7-5 Glorifying God In Preaching

Glorifying The Name

The overriding desire of the Lord was for the glorification of Yahweh’s Name, not proving others wrong. God’s Name is His characteristics (Ex. 34:5-7). We glorify that Name when due to us, those characteristics are manifested somehow- maybe through others, or through ourselves. The fruits of the Spirit glorify those characteristics  / the Name of Yahweh. When the Lord saw faith, or joy, or repentance, or even the possibility of these things in men, He worked to develop them. He didn’t give up because they were also selfish or unloving or not joyful…And so with us, as the petty selfishness and weaknesses so evident in the flesh of our fellows presses upon our consciousness, focus instead on what is good, on what potential is there, and work on that. Abound in the life of grace, of outgiving when there is no response and no appreciation; and rejoice to live it, and see the honour of being called to live the life of the Saviour in your little life. John Thomas rightly observed that God manifestation rather than individual human salvation is the essential aim of the preaching of God’s word. The Lord Jesus struggled in Gethsemane between “save me...” and “Father, glorify thy name”. The glorifying of the Father’s Name meant more to him than his personal salvation. Likewise Moses and Paul [in spirit] were prepared to sacrifice their personal salvation for the sake of Yahweh’s Name being glorified in the saving of His people (Ex. 32:30-34 cp. Rom. 9:1-3).

And yet the peerless example of the Lord as He prayed in Gethsemane, as we imagine Him moving around Galilee nearly 2000 years ago... can be so remote to us today. He was there, He was as He was, but we are here, and we are as we are. This gap between Him and us can mean that He personally recedes in our minds to the point where He is a distant example, a personification of good, one who was better than us and therefore saved us…but no more. This is a tragedy if we see Him like this. One of our most distinctive  doctrines is that the Lord was our representative and not a substitute. I understand this to mean that He personally represented each of us, not only in His death but in His life; for we are saved by His life as it was and as it now is through resurrection (Rom. 5:10). Paul could say that the Son of God “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20); and you and I and thousands of others can and have said the same. It is one of redemption’s finest mysteries (and yes, there are some mysteries still) that Christ died and suffered personally for you, and for you, and for me; and therefore you, and I, and you over there, must live a life of response to Him, based on His very personal sacrifice for us. In baptism we show that we identify ourselves with that dying and rising for us which He achieved; and in our lives afterwards, we live this out. We are under the tyranny of words in writing about these things. Whilst we struggle intellectually to understand the depth of the atonement, may I suggest that one practical thing that comes out of the representative nature of the Lord’s work and death for each of us is that somehow the personal experiences which we have in daily life, He also had in essence. We are living out His life and living. This is why I commend each of us to a serious, personal study of the Gospel records; for in His life you and I must see something of our own. By its’ very nature, this study which I suggest can only be personal. According to tradition, it was obligatory for early Christian converts in some ecclesias to learn the Gospel of Mark by heart; and one can see why.

Placarding Forth Christ Crucified

There is a major theme in the NT: that we are living the life of Christ, and thereby His life becomes ours. In this sense we have and live the eternal life. “As he is, so are we in this world” (1 Jn. 4:17); we will be persecuted as He was persecuted (Jn. 15:20); we fellowship His sufferings, being made conformable to the image of His death, and thereby will fellowship His glory (1 Pet. 4:13; Phil. 3:10; 2 Cor. 1:7). Paul had this idea ever before him: “It is now my joy to suffer for you; for the sake of Christ’s body, the church, I am completing what still remains for Christ to suffer in my own person” (Col. 1:24 REB). When he speaks of “…that I may win Christ….to live is Christ”, his idea seems to be of attaining a spirituality even in this life where the life we live is Christ living in us, totally reflected in our actions (Phil. 1:21). We have not yet resisted unto blood in our striving against sin, as the Lord did in Gethsemane (Heb. 12:4 cp. Lk. 22:44); but, the implication is, we ultimately should. We bear about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal body (2 Cor. 6:10)- not just at resurrection, but now. And it is through this that we bear witness to the resurrected Jesus. He can be seen as alive because He lives in us. Paul could tell the Galatians that in him they had seen Jesus Christ placarded forth, crucified before their own eyes (3:1). Paul knew that when people looked at his life, they saw something of the crucifixion of the Lord. The Galatians therefore accepted him " even as Christ Jesus" (Gal. 4:14). He could describe his own preaching as “this Jesus, whom I preach unto you…” (Acts 17:3), as if Jesus was right there before their eyes, witnessed through Paul. As the Lord was Paul’s representative, so Paul was Christ’s. The idea of representation works both ways: we see in the Gospel records how the Lord experienced some things which only we have; and we show aspects of His character to the world which nobody else can manifest.

