- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
REALISING REALITY.
From an old magazine.
Human nature is stubborn and seeks to turn simple statements into complicated ones. Not so the Lord Jesus Christ. He taught simply with illustrations from everyday life, using ordinary things and familiar situations. He referred to fishermen and fish, the sower and the seed, the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. He presented the most profound truths of divine revelation with the greatest simplicity and directness. He stated the commonplace with brightest clarity and the people understood. From Him we must learn that we too should be unsophisticated and yet not ignorant, sincere and not shallow, honest and not artful.
By way of illustration, the Saviour stated that He Himself is ‘‘the way, the truth, and the life”. He described Himself and His purpose in three simple statements, but we often make them difficult to understand and practically impossible to realise.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the Way, not a way to the Way. We can be so preoccupied with the problems of making a pathway to Him that we do not walk in the King’s highway. We are taken up with steps, signposts and self-evaluation, with the result that we wander in a maze of our own making. We busy ourselves with activity and make no spiritual advance, we persist in painful effort and do not progress.
We are not to plod painfully toward the way, rather, as the Scriptures say, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live (walk) in Him” (Col. 2 v6). We receive Him by faith, and by faith we are to live in Him. “We are living a new life” (Rom. 6 v4). Galatians 5 v25 adds, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit”, and by walking in the Spirit we will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature (Gal. 5 v16). We are to walk in the light (1 John 1 v7), we are to live a life worthy of the calling we have received. “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4 v1&2). Most of all we are to walk in the Way and not keep striving to make a way to the Way.
The Lord Jesus Christ is also the Truth. We often try to devise complicated philosophical and theological systems to discover the truth. In our self-effort to attain it, we lose our way in a maze of speculation. By searching we never find God. The Bible plainly declares that “in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know Him” (1 Cor. 1 v21). Instead of searching after Truth with the dim light of our own understanding we are to begin with the Truth and to look at divine revelation from His viewpoint.
We must face the facts of God’s general revelation and His creation with the awareness that Christ “is the image of the invisible God”, that He existed before creation began, that “by Him all things were created . . . visible and invisible” and that “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1 v15-17). This is His universe to be observed and understood in all humility by the studies of science.
We turn to the Bible as God’s special revelation and beginning with the Truth we take the same high view of the inspiration of the Scriptures as the Lord Jesus did. He plainly held that all Scripture is divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit and is fully accurate and authoritative. There are vast areas of reality to be learned in the Scriptures and in the universe of things and men, but beginning with the Truth we proceed to learn their true meaning and relationship.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the Life. We do not live in Him by striving, struggling, agonising, falling and rising. We live in Him by breathing the fresh air of the Spirit of life, and are nourished by the wholesome, satisfying Bread of life, and refreshed by the Water of life. There is tremendous reality to be realised in understanding and accepting Galatians 2 v20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me”. Our testimony should be, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1 v21). God’s Word declares that, “This is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son” (1 John 5 v11).
The Lord Jesus Christ is the Way. Walk in Him and find that He walks with you and in you.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the Truth. Believe Him, trust and obey Him.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the Life. Live in Him and find His glorious resurrection life in you.