I'm going to share from Forsyth, P.T.
Forsyth.
Peter is his first name.
Hardly known by anyone, even out of his
own congregational church in which he was a
minister and a teacher, died in 1921.
So his principal work took place at the
turn of the century.
I have one book where a series of
lectures that he gave to Yale divinity students
on preaching.
There's another book that's an old-time classic
called The Soul of Prayer that should be
in every believer's bookcase and in their hand.
I've never read anything more powerful and more
penetrating, more profound on the subject of prayer
than P.T. Forsyth's The Soul of Prayer.
And somewhere in the course of that book,
he says that the whole purpose of our
faith and our being is prayer, that the
soul of prayer is the soul of the
faith, not just an adjunct.
So he's a remarkable resource that I bumped
into almost accidentally, a little classic called The
Cruciality of the Cross.
Very cross-oriented and probably one of the
most original thinkers that I've had the privilege
to encounter.
But his language is often difficult and he's
wrestling with static concepts and formed and hard
doctrinal things like the two natures of Jesus
that go all the way back to the
fifth century determination of the councils of the
church of how to understand how deity and
humanity could be reconciled.
And that they laid the foundation for the
church's present understanding, which is rather fixed and
static.
But here comes a man who wrestles and
comes up with a way of perceiving the
remarkable issue of incarnation in a way that
just blows your mind.
So you'll have to listen closely.
What is considered his most significant work is
the book that I have in my hand,
The Person and Place of Jesus Christ.
And there's a publisher now in Oregon who
has reissued most of Forsythe's works.
So you don't have to go scrounging for
some used copy.
You can get them freshly printed and it
will stretch you.
If we had all kinds of time, I
wish we could go through many chapters of
the book, but we have in the shortness
of our time just to deal with the
last chapter or so.
So Lord, if there's such a thing as
asking for special grace, though grace itself is
special, we're asking for a special special or
a grace of graces that we should be
able to obtain from this remarkable saint.
Something, my God, of the riches of his
own wrestling and coming through with a perception
of the mystery of Christ, his person and
his place of incarnation, the unprecedented event that
has taken place in time and history of
God coming down into the earth and taking
upon himself the form of a man.
And that there are implications for that union
of deity and humanity that go even beyond
the atonement affected by it.
That there's other things that should be understood
because we bear something of that mystery in
ourselves, God in our flesh.
So Lord, make this rich.
And prompt such responses and questions as will
forward the deeper understanding.
And as I just prayed in my little
walk, that you'll give answer to the distress
and the cries that came out from this
morning in a way and beyond what they
could have thought would have been appropriate.
In the same way that you gave Nicodemus
an answer that utterly perplexed him, that did
not seem to have any correspondence to the
questions that he asked.
He asked from an earthly plane and you
answered from the heavenly.
So today also answer from the heavenly plane
and in so answering, bring us up to
that plane.
We thank you and give you praise in
Jesus name.
It should be remembered that human personality is
not a ready-made thing, but it has
to grow by moral exercise.
One of the things that distinguishes the writings
of P.T. Forsythe is the word moral.
It comes up almost on every page and
it's a word that has become extinct in
our contemporary life.
Whoever speaks about moral, what does moral mean?
It's like an echo out of a past
that doesn't have any present cogency.
And yet, as I have said, and in
the message that I gave in Albania that
someone graciously transcribed, the issue of what is
moral is the issue of what is man.
Strip man of what is moral and you
have an animal.
It is the thing that is moral that
distinguishes the humanity of man.
So I quite understand his frequency in the
use of that word, because before, just a
line above where I began to quote, we
have man's movement to God and man's action
on God, either in the way of aspiration
and prayer, or in the way of acquiring
from God moral personality.
Can you see why I drew?
Moral personality.
Like wow, all we knew before was personality.
And in Brooklyn, poisonality.
But moral personality, that what is the component
that really distinguishes what is human is personality,
is at its heart the moral component, that
there's a moral personality.
And if Jesus is anything, he's that.
Jesus was a moral personality, not moralistic.
That's the difference.
That's false piety, like the length of your
skirts and how you're dressed.
No, that's moralism.
That's religious contrivance.
Moral is a much deeper word.
And you don't wear it on your sleeve.
It's intrinsic.
It's in your deeps.
It's what you are.
It's the distinguishing mark of your humanity.
But if we're not conscious of it, and
we overlook the occasions by which moral personality
is formed or grows, how shall we attain
it?
If we're just a bunch of dum-dums,
and one day is like another, and we
never see an issue or a crisis in
its moral meaning, how then shall we obtain
that meaning?
And most of us don't see it.
So, it should be remembered that human personality
is not a ready-made thing.
You could say, I can't help it.
I inherited this from my parents.
I grew up in Brooklyn.
I can't help it.
But you can help it.
And there are issues that come before us,
usually as crisis, that require some response that
has to come out of our deeps that
is more than the issue of practicality or
expedience, but the issue more of rightness.
What is right in a case like this,
where you don't have a book to which
you can turn and find a prescription, but
you have to find it in that moment,
in the measure of the knowledge of God
that you have, and the union with him.
There's where the moral personality is formed.
And that's where this writer says, Jesus's moral
personality was formed.
He did not come full blown.
He grew in grace and stature by facing
these issues and responding.
So, it has to grow by moral exercise
and chiefly in the kingdom of God by
prayer.
