Monday, March 17th, 2014 Bringing Sons unto Glory Studies in the Life of Our Lord Oswald Chambers Copyright 1944, Oswald Chambers Publications Association Scripture versions quoted: kjv (av); rv Bringing Sons unto Glory For it became Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren. Hebrews 2:10-11 (RV) The Plerosis The Self-Fulfilling of Jesus We have to place the Lord Jesus Christ to our faith where the New Testament places Him. We are apt to look upon Jesus Christ as some marvellous power of God with no identity of its own, forgetting altogether that the New Testament Jesus Christ, Who transforms human lives by the miracle of regeneration, retains His own identity all through. Our Lord had a Self-conscious existence built on exactly the same basis as our human personality. What is true of the conscious and unconscious mind is true also of personality. The part of our personality of which we are conscious is the tiniest bit; underneath are the deep realms of unconscious life known only to God. Our Lord can never be defined in terms of individuality, but only in terms of personality. “I and My Father are one.” Every bit of the personality of Jesus, conscious and unconscious, fulfilled the purpose of God. 1. His Sovereign Self-Identification That they may be one, even as We are one. (John 17:22) (a) The Joy of Personality These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. (John 15:11) You can never use the word “happiness” in connection with Jesus or His disciples. It is an insult to God and to human nature to have as our ideal a happy life. Happiness is a thing that comes and goes, it can never be an end in itself; holiness, not happiness, is the end of man. The great design of God in the creation of man is that he might “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” A man never knows joy until he gets rightly related to God. Satan’s claim is that he can make a man satisfied without God, but all he succeeds in doing is to give happiness and pleasure, never joy. Our lives mean much more than we can tell, they fulfil some purpose of God about which we know nothing; our part is to trust in the Lord with all our heart and not lean to our own understanding. Earthly wisdom can never come near the threshold of the Divine; if we stop short of the Divine we stop short of God’s purpose for our lives. “. . . that My joy might remain in you.” What was the joy of Jesus? The joy of Jesus was the absolute Self-surrender and Self-sacrifice of Himself to the will of His Father†††, the joy of doing exactly what the Father sent Him to do. “I delight to do Thy will,” and He prays that His disciples may have this joy fulfilled in themselves. There is no joy in a personality unless it can create. The joy of an artist is not in the fame which his pictures bring him, but that his work is the creation of his personality. The work of Jesus is the creation of saints; He can take the worst, the most misshapen material, and make a saint. “Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there is a new creation” (rv mg). The fullest meaning of sanctification is that Jesus Christ is “made unto us . . . sanctification,” that is, He creates in us what He is Himself. The Apostle Paul alludes to the joy of creating when he says, “For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of glorying? Are not even ye. . . ? For ye are our glory and our joy” (1 Thessalonians 2:19-20 rv). “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, . . .” It was not reward Our Lord looked forward to, but joy. “Reward” is our lame word for joy. When we want a child to do well, we do not say “You will have joy”; we say “You will have a reward, a prize.” The way the joy of Jesus manifests itself is that there is no desire for praise. As Bergson has pointed out, we only want praise when we are not sure of having done well; when we are certain we have done well, we don’t care an atom whether folk praise us or not. (b) The Peace of Personality “My peace I give unto you” (John 14:27). The idea of peace in connection with personality is that every power is in perfect working order to the limit of activity. That is what Jesus means when He says “My peace.” Never have the idea of jadedness or stagnation in your mind in connection with peace. Health is physical peace, but health is not stagnation; health is the perfection of physical activity. Virtue is moral peace, but virtue is not innocence; virtue is the perfection of moral activity. Holiness is spiritual peace, but holiness is not quietness; holiness is the intensest spiritual activity. It is easy to conceive of a personality full of joy and peace, but isolated. The striking thing about Our Lord is that He was never isolated. “If a man love Me. . . ,” He says, “We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.” The conception is that of perfect converse and union; the abiding of the Trinity with the saint. The destiny of mankind in the purpose of God is not to do something, but to be something—“that they may be one, even as We are one.” Jesus had joy and peace to the last reach of His personality. With us it is possible to have joy and peace in one domain and disturbance and unrest in another; we have spells of joy and spells that are the opposite of joy, tribulation that brings distress; but there is a time coming when there will be no more tribulation, no more distress, when every part of our personality will be as full of joy and peace as was the File Leader* {* File Leader: Leader of mountain expedition or military unit; person with absolute authority.