Thank you for that marvelous introduction.
Fred and I were talking earlier about the
speaker last night, and being young, he's well
able to speak rapidly.
And we were both reminiscing about the times
when we could speak like that.
And I remember driving a dear woman crazy
who was interpreting for the deaf in Upper
New York, and Fred had similar experiences.
And as you get older, you do get
slower, and one of the things that really
worries me is, will I be able to
speak at all when I get as old
as Fred?
You had that coming.
I want to read you a little something,
not from my book, but I want to
read this before we have prayer.
This is a book review that was made
of my book, and I'll tell you why
I'm reading it right after that.
I'm only going to read you a little
bit of it.
The title of it is, Toxic Wells or
Emergent Theological Perversions or Biblical Principles.
I refer not to water wells tainted with
hazardous waste, nor to oil wells intrinsically poisoned
to humans, but to Tom Wells' recent theological
reflections in his book, The Priority of Jesus
Christ.
And then the man went on like this,
and among other things, he said, chalk up
my criticisms and wounds of a fellow Calvinist
friend, but I consider his recent views as
an inexcusable perversion of the New Testament.
His latest book continues in line with the
earlier antinomian co-authored New Covenant theology.
And for those of you who know who
my co-author is, this is why you
can enjoy that for a third time against
Fred.
Now, the reason I read that is because
I want to ask you a question.
Who could resist reading that book after having
read that?
That review goes on ten pages like that,
and it gets worse as it goes.
And the brother who wrote it was not
writing tongue-in-cheek.
He's a good friend of mine, and I
appreciate him in many areas, but he's actually
sold books for me because he's given that
out to a number of people.
There are a number of people here who
have read that entire review, and they were
anxious then to read the book.
And so who knows what will happen when
some of these things go wrong, so to
speak.
Let's bow our heads again for prayer.
Thank you, our Father, for the wonderful privilege
that we have to gather together with fellow
believers and to share Christian love and to
talk of the things of Christ and other
things, Lord, as we renew our acquaintance.
And now, Father, we come this morning to
the first of sessions in which we are
to learn your Word, and we pray that
you might, if it would please you, teach
us, teach the man who is speaking first,
and teach all of us who gather here
by your Spirit.
We ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
I want to read to you two passages
of Scripture.
Neither of these could be called my text,
really.
But the first is from 2 Corinthians 4,
starting at verse 3.
And then I want to read to you
from 2 Timothy 3, starting at verse 15.
And after I read from 2 Timothy, you
may want to just leave your finger in
that slot, or your notes, or whatever you
have, because I will come to that first
before I come to the 2 Corinthians passage.
But let me read to you from 2
Corinthians 4, starting with verse 3.
I'm reading, by the way, from the NIV.
And even if our gospel is veiled, it
is veiled to those who are perishing.
The God of this age has blinded the
minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see
the light of the gospel of the glory
of Christ, who is the image of God.
For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus
Christ is Lord, and ourselves as your servants
for Jesus' sake.
For God who said, Let light shine out
of darkness, made his light shine in our
hearts to give us the light of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ.
And then from 2 Timothy 3, the last
3 or 4 verses, actually the sentence in
the NIV starts in verse 14 of 2
Corinthians 3, so I'll start reading, or 2
Timothy 3, so I'll start reading there.
But as for you, Timothy, continue in what
you've learned and have become convinced of because
you know those from whom you learned it,
and how from infancy you have known the
holy scriptures which are able to make you
wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
All scripture is God-breathed and is useful
for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness
so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.
We trust that the Lord will add his
blessing to the reading of those sections of
his word.
Some years ago now, a friend of mine
said to me, you know, he said, I
think that we talk too much about Jesus
Christ and too little about God.
Now that was a very interesting comment, and
it showed that whichever was true, that brother
was certainly on the right track because the
subject of the scriptures is largely God and
Jesus Christ, not to the exclusion of sin
and salvation, of course.
So I thought about that, and that was
actually the occasion of my writing the book
that Fred has introduced this morning, The Priority
of Jesus Christ.
What are we talking about when we talk
about the priority of Jesus Christ?
Well, one of the things we're doing is
discussing how much to say about each person
of the Trinity, and of course if you
put it in those terms, if you say
to somebody, how much should we say about
each person of the Trinity, the obvious answer
is as much as possible.
You know, God the Father, God the Son,
God the Holy Spirit, we want to talk
about them and hold them up and make
them prominent.
And so the answer, of course, is as
much as possible.
But if you're talking in terms of which
one you're going to put the emphasis in,
you might by that method imply to people
that there was some kind of competition in
the Trinity, and of course that would be
a horrendous idea.
Father, Son, and Spirit are not competing with
one another.
I've been reading something recently on the simplicity
of God, and while there was a good
deal of philosophical in there that was probably
over my head, it brought home the fact
that there could not be any competition between
Father, Son, and Spirit.
But in talking about these, we are touching
upon the honor of each of them, and
as may already have been seen in the
title of the book, The Priority of Jesus
Christ, I think that there is a sense
in which we must say most about the
Lord Jesus.
Now this is not an academic question.
This is a question about our own personal
attitude and intensity, and it's not to satisfy
curiosity.
We have so many things in theology that
we study almost for that reason.
One of the breaths of fresh air in
the latter part of the 20th century and
the beginning of the 21st is the emphasis
on biblical theology.
I was saying to someone this morning, up
until about 1950, if you went to a
seminary, you learned somebody's system.
Now that's not all bad, and God has
made the mind in order to make us
systemize the things that we hear, and I've
written plenty of system, as it were.
But nevertheless, it is true that we must
try to catch the emphases and say the
things that the Bible is saying, and there's
been more emphasis upon that in recent years.
Nor is this question simply about human relationships
and how God may come in on occasion.
If that were the case, you've heard the
little acrostic J-O-Y, and that is
an excellent little acrostic.
J stands for Jesus and O stands for
ourselves, or, pardon me, others, and Y, see,
I'm self-centered, but O stands for others
and Y stands for yourself.
And so if we were making that kind
of measurement, obviously the Lord Jesus Christ would
be at the beginning, but that is not
what I'm talking about in this message.
In what way does Jesus Christ come first
in the persons of the Trinity?
And again, this is not about changing the
order, Father, Son, and Spirit, and that's one
of the reasons for this horrendous review I
got.
I think the author of that review read
the title, assumed that I was going to
do some rearranging within the Trinity talking about
the ontological Trinity for you fellows who use
big words, but actually I am only concerned
to say how does God make himself known
and to make the point that we see
him best in Jesus Christ.
And I want to emphasize that.
We see God best in Jesus Christ.
Now where does God reveal himself?
Well, you might almost ask the question, where
doesn't he reveal himself?
Because the answer would probably be the same.
I mean, the answer would be 360 degrees
apart.
God reveals himself in everything.
One of the joys of coming to a
place like this, and particularly in the springtime,
is to see God revealing himself in creation.
And it is beautiful.
It's sometimes misused.
My friend Jim Bow, who is here and
one of the members of our church, has
a name for where a lot of people
go on Sunday morning.
He calls it the Green Cathedral.
Can you imagine where that is?
It is the golf course.
And if you ask people about why they
go to the golf course, they may, if
they're pious like me, they may say, well,
I can see the beauty and the majesty
of God out there.
And indeed that's true, but it does not
come to grips with the question, where does
God reveal himself best?
He revealed himself in Moses.
Moses was a powerful revelation of God, even
though, of course, a sinful man like the
rest of us.
He revealed himself in the prophets, and he
revealed himself in all of the Old Testament.
That's what the Bible is about in a
real sense.
It is about God, and it's about Christ,
and it's about sin, and it's about salvation.
But all of it is a revelation of
God, and that is true of the Old
Testament.
God also reveals himself in the lives of
believers.
And that, of course, is a difficult concept,
but the scripture tells us that in some
respects we are clothed in Jesus Christ.
And it is no doubt true that there
is a great change that comes into the
life of the believer.
In fact, theologians have sometimes discussed whether a
greater change takes place when we are converted
or when we go into eternity.
And for myself, the answer to that question
is, a greater change takes place when we
are converted because we were dead.
We pass from death into life, and we
will express that life for the rest of
eternity.
But you'll notice that in talking about this,
mainly, I've left out the New Testament.
And in a little bit, I hope to
show you why I have done that, because
in the New Testament, I'm going to contend
that the Lord Jesus Christ is revealing the
character of God throughout the New Testament.
He's in all of the New Testament, wherever
you turn.
And somebody says, isn't that true of the
Old Testament as well?
And of course it is, and that's the
reason I had you turn to 2 Corinthians
3, because I want to tell you in
what sense that is true of the Old
Testament.
And again, if you have it open, look
with me at verse 15.
It starts in the middle of a sentence.
And Paul, writing to Timothy, says, How from
infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which
were able to make you wise for salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus.
So the Old Testament was able to make
people wise for salvation.
That is to say, they could come to
know God.
And further than that, he says in verse
16, All Scripture is God-breathed and is
useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may
be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
So if the man of God is thoroughly
equipped for every good work, and he can
be saved through the teachings in the Old
Testament, why do we need a New Testament
at all?
And the answer is the answer that not
only New Covenant theology gives, but many others.
And that is that you need to look
at the Old Testament through the lens of
the revelation of Jesus Christ in the New
Testament.
And as a consequence, the Apostle Paul, who
is talking there only about the Old Testament,
probably, is nevertheless not saying that when you
evangelize, all you have to do is give
out Old Testaments, and when you are wanting
to train people to carry on as Christians,
all you have to do is give them
an Old Testament.
Not at all.
He is saying that it is through the
lens of Jesus Christ that those things are
true.
And the reason we know that, of course,
is because Timothy was a preacher of Jesus
Christ and had been commissioned to do that.
And so Paul is not saying that we
can be content with the Old Testament and
there is nothing wrong with the Old Testament.
There is everything right about it.
It is the inspired Word of God.
But the way to understand the Old Testament
for us in this age is to read
it through the lens of the New Testament,
which is primarily a revelation of Jesus Christ.
To put it another way, the New Testament
is intended to reveal Jesus Christ as He
was never revealed before.
And God intends to reveal Himself, Father, Son,
and Spirit, through the Lord Jesus Christ.
His person, His character, His will.
Through all of those things, Jesus Christ presents
to us the Lord Jesus as God.
And we find the revelation of God in
the Lord Jesus.
So, to put it another way, Jesus Christ
comes first.
If you are asking the question, Where can
I see God best?
Do you ask that question often?
It is suicidal not to.
I mean, that is the question.
We want to know God.
Those who know God are saved.
And how can we best know God?
We can best know God through Jesus Christ.
Your present life depends upon that as a
Christian.
And your eternal destiny depends upon that.
Coming to know the Lord Jesus Christ.
As preparing this message, I thought about another
related question.
Distantly related.
How spiritual is the United States of America?
And my answer to that is, it is
one of the most spiritual nations that has
ever existed.
It is extremely spiritual.
But, when you ask the following question, Where
does the typical American look for his spirituality?
The answer is, he looks within himself.
There are all kinds of gurus going around
the nation and the world who are telling
you that you have inexhaustible supplies of wonderful
things inside of you, and all you need
to do is to come to know yourself
to be the kind of spiritual person you
ought to be.
And there is a sense in which that
is true, but that sense is destroyed by
leaving out the doctrine of the depravity of
man.
You and I, brothers and sisters, are sinners.
And unless you come to grips with that
fact, and take hold of it, and meditate
upon it, and think of it in all
of its abysmal depths, unless you think of
our depravity, you may be spiritual.
