Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the institute to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Dear Father, in the midst of our own weakness, we just pray that your power may still be prevailing with us this morning.
So guide us now, we pray thee in this meditation through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
It seems almost as if the subject that we have this morning. Which is seeing the character of Christian discipleship as a new humanness, not the old humanness that I got into, is what we will be inhibited from giving.
Let me unfold this with five major points. And we'll have to cut these down because of the lack of time.
But I think, first of all, our characters develop in Christ as his disciples.
When we become aware of the inadequacy of our faith.
Secondly, we therefore need the experience constantly in our lives of repentance.
But thirdly, we recognize that in God we have a covenant that is the basis for a new way of living.
And therefore, falsely, we discover that this new quality of life, as it seeks to be integrated with the old Adam that I am, provides us with a new humanness to our life.
And then, finally, I want to say something about, therefore, what are those distinguishing traits which help us in the growth of our character?
Well, very briefly then, first of all, the awareness that we need to have as the apostle, as the disciples had of their inadequate faith.
One of the things that we find about Matthew's Gospel. Which we've been using as the focus of our understanding of discipleship, is that Matthew, compared with St. Mark, is a very kindly narrator.
Mark is brusque.
He's almost rude sometimes in the way in which we find the disciples described.
And there are 14 times, at least, that one can think of.
When we find that Matthew softens the accusations or the inadequacies that are revealed of the disciples.
So Matthew is a gentler narrator. But at the same time, we find that Matthew focuses on one intrinsic weakness of the disciples.
And it's this phrase that we talked about yesterday.
Little faith, O ye of little faith, five times over.
We find that Matthew describes the disciples as having this weakness.
We find that these weaknesses are, in fact, in the terms of powerlessness.
The disciples don't know how to handle the crowds when they need bread.
The nine disciples don't know how to handle the epileptic boy.
After the transfiguration, we find that in the storm that the disciples don't know how to handle the chaotic threat that they face on the sea which threatens to engulf them.
And really, what Matthew is describing to us is a state of our church today, that considering the resources that we have in Christ, the summary of Matthew is that what is lacking with the Church in a world that threatens to engulf it in chaos, or a world that is hungry for bread and we can't provide it, or a world that is full of passionate fits and lustfulness that we cannot control, that in the midst of all of these things, the disciples, like ourselves, are lacking power to face awkward situations.
So one of the things that we therefore have to recognize in all of these situations is that there's a need to trust Christ four times, in addition to these five accusations, four times over. We find, however, that faith is so often found on the periphery of the Christian believing community.
Jairus daughter is healed because of the faith of the centurion, who really had no raison d' etre for such a faith. He wasn't brought up within the commonwealth of Israel.
Or again, we find the Syrophoenician woman, again no reason at all why she should have this remarkable faith as she seeks the healing of her daughter.
And the other examples are the same.
And so one of the things that perhaps helps us, those of us who have long been within the body of the Church and who know all about the orthodoxy of faith, is to recognize that sometimes we learn most deeply, not from those who are most conventionally in the body of the community, but those who are in the periphery and who, in their bankruptcy and despair, the freshness of their faith in Christ, have great faith.
And so we have this paradox that Matthew speaks about.
And yet it's also a faith that is to be shared, because it's Christ who is being shared and communicated.
And so we find, therefore, that this is the beginning, I think, of a turn in our own experience as Christians, that we need to begin by recognizing the powerlessness of our lives, in spite of all the conventionality and all the orthodoxy and all the know how that we may have, theologically speaking.
Then, secondly, we therefore need repentance.
And so we find in Matthew chapter 3, for example, in verse 2, in Matthew 4:17, that that Jesus cries out, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
This whole new way of living is at our doorstep. The potential is at our hand.
We therefore need, if we are seriously to think of the development of a Christian character, we need to recognize this need of repentance.
And we are Reminded that it is faith that leads to repentance. That is to say, when we see the potential that we can have for trusting Christ and we realize that we're not utilizing that potential from day to day, we therefore are led from that potential of trusting him to repenting of our lives.
