He has risen. Praise the Lord, huh? Amen. Praise the Lord.
Let’s read just a couple of verses, please, both in the New Testament.
In Revelation Chapter 1, I want to read it just for this phrase: Revelation Chapter 1 and Verse 9.
I John, both your brother and companion in tribulation and kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was on the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.
I want to just key on the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Then I’d like to go to 2 Corinthians, Chapter 2, starting with Verse 14.
Now thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ,
and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place.
For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.
To the one, we are the aroma of death leading to death,
and to the other, the aroma of life leading to life.
And who is sufficient for these things?
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, as we come to You this morning, we want to thank You for giving us the Savior, Your Son Jesus Christ. We stand here today—we are gathered here today—because of that. We gather around Him who saved us and has brought us to You blameless and without reproach because of what He has done.
We worship You, O God. As we come to You, Lord, we are asking that You reveal Jesus Christ to us. Reveal Him through Your Word and by Your Holy Spirit. We are asking for this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I gave the little title—which I really don’t like to give titles, but we have to, or Jack gives one. I gave him the title, and he goes, “Hey, you spoke on something like that fifteen years ago.” So I hope you guys don’t remember. Now, I don’t even remember.
But this morning, my heart is to talk about testimony. The last time I spoke, I think it was in November, I spoke about the Lord wanting a testimony in us. I looked in my notes, because I did have those. It wasn’t fifteen years ago.
The idea of the testimony is that the testimony the Lord is portraying through us is that Jesus Christ is our Savior and that Jesus Christ is Lord.
But I’m still stuck on this idea of testimony. What is the testimony?
For those of you who are my age, you remember what testimony meant. “Go up and give your testimony.” It was to tell how you got saved. A lot of times, it turned out to be telling how bad you were, and Christ saved you. Sometimes it became contests. But that was the idea of testimony: to say, “This is what I was, and Christ saved me.”
What testimony really means is this: if you are brought to court and you are asked to testify, you are asked to tell the truth. That is testimony. Testimony is the truth.
The thing that has caught my heart—or caught my mind—is this: What is the testimony of Jesus? I’m not talking about it in terms of where John said, “I was imprisoned for the testimony of Jesus,” because I think that is another thing: Jesus being Lord.
But what I want to look at this morning is: What was the testimony of Jesus when He lived on earth? What was the testimony? What did other men see? What was the truth that was in the life of Jesus, our Lord, Jesus the Christ, when He was on the earth?
What was real about Him to men who saw Him when He walked the earth? I’m not trying to delete His deity, because a lot of men were not considering that they were seeing deity. But they did see a man. Whether they saw the fullness of deity or not, they saw a man.
What did His humanity testify to them? I think that is important, because He is the new man. His humanity should testify to all those around Him about what man should be.
Our testimony should be the same, because we are a new creation. We are new creatures in Christ, and Christ is in us. So the testimony that He had when He dwelt among men here on earth should be our testimony as we dwell here on earth.
What I want to say is that there are a few things—and I think I’ve gotten twenty-two times to do this. Mac Berman said that lunch might be light, so I have as much time as I want. Okay?
This week, I want to look at three things, and next week I really want to look at one. What did man see in Jesus? You can see the same thing when you read the Gospels, if you behold the man—if you look at the man.
Like I said, we are not looking at His deity, because our testimony is not that we are deity. We are not. We are sinners saved by grace. We do not have a testimony like that.
We may not have the works that He had—the healings—or we may not have the teaching that He had or carry the authority that He had. But we do have the humanity that He has, because we are new creatures. We are created in Christ Jesus, new creatures, and we carry that new nature.
That new nature, I believe, was presented to mankind when Jesus walked on the earth. He was like no other man. No other man was like Him. In what ways was no other man like Him?
Well, I chose three. I have to give credit to Lenny Amato. When I was going to speak, I think, on the house of God, he said, “Jimmy, you need to read this.” I did not read it at that time. I wish I would have.
It came from The Golden Candlestick. It was two articles by T. Austin-Sparks, and it was called A Way. In it, T. Austin-Sparks brought us to look at Jesus in a way that I had never really thought of before. It was just wonderful to me to behold Christ like that.
