Wherefore, seeing we also are encompassed about with
so great a cloud of witnesses, let us
lay aside every weight and the sin which
doth so easily beset us, and let us
run with patience the race that is set
before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and
finisher of our faith, who, for the joy
that was set before him, endured the cross,
despising the shame, and is set down at
the right hand of the throne of God.
Now, it says here that we Christians are
to run the race, the race of which
I preached twice before here.
But now I want to go on a
little further.
It says here that we are to run
the race, keeping Jesus in full view, looking
unto Jesus, the author and the finisher of
our faith.
Now, it is in our nature to have
to look out.
God made us with eyes that could not
see themselves.
One man pointed out that the eye that
can see itself is blind.
It just sees itself and stops.
But the eye was made to see through,
and not to see, but to see through
and by.
So we are born to look out, which
teaches us that we are not sufficient in
ourselves.
If we were sufficient in ourselves, there would
be no reason why we should look out.
But our nature is such that we must
look away because the world is too big
and deadly, and we are too weak and
unwise to deal with it.
We don't have what it takes.
And if we look inside of ourselves, we
can only go into a tailspin of real
discouragement.
We must look somewhere for assurance.
We must look to somebody worthy to be
looked to.
Not to some political figure or even some
religious figure, but we must look to one
who has made good, who has done what
we would like to have done, who has
won for us, who has won through for
us, and has established himself the right hand
of God and now is bringing a company
of people with him.
He is said to be here the author
and finisher of our faith.
Among my private and not too secret enjoyments
is kidding the translators because of their failure
to get together on things chiefly, or because
they know Greek and don't know English.
But here I find the translators are really
in a tizzy.
They say, looking unto Jesus, the pioneer and
perfecter of our faith.
Another translator says, looking unto Jesus, the starter
and the finisher of our faith.
Another one says, looking unto Jesus, the guide
and the end of our faith.
Another one says, the beginner and finisher.
Another says, a leader and perfect model.
Another says, the leader and example.
And another says, the princely leader and perfecter.
And another says, the forerunner and finisher.
Evidently they can't quite get together on what
those words mean in the English.
But I think by taking all of those
words and putting them in the bag and
shaking them up, we'll get at this, that
Jesus Christ, our Lord, is the pioneer, the
one who blazed the trail, the one who
started the Christian faith, upon whom it rests,
and who is leading it through to a
successful consummation.
And this, our Lord Jesus Christ, is.
And as we go along with this, I'd
like to point out that the faith we
mean here is not our personal faith.
You won't have much trouble with your personal
faith if you become really acquainted with the
faith of our fathers.
We try to pump up faith when we're
not informed on the faith.
You see, the faith we have is our
personal attitude toward and confidence in the faith
which is the doctrines presented and the truth
that is brought to us in our Lord
Jesus.
He does not say that he is the
author and perfecter of my private faith, my
own attitude or reaction toward or confidence in
the truth.
He says he is the author and the
perfecter, the author and finisher and leader and
consummator of the faith of our fathers, the
doctrines, the truth, that God made the heaven
and the earth, that God subsists in three
persons, that God spake by the prophets, that
God sent his only begotten Son into the
world, that whosoever believeth on him should not
perish but have everlasting life, that to do
this he must die and rise again, that
he sits now at the right hand of
the Father, that he is there interceding for
his believing people, that he is coming back
at a time known to him and to
nobody else to take his people to be
with him, that he is going to purify
the earth and take out of it every
bone and every bit of mold and every
monument to iniquity, and he is going to
have a new heaven and a new earth
of which he is the Lord, and then
when that long time has worn itself out
in half the millenniums, he is going to
turn all things over to the Father, and
death will be put down and that enemy
will be destroyed.
Now, this is the faith of our fathers
in brief outline, and this it is that
we mean when we say Christ is the
author and the finisher of our faith.
And our attitude toward that and our confidence
in it, in these things, that's another matter.
He helps us with that, too.
But I think that if we get fully
acquainted with what our faith teaches, then our
personal faith will rather be an automatic thing
and will spring joyously up because of its
great confidence in what it hears and sees.
Now, it says here that he endured the
cross, this author and finisher.
He endured the cross and despised the shame.
That is, he felt the cross in two
ways, physically and mentally.
The physical pain of the cross is too
much talked about for me to add anything
now.
We all know how the nails went into
his hands and his feet, and we all
know how the thorns were on his brow
and his back was beaten until it was
bleeding.
We know how thirsty he was and cried
in his agony, We know that.
That's the physical pain of the cross.
But we must also remember that there was
the psychological or mental pain, the pain of
shame and rejection, the pain of being spurned
by your fellow man.
This pain, when his friends turned his back
on him, added to the physical pain that
he had when he hung on that cross.