}of our faith. Have we got the unfathomable comfort of knowing that in and above all the clouds and mysteries the joy of Jesus is unsullied? “Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 24). It is a good thing to let the Spirit of God kindle our imagination as to what Jesus Christ is able to do. 2. His Sovereign Self-Fulfilment Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted . . . (Acts 2:33) The Ascension placed Jesus Christ back in the glory which He had with the Father before the world was. The Ascension, not the Resurrection, is the completion of the Transfiguration. The two visitants on the mount, who might well have come to usher Him back into heaven, instead spake with Him “of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem.” “And it came to pass, while He blessed them, He was parted from them, and carried up into heaven,” and the angels told the watching disciples that “this Jesus, which was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him going into heaven. Our Lord does now, without any hesitation, go back into His primal glory; but He does not go alone. Through His Death and Resurrection He has made the way for the whole human race to get to the very throne of God. The Death of Jesus was a revelation in act of the judgment of God upon the sin of the human race; the Resurrection is the absolution of God pronounced upon the human race, the abolishing of death which is the wages of sin. By His Resurrection Our Lord not only has the right to give His own life to anyone who will take it, but power to “fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of His glory . . .” (rv). That does not take place in this dispensation. Beyond our comprehension, you say? Only beyond the comprehension of intellect. There is all the difference between the comprehension of intellect and the comprehension of spirit. We comprehend a thing by our spirit and feel we know it but cannot express it; it is a knowledge “which passeth knowledge.” (a) Supreme Power “All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). All power is given—unto whom? To the Being who lived a humble, obscure life in Nazareth; the One who says “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” If all power is given to Jesus Christ, what right have I to insult Him by worrying? If we will let these words of Jesus come into our heart, we shall soon see how contemptible our unbelief is. Jesus Christ will do anything for us in keeping with His own character; the power that comes from Him is stamped with His nature. Will I say sceptically, “What does Jesus Christ know about my circumstances? Is His power and understanding sufficient to manage things for me?” To talk like that is the way to realise the size of our unbelief, and to see why Jesus Christ was so stern in condemning it. “All power is given unto Me,” and yet Paul says “He was crucified through weakness,” and, he adds, “we also are weak in Him.” Am I powerful enough to be weak? Any weak man can strike another back, it takes a strong man to take it meekly; the omnipotence of Jesus at work in a man means that neither the world, the flesh or the devil can make him show anything but Christ-likeness. The Self-identification of Jesus with His servants through all the ages is along this line. “They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” The meaning of salvation in experience is that we are enabled to manifest in our mortal flesh the family likeness that Jesus had to God. There is only one type of humanity, and only one type of holiness, the holiness that was manifested in the life of the Lord Jesus, and it is that holiness which He gives to us. It is not that we are put in a place where we can begin to be like Him: we are put in a place where we are like Him. In Galatians 2:20 the Apostle Paul is referring to the fact that the very disposition of holiness which was in Jesus is in him by means of his identification with His death. It is not sentiment, it is a fact; not poetry, but a practical working out of this marvellous likeness to Jesus Christ. “We know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). (b) Supreme Wisdom “Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do” (John 14:13). When you pray, remember that it is Jesus Christ who carries out the answer, God hands over this marvellous power to Him. By His Ascension Our Lord becomes omniscient, all-wise; have we ever had a glimpse of what that means? The wisdom which He exercised in a limited sphere and in complete dependence upon His Father while on earth, He can now exercise in an unlimited sphere. The revelation of our spiritual standing is what we ask in prayer; sometimes what we ask is an insult to God; we ask with our eyes on the possibilities or on ourselves, not on Jesus Christ. Get on to the supernatural line, remember that Jesus Christ is omniscient, and He says, “If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it.” (c) Supreme Presence “And lo, I am with you alway.” Don’t refine this revelation fact away by taking it to mean a spiritual presence by the Holy Spirit; it is a grander, more massive revelation than that, “I am with you alway.” Through His Ascension the glorified Lord is with us always. May God lift the veil as to what this means. Who was it saw Jesus after the Resurrection? Only those who had spiritual insight. When the Spirit of God opens our spiritual eyes, we see Jesus, “crowned with glory and honour.” By His Ascension Our Lord raises Himself to glory, He becomes omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. All the splendid power, so circumscribed in His earthly life, becomes omnipotence; all the wisdom and insight, so precious but so limited during His life on earth, becomes omniscience; all the unspeakable comfort of the presence of Jesus, so confined to a few in His earthly life, becomes omnipresence, He is with us all the days (rvmg). What kind of Lord Jesus have we? Is He the All-powerful God in our present circumstances, in our providential setting? Is He the All-wise God of our thinking and our planning? Is He the Ever-present God, “closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet”? If He is, we know what it means to “abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”No one can tell us where the shadow of the Almighty is, we have to find it out for ourselves. When by obedience we have discovered where it is, we must abide there—“there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.” That is the life that is more than conqueror because the joy of the Lord has become its strength, and that soul is on the way to entering ultimately into the joy of the Lord. TO BE CONTINUED….. ________________________________________
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 14:01:00 +0000
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