.
He was sinless. But by sinless, I am not saying merely that He was innocent. I mean that He took that sinless purity of being into the fires of testing, and it proved Him to be holy. It proved Him to be holy.
He was different than any other man. He was holy. He was man as God had meant man to be—free from sin.
When God created man, He created him without sin. He was meant to be without sin. By “without sin,” I mean that he was free from the nature that sins and free from the nature that sin is able to master.
It is in this way that His life is the light of men. In this Man, Jesus Christ, men can see man as God intended him to be. That is important.
Not only that, but as man, we also need to realize that He was born of God. Luke 1 speaks of the birth of Jesus. Mary said, “I have never known a man. How can this be?”
The Holy Spirit would overshadow her, and the power of the Most High would overshadow her, and she would be found with child. That is why He was born without sin.
He was also born unto God—a Son. Every first son, according to Jewish religion, was to be dedicated and given back to God. He was dedicated on the eighth day, as all Jewish boys were supposed to be.
The first son belonged to God. Therefore, as a Son, He became aware of who His Father was, and He knew that He must be about His Father’s business.
Hebrews 10:5-7 says:
Lo, I am come
(In the roll of the book it is written of Me)
To do Thy will, O God.
This is His purpose: “I have come to do Your will.” It is taken from Psalm 40:8, where it says:
I delight to do Thy will, O my God.
He was the One who presented Himself as a living sacrifice unto God. In presenting Himself to God and being about His business, He found the will of God, as Romans 12:2 tells us, to be good, acceptable, and perfect.
This shows us man as he was meant to be. Man was meant to be pleasing to God.
We know Jesus was pleasing to God because there are at least two times in Scripture—Matthew 3, at His baptism, and Matthew 17, at the transfiguration—where God spoke from heaven, saying:
This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
What pleased Him? He did His will.
In this way, His life is a light to men. Men can now see that God intended men to be pleasing to Him.
Because this Man, Jesus, was without sin and was obedient as a Son, man could now see what God was like. He was in the image of God.
From His fellowship with the Father, man could see: “I only do the things the Father shows Me. I only speak the words the Father gives Me.” All of a sudden, we move from seeing a perfect man to seeing what God is like because He is a perfect Man.
Jesus is that shadow man was meant to be. In Jesus Christ, you see the nature of God in all that He did.
When you are reading Matthew or the other Gospels, take note when you see Jesus doing something. In Him doing those things, you see God’s nature. You see God’s desire, because it is able to be revealed.
We beheld Him, and we behold Him, and we see His glory.
In seeing this Man Jesus, man can also see what man should be like. In seeing what man should be like, men see that they fall short of the glory of God.
His life is the light of men because it shows us that we fall short of that glory. What is that glory? What is the glory that we fall short of?
When I was a young Christian, I thought that falling short of the glory of God meant we did not shine like Him. What does that mean—no halo or something like that?
What it means is that God was meant to be satisfied with man. That is the glory of man: that God is satisfied with him. Man has fallen short of that glory.
Man sees that the way he is in his fallen condition is just not satisfying to God. He falls short of what God meant him to be.
In seeing Jesus as man, we see that we are poor in spirit, lacking righteousness. We are stripped down to our bare need. We see that we are poor, blind, wretched, and naked.
Hopefully, in seeing that, we are undone. We see that we need to be redeemed. We need to be brought back to that place of fulfilling the purpose God had for man: to have fellowship with Him and to be able to convey His image.
Man, as fallen, can never be what he was meant to be. But is it not interesting that this life we see in Christ was not a turnoff?
When you look at the Gospels and the people coming to Jesus, this life, even though it exposed who we are, did not repel men. Men were drawn to Him.
Jesus Himself did not draw back from sinners. He said just the opposite: “Come unto Me.”
How can they be redeemed? Is that not what Nicodemus said, really? Jesus said, “You must be born again.” What is He saying? You have to be redeemed.
Nicodemus’ answer was, “I am old. How can that ever happen to me?” I am lost.
In this Man, Jesus, God now has a vessel able to redeem us and recover us by payment. He is a perfect life—spotless, blameless—able to be presented to God as an offering for me and for all mankind, able to redeem us and recover us.
This is really the title of the message: We have redemption in Jesus Christ.
Man is brought back to the place where God wants him. Eternity in our heart has been recovered by Jesus Christ.
When I say He is able to redeem and recover us, I mean that we do not remain the same. Once we are saved, once we say, “I accept Your sacrifice for my sin,” that is not all. It is not just that the penalty is covered.
In 1 Peter 1:18, it says that He redeemed us from our fruitless way of life. He recovered us from a fruitless way of life.
The life we would have continued to live would never take us to meet the mark of God’s satisfaction—the glory we forfeited because we cannot satisfy God. But He has recovered us from this fruitless way of life.
This is not the total of the offering. He offered His perfect humanity as an offering for sin so that He might take up that life again in His resurrection and impart that life to all who are born again through faith in Him.
That is His mission as man: to redeem mankind.
He has come to bring many sons to glory. By glory, I mean that glory which all men fall short of. He has come to bring us into that glory, where we can satisfy God and portray who He is.
Romans 8:29 says that this life is imparted to us so that we might be conformed to His image. The humanity Christ lived is to become the humanity we live, conformed to that humanity through His working in us.
That is another story. We will touch that at some other time. The result is this: because of this Man, Jesus, who is called Christ, man is now brought into God’s eternal purpose again.
We have been born again to a living hope. This is 1 Peter 1:3. We have been born again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because now that life can be imparted to us.
He becomes the Author of our faith—the beginning of our faith and of our being brought into the eternal purpose of God.
As a result, we have been born into this new hope. What is this hope? That we would be like Him.
How many of us, in the depth of our heart, read the Scriptures and say, “Why cannot I be like Him? Oh, how I long to be like Him. If I could just have a humanity like that.”
Brothers and sisters, that is our hope. We have been brought into this hope, that we might be clothed with this very humanity—this new Man whom God has given us: Jesus Christ.
This is full redemption. Full redemption is not merely having the penalty for our sin annulled. It is being brought back into the eternal purpose of God—to be exactly what God created us to be.
Once again, we can have fellowship with Him and, out of that fellowship, convey who He is to others.
That is the beginning of the eternal purpose. When we say that it is all wrapped up in Christ, we have to see that Christ was human. He was a man as well as God.
We have to see Him as man redeeming us and as God redeeming us. We have to see both things.
I want to end as a prayer by reading a hymn.
I want to be like the blessed Redeemer,
This is my constant longing and prayer;
Gladly I’ll forfeit all of earth’s treasures,
Jesus, Thy perfect likeness to wear.O to be like Thee, O to be like Thee,
Blessed Redeemer, pure as Thou art;
Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness;
Stamp Thine own image deep on my heart.O to be like Thee, full of compassion,
Loving, forgiving, tender and kind,
Helping the helpless, cheering the fainting,
Seeking the wandering sinners to find.O to be like Thee, lowly in spirit,
Holy and harmless, patient and brave,
Meekly enduring cruel reproaches,
Willing to suffer others to save.O to be like Thee, Lord, I am coming,
Now to receive the anointing divine;
All that I am and have I am bringing,
Lord, from this moment all shall be Thine.O to be like Thee, while I am pleading,
Pour out Thy Spirit, fill with Thy love;
Make me a temple meet for Thy dwelling,
Fit me for life in heaven above.O to be like Thee, O to be like Thee,
Blessed Redeemer, pure as Thou art;
Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness;
Stamp Thine own image deep on my heart.
May God bless His Word.