And you know something of what our Lord
endured.
So he endured the cross and he despised
the shame.
He endured it by suffering it out, and
he endured and despised the shame of it
by looking down on it as something not
worthy to be mentioned when set over against
the glory that was to be revealed.
Now, right up to this point, all fundamentalists
are agreed, all evangelicals are together on this.
And I could preach in any Bible conference
anywhere and be invited back, and nobody would
whisper out to another fellow behind a tree
on the campground that they thought Tozer was
a little bit legalistic.
Up to here, everybody agrees.
But now from here on, a lot of
them don't agree.
They'll be smiling about it, inviting me back,
hoping I'll skip this.
But nevertheless, they don't agree.
Here's what I mean.
That our Lord Jesus not only endured the
cross and despised the shame, but he invited
us to do the same thing.
Look, in Matthew 16, Then said Jesus unto
his disciples, If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself, and take up
his cross, and follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose
it, and whosoever will lose his life for
my sake shall find it.
John 12, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone.
But if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.
He that loveth his life shall lose it,
and he that hateth his life in this
world shall keep it unto life eternal.
Galatians 6.14 But God forbid that I
should glory, save in the cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is
crucified unto me.
And I unto the world, Galatians 2.20,
I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.
Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.
And the life which I now live in
the flesh, I live by the faith of
the Son of God who loved me, and
gave himself for me.
Now by such words as these, our Lord
identifies us with himself.
He puts the cross in our lives where
it belongs, instead of on the cross where
it once was.
I don't know where that wooden cross was.
I once made some people very angry.
They howled with anger, but they said they
were grieved.
I have caught on to that now.
When I get a dirty letter telling me
that they're grieved over something I wrote, they
mean they're mad.
And I got one saying that I shouldn't
have said something I did.
I said, Peter the Hermit gathered a lot
of people together to try to take physical
possession of an old tomb that had only
been used three days and hadn't had anybody
in it since.
And they said that was a terrible way
to talk about the tomb of Jesus.
Joseph's tomb was a place to put him
in the hillside there till the clock had
ticked out its three days.
Then what did God care about that hole
in the ground after that?
What did he care about the tomb after
that?
We tend to want to impart to rocks
and trees and springs and hills spiritual significance
just as Israel did and as the pagans
did before them.
It's a thing God hates.
It is not the hole where they laid
Jesus in the tomb that is sacred, but
it is the holy man who lay there
three days that is sacred.
And when he came out of there, the
grave had no more significance there.
So it is with the cross of Jesus.
They hung him on a wooden tree, simply
a rough thing thrown together.
They hung him up there, and then when
he had come down from there and been
laid in the tomb and had risen again
and was the right hand of God the
Father Almighty, what did that wooden cross mean
anymore in the mind of God?
Nothing at all.
We sing about the old rugged cross.
I hope we don't mean that cross, because
our Catholic friends have torn that all up
into little splinters, and they have a pile
of wood as big as this church scattered
around all over the world that is supposed
to be parts of the cross.
Anyhow, apart from that, that cross is no
longer in existence, but there is a cross
now.
And that is the cross that you take
and I take, following the Lord who took
his cross.
When you have taken your cross and then
have won through beyond it to the resurrection,
your old cross will pass away and be
no more, and death will have no more
dominion over you just as it has no
more dominion over him.
But in the meantime, you must take your
cross.
And by the texts I have quoted and
many others, our Lord identifies us with himself.
There is an old hymn nobody sings anymore
that expresses something that I am much concerned
with.
Here it is.
O for that flame of living fire which
shone so bright in saints of old, which
bade their souls to heaven aspire, calm in
distress, in danger bold!
Where is that Spirit, Lord, which dwelt in
Abraham's breast and sealed him thine, which made
Paul's heart with sorrow melt and glow with
energy divine, that Spirit which from age to
age proclaimed thy love and taught thy ways,
brightened Isaiah's vivid page and breathed in David's
hallowed lays?
Where is that Spirit, Lord?
Why do we have to cry in this
pathetic and plaintive manner, where is that Spirit,
Lord?
I think it is because we differ from
the saints of old in our relation to
the cross.
The modern gospel churches, of which we are
one, have decided where to put the cross.
They have made the cross objective instead of
subjective.
They have made it external instead of internal.
They have made it judicial instead of experiential.
And the terrible part of it is that
they are so wrong because they are half
right.
They are right in making the cross to
be objective, something that stood once on a
hill with a man dying on it, just
for the unjust.
They are right in that it is an
external cross.
They are right in that on that cross
God did a judicial act that will last
while the ages burn themselves out.
They are half right.
Where they are wrong is that they have
failed to see that there is a cross
for you and me, and there is a
cross for every one of us.