I was caught by that, and this is where part of this comes from. What was the Lord Jesus like to man?
First of all, as a man, He was a man who was at rest. You never think about that, but He was a man who was at rest.
Now, what does that mean? Rest does not mean He was sleeping. It does not mean He was not working, because the Lord Jesus was always at work. But rest can be synonymous with peace. He was at peace. He was at rest.
Why did He have this rest? I think there are three things we want to key on. First of all, He had the rest of sinlessness. Being sinless, He had that rest.
What that rest says is that there was an unbroken friendship with God. Because He was sinless, it was unbroken. To put it another way, there was no enmity between Him and God. There was no friction between Him and God. He was at peace. He was at rest with God and with creation.
The second thing: He had the rest, the peace, of a right relationship. We may not know the rest of sinlessness, but we do know the rest of right relationships because we know it within our own households.
When our relationships are right with those in our own household, we know rest. When we know right relationship between brothers and sisters in Christ, we know rest. When we have right relationships with the people we work with and in the world, we know rest.
But the rest of His relationship was this: He took the form of man. Philippians Chapter 2, beginning with Verse 5, says:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
who, being in the form of God,
did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,
but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant,
and coming in the likeness of men.
And being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.
In other words, when He became man, He took that place of man in relationship to God. Even though He was one with God, He took the place of man. In that, He took the right relationship that man had to God.
Because He took that right relationship and knew that right relationship, He was at rest. He did not abandon that relationship, grasping at something else for Himself, like Adam did. But He submitted to it.
He took that form of man and the relationship—the place of that relationship—that man should have to God. Because He took that relationship and took it in the right way, He had rest: rest with God.
Then He had the rest of absolute trust that comes from that relationship. When you come into that relationship and let God be God, it puts you in a place where you absolutely trust Him.
When you have absolute trust in someone, you have rest. You are not thinking, “Oh, what if He does not do what He is supposed to do?” Nothing like that.
He had that absolute trust. As a man, as a new man, He knew God as His Father. He told us that this is how we should approach Him.
Look at the Sermon on the Mount. How many times does He give to God the name Father? “Go into your closet and pray; your Father who sees in secret.” “When you give alms, do not let your left hand know; your Father sees it.” “Your Father knows that you have need of these things.” When you pray, pray, “Father.”
The relationship that He had was this relationship of Father and Son. What is a father? In God’s perfect will, in God’s perfect economy, a father is a provider. A father provides for all his household.
A father is a protector. He protects his household. He protects those that he loves. The father is reliable and trustworthy. You can trust in him to provide for your needs. You can trust in him to protect you.
It is a wonderful picture when you watch little children, because this is the exact picture the Lord wants us to have. A little child really has an undying, unwavering trust in their father. Father can do no wrong. Their father is the greatest thing there is. He protects me, and he gives me the things that I need.
He provides for me. I am clothed. I have a place to live. Therefore, because I can rest in that, I can go on to think of other things because I am not worried. I am not worried at all about not being provided for and not being cared for.
What did Jesus say? Look at the lilies of the field. They do not toil or spin, but God provides for them. What about the birds of the air? They do not sow or reap, but God provides. How much more for us to be in that place?
So He was at rest. In other words, because He was in this relationship, He had no anxiety.
When I read that from Sparks, I was floored. Here is a man who was anxious for nothing. Think about the things that He said: “Foxes have their holes. Birds have their nests. But Me, I have nowhere to lay My head.”
What about the time Herod was after Him? You would make a big thing: “Oh, my God, Herod is after me. What am I going to do?” You did not see that in Christ. There was no anxiety.
If you read the Gospel of John, you are always hearing this: “My time is not yet.” He knew that His Father was with Him. He knew His Father would not let anything happen to Him until the time was supposed to be. So He was totally at rest.
What man is ever totally at rest? But Christ was. He was so at rest that, in that storm out on the Sea of Galilee, He was sleeping.
The disciples had to wake Him. Even when they woke Him, they were very anxious: “Do You not care that we are perishing?” Jesus did not say, “Okay, let’s take the buckets.” He just stood up and said, “O you of little faith.”
Faith in what? Faith in whom? He said, “Be quiet,” and things came to rest.