You may be able to give lectures on
how to look within and find all of
these marvelous things, but you will not understand
God.
For God reveals himself from outside, through a
book that reveals to us, Jesus Christ.
And that is one of the great tragedies
of the day in which we live.
Now I want to spend the rest of
the time talking with you about how Scripture,
and particularly the New Testament, makes this firstness
of Jesus Christ clear.
And do you understand, because I must not
mislead you, I'm not talking about the relative
importance of the persons of the Trinity.
I'm talking about where do you have to
look in order to learn the most about
all the persons of the Trinity.
Now, the reason that I'm talking in these
terms is because Jesus Christ is the agent
of God, Father, Son, and Spirit, to reveal
what God is like.
You know what agents are.
God reveals himself through the Lord Jesus, because
Christ is his agent.
If you want to think about what agency
is, you can think about, for instance, the
corporate ladder.
Most of us are familiar with that.
There is a manager here, another manager over
him, and so on and so on, up
the corporate ladder.
And those managers are the agents of the
people who are above them, and particularly they're
the agents of the chief executive officer or
the president of the corporation.
You may never meet in the corporation, probably
won't ever meet the chief executive officer, if
the corporation is very big.
But that chief executive officer is the one
through whom the direction of the company comes,
and you get it from his agent.
Now, when you turn to the New Testament,
you find something very similar.
God wants to reveal himself.
How does he reveal himself?
Well, he reveals himself in the character and
person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, I've not yet spoken exhaustively, because it
is also true that God reveals himself through
his Spirit, but it is also true that
in revealing himself, what the Spirit is doing
is letting us know more and more about
the character and person of Jesus Christ in
order that we will know more and more
and more about all three persons of the
Trinity.
And so he is the agent of Jesus
Christ.
You deal with agents all the time.
If you deal, for instance, in a local
bank, you go into a local bank that
has just one office.
There aren't many of those left anymore.
Just for curiosity, by the way, it has
nothing to do with what I'm saying, but
how many of you have a bank called
HKSC Bank somewhere near where you are?
Does that ring a bell?
Well, I'm surprised it doesn't, because I've seen
them over here in Pennsylvania, but that stands
for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation,
but they never say that.
And the reason that I happen to know
that is that for many years I was
a collector of Hong Kong stamps.
I told you this had nothing to do
with what I'm preaching about.
But if you go into a local bank,
let's say there's a door right there at
the end of this platform, and this is
the area where you actually carry on your
business, and what takes place is that you
deal with an agent or the owner.
He's sitting right behind that door, but you
don't talk to him in normal circumstances.
You talk to a teller, and that teller
is an agent.
Or again, if you go to a locally
owned hardware store, you don't talk to the
owner.
You talk, generally speaking, unless it would be
very small, to one of his agents, a
salesman or somebody who is there.
And that is the role which God has
placed Jesus Christ in.
He is his agent, the agent of all
three persons of the Trinity, to reveal what
he is like.
And so for us, in answering the question,
what is God like?
The chief answer, not the only answer.
As I said, there's revelation in creation, there's
revelation in the Old Testament, but the chief
answer is, look at Jesus Christ.
Now, with that in mind, I want you
to turn back to 2 Corinthians chapter 4,
if you would please.
2 Corinthians chapter 4.
There the Apostle Paul is talking about his
ministry.
In fact, he's talking about his ministry the
whole book of 2 Corinthians.
When I think of 2 Corinthians, I think
of a book that is somewhat like the
hamburgers that you see advertised.
You know, the huge bun, a fairly nice
piece of meat in the middle, and then
more huge bun underneath.
Now when you actually buy it in the
store, the huge bun predominates and there isn't
too much in the middle.
But 2 Corinthians chapters 8 and 9, I
believe, discuss the subject of the collection for
which the Apostle Paul was, or that the
Apostle Paul was taking up.
The rest of it is pretty much about
his ministry, so we're not surprised that he's
talking about his ministry here.
Now let me read to you again, verses
3 and 4.
