“Intercessory Prayer” - ‘The Case for Jesus Christ’ - (part 2)

We continue addressing the question of last week of why Paul could not see God’s intention in Christ, Who Christ was, why He was needed as the Sacrifice for sin.

As well as taking a glimpse into the difficulty we have today of the fact of Jesus Christ.

There were so many reasons, so many rationalizations and radical attitudes that blocked the vision of God’s work in Christ.

What plagued Paul and his colleagues is the same problem plaguing us today.  

There is not one of us who likes the idea of ‘being dead and buried in sin’ - that is offensive to our pride and sense of moral righteousness.

We do not need someone else to point out the way to us - we can handle things ourselves - so we think.

But - at the same time - all mankind, deep within, wants to be delivered from a loss of the meaning of life, from moral guilt, from finite limitations.

We all want to experience living, with joy and contentment, in a state where that sense of spiritual lostness is dealt with and where life leads to real life - where we do not feel as though we are ending in nothingness.

The search for this continues - it has intensified in our modern thought - universally, we are in desperate quest for
this satisfying fulfillment.

Paul, in the pursuit of this same quest, had his eyes opened to the answer - his direction of life was changed when his blinders fell one day.

It was God’s doing to send His Son as Savior - to be the Sacrifice for sin on the Cross and to be raised again for our justification.

And, God concluded all under sin, that we come to Him on His terms or stay deluded in our present state. 

Paul finally ‘saw’ this.

This is, generally, how we started this topic last week.

Now, tonight, I would like to continue, but I do want to, at the start, let you know that what I have to say, not only tonight, but in what follows as we go on, could easily become a bone of contention with some of us.

So, I would like to encourage all of us to, first, take these things before the Lord ourselves and look at them in the light of Christ and His redeeming work among us - and, then, pray earnestly for His enlightenment. 

There is nothing wrong with disagreeing on a particular point, but, for a Christian, there is everything wrong with being disagreeable, contentious, and obnoxious about our views.

We Christians - sad to say, are good at that - we can be thankful for the mercies of the Lord in this regard!

I fully expect you to discuss these things among yourselves, but, I issue a word of caution - dislike for one another because we disagree turns to anger, anger to hate, hate to dissension, and dissension to separation.

And that is not Christ among us that God intends the world to witness of Him.

Now - having said that, let us go on.

As I stated last week - there are ‘inter-faith issues’ the Church must deal with - and it must deal with it in the face of Jesus Christ.

The early Christians knew the challenge of other ‘religious’ faiths - and, as you know, Paul confronted a number of them.

These believers took their faith in Christ so seriously that they actually were willing to die for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake. 

Many paid that sacrifice to show the world how deeply they stood in their faith in Christ’s reconciliation of the world unto God!

Their stand was uncompromising that what Jesus Christ did and represented was the only Way of Salvation.

Currently, this view of Him is being seriously challenged in the religious world generally.

Many faiths have moved right on into our very midst and we are becoming a sort of a religious ‘melting-pot’.  

And, the argument goes that we are to recognize other faiths, no longer as an add-on or a replacement that Paul warned the early Christians against, but as viable alternatives to Christ.

‘We are all part of that global search for God’s fullness - for fulfillment.

As Christianity is part of the Western culture, so these other religions are part of other cultures.

They each have truths that do not cease to be truths in themselves: each one has God’s face in it.

All roads lead to God and Christianity is just one way of perceiving the truth.’ 

Now - that is the general argument which, I am sure, you have heard once or twice these past number of years.

With this, the Church is asked to abandon Christ’s declaration of: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

This is the major revolution taking place in modern thought about God! 

That has its consequences for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for His Church, for His work, for the ministry of His Word.

Now - here is where I would like to carry this one point  made earlier over to this problem the Church faces. 

In accordance with the kind of life Jesus is to us, we can  do exactly the same with this religious revolution as a whole as we do with each other in an individual sense.

That is, we can disagree with this world’s point of view, yet not be disagreeable.

We can make the point - as Paul did - that Christ is the Unique Son of God - no other compares with Him - that He is the complete, distinguishing, and conclusive fullness of God’s revelation - we can make that point emphatically - and still appreciate, love, and value what these other faiths have to offer.

