My first thought is that all that we're
discussing, unprecedented as it is, has everything to
do with the bringing of many sons to
glory.
Can they be brought to glory in the
absence of these considerations?
Or are these considerations the very completion, the
very grace that would be needful for the
attainment of sons?
Not only on their own experience, but that
of the patterned son before them.
Is that a remarkable thing?
To acquire a tested sonship performed by another,
through inheritance, by faith and appropriation?
Isn't that remarkable?
Can it be that's why we see so
little of present sonship now?
Because it has not thought to tap the
remarkable tested experience of him who was the
patterned son himself in his humanity.
I'm excited by this.
So Lord, we thank you.
What considerations, what choice?
Maybe it's waited till now.
We had to go through all of these
preliminaries on sin and atonement and suffering to
come to this capstone.
So continue, my God, and fit it in
so that when we sit down together in
small groups, we can internalize, take in, consider
the practicality, the outwork, and the reality of
this dimension of consideration in which you have
been silent until now.
So Spurgeon says, what God has engaged to
give, we must inquire after.
I guess this is like seek me, if
you will seek me with all your heart,
all your soul, you shall be found of
me, but you shall be found of me
for this missing dimension, which is critical to
the attainment of your own true identity in
Christ.
What God has engaged to give is not
automatically ours.
We must inquire after, or we manifest, we
show that we have neither desire nor faith.
How many of us will press into this
now that we're learning that there's a remarkable
legacy available to us if we will but
seek and acquire it?
It's like someone telling you you've inherited a
fortune, but you need to get to the
bank, you need to present yourself and file
your claim.
Oh that God the Holy Spirit would work
in us with all his mighty power, filling
us with all the fullness of God.
The Lord will have us active in obtaining
this grace.
Let us then bestow ourselves and seek him
in whom are all our fresh springs, both
in his humanity as well as in his
divinity.
That was Spurgeon's concluding thought.
Then I have here later reflections that I
want to trot out and see what you
think of it.
Why is it that we're more willing to
receive of the deity of Jesus than of
his humanity?
It's easier to condescend to God than it
is to condescend to man, even the son
of man.
Is there something about man that makes us
walk?
Is it easier to receive of God because
we recognize his unquestioned supremacy, but to receive
of man raises tensions and conflict of another
kind that has to do with our vanity.
Our vanity dare not show itself before God,
but it can show itself before man, even
the son of man.
So I'm just raising this question.
Is there a hang-up about man?
Because I've observed in my own humanity that
believers are, what's the word, cautious or standoffish.
They don't want to acknowledge your humanity.
They love the gift that is in you.
They love the Christ who is in you,
but they have little regard for you as
a man.
So it shows me that there's something in
us that is resistant to man that needs
to be overcome or we cannot receive the
benefit that comes to us through the man,
Christ Jesus, and through the men that God
has given as good gifts to men.
Isn't that why we have suffered the ministerial
mystique where a pastor does not dare allow
his humanity to show.
He just comes on the platform for the
golden hour as the man of faith and
power, and then he retreats.
You can't find him.
Because if he allows too much of his
humanity to show, his credibility will suffer a
loss and you'll not be able to receive
his word or his message or his ministry.
That's a fixed factor in our contemporary American
Christianity.
And that's why so many of our ministers
are deficient in their humanity.
And that's why they collapse in that very
area.
They have not opened themselves as men and
to receive what they need as men, flesh
and blood, and subject to temptation as others.
And they hide themselves in a kind of
a vapor of man of faith and power
until it's brought down in shame.
Why are we unwilling to acknowledge the gift
of men to the church who gives good
gifts?
And he gives those gifts as men.
And he's given them as apostles, prophets, evangelists,
pastors, teachers.
Why are we loathe to recognize that or
to compliment that?
There's something in us that is afraid that
we're going to butter up these men and
that their egos will swell if we acknowledge
that they themselves are the gift, that the
men is not just a passive, abstract conveyance
for the operation of the gift, but the
gift and the man are one thing.
That in fact an apostolic man is the
thing in himself.
And that just like we need to recognize
humanity of Jesus or we do him a
disservice, we need to recognize the humanity and
the service of God or we do them
and God who sent them a disservice.
Why do we balk at this recognition?