And even if our gospel is veiled, it's
veiled to those who are perishing.
The God of this age has blinded the
minds of unbelievers.
And what is the effect of that?
So that they cannot see the light of
the gospel of the glory of Christ, who
is the image of God.
You see what the Apostle Paul is saying?
There are two classes of people in the
world.
There are those who can see the glory
of God, and there are those who cannot
see the glory of God and whose faces
are veiled and they just can't get the
greatness of the glory of God.
And you might suppose that if people were
talked to enough, they would get something of
it.
But I've had the sad experience of having
a friend who, for many years, came to
our church on Sunday morning.
On Sunday night, he attended the prayer meeting.
On Wednesday night, he prayed in the prayer
meeting and he had no more idea of
what the gospel was than the man on
the moon.
Now, please don't take that as a reflection
upon the capability of our preaching in the
King's Chapel.
But we never reached him, and he didn't
know that he wasn't being reached.
One of the saddest cases I have ever
known.
But there are those to whom the gospel
of Jesus Christ is hidden.
And why is this whole thing hidden from
them?
It is hidden from them, according to the
Apostle Paul, because the God of this age
has put a veil over their face in
their sin and as a consequence, they can't
see the glory of God.
And if you can't see anything of the
glory and the majesty and the greatness of
God, how can you possibly be saved?
Now, you don't have to know it exhaustively.
You never will know it exhaustively.
You don't have to know it comprehensively.
But if you cannot see the greatness and
glory of God, then you're missing something.
Now, Paul says that that greatness and glory
and majesty of God is revealed in the
face of Jesus Christ.
And there, of course, we have a figure
of speech which means in the person of
Jesus Christ.
If you look at the Lord Jesus and
you do it with the eyes that the
Holy Spirit has enabled, you will begin to
see the greatness of God in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
And the preachers and the writers of the
New Testament were equally servants of the Father
and of the Son and of the Spirit.
But as we see here, they preached Jesus.
Let me illustrate that from the New Testament
itself.
There are 30 or 31 instances of words
that mean to herald used in the New
Testament with a personal object.
That is, the person is named that you're
heralding.
I'm preaching Christ or I'm heralding this person
or that person.
There are 30 or 31 of those.
And of those, 26 of them are statements
in which the Lord Jesus is the one
being heralded.
I'm preaching, I'm heralding.
There are a number of different words, I
think six different words that could be translated
that way in the New Testament.
But of the 30 some uses in which
we're talking about a person, I'm heralding this
person, I'm preaching that person, God is the
object three times.
Jesus Christ is the object 26 times.
And Moses, I think, is the object once.
And that just about exhausts the group.
So what were the writers of the New
Testament doing?
Well, they were writing to us about Jesus
Christ.
Was that because there was a competition between
the Father and Son and they wanted to
get in on the right side?
No, of course not.
They were doing that because they recognized the
priority of Jesus Christ as the agent for
our understanding what God is like.
Let's look at verse 6 of 2 Corinthians
4 for a moment.
The Apostle Paul goes on to explain why
he talks about the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he says, For God, who said, Let
light shine out of darkness, made his light
shine in our hearts to give us the
light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Now you see, he couldn't put it more
plainer there.
It's an illustration the Apostle Paul is using.
He's talking about creation, the first creation, not
the new creation.
But the first creation, he says, you remember
how God did that?
God did it by saying, Let there be
light.
And what happened when God said, Let there
be light?
Well, Paul tells us so we don't have
to conjecture.
God said, Let there be light, and there
was light.
God said, Let there be light, and there
was light.
And now Paul says, The light of the
knowledge of the glory of God is seen
in the face, that is, in the person
of Jesus Christ.
So you'll understand how tremendously important it is
for us to major on Jesus Christ, not
in our theological thoughts.
There we will want to wander to Father,
Son, and Spirit and a hundred other things,
but to major upon Jesus Christ when we
want to see men and women come to
the Lord Jesus and to be saved.