Men saw in Jesus a man who was at rest. That is amazing. It is an amazing thing.
Secondly, when they saw Jesus, He was a man who walked not in darkness. I could have said, “walked in light,” but I wanted to say, “walked not in darkness,” because I want to look at the negative first.
He walked not in darkness. What does that mean? He was not like man in his fallen state, or his darkened state.
If you look at some of the verses that talk about the state of man, Ephesians 4:18 talks about the Gentiles and says, “Do not be like the Gentiles, who, being darkened in their understanding, are separated from the life of God.”
They are darkened in their understanding. When something is dark, you cannot see. You cannot see what is real. In darkness, you cannot see what is real. That is why it is scary in the darkness. You hear noises. You do not know what is real. You do not know what is out there. Light dispels that.
Then we might say, “Let’s talk about the Gentiles. What about the Jews?” In Romans 10:2-3, it speaks of the Jews not knowing the righteousness of God. Not knowing. They were in darkness about the righteousness of God. Therefore, they were trying to establish their own righteousness, thinking that it was sufficient for God.
So, in that sense, they were in darkness. Even though they had the law and the oracles of God, they were darkened in their minds and in their hearts.
Last, when it comes to all humanity, Romans 1:20 speaks of all mankind. It talks about those who are futile in their thoughts and darkened in their hearts. Futile in their thoughts—in other words, their thoughts cannot find what is true. They cannot find the truth.
Darkened in their hearts—if their minds are futile, how much more is the core of their very being dark? “If the eye that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness?”
But Jesus, our Lord Jesus, was a man who walked not in darkness. He did not walk in a darkened state. He walked in light.
What I mean by that is this: He walked in the light of who God is. How did He do that? He walked in the light of who God is as the Scriptures revealed God.
We think, and I deal with kids a lot, that because Jesus is God, He did not have to go through the things that we did as man. He did.
It is like we think that, in grade school, He had the whole Bible memorized because, after all, did He not write it? No. Just like us, He came to know. He had to be given light through the Scriptures.
So He was a man who walked not in darkness because He had the light of who God was as revealed in the Scriptures.
He walked in the light of eternity. In other words, He was able to see the eternal nature of things, to discern between the eternal and what is temporal. So He was able to walk in the light of eternity.
He was also able to walk in the light of who He was—as a man. He was here to do the will of God.
You can find that in Hebrews Chapter 10, where it quotes Psalm 40:6-8:
Behold, it is written of Me in the volume of the book,
I am come to do Thy will, O God.
In the light of who He was, remember when He was twelve? It was shown that He had begun to realize who He was and what He had come for. In Luke Chapter 2, He came to this realization: “I must be about My Father’s business.”
I must be involved in the purpose of God—the purpose which is eternal. So He had this light. He was aware of this, and He walked in the light. He walked in the light of God—who God is. He walked in the light of eternity, and He walked in the light of knowing who He was.
His walking in the light, and the light that was given to Him by God as a man, translated into holiness. When we think of holiness, sometimes we mix it up with righteousness. I am not talking about that. I am talking about holiness.
Holiness has to do with being separated—separation unto purpose. I remember, for example, when I was in high school and my goal was to be a player in the NBA, I separated myself to that purpose.
My eye was single. I did not think about other things that other people were thinking about. Because of that, I was different. I did not imbibe in a lot of things other people were doing at that time.
He was holy. What does holy mean? We said separate, but I want to do a little play on words. We look at holy, spelled H-O-L-Y, right? Now, you English teachers are going to have to help me here.
He was holy, but being holy—H-O-L-Y—means this: He was wholly—W-H-O-L-L-Y—given to the task that was before Him. That is why I teach history, not English.
He was wholly given to the purpose of God, the eternal purpose. In other words, He could not be held by this world, nor was He holding on to this world. He was not held by or holding on to the values of this world, nor was He holding on to or being held by the power of this world.
Like no other man in history, there is no other man like this. Because, having seen the eternal, He wholly gave Himself to God that it would be accomplished—wholly.
Third, He was a man who held communion with God. That is a weird way of saying it—not merely that He had communion, but that He held communion with God.
We can look at it this way: you business people hold a meeting, right? But it is even more than just gathering together for a meeting. It is holding communion.