Is it because we have not subscribed to
the mystery of incarnation?
We've not seen it in Jesus.
We celebrate his deity.
We think it's a magical thing.
We have lost the human aspect of it.
And therefore in our own relationship as church,
it's not functioning.
As we've not seen it in Jesus and
honored and esteemed it in him, how shall
we in men that are visibly before us?
And why is it that a prophet is
without honor in his own home, in his
own country?
Elsewhere he's honored, but when he comes home
and before his own people, he's not acknowledged
or honored.
That's a statement in scripture that I think
is clearly visible.
Why is that?
Others can celebrate the same prophet in Thailand
and Oshkosh and Timbuktu, but when he comes
home, he's just Joe Doakes and his frailty
and the weaknesses are there to be observed
and his credibility declines with the lack of
respect for the man and his office.
Does he forsake it in coming home?
Did Jesus say he could not do any
great things in Nazareth, in his own hometown?
Because there they had the greatest difficulty in
recognizing him.
Is not this Joseph's son?
Isn't this a piece of flesh like us?
Why are you ascribing to him messiahship and
lordship and being all swept up by his
impressiveness?
Isn't this Joseph's son?
There's something stubborn in man that refused to
recognize the God man and the man, God
in man, but man is a cherished thing.
How much is the church losing for the
want of respect and esteem for what God
sends and gives in men and how many
believers are themselves disrespectful of their own humanity
and kick themselves because it doesn't rise to
the level of their own standard and fail
to esteem what they themselves are in God
for the body.
We need to raise the question about Jesus.
Was he self-conscious about acceptance and that
people would recognize and esteem him and was
he wounded if they did not?
What about his manhood that he did not
live in some consciousness of himself, but in
fact the scriptures seem to suggest he came
to an increasing consciousness of his call even
as he approached the cross itself, but it
wasn't with him at the first.
Peter Forsythe describes Jesus as growing not only
in stature and esteem, but even in his
own consciousness of his own call.
He was never self-conscious or needing the
approval of men or else he would have
been done in.
So if he's the model pattern son, what
is the implication for ourselves?
Can we come to a place where we
do not need the approval of men and
yet at the same time there's something that
is becoming to God in recognizing the good
gifts that he has given the church in
men.
It's a paradox and we have missed it
and I think we suffer for the inability
to acknowledge man, God in man.
It's the issue of incarnation that is before
us now, not in Jesus, but in his
servants.
Okay, so I'm just raising that question.
The crux of our problem is that an
unwillingness to submit to a man, but only
deity, especially of our conception of deity, that
it's lofty and high and deserves our admiration.
His deity, however, is inseparable from his humanity
and is concealed within it.
You can't celebrate the deity of Jesus independent
of his manhood.
His manhood is the revelation of his deity
and his deity is enhanced by his manhood.
They are inseparable.
There's a union, there's a remarkable synthesis, there's
a dynamic between what is divine and human
that distinguishes Jesus as the son of God.
And that same dynamic ought to be working
in us.
We also have the divine in us, Christ
in us, the hope of glory.
We also have the Holy Spirit, which is
the spirit of the Lord, which is the
spirit of God in our humanity.
And somehow there's got to be a dynamic
of the relationship between the two by which
our humanity is enhanced and by which the
spirit of God in us is glorified.
But if you fail to reckon on the
humanity, the God part is lost also in
proportion.
The two are inseparable and in remarkable interrelationship
that the theologians could not identify or explain
the mystery, they can only describe it.
But that mystery is with us as it
was with him.
The union of God with flesh.
But if you're offended by flesh and don't
like the man part, you can forget the
deity part also.
And in fact, how many of the gifts
that God has given to men are lost
for that reason.
And my most recent experience in Brooklyn that
I've shared with others in the earlier part
of the school, with a history with this
Pentecostal church in Brooklyn, and poured out my
soul in the three or four public times
of speaking, were absolutely golden.
So that in one of the last times
the wife of the pastor has to say,
Art, after hearing you today, I feel like
I've never been saved.
I need to go back to square one
and learn all over again.
She was so remarkably moved.
But the last time I spoke, and it
became a critique of the church and its
worship and its dullness and whatever the Lord
had me to speak, they were offended and
she was offended.
