How to Study the Start
How to Study the Start
Some Things to Remember
The Revelation of Christ (Mathew xvi. 16–17)
The Records of Christ (John v. 39, R.V.)
The Realisation of Christ (1 Corinthians i. 30)
Some Things to Realise
The Evangelical Experience (The Synoptic Gospels and St. John)
The Examined Experience (The Epistles)
The Exercised Experience (The Present Obedience)
The basis of Christian Psychology is not a knowledge of man, but a knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is easy to put up our Lord as an Example, but according to the New Testament He is much more. He is the Redeemer, One who can reproduce His own life in us. To be born from above means more than conversion. It means that Christ is formed in us, and the Christ in us must be exactly like the Christ outside us. The characteristics that Jesus Christ exhibited in His human life are to be exhibited in the Christian. Christian Psychology is based on our realisation of Who the Lord Jesus Christ is and on an experimental understanding of His life in us.
There is a difference between sight and the organ of sight. Most of us are quite content to see, we do not bother about the organ of sight. But when something goes wrong with the organ of sight those of us who can see only are of no use to put the eye right; we must know how the organ of sight is constructed. The Christian worker is apt to say—‘Oh, well, I have been saved by God’s grace and that is sufficient.’ It may be sufficient for you, but if you are going to be “a workman that needeth not to be ashamed,” you must do more than ‘be saved,’ you must take the trouble to find out what the Bible says about that salvation. Most of us are like the folks who are content with being able to see; but the organ of sight spiritually in many has gone wrong, and we have no knowledge of how to deal with it, all we can do is to give our testimony. That is not good enough. The point of the study of Christian Psychology is not only that we might understand salvation for ourselves, but that we might understand how to assist others.
Some Things to Remember
The Revelation of Christ. “And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven “ (Matthew xvi. 16–17). The Lord Jesus Christ is not a commonsense fact, that is, we do not understand Him by means of our common sense. The disciples at this stage only knew Jesus Christ by means of their common sense—by their eyes and ears and all the powers of commonsense men; they had never discerned Who He was. Our Lord is a revelation fact, and when Peter confessed, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus Christ recognised from Whom he had received the revelation, not from his common sense, but from God. Is Jesus Christ a revelation to me, or is He simply an historical character?
The Bible is the universe of revelation facts; the natural world is the universe of common-sense facts, and our means of communication with the two universes is totally different. We come in contact with the natural universe by our senses, our intellect has to be curious. Scientific knowledge, which is systematised common sense, is based on intense intellectual curiosity. Curiosity in the natural world is right, not wrong, and if we are not intellectually curious we shall never know anything, God never encourages laziness.
When we come to the universe of the Bible, the revelation facts about God, intellectual curiosity is not of the slightest use. Our senses are no good here, we cannot find out God by searching. We may have inferences from our common-sense thinking which we call God, but these are mere abstractions. We can only get at the facts that are revealed in the Bible by faith. Faith is not credulity; faith is my personal spirit obeying God. The Bible does not deal in common-sense facts; the natural universe deals in common-sense facts, and we get at these by our senses. The Bible deals with revelation facts, facts we cannot get at by our common sense, facts we may be pleased to make light of by our common sense. For instance, Jesus Christ is a revelation fact, sin is another, the devil is another, the Holy Spirit is another. Not one of these is a common-sense fact. If a man were merely a common-sense individual, he could do very well without God.
In order to get scientific knowledge we must use our common sense; but if we are going to know the facts with which Jesus Christ deals, the facts which He says belong to the Kingdom of God, we must have them revealed to us. ‘Marvel not that I say unto you, You must be born again before you can come into contact with the domain in which I live.’ The domain in which Jesus Christ lives is the domain of Bible facts. How are we to get the revelation of Jesus Christ? Very simply, if we want it. Jesus Christ said that the Holy Spirit would glorify Him, and we can receive Holy Spirit for the asking (Luke xi. 13). Then we too shall be in the same category as Peter, and Jesus Christ will say to us, “Blessed art thou, ... for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven.” Jesus Christ is a Revelation, and we can get the revelation of Him by receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ continually said things (such as Luke xi. 13) the meaning of which cannot be got at by common sense. Have we ever received Holy Spirit? If we refuse any one way of getting at the truth because we do not like that way, we are dishonest.
