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

Different culture, different background, different language. All Gentiles, no Jews there. One of them is a half-breed. It’s the closest you got to a Jew besides the guy who’s leading them. He’s Jewish, but he’s been called to the Gentiles, and he teaches them the Bible and teaches them to pray, and he gives them a seminary education. No, no, he doesn’t do that.

He brings those men to one town, and he lives with them for four years. That’s one year longer than the Lord did. I guess he needed a little more time. Some people believe the Lord’s ministry lasted four years, so maybe it was the same length of time. They sit and watch him, listen to him preach, and watch his life. He goes out from Ephesus, and he raises up churches around that city, and they watch him live, and they watch him live in the presence of his Lord. They watch his prayers, and they watch his fellowship, and they enter into it, and they are raised up as workers by exactly the same way that Jesus Christ raised up the twelve Jewish apostles.

What Jesus Christ did in Galilee, Paul of Tarsus did in Ephesus. There was no difference. That is how a worker is supposed to be raised up. The habit of the Trinity brought to Galilee was still intact in Ephesus. We need to go back into the Godhead for our Christian resource to really understand the wellspring of church life.

Our fellowship must be with the Father and the Son. From this springs the church. This is not a seminary; this is a living room, and I hope, to some very small and in some very, very, very limited way, even embryonic, maybe this is sort of a prototype, not the real thing, but a prototype. I hope that Galilee and Ephesus will remain intact, or become, perhaps after a long, long sleep, will come and be intact again.

So, you see, I am choosing the life of the Lord Jesus Christ to help you see the fellowship of the Father and the Son, that you and I might enter into that fellowship, and that we might proclaim that fellowship. I trust that the hint and the sense and the aroma of Galilee will be here in just a little bit.

I am not a Paul; I’m just a worn-out Baptist preacher who wishes he were in good health. Nonetheless, I would like to ask you to keep before your eyes Eternity Past, Galilee, the Gentile cities and the Gentile churches and Ephesus, and the restoration of the fellowship of man with God as the primary source of the Christian faith, the Christian life, the life of the church, and the preparation of the worker and the proclamation of the worker.

So when we come back and go through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and try to cover it all, I am doing this to turn your eyes to Him on earth and in the heavenlies, in the genuine and sincere hope that you and I both will be profoundly altered. We will try not to learn these things as head knowledge, but to seek to enter into the mind of God. Even into the mind of God in eternity past, and the mind of God as Christ laid hold of that mind as he moved out of the realm of three dimensions and moved there in Galilee into the realm with no dimensions and laid hold of that mind that he laid hold of.

Let this mind, let that mind be in you, in you today here in this room, that was also in Christ Jesus. Now, if we can do that even a little bit, if we can pioneer, we would have made some enormous progress in the kingdom of God, and for the glory of the Lord and His purpose in this realm. I want to sanctify this.

That, Lord, is our hope. And to this room, and to this gathering, for this purpose in this room, in this gathering, we commit ourselves. Lord, we mean to do this not with our hands, but with our spirits. We mean to join You in other realms, see You in other realms, and understand the fellowship and the commerce that You experience between two realms while You live on this earth.

Lord, open up Your life in Galilee to us, not in our heads. Lord, not even in our spirits, but in our vision of seeing You until we are so surrounded by what was going on, and we see it so clearly, that it gets woven into our very mind, thoughts, and being.

Lord, so direct our spirits. So take our fellowship here. Lift us, Lord, into the eternals, and behold the Christian life as only You can live it. Amen.