WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS
Many of us may be familiar with the hymn with the above title. As I consider this subject, I think of the psalmist who cried out to God to deliver him in very trying situations; he cried out for protection from those who sought to hurt and kill him; and I remember the psalmist lamenting that his closest and best friend, who walked with him, turned against him, and sought to cause him pain and sorrow.
A friend is one of the greatest blessings on earth. Love is better than money and wealth; empathy and care, better than owning property and large estates. The world is full of sorrow because it is full of sin. A friend is like the brightest ray of the sun on a cold winter day; friendship eliminates half of our troubles and doubles our joy.
However, a real friend is scarce and rare; even among Christians and in the fellowship of the church and Christian community. There are many who will eat and drink, and laugh with us in the sunshine of prosperity.; but few are those who will stand by us in the days of darkness – few who will love us when we are sick, helpless and poor – few, above all, who will care for our souls (even telling us the truth in order to help us spiritually, even though the truth may hurt).
I recall a rich friend who was a prosperous businessman. He told me that when he went to his bank, the manager would welcome him and carry his bag. However, when he went ‘bankrupt’ in the downturn of the economy, the same manager will not even see him or look at him.
Do we want a real friend, a friend who sticks closer than a brother (Proverb 18:24); a friend in need, who will not hesitate to sacrifice himself for our sake, a friend who would do his utmost to restore good health and healing in our illness and our dying; a friend who will rescue us from our bankrupt spiritual state and our bondage, a friend who loves us freely, mercifully, without hesitation?
If we search all of history from the beginning of the world; if we look around the circle of those we know and love; you never heard of such friendship among the sons of men. There never was such a real friend who was willing to help us in our desperate time of need as was Jesus Christ.
A real friend is measured by what a real friend does; it is not about his words and letters: but his actions in real friendship. What the Lord Jesus Christ has done for man is the great proof of his friendly feeling towards him. Never were there such acts of kindness and self-denial as those that He has performed on our behalf. He has not loved us in word only, but in action and deed.
Look at the ‘INCARNATION’: He who is God becomes man, laid aside his glory and took upon Himself flesh and blood like our own. The almighty Creator of all things became a litte babe like any of us, and experienced all our bodily weaknesses and ailments, apart from sin. Trace His rejection by those to whom He came to save; recall his weariness, humility, taking the form of a bond servant; look at the cross- meditate upon the sacrificial loving act of one who was innocent and sinless, who allowed himself to be condemned, led as a lamb to the slaughter, and who poured out his soul unto death (1 Thess. 5:10).
Such friendship as this passes man’s understanding. Who can find a friend who would die for those he loves? Who can find a man who would lay down his life for those who hate him? Yet this is what Jesus has done for us!
Not only just a wonderful and precious friend with regard to the above; He is also resurrected and ascended to the right hand of the Father. He still comes to us in the ministry of the Spirit; He still intercedes for us and watches over us. He is also a mighty and powerful friend. Power to help is something that few possess in this world. Many may have desire to do good to others, but have no power.But though man is weak, Christ is strong, almighty with all authority given to Him in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18). He can help both body and soul; He can be a friend both for time and eternity.
He is able to pardon and save the very chief of sinners: He is able to convert the hardest of hearts and create in man a new spirit (John 1:12; 2 Cor. 5:17). He is able to preserve to the end all who believe in Him and become His disciples. He can give them grace to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil, and fight a good fight to the end.
Having such a friend means we can experience peace, joy, comfort, even in the most trying moments of our lives; we can dismiss fear from our emotions and have the surest confidence in Him to give us the very best in any circumstance of life. Even when things appear perplexing and we experience much pain and distraught, we know that Jesus ‘feels’ for us and He understands, and also He would continue to give sufficient grace for us to continue to endure and persevere. We can rest assured that He makes no mistakes in managing our affairs – He is indeed a tried and proven friend. Indeed, he who has Christ for his friend on earth can proclaim that his friend is truly reliable, loving, merciful, gracious, and he is indeed blessed!
DID GOD DIE ON THE CROSS?
Since Jesus was divine, how do we explain his death? Can the eternal God die? This is perhaps the question that many find hard to ignore. But what is even more perplexing for some is how Jesus was able to rise again from death in a resurrection that is unique in human history (even those who were reported to rise again eventually died, but not so with Jesus).
As we observe ‘Good Friday’ and ‘Easter Sunday’ this month, I find an article written by the late J.I. Packer in ‘Christianity Today’ is very insightful. I quote:
“So the first thing to say is that all human selves, with all the powers of remembering, relating, learning, purposing, and enjoying that makes us who we are, survive death, and b y dying are actually set free from all shrinkings of personal life due to physical factors – handicaps, injuries,and deteriorations of body and mind; torture and starvation; Alzheimeri’s disease, Down Syndrome, AIDS, and the like. This was true for both Jesus and the believing criminal to whom he said, as crucifixion drained their lives away, “Today you will be with me in paradise”; and it will be just as true for you and me.