In Mark 1:35, after Jesus had started His earthly ministry—after He had come out of the wilderness and gone through the test of the wilderness—Mark Chapter 1 is full of the beginning of His ministry. There are healings. He visits Peter’s house. People are being brought to Him.
After this big day of activity, Verse 35 says:
Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight,
He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed.
That is the beginning of communion. First, it says that He went out to a solitary place. He kept the morning watch.
What—or for whom—was He watching? He was watching for the Lord, His Father, God. He was watching for Him. He went to a solitary place. He got by Himself.
What I mean by “held communion” is that what became real in that time of morning watch came out later in the day. He could say, “I do what I see the Father do. I speak what the Father has taught Me.”
Where did the Father teach Him? He taught Him in this place of communion. He held that. In other words, He did not let it go.
It was not like, “Okay, Lord, I have had my time here. Now I am going out and doing stuff.” No. His communion with God continued throughout the whole day. He held communion.
Even though all these things might be happening, He held communion. Think about it. When the woman came up from behind and touched His garment, how did He know? He was being thronged all over.
I think it was because He was in communion with God, and God was doing something through Him. He knew. He held that communion. He had that communion still in His heart, even though He had to go through a day like we do.
He went through His day doing what He had to do, doing what He was supposed to do. Yet He still had that touch with God that was not ripped away from Him because of the day. Through the day, that communion with God was not let go of, like sometimes we do. We have had our time, and we let it go.
John 7:15 says that when the Pharisees and the Jews were talking about Jesus’ teaching, they were amazed at His teaching. They said, “How does this Man know letters, having never studied?”
What they meant was, “How has He never been to a rabbinical school?” Or, “He has never been to a seminary,” as we would call it today. “He has never had any formal training. How does He have letters? Where did He get this teaching from?”
It was from His communion—communion with His Father. Out of His communion came His ministry.
In these three ways, this is where I am going to stop as far as the testimony of Jesus. As a man, men saw that He was a man at rest; that He was a man who walked not in darkness; and that He was a man who held communion with God.
This was something sensed about Him. They say that a dog can sense fear. Dogs cannot sense fear—they can see it in your eyes. That is how they sense fear. Now, they smell fear, you know; dogs smell. Fair enough. But they see it in your eyes.
You could sense, when you saw Jesus, that He was at rest. You could sense that He walked not in darkness. You could sense that He held communion with God. There was that sense. There was something different about Him.
He was holy—different. He was that gray-speckled bird. He was not like the rest of them.
This testimony of Jesus is to be our testimony. Now, do not think that I am going to say, “Okay, this is how you do it,” and give you these things, or that now you have to work it up. You are going to get all upset because you say, “Well, how can I be like Jesus?” and things of that nature.
Everything is provided for in our testimony. Our testimony—the reality of our life—is to God, to the brothers and sisters in the assembly, and to the world.
What the world needs to see, what God wants to see, and what the church needs to see is reality. Not facades; nothing else but reality. Because that is testimony. Testimony is reality. It is true.
We are to be those at rest. He provides for that rest. You might say, “Now wait, Tim. We are not sinless. We are all sinners.” That is true. We are.
We may not know the rest of sinlessness, but we should be knowing and experiencing the rest of sins forgiven. All of us should be knowing and experiencing that.
Through the cross of Calvary, we have been given forgiveness of sins. Psalm 32 says, “How happy is the man whose sins are forgiven.” I do not have “blessed,” but blessed is translated “happy.” I am looking for happy faces.
Not a put-on happy thing, you know. Nobody is smiling. Okay.
But we do have His rest. If you remember John Chapter 14, when He was with the disciples in the upper room before He went to the Garden of Gethsemane, He said to them, “My peace—My rest—I give to you. My rest I give to you.”
That is a wonderful thing, because His rest is the rest of sinlessness. Because of His work on the cross, we can have that rest. Because we have been made new creatures, our sins are taken away.
I am not saying we have a sinless humanity. We will when the Lord comes back. But we can know the rest that Christ has because He gives us His rest.
We have the rest of having no enmity between us and God. God is not angry with us anymore. Not only that, we are not enemies. Our nature is not enmity toward God because we have a new nature.