And though I make myself available, I spoke
on Sunday, I wrote them a letter on
Monday.
I said, please, you have a choice whether
you're going to be offended or blessed.
And I want to make myself available while
the memory of what I spoke is yet
fresh in your mind.
I'm willing to come and share with you
or the church or the elders and review
what was said.
And if I was in error in anything
that was spoken, I wanted to recognize and
receive that.
Please, while the message is yet alive, talk
it over with the congregation and with yourself
as well.
They never did it.
Never responded.
I went overseas.
I came back and visited the church on
a Sunday morning when they were serving communion
and the text was from Ephesians that God
has given good gifts to men.
I came into the church like a leper.
People looked away.
They would not acknowledge that I was present.
The pastor who usually says, oh, Brother Katz
is back.
Good to see you.
We've been praying for you.
We hope to hear some report.
Not a word.
As if I was non-existent, a non
-entity.
People walked by me.
And then they served communion about the fellowship.
And here's the man sitting like a lump,
who's God's gift to them.
So when it was over, I went up
to him and I said, your failure to
acknowledge my presence this morning in this service
is a statement that you have not recognized
or received the good gift that God has
given you and the church in me.
Does that sound like boasting?
Is that vain?
Because that man had received from me counsel
and insight and depth of a kind that
in his 50 or 60 years as a
Pentecostal, no one has ever dared breathe such
words or had even the thought to speak
it.
Corrective, deep, rich things.
I watched the man cry over his kitchen
table in things that the Lord identified for
him through me.
I was a good gift to the man
and to the church.
But I said, your failure to recognize me
as that gift this morning in total silence,
not failure to acknowledge, in a courtesy that
any human fraternal organization would have performed.
The Elks and the Lions and the Rotarians
would have done as much.
But your failure indicates that you have not
recognized nor received the gift.
And I believe that the Lord will withdraw
it and he has.
So why is it they couldn't humble themselves?
They were so insulted and offended.
Isn't the man capable of error?
So in three or four times of the
previous big news, blessed out of their socks
and this time, maybe he missed it.
Can't you make allowance for that?
Can't you confirm with him?
Can't the situation be reviewed?
Are you going to dismiss the entire relationship
that God has given?
A young brother said to me as we
were driving in the car, Artie said, where
do you see anywhere where the church today,
the conventional church, even at its best, is
open to receive apostolic and prophetic men?
Because if they don't, what hope is there?
I said, well, just for you to know
that I'm presently pioneering such a relationship with
this Pentecostal congregation.
And for the first time is there's a
possibility of bridging the enormous gap between conventional
or prescribed Pentecostalism and a man who comes
to them as one sent with apostolic or
prophetic credentials.
We're taking the first experimental steps and I
tell you that I want to run away.
Many times I can't stand to sit there
in that congregation and listen to the droll
thing and the so-called worship and the
lifeless messages, but I'm sticking it out and
trying to be a presence because if we
can affect it here, then there's hope for
the church everywhere.
All the more that this church in Brooklyn
has the Jewish community growing right up to
its doors.
It never was a Jewish neighborhood.
It's becoming that and the Jews are buying
up the houses right and left and coming.
They even wanted to buy the church because
they're looking out over this remarkable property with
a vast lawn and parking lot that they
would adopt to make a Jewish center, but
he will not sell.
But what a potential to touch the Jewish
community in Brooklyn and fulfill the apostolic call
to the Jew first if they have something
in which they can communicate and move them
to jealousy, if they can receive foundational apostolic
and prophetic input and not be offended by
it.
So that relationship is ruptured because of the
offense of man.
All the more when it's a man who's
tested, who has come to you after being
sent by the Lord in Asia and Africa
and Europe and all over the world, somehow
that the Lord can employ him to speak
there and can't employ him to speak here.
And even if he has missed it this
once, isn't that all the more reason why
that man should be taken and prayed for
and prayed with and counseled and helped because
we know that he's a gift to the
church and the world, but here he has
missed it.
So instead of dismissing him, let's consider him,
but instead as if he's nonexistent, not even
a moment's recognition.
The same thing with the brothers in Israel
where 13 of the leaders send me a
letter that I'm a man in error and
even a false prophet in our view in
Israel.
