And in the third verse, third and fourth,
he says, For consider him that endured such
contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be
wearied and faint in your minds.
Because, remember, ye have not yet resisted unto
blood, striving against sin.
Now, this man, as I've said over and
over, is writing his epistle to young converts,
who are, some of them, very unsure of
themselves and unsure of the faith which they've
tentatively entered anyway.
And they're asking, in effect, just what is
this Christian life, this saved life?
How am I to learn how to live
it?
And who is to be my example and
my model?
And how can I keep from wearing out
in the thing and losing heart, ceasing to
have any interest in it?
Well, the Holy Ghost says, Consider Jesus.
Think constantly of Jesus.
We get life from Jesus dying, but we
get courage to live by his living.
I mean, we get life from his dying
and resurrection, and we get courage to live
by his having lived.
Because it is the life he lived on
earth that gives us courage here, and it
is not to the life he is now
living in heaven at this particular point in
the epistle, but it is to the life
he lived when he was on earth that
we are appointed.
And we are told that by knowing how
he lived, we can get the courage to
live, and we can get the courage to
persevere and keep on living.
Wear the devil out and live on past
all the obstacles, and get over them and
get around them and continue to live.
And even if we get weary, we can
lose the weariness or shed it off or
endure it by knowing that somebody else was
weary as he sat off so thus on
the well.
And so we consider him, thinking constantly of
Jesus.
Now, to know this, to know how he
lived, we must, of course, remember how he
lived.
We must read the scriptures and learn and
then think upon it.
I believe that we ought to meditate three
times more than we read.
I believe I can safely say that I
think ten times more than I read.
I remember old Dr. Samuel Johnson was invited
by the King to come over and have
an evening with him.
He was a well-known literary lion in
those days.
And so he came over to the palace
or to the mansion where the King lived,
and they sat in front of the fireplace
and talked.
And the King said, I suppose, Doctor, that
you have read a great deal.
Yes, Your Majesty, but I have thought more.
And I believe this.
I believe that we ought to do a
lot of meditating.
I believe that if you were to meditate
more, you'd need to read less.
This idea of speed reading is not in
the realm of the pulpit to deal with
it, but I'd like to take a crack
at it sometime.
Because what's the difference how many words went
through your head if they didn't leave any
deposit there?
What's the difference how many books you read
in the course of a week or a
month if there was no result?
I believe that a little reading and a
lot of reverent meditation will teach you more
than you'll ever learn from many books.
I just picked up the Apocrypha this morning
and was looking at it, wondering whether I
might take it along with me on the
trip to New York.
And I noticed this one sentence standing out.
It said, A man's own soul will sometimes
give him more information than five watchmen on
a watchtower.
I didn't read on, I don't know what
he had in mind.
But I like that.
That if you'll stop and meditate and take
the word of God and dream over it
and let it get hold of you, it'll
teach you more than you can learn from
five watchmen on a watchtower.
So he said, meditate and consider what happened
to Jesus.
And remember that Christians are Christ's younger brothers.
He calls us brothers, and he's not ashamed
to call us brothers, he says.
And as he was sent into the world,
so are we sent into the world.
Except, of course, there was one wonderful, lonely,
isolated, glorious, unapproachable field where we can't enter.
When he went out to give himself the
just for the unjust, the lamb for sinners,
and in the darkness of the cross did
that mysterious something, whatever he did there, that
made it possible for God to justify sinners
and forgive rebels and restore to his heart
alienated men and women, in that act of
redemption we share not at all, and we
can never share.
Our high priest did that alone.
But all the incidental living that Christ did
on earth, we share.
As his younger brethren, we go the way
he went.
And he says that as he is in
the world, so was in the world, so
are we.
He was a witness to things above, and
so are we witnesses to things above.
There are two little words, the tiniest little
words, two tiny little words.
No Christian people, especially scholarly Christian people, tend
to multiply language, multiply words.
But often more power lies in a little
word than in a big one.
For instance, the word as, A-S, and
the word so, S-O, have tremendous power
in them.
Notice this.
As thou hast sent me, so have I
sent them.
As and so.
And when so becomes equal to as, as
thou hast sent me, now that's the said
of Jesus.
Now, so is said of us.
So have I sent you.
And when the so becomes equal to the
as, then we are fulfilling the will of
God.
And then again, as my Father has sent
me, so have I sent you, saying the
same thing.