If Christ is really our Lord and Savior, if he's able to redeem our souls from destruction, if he's able to empower us in the miraculous way in which he's described and in these miracles of Matthew's Gospel, then true repentance will be based upon the awareness of such a faith.
The turning then of our lives towards God will ensue.
I would recommend that sometime you meditate on Calvin's Institutes, especially section three.
And in book three, section three, he talks about the contrast between the way in which we sometimes think of the Christian life in terms of modification.
Well, we're sorry for sins where we're aware of our lusts, where we're afraid of our emotions, and we therefore need to have some kind of clean out.
But he says the difficulty about that perspective of mortification still tends to be man centered. That is to say, we do it because we're ashamed of ourselves, or we do it because we are afraid of the consequences of, of not turning direction or curbing or controlling our passions and our feelings more carefully.
But that kind of mortification is still too anthropocentric.
It's still too man centered.
And what is needed therefore is something else. And he distinguishes between the mortification that is man centered and man motivated from the repentance that is God centered and God directed.
In other words, if we recognize, as the apostle says, that we need to have repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ. That's a marvelous slogan for the reorientation of our lives, repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
So true repentance really requires a true faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that is able to realize that I can do all things through Christ who strengthened me, and that we are not likely to have repentance unless we pit ourselves against the impossibilities of life time and time again. As I relate and counsel with young people, I find that they are always saying, well, look, if you are directing me that way, that is impossible. I just can't do it.
But there's no other way to face God. There's no other way to have the resources of God than living with the impossibilities.
It's when we live with the possibilities that we live a man centered religion and a man centered life.
And so if we major in our possibilities, we are in fact handicapping ourselves from having more than little faith.
Faith we have because theoretically, potentially, we see the resources are in Christ Jesus, but actually we don't, because we never stretch out to the impossibilities of our life. And the impossibilities, of course, are in terms of having those qualities of character which are Christlike. I can't forgive somebody that stabbed me in the back. I can't forget things that have happened to me so drastically in my life. I cannot get over these inhibitions or temperamental problems or anxieties that I face in my character, in my own strength. And it's only then that we can reach out beyond little faith to the bigger things of life.
And if we cannot know how to curb our own passions and our own emotions, if we cannot see any changes taking place in our own character, then of course the consequences are that we live perhaps clearly analytical of the problems of the world, but utterly powerless to be able to do anything to transform those problems that face the world.
And so there's a tremendous need, therefore, for the understanding of biblical repentance.
I haven't time this morning to go further than that, but would I suggest that one of the great writers of repentance is a man in the 16th century called John Bradford.
He was one of the martyrs. He was martyred at the stake at the same time as the three bishops, Bishops Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer, the whole life. And you'll find that the works of John Bradford have been republished by the Banner of Truth in one of their publications.
But the whole style of life of John Bradford is that his whole ministry and his whole example was a life of repentance. It came about that as a young man living in a very corrupt culture of graft and bribery that he worked in the Treasury.
He saw that quite a good deal of the funding of the treasury went into his own pocket.
And when he became a Christian, he was so guilt ridden and so contrite by what had happened that he told his own bosses what he had done and resigned from his job and in the process forfeited his pension. So he lived for the rest of his life without a pension because he didn't feel that he was worthy now of having from the King's purse that which, in the little ways it wasn't anything very serious he had previously pilfered and robbed for his own benefit. And so John Bradford, from his own Existential experience understood the reality and repentance.
We cannot have Christian characters without a lifestyle of repentance is what Bradford would tell us then. The third point that I want to just touch on this morning is the recognition that the formation of our Christian characters depends also on knowing God as the basis of a new covenant relationship.
The covenant relationship of the Old Testament is still the same relationship that we have today.
And it's this that God is loyal, God is faithful.
And the very last words of Matthew's gospel remind us of this.
Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
And so, if we live our lives in the reality of the dependability of God, that we do not question God in spite of all the providential changes of our life or the vicissitudes that we go through, that we then begin to recognize that God is pledged to us with such a commitment, with such loyalty and love, and therefore his promises and His Word, we can claim for ourselves the Bible is a distant book. We do not use the Bible devotionally when we lose sight of of God's covenant with us.
But when we know that these are God's promises for us and that his words are yea and are men, then the consequence will be that our whole character will be a godly one under the covenant of God.
Now, under the old covenant, there were certain traits, and let me just summarize what these traits are.
The covenant people were those who were responsive to God's Word.
They live by God's Word. And so the godly Israelite, as he meditates on Psalm 119, gives us an understanding of what it is to live under the covenant of God's Word.
Meditate on that psalm for that framework of covenant relationship with God.
So there's a responsive attention to the words of God.
Secondly, there's loyal conformity to the commands of God that in the nature of a covenant that we are pledged to Him. Our response to his faithfulness is that we are obedient to Him.
And so obedience is the mark of a godly character.
Thirdly, there is a trustful hope in the promises of God that the consequence will be that our lives are lived with trust in the promises of God and we live hopefully our focus is upward and onward.
Fourthly, there's an adoring admiration for the works of God in creation and providence, that all around us our lives are lived gratefully, our lives are lived praisefully as a result of our admiration of all his doings.
Fifthly, there's submissive patience under his afflictions.
The psalmist could say, in my affliction I was dumb before thee, O God. For it was thou, O God, who didst afflict me. We don't gripe and grouse and grumble publicly about what's happening to us, because thereby we are betraying the relationship that we may have with the living God.
And therefore I was silent before thee, O Lord, for it was thou who didst afflict me.
We take all things from his hand.
Then also 6 slave was a reverent delight in the gifts that God gives to us.
We recognize that our lives are lived in the reality of how much he's given.
And we reverently delight then in those gifts.
Seventhly, those in the old covenant lived with an active identification with the cause of God.
Their lives were jealous of God's name.
Their lives were seeking to honor God in all ways. And so there was an active identification with the cause of God.
And then eighthly, we find there was an unflagging desire then for the fellowship of God, for his companionship, his friendship, for his association.
And therefore, ninthly, there was a committed solidarity with the people of God, that one was one with others who were on the same pilgrimage under the same loyalty of the same covenant with God.
And so, finally, there was a positive neighborlessness to one's fellows. One had this awareness of the need of care and compassion and neighborliness to those all around us.
Well, these are the marks of the old covenant. And what we find in the New Testament is that all those 10 marks are continued.
We still have to maintain all of those things. But there's a new basis for such a covenant relationship.
And so we find that there are four things that are added to in the New Testament under the new covenant we have in Jesus Christ. First of all, the covenant is now embodied in Jesus Christ.
It's no longer a covenant. It is Jesus Christ who is the covenant.
It's no longer abstracted. It's now personalized.
And so the quality of our Christian life will be that which grows with that awareness.
Secondly, there's the involvement of. Of a new age because of the Holy Spirit.
That when we want to know, how is it possible that he is with us always, all the time?
And the answer is that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus.
The Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus.
The Holy Spirit is the power of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, in fact, the pledge of that covenant to us.
And so we live in a relationship with Jesus Christ that is enabled by the Holy Spirit.
And thirdly, There is therefore a new liberty that is given to us because, as we sometimes sing, he lives, he lives. Christ Jesus lives today.
You ask me how I know he lives.
He lives within my heart.
And that gives us a freedom to go to the ends of the earth. It gives us a freedom to live in any circumstance. It leaves us to live imprisoned lives.
And we're free because of that quality of identification with him. We've been adopted into his family.
We are his brothers and sisters. We are his children.
We are in that family of God. And therefore there is given to us in the new covenant a new detachment, a new detachment from earthly things, a new detachment with a much more fulfilled hope, with much more foretaste of heaven and the character of such a life.
And so when we ask ourselves today, why, what is Christian discipleship? What is the spirituality for this discipleship?