A man whom they used to say when
art comes to Jerusalem, he brings the word
of the Lord with him invariably.
So what happened now?
Did he miss it this once?
So what do you do?
You dismiss him?
Why don't you invite him at your expense
and sit down with him and show him
where he's in error, straighten him out because
he's, he's proven to be such a consistent
gift of God over the years, but he's
failed here.
Is that the reason for the dismiss?
So the church, poor, we need to pray
in their inability to extend the kind of
grace, as I've said, that you would expect
Rotarians and Elks to give in human fraternal
organizations.
And the church with, with the aid of
the spirit cannot even begin to match.
Shame, but there's something in man in which
they walk.
But the Lord himself, what did he receive
in his earthly tenure?
What recognition, what rejection in his teeth, even
in his suffering on the cross, come down
and we will believe you to the last
moment, the most antagonistic and vile rejection while
he's, while a dumb centurion looking on the
same man says, truly, this is the son
of God.
His Jewish kinsmen are upbraiding and mocking him
in the same suffering.
This is what the Lord suffered.
And when we will assimilate and take in
some measure of that moral anguish, we will
be less prone to be offended if we
are ignored.
It's a provision of what he has passed
through for which benefit we can receive through
faith and his human experience.
You think it's an accident that in the
genealogy of Jesus, there's a prostitute and who
else is there?
Rahab and one or two other questionable, and
even a Gentile woman, what's her name?
Ruth.
I mean, God has seen to it that
even the genealogy of Jesus, there's a red
thread of shame and question and questionableness that
goes into his very natural descent.
Well, we've had a red strand running through
Ben Israel.
There's been scandal here, marriage and family and
failure.
And is that accidental or is that necessary?
Is God dealing with the pride of man?
And that if they want to be offended,
they can find room.
I've noticed this for you candidates to be
prophets.
Be aware that there's not a message that
you'll give in which there'll be some lapse,
some illustration, some accent, some word that was
improvident that probably you should not have employed
because surely there'll be people out there to
seize on that very thing and to be
offended on that one basis by a word
and to dismiss both you and the message.
That's intrinsic as if God is saying, I
defy you to see myself and my word
through this earthen vessel.
And you're going to find fault with the
vessel and therefore dismiss the word.
This is God's lament over the condition of
the church, the condition of Israel.
And we need to overcome it.
So that's why God gives us the mystery
of incarnation.
Except for the necessity of a man that
would suffer and die to retain our atonement,
the theologians raised the question, if that were
not necessary, if God could have provided an
atonement for sin without the necessity for the
human sacrifice of Jesus, would he still have
had reason to bring Jesus as a son
of man?
Would there have been sufficient reason in itself
independent of atonement for God and deity to
come in the form of flesh as man?
And my answer would be yes, every reason.
Because left to ourselves, we would celebrate deity,
not as it in fact is, but as
we would think it to be in a
way that is self-serving.
We would love lofty and ethereal thoughts of
a distant God, which is what Jews today
prefer.
But because he came as man, we have
a glimpse of God in a way that
we would not otherwise have seen him.
And it's a true glimpse.
Jesus revealed in his humanity as man, what
God in fact is.
And we need that revelation.
And that revelation needs to continue to go
out now.
But through what means?
Through the humanity that we ourselves are.
God, Christ in us, the hope of glory.
Is the mystery of incarnation yet being continued?
Only in those for whom it is a
conscious and desired thing.
And desire to see that fulfillment and see
themselves in that mystery.
And I'll tell you this, and Mark has
heard this many times from me, nothing offends
Christians more than I should say, the words
that I'm speaking, not my words, but the
words that the Father has given me.
This message is not my own.
And in fact, it's not who is the
speaker.
The mood and the accent and the voice
is the Lord.
I'm the vessel through which deity is expressing.
And it offends believers to the hell.
Who do you think you are?
As if this is a statement of presumption
rather than a statement of humility.
They would much rather hear you say, this
is my message.
I got this last night.
I've worked in the concordance.
I looked up the scriptures and here it
is.
This is my message, my understanding, my interpretation.
They would prefer that.
Why?
Because men want to serve God from their
own unaided humanity.
They want to succeed humanly without the mystery
of deity incarnate in humanity.
