So his growth, in what he was and
not simply what he might be, his unique
relation to God was a relation to a
free God and not to a mechanical or
physical fate or to an invincible bias to
good.
There's a freedom here and a growth in
the knowledge of his own vocation and of
the Father who sent him to fulfill it.
It is here alone that we grasp God's
real presence and rest on it forever.
Valuable as speculative versions of the incarnation may
be, we only really have it and believe
in it when we sit inside it by
the saving action which sets us in Christ
and assures us of the incredible fact that
we are included by God's strange grace in
the same love, wherewith he loves his only
begotten Son.
That's why Paul could say, who could separate
us from this love?
Can persecution and terror and want?
He makes a whole list of things.
No, we're certain of this love because he
who gave his Son, will he not with
him give us all things?
There's a knowledge of the love of God,
the saving action which sets us in Christ.
Salvation is not just a technical thing, you're
saved.
Next, there's a coming into something, a redemptive
reality.
Christ in us, the hope of glory, we're
saved, the life of God has come in,
that we are included by God's strange grace
in the same love, wherewith he loves his
only begotten Son.
We are only sure of the incarnation, only
as those who taste the benefit of Christ's
death in union with him.
He's writing around 1909, at a time when
the higher criticism was beginning to come out
from German theologians.
And maybe Jesus is just an example, and
not really the Son of God.
And salvation is just a mental attitude of
reform, by which certain principles now can be
humanly conducted.
He's fighting for the true faith, and against
an environment that was already becoming hostile, and
reaching out even into England.
And now look at the Church of England,
homosexuals and made bishops and scandal, because what
he saw already in his early time has
now come full bore.
So it doesn't begin as a finished article.
It begins with certain possibilities, with a destiny
ingrained in the protoplast, but it only passes
from a destiny into a perfection through a
career.
It only passes from a destiny into a
perfection through a career.
He's using the word career not as a
piece of professionalism, but through a history, through
something tested in time, through actualities, through issues,
through crises, through morals struggling, through groanings.
Now Jesus even came to the place of
being perplexed with his own disciples.
How long must I suffer you?
There's a pain in his own humanity.
So it comes to fulfillment through a walk
and a history.
Do you have a history with God?
Do you have to wait to be an
old crock like me before you realize that
you have a history?
Ought you not to be conscious even at
whatever stage you are in the faith that
there is already a history, and there is
a continuing history with God, of which you
need to be conscious and to cherish.
That it's yours uniquely.
No one else has your history, your career
so to speak, with God.
It is yours uniquely, and he has set
it up.
He's brought the anger into your life.
He's brought you to Nowheresville in northern Minnesota.
He's done this, he's done that.
He calls for this, he calls for that.
The struggles, the crises, it's all designed.
It's all skillfully crafted.
He's a master craftsman for the formation of
sons.
But you have a history, and it needs
to be a conscious history, and a history
of which you are appreciative and grateful.
I am grateful for my history with God.
Just think of how many times I'm citing
from my experiences to make a point here
with you.
But I've got the experience to cite.
I have a history, a confidence, a knowledge,
of being sustained for 41 years, and being
on these grounds for 31 years, in poverty,
in the extreme arctic cold, and all of
the struggles with the Jesus freaks that came
to Venezuela and were right behind the ears,
and brought their rusty old cars and said,
hey, we're giving you this.
We're giving our all.
But you now see to it that there's
food on the table, and heat in the
houses, and that there are houses.
Your faith.
Here's our rusty old junker, and all the
indignities.
And to be told by these same ones
later that you yourself are a traitor to
the gospel.
One of these people heard me publicly in
Texas a couple of years ago, and she
came up weeping.
I mean, heartbroken.
And she said, Art, I never knew you.
I was in the community for such and
such a time.
I glimpsed you in that context.
But until I've heard you publicly, I never
really understood or seen you.
She said, you need to tell all the
Venezuelans.
They need to find some occasion where they
see or hear you outside of this place
in functioning in your call.
So until she saw that, how did she
treat me?
Improperly, without due respect, because she's a young
snot.
And she saw through the limitation of her
own humanity and came to certain conclusions.
And do you have to bear that?
Okay.
And Jesus suffered the same thing in Nazareth.
Isn't this Joseph's son?
So by having given due effect to each
side, how can we have these apparent contradictions
united in one historic personality?
Absolute God and man?
Absolute finality and growing attainment?
Absolute grace and growing in grace?
The victory won and the victory to be
won?
The kingdom come and the kingdom coming?