Then we say, it's that which has a whole new orientation from the old covenant. It's all that plus.
But the orientation is now that our lives are actively exploring the relevance of Jesus Christ in all our ways.
And so a new rule for our Christian character is therefore to recognize and to respond to the reality and to the power of God in our faith in Jesus Christ.
That's what that new orientation is. It's that that helps us to break through from little faith to having great faith.
Then also we find that the consequence of this life is that we're still living the old life. We still have a lot of the old passions. We still have a lot of the old temperaments. We still have a lot of the old weaknesses still within us.
And yet all the time, integration of life is our quest for Godliness.
And in that integration of the newness of this life, of the fullness of this covenant with our God and Jesus Christ.
We therefore see that the character of Christian discipleship is that we're expressing a new humanness that really, if people ask you what it is to be a Christian, it is to be a more genuine human being. That's all.
It's a life that's living out the new life of covenant with God in Christ in such a way that that newness is at the same time natural to us.
We wear it not like we may when we first buy a new dress or a new suit. And we're perhaps being admired. We feel a little awkward, don't we?
It's still too new.
Well, there's a sense in which we want the newness of our faith in Jesus Christ to be well worn, so we're comfortable in it.
We've integrated it within our very personalities.
How then do we do this?
I think we do it by recognizing that to be most human is to be most Christlike.
And Christlikeness has many angles.
We view it from different facets, like a brilliant.
The brilliant sparkle of a diamond.
First of all, we view it from the angle, perhaps of maturity, that we're more mature in our attitudes, we're more enriched in our relationships.
We have more freedom than we ever had before.
There's evidence of growth in our lives.
There's a new quality of dignity, there's a new sense of worship.
There's a much stronger hope about our lives.
And it's summarized by our desire to live holy lives.
There are certain guidelines that we can appropriate for such a naturalness about our Christian discipleship.
Because we live in the crises and changes of society, with all its pressures, with all its relativism.
And what marks a man or woman of God is that like a strong oak, they stand upright and they resist all gales and all winds, all storms.
There's an unflappable quality of consistency about them.
Why is that?
Well, first of all, because the mark of this humanness is that instead of being insignificant tadpoles in a large pond here in Washington, we find ourselves affirming the greatness of the soul before God.
Now, one of the books that has profoundly helped me to see the greatness of the soul before God is Teresa of Avila's interior castle, the 16th century mystic. And she gives you the option for your life.
Either your life without God is a shriveled up walnut that has already been eaten up by the worms, or you have the possibility of Christ in you being the hope of glory and Christ in us. The hope of glory gives us infinite potential, and there is an infinite sphere of the exploration of our lives with God.
You know, this whole psychological framework of psychoanalysis is ultimately deadly in its secularity because we bore through and end up seeing nothing.
But if we find that the new equation for our lives is that Christ is in us, then, says Teresa, our life is like a medieval castle that she knew. These enchanted castles that have infinite spheres for exploration.
And as you go through the castle of your soul with Theresa, and she thinks of her castle, and her soul is really like the brilliance of a diamond, shining in all its translucence and transparency, and yet having such marvelous beauty about it. The beauty of the soul before God is what gives us a whole new orientation to our humanness.
It's no longer dirty, although there is still the possibility in the first series of mentions of the reptiles and the creepy crawlies from the moat coming into the interior of the castle.
But nevertheless, there is this wonderful awareness of the immortal significance of our souls in the presence of God.
And there's also the possibility of us recognizing, therefore, that there are infinite explorations of relationship. The exploration of the castle is not a psychological exploration, it's not a geographical exploration.
It's an exploration of relationship.
And so the seven series of mansions are seven stages of relationship that we can have with the living God.
Have you ever thought how many relationships you've got or you had already explored? Well, read her and you'll find that this is the first thing. So this is the first guideline that will help us to this new humanness of our life in Jesus Christ.