And when you suggest that you're operating on
another basis, in fact, the very same basis
by which Jesus operated, that appears to them
to be unspeakable presumption and arrogance of pride.
And because if you are true in what
you're saying, that your words are not your
own or the speaking is not your own,
then what is the implication for them?
And that means that what they're about in
their humanity is fraudulent and a cheapy and
a religious cop-out.
That there's a higher way to serve and
that there's a flesh and blood man who's
actually demonstrating that and so you're without excuse.
Got the idea?
They want men to come down to their
level and succeed on their level because that's
the level in which they hope to succeed.
But when you say, God Christ in me,
it raises uncomfortable questions that they don't want
to consider and they are quick to dismiss.
So this has been my experience.
Nothing more offends Christians than that suggestion or
that assertion.
And when Jesus said, you see me, you
see the Father, he was just as offensive
to his Jewish kinsmen as we are to
our Christian brethren by making references of a
comparable kind.
We're exploring something of the mystery of incarnation
and the resistance to the mystery even in
the church itself.
And will the church be the church until
it breaks that propensity and humbles itself and
recognizes the remarkable mystery that it is in
God's own wisdom and will, set forth first
through his son and now intending to set
it forth through many sons being brought to
the same glory.
And what does Paul boast in?
Never in himself.
He counts all things as dung that distinguished
him as a man.
His Hebrew ancestry, his rabbinical training, his intellect,
all the things in which he could have
boasted and by which he might have attained
great success, he counts as dung that he
might win Christ.
So when he says for me to live
as Christ, the man's not woofing.
He means it and it's evident.
What letters, what epistles, what insight, what courage,
what depth, the cry of Paul in Romans
9 that he would wish himself a curse
for his brethren's sake is not some little
cheapy piece of sentimentality.
It's a deep anguish of soul that so
mirrors and reflects God's own attitude toward this
ancient people.
And at the end of Romans 11, that
great outburst of praise, oh the depth of
the riches, this is a man beside himself.
In fact, he said, I am beside myself
for your sake and for his sake.
Paul is the exemplification of all that we're
speaking about.
And so if it was possible for Paul,
why not us?
Where are the Pauls of our time?
Where are the God-men and the men
of God who can say for me to
live as Christ?
Why have we fallen short of that?
Why can't we appropriate that full grace that
was operative in him?
So why is it that community is so
difficult and rejected and shunned?
You know why?
Because it's made up of men.
If it was only made up of demigods
and little angels with halos, it'd be a
snap.
But it's made up with men.
And what drags, what terrible problems and difficulties
and personalities and stubbornness and immaturity and selfishness
and all those things that you don't see
if you're only meeting on Sunday.
Because Sunday we can keep our nice religious
face.
But when you're with the same people on
Monday and thereafter, then you begin to see
and feel the drag, the weight, the difficulty.
And it's an agony, it's a suffering.
Community is a suffering.
But it's also the prospect of glory.
So again, we're offended by men as they
in fact are in their present condition and
we're unwilling to suffer them in their present
immaturity.
And we have idealistic notions of a community
with that is peopled exclusively by men like
ourselves.
Then it would be a snap.
But when it has to do with the
reality of men and their present condition on
a daily basis, that is struggle.
That is suffering and we're unwilling to bear
it.
So we need to sum up and say
that the community in corporate life is the
key.
We're shunning it for the same reason.
We've not made our peace with man.
Man as he in fact is.
And even as we'd like to be idealistic
and think of God as we think him
to be, we don't want to consider man
as he in fact is.
And yet these realities are foundational and we
have to bear them if the glory of
God is to be revealed and the bringing
of many sons to glory because there'll not
be one son being brought to glory in
isolation from other sons.
Only in the interaction, only in the struggle,
only in the offenses, only in the difficulties,
only in the misunderstandings.
I can tell you that dear saints, nothing
I have ever suffered from my Jewish kinsmen
touches in the slightest way the greater indignities
and the greater hurts that I've had to
bear in the church and in community as
against unbelieving Jews.
It's nothing to be kicked in the shins
or spit at by unbelieving Jews, but to
be told by someone in your own midst
for whom you've given a sacrifice that you
are yourself a traitor to the gospel and
to bear and hear those insults or one
with whom you've gone into the house of
God and broken bread together and then makes
a final tour of all the places which
he knows because he has obtained those connections
through the ministry and in each place he's
and insinuating and leaving the hint behind that
something is wrong with Ben Israel and cats
is not all that he's pumped up to
be.
