Life of Christ #11 – How Did Jesus Live the Christian Life? Fellowship With the Father

During the medieval days, illiteracy- the inability to read – was running somewhere between 98 and 99 percent in Europe. In the first century, it was better off…it was running somewhere between 95 and 97 percent illiterate. If we ask first-century Christians to live by the gospel we proclaim today with such a total commitment to the knowledge of Scripture as the means for living the Christian life, then every first-century Christian would have been running around town with a very large wheelbarrow, carrying these huge scrolls. I ask you, what scrolls would they have been carrying?

Well, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, it hadn’t been written yet. The book of Revelation, it hadn’t been written yet. Well, the Gospel of Mark, it hadn’t been written yet. If you get up to around 55 A.D., 25 years after Pentecost, and you say, now it exists; that’s true. You can go all the way to Galatia, and you can probably find one or two copies of it among all the churches. The first sewn-together New Testament didn’t occur until about 360 A.D., and before that, passing it around wasn’t a monumental thing.

Well, then, they had the Old Testament in the first century, and that’s what they filled their wheelbarrow with. It would be difficult to find a complete Old Testament in any city in the world other than Jerusalem. You might find an average of five to seven completed scrolls, or five to seven books, in the synagogues. The one thing you would probably find in any synagogue would be the Psalms. Then did the first-century church use the Scripture, inspired Scripture, as its means to the Christian life? It could not have. Saints, it could not have.

Well then, Gene obviously does not believe in the Bible. Well, you know, I’m going to say this every chance I get. I have never found a biblical-ist as committed to Scripture as men who have made Christ the center of their life. The biblical-ist will do all sorts of things when he makes the Bible the center of his life and ministry that a man who has made Jesus Christ the center of his life cannot do in conscience, such as having choirs and pulpits and so on.

For the record, and I’m going to say it again and again, I believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. I believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible. I believe in the dynamic inspiration of the Bible. I believe in the inerrancy of both the Old and the New Testament. I don’t know how I could be more committed to it. I also have to tell you I am in the corner of the three-fifths of the people on this earth today who cannot read or write a single word. That’s the majority of the people on this planet.

I cannot go to them and say it is absolutely necessary to be able to read and write to be an effective Christian; that literacy is a necessity for the triumphant Christian life. I can’t say that with a straight face because I don’t believe it, and the first-century church didn’t think in those terms. It didn’t have a Bible, but it had an indwelling Lord, and it was the indwelling, living Christ within that was for them the third season, the third expression, perhaps I should say, of the Christian life. They were in the third act, three of the same play.

Now, I have to say then I’ve just destroyed prayer and the Bible, at least as the means of the Christian life. What was the Christian life? What were the means of it? The answer cannot be found on this earth, and it is not found in objective things such as studying the Bible and learning ways how to pray. The seven things you must know before you come to prayer. The three things you must say at the beginning of prayer. Four ways to confess your sins as you enter prayer. Five things that must not be in your life when you come to pray. Three things you should ask the Lord for. Four things you should never ask the Lord for. Have three ways to pray in Jesus’ name. How to close your prayer. Well, that’s prayer…modern-day style. The Lord Jesus said to His Father, “Father, I’m only praying the way I’m praying for the benefit of those who are listening.” What was going on in His prayer life?

Now forget all of that, and I have to come back and say, what is the wellspring of our Christian faith? Who was the first Christian? Press me, and I would say Jesus Christ was not the first Christian. I would say the Father was the first Christian.

Well, how did the Father live the Christian life? By prayer and Bible study? By witnessing? By passing out tracts on the street? By being filled with the Holy Spirit? I don’t mean to be facetious, but how did the Father live the Christian life? How did the Lord Jesus Christ live the Christian life when He was the eternal Son before the Incarnation? How did He live the Christian life? By what means did the Son of God, by what means did God the Son live the Christian life?

Alright, by whatever means, perhaps it’s a mystery we will never know, but let us say there was some means by which the eternal Son lived the Christian life in the Godhead. Now let us see Him come to earth incarnated, and He begins to grow up, and the Father does live within Him.  It should be obvious to all of us that the habit of eternity has to be broken; now that He is a human, He has to live the Christian life by some other means than the way He lived it when He was the Son in the eternal past within the Godhead.

Now do you believe that? Did He somehow change and take on a new standard? Now remember, He was without any sin. He was not limited as I am in my fallen nature. Did Jesus Christ, beginning say at the age of twenty, live the Christian life differently in His relationship? Did He draw His means from some place different than He did as the eternal Son? My answer is an emphatic no. He brought the habit of eternity into time. He brought the invisible relationship into the visible domain…and that was stage two.

Stage one was the Christian life in eternity past. Stage two was the Christian life in Galilee, being lived by the same means. Then I have to tell you…I have to tell you…how He lived the Christian life. Do you know how the Lord lived the Christian life as the Son of God? The same way He did in Galilee and Judea. He lived the Christian life by living in the presence of His Father and beholding the Father, by sharing the life of the Father, a common life they had between them, by listening to the Father, and by speaking to the Father, and all of that is simply the fellowship of the Father and the Son, probably by means of the Holy Spirit, whatever that means. I do not fully understand.