How are we to adjust the contradiction between
the absolute and the merging in this concrete
and crucial case?
On the threshold of such inquiry, let me
remind you once more that it is only
in the illogical, that which is not logical,
unity of a person for whose action and
growth they are necessary that we find the
harmony of several antinomies that defy rational adjustment.
You know what our problem is?
Our English is not adequate.
This is perfectly coherent and well written.
So he's summing up here.
How do we reconcile the infinite with the
finite, the humanity with the deity, the absolute
God and relative man, growth in grace and
the absolute grace, the victory won, the victory
yet to be won, the kingdom come, the
kingdom coming?
How are we to adjust the contradiction between
what is absolute in God and what is
merging and forming in this concrete and crucial
case?
Do you realize that the faith is a
tension?
It's not cut and dried.
The faith is a dynamic.
And you know that tension is a suffering?
And that many people refuse to say yes
to the Lord because they intuit that they
don't want to come in to this kind
of reality that requires of them a continual
tension of faith.
They like it in the world where they
have it cut and dried, they know and
they live by their own understanding and it's
their baby.
They don't want to enter a realm where
the modus operandi is faith.
Faith is a tension of apparent contradiction.
Marriage between a Jew and a Gentile, a
sophisticated university graduate and a simple village girl
is a contradiction.
But in that contradiction and the toughing of
it out comes revelation and depths of growth
that could not be obtained in any other
way.
So that even our own life is a
minuscule version of the mystery of the faith
itself.
And we would not be willing to suffer
it if we did not glimpse it in
the faith itself.
See what I mean?
If we did not realize that suffering is
intrinsic, that contradiction is fundamental, that something is
not cut and dried but it's a dynamic
and process of formation to which we need
to give ourselves interest.
Meanwhile, suffering the scandal of the thing that
is not yet formed.
Because one of the greatest things we've had
to bear, how can art be in a
place of authority when his marriage da da
da da da and his family da da
da is not together?
And who can give answer?
That we're living out something of a prophetic
kind.
This reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, the prophetic
man with the church in his present carnal
condition.
And that it's not going to be done
overnight in the waving of a magic wand.
But doesn't it say that you have your
house in order?
How do you answer those things?
And if people want to be rejecting both
of the man and his word, they can
find grounds.
So you suffer, not only the struggle in
attaining, but you suffer the accusations and the
indictments and the way in which you're perceived
by others.
You live the scandal.
Jesus was a scandal.
The cross was a scandal.
The gospel is a scandal.
But Paul was not ashamed of it.
Because in that scandal is the power of
God unto salvation to everyone who believes, especially
to the Jew first.
So, Jesus was a scandal.
The cross was a scandal.
The gospel is a scandal.
But Paul was not ashamed of it.
Because in that scandal is the power of
God unto salvation to everyone who believes.
Okay.
So, we are at the threshold of such
an inquiry that we need to be reminded
that it is only in the illogical or
the non-logical unity of a person.
How is this mystery and tension presented to
us?
It comes in a person who is both
truly God, and truly man, for whose action
and growth they are necessary.
He would not have come to his career,
he would not have come to the fulfillment
of his vocation, except through the walking out
of these contradictions.
And there we find the harmony of the
several contradictions that defy rational adjustment.
That cannot be classified and categorized in a
neat little doctrine.
That's why I chafed by watching that video
of those guys.
They have it all together.
There's something so smart and so smug in
the way they talk about the gospel of
the faith that doesn't give any indication of
groaning, of struggle.
It's a nice formula that they've learned and
they can market and market it well and
live comfortably, if not lavishly on that basis.
But I don't sense in them even their
voice, their attitude, or their speaking, a sense
of the wrestling with this faith of contradiction.
But that they have reduced it to a
formula.
It's a formulaic Christianity, and they have it
all together.
And prospering at it.
Why then are we knocking about and...
I'm chafed by that easy similitude called Christianity
to which you're...
to give your seed faith that you might
receive.
Even that's reduced to a formula that accounts
for their great prosperity.
And there's something...
Do you have to be doctrinally false to
be false?
No.
Maybe the most dangerous deception and the worst
kinds of falsity of...
Fraudulence?
Of deception is those who speak the technical
truth of it without the spirit of its
truth.
And have reduced it to a sterile thing
that robs it of its beauty and its
glory.
That's a more dangerous thing than actual heresy.
This is the danger of the last days.
Those that are technically correct and miss the
glory of the faith.
And all you have to do is add
the music, the worship, the themes, the acoustics,
the amplifiers, a happy guy or woman on
the platform leading and all that, and they'll
come in droves.
