God Intended YOU To Be HIGHER Than Angels

I’m going to talk with you about the…Before I do, I’d like to review what we talked about last night. Last night we talked about the beginning of the Christian faith being in the Godhead, that when the Lord Jesus Christ came to earth, He came bearing mostly His past experience with the Father. Now, did He come to earth to give us that experience, or did He come to earth to create a new experience for us, different from that which He had with the Father? Was He going to pass on what He had or was He going to create something new? If He were going to create something new, then surely, He would come and tell us to pray, read our Bibles, witness, tithe, and go to church on Sunday. But if He was coming to share with us what His Father and He had had together through all eternity, then we need to go back to the scripture and take a whole new look at it because we may have just shot right past most of our faith.

The time that the Lord Jesus Christ lived in Galilee and Judea with His disciples, and they watched Him. It was not His way of living, His philosophy, or His teachings that mesmerized them and magnetized them. It was something going on inside of Him that was not of this world. If we continue committed to our present conduct, our present idea of conduct: we go to church to find out what we should and should not do, we open the Bible to find out what Almighty God expects of us, then wittingly or unwittingly we’re ending up with a salvation based on works. That’s not exactly what we do. You know what we really do is we have a salvation by grace, but beyond that moment of grace, everything else is works.

We are looking at a certain way to pray. We are looking at a certain obligation to God and a certain obligation to man, and that is what is demanded of us, preached to us, and it’s what we go out to fulfill. And essentially, we are Muslims. Now, don’t take that and go quote it. Gene said, “All the Christians are a bunch of Muslims.” But all that a Muslim understands is what God expects of him to perform, and that’s all that he knows. He performs it five days a week with a few little rules thrown in, and as I look and visit and witness and get to know Christians, I see all over the world this obligation, these things I have to do. Do this, and I will satisfy God.

Where’s the spiritual element? Where’s the other world? Where’s the unknown? Where’s the…I think our concept of the Christian faith today is based on one false premise, and that is, whatever I’m told to do and to perform, I can do it. It is expecting of me divine conduct from a non-divine creature. It is the same as going to a sparrow and telling him to write the Declaration of Independence. You can’t do that as a sparrow because you are the wrong life form, and to present me or to present any Christian to present you with an with an the obligations of the Christian faith and never tell me anything about my internal being and how I am to lay hold of the life within and the Lord within me and expect me to perform the Christian faith is more ridiculous than asking a sparrow to write the Declaration of Independence.

Yet that is basically what we’ve got. An objective faith that says, “Here is a parable; this is what the Lord demands, you go do it.” Here is a teaching of the Lord: this is what He demands you go do it. That is all built on this assumption that, as an ordinary human being, fallen, sinful human, I can do that. You’ve got to give me a little more than that, folks, or I’ll never make it. Something is desperately missing here. And I believe that we will find the essence of it in the Godhead and their fellowship. I believe that’s what the Lord came to give you and to give me.

Well, I also traced last night in the last meeting what happened to…the origin of the deeper Christian life was in God. It was lived out and experienced in Christ, in His relationship to the Father, during the first 30 years of His life. As He grew into it, He shared it with a group of people. He shared that life with them. He then gave them that life after His resurrection, and they lived it out corporately together. And the best thing I can say about that is how far a field we are from it is to simply look at the first-century vocabulary. It is not our vocabulary.

Did you read Ephesians 1? That’s first-century vocabulary. Have you heard anything like that recently? Did…do you…you’re laughing, Andy. Do you get my point? How far a field that is from next Sunday’s sermon in a good Southern Baptist church? Southern Baptists, forgive me, I pick on you because I have the inherited right to pick on you. I can’t say anything against the Methodists. Tom can talk about the Methodists.

Boy, they had something going there. If they wrote, if they wrote and spoke that way, and they understood what they were talking about, those people had a sense of things that we have no concept of, but I hope you’ll have a little concept of them before we finish this. It was lost in the second century, probably because of persecution. In its place came the Greek and western mind, taking over essentially, boy, I’m this is new, essentially an eastern faith, I’m going to get nailed for that. We get the impression that Jesus Christ grew up in Athens, sometimes I think in Rome or Paris, forgive me, I know he didn’t live in India, but boy, He sure didn’t live in Athens. And He did not have a Western mind. He didn’t have a Western mind. He had never studied under Plato or Socrates, but you’d never know that today. We’ve ended up with a Western faith, and we are constantly demeaning and deriding Eastern religions, saying, “Would be fine with me, just as long as you keep that on the other side of the Ganges River,” or wherever India begins. But the Hebrew faith stood between east and west and was neither, and it had some element in it that’s just not found in our western faith.

When we crossed the isthmus of Byzantine or Byzantium or something like that, when you cross that, when the faith crossed that line, it lost a lot and picked up a lot it should have never picked up. Your faith is not Western, but your present-day mindset, and the way we view it is Western, and we are always damning and demeaning Eastern religions. I wish we’d stand up and damn and demean Western religion a little bit. It’s as ungodly and as much from darkness as is the east. And our faith has suffered from the Western mindset. The deeper Christian life got caught up in the 7, 8, 9, or 10 stages that go from conversion to union. Whatever this is, it’s purely Roman Catholic. It’s got no place in an evangelical faith; in the meantime, we are still being plagued by Aristotle. I don’t know if you know it, but Aristotle wrote the first dissertation, as far as I know, ever written on the basis of presenting logic.

When I got to the seminary, the first thing I was told was to outline the book of Galatians. Well, what’s that got to do with u being Western? I’m sorry, but Paul was not a Western man. In that book, it doesn’t follow an outline. I’m here to tell you, if you try to outline the book of Galatians, it can’t be done. You can force it to be outlined, but that is a living, breathing book passionately written by a brokenhearted, angry man. It’s a letter. It’s all it is. It’s a letter written by a man who had visited other realms, but boy, when I got through with it, I could outline it from and had lost everything in the process. So, Aristotle still lives in the Christian faith. I just want to tell you, we need to go back to eternity past and enter the mind of God, or we are never going to get anywhere in coming back to a first-century faith.

We’ve got all of the superstition of the West, all of the traditions of paganism, the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, the Western mind, and now modern-day humanism to cut through, and we’re never going to make it. We’d better just leap over them and come back to the very mind of God. Let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus.