Did We MISS the Entire Point of the GOSPELS?

Tom, now you should already be excited. Audience: I am.

You’re excited. Alright, I’m excited. I would say to all of you: just pick up your New Testament and say, “Wait a minute, my faith originated outside of time and outside of space, and it originated in God.” Let me find out what was going on between the Father and the Son. By the way, I’ll often say between the Father and the Son, and I won’t say between the Father and the Son and the Spirit, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Because I can find so little in Scripture about the fellowship of the God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and I’ve really been touched by a recent issue of a book that was entitled, “The Shy Member of the Trinity.” He is very hidden. It seems as though his part in the Godhead is to bring the fellowship between whoever, between the Father and the Son, between us and the Father and the Son. You know, in 1 John, John said, ‘and our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son”, and he didn’t mention the Spirit. It was the Spirit who was causing and making possible their fellowship. So, I’m not theologically in error here, nor am I forgetting to mention the Spirit. He is just very shy and very difficult sometimes to place in all this.

Alright, if you had spent eternity in a certain experience and you broke into a new universe, would you not tend to bring into that universe some of your past experience? Then I would say that whatever the Christian fellowship, the Christian experience is, or whatever it ought to be, it will bear some resemblance to what was known by the Father and the Son. That is where we are going to spend a good portion of this week, and I hope that when you leave here, you will have found a new handle, and I hope you will have found a new plane.

Now, I’m going to take just a moment, and I’m going to review what happened after this eternal fellowship. It was greatly altered when the Lord decided to create. He created the angels. And there seemed to have been at least some communication, if not fellowship, between angels and God before the creation of the visible sphere. Then came the creation of the visible sphere, and praise the Lord, now we come and we break into, really, the deeper Christian life here, or at least a fellowship that is not small. In the creation of man, we see God the Father and God the Son; we don’t know…God fellowshipping with Adam, but that must have been wonderful.

Here is a man who is sinless, doesn’t even know the concept, who is really as perfect as a man can be without the life of God in Him. He is more or less as perfect as God can make that which does not contain God, and they have wonderful fellowship. It proved to be an inadequate fellowship, but it was wonderful, and I’m sure you and I today would say, “I’d swap what I’ve got with what Adam had.” Yet if we did that, we would be taking a secondary place, because Adam had a relationship like this. Whereas ultimately, the Christian relationship has to be like this. It is ultimately like this, not this.

Well, then there came the fall, and how staggering was the alteration to the very universe…but mostly the man. I sometimes feel that the damage that man experienced was greater than all the rest of the universe combined. I am still amazed at how damaged the human race became in that fall. Now, after that is a period of time that I frankly will tell you I don’t understand, and that is the period of the Old Testament. I couldn’t tell you the relationship of an Old Testament saint to God if my life depended on it. Now, I know there are many wise men who can, but I’m not one of them. I do not know what kind of fellowship there was on the spiritual plane between the Old Testament saints and the Lord. We see visitations, God breaking into history, God coming from one realm to the other. His spirit is on man, but His spirit does not seem to be in man. Yet you can’t prove that going either way. I don’t know. I just don’t know. So, not knowing, I will immediately run to the New Testament, where things are clearer.

You come to the Gospels, and you see clearly the deeper Christian life. No, you just see the Christian life. What just staggers me is that we, as Christians, always run to the epistles to find out everything, and I can’t think of anything that’s really more neglected than the fact that we are not looking more at the gospels to figure out what the Christian life is. We look at the Lord’s life to find out…do you know what we look at the Lord’s life for to find out? Why do we study the Lord? Why do we read the Gospels? What is our purpose generally when we open the Gospels, and we start reading them? No, not how to live the deeper Christian life. Not at all. You know what it is? Absolutely, we go there really with a feeling of, ‘Alright, God, what do you want? What are you looking for? What are you expecting out of me?’ Is that not true? Absolutely. And here’s a parable. What does that mean to me? What’s He trying to tell me? What’s God expecting? We go to a conference…parables? That’s what God wants out of me. Any illustrations? The Good Samaritan? And we go there looking for what our obligations are. No question about it. Masochistic seeking of that which is obligatory. You got that, I’m sure. Did you understand that? Alright, we are…what have I done wrong? We’re doing penance, that’s what we’re doing. How can I make it up to you, God, Lord? Tell me what I’ve done wrong. Tell me what I ought to do. Show me what you’re expecting of me, and man, do we run over the main point, because we miss the incredible picture of the Christian life that’s right there in front of us.