Doing that with the connections that he's obtained
from the fellowship, the community itself.
So we've seen betrayal.
We've seen remarkable offense and there's not a
word for it.
It's an anguish, but we would be naive
to think that the corporate life could be
attained without that suffering.
This is men.
This is vain men.
This is ambitious men.
That one guy who left made sure that
he went to every household to tell the
people why he's leaving because his wife heard
from God that judgment is going to fall
on Ben Israel.
We're still waiting for that judgment.
It has not yet come.
But he went and told to every household
hoping to draw them out and that they
would follow him out and that itself would
bring the judgment.
He was going to affect it himself.
And when he saw me the last time
he said, Tats, the only difference between you
and me is your early morning communion time.
I didn't even answer him.
I'm sure there are many more differences than
that.
But his language and his mentality, the only
difference between you and me, what are we
in competition?
He thinks himself a prophet of world class,
but I don't know that he's ever left
Bemidji yet.
But the presumption, the pride, the arrogance of
a man who has traveled with me in
the world to come to a place like
that and try to lead Ben Israel out
so that I would be stuck with the
judgment.
Listen guys, I can multiply.
I'm not appealing for your sympathy.
I'm just telling you community is struggle.
It's a reality.
It's something to be toughed out.
It requires grace and mercy.
And you run to the communion table because
there you are replenished in the strength and
life of God who knows exactly what it
is through which you are passing and can
alone supply the enablement.
Well what about Jesus?
They wanted to make him king and the
next day they're ready to crucify him.
Listen guys, we need to be realistic about
man, but that's not a reason to despise
man because man is made in God's image,
but that image is marred and it needs
to be rectified through the forsaking of sin,
the cleansing and purging of his blood and
the admission of his deity into man that
we might be men.
It takes God to be a man.
It's a mystery, but we need to embrace
it because it's at the heart of the
faith and not to shun it because it
requires man.
And this is why Jews have rejected the
gospel.
That was God?
A criminal on the cross outside the camp?
Are you kidding?
But the humanity of Jesus is the stable
or cave amenable to God and offensive to
man and therefore chosen.
Humanity itself is in the mystery of God
what the stable was for the birth of
Jesus and the cave was for David.
God requires somehow offensive externalities in order to
bring forth his glory.
David would not have been David without a
cave.
Jesus would not have been Jesus without a
stable.
And God will not be God without the
stable that man is in his humanity.
It's a remarkable contradiction of choosing the thing
that is foolish and weak.
But God chooses it and God provides it.
And where does it say?
What is man that God should desire him?
What is man whose breath is in his
own nostrils?
Isn't it a paradox?
God who gives us the uniqueness of man
and the same breath.
What is man that he should acknowledge him?
But God does acknowledge him.
And if God will acknowledge man, what ought
we to do?
How do we dare despise what God acknowledges?
And more than acknowledges, he honors.
And how does he honor?
He is willing to invest his deity into
those human vehicles, into those human vessels.
That we might say, for me to live
as Christ.
Think of God's condescension.
And however flaky and inadequate we are in
our humanity, God does not shy or shun
away from investing his deity in those very
earthen vessels.
And if he will do that and have
that kind of respect for man, what ought
we to have?
We're more, what's the word, proud than God.
He doesn't hesitate.
So Spurgeon himself illustrates all that we've been
saying.
And the seasoned tempered maturity he obtained almost
from the first as a teenage convert.
There's no other way in my opinion to
understand what Spurgeon is.
And maybe we can say the same thing
about many of the great godly men.
That they were exhibiting things before they could
be explained in terms of their own experience
and their own chronology.
Something they had gained early from their conversion.
Gave them a knowledge of God and a
sense of God.
A sense of eternity as we read this
morning from the selections in Spurgeon.
That is not to be explained in a
natural way.
They've acquired something.
And the heck of it is that that
acquisition is available to all of us.
Who believe for it, desire it, and have
the faith to obtain it.
Lord I want the full measure that you
desire that I should receive and take into
myself of that reality through which you yourself
have passed.
