- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
“LOOKING UNTO JESUS” (Heb. 12 v2).
By J.C.Metcalfe.
Success in the Christian life, depicted in this passage as a race to be run, depends on fixing our gaze on Him who sets us the example of faith, who leads us in faith and in whom faith finds its perfect fulfilment. In Him alone do we see absolute dependence on God, implicit trust, what it is, what it costs and what it results in. On Him our gaze must be fixed if we are to endure, for in Him the beauty and the reward of a life of faith are seen. Faith showed itself in Jesus, especially in His endurance of the cross in virtue of His faith in the resulting joy beyond. In this way a basic principle of effective Christian living is set before us, and we need to be constantly reminded of it. How easy it is to have our confidence rooted elsewhere than in Him. It is a common failure to believe all that we hear about Him, without trusting Him, to rely on someone else’s evaluation of Him, without ourselves having a personal, loving confidence in Him. There cannot be any second-hand experience of saving grace. Paul describes Christians in Philippians 3 v3 as those who ”worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh”. How difficult it seems for us to turn our backs on our natural resources and to look away to Him alone.
We can become absorbed in our own knowledge of Christian truth, we can become confident in our praying, we can take pride in some aspect of self-control. We can look back with a sigh of satisfaction on the amount of effort expended in our work for God and can even square our shoulders in conscious realisation that we have striven harder than almost anyone else we can think of. These and other forms of self-effort can become the basis of our lives until Christ is unconsciously relegated to the shadows.
Scripture abounds with illustrations of the singleness of eye upon which rests the fulfilment of the promise, “your whole body shall be full of light”. When Elisha is faced in 2 Kings chapter 2 with the crisis of Elijah’s imminent departure to heaven, his effective watchword expresses determination to look only to his master whatever may come. “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you” (2 Kings 2 v2, 4 and 6). And the closing words of verse 6 show the beautiful intimacy which resulted between them, “So the two of them walked on”. Surely this is a picture of the fellowship which should exist between the Lord Jesus Christ and His disciples when there is truly nothing between. It is interesting to note that Elisha’s equipment for his ministry which caused the onlookers, the sons of the prophets, to exclaim, “The spirit of Elijah is resting on Elisha”, was the direct result of his single-minded loyalty to and trust in his master. So it should be with us. There is a great deal said and written about the fulness of the Spirit, but the Scripture says of Him, “For God gives the Spirit without limit” (John 3 v34), and of us it says, “You have been given fullness in Christ” (Col. 2 v10). In other words our lack is made up by His fulness, our insufficiency by His sufficiency. All this we have by virtue of our union with Him, and we must never allow anything to turn our eyes in any other direction.
We are inclined to try any and every means in an endeavour to live powerfully, rather than the way God had laid down, namely that of denying any power that we may have imagined we possessed in ourselves and trusting solely in Him. In Philippians 3 Paul, having set out a list of those things on which he might pin his faith, says, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ” (v7). It might be good to sit down and list all those things in which we have trusted, and then deliberately to write them off and in their place write the simple words “in Christ”.
It is interesting to note how faith is infectious, and how much more telling is the example of faith than its instruction. Elisha, for example, had an ardent disciple in the Shunammite woman, who had obviously watched him very closely as he came and went. In the time of her need, when her son lay dead, she boldly declared her unwillingness to place any confidence at all in Gehazi, and took Elisha’s own attitude to his master, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you” (2 Kings 4 v30). The result is very simply expressed, “So he got up and followed her”, with the glorious result that death itself was compelled to release its prey and her son was returned to her alive.