The living soul has to grow into moral
personality.
So, here's prayer invoked as the milieu, the
mode by which the moral things are obtained.
How do you know what to say and
do?
Well, you turn to the most high, the
soul of prayer, not just your formal time
before coming out for the day, but in
a certain sense, you're continually breathing prayers Godward,
as I just did now, taking a little
walk for how to commence here.
What he brought with him was such a
soul as was bound morally to grow under
his life's vocation, to the personality that was
the complete and final revelation of God.
Isn't that a remarkable thing that the father
would trust that something had to be worked
out in the career and history of Jesus,
in his own personality as a human being,
as a man, and the issues that would
be before him, by which in his history
of moral responses, he would grow into the
form of the son of God that reflects
the father.
That this is not some fixed thing that
is ironclad, but there's a dynamic here even
of the father's trust.
Talk about faith and the son in which
there's a moment by moment and an event
by event dynamic of life and reality in
which something is formed over a history that
by the end of that history, what you
have is the expression of the father perfectly.
What a difference this view is than to
think that it's all canned, all mechanical and
all given.
This shows the issue of faith, the issue
of prayer, the issue of relationship, the issue
of autonomy, the issue of being a human
being faced with crises that require decision.
Hey, that means he at every point was
like us.
That's how he became a high priest.
If it came all fixed and in a
capsule and it was all determined before he
left heaven to come to earth, what does
his earthly tenure mean?
Just providing a body that can be put
up on a cross?
We have not sufficiently considered the remarkable, the
magnitude of the, I don't have a word
for it, the adjectives fail, of what is
represented in this incarnation that is not fixed,
but that there's an element, a great element
of reality being propounded by episodes given by
the father and in the reality of being
in the world by which a moral man
grows in stature and grace in dependency of
the father.
That is an example for us and a
pattern.
He's the pattern son and this gives us
a greater glimpse of what sonship means.
It's not going to be any mechanical for
us, a ready-made thing, if it was
not that for him.
We will grow morally by the issues that
we face and which we turn to God
and so he had to grow under his
life's vocation to the personality that was the
complete and final revelation of God, the agent
of man's redemption.
If he hadn't grown to that, what he
had sacrificed on the cross would not have
been sufficient.
He had to complete the true man and
true God to be true sacrifice.
So this is not some light question of
his getting it together.
It's more than the issue of how it
pertained to him.
It's the issue of how it pertains to
us, how it pertains to the father.
He had to come to a certain formation
that fulfilled his vocation or his destiny, but
he didn't come to it mechanically nor automatically.
He came to it in a life existential
dynamic of responding as a man without the
access to his deity, which he had laid
aside those prerogatives and had to work out
before the father in response and in speakings
the kinds of things that he did.
So by the time that the cross came,
he was the complete son.
That's what Forsythe is saying.
Well, where does it say that?
It doesn't say that.
We're given only the sparsest biblical information, but
it requires a holy ghost immersion into the
mystery to seek out what this incarnation means
and represents.
And I don't know of anyone who has
probed it more deeply than this man.
And I appreciate the reform writers and John
Murray, but they are so exacting.
They are so precise.
They haven't moved a bit from the Nicene
Council and the Chalcedon.
All they're doing is expressing the classic theological
doctrinal view of the issue of divinity and
humanity, but it's not an insight into the
mystery.
It's just a reiteration of the conclusions to
which the church councils have come in order
to avoid threatening heresies to the faith.
So they just gave the bare skeleton, praise
God for it.
What this man is doing is coming in
deeply into it.
I'm trying to understand what that mystery represents.
So a soul of Godhead is the necessary
postulate of the redeemed personality.
The redeeming personality is the necessary foundation for
the growth of that personality is the necessary
condition of the finality of his work.
Is that so Mr. Forsythe?
And what's the necessary condition for the finality
of our work?
I'm teaching you guys how to read.
Yesterday was how to examine a text.
Today is how to read, which is to
say, when the writer is making certain statements,
we need to ask as we're reading, well,
then what's the implication for me?
Because certainly there's got to be an implication.
So what is he saying?
That the agent of man's redemption, the soul
of Godhead, was the necessary foundation to the
growth of that personality and it is the
necessary condition of the finality of his work.
That the issue of his personality and the
formation of his humanity and manhood is not
just some isolated subject in itself, how interesting,
but the necessary condition for his redemptive call,
for his vocation.
He had to be true man and true
God to be the true sacrifice.
And if he missed it and did not
come to a fullness, it would have been
inadequate.
Well, then what about us and our vocation?
What about our calling?
What about the things that make for our
finality and our completion?
Is it altogether unrelated to his or is
it altogether profoundly related?
Therefore, he should be himself an object of
study because in studying how he attained to
the fullness of his manhood in the light
of his vocation and calling has got to
give us some insight in the things that
are intrinsic to our call.
We're not getting fancy to be fancy, but
when you probe the deeps of the faith,
it is going to require a stretching and
a hearing and dealing with words.
So it was a personality that differed from
all others by finding its growth to lie
in the unaided and sinless appropriation of that
which it already was.
What are you saying?
He's finding and attaining by a process of
growth that which he already was.
He was already the son of God.
There's no taking that away.
He was that eternally with the Father before
he came to earth, but now coming to
earth in his humanity and by process of
the life of his humanity, he's finding out
or becoming what he already was.