To be sure, the ugliness and pain and aftermath of dying as we know it is the penalty of sin. For anyone unconverted in heart, who is thus already “dead in transgressions” (Eph. 2:5), dying means entering more deeply into the death state (meaning, separation from that sharing with God that Scripture calls “life”), We need to be clear that as our penal substitute, Jesus “tasted death” (Heb.2:9) in this deep sense precisely to ensure that we would never have to taste it. The natural view of his cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (first words of Ps. 22; Matt. 27:46), is that he was telling the bystanders, and through them the world, that in fulfillment of prophecy he was already undergoing deep death, as we may call it, during those dark hours. Godforsakenness was the hell into which Jesus entered on the cross, as Rabbi Duncan once told a class, with tears in his eyes, “It was damnation, and he took it lovingly”.
Incarnation gave the eternal Son of God capacity for this experience. “The Word became flesh” in the sense that without ceasing to be anything that he was before, he added to himself all that humanness in this world involves – namely, life through a body bounded by space and time, with all the glories, limitations, and vulnerabilities that belong to our everyday existence, including in due course leaving behind the body through which one has consciously lived all along…
There are mysteries here beyond our grasp – how, for instance, the sense of human and divine identity meshed; how the Son controlled his divine powers so as not to overstep the limits of human finiteness; how entire dependence on his Father’s leading for every word and deed made him the most unnerving initiative taker ever seen; and so on. But the certain fact is that as his life was a divine person’s totally human life, so his dying was a divine person’s totally human death.
Nor was Jesus’ dying the end of the story. HIs rising from the dead, of which Scripture speaks as the work of all three persons of the Trinity (John 10:17-18; Acts 13:30; 1Peter 3:18)), was a fresh exercise of the power that made the world and effected the Incarnation, leading on to the further work of power whereby the Son was glorified and enthroned,now to live as the God-Man in unbroken fellowship with his Father forever (Rom.6:9-10). His resurrection and glorification is the prototype of what awaits all believers, and his experience of dying guarantees that when it is time for us to leave this world his loving, supportive, sympathizing presence with us will “land me safe on Canaan’s side.” Such is God’s great grace.
Theology is not for casual curiosity, but for heartfelt doxology and never more so than when Christ’s death is the theme…” End of quotation
THE TRUE STORY OF GOD’S GRACE IN CHRIST (B)
In the previous sharing, 2 Cor. 5:15 was quoted as the main application from the true story of the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ for believers – we who live no longer should live for ourselves but live for him who died for us and rose again. In other words, our lives belong to the Lord Jesus and we, in one sense, have no right to live for ourselves; instead, we shall live for him from now on as believers.
This means, in reality, what is communicated by the Lord Jesus in Luke 14:25-33 – the demands of discipleship. If we are to live for him, we are to be his disciples and the demands for discipleship reflect what it means to live for him, and not for ourselves from now on.
We see some aspects of this in Luke 9:23-26; elsewhere Jesus said that those who put their hands and look back are not fit to be his disciples.
From these various passages, we can glean three tests and demands of discipleship.
First and foremost, are we willing to put Christ before every other person in our life, every other pleasure, every other possession?
Someone said that the stages of the Christian life could be described in four words: easy, hard, difficult, impossible. Some people think it is easy to be a Christian: all you have to do is sign on the dotted line, say a prayer, and you are in. When they get in, they find that it is a little harder that they thought. And then they go through a phase where it is extremely difficult and, finally, they come to a stage where it is impossible. When they come to this final stage they are actually at the point of their greatest breakthrough, because we cannot live this life in our strength. There is no way we can be a disciple of Christ by our own energy entirely. We become a disciple by committing ourselves to him.
Perhaps the biggest issue facing the church today is discipleship; this is what God is concerned about in this hour in which we are living. And in our study of the book of Revelation, we noted that only disciples would be able to stand up against the tide and persecutions in the last days, and remain standing at the end.
Committing our lives to Jesus Christ affects, cuts into, every other relationship that we have. There must be a willingness to put Christ first and others second.
By commanding us to take up our cross, Jesus is not talking about the unavoidable sufferings of life, nor is He saying that He wants us to suffer in some way physically. And nor does He have in mind the irritation, aggravation, and frustration we experience in life. What Jesus is asking is whether we are willing to put our self-concern and our self-interest to one side and to make His cause and His claims a priority?