The Records of Christ. “Ye search the scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life” (John v. 39, R.V.). The Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, are all revelations of Jesus Christ. The context of the Bible is our Lord Himself, and until we get rightly related to Him, the Bible is no more to us than an ordinary book. Common sense does not reveal Jesus Christ; to common sense He is nothing more than a Nazarene carpenter who lived twenty centuries ago. No natural man can know Jesus Christ (Matthew xi. 27). Higher criticism, so called, works on the lines of common sense, consequently when it deals with our Lord (Whose highest sense is not common sense, but Deity), He has to be explained away, His Person is ‘dissolved by analysis’ (1 John iv. 1–3). The findings of higher criticism may be logically proved, but the biggest facts in life are not logical. If they were, we should be able to calculate our ends and make sure of things on rational logical lines. Logical truth is merely the explanation of facts which common sense has gathered. Men say, ‘I must have these things proved to my reason. How much good spiritually did a man ever get by proving things to his reason? In spiritual matters logical processes do not count. Curiosity does not count, nor argument, nor reasoning; these are of no avail for spiritual discernment. There is only one golden rule for spiritual discernment, and that is obedience. We learn more by five minutes’ obedience than by ten years’ study. Logic and reasoning are methods of expounding Reality, but we do not get at Reality by our intellect. Reality is only got at by our conscience. When we deal with the records of Christ we are dealing with fundamental realities, not with intellectual problems. Faith in God is the only way of coming in touch with the fundamental realities, and there is nothing logical about faith; it is of the nature of life.
After we are born again, the Bible becomes a new Book to us, and we search the Scriptures, not to get ‘life’ out of them, but to know more about Jesus Christ. “Ye search the scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life, ... and ye will not come to Me that ye might have life” (John v. 39–40, R.V.). The vital relationship which the Christian has to the Bible is not that he worships the letter, but that the Holy Spirit makes the words of the Bible spirit and life to him. Before we are born from above the Bible is only an ordinary book; after we are born from above, the Bible becomes a universe of revelation facts whereby we feed our knowledge of Jesus Christ.
The Realisation of Christ. “But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption ” (1 Corinthians i. 30). In Proverbs viii. we read of Pre-incarnate Wisdom, and in John’s Gospel that Wisdom is referred to as the Logos, or Word. Historically, the Word was called Jesus Christ. The whole wisdom of God has come down to the shores of our lives in a flesh and blood Man, and John says, we have seen Him and we know Him. How are we to realise Jesus Christ? He says “Come unto Me,” and there is no profounder word in human language than that. The one thing that keeps us from coming to Jesus Christ is obstinacy; we will do anything rather than come. It is not God’s will that a man should be smashed before he is saved, it is the man’s obstinacy that does it. There is no need to go through the agonies and distresses that so many do go through, it is because men will not come . If we want to realise Jesus Christ, He says “Come unto Me,” and when we do come, God makes Him “unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” If Jesus Christ is not revealed to us it is because we have views of our own, and we want to bend everything to those views. In order to realise Christ we must come to Him. That is, we must learn to trust Someone other than ourselves, and to do this we must deliberately efface ourselves. Devotion and piety are apt to be the greatest opponents of Jesus Christ, because we devote ourselves to devotion instead of to Him. To surrender to God is not to surrender to the fact that we have surrendered. That is not coming at all. To come means that we come to God in complete abandonment and give ourselves right over to Him and leave ourselves in His hands. The Lord Jesus Christ is the one Person to Whom we ought to yield, and we must be perfectly certain that it is to Himself that we are yielding. Do not be sorry if other appeals find you stiff-necked and unyielding; but be sorry if, when He says “Come unto Me,” you do not come. The attitude of coming is that the will resolutely lets go of everything and deliberately commits all to Him.
Some Things to Realise
The Evangelical Experience. The Synoptics are the first three Gospels; John’s writings include his Epistles and the Apocalypse as well as his Gospel. Our Lord neither talked of Conversion and Regeneration and Sanctification in stages; neither does the Apostle John. If we get hold of books which talk in the stages of experience and then come to the Gospels where those stages are not marked, we are apt to get embarrassed. The Gospels always present truth in ‘nugget’ form, and if we want to know the stages of evangelical experience, we must go to the Epistles which beat out into negotiable gold the nuggets of truth presented by our Lord. In John iii. our Lord is not talking about the stages of conversion; He is talking in the great terms of what He came to do-viz., to make Redemption the basis of human life. We can introduce other things into His words if we like, but we must not say He said them. Our Lord is not examining the evangelical experience, He is stating it. He said to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again.” That is not a command, but the statement of a foundation fact.