Well, what were we already who knew us
from our mother's wombs?
There's a mystery even to man as if
God already foreknew us as if we had
some kind of an existence or he foresaw
that there's a knowledge that we've become what
we already were or intended to be.
Do you have that sense?
You can pray for strange men like myself
who think that what they are about in
God, whether in whatever nation or situation, is
a work to walk in that was established
before the foundations of the earth were laid.
And not just some impromptu happenstance to which
we have to kind of find our way
by the grace of God.
We're walking in works established before the foundations
of the earth were laid.
So there's a certain pre-knowledge of God
in the mystery of our call.
And mystery is not a bad word, dear
saints.
The American church is conspicuously lacking in an
appreciation for mystery.
I'm not talking about detective stories.
I'm talking about those things that lie too
deep for words that need to be into
intuited or apprehended if we are to have
a commendable sense of God and ourselves in
his purpose.
There's mystery.
And when you have a sense of mystery,
you'll find yourself so much less prone to
becoming exasperated or impatient or how come and
why.
You just let those questions.
There's something being worked beyond your ability to
know what to understand.
And that is God's work.
But that he had to do it and
that it's not automatic, that it requires prayerful
decisions and exacerbating crises that tear your heart
out and that you feel the moral weight
of it and the moral anguish of it.
He's the pattern son.
But astonishingly, we are called in great measure
to that same pattern.
He's working out something for us and we
need to follow that pattern son, emulate that
pattern son.
I recognized that it was not a snap
for him.
Now he had no advantage unavailable to us.
Even in the miracles that he performed were
available to him through the measure of his
faith as they are available to us.
See, it's one thing to have a phony,
synthetic emulation of Jesus like, well, he's an
object of admiration.
What can you say?
He's God.
Of course he had the power.
He had the ability.
We can't hope to emulate, you know, be
like that, but we can admire him.
There's much more here than just admiring.
There's a pattern here that we need to
observe that will encourage us in the attainment
of our sonship and the fulfillment of our
vocation by the same means by which he
obtained it.
That's the point.
But if he's God, then he couldn't help
himself and always had the right word and
the right act.
And there was no moral groaning, attention of
faith, then all we can do is admire
him, but we can't be benefited by him.
See what I mean?
He's the ultimate son.
This is the pattern son.
You want to know what sonship is?
Study him.
And if he did not obtain it through
what he learned in obedience to suffering, how
then did he obtain it?
And if it took a suffering of obedience
for him to obtain it, what will it
take for us?
Well, that'll give us a different attitude about
suffering.
And not just physical, because the more excruciating
form of suffering is moral.
Of the kind of cry that we heard
this morning.
I wonder in that sense, the statement that
he made, greater things than I have done,
you will do.
If this mystery needs now at the end
of the age to come into a full
and corporate son that merges and takes in
the diversity of personalities and all the things
that make up individuality, that's a greater work
than what was obtained in his own individual
sonship.
The inherent mystery is there in him, but
to see that now come to full expression
in a body is awesome, and that is
the ultimate glory of God.
Unto him be glory in the church that
has come to maturity as sons and can
act with the same obedience to the Father
as one life, with one voice, and in
the same moment as he exercised in his
own individual person.
What an achievement.
I was ready to throw in the towel
after this morning, just hearing the different ones
in their condition.
Like, wow, who wants to be locked up
in Noah's Ark with a bunch like that?
You'd go out of your skull.
But this is it.
That's what we're here for.
That's what we're in.
Ben, Israel has been a suffering.
The churches are suffering before it's a glory,
and in it you have to deal with
the saints in their diverse condition, circumstance, maturity,
understanding, and out of their own hearts and
the unique histories of their own lives, failed
marriages, betrayal, some warp has come by which
a woman is now nursing the grievance that
is ventilated by gossip.
And so you don't just deal with the
surface thing, but you seek for the root.
She's got to be healed if she's going
to be part of this composite glory for
which God waits, and nature and creation is
groaning until now for the manifestation of the
sons of God.
In fact, we should say the manifestation of
the son of God, that plural composite entity
that Chris is talking about.
But the genius of it was already set
forth by Jesus.
But this is a greater work that this
can come in a composite corporate way.
And what does that take?
It's not just that we are required.
He himself is trusting.
In fact, his faith and his trust is
far more staggering than our own.
Easier for us to trust in God than
for him to trust who has put all
his eggs in one basket called the body
of Christ or his own son on the
earth and all of the temptations and struggles
to which that life would pass.
And the father trusts, because as I said
yesterday, faith is the milieu.
Faith is the divine environment in which God
himself moves and has his being.
It's not something he requires of us.
It's something that is intrinsic to him.
So it's a remarkable thing that the father
in every way is afflicted with our afflictions
as he was with his son.
He knows the struggle.
He's not detached.
I don't know how to explain it.
We're at the threshold of revelation or heresy.
And I'm not sure which way we're going
to fall.
But if you don't take that risk, you're
going to forfeit the revelation.
This is what Forsyth is saying.
He came to this by a progress of
growth that when it was complete, he was
that image.
Maybe at any stage he reflected it, but
the totality came with the completion of his
growth and the same issues with us.
But the father trusted for that and the
son did not betray that trust, but it
required a dependency on the grace given by
the father.
And we equally have that dependency.
