The Perception of Our Fullness in Jesus Christ
O Lord Jesus Christy Thou who is the Living Word, L invite Thee to live in my heart and flow from me into the world around me. Let me deal with those issues in my life that would hinder Thee from doing all that Thou wouldst do in and through me. Amen.
Everybody talks about the Bible, and yet I wonder sometimes how much of the Bible they really believe in. From my experience with the Scriptures, there are only two ways to deal with them.
One way to deal with Scripture is to pull it down and understand it in the light of our personal experience. The other way is to rise up into Scripture and understand it in the light of its own intention and its own purpose.
Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God
Mostly, we reach up and pull the Word of God down until it is familiar until it is on our level, and we do not get under much conviction.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is usually read by God’s children in light of their limited attainment:
For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God. -Ephesians 3:14-19
I fear this is the trouble with most Christians today. We have developed what I call a psychology of ignoble contentment. We want to be comforted when we ought to be stirred up and made discontented. A noble discontent is always more desirable for a Christian than an ignoble contentment.
Too many these days are going about the country making contented Christians. This is one of the worst possible things that could be done in the church—make a Christian content. We should not want contentment, but a thirst and hunger after God.
As long as we are without the thirst and hunger, we will be content. A man who is neither hungry nor thirsty does not go to a restaurant or step up to a water fountain. It is only when he is hungry or thirsty that he looks for a way to satisfy himself.
There must be a better place for most of us Christians than we have found up till now.
Every time this is said, somebody rushes out from behind a bush or crawls out of the woodwork somewhere and says that he or she is what we are talking about. Every time I write an editorial to the effect that the church needs prophets, somebody will write and say, “You’re right, and I am the man.
” When you talk or write about the deeper life and say to God’s people they ought to be more spiritual than they are, somebody comes rushing out all aglow and says, “That’s right, and I’ve got it.”
If you follow those people around, you will find as a rule that they do not have what they think they have. I have not seen very many people who have anything I want in the area of spirituality.
I do not want to judge people, but just look at modern fundamentalism and evangelicalism and ask this question: Is this what Jesus Christ was talking about when He told us what was going to take place after He went into heaven? I do not think so.
If what I see all around me these days is what Jesus described, then He was guilty of greatly overselling His product. He was guilty of great exaggeration, because have you noticed here that the Lord Jesus Christ raised expectation by description?
For instance, in John 4:14, Jesus said, “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.” And in John 6:35.
He said, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger.” In John 7:38, Jesus said, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”
In John 14:26, He said that the “Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.” In John 15:26, He said this Comforter “whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me,” and in John 16:8,
“He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” In John 17:24, He said, “That they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.”
Are these things a reality among Christians today?
When we come to the episodes, they are constantly describing something that is of a different flavor from what we find around us today in even the best of evangelical circles.
Read the New Testament without prejudice, with an open mind, and catch the flavor, catch the spiritual fragrance, and then sniff around where you go to church and the people you associate with and see if it smells the same. There is a synthetic something about modern Christianity, and it is not the same as what we see described here.
The Corinthians were about the least spiritual of the people to whom the apostle wrote, yet if they were to come into the average church today, they would set things on fire because they were gifted people. They were people that would fall on their faces and say, “God is in this place.”
They had something; they had a supernatural something. There was some carnality hanging around that Paul tried to get out, but there was also a lot of spirituality there, and to compare even the Corinthian church with our average church today would be ridiculous, just plain ridiculous because we just do not have what they had.
We just are not where they were. We are far beneath them. We have pulled the New Testament down, and all those high promises and expectations have been dragged down to the level of our mediocrity.
The man of God admonished, “Let us go on unto perfection.” I would like to say that there is a better place spiritually than you now possess. There may be a rare few who have climbed the mountains and from those delectable mountains have seen the city of God.
It may be that you are about to step over the river and enter into it. It may be, but most of the Lord’s people these days are not quite there yet. There is a better place for you, and I want to direct you to that better place. To do so, I want to make you just as dissatisfied as I possibly can because it is the only hope for any of us.
There is a better place for us, and we do not have to alter our doctrine to get there. You can be a spiritual, godly, Christ-like, worshipful person and never change your doctrine at all.
We have all the doctrine we need. We do not need to import anybody to teach us any new doctrine. It is not something new I need to learn. It is something new I need to experience, and what I experience lies within the framework of the simple gospel as we know it.