I cannot hope to begin to emulate or
experience it for myself.
But I want to receive as a tempering
in my soul that through which you have
passed and that you are willing to communicate
as part of our legacy and inheritance in
your humanity as well as your deity.
We would be a different church.
So the entire person of Jesus is but
as one gem.
This is Spurgeon now writing.
He is altogether complete not only in his
several parts but as a gracious all glorious
whole.
You cannot separate the deity from the man
and the man from the deity.
He is the thing in himself as Paul
himself was.
Oh Jesus thy power, thy grace, thy justice,
thy tenderness, thy truth, thy majesty, thine immutability
make up such a man or rather such
a god man as neither heaven nor earth
has seen elsewhere.
Thy infancy, well I'll just quit the thys,
your infancy, your eternity, your sufferings, your triumphs,
your death, your immortality are all woven in
one gorgeous tapestry without seam or rent.
Remember that they couldn't divide Jesus' garment, it
was without seam.
They could only gamble over it because the
garment was the statement of the man.
He's indivisible.
You can't know where deity ends and man
begins.
It's one together in his person in exactly
the same way that God intends it for
us.
All woven in one gorgeous tapestry.
Therefore to condemn the human part and only
celebrate the deity part is to miss it.
Now you mirror of all perfection, each spice
is fragrant but the compound is divine of
humanity and deity.
O sacred symmetry, O rare connection of many
perfects to make one perfection, this is me.
Jesus brought up to heaven at the throne
not only his wounds but his perfected humanity
bodily in which and by which they were
obtained.
It is that Christ, italics, that is made
incarnate in us for he had obtained in
his humanity that which was the distinctive of
his deity, humility, servanthood, love.
It is that Christ that God desires to
be formed in us and not some dubious
construction to which we append the name Jesus.
It is that Christ which is the hope
of glory and too great an achievement to
be lost with his ascension and poured out
with his spirit.
This is the answer for every nation because
by it is that righteousness by which prosperity
is obtained being made the righteousness of God
in him.
This was my message to Africa, righteousness exalts
a nation but which righteousness?
The righteousness of God in him.
To African believers who can assimilate and take
in the righteousness that comes with the whole
man.
This is the reality that must be set
forth before God's people not just for their
admiration but for their appropriation.
It is that Jesus alone that saves to
the uttermost all who come unto God by
him.
In all this he is the patterned son
bringing many sons to glory.
Not a bad statement.
I would even say that the statement is
so good that it is beyond my own
inspiration.
That the very statement is itself the outworking
of the mystery.
Christ in me is inspiring a summation of
what Spurgeon is saying in a way that,
and this was all together, this is not
second, third draft of something.
This is it, this is the first statement
spontaneously just typing it up sitting at the
computer.
So what am I saying?
That the very mystery is working even in
the contemplation of what Spurgeon is putting before
the reader and the way that the reader
is commenting is itself the outworking of that
life.
Believest thou this?
And now I'll really embarrass myself by telling
you my prayer early this morning and not
just once but several times.
That Lord, that you not only set forth
the great subject, the neglected subject of incarnation
of God in the flesh before this people,
but that in this servant that you have
set before them they would even glimpse the
measure of the reality.
What think ye of that?
Is that vanity?
Is that vain boast?
Or is this the kind of attitude that
is pleasing to the Lord?
This is what he wants, that's why he's
given this sacrifice.
This is the reality by which sons are
brought to glory and which they can say
to some measure, if you see me you
see the Lord.
If you hear me you're hearing him.
This is not me, this is not my
talent, this is not my little distinctive.
This is deity in humanity with a Brooklyn
accent.
What else did you expect?
That's the flesh, that's the frame, that's the
earthen thing by which the deity is being
expressed.
But the source of the energy and the
inspiration, the expression is him.
I believe that, pray for me, or I
am of all men most to be pitied.
I want to be not just the expositor
of the mystery, I want to be the
reflection and the statement of it.
You can come and touch and feel and
see that there's a possibility.
If God can do this through a Jewish
piece of flesh pushing 80, what's the prospect
for yourself?
It's the prospect that he intends and we
are living beneath that glory.
We're wanting to succeed in our unaided humanity,
maybe a little help, but we don't want
that union by which he receives all the
glory and we are nothing.