All I can give is my own little
paltry experience.
That is to say, does he tell you
what that work is?
Do you know it in advance?
So you have to trust that when you
open your mouth, what is being expressed is
the fulfillment of that work.
After it's finished, you can see maybe something
of the magnitude of what has taken place.
But the beginning and the continuation is the
issue of faith and trust.
So there's a tension because it was established
before the foundation that the earth was laid.
It doesn't mean that for you it's going
to be a snap.
For you, it's a total risk.
For you, it's a threat.
For you, everything is hanging on the making
or the breaking of it only as it
comes forth in moral obedience.
Got the idea?
And when it does come forth, it is
that work.
It requires a faith to believe for that,
but it doesn't mean that faith means you
lean on your haunches and it's all done
and you just come and open your mouth
and boom, it takes place.
There's a dynamic of trust, even word for
word.
Have you ever watched speakers like that?
They stop and you wonder what they're pausing
for.
What they're pausing for is the next word,
the next thought.
They don't have it except as they are
giving themselves in faith for the unfolding of
it as we are doing even now, right
now, this morning, today.
That I looked at this book two days
ago, put it on the pile, and now
I'm opening it for the first time.
Why?
Not to say, look, I'm on no hands,
but to give God full optimum occasion to
give on the spot his spontaneous work and
by the life of his spirit.
True preaching is that every single time.
True teaching, true witness, true prayer.
There's got to be a living God.
Isn't that who you're praying to and whom
you believe?
He's a living God.
Okay, Lord, you're on.
This is it.
This is finale.
This is conclusion.
We can't humanly know what needs to be
expressed in the last session.
Having heard the cries of this morning, people
still in distress, still waiting for answers, still
more agitated for having come than had they
remained.
So Lord, how is that to be met?
And one final statement from you at the
conclusion of our days, who's sufficient for those
things?
And so you open and you trust for
the dynamic of God himself in his presence
and the reality of his spirit and power
to bring forth.
And when he brings it forth, it's the
work that was appointed and established before the
foundations.
You know what?
If that's true, what kind of admiration ought
we to have for such a God?
That a work that was established in his
conception before the foundations is now being perpetrated,
obtained and performed in this gasp of stuttering
and believing and gasping for air and for
the word in all of the moral strain
and trust that hinges upon a piece of
flesh called a man for that work.
So it brings the thing established with the
thing taking place in its present dynamic.
Well, maybe I'm still a Marxist in my
deeps because the root of Marxism is dialectical
materialism for anybody who's been to sociology 1A.
What is that?
That Marx drew from the German philosopher Hegel
who had conceived of a dynamic at the
root of life called dialectical.
A dialectic of a thesis and an antithesis.
Something in opposition and something in the working
of these opposites in the dynamic brings forth
the new thing.
A synthesis.
And what is a synthesis?
Socialism.
What does it come out of?
Capitalism and I don't know what else.
So Marx took this philosophy and brought it
as a key of history and the understanding
of society that was so dynamic that it
raptured me.
When I was a kid going to Marxist
Institute in Manhattan, I can't tell you, I
would leave the lectures floating.
My feet were not on the floor.
Dialectical materialism.
It so spoke to my heart because it
touched at something that I think is real.
Isn't it interesting that Marxism and communism has
done more in its perverted way with the
concept of the community and the cell and
people in a bonding of identity for purposes
than the church itself knows.
So this man is bringing this kind of
mentality.
There's a dynamic.
We haven't seen it sufficiently and that's why
we're so passive.
That's why our churches are constituted by overacting
men on a platform, the professionals, ministering to
a sea of passivity.
That nothing is ever required but their presence
and their dollar in the collection plate and
an amen and a hallelujah in the singing
of a chorus.
We're breeding an entire church that is stupefied
in stupefaction and narrowness and does not grow
because there's nothing required.
There's no dynamic.
There's nothing incumbent upon them.
It all takes place from the platform.
So we lose the genius of the dynamic
of the church that Jesus exhibited in the
dynamic of his own humanity.
That's what this man is saying.
Okay.
We need to become dialecticians.
We need to see the spontaneous and electric
elements that come up in life that need
to be recognized and to see the outworking.
That things are not static and fixed.
There's hope.
There's the presence of God who is the
third fold caught in covenant.
His presence in our situations means that our
marriage is not hopeless.
If God is the third fold, there's hope
unspeakable.
And there's a dynamic there of how he
will express that presence and how we recognize
it and yield to it and are tempted
in our condemnation of each other for failing
as husbands and wives.
It's another mentality.
And what to God the church would have
it.
I would say faith is sacrifice in every
instance.
That is to say you can easily lapse
into your own humanity in any situation.
It's always accessible to have a convenient, practical
answer out of your experience or out of
your knowledge of thought.
If you want to be relieved from the
tension of what God's word and God's reality
is in that moment.
So the faith means the sacrifice of forsaking
the comfort and security of what's available to
you in your unaided humanity.
And then trusting that what comes is from
God and speaking and doing it.
So there's only one of multitudes of instances
where God will do the untoward thing.
And often in a way that seems to
contradict what you think God to do.
And even contradict and offend your own taste
and sensibility.
That would offend you to hear anyone say
it, let alone that you should say it.
That's the faith which is sacrifice.
That's the faith that Jesus exercised.
I only do that which I hear from
my father or see from my father.