We got the tree, all right, The trouble is, the tree is not blooming. Fundamentalism and evangelicalism are a tree in winter. It is not dead, because there is life in it, all right, but it is not flowering.
God never meant the tree of correct doctrine to stand stark and cold with the wind whistling through its bare branches. He meant the tree of correct doctrine to blossom, flower, and bear fruit.
We do not have to hunt up some Greek teacher and get the marginal annotation from another translation or have someone come from a foreign country to tell us all of this.
All we have to do is get down on our knees with our New Testament and pray through that boundary The ladder that stood up on the earth with its top reaching halfway up is still there, and we do not need anything else, just our knees and a New Testament.
What is our trouble today?
Our trouble is, that we hear sermon after sermon and do not get anywhere. Why do we push and push the old cart up the hill, and then slip and have to go back down and get it the next Sunday morning, and push it up again?
The average church consists of fifty-two futile efforts that go on per year, plus perhaps two or three thrown in that we call “revival efforts.” I think we should call them revival efforts rather than revivals. In some parts of the country, they call them protracted meetings. I think that perhaps is more honest. But we always slip back to where we were before.
Spiritually, we hop up on Sunday, but then slip back on Monday. Then we come, repeat it Wednesday night maybe, and do the same thing on Sunday. In light of the soon coming of the Lord, it is a terrible thing; in light of the fact that some of us have not got too long yet to go, it is a terrible thing.
Why is this happening? This is happening because we have a lack of desire. We do have not the desire we ought to have, and God’s people are not hungry and thirsty anymore. Occasionally I run into somebody who is so hungry and thirsty that he is practically in agony. I do not worry too much about him, because I know he will get somewhere.
Why is there so much light now among God’s people, yet so little delight? The Lord’s children do not have much joy in God anymore. We have to whip it up, which is why we have song leaders who are as smooth as a willow in the wind and could dance anytime they want to and know just how to whip us up and finally get us going.
Why is it that we have no delight in God and have to get it somewhere? I will tell you what I would rather do. I would rather hear a half-hour concert of folk music than to be in a so-called Christian meeting, where they have to whip me up all the time, wave their arms grin, and show all thirty-two teeth in order to get me going.
We just do not have the delight that the Scriptures promise us. We have replaced the light with what we call methodology. A group of men will sk around and have what they call a panel discussion.
It used to be the worship service would burst forth, and everybody’s delight brought other people in, and they got convicted before God because of the sheer delight of the spiritual life around them.
Now it is methodology. We are teaching methods. The panel discussion is made up of twelve people who do not know what they are talking about, and who are sitting around pooling their ignorance. That is the way we get on now. There is much light, but not much delight. We have a great deal of truth, but it is not blossoming.
We need to see great saints once again in our fellowship. The greater the saint and the holier the man, the less likely he is to admit that he amounts to anything. However, in those saints of the past, did have a treasure, they did see visions of God, they did have heaven open up to them, and they did have great freedom and great peace and great joy and great delight and great intimacy with God.
They may not have had it every day, but they did have those experiences, and God had it written in the great “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11.
Some people just get old and become spiritually mediocre. They have been a Christian for years and have served in the church, but they still have a spirituality that is mediocre at best. We used to ask a very pertinent question: “Are you as spiritual as you were last week?” Nobody does that now.
Everybody takes for granted their spiritual situation, which in my opinion is not a good thing to do. We need to inquire, “How’s your soul this Sunday morning, brother?” Rather, we say, “Who won the game last night?”
As you look at the saints of old, you might want to ask, what made these saints the kind of saints that they were? It was the intensity of their desire after God. They wanted God more than they wanted anything else.
They wanted God more than they wanted ease, comfort, fame, wealth, friends, or even life itself. They wanted God, the triune God, so their hearts panted after God as the deer pants after the water brooks.
Jesus Demands This Heart of Mine
Jesus demands this heart of mine—
Demands my wish, my joy, my care;
But, ah! How dead to things divine,
How cold, my best affections are!
’Tis sin, alas! With dreadful power
Divides my Savior from my sight;
Oh, for one happy, shining hour
Of sacred freedom, sweet delight!
Oh let Thy love shine forth and raise
My captive powers from sin and death,
And fill my heart and life with praise,
And tune my last expiring breath. -Anne Steele(1717-1778)