Got the idea?
What do you think I did on the
break?
I took a walk and I'm talking over
to the Lord.
I said, God forbid Lord, that I who
am so privileged to set forth for the
first time considerations of this kind should in
any way be boastful or take to myself
any kind of credit or that what I'm
sharing would in any way be tinged or
corrupted by any vain notion on my part
because I recognize the danger and that the
Lord must be all in all.
This is the mystery of saints and we've
not been this way hit too far and
we will miss it a little bit.
There'll be stumblings and fallings.
We will lapse, but we've got to walk
in this and grow in this, cherishing our
humanity as we cherish the deity in our
humanity that makes our humanity humanity.
We're not men without God.
He would know no man after the flesh,
but as I shared with someone yesterday, check
the Greek word there.
There are two Greek words for flesh.
One is sarx, S-A-R-X, that
I believe actually refers to the literal body
and the other word flesh, like the flesh
is at enmity with the spirit, is a
word that is suggestive of our soul-ish
life.
He would know no man after their soul
life, but he would not despise their humanity,
but he would recognize the man in his
totality, not just by the outward and the
external, but by the thing that makes the
whole thing whole, where you can't separate the
deity from the humanity.
Maybe that's what the world is waiting for,
when God will have set prophets in the
earth, where you cannot say where the man
ends and where God begins.
They'll have the same audacity and authority as
Elijah, who says it shall not rain nor
dew, but according to my word.
Who the heck does he think he is,
that he can command the elements and hold
them back for three and a half years
and bring a global famine?
He's only a piece of dust himself, fed
by ravens, and yet he speaks it with
audacity and complete conviction.
And what happens?
There's no rain nor dew for three and
a half years.
So where does Elijah end and where does
God begin?
And what kind of a history did Elijah
have, that he would end and that God
could begin?
Because the same man, after his greatest feat,
of challenging Israel about his apostasy, runs away
because he hears that Jezebel is threatening his
life, and hides in the wilderness.
Take my life, I'm not better than my
father's.
He vacillates, he's up one day, down the
next, showing his humanity.
And yet in that humanity, God brought an
entire nation to repentance.
The Lord, he is God.
And that Elijah must come again before the
Lord, and when he comes, he'll come corporately.
He'll be a corporate son, and you'll not
be able to tell where his humanity ends
and where deity begins.
He'll speak with the authority of God and
the audacity of God, and yet he'll tremble
for his own frailty after his greatest accomplishment.
How do you like them apples?
Will you be part of that?
Let's pray.
Lord, you're not just giving us little classroom
stuff.
This is the nit and grit of the
whole economy of God.
This is the whole redemptive saga.
This is the way this thing has got
to conclude.
Elijah must come first.
But what manner of man is he that
speaks with the authority of God in absolute
boldness and uncompromising insistence, and nature obeys him?
Lord, what are you saying?
We are so removed.
We're so caught up in our own little
petty world and life, and we think ministry
is doing this and that, and a guy
calls up, and how do I reprove a
brother?
Tell me how.
Step one.
Step two.
Lord, the mystery, Lord.
If Elijah comes, and he must come, he'll
come in this mystery, or he'll not come
at all.
He'll be a union of man and God,
so inseparable you can't tell where the one
begins and the other ends.
And he will not have attained that in
a moment.
It's not magic.
He will have obtained it through process, which
you did not show us.
You're discreet.
You keep this undisclosed.
We don't know how Elijah was brought up
in the school of prophets to be that
man, but we desire, my God, to see
that fulfillment and to be part in it.
So come, Lord.
May we receive the full benefit that is
already wrought in Christ and his humanity, that
we might take it into ourselves, Lord.
His humility, his suffering, his anguish, his soul
crises, the things through which he's passed, and
the totality of human experience can be ours
to temper our souls and to bring dimensions,
my God, that fulfill the glory for which
you wait in sons.
Help us, Lord.
Give us the faith to appropriate our total
legacy given us in your great Son who
took upon himself flesh that we should have
this prospect.
And we thank you, Lord.
Turn this mystery into reality, we pray, Lord,
in these last days for this dying world
and decrepit church.
And we thank you and give you praise.
In Yeshua's name.