I never once drew from my own very
capable humanity as distinguished as it was.
I was other and always totally thrust upon
him.
I'm a son.
And my object is not to get by
in the moment that I'm saved from embarrassment.
My object is to glorify and gratify him.
So whatever he gives me to speak, Nicodemus
comes and says, and who's Nicodemus?
He's a ruler of the Jews.
What a plumb, what a feather in anyone's
cap that if you gave him step one
and step two in how to be saved
brother and he receives the Lord and he
comes into the congregation and he's an important
person in the Jewish community.
Terrific.
What does Jesus do?
He blows it.
He confuses and he bewilders the man and
gives him answers that seem totally unrelated to
his questions.
Except you be born again of the spirit
and water, you cannot enter the kingdom of
God.
God wasn't even thinking along those lines.
Must I, must I pass again the second
time through my mother's womb?
Shows how literal and material he was in
his mindset, though he was a ruler of
the Jews, which means he should have been
informed about spiritual things.
Jesus said, if you're not received from me,
these things, how should we receive heavenly things?
So he's giving him a heavenly answer to
earthly questions and letting the man go in
a bewildered state in which you don't know
the result because he himself says in John
3 that the spirit blows where it will
and you cannot tell from whence it's coming
or where it's going.
But we want to tell, we need to
know, that's what we were schooled in the
world.
You don't do something before you know what
the consequence is going to be.
But in the kingdom, the spirit will list
where it will and you cannot know where
it came from, know where it's going.
You cannot know.
All you can do is be obedient and
yield it to that spirit.
That's what Jesus was.
And what do we find out in his
death?
Nicodemus is the one who asked for his
body.
And if Nicodemus is not in heaven now,
I'll eat this book.
And he's in heaven because he received an
answer from the father greater than his question
to a son who is obedient to give
it and not fall back on John 3
.16 or are you saved brother.
See what I mean?
Faith is a dynamic of trust and it'll
bring you into places where you'll find yourself
mortified or embarrassed or you think that even
God himself is being contradicted.
How can he say that and do that?
And yet it is God and you need
to trust.
And how do you come to that faith?
By suffering, by degrees, by a history.
You grow into it.
He's not going to give you a challenge
of faith beyond what your present capacity is
to which he has led you now.
You're not going to be asked to address
60 university students or 100 or 200 black
ministers.
You're going to be asked to witness to
the next door neighbor or to your Jewish
dentist or something like that.
The issue of faith will be appropriate to
what our history has been until that time.
And when you're obedient in that moment, then
you go on to the next, the next,
and the next.
So it's a dynamic life, not static.
In fact, to use Jesus' reply to Nicodemus
for yourself may be entirely to the Lord.
He didn't give us a one-time prescription
for every situation.
Now, because he said that to Nicodemus, now
we have a formula.
Life is not a formula.
That word that was perfect for Nicodemus would
be totally out of place with another man
on another occasion.
So what we need to do is find
the word appropriate for the man in that
moment and in that situation as Jesus found
it for Nicodemus, by a trust of the
Father.
That's a dynamic life.
So the great question that Saul asked when
he was brought down to the earth on
the road to Damascus is the question.
And Paul lived his entire apostolic life in
the light of that question, Lord, what would
you have for me to do?
So we need continually to be in the
tension of that question now every day, like
today.
Is this what you'll ever have us to
do?
Or should we have done something else?
Because once it's done, it's irretrievable.
And that heightens the risk and the value.
Can we have a confidence in that what
we are about is what we ought to
do?
How valid is the question that we're putting
forward?
Do we really mean it?
And if it requires something on our part
like embarrassment, humiliation, or the prospect of failure,
will we yet obey?
It's not pat, it's not snap.
And as far as Jesus knowing his vocation,
even that may have been progressively revealed to
him as he went on, as he came
closer to the approach of his death, he
was able to say, I need to go
to Jerusalem in their wicked hands.
And maybe he didn't know it at the
first and the angels therefore had to comfort
him.
And so we need, this is what it
means, true man and true God, true man
in trembling, true man in dependency, true man
in faith, and all of the kinds of
things that we face as men.
It was a personality that differed from all
others by finding its growth to lie in
the unaided and sinless appropriation of that which
it already was.
But it was in no fated or mechanical
way.
The ground of his inability to sin did
not lie in the immunity and almost necessity
of a nature or rank, but in the
moral details, the moral reverberation of his great
initial and inclusive act eternal in the heavens.
His renunciations on earth had behind them all
the power of that compendious renunciation by which
he came to the earth.
Isn't that a stagger, is that a thought?
The great renunciation was the decision to come
to the earth.
That's why the crisis was not just his
death, but his birth.
The voluntary willing agreement of the son to
the father to leave the indescribable blessing and
comfort of eternal presence with the father and
come leave that and come into the earth
was the great renunciation.
It was already the cross before the cross.
It was already the principle which is intrinsic
in the Godhead itself.
And once you have that behind you, that
initial moral resolve and decision and choice, then
your earthly walk is the continuing working out
of that initial renunciation.
I'll give an A for the day and
two gold stars if someone can translate that
statement into its application for us now.
There's a single basic great renunciation that is
foundational to the entire subsequent spiritual life and
the fulfillment of its vocation.
But if it is not made, then how
shall our continuing renunciations have an energy and
a source if we have not made the
initial one that Jesus made before he came
to earth?