To be a disciple of Christ means also the acceptance of personal discipline, the discipline of spending time with Him in prayer and in the Word of God. What do we do with our time? Jesus is actually saying that His claims must control our time, the films we see, the things we watch, the way we use our talents, the way we discipline our life.
If we really want to be HIs disciples, we must be willing to give Him all that He is asking – and He is asking for all. If He is worthy of our commitment, then it must be a radical, wholehearted 100 % commitment. And our money and possessions are usually the last thing to be laid upon the altar.
If our lives no longer belong to us, and if we have been ‘crucified with Christ, then the demands of discipleship are not unreasonable.
WE CAN HAVE CONFIDENCE THAT THE BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD
The question has been asked whether it is warrantable to treat the Bible as the Word of God when we have no reason to think that any manuscript or version now existing is free from corruption? It is sometimes suggested that in practice we are involved in an inescapable subjectivism by the necessity of relying on conjectural reconstructions of the text, and that we can have no confidence that any text we possess conveys to us the genuine meaning of the inspired Word. It is, of course, true that textual corruptions are no part of the authentic Scriptures, and that no text is free from such slips. But faith in the consistency of God warrants an attitude of confidence that the text is sufficiently trustworthy not to lead us astray.
If God gave the Scriptures for a practical purpose – to make men and women wise unto salvation through faith in Christ – it is a safe inference that he never permits them to become so corrupted that they no longer fulfill it.
Our attitude of faith in the adequacy of the text is confirmed, so far as it can be, by the unanimous verdict of textual scholars that the biblical text is excellently preserved, and no point of doctrine depends on any of the small number of cases in which the true reading remains doubtful.
While the work of recovering the original text is not yet finished, we should not hesitate to believe that the text as we have it is substantially correct, and may safely be trusted as conveying to us the Word of God with sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes. God’s faithfulness to his own intentions is our guarantee of that.
Hence evangelicalism has historically affirmed the infallibility and sufficiency of the canonical Scriptures as a God-given guide in all matters of faith and life; their necessity as a central and corrective of human thought about God, which left in itself will always go astray; and the clarity or perspicuity of the entire collection as a body of intrinsically intelligible writings that demonstrably belong together and constantly illumine each other. Indeed we can have confidence that we have in the BIble (Scriptures) the faithful Word of a faithful God!
FOCUSING ON JESUS TO FINISH THE RACE
The life of Christian endurance is lived by fixing our eyes on Jesus (Heb. 12:2). It means looking away from everything else in order to concentrate on our object of attention. The writer of Hebrews is telling us that the secret of endurance is to concentrate on Jesus himself; “gaze steadily at him” is the thought the writer expressed.
Recall that the book of Hebrews was written to warn Jewish Christians not to turn back to Judaism, in the face of intense persecution which involved losing their homes, imprisonment, and even death, when they refused to worship Caesar. The Jews were exempted from worship of Caesar as the Romans allowed this in view of their religion, but the Christians (Jews and Gentiles) were not exempted.
The writer of Hebrews wrote to affirm that Jesus was greater than the angels, than Moses; He was the ultimate High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, the final once and for all sacrifice (Lamb of God), entering into heaven and not the earthly tabernacle; He inaugurated the new age and the New Covenant, fulfilling all the promises in the Old Testament, and would bring His people in the final exodus to the new heaven and new earth. To turn away from Jesus is to turn away from such a great, unique, and incomparable salvation!!
The most vital truth for the life of holy endurance is that Jesus is our sustainer, our source of strength to action, our sovereign grace giver (Heb. 2:18;4:16), the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). Faith i s a compound of knowing, trusting, hoping, and stubbornly persisting in trustful hope against all odds. Faith can do this because the one who has graciously brought us to faith, and whom we now trust, helps us to do it. He has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper: I will not fear; what can man do to me?” (13:5-6). “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need”(4:16).
Hence the need to focus on Jesus to endure and finish the race. No matter what is happening around us and what is happening to us, we are to look away from them in order to concentrate on Jesus and gaze steadily at him. This confident expectant approach is faith in action. It is precisely the glorifieds Lord Jesu who now helps us to stand steady as we gaze on him and cling to him by means of our focused, intentional, heartfelt prayer. His mercy and grace would see us through any circumstance; but we need to fix our eyes of faith on him, and not turn away and be distracted or distressed by everything else. We need to continue to gaze steadily at him and find help in time of need; we need to nurture our relationship with him such that our gaze on him remains focused and steady in the “storms of life”. And there are many storms now and ahead of us before we reach the harbour where Christ awaits us; he is at the finishing point; he is also running besides us in this race; he begins our faith and he would finish it – he is the founder and perfecter of our faith.