If we can rise up to all this, placarding forth the Lord's crucifixion sufferings in our lives, then there will be a power and credibility to our preaching which will be hard to resist. It was before the eyes of the Galatians that they saw in Paul, Jesus Christ crucified (Gal. 3:1). But the only other reference to the eyes of the Galatians is in Gal. 4:15- where we read that they had been so transfixed by Paul's preaching that they had been ready to pluck out their eyes. And where's the only other reference to plucking out eyes? It's in the Lord's teaching, where He says that if our eye offends us, we should pluck it out [Mt. 5:29- same Greek words used]. The connection is surely this: Paul's personal reflection of the crucified Jesus was so powerful, so compellingly real and credible, that it motivated his hearers to rise up to the spirit of the very hardest demands of the moral teaching of that same Jesus. Insofar as we genuinely live out the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus, our preaching of His radical moral demands will likewise be heeded. The crucified Christ that Paul placarded before their eyes was " the truth" (Gal. 3:1; 4:14-16); and the integrity and reality of that truth was confirmed by the congruence between the example of Paul, and the reality of the crucified Jesus whom he manifested to them. In Paul's body language, in his character, in his response to problems and frustrations great and small, in the way he coped with physical weakness, his audience somehow saw the crucified Christ. In the same letter, Paul reminds the Galatians how they had initially seen him preaching to them in a weak bodily state, and had seen Christ in him then (Gal. 4:13,14). He says in Gal. 3:1 that they saw Christ crucified in him. Perhaps the way Paul handled a sickness or bodily weakness which he then had, somehow reflected to his audience the spirit of Christ crucified.

The effort we should consciously make to allow the life of Christ to be lived in us, is a natural outflow of the basic doctrine: that Christ was our representative. If we love Him and the record of His life, we will see in Him and His living the essence of our own: the same betrayal, barriers with His family and all close relationships, the pouring out of the love of God to a world and people who misunderstood, who thought they understood but didn’t, who were blind, who thought they saw, who only broke from the petty materialism of their lives to listen to Him because they thought they might get some personal benefit…all the time, He poured out His grace and the Father’s love. And He kept on to the final unspeakable, unwriteable, unenterable agony at the end. And even there, we sense He was not gritting His teeth trying to be patient, trying not to sin…He was pulsating with a love for men, a care for Pilate (comforting him that another had a greater sin); concern for the women who wept crocodile tears, that they might really repent; praying for forgiveness for those who knew not [i.e., fully] what they did; preaching to the thieves in whispers, each word taking an agony of pain, heaving Himself up on the nails to get the air to speak it… To love one’s neighbour as oneself is to fulfil the law (Gal. 5:14; Rom. 13:10); and yet the Lord’s death was the supreme fulfilment of it (Mt. 5:18; Col. 2:14). Here was the definition of love for one’s neighbour. Not a passing politeness and occasional seasonal gift, whilst secretly and essentially living the life of self-love and self-care; but the love and the death of the cross, for His neighbours as for Himself; laying down His life “for himself that it might be for us” in the words of Bro. Roberts. In Him, in His time of dying, we see the definition of love, the fulfilment of the justice and unassuming kindness and thought for others which was taught in the Mosaic Law. And we through bearing one another’s burdens, through bearing with their moral and intellectual and spiritual failures, must likewise fulfil the law, in a voluntary laying down of our lives for each other (Gal. 6:2). And in this, as with the Lord, will be our personal salvation.