And that cross is subjective and internal and
experiential.
That is, that cross is not something outside,
it is something inside.
That cross is that which we voluntarily take
up that is hard and bitter and distasteful,
that we do for Christ's sake and suffer
the consequences and despise the shame.
But the great Christians, great Christians, David with
his sacred lyre and Isaiah with his hallowed
page, they knew something even before Christ was
born of Bethlehem.
In Bethlehem they knew something of the cross
and what it meant to be despised for
Christ's sake.
They saw ahead and saw Christ's day and
were glad.
But the evangelicals, and I were part of
them, we say, Let the cross kill Jesus,
but we'll live on and be happy and
have fun.
But the cross on the hill has got
to become the cross in the heart.
And when the cross on the hill has
been transformed by the miraculous grace of the
Holy Ghost into the cross in the heart,
then we begin to know something of what
it means.
And it will become to us the cross
of power.
To Paul, in the Galatian text which I
read, to Paul the world was already dead.
He didn't plead for it nor try to
salvage anything of it.
He let it go, the whole thing go,
though he loved people.
Paul's love was for people.
Jesus our Lord loved people.
When he said, God so loved the world,
he didn't mean that God loved Hollywood and
that he loved the ballpark and that he
loved the things people do and enjoy doing.
Some of them are all right, certainly.
I throw a ball around a little in
the mornings to get warmed up myself in
the living room, so I'm nothing against balls,
you know.
But it's just a question of the organized
world with its fun.
Isn't that the Lord loved?
Because he knew it couldn't last, even though
innocent, it couldn't last.
So he loved not our organization, not our
literature even, or our music.
He loved people.
He loved human beings made in the image
of God and fallen.
He loved people.
So when I say that Christ, that Paul
followed Christ in counting the world dead, I
don't mean that he spurned people.
Never, never.
He loved people.
But he spurned the organized world.
If you're foolish enough to do it, if
you're a sucker enough to be taken in,
the world can entertain you from right now
on until the doctor says you've had it.
You can't live.
You can be entertained and have fun right
on the world is organized.
All you have to do is pay for
it.
They have arranged it so we can be
relatively happy in this world and never think
of God.
You know that?
That's what it's for, brethren.
That's what it's for.
The newspapers, the magazines, the radios, the television,
the sports, the fun, even the concerts and
music, which I happen to like.
The whole business is there in order to
keep us from taking God seriously and remembering
that we've got to die and come to
judgment.
And if you will be gullible enough to
be taken in by the world, when I
was a boy, we used to butcher in
the fall, and it would be my job
to coach the fat pigs in, shoot them
well, and then my father would bleed them.
And I would throw them some corn and
they would come grunting in and I'd pull
my rifle down on them and let them
have it.
And Dad would go in and bleed them.
And after that they dressed them out and
we had pork.
Those pigs never caught on.
They never caught on.
When I threw them that grain, they never
caught on.
There'd been an old crow, you couldn't have
fooled him.
You'd go out in the field with a
gun and try to find a crow.
They'd disappear, they'd dissolve into liquid or into
gas.
They're smart, a crow's smart, but a pig
never caught on.
They shot his grandfather and they shot his
father.
Now they're shooting him and he never caught
on.
A gullible swine.
And the world has tossing you not ears
of corn, but other things to keep you
interested while you get old and die.
Or get too old to care about it.
That's the world.
And Paul said, that's all dead as far
as I'm concerned.
I have my eyes set on a city
that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is
God, and I expect to live with God
forever.
And I expect to see the lovely, wonderful
face of Jesus Christ shining in its glory.
Well, the great Christians are allowed to cross
to kill their self-love and their self
-confidence and their self-will and their self
-righteousness and their self-pity and their self
-defense and all the other self-sins.
Allowed to kill these things.
Keeping Jesus Christ in full view.
Looking away from ourselves and looking at him
and following the way he went.
And as we follow, we'll find hoots and
jeers from a crowd that doesn't understand us.
Stares of astonishment at friends and relatives who
wonder what's happened to us.
But we'll follow the way he went.
Bloodstains on the rocks.
Thorns beside the way.
But we'll rise again in glorious newness of
life.
For if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.
Much fruit.
Are you willing to be made willing to
follow keeping Jesus in full view?
Remember, you can never keep your courage up
unless you keep Jesus in your focus.
Remember, not all the pep talks and inspirational
messages given you by pastors and friends over
the years will ever be able to help
you.
The world is too big and you're too
weak.
So we're going to have to look somewhere
for help.
And where we look, God says, is straight
out of his Son.
The author, the finisher, the perfecter, the leader,
the princely leader of the faith once given
to the saints.
God grant that we may.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.