That's a cheap alternative.
It's an idolatry.
It's a version of the golden calf around
which they dance nakedly.
Okay.
Coming to a conclusion, Forsythe says, he grew
in the grace in which he always was,
and in the knowledge of it.
He grew in the knowledge even of his
own calling.
As his personal history enlarged and ripened by
every experience, and as he was always found
equal to each moral crisis, the latent godhead
became more and more mighty as his life's
interior and asserted itself with the more power
as the personality grew, both in depth and
scope.
This guy has a handle on something.
And in fact he says, the more his
divine soul renounced his immunities, the more he
acquired his glory.
He said that something came in gathering power
through growing humiliation came to a growing exaltation.
That in German, er starb und wurde, he
died and he became.
That the greater deity emerged not by his
insistence on his god origin, but on his
forsaking.
That he went up by going down.
That he grew by dying.
That he acquired his divine soul as he
renounced the immunities that he could have employed
as being god as well as man.
And so, the more he acquired his glory.
How is it that P.T. Forsythe sees
it and the Copelands do not?
I'm not making an issue of a particular
man, but what he represents in his static
cut and dried get it all down to
a formula of a particular personality and toothy
grin and the best of all worlds and
happy am I.
How is it that that's how he interprets
the faith as against how Forsythe interprets it.
Same faith, same data, but to one it's
been reduced to a glib formula and to
the other it was a coming inside the
mystery of living it out and understanding and
wrestling and seeing the implications for his own
humanity and seeing that God was demonstrating immutable
and eternal principles that you attain glory not
by grasping and clutching but by forsaking and
letting go.
I remember in one of our trips to
Israel we visited a congregation that had both
Palestinian Christians and Jews and there was a
fight on over a menorah that was on
the platform.
The Jewish believers wanted to retain it and
the Palestinian Christians wanted to remove it because
it was too ostensibly a Jewish symbol and
they were in the heat of conflict over
that thing and we were just stupefied to
learn about it.
We came back into the bus and walked
into my seat and one of the ladies
in our group pulled my sleeve she said,
you know what the answer is?
I said, what?
She said, relinquish.
Relinquish.
What a golden word.
The Jews have to relinquish their insistence and
the Palestinians need to relinquish their animosity.
Relinquishing is the key to glory not insistence
and has been demonstrated by the son of
God in becoming a son and it's our
way also.
The more his divine soul renounced his immunities
the more he acquired a glory.
More and more as he laid by what
he eternally was he came to be what
he began by being.
The eternal son learned by suffering the sonship
he had never forgotten and this was the
positive process of the long act of our
salvation.
Our redemption was the achieving also of his
old incarnation, the growing involution of these two
movements descent and ascent was the process of
the reconciliation of God in the world.
The consummation came, it was all secured where
it could never be undone but it must
be forever unfolded for what it is and
not to what it might be made to
become.
It always needs to be unfolded for the
glory that it is and never allow it
to settle into a formula.
That's our jealous keeping of the faith lest
it will become a formula because formulas are
convenient but the mysteries of faith are difficult
and painful both to understand and to fulfill.
So thus the sinless growth of Christ's character
is in the very act growth also of
his objective achievement for us.
It is the moral process of man's salvation,
the gradual act of God.
Christ's perfect progress to perfection, the achieving of
his finished work is the detail of God's
act of our redemption of his absolute and
holy love and his holy son.
His self-sanctification was ours also.
Christ worked out the salvation he was.
It was only in history and its conditions
that he could realize all that was super
historic within him.
He was exercised unto the godliness he brought
with him.
The deepening of his faithfulness was the emergence
of his deity.
He was not acquiring deity, he was unfolding
it.
And in his lowest limits, his divinest mastery
showed.
In the lowest limits, where was that?
At the cross.
His divinest mastery shows.
The glory of the deity that was his,
that he forfeited and acquired by process of
growth is shown not in its most powerful
demonstration but in its weakest.
And that's why the centurion at the foot
of the cross, seeing this man writhing in
excruciating pain but not condemning his persecutors, but
praying their forgiveness and then giving up the
ghost.
He said, truly, this was the Son of
God.
Something was revealed in the lowest limit of
Jesus' obedience unto death of his divinest mastery.
And don't forget, we operate equally in that
same absolute freedom.
We're not compelled to walk in the works
that were established before the foundations of the
earth were laid.
And if they're going to be fulfilled, it
will not be something compulsory but something free.