He has given us this rest that we can count on, that we are to walk in. We are to walk in this rest—not as if we had it, but because we have it. We always want to say, “As if we had it.” No, we have it. It has been given to us in Christ.
We have also been brought back into relationship. We have been restored to a relationship. We have the rest of having a heavenly Father. We have been brought into this relationship by being in Christ. We are born again into this relationship with our heavenly Father.
It is not just that we have rest because our sins are forgiven. It is also rest because we have a Father. We are not orphans. We are not on our own. We have One who will provide our needs.
The Father provides my needs, not my wants. My needs. Our needs are very few. Does anybody know what our human needs are? Food, shelter, clothing, and the need to be loved. All of those are provided for us. The Lord provides all our needs.
Now, just because we may be in need and waiting for the Lord to do things does not mean that the Lord is not providing our needs. Because He is our Father, it does not mean that He shelters us from the things life brings into our path.
But it does mean that in those times, He provides for us the things we need. It is a big difference. We want to be sheltered from those things.
If you read Psalm 23, is it not interesting? You have the Shepherd leading us beside still waters and into green pastures, and it is so idyllic. Then you get to the place where it says, “Even though I go through the valley of the shadow of death.” Who threw that one in there?
That is part of life, is it not? But the thing is, the Shepherd is with the sheep.
Thy rod and Thy staff,
they comfort me.
I am comforted by the fact that One is with me, and that One will provide for me.
I think of Mimosa. It is my favorite book. You look at her life, and you look at all the things she went through. She was not sheltered from anything, any of the sorrows that life brings. Yet every time, she had a heavenly Father, because she went every time to her little closet, put her sorrow out, and prayed to her Father.
Her Father answered her. It might not have been in the way she thought she should be answered, but the thing was, He answered and He provided for her every step of the way. Every step. She was at rest.
I just want to bring this up because a lot of times we say, “Well, I do not know about getting rest in these times of need.” My youngest daughter is here. I remember when she was born. It was a hard thing because she did not come home for about five weeks. She was in ICU and things like that.
I remember, I was a basket case. But my wife was at peace.
When we talked about it, I was worried that bad things were going to happen. Barb said, “The Lord just came and let me know that everything is going to be okay. It is in My hands.” She was at rest.
Even though you look at the circumstances, who would be at rest? I was not at rest. My wife was. That is what I am talking about.
God will take care of our needs, even though we cannot see a way through it. We go to the Father. We say, “Father, I am in need.” Not, “These are the things I want.” “I am in need.”
We cast all our cares upon Him. Why? Because He cares for us. That is what it says in 1 Peter: “Cast all your cares on Him, for He cares for you.” What rest! That is the rest that is ours to have.
Secondly, we are those who walk not in darkness. We have been provided with light.
How? First of all, we have been given the Scriptures as light to us. We have been given things that make for light. But we are not just left to the Scriptures in our minds, even though our minds are to be engaged when we read the Scriptures. Do you understand that? Our minds are engaged when we read.
But light also comes by way of the Holy Spirit. He has given us a Paraclete, One who comes alongside, One who opens the Scriptures to us.
Remember the Ethiopian eunuch? He was reading Isaiah, and he said, “I do not know. What does this mean?” What happened? The Lord provided a paraclete. Philip came down and explained the Word, opened the Word to him.
The Lord has not left us in darkness to think of who He is like the blind men trying to find out what an elephant is. “Oh no, he is a rope.” “No, he is ear flaps.” “I do not know, he is leather.”
No, He has given us the Holy Spirit to reveal Himself. He reveals Himself through His Word. I am not saying that it is always through the Word, because Mimosa, for example, was illiterate.
But you have the Holy Spirit. God did not leave her alone. He did not leave her as an orphan. He provided her with what she needed.
When we walk in the light, we are to walk in the light God gives us—the light of eternity and the light of the eternal. The light of the eternal and eternity should far outshine the light of the temporal.
The temporal is nothing compared to eternity. The thing is, we are so caught in the temporal that we cannot raise our heads to see eternity.
It is like how many of you got up this morning and had pollen on your windshield? How many of you put on the windshield wipers and put the little squirter on? That made it clearer, did it not?