Because it can't happen without the revelation of
what God is like.
And that revelation is given in the face,
the person of Jesus Christ.
It's wonderfully illustrated in various places in the
Bible, but one of the places I like
is Matthew Chapter 8.
We won't turn there, you know the story.
The centurion's servant was dying.
The centurion, of course, was a Roman man,
and as a consequence he was not Jewish.
He may have been a God-fearer, that's
certainly possible.
A God-fearer, you remember, was a person
who attended the synagogue and took in a
good deal of knowledge about God, and some
came to love God and to serve him,
but they didn't go through the rituals that
would make a man a Jew.
At least that's the general idea of God
-fearers that's accepted today.
But it is perfectly clear that when he
came to Jesus and said, My servant is
ill, sick, and afflicted, and on the verge
of dying, when he came to Jesus, it
was the revelation of God in Jesus Christ
that he saw.
And the reason we know that is because
of the way he talked about the Lord
Jesus.
Remember, he gave an illustration as to what
Jesus was like.
He said, All you have to do is
speak the word.
Then he said, I'm a man under authority.
I know what those who are under authority
do.
I say to this man, Go, and he
goes.
Of course, in the Roman army, I expect
that that was true 100 times out of
100.
And he said, If I say to this
man, Come, he comes.
And if I say to this man, Do
this, and he does it.
And then he says, That's just like you.
So you don't have to come to my
house to heal my son.
It can be done here.
Now, Jesus goes on to discuss the extent
of this man's faith.
He discusses it not with a man, I
take it, but with the people around who
listened.
And he said to them, In all of
Israel, I've never found faith.
Meaning, in this case, faith in God.
I've never found faith like the faith in
this man.
And then he took that incident and expanded
it and brought an eschatological or closing in
time truth out of it.
And he said, There will be many who
have been invited to this great feast that
will be the end of time.
And there will be many from the Gentiles
and foreign lands who will come and sit
down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and
the sons of the kingdom.
That is to say, those who were unbelieving
Israelites would be cast out where there would
be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And you see what has happened here is
that the man has seen Jesus Christ.
And he's listened to him.
And as a consequence, if he already had
faith in Yahweh, that faith was greatly increased
so that Jesus said, That's the most faith
I've ever seen in anybody.
In John chapter 14, you remember that Philip
came to the Lord Jesus and said, Lord,
show us the Father and we'll be satisfied.
Or it suffices us, as the King James
Version says.
I use the NIV, I have nothing against
the King James, but it is less and
less modern English.
And so I have a hard time saying
suffice us.
All of you who use the King James
all the time, it just rolls off your
tongue beautifully.
But I had to work on that a
little bit.
But Philip said to the Lord Jesus, Just
show us the Father and it will be
enough for us.
Now, you know, that's one of the most
remarkable statements in itself.
What Jesus is going to say is more
remarkable than that.
But that's one of the most remarkable statements
in itself in the New Testament.
Because would you come up to me and
say, Tom, just show me the Father?
Would you come up to me and say,
Tom, show me the backside of the moon?
Well, all of us know that I couldn't
do that.
It would be absolutely helpless to do anything
like that.
But these men who had walked with the
Lord Jesus Christ for these several years had
the audacity and the faith and whatever else
it took to turn to the Lord Jesus
and say, Just show us the Father and
we'll be satisfied.
And there is not another human being in
all the universe to whom they could have
said that in that day with anything like
that kind of power.
And so the Lord Jesus Christ said, Philip,
have I been with you so long that
you don't know me?
In other words, he was saying, when you
see me, you see the Father.
When you talk to me, you talk to
the Father.
Now, it doesn't mean to mix up the
person of the Trinity, but to say that
the thing that we need to know about
God is his person and his character and
his goals and aims and intentions as far
as he has revealed them.
And Jesus was saying that if Philip was
paying close attention, he would have found all
of that in Jesus Christ.
Think of the audacity of saying that.
Somebody read to me something that's in the
book, N.T. Wright's book, Jesus and the
Victory of God.