God is not going to allow anything that
pertains to his glory in the earth to
be obtained by anything other than the means
by which Jesus obtained it and made himself
a candidate in his freedom, voluntary and free,
which is a great responsibility and an anguish
to be responsible in your freedom.
And how many of us are forfeiting that
moral aspect of our life by not acting
in it and coming to a place of
indifference, neither up nor down, neither yet so
known, neither with it nor against it, but
in limbo.
We're not acting as sons because the act
is a statement of a freedom of choice
and a decision to be obedient so we
can guard ourselves from even that necessity and
allow a structure of life to be formed
around us by which we're kept from the
necessity of acting in freedom.
There's a great classic of sociology, Eric from
freedom Escape from Freedom came out in the
1960s or 70s in which he says totalitarianism,
the rise of Nazism, fascism, communism is a
statement that modern man rejects his freedom.
He's afraid of it.
He doesn't want to act in responsibility.
He wants a welfare state.
He wants those things decided from and provided.
He doesn't want to take the initiative of
being a man.
He wants a system from the cradle to
the grave that will secure his existence and
make unnecessary his requirement to act.
You think that that's a finished issue?
Or is it the issue of the age?
And if the church will not exercise its
freedom in its sonship, what do we call
the world?
What is our example?
What is our challenge?
If we ourselves are in flight from freedom,
choosing not to or even to be phrased,
we want an environment that frees us from
the necessity to have to choose and to
have to act.
And isn't that the reason why we've grown
up a church system where the man on
the platform does it all?
And what he is really is a CEO
that the most impressive ministers of our generation
are executives who make the decisions.
And all we have to come on a
Sunday is put a few bucks on a
collection plate and sit passively, we're entertained, and
we go home.
We don't want the responsibility of being a
saint.
I was talking with Bill the other day
where Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14 when
you come together, everyone has a tongue and
interpretation of prophecy in a revelation.
That's why Paul could leave those fellowships.
They would nourish each other by their own
freedom and yielding to the gift that God
had given them.
And when he came back two years later,
they were still functioning and flourishing.
And then he would recognize who it is
that has risen to the place of authority
by their freedom to take responsibility.
That's how you identify an elder.
And then he would just set them in
before the congregation with fasting and prayer.
And that's how the church was formed.
But how does the church now continue?
It's crippled, it's languishing, it's underfed, it's malnourished,
it's lost its participation.
It's an audience, it's a theater of performance
from the platform and passive acquiescence in the
congregation for which we gladly pay the bill,
so long as we are freed from the
necessity to have a tongue and interpretation of
prophecy and so on.
Freedom is the name of the game.
And that's what Ben Israel has been in
its history.
And he would say, why don't you make
these guys clean up?
Why don't you make these guys do this
or do that?
I said, we could easily do it, but
what would it be?
Would it be like a training camp?
They're not going to become mentioned, they're not
going to become persons and sons except by
a free choice.
They need to see, they need to act,
they need to do.
Anyone can tell you they need themselves to
see and to act.
And of course, what does that mean?
It's going to take a long time.
The garbage will grow up until you have
to step over it to get out of
the house.
Until they see it, my God, they're Jesus
freaks who've lived in garbage and they don't
even know.
But for a woman from Denmark with Ordnung,
a German word of order, for her it
was chafing to have to live with people
in that condition.
Why don't you just do it?
Why don't you establish it?
Where's your authority?
Well, we have it, but if we rob
men of their freedom, we rob them of
their humanity.
We rob them of their sonship.
We just make mechanical dolts out of them.
Of course they'll do it, but there's something
more than doing its being in the form
of the Son of God, who is entirely
free in every aspect of his life, as
are we.
So the total bearing of his action or
speech means that his action arose ethically out
of what he was, and that his courage
expressed his soul, that his vocation rested on
his position, that his receptivity is the greatest
human activity, that he was first and foremost
the ever-receptive son of the Holy Father,
and that he only did the things which
were sworn to him of God.
His manhood was in his perfectly active, free
receptivity.
His subordination was no inferiority.
His obedience was his divinest achievement.
And out of that obedience grew his vast,
creative, commanding effect upon the world.
His kingly rule is the upper side of
his filial sacrifice as a son, of the
obedience which put him by man's side while
he was on God's.
Something about his humanity, his relations to a
holy God, his manhood, consists in the moral
reality of his experience, his conflict and his
growth.
It means his true ethical personality growing in
an actual historic situation.
I don't know about you guys, but I
love this.
That there's a real context for the life
of Jesus.
That was not a glass house, what do
they call it, a greenhouse, an ivory tower
situation.