It is not man’s ingenuity. God gives us what we need, and we walk in the light. We walk in the eternal to understand.
We have been given the ability to understand that we have been called into the purpose of God. When I say that, we are not called into the purpose of God for me.
We have this tendency to always put ourselves at the center of things. It is even like Campus Crusade: “God has a wonderful plan for you,” right? There is truth in that, but it is not centered around us.
God has a wonderful plan, and we are called into that plan. It is not, “This is a plan for me.” It is His plan. Do you understand what I am saying? It is God’s purpose. It is what God is doing that we have been called into.
Where are we? Well, we are in the plan. We have been called into that plan. But we are not the center. It is not the purpose for me. It is not about me, and it is not for me. It is about God, and it is for God.
Seeing this and becoming aware of this, it is for me, then, to give myself wholly to God, that His will may be done on earth—not just in my life, but on earth.
How much bigger it is. How much bigger things are in the eternal.
Did anybody go out to look at the red moon? Did you see it? Cloudy, was it not? Oh, you saw it? Sort of. I saw one once in nineteen-eighty-something-or-other. It was really cool.
When you go outside—even if you are in the mountains—or even tonight, you look up into the heavens and see some stars. You say, “Oh, this is just big.” Well, get a Hubble telescope. Have you ever checked Google Images, just pictures from the Hubble Telescope? How much bigger? How much bigger?
Just for us, too: how much bigger it is once we get past the brightness of ourselves and into what God has called us to—what God’s purpose is.
Last, we are to be those who hold communion. Hold communion.
God says to us in Revelation, to the church of Philadelphia, “Behold, I set before you an open door, which no man can shut.” We have an open door for communion, which no man can shut.
Even though no heavenly power can shut it, the door is open. It has been opened by Christ. “I hold the keys. I open the door. I rent the veil.”
But the thing is, do we want to go in? That is the whole question, right? When we go in, how do we go in? Or how do we stay?
Jesus went out to a solitary place. Our humanity today hates being alone. We do not like being alone.
I do not like being alone in my house when Barb is leaving. It drives me nuts, because when I am left alone, I do things I should not do—whether I eat things, watch things, whatever. I do not like it. It bothers me. It is not that I am afraid; I just find myself doing things. I do not like to be alone in that sense.
But some of us do not like to be alone because we always have to have something or someone. There are people who have to be stimulated. That is what I mean: stimulated.
The Lord is saying, “Let Me be the One who stimulates you. You do not need all these bells and whistles.” A solitary place.
What is the hymn? “I come to the garden alone,” right? “I come to the garden”—how? Alone.
What does alone mean? Does it mean by myself? Well, yes. But it means without any of the trappings of stuff that would follow me in—without the cares of life, without thinking about what my work is like, or without the disturbances of social media.
How many of us have a Bible on our phone? You do not have to raise your hand. But how can you read your Bible on your phone when every time someone texts you, it beeps?
How can you do that? “Oh, wait a minute, God. Excuse me. I have to take this call.” It sounds ludicrous, but is that not what we are? “I cannot, Lord. Wait a minute. I have to do this first.”
I come alone. Come to a solitary place, alone, without all those other trappings, all the other junk. Just me.
We come just as we are, but we come.
When I am coming alone, it means I give Him my time. That is His time. “This is Your time, Lord.” I give Him my ear. I am not listening to anything else. I give Him my ear.
I give Him my mind. In other words, I am engaged in what I am doing. I give Him my full attention—full attention. I engage.
Then, in that song, it says, “And the voice I hear…” In other words, He communes with us.
It is not just that I am communing with Him. He comes down. I am always flabbergasted when I look at some of the pictures of the tabernacle. Yes, it is just a tent and stuff like that. But when the Lord was meeting with Moses, the glory—the Shekinah glory—came over the tent.
You might not have seen it in the tent, but everyone else saw the big fire above the tent. He is communing with you. He is coming down to commune with you, to share Himself with you.
A lot of times we think communing with God is us telling Him what is on our heart, us reading the Bible. It is us, us, us, us, us. But it is Him. It is Him coming down to meet with us.
Once we get alone, He says, “Oh, now I can come in.” A lot of times we are not alone. We do not even recognize Him being there. We are caught up with ourselves. We are caught up with, “Oh, it is my quiet time.”
