The first reaction that many have upon seriously reading the teachings of the New Testament is that Jesus is presenting us with directions that can never be followed and commands that can never be obeyed. The life style that emerges is the dream of an idealist.
How can we forgive our enemies seventy times seven? How shall we find resources in us to turn the other cheek to the man who has just hit us? The very idea of making a gift of our shirt to the thief who has just stolen our jacket sounds absurd. It all sounds so idealistic that very few churchgoers consider His teachings an outline of a life that can be lived on this planet, especially in the twentieth century. Some doctrinally place it all in some future never-never land. But a serious reading will not allow that, for every word of it is to take place where enemies need to be forgiven and thieves are a daily reality.
It is some of His greatest promises that brings us almost to despair.
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28, 29)
The words could suggest that Jesus is cruelly teasing us. How could He use such words as light and easy to describe the way of life He expounded? His every word cuts across all that is natural to us. Surely if we are ever to achieve what He said, it will be with gigantic effort and willpower. For most of us the words we associate with the Christian life are not light and easy, but more like determination, dedication, vows and re-dedication. After all our pledges we still produce failure before many days are past. Yet Jesus said His way was easy and light. What is it that we are missing?
With all our failures as Christians we have reduced the Gospel of necessity to one of receiving God’s forgiveness. We come confessing our failure to live in love for God and man, asking for God’s forgiveness. And we receive it every time!
But if that is all the Christian life is about, we must say that God did not expect us to take His Word seriously ”“ He knew it would be too difficult for us! That is absurd. There must be more to it than receiving forgiveness, or Christianity is the news of God mocking us in our helplessness.
Do not underestimate forgiveness! Before we can know fellowship with God, sin must be dealt with. God, the Holy One, cannot fellowship with sin. It must be punished in such a way that perfect justice is satisfied. Jesus accomplished this once and for all when He took our sin upon Himself and paid the penalty to the full in His death. He was raised from the dead because justice was satisfied. When we accepted His work for us, we were made to stand before God as if we had never sinned. For sins committed afterward we could receive instant forgiveness.
But the Good News is more. It states that not only are our sins forgiven, but we are brought into an actual functioning unity with God through Christ. The pages of the New Testament abound with such phrases as, "Christ in you," "I live yet not I but Christ lives in me," "God which works in you," "Greater is He that is in you…," "He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit,’ and many more.
Here is the key to the impossible life. Behind the statement that His yoke is easy and His burden light is the truth that He does not merely tell us what to do, but enters into union with us to be the ability to do it.
Colossians 3:4 puts it boldly: "Christ who is our life." The gift of eternal life is not an impersonal thing that God gives us. The gift of life is God Himself. He gives us the Spirit of Jesus to live within us. "He that has the Son has life…" (John 3:36 KJV) To live in eternal life is to live in the ability of Another’s life.
The idea of a God outside of us giving us aid as we struggle to keep His commands is foreign to the Gospel. He is within us, alive in our personalities being His Holy Self. It was this consciousness that caused Paul to exclaim,
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)
But how does it work? If Christ is in me, how does His life actually become my life? How does His love operate in loving the enemy through me? When we are faced with problems and pressures of life, how does His patience and gentleness become the way we are? How is it that we live, yet not us but Christ living in us?
One of the simplest illustrations of the principle is set out in one of the great miracles of the life of Jesus found in Matthew 14: 13-21 and John 6:1-14.
It was early summer in Galilee and the people flock to hear Jesus and stand in thrilled awe at His miracles. (Matthew 14:14)
The crowd follows Him to a desert place to be taught. There are five thousand men. Allowing for women and children, the crowd swells to nearly fifteen thousand persons. As the day wears on they begin to feel faint with hunger under the hot sun. It is impossible to continue teaching. The disciples begin to panic. They cannot have fainting people at the meeting ”“ it would be bad publicity. Send them away! Let them faint on someone else’s doorstep.
Jesus refuses and tosses the ball to them. "You give them something to eat." It was Philip who He addressed individually, "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?"
Philip manfully tries to point out the problem and get rid of the crowd. He answers, "Eight months wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!"
The others take stoke of the situation to see what supplies are present. They find nothing except a boy who has five small barley loaves and two fish. Too excited at what he had seen, he had forgotten to eat what his mother had put into his lunch pail. As Andrew tells of his find, it only makes the situation more ridiculous. Five hard rolls and two little fish somehow mocked their hopelessness. They cannot meet the need of the people, send them away before they embarrass us.
Jesus takes command. He orders the people to sit down on the grassy slopes. Taking the bread and fish He blesses them and breaks them into twelve pieces, one for each of His disciples. The little broken pieces of barely roll look pathetic in the fisherman’s large hands. When divided between them the fish was smaller than an appetizer in an average restaurant.
Jesus calmly tells them to go and feed fifteen thousand very hungry people with what is in their hands. He treats it as casually as if He is asking someone to pass the salt. There is no struggle, call to prayer or new dedication as if something has to be accomplished. He tells them to go and feed the crowd as if truckloads of food waited to be distributed.
The twelve men feel the bread. It is small enough to be hidden in their fist. Every sense tells them that they do not have enough bread in their hands for one person to be satisfied, let alone this mob. But above their feelings and senses the quiet command of Truth Himself is saying that, contrary to appearances, they do not have enough and should go and use their supply to feed the people until they are full. They turn and walk toward the multitude to give away what they can neither see nor feel, because Truth said it was really there.