We mean by the Evangelical Experience an experience based on the fact that the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, His death, is the gateway for us into His life. We delight to hear about the life of Jesus, it captivates our imagination to hear sermons on following in His steps—until we find that we cannot begin to do it. ‘Jesus Christ was a great Teacher.’ So He was, an amazing Teacher, but where are you going to begin to carry out what He says? The Sermon on the Mount is exquisitely beautiful teaching, and it fascinates us so long as we deal with it intellectually only, but when it comes down to our daily life, practical and sordid and real, we find we cannot begin to carry it out. We may give our mental assent to it, but our actual life won’t walk that road. The teachings of Jesus must produce despair, because if He meant what He said, where are we in regard to it? The revelation of the New Testament is not that Jesus Christ came to teach primarily but that He came to redeem, to make us what He teaches we should be. Then the teachings of Jesus become the description of what God has undertaken to make a man if he will let the power of God work through him. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can give us His own disposition, and all the standards He gives are based on that disposition—i.e., His teaching is for the life He puts in us. We enter into the life of Jesus by means of His death, that is our only door of entrance. We may try and batter through some other way if we choose—through Bethlehem, through the teachings of Jesus, but we cannot get in. Those ways in would produce frauds and humbugs. If a teacher or preacher has not an evangelical experience himself, his preaching and teaching will degenerate into mere intellectual common sense. It may be smeared over with the teachings of Jesus and may sound beautiful, but there is no power in it to alter anything in us. We cannot get into the life of Jesus by imitation, by trying to do the right thing, because something in us will not do it. We can only enter in by identification with His death. The Cross of Jesus Christ is not the cross of a martyr, but the door whereby God keeps open house for the universe. Anyone can go in through that door. The Cross is the historical presentation of the one Reality there is, viz., Redemption, and if we come to Jesus that Reality works in us by the incoming of the Holy Spirit and we find that we are brought into a new Kingdom. There is something totally different now, we can do what we could not do before. We can show in our bodily life the disposition of Jesus Christ which we receive by means of His Cross, we can begin now to live the kind of life He lived.
The Examined Experience. The evangelical experience is stated in the Synoptics and in John’s writings in its great wonderful revelation form, not in its examined stages; but if we want to have the experience examined and stated so that we can see its stages and get a grasp of it, we must turn to the Epistles. The Epistles are the posthumous writings of the Ascended Lord; He sent the Holy Ghost, and the ‘pens’ used were the apostles, and the expositions given are from the Holy Ghost. Our Lord’s teachings and the expositions given in the Epistles stand or fall together. The Epistles are our guide in finding out the stages of the experience. There we will find all about Conversion, about Regeneration, and about Sanctification. We will find the stages all carefully set forth, but we must take the trouble to find them out. Acts xxvi. 18 gives the examined experience in condensed form better than any other passage in the New Testament. We so often try to worry out Jesus Christ’s statements apart from the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is the workman of God who can rightly divide the word of truth who becomes the expert in the things of God, and when anyone is being led astray by false doctrines, the expert can show what is wrong.
The Exercised Experience. If we have experienced regeneration, we must not only talk about the experience, we must exercise it and work out what God has worked in (Philippians ii. 12–13). We have to show it in our finger-tips, in our tongue, and in our bodily contact with other people, and as we obey God we find we have a wealth of power on the inside. The question of forming habits on the basis of the grace of God is a very vital one. To ignore it is to fall into the snare of the Pharisee—the grace of God is praised, Jesus Christ is praised, the Redemption is praised, but the practical everyday life evades working it out. If we refuse to practise, it is not God’s grace that fails when a crisis comes, but our own nature. When the crisis comes, we ask God to help us, but He cannot if we have not made our nature an ally. The practising is ours, not God’s. God regenerates us and puts us in contact with all His divine resources, but He cannot make us walk according to His will. If we will obey the Spirit of God and practise through our physical life all that God has put in our hearts by His Spirit, then when the crisis comes we shall find that we have not only God’s grace to stand by us but our own nature also, and the crisis is passed without any disaster, but exactly the opposite happens, the soul is built up into a stronger attitude towards God.