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

I’m going to say it again. By beholding, by living in the presence of; beholding, drawing His life, a common source of life, divine life, eternal life, the life of God, and living by that life, by speaking and by hearing. Together, all of that is the fellowship of the Godhead. It went on for all eternity past, however long that was. It entered time and space and was lived out by a young man in Galilee who, day after day, grew to sense the Father more and more in Him.

You know, as a little baby in Bethlehem, He really couldn’t have opened His mouth and told us what it was like the day He called Abraham. I don’t know if He could have done that at ten. By twelve, He had already learned and clearly understood that He had only one Father, and His Father does not live in this realm. He has a mother who lives in this realm. He had only one Father, and that Father lived in the other realm. He had only one Father, and He knew it. He also knew that that temple in Jerusalem was not real. It was a picture of a real temple somewhere else in another realm. He was already beginning to glimpse His past on the other side of the door that separates two realms. He was beginning to understand and know the other realm.

I have a notion that by the time He was twenty, and this is why He didn’t need to study the Bible, by the time He was twenty, He could probably already remember the day that He created the universe. It may be that by the time He was twenty-five, He could recall standing on the banks of the Red Sea, parting the oceans, standing on the Mount, and speaking face to face with Moses, and remember every word. The divine remembrance grew and grew in Him, saturating more and more this carpenter of Nazareth, who was one hundred percent man and one hundred percent the one and only living God.

And then the time came when the element of God the Son and God the Father were so much one inside this carpenter that, on the night He was crucified, even He couldn’t tell which was which. His growth has come to full maturity. The Father and the Son are so much one inside this man that when Philip looked into the eyes of a Nazarene carpenter and said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father,” well, who was it that spoke back, “Have I been so long with you and you’ve not seen me?” Now, who in the world was that speaking? It was the Father speaking, so much inwrought into the nature of the Son. I believe that, in that moment, the Lord Jesus Christ, in His memory, could go back through time, space, and eternity and remember everything of His history as God.

If that be true, then the Scripture was not the foundation of His life. The Father was the foundation of His life, and the fellowship of eternity past had become the foundation of a human being in this world and on this earth.

Well, did He do these same things that He did in eternity past? If I look at the Lord’s life without somebody in this age telling me how to live the Christian life, and I take a real look at the life of the Lord Jesus Christ when He was on this earth, which is what we’re going to be doing in this room together; if I take a look at that life and how He lived that life, I find that He lived that life by means of the Father. He had a sense and consciousness of God being with Him, not as beside Him or with Him out there; it was the sense of the Father’s presence within Him. He was always beholding the Father, and not with these eyes outwardly before Him, but with inner eyes, He kept looking at the Father.

And He heard the Father’s voice. We have to realize that we follow a Savior who heard voices. He said, “My Father speaks, and I speak what I hear my Father say.” He heard. “I hear My Father’s voice.” He even said, “I do not speak, never…I do not speak except what I hear My Father speak.” It was almost as though, poor illustration, as though God had set a microphone to the door between this and the other realm and put it on this earth…I mean, speaker, and that speaker listened for what was going on on the other side and then spoke in this realm what He heard in the other realm.

It is not easy for me to realize this. It is not easy for me to apprehend it. It is not easy for me. Certainly, I can’t explain it, but in some way the Lord Jesus Christ lived in both realms at the same time. With His body and His soul, He lived in this realm, but with His spirit, He lived in the other realm. He faced His Father, heard His Father, and spoke to His Father. And He spoke what His Father said. This was the fellowship of the Son and the Father, as it had been through eternity past.

His Spirit lived in another realm. If you will read in John 3, He says, “The Son of Man who has come down from the heavens and is in the heavens.” At that moment in John 3, while He was talking to Nicodemus, He watched wind blow in another realm, and He watched wind blow in this realm. And He said, “You can’t see that wind blow. You don’t know where it came from nor where it goes. There’s another wind.” The words wind and spirit are the same in the Greek—another wind. You don’t know where it came from nor where it goes. It’s the wind of the heavens, the spirit of the heavens, the holy, the sanctified, the other-realm spirit, the Spirit that broke forth on Pentecost. Read the record: it came down from the heavens like a mighty rushing spirit, like a mighty rushing wind.

He lived in two realms. He beheld the Father. He was in the Father’s presence. He listened to the Father’s voice. He spoke to the Father, and all of this made the fellowship that was between them. This is the means by which the Lord Jesus Christ lived the Christian life…and we tripped merrily past that and never even noticed. We never have talked about it. We’ve never read about it. We’ve never thought about it, and it’s staring us right in the face.

Alright, let’s look at the third motion of the Christian life. Let us look at His very first disciples. Here we are: ordinary fishermen. We have been called by this incredible creature who came from another realm, who lives by another life, a life not human. For three years, we live in His presence, and we watch Him. He doesn’t pray as we pray. He doesn’t live as we live. He doesn’t talk like we talk. He doesn’t think as we think…and He sure doesn’t relate to God the Father the way anybody else had ever thought of Him doing so before. There’s an intimacy there that will cause Him ultimately to be charged with blasphemy.

We watch Him, and you watch Him, for three long years. We believe we could say this without worrying that the only time we ever saw Him pick up a Bible during those three years was in the synagogue, when it was part of the ritual, and He read from it. Even then, there’s an eerie, spooky aspect of it when He opens the scroll in Nazareth and reads it, rolls it up, puts it down, and says, “What you’ve just read has now been fulfilled here, right here today in this room.” He declares, “I wrote that several hundred years ago, and now I fulfill it here.” What a relationship to Scripture. What an incredible relationship He had to Scripture.