What's the possible application of that for us?
Do we make a decision before we're in
the earth now?
But have you ever made a once and
for all basic renunciation?
A really a committing of your life to
death that you have no life, no possibility,
no future if there's no resurrection, that there's
no purpose for you in and of yourself.
And you're giving over your future and your
hope for marriage, for family, for career as
one death.
That your baptism was that renunciation.
And if there's anything after that, it's the
miracle of resurrection or you're still down there
in the water in the muck.
How many have made a renunciation of that
magnitude?
And I'm suggesting that because we have not
made it, most of us, our lives are
continually spotty, up and down, erratic, one day
up, one day depressed, because there was not
as foundational a renunciation at the inception of
our spiritual life as there was for his.
I've never before seen that.
I've never before said that until I'm reading
what he's saying about Jesus.
Because my practical Jewish mind or whatever it
is, is always looking for what's the implication
for us?
And there is an implication.
There was a profound renunciation for Jesus before
he left heaven.
And every subsequent renunciation, even to the cross
was, so to speak, already decided there.
Once you've made that, the rest follows.
But if you've not made that, you're going
to be choking and spluttering and kicking and
howling all the rest of the way.
Let's examine the genius of that apostolic moment,
because Paul is the apostolic man that begins
with a revelation, the sight of the crucified
Christ, the indictment, why do you persecute me?
And then, Lord, what would you have for
me to do?
When does God answer that question?
He does.
And by whom?
And when?
It came through Ananias, who was one of
the lowliest and most ordinary of all saints,
trembling with fear to go to this dangerous
man's bedside, lay hands upon him.
But when he does, the answer is, tell
him what great things he must suffer for
my name's sake.
Not what deeds, what great things he must
suffer for my name's sake, is the essential
answer of God to the apostolic man.
What's the implication for us?
If Paul is the prototype, the paradigm of
apostolicity, and this raises the great question, and
this is the great answer, what then for
us who have apostolic intention, not to be
apostles, but to go in and serve in
that mode, in that reality, is a great
suffering.
Have you recognized that?
Do you even have a heart for great
things?
Do you have a heart for the word
great?
Because to be called to what is apostolic
is to be called to what is great,
and necessarily implies a great suffering.
Okay, it was so for Jesus, it was
so for Paul, and it should be also
for us, but in no fated or mechanical
way.
His renunciations had behind them all the power
of that compendious renunciation by which he came
to earth.
Have we recognized that as compendious?
I don't know, I've never heard that word
before.
An enormous renunciation.
It's the revelation of God, just the decision
to come, shows God's own nature, and the
son's freedom, and voluntary choosing to obey the
father's will, is the revelation of God himself
even before he comes on earth.
Just a voluntary decision, heightens our appreciation, and
that's why elsewhere in this book he says,
in a previous chapter, in which he, a
whole chapter is devoted to the pre-incarnate
life of Christ, he says the church is
suffering, I've got to find that for you.
It's so true.
It may be observed in conclusion on examining
the pre-incarnate life, that if the influence
on the church upon the world is less
today than it once was, that loss of
effect is at least concurrent with an unprecedented
weakening of belief within the church itself, in
his life before life, and in his prenatal
will.
He's saying the church has paid a price
for losing, or perhaps never having, a sense
of the pre-incarnate life of Christ.
That there's mystery there, there's revelation there, and
to ignore that is as much as to
ignore the post-resurrection life, namely his ascension.
So the coming down into the earth is
a profound statement of God, as the much
is being raised up out from the grave
to the throne is a statement of God.
If you miss the one or the other,
or give them inadequate attention and comprehension, you
miss God in the fullness of his glory
that is intended for our perception, and our
praise, our worship, and our adoration.
We may be losing out on the issue
of adoration exactly to the degree that we
have been non compass mentis on the pre
-incarnate life, and have not understood what it
represents, and what it represents in Jesus' voluntary
willingness to leave it, to come down into
this grimy earth, and suffer not just the
physical things, but the moral things of God
being compressed into the finiteness of man, and
suffering all those things as a servant, and
then as a death of the most vile
kind as a criminal.
So the same author is saying, it could
be that the church has lost its influence
in the world, and that it's concurrent or
in proportion to the weakening of belief within
the church in itself, in his life before
life, we must consider the pre-incarnate life,
because something was transacted there, foundationally, that is
later acted out in the earth, but had
its first inception in heaven.
Because he made it, he can communicate to
us something of the moral strength, tested in
his own decision, for us to make a
comparable decision.
This is the legacy of the humanity of
Jesus that we acquire by faith, that in
him is all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily, but also all the fullness of his
own history, of his own renunciation.
He's the master renouncer, all the way to
the cross, and he's calling us to a
renunciation also, not just once, but continually.
Like not speaking a conventional thing that would
please people, but a thing that will stupefy
them, or whatever it is the obedience requires,
is predicated on a certain grace given to
us by someone who has already preceded us
in it, and can communicate something of the
moral strength necessary for us to perform it.
So without him we can do nothing, we
can't even renounce, and maybe that's why our
renouncing is so threadbare, because we're renouncing out
from our own humanity.
We're making a human kind of decision like,
I don't know, as if it's a commercial
transaction.
Why do we do that?
Because we have not understood the magnitude of
what renunciation is.
If we understood that, that at some measure
of what he renounced, giving up his eternal
union with the Father, coming into a grim
and inhospitable earth in a world that is
at enmity with God, and that our renunciation
bears something of that same weight, we would
know that we can't make it humanly.
In fact, we can't do anything humanly.
We're utterly dependent upon him who has gone
before us.
And you know what?
What an appreciation.
What a deepened admiration that he's not left
us orphans, and he's not left us destitute,
that we don't have to play the game
of Christianity as Rotarians and Elks, and as
if it's some fraternal organization, and we can
do this by the numbers humanly.
The call to the faith is impossible.
With man it's impossible.
God has called us to what is impossible,
but if it becomes for you possible, you're
out of the faith.
If your Christianity is something that you can
perform on the basis of your humanity, your
resolution, your ability, you're out of the faith.
We can become servants, which is the essential
identity of God himself.
Of course, servanthood is renunciation, and we should
not be ashamed of a lowly calling, which
Jesus demonstrated in the washing of the feet
of the disciples, not just as a momentary
inspiration, but as a statement of what he
ever and always was, even before his earthly
advent, that the Father himself is a servant.
How is he a servant?
He sends his Son.
He sends now everything, every good and perfect
thing comes down from above.
The Father is continually serving.
The Son served.
We're called to serve, but we want to
be served rather than to serve, so we
will reflect our greater David, not just as
a model that we emulate, but as a
life that we have received that's already conditioned
and disposed to those things by his nature.
So he's working out his essential nature in
the eventualities of the life on earth.
He had come to a place of humiliation,
humility, in which his supposed knowledge has gone
out the window with that revelation of the
crucified one whose believers he was going out
of his way to persecute.
So what he has to say in one
fell swoop, I'm all wrong.
Everything in which I've trusted and I've been
groomed is totally wrong.
I don't even know God.
I'm opposing and persecuting him in my zeal.
Lord, who are you?
And I think that that is a necessary
preliminary to the question of, Lord, what would
you have me to do?
That we're co-heirs with him if we
will suffer with him, so also will we
share his glory.
That what Jesus exemplified his life, poor experiences,
and now commends to those whom he brings
to the faith.
And yet, is that not current with us?
That suffering is intrinsic to the faith, is
unavoidable, and not only as persecution or external
suffering, but where that's not available, there's an
inward kind that the Lord knows how to
allow, even in the ordinary circumstances of our
life, our marriage, our family, and our situation,
that is even yet more painful and excruciating
than that which is external.
Okay, well, so even as his earthly acts
of individual forgiveness before he came to the
universal forgiveness of Calvary, had behind him the
cross, which he took up when the Lamb
was slain before the foundation of the world.
His relation to God was immediate from the
first and perfect, but that did not give
him any immunity from the moral law that
we must earn by which we earn our
greatest legacies.
Let me read that.
His relation to God was immediate from the
first and perfect, as the Son in his
eternal designation with the Father in heaven before
he came.
But in coming, that did not give him
any immunity from the moral law by which
we must earn our greatest legacies.
I even wrote it, any magical immunity.
His deity did not make him immune or
save him from the requirement of being a
man in the world, and testing and perfecting
the reality of his sonship to the Father
by the things which he suffered and had
to experience, because he lay aside those prerogatives.
So we must earn our greatest legacies and
appropriate by toil and conflict our best gifts.
Here he's not waiting for us to ask
the question, he's telling us, if this is
what Jesus had to do, how do you
obtain your legacy and your best gifts?
In the same way, by the moral law,
conflict and all that is required in the
attainment of maturity, this was only possible if
he had to begin with a unique, central
and powerful relationship, relation to the being of
God apart from his own earthly decisions, so
that his growth was growth in what he
was and not simply by what he might
be.
It was not acquiring what he had not,
but appropriating and realizing what he had.
It was coming to his own unique self.
So he's saying very much about that relationship
with the Father, a unique, central and powerful
relation to the being of God.
So the question is, did Jesus have that
by virtue of his eternal relatedness to the
Father?
Or did he have it by a faith
that appropriated and quickened the relationship with the
Father?
Was the Father a factor in the Lord's
life automatically by virtue of his prehistory?
Or was the Father a factor in his
life by his continual prayer and devotion and
the seeking of the Father early at the
commencement of every day?
The only answer I'm asking is, is even
the relationship with the Father a moral issue
and not some automatic thing with which he
came fitted by his prehistory?
Though it was true he had that relationship
with the Father's prehistory, but to eventuate and
activate that knowledge and relationship with the Father
on the earth, it was not by summoning
what he already had automatically.
It was by devotion.
It was rising early in the morning.
It was seeking the Father.
It was condescending to the Father.
It was waiting on the Father.
That makes all the difference, because then that
relationship is equally as available to us.
We equally need a sense of the Father
behind us as sons, and if we couldn't
have it by virtue of natural birth or
circumstance already in the earth, we can have
it by an attainment through prayer, through fellowship,
through communion, which is in fact the critical
factor that is so grossly neglected by most
of the church today, because we are unwilling,
like Jesus, to rise early to seek him.
He was not seeking him for instruction.
I know that I know that.
He was seeking him for communion.
That's why he said, this kind cometh not
out, but by fasting and prayer.
Not that it will equip you with a
formula.