We all know about persons of other faiths who have contributed much to the world, in terms of social services, in terms of high values, in terms of theological scholarship, in terms of their devotion to their systems.

At the same time, we cannot dimiss the fact that God does, and no doubt continues to, reveal His saving power through Christ in these sincere religious people.

Listen to a quote of one who was so invaded by Christ:

   ‘It has often been asked why I renounced [my religion] 
   and became a disciple of Christ.  My answer is, that I                    
   was drawn almost unconsciously to Christ by His holy 
   and blameless life, His devotion to the will of God, and
   His works and benevolence towards suffering humanity.
   
   The excellency of His precepts as given in the
   Sermon on the Mount and His love for sinners won 
   my admiration and my heart.

   The incarnations I have been taught to worship [that is,            
   the heros of his religion] were all incarnations of power -   
   they were all heros, sinful men of like passions with    
   ourselves. Christ only appeared to me as holy and          
   worthy to be adored as God.

   But the doctrine which decided for me to embrace 
   the Christian religion and make a public profession of     
   my faith was the doctrine of the vicarious death and 
   sufferings of Christ.  I felt myself a sinner and found                        
   in Christ One Who died for my sins - paid the penalty
   due to my sins...This was the burden of the thought of
   my heart, Christ has died, and in doing so, paid a debt
   which men could never pay.’

This is only one example of the Lord’s revelation of His saving power in Christ.

We know God is not limited - He is able to take the various truths that these faiths have lifted from His Word. 

And He uses them for invading a person’s life to reveal the power of His Son in His redemptive work. 

So - yes - we can accept the value and the contributions that these faiths made and are making to the world.

But, it first must be very clear in our own hearts and, of course, in our own lives, that the fact of Jesus Christ is NOT negotiable.

We absolutely cannot compromise on that.

According to modern thought, this is defamatory to the faiths of the world.

This uncompromising stand emerges as being narrow-minded - and, to them, it may well be!

But - without question, we know that at a particular time in God’s salvation history, God made Himself known in a practical, visible way - by His Son Who - in His incarnation - became a particular Man at a particular time in history.  

And He worked such a work of Redemption, that the claims and contributions of other faiths cannot hold a candle to Him and His work.

He was and is, not a contribution to the religious quest of humanity, but the actual answer to it!

It was His coming that changed everything - it was His work  of reconciliation to God in His death and resurrection that lifted humanity to its moral heights.

‘Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other Name under heaven whereby we must be saved.’ 
(Acts 4:12)

And, please note: although the context is that of healing, Peter, - when he made this statement - is making an exclusive claim over and against the contemporary religions, specifically Judaism.

Other New Testament writers were just as uncompromising about this.  

This Jesus has a Name that is above every name and the day is coming when universal homage is going to be given to Him. 

You will find that in Phil 2:9-11.

Paul wrote in 1 Cor 8:5-6: ‘Even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth...’, it changes nothing, ‘...there is but one God the Father from Whom all things came and for Whom we live; and...one Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom all things came and through Whom we live.’ 

And in Col 1:15-22, as I stated last week, he made the astounding confession of Christ as the image of God - so astounding because of what his thought of Christ was in his pre-Christian days.

At that time Paul was extremely unwilling to accept the fact of Jesus Christ - to accept the fact God had overriden his thoughts and the concepts of his faith in God.

It was only because he was a faithful Pharisee that he was able to appreciate the importance of what God had done for humans in Jesus Christ.

So - this is a bombshell to the religious world - to see that Paul could not really see God or really know Him until he saw Him in the face of Jesus Christ. 

One day, he had to admit that his faith had been deficient - he had to say of it: ‘I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not what I want to do, but I do the very thing that I hate.’

It was his faith that was a mirror where Paul saw his own shortcomings - all he could honestly say of himself then was: ‘...Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners;  of whom I am chief.’ (1 Tim 1:15)

But - it was in the face of Jesus Christ that he saw a reflection of what he could become by the free grace of God: ‘God has done what the law...could not do: sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh...’.

He had been blind - his heart had been blinded, shut tight - and he never realized it until that moment.

His eyes were opened as to why he could not have seen it clearly from the start.

Paul discovered that the jailer that is so rigid and inflexible to keep one in darkness was the ‘god of this age’, the prince of darkness. 

