“The Case for Christ - His Importance”

This evening, I would like to start by posing a few questions.

Because this is such a heavy burden upon my heart, I would like, Lord willing, to spend the next few weeks concentrating on the importance of Christ.

And I am doing this because, of late, I have been more and more aware - not in just a few instances but in any number of times - that the foundational element of the Christian life seems to be missing in some Christians.

There seems to be a disregard or, perhaps, a misunderstanding - of the mystery of the life of Christ that lies hidden in believers.

And - yes - believe it or not - it is so much depreciated in the behaviour, attitudes, and the display of ourselves to others and to the world that His witness is obscured.

Jesus Christ, the One we have accepted as our Savior, Who has given us life, and promised life in abundance, is, not only utterly left out of our daily actions and thoughts, but even blatantly done so.

And my observations in this very significant area lead us to this deliberation that we will start this evening.

Thus, my first question is this: how important is the Lord Jesus Christ to us?

Just how important is He to us in our daily living?

I hope you are saying in your heart, ‘oh - very important’ because that indicates that you are at least curious.

But, before we go on feeling too self-satisfied, let us probe ourselves a little deeper tonight.

And, let me start by asking, quite bluntly, how can we honestly - I mean, honestly - say that Jesus is important to us when we fail to appropriate Him - to appropriate the  grace He has for us over and over again to live out from His righteousness?

Why is it that day after day, week after week, year after year, we fail to actually apprehend Christ in our daily walk?

Why is it that we have been shown over and over again our own personal downfalls and defeats - and still think that they need to be exposed one more time before we consider repenting and taking the opposite course?

Why is it that we never seem to get beyond them - never get beyond those actions and attitudes that are being constantly laid out before us, being put on the block for the disposal of them forever?

He made the statement in John 5:40: ‘And you will not come to Me, that you might have life.’

‘You will not come to Me - you will not come to Me - that you might have life.’

Why do we not just ‘come’ to Him to change our habits, to lift our attitudes up out of the scum and filth of the world’s ways and thoughts?

Why - I ask you - why do we not come to Him, we who say we ‘believe’ in Him, we who have been given the Gift of His divine nature when we accepted His atoning work for ourselves?

Why - I ask again - why do we not come to Him so that He is given freedom to work the corresponding character of Himself into our lives?

These can all be very soul-searching questions, I know.

But - will you consider them seriously and earnestly with me tonight?

Will we seek Him out to honestly examine just how important He really is to each one of us personally?

I think that one of the main reasons we do not always ‘come’ to Him is because we do not really know Him - we have not really grasped His importance, of the impact of His Person in our lives.

Yes - I said, ‘we really do not know Him!’

Does that shock you?

Yes - oh - I hope it does - because this may be the start of actually coming to know Him in a daily, living way.

So - let us start with why the living Person of Jesus Christ is to be so important to each of us personally.

When Christ arrived on the scene of human history, He came when a course of preparation conducted through previous ages was complete.

This is why you find in Scripture the phrase ‘...when the fulness of time was come’, or ‘...the dispensation of the fullness of times’.

The word ‘fullness’ simply means ‘that which fulfills or brings to completion’.

In other words, it is the coming of that given moment that completes a certain period of time.  

It is that hour that fills up its appointed measure and brings it to a close and everything that preceded that moment was in preparation of this exact moment.

So - when Christ came into history, the preceding ages had prepared the way for Him.

If you have ever read the Old Testament through, by the time you reach the New Testament and hear of the coming of Christ Who came to change the futility of life’s natural ways, you understand why it was time for the Deliverer to appear.

The groundwork had been set - certain events and certain prophecies had been distributed in their certain places - the eternal plan was slowly being hammered out.

Circumstances had been built, one upon the other, to expose man’s poverty - what his fitness toward spiritual uplifting really was.   

Unrighteous moral experiences and choices that had been made from generation to generation ripened the time for the ushering in of a ‘new’ thing.

It was time - it was truly time because the natural law that men tried to follow kept revealing more and more the greatness of sin and the weakness of man to deliver himself from its damning hold.

Things had so hit bottom - it was so bad that there were  only a grateful few who yearned with their whole hearts for better things - who hungered and ached for a lifting up of the moral measures, patterns, and rules of the land.

‘Things would surely be better when the promised Deliverer arrived’ was the craving of their hearts. 

An old gentleman, Simeon, by name, in Luke 2:25-32, was such a man.

He was among the few believing remnant of Judiasm who looked forward to the Messianic Age in its spiritual aspect.

When he took the Infant Jesus in his arms one day, he knew at once how important Christ was.

He knew that, in his hands, he held the embodiment of God’s salvation and deliverance.

Christ it would be Who would bring revelation to the Gentiles and glory to Israel, Who would bring things into the alignment of God’s Righteous thought.

And Simeon predicted that because of this Christ many would be brought to a moral decision: some to a falling, to collapse, and some to a rising, a lifting up.

He knew without one doubt how important Jesus was in God’s economy of time.

And - it was Simeon’s time to cradle Him, to press Him close to his own heart and welcome deliverance for himself.

It was the Christ Who came. Yes - He had come in the fullness of time.