And then secondly, we will find that instead of a cultural negativism about our world, you know, Mr. Taboral was hated by Hengre Gide as a young boy, his science teacher, because this young boy, sensitive and full of the wonder of life, rushed into his science tutor and said, oh, Misha Tabora, see what I have seen? And he saw the transformation of the chrysalis of a butterfly.
Oh, my dear boy, that's only but the following explanation. And as Donald Mackay talks about, there's nothing buttery that is the realm of naturalism.
We have a different perspective. This is God's world, and we affirm the goodness of the creation.
So when your life is lived in Christ, you can spend an afternoon with a blade of grass in front of you, and you can look the specificity and the mystery and the wonder of just simply a flower.
Your camera lens can zoom in on that alpine meadow, and out of that blur of all that color, you can focus on one specific petal or flower and see the goodness of God.
So that gives you a second perspective.
Thirdly, we find that this new humanness in Christ is one that takes us from cool self absorption to a compassionate identification with others.
We see the beauty, we see the uniqueness, we see the fragility, we see the need of other people and beyond their status, beyond what they're wearing, beyond who they profess to be.
We can identify compassionately with them in their imprisonment, in their emotional frustrations, and seek to have that compassion and caring for others.
And therefore we find, fourthly, there's another guideline for this. Humanness in Christ is therefore, that we move away from seeing everything institutionalized or professionalized or bureaucratized to a living community.
We need to go around the world today, not simply with an environmental concern for the fragility of our ecosystems, but for the fragility of personal life and of the pressures under which personhood are being subjected to in our culture.
And we see that the tyranny of our life is to reify everything, to make things into objects and things, things that we master and control and want instead of reverencing and giving kindness to the space of our uniqueness.
And therefore we also fifthly move from intellectualism with its control and mastery over life, to a spirit of worship that is not controlling but is truly the aesthetic principle of expressing our attitude of letting be and adoring what is in God.
And then finally we find that therefore we move from abstract formulae.
And you know, one of the problems that we face as we grow in Christ is that we become too theological, we become too notional, our faith and the reason why to other people we lack faith, we are like disciples of little faith is because so much of what we're talking about in Christianity is pure theory.
It's abstract.
We've not lived it, we've not actualized it, we've not seen it in the reality of Jesus Christ.
And so we therefore need to go from this, what we might call theological naivety, thinking that theory is enough, to recognizing the need then of a life that is much fuller.
And so finally the consequence of all of this will be that we will have traits that we seek to have in our growth of Christian character.
There are two books that I would recommend because we haven't time to dwell on this further. But there is a book that that was published at the beginning of the 19th century by a man called Gardiner Spring, S P R I N G and it's called the Distinguishing Traits of Christian Character.
And this book by Gardiner Spring is in fact itself a spin off from Jonathan Edwards book called the Religious Affections, which he published in 1746.
In fact, in our own classics of faith and devotion. Chuck Colson is writing an introduction for this book and it should be out this next month.
A revised and modernized version of Jonathan Edwards.
But the heart of it all is, as Jonathan Edwards points out, that the distinguishing trait of a Christian character springs from one thing and that is our admiration of God, that the excellence of his glory, the wonder of his being, so captivate and so overwhelm us that our lives are lived with an outpouring of affection for the wonder of such a great God.
We live in a society that is so smog bound like a Californian coastal road that we are so caught up with the cleverness of man and the ingenuity of man and the self interests of man that we have lost sight of the Son of the glory of God.
We need to recover then the glory of God.
And says Jonathan Edwards, when we have that true gracious mark of knowing who God is, then we will live humble lives, lives open to him, but lives that begin to fall in love with him, lives that begin to be outpoured in gratitude to him, lives that therefore are totally so overwhelmed by the reality of this that nothing else will do.
One of the lyrics of George MacDonald is on this theme there's nothing else will do once you've seen him in the splendor with which Saul of Tarsus saw him on the Damascus Road.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: The proceeding was a presentation of the C.S. lewis Institute and the legacy of C. C.S. lewis. The institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life. For more information please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org. thank.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: You.