It was grim, it was real, it was
authentic, it was actual.
He was born into a certain place and
time of a historic situation in which he
had to live and work out his being
and his destiny.
So also are we.
We're the call to the last days.
We have a context that's historic and real
and in it we work out our salvation
with fear and trembling as also did he.
It means that his true ethical personality grew
out of an actual historic situation.
It means that he counted in the public
of his age.
It wasn't just an idle laboratory for his
perfection.
He made an effect.
He was present.
He counted.
There was a consequence for his being there.
We need to ask is there a consequence
for our being there?
Are we having an effect?
Is something happening because we are in this
historic context?
Are we making our right felt?
Do we have something to say?
Is our presence commanding?
Does it make the world to sit up
and take notice?
Are we writing letters to the editor as
I did when the Star Wars thing came
out and they had six, seven feet tall
cardboard cutouts of these ridiculous otherworldly creatures and
they hung them in the supermarket.
You couldn't go in and buy a loaf
of bread or a can of tuna fish
without having to see these hanging effigies of
extra-terrestrial creatures and when the Star Wars
film came out the kids were in their
sleeping bags outside the door of the theater
all night long to be the first one
in and I wrote a letter to the
editor which was a letter to the public.
Scandalous!
Are your kids outside the doors of their
church waiting for it to open?
Who are these companies that sell the rights
to use their images from their films to
the Pepsi Cola company and hang these effigies
in stores that you're compelled to brush them
by?
It's an intrusion into our life and into
our privacy that we haven't asked for but
that commerce compels.
And I'm raising a voice of complaint and
dissent.
I refuse to have my life ordered by
the Pepsi Cola company because they paid two
and a half billion dollars for the rights
of Star Wars.
I mean, who read that and what difference
did it make?
But if I had not written it, it
would have made a difference to me.
I would have forfeited a moral occasion that
required a response from a Christian man who
was in a place of leadership into the
society in which I've been plunged whether it's
heard or not.
That's what Forsyth is saying here.
He really inhabited its spiritual milieu, the public
of his age.
He filled a mighty place in the social
situation of his land and time.
What a statement that is for the church.
Are we fulfilling as the church a mighty
place in the social situation of our land
and time?
And in fact, in previous generations, the church
did exactly that.
Anything that's called women's rights and even the
elevation of women to any kind of dignity
would not be had it not been for
the history of the church in the world.
Women would be what's the word?
Baggage.
They would be accessories to the lust and
whims of men as they are everywhere in
the world that is non-Christian.
But in the Christian world, they have a
dignity and a recognition as persons that only
comes by virtue of the gospel and the
presence of the church in the world that
demands it.
What's the message in Africa?
You have an obligation, church, to stand for
what is made in God's image.
Just driving through the streets of the capital
city there without traffic lights means that when
you come to an intersection every vehicle and
motor scooter and motorcycle gushing clouds of smoke
are edging for a position to come and
get through to their place where they make
a right or left and so you have
to take in gallons of fumes because for
the want of a stinking traffic light and
order I said, church that's an indignity to
what is made in God's image.
You need to go to the legislatures and
say we represent a Christian committee of moral
concern and we demand the most elementary provision
that pertains to the dignity of men like
traffic lights.
We insist, we have an obligation to stand
for what is made in God's image and
once the legislature who's this?
Because they come with authority from heaven making
a requirement on earth and when they begin
to give them traffic lights and bring elementary
order, the principalities and powers of the air
suffer an enormous defeat and setback because they
thrive on chaos and confusion and the degradation
of men rather than their dignity.
Got the idea?
It's a struggle in a country where if
a journalist dares make any criticism of these
fat calves that are feeding their fortunes by
running the country they're in a fraternity of
glut.
You ought to see their homes.
Here and there they're little castles with barbed
wire rooftops and armed guards to preserve their
little privacy and their advantageous lifestyles while the
poor slobs down on earth drink gallons of
fumes day in and day out without any
concern on the part of those in power.
That ought not to be and I said
to the church you cannot be moral without
being political and you cannot be political without
causing a ruffle be prepared for prison be
prepared for opposition if you begin to assert
the issue of God with men in your
nation, in your continent.
That was the message and made men fear
to hear it and a man one of
the leading pastors in our community in whose
church I gave that message he said later
every word you spoke on was a fire
in my heart.
I burned internally with every word that you
spoke.
It was from the throne of heaven and
I received it as a personal mandate.
Whatever the consequence of the cost, I am
now under obligation because that word has come.
