“No one can
drink so deeply of it here, but he will more deeply drink hereafter. Blessed be
God, no stream of Lethe flows this side of his city to wash away from our minds
the remembrance of redeeming grace! The life above will be a ceaseless coming
to Jesus, the Mediator of a better covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling
that speaketh better than Abel. The Lamb slain for our sins will be all the
glory of Emmanuel’s land.” G. Vos
Continuing with
the quote from the previous post:
“No one but a
redeemed creature can truly know what it is for God to be God, and what it
means to worship and possess Him as God.” I’m reminded of a song, titled
The Song of the Soul Set Free, I first sang as a new Christian in 1966 in a
camp meeting choir outside of Frostburg, MD. Some of the words are (relying on
memory), “Angels cannot sing it, this song of joy and freedom, for mortals only
know it, the ransomed and the free.” Peter writes that “angels long to look”
into the things of the Gospel and salvation (1 Peter 1:12).
Sadly, when we
repudiate the image of God we abandon the glory of God’s creation, including
His creation of mankind. We abandon that special place God has placed man (see Psalm
8) and man’s special calling to live in koinonia with God, with one another,
and to live as a steward of creation. For the Christian, the restoration of the
image of God in us through Jesus Christ should be one of the unfolding delights
of our lives – and yet our earthbound “Christianity” has the practical effect
of stunting our growth in Christ, we are like the seed sown among thorns who
allow the things of this earth to choke our growth (Mark 4:18 – 19).
“This is the fine gold of the Christian’s
experience, sweeter to him than honey and the honeycomb.” Our lives are to
be about knowing Jesus and making Him known to others. Knowing Jesus is our
calling, not engaging in perpetual self-improvement projects. Paul’s great
desire was “…that I may know Him…” (Phil. 3:10). Jesus says to the Father, “This
is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom You have sent” (John 17:3).
As I look back
over my life, I see irony in the fact that as a young professing Christian I often
said that there is a difference between knowing about Jesus Christ and really
knowing Him. I have heard this throughout my life. The irony is that I was
often in situations in which I didn’t know Jesus, I didn’t display a life in
Jesus, and in which I was substituting a Christian “lifestyle” or a set of
doctrines or teachings for koinonia with the Trinity. (Please don’t
misunderstand me, doctrine and dogma are critical to our life in Christ and with
one another – one of our problems is that because we are ignorant of the Bible
and its dogmas we make things up as we go along and therefore live in confusion.)
Let me tell you
a common sense thing, if we really know someone we’ll talk about him or her, we’ll
talk about character, we’ll talk about our relationship, we’ll talk about our
joys, and we’ll talk about the things we don’t understand. We talk about the
people and things that are important to us; are we talking about Jesus Christ?
Are we sharing our life in Christ with others, both those who know Him and
those who don’t?
I think of a
song titled, Knowing You, or All I Once Held Dear. The chorus
goes, “Knowing You, Jesus, knowing You, there is no greater thing. You’re my
all, You’re the best, You’re my joy, my righteousness, and I love You Lord.” Is
this our heart’s desire, to know Jesus and to make Him known to others?
Paul writes, “For
now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but
then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known” (1Cor. 13:12).
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