And then, as he is in this world,
so are we.
As and so.
As he is, so are we.
When the so of our living becomes equal
to the as of his living, then we
are where we ought to be.
So, let's remember that power lies in little
words and not despised them.
And what we want to set out to
do by the grace of God is to
bring the so of our living up to
the as of his living.
In other words, equate the two and bring
them together so that we're living as he
lived.
He was a witness on earth, he was
a light to men, and we are to
be.
He was a moral judgment on the world,
and so is every Christian a moral judgment.
And then, the world's hostility toward Christ.
I think it is one of the great
mysteries of human life, the world's hostility to
the Savior.
He was rejected by his own nation, and
he was condemned by organized religion, and he
was executed by organized government.
And they did all this without a cause.
He said, they hated me without a cause.
You know, there is such a thing as
thinking up excuses for what you do.
They call that rationalizing.
And you have an ulterior motive.
You have a reason for doing something, but
you don't like to admit the reason.
So, you think up a reason which becomes
an excuse.
And you even think it up for yourself.
You do what you do for a hidden
reason, and then you give a big, bold,
plainly visible reason as the reason which is
not the reason at all.
And so, anything they did against our Lord
Jesus Christ, it was all rationalizing from their
hatred they felt for him.
They said he wants to be king.
Who did they care about that?
If they could have had him become king
and rise and put down Caesar, they would
have shouted and danced in the streets.
But they used that as an excuse.
And so did almost all of the other
excuses that they had, rationalizing their hatred.
And Christ gave this world up as lost.
That is, he said, I pray not for
the world, but I pray for them which
thou hast given me out of the world.
Now, he did not give up his chosen
individuals out of the world everywhere as lost.
But he gave the world up as lost.
I pray not for the world.
That's bothered some people, but you'll find it
there in the text.
The prayer of Jesus now in heaven is
not for the world.
The prayer of Jesus is for his own
people.
Those whom thou hast given me out of
the world, thine they were, and thou gavest
them me, and they have believed that thou
hast sent me, and I have given them
eternal life.
These are those who are being prayed for
by our Lord, effectively and efficaciously prayed for
by our High Priest and Mediator at the
right hand of the Father.
But the great world out there, he doesn't
expect them to be anything.
He says the world will get worse and
worse, and evil men and seducers will even
enter the church.
And that when the Son of Man comes,
will he find faith on the earth?
He expects the great world to rot and
decay.
It is rotting, it is decaying.
And he expected it to.
But he always has a people whom he
has called out.
Now, the world, I say, is hostile, and
you are living in a hostile world.
You must keep that in mind.
You are not playing on the field where
everybody is friends with everybody else.
You are fighting on a battleground where everybody
on one side is enemy to everybody on
the other side.
And there are two spirits in opposition to
each other.
Christ walked among men inwardly free, and they
said he broke the law.
He was the only free man in Israel,
completely and perfectly free.
And a Christian is, among other things, inwardly
perfectly free.
That's why a Christian has a good conscience,
but he doesn't have a troubled conscience, and
he doesn't have a sick conscience.
One of the problems of a pastor is
to handle people with morbid consciences.
They are not free inside, and so their
consciences bother them because they are breaking their
own rules.
And the Jews, of course, were that kind
of people.
That is, the Pharisees and the people in
authority, they were that kind of people.
And our Lord walked in the earth inwardly
free, a perfectly free man.
He wasn't going to sin, and God knew
he wasn't going to sin, and he knew
God knew it, and so whatever he did
he didn't apologize for and worry over.
He just did it simply as a rose
blooms quietly without any apology.
It just blooms.
So he just lived his inward life, and
the inward became the outward, and the internal
became the external, and what he was became
what he did, and he lived like that,
perfectly relaxed, and not always digging at himself
and worrying about himself.
And of course they said, well, he's a
lawbreaker.
He and his disciples were going through the
fields, and they had been on a long
missionary journey, and the disciples were hungry.
And they did what I've done as a
boy a hundred times.
Now they reached down and pulled the head
off of the wheat and rolled it in
their hands and threshed it that way, and
then ate it.
And the Pharisees said, well, you're threshing on
Sunday.
Can you imagine a thing like that on
a Sabbath day?
Can you imagine anything as little as that?
That's because they were sick inside.