Because that word was a work to walk
in before the foundations of the earth were
laid but it had to be spoken out
of a freedom of obedience to the God
who gave it.
By a white man, why are they under
obligation to hear him and because others have
come to teach them about church growth and
so on and all of the racial tensions
of former colonial history that makes them dubious
about anything that comes from a white man
so that what they hear has got to
come from a man beyond the issue of
race and nationality because he's not coming from
America he's coming from the throne of heaven
he's a sent one with a sent word
that means that we ourselves have got to
rise above our own culture, our own civilization
our own ethnic and racial origin.
We can't come as middle class whites to
the Africas of this world we have to
come as the messengers from heaven who are
transcendent and above the conditions of our own
nation and culture How do you do that?
You're separated That's what God was waiting for
in Acts 13 Separate unto me Paul and
Barnabas from work to which I've called them
Separate unto me separated men who are separated
from the fact that they're Jews and have
no vested interest even in their own ethnic
identity nor will they employ it nor will
they seek to be recognized nor will they
intimidate Gentiles by coming as Jews they come
as transcendent sons, sent and therefore the Gentiles
can receive them and their message and when
they're told later that they will see their
face no more, they hang on the neck
of that Jewish man and weep Jesus was
sent but he was not a man under
compulsion and obligation because the father required it
he chose to be sent it's an act
of the father and the son in complete
freedom and love if Jesus was just under
obligation the glory of what is represented in
his coming to the earth and his suffering
would have been lost he was the man
of freedom he grew in stature and grace
through free voluntary obedience both in being sent
and in acting out all that was needed
and we ourselves issue by issue moral issue
by moral issue face the responsibility of freedom
and obedience and that's how we grow in
sense so when we're faced for example with
the discipline that the church needs or to
allow that malefactor to continue or someone in
sin of whom we we're conscious to remain,
something is going to corrupt the entire body
when I lived in St. Cloud maybe I
should even mention the place because it happens
everywhere, one of the young studs of the
congregation fornicated with one of the young girls
he was a charmer and became known to
the pastor and the way it was dealt
with, he was sent off to California and
the girl was patted on the back and
made nice and the church went on it
wasn't long before the pastor's own wife own
daughter became pregnant out of wedlock and I
said to him and we've never been friends
as much since when I said to him
your daughter's pregnancy was the result of your
failure to identify that moral issue and deal
with it publicly before the entire congregation you
swept it under the carpet but it emerged
for the fall of your own daughter why
do men sweep it?
why don't they identify it?
because it's difficult to deal with moral questions
and we'd rather look the other way, so
we did not exercise our freedom our responsibility
by which we would have grown in grace
as Jesus did, by never forfeiting an occasion
that came to him to act freely and
responsibly in behalf of the father in righteousness
that's how sons are formed saints it's not
a formula it's not an automatic thing, it's
a process of growth it's fearful but there's
a grace that God gives for righteousness that
we can say in Africa righteousness exalts a
nation you want to prosper?
don't look for loans from the UN or
relief organizations start practicing righteousness and God will
exalt that because exalt means to prosper it's
not dependent on your raw materials or your
manpower or their skills it's dependent on your
faith because Africa is shot through with unrighteousness
with bribery, with corruption with every violation the
most elementary things that we in the West
take for granted as being reasonable and right
so to insist on righteousness in an environment
like that is to run across the whole
grain of a dark continent, but God says
to honor it okay, the cross is ever
before us and it's a principle of growth
and reality if we submit to it there's
a suffering, but there's a glory and that
glory is growth as sons which is not
automatic and will not take place under hothouse
conditions but takes place under the grit and
the reality of the situations in which God
has placed us in this world in this
community, in this locality it raises the question
of what was the environment in the church
itself that was conducive to this young man
taking that liberty how much of it is
the issue of the church itself rather than
just the act and how much are we
responsible for that atmosphere that was condescending and
even encouraged lust there's such a thing as
spiritual lust the desire for experience the enjoyment
of experience for which we'll run to Toronto
or who knows where, if we can get
it and how great a difference is it
between a lust for experience spiritually and a
lust for experience sexually so we need to
really get to the root of the problem
we have a moral obligation and the church
has a moral obligation to raise the issue
of the history of the nations in which
it exists why has the nation suffered so
and so why is it suffering now where
are we failing God and bringing a consequence
an indifference to him that we are interpreting
as economic failure or social failure but the
root of the problem is spiritual failure if
the church doesn't raise those questions and press
them, how can we expect the nations themselves
to do it out of their secular mindsets
so we're not living in our time and