They had not served the first group of people before they realized that the piece of bread in their hand would not decrease however much they gave away. The bread and fish remained the same size, defying their human reason.
After feeding the one hundredth person, it became apparent that any one disciple had given away more bread and fish than one man could carry ”“ yet they had never felt more than a fistful in their hand at one time.
When the feeding operation was done and the multitude completely satisfied, Jesus ordered the elated disciples to collect all the leftover scraps. They returned with twelve large basketfuls of bread that no one could eat. The fistful of bread had not only fed thousands but ended up in their own hands as a basketful.
The next day the disciples were still high on the memory, and the people awestruck with what they had witnessed. Jesus turned them away from the historical facts of the miracle, showing them that all they had witnessed was only a shadow of Himself.
Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst." (John 6:35)
What did He mean?
He is pointing to Himself as the total supply for all the needs of man. What the bread was to the physical, He was to life itself. He is not merely the doorway to God’s supply, He is the supply.
It is not that we receive Christ and then pray for more love, patience, wisdom or power so that we can be like Him and be a better Christian or do God’s work more effectively. He is all of those virtues and powers. When we received Him to the center of our life, He came to be all virtue and power within us.
Man’s spirit is hungry and he needs a spirit bread that will satisfy. Jesus said, "I am the bread of life…" He does not give us something apart from Himself, blessed by Him, as He gave bread to the people. He gives us Himself. He is the gift
United at the heart of our being to this infinite Person, we do not feel His fullness. When we check our feeling of Him it is like a fistful of bread. We cannot believe that we have enough of Him to meet the crises of life that face us like ten thousand hungry people.
We assume that in our present state of relationship to Him, He is not enough. We dare not to face the challenge of each hour until we feel we have enough. We pray, fast, go through endless prayer lines hoping for an experience that will bring us the necessary feeling of sufficiency to meet the needs of the day.
But all the time we are containing the inexhaustible supply. The disciples never could feel the bread they gave away ”“ it was more than they could carry. Our finite spirits can never feel the infinite Christ who is in them. The fistful of Christ we feel in our trembling spirits is enough to meet every crisis and challenge as well as fill every hour with the glory of God. All we need to do is walk out into life and begin to expect Him to be our life.
We must learn to see the infinite supply instead of the needs that tower before us. The disciples found it very easy to see a multitude with so much need that they wanted to send them away. Jesus saw the needs swallowed up in the infinite resources of the Father. He saw it in the eternal now. Not something to be prayed for and drawn out of God by promises and vows, but something already there waiting to be brought into manifestation by the action of the disciples. He sent them to serve what they did not feel they had, because He saw that they did have it.
It is significant that the New Testament calls sinners blind. Other words describe the state of the unconverted similarly: "ignorant," "know not what they do," etc. A whole world lies before a blind man; but he does not see it and, therefore, does not know that he has it.
So all of God is available to man through Christ, but the sinner does not know it. Many times our conversions is like the blind man of Mark 8:22-25. We see, but we do not see. We know we have met with God in Christ, but we do not see that all things are now ours. We still pray for what is in front of us ready to be taken. For such Paul prayed Ephesians 1:17-19:
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might.
In that twilight state we still the need and tend to be blind to the supply. We see a whirlpool of hate and pray for love, not realizing love Himself is joined to our spirit and waits for us to begin living out what we do not feel. We still see confusion and darkness, not realizing that we are a unity with light and wisdom and as we live out from Him darkness will be swallowed in light. We are surrounded by not only our needs, but the needs of thousands of others. If we do not know we are in unity with infinite supply, we tend to tremble with them before their problem and whimper our prayers on their behalf, telling Father of needs. When we know who we are, in unity with the Bread of Life, we will see their need and thank God for His infinite supply that eternally is, though presently not seen or felt.
We are so programmed to see the need and not the supply that we feel something akin to guilt if we embrace every need as the opportunity to reveal a supply. When we have seen the fullness that grace gives over and over again, we walk confidently speaking supply where none can be seen or felt by human eye.
Peter and John going to the Temple came upon a lame man (Acts 3: 1-10); Peter felt a fistful of the Bread of Life in his spirit who was almightiness and eternal health. He fed the man with bread.
…"I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you: In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene ”“ walk!" And seizing him by the right hand, he raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were straightened. (Acts 3:6,7)
It is with this infinite resource now within us that Paul dared to write:
But now you also, put them all aside: Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him…And so, as those who have been chosen by God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against any one; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. And beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. (Colossians 3:8-10, 12-14)
The old life style can be thrown off like a ragged garment. The new way which is Christ can be put on for Christ is already in us. That way of life is the way He is, and we can take every challenge of life to let Him be Himself.
We look at the lineup of hours, filled with uptight, angry people and crying children. We feel totally inadequate to meet the needs, to meet them with the kindness and gentleness of Christ. We know Him, but not that well! Truth whispers, "Go live His life, you have an inexhaustible supply." We walk hesitantly forward, expecting Him to be His living self in us. With wonder we become aware of a Life flowing in our life causing us to live a love that we did not feel. We have discovered that His yoke is easy and His burden light. As days go by we forget to live in the rest at times, but increasingly we return to it. As the consciousness of our unity with Him takes hold upon us, the consciousness of need fades, swallowed by the consciousness of the infinite Person who is a unity with our spirit. We walk into the problem to bring the supply into manifestation feeling a fistful of infinite Bread.