And Jesus and his disciples, he was free
inside, and he was trying to make them
free inside, and he knew that the Lord
God in heaven wasn't so hard to please
and so farsighted that he would care if
a hungry disciple reached down and pulled off
a head of wheat, rolled it and got
himself a mouthful of wheat to munch on
as he went, waiting for a better dinner.
That's why the free Christians have always been
in trouble, and have usually been called something
else but free.
I remember my friend Tom Hare, of whom
I speak quite a little.
It's written in the little booklet there.
You may have read it.
But I remember that Tom one time was
having an all-nighter prayer.
He had frequent all-nighter prayers, two and
three a week.
But he had a group with him that
night, and they were praying, and had meant
to make all night of it.
And along about one o'clock or so,
Tom, being an Irishman, suddenly wanted what he
called a cup of tea.
So Tom just got up and went out
and made himself a cup of tea.
And the rest of them felt he was
a sinner.
They felt that was just terrible, that this
man, why he was supposed to be fasting
and he drank a cup of tea.
The fact is, he and God were on
such good terms that I think God made
the tea for him.
Because he and God were in perfectly good
terms, and he was perfectly free inside, and
he didn't worry.
Now, if you're in bondage to something, if
you disobey that thing, then you're in trouble
with your conscience.
But if you're free from everything, and only
in bondage to the love of God, the
happy, joyful bondage, which you wouldn't give up
for the world, then whatever you do is
all right, because you do it in love.
And Christ lived like that.
And of course, that was exactly contrary to
the spirit of the world.
The spirit of the world had no freedom
in it.
It had only bondage.
Bondage to self, bondage to sin, bondage to
the devil, bondage to arbitrary moral rules, and
bondage to religion, which God had never given
them.
And the result was, of course, they said,
well, he's a lawbreaker, and he's leading the
people astray.
And they brought the judgment on him.
And he talked familiarly of God.
He talked about God to somebody that he
knew.
He said, my father always hears me.
The Son of Man is in the bosom
of the Father.
He talked about the Father with the familiarity
of a little boy talking about his father
here on the earth.
I don't care how great the man is.
His own son.
I never can see it.
His own son.
He's just my dad.
And they get terribly, wonderfully familiar with him
in their conversation and in their talk.
Now, one of my boys, whom I know
loves me very much and respects me too,
wrote and said to my new wife, he
said, my wife Connie says that I am
just like my dad.
Pontifical and dictatorial.
But he said, I am too humble to
claim any such honor.
Well, now, of course, that was a rib
at me.
But he could say that to me where
you probably wouldn't say it.
You might think it, but you wouldn't say
it because you're not my son.
Now, the Father and the Son are in
such perfect accord and so intimately related with
a relaxed intimacy that the Lord Jesus Christ
was perfectly free to do whatever came out
of his heart to do because he knew
he loved God and was living within the
mighty, mighty boundless framework of the revealed will
of God.
But they couldn't see that.
They had their own little rules.
They said that they added to the Ten
Commandments 365 other commandments.
That would be one for every day.
And then they put the pressure on for
those other commandments just as great as for
the ten that the Lord had given.
And of course, when the Lord walked in
that kind of a world surrounded by that
kind of Christians, he was a stranger to
them.
And they to him.
Though he was one of them, born of
one of them, a Virgin Mary, a Jewess
herself, still their religion separated them from him
because it was not arbitrarily created religious rules
that the Lord lived by, but he lived
naturally, I repeat, out of his heart of
love for his Heavenly Father and for the
world.
And of course, they hated him for that.
And I'll say to you, the more carnal
you are, the less trouble you will have
with the world.
And the more spiritual you become, the more
the world will persecute you for what you
are.
Now Christ, I say, belonged to another world
and so does the Christian.
We are brought out of the kingdom of
darkness into the kingdom of the Son and
his love.
And these two worlds never can be reconciled.
Hear me now.
Now this is one of the great basic
rules which you must know as a Christian,
which if you fail to know, will only
have a socio-religious church, a religious that
is partly social and partly religious and couldn't
exist apart from its social activities.
But if you see that the Christian belongs
to another realm altogether, that he has been
translated out of the kingdom of darkness and
now exists in the kingdom of light, and
that he is here to mingle with and
fellowship with others who have had the same
experience, you will then see that there is
a different relationship held between the average religious
church man and the world and that held
by the Christian, the true Christian and the
world.
These are the contrasts.
The spiritual man has treasures that the world
discounts.