in our history as Jesus was we're not
making our way felt so a church is
more than services so he lived a true
man's life in his identity with humanity in
his own voluntary act of self-identification with
it going down into the Jordan and identifying
with the sins of Israel was his first
act that pleased the father though he had
no need to be baptized his identity with
man lay in no mere continuity of substance
nor even in participating in personality but in
his assumption of man's conditions of personality and
in his renunciation of God's he made a
willful choice to identify with man how humiliating
for God but because he did we have
salvation it lay in his active acceptance of
the human and sin laden conditions of communion
with God in such victorious and sinless way
as to make that communion possible and real
for every other personal soul mamma mia what
are you saying Forsyth much learning hath made
thee mad what are you saying that because
he voluntarily took this identification with humanity and
worked out the issue of his own ultimate
identity and vocation in the grit and the
reality of the kinds of things that we
face through communion with the father that we
have now a key and a door to
the same communion because he forsook ideal conditions
and took the reality of the conditions of
life we in the reality of our condition
of life can have the same quality of
communion as he and he did it for
that purpose he didn't need to he could
have had a lofty ethereal and ideal relationship
with the father if he had chosen to
exempt himself from the conditions that pertain to
being a man but because he accepted those
conditions and embraced them in full in all
their indignity and suffering we have a key
to the father we have a key to
devotion I like the way he says it
he made that communion possible and real for
every other personal soul that what Jesus toughed
out in the early morning hours while it
was yet dark in the condition of exhaustion
where he needed his sleep is an encouragement
for me to get out of bed at
an early hour and do the same and
I don't think that his was more gratifying
in his experience than mine I don't think
the father immediately enveloped him in such an
aura of felt reality he may have just
let the son by faith tough it out
without any sense of the father's presence to
see if that devotion would continue as a
true son that doesn't have to be paid
back in felt experience and because he toughed
that out we then have a key and
a door for our own relationship and devotion
he went through everything in the whole gamut
of humanity in the context of the reality
like unto our own and whatever he felt
experience was in its substance and its constituent
elements though 2000 years earlier and in a
middle eastern environment exactly the same of every
issue that we face in its moral essence
and constitution therefore here's the pattern this is
devotion this is sacrifice, this is love that's
why Paul can say who can separate this
from the love of God how does he
know it?
because he's fathoming the extent to which that
love was expressed that was voluntary and free
not just at the cross but in every
moral act that culminated in the cross and
was in its essence the cross reiterated that's
love that's God and our God and the
grace that was extended in that relationship by
faith is the grace of the Holy Cross
how much more will he give us all
things by that one whom he allowed to
die for us Paul God and Christ is
the maker of his own revelation it was
God himself that came to us in Christ
it was nothing about God even about his
eternal essence or his excellent glory it is
God that is our salvation not the truth
about God what Christ came to do was
not to convince us even that God is
love but to be with us and in
us as the loving God forever and ever
he came not to preach the living God
but to be our God our life what
he came to do was not to convince
us even that God is love but to
be with us and in us as the
loving God forever and ever because we're joined
with him in death and resurrection that's what
we can say for us to live as
Christ in him we live and move and
have our being this isn't a God who
went back to heaven and to enjoy then
what he left behind forever but he's accessible
and available and in us that we might
live through him that he's continuing his same
diminution his same reduction of incarnation that he
experienced in his own earthly body by being
now the same in our earthly body have
you thought of that he's still incarnate he's
willing yet to continue to be limited and
confined in our bodies to be the life
of our life not just to give us
an example but to continue to be that
reality that we might live in and move
and have our being in him this is
provision that is spectacular that's why we can
go to Africa and anywhere and be instant
in season and out because the one whom
we have in us is inexhaustible the living
God in his resurrection reality and in his
enthronement now the source of our own life
and being because he's willing yet to be
incarnate and that leave us just a set
of principles to hope to emulate but the
very life itself crowned and enthroned has come
down from heaven and is in us to
will and to do of his good pleasure
but is he having opportunity through our freedom
of will to allow him for that expression
because it's easy to grieve the Holy One
of Israel and to deny him the full
possession of the vessel that he occupies or
to allow it to become so defiled by
its own sin and excess that he himself
is curtailed or required to withdraw so we
have to keep our vessels clean therefore the
blood therefore confession therefore the acknowledgement of the
truth of our condition that he would have
a vessel appropriate to his holiness to occupy
everyday when you commence in prayer what do
you pray?
what do I pray?