His coming was the time of God’s fresh, new action, the time of a regeneration of creation.

To mark out the significance of the Person of Christ for ourselves, we must realize that Christ was not a product of His own age, or of any preceding age.

What is true of us in our age or of men in the preceding ages was not true of Christ in His age.

We, in our natural selves, can place ourselves in that time when the age in which Simeon lived is reflected in the age in which we live.

We take a current idea - something that is clothed in unrighteousness - pick it up, love it, are pleased with it, welcome it, refuse to see it as unrighteous, and clutch it in the fear of it being snatched from us.

Why? because it reflects our characters perfectly, it reflects what we really are inside.

And, still true to the way of human nature, we may see and approve the better course that we know we should take.

But - in the actual practice of our daily lives, we choose instead to follow the lowest and poorest course in our moral activity and attitudes.

Is that not the way man is in his natural self?

What makes the age in which Simeon lived any different from ours today?

Now - we who call ourselves Christians - have a real struggle, at some time, in some way, between laying hold of ‘that which is good’ and letting go of that which exposes our own selfishness.

We cannot bear any close moral inspection - we are jarred by it.

We are afraid of our inconsistencies, our weaknesses, our moral lassitudes as they really appear in the light of the righteousness of Christ.

Taking the high road of character because it is the character of Christ within us seeking to take hold of us is an affliction to us, a curse, an annoyance - to say the very least!

It is far easier to stay down than it is to be lifted up on the wings of His grace and mercy - is it not?

At least we deceive ourselves in thinking in that way.

That is man’s natural self that we who say we are Christians dare to hold on to.

But - with our Lord Jesus Christ, all of those things were otherwise.

He owed nothing to the time or to the culture of the day.

He never was influenced by the Greek world of thought or by the Roman world of politics and administration.

He did not follow the course of His contemporaries who He termed as a ‘generation of vipers’, guilty of evil coming from what was so abundant in their hearts. (Mt 12:34-35)

He stood in a totally different relation to moral truth from that of all other men.

In John 8:50, He said: ‘I am not in search of honor for Myself...’

And He continued in verse 54:  ‘If I were to glorify Myself, I would have no real glory, for My glory would be nothing and worthless.  It is My Father Who glorifies Me, of Whom you say that He is your God.’

‘You say that He is your God’!

You see, the moral conviction of the day had deteriorated into vague and fruitless strivings to tie back into God.

They failed to see the various revelations of all those circumstances surrounding their coming Redeemer.

‘In many separate revelations [each of which set forth a portion of the Truth] and in different ways, God...’ had spoken to their forefathers.

But - by the time Jesus was about to appear, it had been nearly four hundred years since the last prophet had spoken.

And during all that time, the nation had been striving to reinterpret, to reassess, to renew, to recreate and to regain   their former standing with God.

It was then, for one last time, that ‘...God spoke... in the person of His Son, Whom He appointed heir and lawful owner of all things, also by and through Whom He created the worlds, and the reaches of space and the ages of time...’

You recognize that from the first chapter of Hebrews.

And the appearance of that appointed Heir of all things, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, would start the process of moral change upon the earth and in the hearts of men.

For, in verse 8, God said of His Son: ‘...Your throne, O God is forever and ever, and the scepter of Your Kingdom is a scepter of absolute righteousness, of justice, and of straightforwardness.

You have loved righteousness. [You have delighted in integrity, virtue, and uprightness in purpose, thought, and action] and You have hated lawlessness.’

And in verse 12: ‘...You remain the same, and Your years will never end, nor come to failure.’

Do you think the coming of Christ to the earth was a significant event in the light of God’s heart?

Oh - yes it was!

God sent Him as the Deliverer after God had thoroughly displayed man’s own ineptitude toward righteous living.

He sent the One Whose Life is Integrity, Whose Life is Virtue, Whose Life is uprightness in purpose, thought, and action.

And He is the One Who invited men to come to Him so He could give that same Life to men to live it as He is.

Now - let me close with some questions again.

First, let us turn the statement of Jesus in John 5:40 into a question and read it in that way: 

‘Will you come unto Me so that you might have life - that you might be lifted up in moral character to the highest ground ever possible to humankind?’

Yes - we may say we are Christians.

Yes - we may say that He is our God.

Yes - we may say that Christ is Lord.

But - how often do we come to Him - to put Him on as our clothing of righteousness?

How often do we take that deliberate, conscious acceptance of His Lordship so that all our motives, all our desires, all our attitudes come under His government?

How often, in the course of each day, do we make that fresh advance forward into more of His likeness, into an increasing knowledge of Him?

I ask you, one last time, just how important is Jesus Christ to you - really?

We must decide, once and for all, how we shall live - do we continue life through the natural self or by Christ?

I leave that for you to answer - it is your choice alone! 

Think about it! Pray about it!

And I urge each one of us to let the Holy Spirit root out anything and everything that is not in line with the Life of Jesus Christ in us.

Oh - how I pray that each one of us shall be drawn into that ‘fullness of time’ to be able to see the truth of this message tonight and to act upon it!

Lord willing, next week we will continue onward in this same line of thought - the importance of Jesus Christ. 
  
Let us close in prayer.

[PRAY]

Amen! So be it!