He has a mystic wisdom of the Holy
Spirit.
The world has no organ to receive this
wisdom.
There is no organ to receive it.
He said the world cannot receive him because
it seeth not, neither knoweth not.
Just as a deaf man has no organ
to receive music, just as a blind man
has no organ to receive light, so a
worldly dead man has no organ to receive
the treasure of mystic knowledge by the Holy
Ghost.
And of course, if the Christian says he
has and he is sure of himself, the
world is angry with him.
Even the religious world is angry with him.
They say he is a bigot and thinks
too much of himself.
And the Christian man has a spirit, invisible
and from God, whom the world cannot receive.
The Christian has heard a voice and seen
a light and been enabled to repent and
believe on Jesus Christ.
And the world, as the word is religious,
is just religious.
Oh, I am so deeply concerned that this
church should be a Christian church in every
sense of the word.
I am so deeply concerned that we should
be a Christian church, that we should rise
and shake off that graveclothes of dead denominational
Christianity that lives on a dead tradition and
runs like a truck with the engine off
and the momentums carrying it, and that we
should enter into the Christian life deeply and
gravely and wonderfully and beautifully, and that we
should be a people indwelt by the Holy
Spirit and recognize ourselves as a minority group
living in a world that hated our Lord
and hates us for our Lord's sake if
we act like our Lord, adopts us and
accepts us and uses us if we don't,
but rejects us and despises us if we
do.
And that's how you keep from being weary
in the Christian life.
You remember that you're out here, that's what
you're here for.
You're here to have trouble.
You're here to have the friction that the
world gives you.
You're out here as your Lord was.
As he was, so are you.
He was rejected, you will be.
He was hated, you will be.
They didn't understand him, they won't understand you,
but always he had some that did.
And always you'll have some that do.
I got a beautiful letter this week.
I thought I'd have brought it to the
pulpit with me, but I didn't.
It's from Hong Kong, and it's signed by
five Chinese students.
They have their name printed so I can
read the English.
And then they have their name signed.
And it's beautiful.
Just beautiful to me.
Beautiful.
They're studying English using my editorials as their
textbook.
That's one of the things they tell me.
But they tell me also about their Lord
and their relation to the Lord, and how
they're learning and how they're growing.
Inviting me to Hong Kong to preach to
them.
Well, I won't go to Hong Kong to
preach to them, but I feel I'm one
with them, and we're one together.
And color doesn't make any difference, and race
doesn't make any difference, and backgrounds make no
difference at all.
We are a people called to follow our
Lord, and there's a little poetry in it
and quite a little music, but it's a
long way from being made up of poetry
and music.
There's heartaches and hardships and bloody feet and
calloused hands and bullets flying and sharp tongues
wagging.
Opposition.
All of this.
It's there in Hong Kong, God knows.
And it's worse behind that iron curtain or
bamboo curtain.
And it'll be here in Toronto if we
realize who we are and what we're here
to do.
Now, I want to read a passage of
scripture to close.
"'Let this mind be in you,' which was
also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the
form of God, thought it not robbery to
be equal with God, but made himself of
no reputation, and took upon him the form
of a servant, and was made in the
likeness of men, being found in fashion as
a man, he humbled himself, became obedient unto
death, even the death of the cross.'" But
someone says, "'You're gloomy.
This is gloomy preaching.
This is terrible.
We're living in a time when we've got
to be jerked up.
We've got to be cheered up.' Well, let
me read the rest of it.
"'For this reason, God also therefore has highly
exalted him and given him a name which
is above every name, that at the name
of Jesus every knee should bow of things
in heaven and things in earth and things
under the earth, and that every tongue should
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the
glory of God the Father.
You see, he had to brace himself and
throw off the weariness of living in a
world that hated him.
He had to continue to live it until
he went down as far as he could
go, and when he was down as far
as he could get, then God reversed enough
that he came as far as he could
get, even to the right hand of God
with every knee bowing and every tongue confessing
in heaven, earth, and hell that he is
Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Now as he was, so are we.
We are also called to follow him in
earth's hardships, in life's labors, in its struggles
and disappointments and griefs and rejections.
And when he finds we've had enough of
it, he will bring us up into a
place of glorious power and light and usefulness,
even in this world, and of course, ultimate
and final glory in the world to come.
So may God help us now to work
and not be weary, because there is full
reward coming for all of the Lord's overcoming
saints.
Amen.