That is a thing. How many times have I gone and not even looked for Him to be there, just doing my time? But He communes with us.
Then we hold communion. All that means is that it does not end with my quiet time or my morning devotion. I am enabled to hold it.
It is not that I am trying to hold on by myself. I am enabled to hold it because He gives us the Holy Spirit. He knows our frame. He knows that we have to go to work and that we have to do those things.
Why does He give the Spirit? Because in those little places, when we have a little time to reflect, the Holy Spirit brings the things from the time we had with Him and enlarges them. He helps us dwell on them.
Maybe He speaks something to us out of that which gives us a different understanding. Or maybe He speaks something to us and says, “The things that you are hearing from the Father, go and share them with that person over there.”
We are enabled to hold that communion, not by our might and main—“I am going to do it this time”—but because He gives us a Helper. It is all Him.
All we do is respond. That is all we do. We just respond to Him.
This testimony, this reality, is the beginning—the beginning—of a pleasing aroma to God. It is only the beginning of it.
I do not know how many of you bake bread, but when you are baking bread, can you smell it before it is done? Oh, yeah. It is like Pavlov’s dogs, right? You start salivating. “Oh, that bread smells so good.”
It is an aroma to God of the work He has begun. Christ has been put in us, and He starts to smell that aroma of Christ. It is pleasing to Him.
But these things—this idea of being at rest, of walking in light and not in darkness, of holding communion—are just the beginning of that aroma coming out.
Not only is this an aroma to God, but it is also to other brothers and sisters in the fellowship. Brothers and sisters, we need to be encouraged by the reality in other brothers and sisters.
A lot of us wane. We are just going through the motions, and we need to see something. We need to smell something that is different. “Oh, what is that?”
You know what Disney would do at Disneyland? I know this because my wife worked there for a while. In the little ice cream parlors and stuff, they would put in the smell of food. Then they would have fans blow it out to Main Street.
It is good marketing. You are walking through Disneyland, and once you start smelling, what happens? You have an appetite. Boy, that is devious in a way, is it not?
But this is the way the Lord works. He puts people in our midst who have that smell, and He blows that aroma to us. All of a sudden, we are caught: “What is that? I want it. I want what that is.” Aroma of life unto life.
Then He takes us out, because it was right on Main Street, right where all the traffic was. In other words, it is not meant just for the people in the church. It is meant for the world.
The aroma is to go to the whole world. Some people are going to be drawn by it, and some people are going to reject it. “I brought my own lunch.” But some people are going to be won by it.
That is the testimony. When there is reality there, that is what is going out. It has substance.
I was looking it up: is an aroma substance? What do you think? There are aroma compounds. Here we have a compound. The compound is this: we are at rest, we are not walking in darkness, and we are holding communion with God.
When those things are compounded together, there is substance. Brothers and sisters, that is what we need. We do not need merely a teaching. We need that teaching becoming substance. We need to see it. We need to smell it in others.
That is what God has done for us. He has given us the testimony of Christ—the testimony of Christ when He walked on earth as a man, so that people would say, “Who is this Man?”
He has also given the testimony of Christ in believers, so that we would say, “What is that? I want it. I am drawn to it.” So that we also might be those who carry with us that aroma of Christ.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that Jesus became a man and demonstrated what man should be. Lord, I thank You that does not take anything away from who He is. Matter of fact, it enhances Him. There is a man in the glory. How can that be?
O Lord, we thank You. We thank You that the testimony that was His on the earth, You have meant for us to have—that we are to have this testimony before You, before one another, and before the world.
Lord, who is able for these things? We look at it and say, “Well, I want to try and be like Him,” and how can we? We have no strength and no power to do that, so we look to You.
Lord, You have given us Christ. You have given us Christ to live in us and live through us. Lord, we want that to be the reality. We want Christ living in us.
We are asking for this. We thank You for the forgiveness of sins and all the wonder that it is and the beauty that it is. But Lord, we want life. We want a life beyond the grave, a life that comes out of that grave resurrected. It is new—a new creation.
Lord, we want to be experiencing what You have for us in Christ. We are asking for this in Jesus’ name. Amen.