Lord, a fresh washing of the blood because
my iniquity is ever before me there's something
out of my base humanity and even the
volume of words that I'm required to speak
contain in themselves the principle of sin my
iniquity is ever before me I'm not waiting
for some large blatant occurrence to be persuaded
I'm a man and my thoughts, my reveries
are left to myself as contrary to your
holiness right from the first breath of the
day wash me in your blood purge me
within and without make me chaste and renew
your covenantal place in my being through the
eating and drinking again of your body and
blood to be the life of my life
in this day the speaking of my speaking
the reality of my reality the hope of
my hope, the love of my love the
righteousness of my righteousness this is the faith
and very few are conscious of it and
are in agreement with it in the great
mystery of incarnation and that's why this was
our concluding subject that we should leave with
this confidence, Christ in me the hope of
glory what am I moaning and lamenting about
and crying out in despair greater is he
who is within you but be conscious of
that life and live out from it given
the first priority not your humanity not your
experience and what you know and skill but
him speaking to do of his good pleasure
it's faith and it's fearful it's full of
trembling but it's full of glory so what's
Forsyth's conclusion we cannot see for the glory
of that light and what we do see
is yet beyond a man to utter still
I trust we have felt some of the
depth of that glory with which unveiled faces
we shall one day behold and rejoice in
it and shall be made like it let
us as we descend and go down into
the valley with a secret which we cannot
perhaps expound but which we cherish and smile
to each other like silent lovers in a
crowd and thus in a true church of
faith adepts overcome the world let us go
down to know that there is nothing in
all the raging valley neither the devilry of
the world nor the impotence of the church
that can destroy our confidence, quench our power
or derange our peace let us go down
to know that the meanest or the most
terrible things of the life now move beneath
the eternal mastery and triumphant composure of an
almighty savior and a final salvation which is
assured in heavenly places in Christ Jesus our
Lord and now may we be so emptied
may he who so emptied himself that he
was filled with all the fullness of God
dwell fully in us may he raise, rule
and perfect us in all holiness to the
end that bowing before him with every knee
both in heaven and upon earth and evermore
calling him holy, holy, holy Lord, we may
be in him to the praise and glory
of the father's grace who made us acceptable
in the eternal son world without end, Amen
Amen the glory of incarnation in its final
expression is the many sons brought to glory
and as that corporate son who even raises
the dead by the faith to believe for
Israel's restoration and the desire to see it
even though it threatens its own choice and
unique relationship with the father to see that
nation raised again because the father's love and
glory is enough both for the church and
for the nation and we desire to see
him glorified by their restoration and we'll be
the instrument by which it's obtained in authority
and we will inhabit heavenly places and some
of us will rule over five cities and
some over ten in exact proportion to the
obedience and authority to which we came in
our earthly tenure.
We did not shrink from any decision and
issue and we met it by the grace
of God and therefore we can grow into
the place of union and authority with him
in his eternal rule as angels ascending and
descending upon the son of God that's why
Paul was outraged when he found two believers
going to the court of the world to
resolve a difference between them.
What are you guys doing?
It would be better for you to suffer
being defrauded then you should go to the
world's court to a difference between you.
Go to the least of and the youngest
and the most infantile of the believers and
let them decide don't you know he said
you're going to rule over nations?
Don't you know you're going to rule over
angels?
You're called to rule and if you'll not
attain the maturity for the issues of your
own present life how then will you operate
in it eternally?
This is the church.
This is life.
This is reality.
This is the environment for growth that we
will carry with us into eternity to the
degree that we have obtained it by faith
and obedience through love and the power of
his life here in Jesus name.
So Lord, thank you for such a destiny.
Thank you for such a call.
Thank you that you've gone before us to
prepare and to make a way that you've
not left us orphans that we have to
scratch at this and play at it by
principles or reduce it to a formula.
Thank you that there's a tested life which
we have received my God with our so
great salvation and out of which we can
live out these realities in the historic context
to which you have brought us as sons
and daughters in this world.
So come my God and have the full
glory, the full realization of this mystery in
and through the church.
Thank you Lord.
Thank you my God.
We bless you.
Grow us up my God through responsibility, through
freedom.
Thank you Lord.
May we see every issue as a moral
issue not just an issue of expediency or
convenience or getting rid of this problem or
that but facing it in the context of
God and his righteousness and doing what is
pleasing in thy sight however it affects us.
So we bless you Lord.
Thank you for this life and its reality
and there's not any accident about our circumstance
and we have every prospect to grow in
that very circumstance as Jesus did in his.
To grow and increase in knowledge and stature
and knowledge of God and of the love
of God as did he.
Thank you Lord.