Because he so hates the ‘Light’, he deepens and confirms the natural darkness of the human mind so that the Light cannot penetrate.

The ‘god of this age’ was blinding his eyes with error, with falseness, with foul imaginations, blocking every little bit of any view of Christ with dense ignorance and pride. 

This is why Paul rejected Christ - this is why he refused to believe Jesus was the Son of God, the One sent by God for his personal redemption, the One Who became the Sacrifice for him.

It is interesting to note how this blindness about Christ always was so.

When Jesus asked His disciples ‘Who do men - the people - the general population - say that I am?’, the answer was never a direct one - did you notice that?

It circled all around Christ - it was obscure, vague: some thought He was Isaiah, some thought Elijah, some thought Jeremiah, some thought some other prophets.

No one ever really hit the target - just went all around Him.

It was Peter who hit the ‘bull’s eye’ with: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Messiah, the One God always promised through the prophets, the Son of the living God.’

You see - there was such a diversity of ideas about Him, even in that day, even though He was right among them, doing all of His wondrous works, showing the world the love of the Father toward the world in His acts, words, and deeds.

Very, very few - the disciples and a little handful of people - actually came close to seeing Who He is.

Now, let me pose another serious question: I ask you - if Jesus was not the final revelation of God and humanity’s only hope to reach God, then why did God bother to send His Son to lay down His divinity, to become man, to go through such an ignominious death to become the ultimate Sacrifice for sin?

Why did God chose the way of the Cross if there were other ways of making atonement - other ways of bringing God and man together in a relationship, into fellowship?

To very briefly answer that, I ask you, how could any man - past, present, or future - be so perfectly righteous that he is able to face a holy God without being consumed by the fire of God’s perfect righteousness?

Let me read Psa 49:7-8 about this: ‘No man can redeem the life of another, or give to God a ransom for him - the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough.’

There is none who doeth good - no - not, one!

There could be no other one - it is Jesus only - the perfect Son of God!

There is no question about it: Jesus Christ is the Good News! 

And any suggestion that He is deficient in any sense, that man can be restored to God without Him, that the Cross of Jesus Christ can be bypassed, is vigorously denied by the unanimous testimony of the Scriptures.

He is matchless and knowing Him is the whole point of human existence. 

And, we, His Church, do answer that Christ died for all - and that His work is universal in scope - that all are included in God’s love as seen through Him.

We should always remember that these other faiths are ‘systems’ and those in the ‘systems’ are people.

The Church stands defenseless against such structures.

Changing a system is out of the question: it is people God seeks to change.

But we stand firm in Christ, preach and teach of His reconciliation for all, and pray that many will see the need 
of recognizing that He is the final word.

The early Christians were just as defenseless against Saul of Tarsus and his threatenings. 

We have to wonder who it was who prayed for him - the man who was feared so much.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was the early Church that set into motion those influences to bring Saul of Tarsus into the Kingdom of God. 

For - you see - the Church has three important ‘tools’ (and I use that word advisedly!) that people have no resistance against: the prayer of the saints, the love of the saints, and the wise application of the truth of Christ.

Most likely - unknown to Paul, they were using those same weapons of faith on his behalf - the prayer of the saints, the love of the saints whose prayers were for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and the wisdom of God in it all.

So, we, also, follow this way of Christ in witnessing of His love and - we take seriously the nature of others’ faiths, admire the contributions they make, are compassionate toward them.

The Lord is not asking us for much when He desires for us to be humbled in this way.

He asks us only to be ‘wise as serpents, but harmless as doves.’

For - we also must realize that to treat other faiths with
disdain and with animosity is not the evidence of Christ within us.

In other words, we are not to go to them with arrogance and the attitude of superiority - that is not the way of Christ.

We go to them as we go to our brethren in Christ - in humility and in love - with the news of a Savior Who can transform their lives as He has done ours.

And we extend Christ’s invitation of ‘Whosoever will, may come.’

I leave you with these thoughts tonight - to prayerfully consider them before the Lord.

And, then, to ask the Lord to make whatever adjustments need to be made within us about these things.

Let us pray in closing tonight - [Pray]

And, now, may our Lord’s peace, joy, and understanding that only He is able to give rest upon all of us throughout this next week.
                                    Amen.