It will equip you with a reality of
God and his magnitude and majesty and authority
that is so implicit in you by your
union with him and devotion that when you
address those dark spirits, they know it.
Jesus they know, and Paul they know, and
they know you because you exhibit the same
inward reality that you have attained by a
process of devotion over a course of time.
That's why this is so important to ferret
out, whereas the church somehow assumes in its
unthinking that Jesus had it all together.
You know, he came, he was the Son
of God, then he did this, then he
did that.
Well, what do you expect?
Of course.
But if we understand that his struggle and
the moral issues of his life are exactly
identical to our own, and that there's a
process of growth through faith and obedience that
required a dependency and a trust and a
knowledge of the Father that grows by virtue
of his devotion is not automatic.
That changes the whole complexion of things.
That gives us a deeper appreciation for the
Son, a deeper appreciation for the Father, that
the Father lets the Son go, like the
father of the prodigal son, not to waste
his substance, but to let him go, and
all of the risks that coming into the
world will be.
Because the first thing that Jesus has to
experience after the baptism in the Jordan, where
the dove came down and the heavens was
opened and the voice of the Father cried
out, this is my beloved Son, is being
driven into the wilderness and tempted by Satan.
If you'll be the Son of God, then
make stones into bread.
If you'll be the Son of God, do
this.
If you'll be the Son of God, he's
already mocking and questioning the very statement from
the Father that he isn't the Son of
God.
And Jesus can't say, well, listen, he's got
to wrestle out these temptations after fasting 40
days and giving the answers to one who
is brilliant in his own knowledge of scripture.
So there's an immediate testing as soon as
the issue of sonship is struck, which is
already a crisis for Jesus.
Don't think, because when he finished, what happens?
The angels come and they comfort him.
There's a solace.
It was such a trial, a test of
his nude identity before the most dangerous opponent
that it required the comfort of angels to
be given him after it.
And that's how his career commences.
This is loaded.
You know, you can almost come to love
a Lord like this, who went through all
that for our sake, not just with the
atonement, great as that is, or we'd be
dead ducks, but also to teach us what
it means to be sons and to go
before us in the realm of faith that
we can believe for ourselves by the same
grace.
He didn't have to, he could have come
automatic, could have performed the things necessary for
atonement, taken up back to where he came
from, the glory that was always his.
He went through a history, a life as
a man, and even as a child, when
he was with the doctors of the law
in Jerusalem, both hearing and answering questions, hearing
and raising questions is a precious glimpse of
his humanity.
Though he had a brilliant, I'm sure by
even the age of 12 sense of things
in his humanity, he respected these older men.
He respected the sages.
He respected these doctors of the law, and
he both raised questions.
It wasn't to tempt them or to mock
them, but to be engaged with them in
his humanity.
And then the parents come because he had
disappeared and they were vexed with, don't you
know you've upset your father and me?
He said, don't you know I have to
be about my father's business?
Don't you understand?
You don't have just an ordinary son here.
I'm getting the sense that I have a
destiny to call in my father's house.
And then it says, he went down with
them to Nazareth and he submitted to them.
And the next verse says, and he grew
in stature and grace before God and before
men.
His going down was the key to his
growth.
Coming down from heaven was the key to
his growth.
Going down to Nazareth was the key to
his growth.
What then is the key to our growth?
Going down to Nazareth.
Submitting again to conditions that are not conducive
to our spirituality, but actually oppose them.
Well, what do we have in our American
mentality?
Discipleship school.
Three months.
Go ahead and save the world.
Young upstarts.
Because we're seeing the older upstarts in such
great need.
What can we say about the youngest?
So we think we can knock something off
the assembly line and send out green and
ill-formed young people who don't yet have
a history in God.
Don't even know what devotion is.
And faith for them is a formula.
You believe for this and you call for
that.
They don't understand faith is an apprehension of
the character of God that you know through
a history with him in trial.
He sweated clots of blood in the anguish
of this final thing that completes his course.
If he could avoid it, not because he
was a coward or he could not take
physical punishment as it would be, but to
become sin in so ugly and noxious a
way that the father himself had to turn
his face and depart from him in any
felt sense that he would have to cry
out in ultimate despair, my God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
That's the cup that he hesitated to drink.
That I would have to forfeit the sense
of my father.
I've known it eternally.
It's my life, my union with him, my
sense of him is my life.
And even for a moment that that has
to be taken, that this is what the
cross is.
Not only it's physical, but it's moral anguish.
I've got to drink that to the dregs.
If this cup could pass, but of course
it could not.
So I'm fond of saying that the blood
of atonement in its first expression was not
extricated by man, but exuded by the son
of man in the garden.
He sweated clots of blood.
So deep was the moral anguish of facing
that cross and all of its agony, morally
as well as physically, that we need to
bow before this remarkable sacrifice.
And that's why that sacrifice was a sweet
savor to the father.
This is more than the blood of calves
and bulls.
This is the perfected son of God.
This is true man and true God giving
himself voluntarily to the most vile form of
execution that only satanic ingenuity could conceive through
a Roman system.
And he knew that in sense when he
left heaven, that this would be the ultimate
destiny.
And he did it voluntarily and freely because
God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten son, and God so loved
the world that his only son was willing
to be given.
So that's the heart of the faith and
the gospel that Paul says is the righteousness
of God from faith to faith as it
is written.
Okay.