Oh, I’m not talking about Jesus being good to people. I’m not talking about healing. I’m not talking about His teachings. That’s what we always look for…and brethren, we must pray early in the morning, the Lord went apart from the disciples, or even before the earliest hour of the dawn, He went away to be in prayer, in prayer. So, the next morning, I drag myself out of bed, and I try to find some sequestered place where I can go pray, and you know what I end up doing? I go to sleep. And so, the message comes to you, and it comes to me: pray, because Christ prayed. Be good to people, because Jesus was good to people. This is kind of the mess we’re in. This is what is normally called the shallow Christian life. And it is the shallow Christian life. What did we miss? Barbara, what did we miss? What did we look for and not find? A relationship. That’s right, and it’s all over the 4 gospels if you just open your eyes and look.

This Jesus is marooned in an invisible realm, in the visible realms. He is into a new experience, and He is faced with the most enormous task in history, and He, I’m not going to say He needs His Father, He never ceased the fellowship that He knew in eternity past. At this point, I think I would like to talk to the person behind that lens. So, wake up. When you think of prayer, you see the Lord going out there early in the morning to pray, and you see that painting…I don’t know who did that painting, but there’s this big rock and the Lord has got His hands like this, and He’s kneeling, and He’s looking up. It looks like there’s a stained-glass window up there somewhere. There’s this light falling just on Him, and the minute you look at that thing, the thing you think to yourself is, gee, I wish I had a place like that where I could pray.

You think of the Lord doing this, and it just shows us this mindset we have. Jesus Christ…the Father (separated). He’s talking to God. I’m here to say to you that when He went out early that morning to be alone, you have to drop every concept you have of what prayer is, because that was internal fellowship. It was an internal fellowship, and it was a fellowship that had been going on for eternity, and it was within, and it was rich. And there wasn’t…if you compare what He was doing there alone in the mornings with His Father, with what we do today, it’s mind-boggling. Forgive me for this, but I just, you know…every once in a while, I bump into praying, and it just really frightens me what the modern-day, and probably for the last eighteen hundred years, the concept of prayer is. It’s sometimes a shouting match. Lord! Obviously, He’s getting old and deaf. Or it’s a thousand miles an hour. (fast) Father, we thank you. We’ve come here this evening. We bless Your name, and we thank You, and we pray that you’ll be with us here tonight. You can hardly know what the guy is saying; he’s speaking so fast. And you think, and where is God? And it’s just, it’s this. It’s talking. What the Lord Jesus Christ was doing there alone with His Father was this. It was something going on internally, just as there had been something going on internally in God.

Let us remove ourselves from that passage of Scripture about prayer and just step back from the Gospels and look at them and say, What can I find here about the fellowship of the Godhead? What can I find here about the Christian life? And open your Bible, your New Testament, your Gospels, and you’ll find it on every page. The complete dependency the Lord Jesus had and the constant fellowship that He had with the Father. Now, I ask you again, just how much speaking in tongues, tithing, praying, and reading your Bible do we catch the Lord Jesus at? Well, you say, oh, but He quoted so much of the Old Testament. No, He didn’t. He wrote it. Don’t tell me He studied the Old Testament. He wrote it. He didn’t have to read about Moses crossing the Red Sea. Shucks, He split that sea Himself. I can’t tell you that He was a Bible scholar who had read his Old Testament; He had inspired every word of it. I don’t ever find Him speaking in tongues, and His prayer was nothing like our prayer. His tithing was as unorthodox as it could be. A fish tithed for Him.

His church life consisted of fellowshipping with 12 people out in open skies, and it was a fellowship that was a prototype of the Christian life and a view of that which had been taking place for all eternity past. It’s a snapshot: God trying to bring to 12, 15, or 20 people what He had known for all eternity.