Such single-minded trust is at first sight costly. The path of blessing for Ruth, for example, meant that she turned her back on all the familiar, well-loved scenes and friends in her own land of Moab, saying to Naomi, “Don’t urge me to leave you . . . your people will be my people and your God my God” (Ruth 1 v16-17). Does not the same thought underlie the Lord’s own teaching to His disciples, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, my servant also will be” (John 12 v26)? In Luke 14 verse 33 we have the devastating declaration, “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple”. The Lord Jesus had just exhorted those who were talking of following Him to do some hard thinking. He gives two pictures. The first is of a man who plans to build a tower, and the second is of a king who faces the attack of an invader. In each case it is pointed out that a reckoning has to be made of the resources that can be counted on, and the application is impossible to misunderstand. We have nothing in ourselves, our human make-up, our gifts, or even our religious experiences, that is of the slightest value in the spiritual life. If we will learn to rely on Christ, we must first admit our utter poverty and turn away from our barrenness to find true riches in Him.
On one occasion Professor Henry Drummond was invited to speak at one of the famous London clubs and this is how he began, ’Gentlemen! The entrance fee to the Kingdom of God is nothing, but the annual subscription is everything’. How true this is. We can add nothing whatever to the great and glorious work which was accomplished for us on the Cross by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, but if we are to enjoy the benefits of His death then every other basis of confidence must be set aside. Every precious thing of the old life must be counted as refuse in order that we may be able to say to Him with all our hearts, “As the Lord lives, and as you live, I will not leave You”.
There are times when we recognise only too clearly the utter inadequacy and insecurity of everything but Christ Himself, but then there come moments when a sense of self-confidence turns us back into ourselves. Then failure follows and Satan is there with his malicious condemnation to seek to bring us into bondage. The lesson needs to be well and truly learned if our Christian life is to prosper. Our one basis of confidence in all and every circumstance must be in Him alone.
Paul, having borne witness to the fact that his life is spent in seeking to grasp the full meaning of his union with Christ at the expense of every other experience or object of trust, tells the Philippians, to whom he is writing, “Join with others in following my example” (Phil. 3 v17), and again, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me - put into practice. And the God of peace will be with you” (Phil. 4 v9). How many of us would dare to direct others in this way to our trust in Christ and to suggest that they follow us? This all means that our ability to look only to Jesus is not only all important for our own heart’s rest but is vital in our ministry to others. We live in a day when academic qualifications are regarded as the essential equipment for Christian ministry, but in itself it does not equip anyone to meet the heart needs of others. There is something more essential. Unless we are walking “in the light as He is in the light”, with our gaze fixed on Him, and Him alone, others will be so conscious of us that He will be hidden. How often that joyous, infectious confidence in Him is lacking and others hear what we have to say but are not turned to Him. Stock answers are not enough, we must be able to share the boldness of our confidence in Christ, and thus establish others in Him. C. H. Spurgeon told his students, ‘The life of the preacher should be a magnet to draw others to Christ . . . this kind of life can only be lived by those who have learned the secret of looking unto Jesus’.
All to often we imagine that the normal Church life, whether of the pulpit or pew, can be lived on a lesser level than that of scriptural holiness. We multiply activities and organisations, we teach and stress the externals of our faith, we put a tremendous amount of energy into evangelism, but generally we utterly fail to lead converts into a life of true godliness, mainly because we know so little of how to live it ourselves. Many are frightened of preaching that stresses the need for sanctification.
In Colossians 2 verses 6-7 Paul gives some wise counsel, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thanksgiving”. Not only is the good news of forgiveness proclaimed in the Lord Jesus Christ through His Cross, but from the moment that anyone sees themselves accepted by God for Jesus’ sake, they become dependent on the resources of God for time and eternity. Never more can we have confidence in anything or anyone else. We find all that we need by looking to Jesus, and if we look in any other direction not only do we go unsatisfied ourselves, but we rob others of the opportunity of seeing Christ’s life in action.
“For no-one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3 v11). Not only is there “no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4 v12), not only is the Lord Jesus Christ ‘‘the way, the truth, and the life”, so that “no-one comes to the Father except through” Him (John 14 v6), but He is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, and while we have nothing else to boast in we may and must glory in Him.
“Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12 v1-2).
From: ‘The Rest of Faith’.