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

Alright, we have not seen Him the great Bible student. We have not seen Him pray the way certainly twentieth-century man prays, or twenty-first-century, or twenty-second, or eighteenth, or nineteenth-century man prays. His prayer is totally unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And now we see Him crucified. We are sitting in a room, very afraid, and out of nowhere, He appears as if He had stepped out of one realm into another, right in the midst of us. Here He is.

He breathes into us the equipment He has had for the last thirty-three years. He has forgiven me of my sin. He has redeemed my soul. He has made my spirit alive, and He has breathed the Holy Spirit into me. Now my insides look very much like His insides when He lived on the earth. He had a living spirit, a human spirit. I’ve got a living human spirit now. I’m one of the disciples. The life of God lives within Him; now the life of God lives in me.

I have two lives. I have human life and divine life. And that’s not all. He had the fellowship of the Father. I have had the fellowship of the Son for three years. I have fellowshipped with the Son who has been fellowshipping with the Father. I’m going to trade that off for a Bible. I’m going to trade that off for objective, shallow prayer.

I have lived with the Son who has lived with the Father. I have fellowshipped with the Son in Galilee and Judea. Now He lives within me just as the Father had lived within Him. Where will I go for my spiritual fellowship? I will go to the same place I have watched Him go for three long years. I have learned how to fellowship with the Son. Physically, I have watched Him fellowship with the Father spiritually. I am now equipped as one of the apostles and disciples to turn within me and sense His presence; to behold His face; to hear Him speak to me and respond to me. I will respond to Him, and this makes up the fellowship that has gone on in eternity, was brought into time and space by the Son of God in Galilee and Judea, and has now been passed on to me as one of His first believers.

I now am the third motion, the third-stage recipient of this. “Well, Gene, this won’t hold water. They taught the Word there in Jerusalem at Solomon’s Porch.” Alright, let’s just go to Solomon’s Porch. Here we are; we’re apostles, and here are three thousand people, and they’re all sitting there, eyes wide open, saucer-faced, and we’re teaching them three ways to approach God, seven things that must not be in your life, how to confess your sins, the first two or three things you must say to the Lord in prayer. I went through all that before. That’s what we’re teaching them, and they’re taking notes.

No way. They’d all leave. Those people, those twelve men, were sitting there telling about how they had fellowshipped with the Lord Jesus Christ. A young kid named John Mark sat there writing it down, taking notes. A few years later, some of the other single brothers wanted his notes. He goes to Simon Peter and says, “Listen, this is a mess. Would you put it in order?” Simon Peter puts it in order. John Mark makes copies to pass out to his friends. It’s the stories they have told of their fellowship with the Son of the living God.

They don’t sit there, as the epistles obviously reveal, and tell the story of a man in Galilee who was a carpenter who lived and died. They passed on to those people listening at Solomon’s Porch a living experience and a way to have the same living experience they had within them. Praise the Lord. Read the epistles from that viewpoint, and you will see they introduce the fellowship they had within them, so the people who heard the gospel might carry it on and be the fourth motion.

The fellowship of the Godhead throughout eternity was passed on to one man, one unique creature, in Galilee and Judea. And He lived again, in time and space, the fellowship He had with the Father in the Godhead, which He then implanted in a group of believers and established within them the same relationship that had been in Galilee and in the Godhead. They, in turn, having now taken this reality into them—which they had watched during those Galilean years—now they had it. They passed the knowledge and experience of that three-motion relationship: eternity, Galilee, and now in them, in Jerusalem. They pass it on to the fourth motion.

I want you to listen to John in his old age say, “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that you may have fellowship with us, for our fellowship is with the Godhead.” Our fellowship right now, in my old age—I, John the elder—my fellowship and the fellowship of the other apostles and the disciples that came afterward, our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son, Jesus Christ. We are declaring what we have seen and heard, that you can come and join this eternal fellowship that began in eternity past, that was brought into time and space, that was watched by a group of men, which was given inside of them exactly as it was put inside of Christ, which is now passed on to those who came after and believe.

I spent this last week with a small group of people in this room, saying the most ridiculous things to them. I have said to them, we’re never going to get back a first-century experience until we can go into the Godhead and live again in the presence of their fellowship and see that fellowship; until we have taken on the mind of Christ—not verses—but we have literally had His mind saturate us, until we have joined in with the fellowship of the Godhead, until we have penetrated time and space and left it and come into their fellowship, we’re never going to get anywhere.

This week, a very interesting thing happened. A sister in this room had a very wonderful encounter with her Lord—an encounter in which she was not present. All that was present was seen; what was there, and what was real, and what she saw, was the fellowship of the Father and the Son together. I told her many times this last week that everything we do as Christians has the “I” at the center. What am I supposed to do now, God, now that I’m saved? What are my needs? What am I supposed to say to You? How am I supposed to please You? Out of that, we suddenly get the idea that we can grow spiritually.

I had told them over and over to disappear and watch the fellowship of your Lord with His Father, and that would be spiritual growth enough for you if you never got involved. She sat here in the meeting, and she said—oh, she was just aglow—and she said, “Ah, we have met the enemy, and it is us.” It’s not the devil. It’s not sin. It’s not some other people. It’s us. It’s our almost egomania as Christians—not that we’re egotistical, but obsessed with the “me” and the gospel. What am I supposed to do, and unfortunately, in our age, what am I going to get out of it?