Wright is quoting this from Jacob Noysner, who
is a Jewish man.
And I don't know, I didn't read it
in context, someone else read it to me,
but I found N.T. Wright, though I
do not agree with him on some things,
a tremendous promoter of thought.
Charles Spurgeon said about F.W. Robertson, that
Robertson's doctrinal vagaries are well-known, but he's
a great thinker himself and a great promoter
of thought in others, and certainly that is
true of N.T. Wright.
You can hardly read him without your mind
just going off here.
But anyway, he was quoting Jacob Noysner.
And Jacob Noysner, who is a man who
has evidently been engaged in some of these
talks between Jews and Christians, put his finger
on the truth, though he hardly recognized it,
I take it, when he made a statement
to the effect, that it is not the
teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ that is
offensive to us Jews or shouldn't be.
It's his person.
He makes the most fantastic claims for himself.
And I think that's exactly right.
You come to the Lord Jesus Christ, or
you don't come to the Lord Jesus Christ,
but if you come, it is because he
has made some claim for himself, which subsequently
he would prove in your life to be
true, but just then you took it by
faith, as God gave you faith.
It's not the teaching of the Lord Jesus
Christ that is so terribly remarkable.
Much of it is said in the Old
Testament.
But it is the person of Jesus Christ
that stands out in the Scriptures.
And so Jesus says to Philip, Haven't you
known me, Philip?
And that was his answer to the plea,
Show us the Father.
There is, my friends, no competition between Father,
Son, and Spirit.
But the Son, Jesus Christ, displays their common
character.
And God said, Hear him.
Let me set the scene for that.
I'm done, really.
I've said almost all that I want to
say.
But you remember in the Mount of Transfiguration,
the Lord Jesus took Peter, James, and John
up into the top of the mountain.
And Peter, who didn't know what to say,
always had something to say.
And he wanted to parcel out the honor
of the occasion to the three that were
there, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.
And he said, Let me make three tabernacles,
one for you and one for Elijah.
And suddenly he was overshadowed by a cloud.
And out of the cloud came the word,
This is my beloved Son.
Hear him.
And you know the most remarkable thing about
that statement?
Jesus didn't say anything after that.
Certainly nothing of consequence that we have recorded
for us.
Because the statement was not about what they
needed to do next.
The statement was about how they must live
and what they must do forever.
If you're here today and you are a
believer in Jesus Christ, I would urge you
to think about the priority of Jesus Christ,
not in every respect, by any means, but
as the agent for the revelation of God.
In the whole New Testament, I didn't get
a chance to get into this, but the
whole New Testament is the voice of the
Lord Jesus through his agents to bring home
to us what God is like.
If you're a believer, read it, study it,
meditate on it, pray over it.
And if you're not a believer, I would
say to you today that you may want
to be a believer, you may think you
want to be a believer, but eternal life
is wrapped up in knowing God and knowing
Jesus Christ as his chief revelation.
And so I would suggest to you, as
I heard John MacArthur suggested to a psychiatrist
who wanted to learn about Jesus, he said,
go home, get out the Gospel of John
and read it over and over and over
and over again until you know who Jesus
Christ was.
And I'm glad to report that man was
converted.
And so John MacArthur started to take him
into the book of Romans.
He said, I've read that too.
And Christ took hold of him.
God took hold of him.
And we will pray that God will take
hold of you if you will earnestly seek
to learn about Christ.
Let's pray together right now.
We thank you, our Father, that you've sent
your Son to be the Savior of the
world.
And we were part of that world.
And you saved us.
And in saving us, you taught us about
yourself.
For all of eternity, we will enjoy that
knowledge.
But right now at least, Father, we get
that knowledge by looking at the Lord Jesus,
by the work of the Spirit of God
giving us eyes.
Do that for any who may be here
without Christ today.
And for those of us who know and
love and serve him, give us a better
look.
Take the remaining cataracts away.
We ask in his name.
Amen.