I want to spend some time looking at the reality of knowing Christ. We just spent the last five or six weeks looking at the reality of sanctification and to be quite honest there’s not much difference between the two. Sanctification is the means by which we know Christ, it’s the putting off of one, and the putting on of another. Or you could say it’s the putting off of the lie and putting on the full knowledge of God in Christ.
I’m want to read a small section from a Sparks book that I think does a great job laying the foundation for where I hope we allow the Lord to take us this morning. Sparks says: now I ought to put an hour in, just here, on two Greek words in the New Testament. I took the trouble to go to the New Testament with these two Greek words; and I got a surprise, after a good many years of study in the New Testament, to find that I had sheets of paper full of references on these two words, both of which are translated into English as the word “know”. Yet, these two Greek words are two entirely different words in two entirely different realms. One Greek word means, “knowing by information.” You know it, because you have been told. You heard it, you have read it, and so you know that way. The other Greek word for “know” is an entirely different word that means, “you have a personal experience of that thing,” and you know it because it is done something in you and become a part of you. Is your history, it is your experience. Is your life – it is you.
Sparks goes on to say the New Testament can be divided by those two Greek words. For example “know”: “this is life eternal, that they may know me,” not by information but the word here is “experience”. To have an experience of Christ, this is life. And it’s that kind of knowing that I want to spend the majority of the time looking at.
I think most of us here would agree that humanity spends most of its time knowing by information. The Adamic man fell into a state that required he provide everything for himself, not having anything to begin with, nor the capacity to keep anything, to hold anything, to bear anything, we are forced to always search within our self for something that’s just not there. It’s a brutal and vicious condition, but we have become quite accustomed to it and we do it very naturally. There is a verse in second Timothy that I think describes this condition very well, and in my opinion, this is one of the most obvious symptoms of the Adamic disease. The verse reads: “always learning, but never being able to come to a full knowledge of the truth.” This condition started right in the beginning of Genesis, Adam was created with the desire for the full knowledge of the truth, and prior to the fall he was in a grand union with the source of this full knowledge. Adam was given a capacity to understand and bear the truth, and at the very same time he was provided an environment of unlimited resource, truth in the fullest natural sense. And what Adam fell from was the source, not his desire, but the source, the fulfillment of his desire. This continues to be the state of humanity today, a desire for the full knowledge of the truth but forever separated from the one and only source. There is a verse in Ecclesiastes 3 that says “He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.”
Now, of course, in the pre-fall Genesis story this is only a shadow of what we have now come to in Christ. The greatness of our salvation is certainly not that we have been rejoined to the full knowledge of the created world but that our soul has been born into an entirely new and heavenly creation, a creation where the Adamic condition has no place. First Timothy 2:4 says God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth. Notice the distinction between being saved and coming to a full knowledge of the truth. The verse does not say God who desires all men to be saved which is the full knowledge of the truth, no, the greatness of our salvation is not the fact of being saved. The greatness of our salvation is not the forgiveness of sins. The greatness of our salvation is nothing less than Christ in you. The substance of our salvation is a union with God in Christ, and apart from coming into the full knowledge of that reality we are left stuck living out from our natural mind always learning, but never being able to come to a full knowledge of the truth.
Now if you’re anything like me, there are going to be some problems. You see I spent the last 29 years of my life walking out the Adamic curse, only ever relying on myself for any answers. Sure, I may seek help and advice in looking for answers through various sources, such as friends, family members, even the church, but at the end of all my searching I have found I come up empty every time. There is a parable in Luke chapter 12 that has caught my attention lately and you’re all probably familiar with it. I won’t read the whole thing but let me just tell you begins with a man looking for answers to his questions, knowledge. And he did the only thing that man has ever been capable of doing when seeking truth, he reasoned within himself… And I’ll at least tell you that the story ends with God rebuking the man and calling him a fool.
Now, what am I trying to get at here? The fact of the matter is that for us here today who have indeed been born-again and translated into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love, for us to reason within ourselves would make us 1000 times the fool that that man was in Luke. But I can promise you we do it ourselves all the time, we stop short of the full knowledge of God in Christ and we lead ourselves down a path of destruction.
Galatians warns us about this saying, “but now, knowing God, but rather be known by God, how do you turn again to the weak and poor elements to which again you desire to be a slave?” A slave? Yes. Apart from the full knowledge of God we are slaves to self-obsession. The New Testament is full of verse references that call those walking in the flesh slaves. Galatians 5 says, “therefore stand firm in the freedom with which Christ made us free and do not be held again in the yoke of slavery.” Again Galatians 4: “So that you know more are a slave, but a son, and if a son, also an heir of God through Christ.” Romans 8, “For you received not a spirit of slavery again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by which we cry, Abba! father!” Hebrews saying that “Through death, Christ might do away with the one having the power of death, this is, the devil; and might set these free, as many as by fear of death were subject to slavery through all the time to live.” The household of slavery is such a familiar place that it feels just like home to us.
Now maybe some you don’t feel like slaves, but for those of us who are nodding our heads on the inside there is a grand opportunity for freedom and this freedom is found in the Cross of Christ. It is in the cross of Christ that God has given the entire world an opportunity for freedom from slavery in the death of His Son. You see that’s the miracle of our salvation, like we said earlier, not just being saved, but God providing a way for us to participate and experience and find our whole being in Him… this is exactly what Paul’s talking about when he says… “I count all things to be loss because of the Excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them to be trash, that I might gain Christ and be found in Him.” Now that is true Christianity, not a system of do’s and don’ts but an inward revelation of the Excellency of the knowledge of Christ. You are a Christian because Christ is in you, but you experience Christian life, true Christianity, when the life of the one who is in you is made known to you, and Paul tells us in Galatians that it is the pleasure of the father to reveal his son in us, not just to us, but in us.
You know there are so many of us who walk around trying to figure out what to do to please God and this little portion of Galatians clearly tells us God finds pleasure in his work only. The father is pleased when He reveals His Son in His Sons body. I wish we could get a hold of that. Again, later on we hear “for it is God who is working in you both to will and to work for the sake of His good pleasure.” And again in Ephesians, “For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus.” There’s nothing else for you and I to do, God has a finished work, a perfect full work, and the only thing there is for us to do is allow Him to work the truth of that reality in our soul. So you can take this or leave it but the bottom line is that God’s work is done in you, not through you. Colossians clearly tells us that all hope and expectation finds it’s beginning with Christ in you and that hope and expectation is for glorification and it finds expression in your soul. You don’t get too much further along in the Colossians letter before you hear “for you have died, and your life has been hidden with Christ in God. Whenever Christ our life is revealed, then also you will be revealed with Him in glory.” And I know we’ve all heard Jason say this a million times but that word is translated in most Bibles when, when Christ is revealed, but the literal is the word whenever, anytime, as often as, each time, every time. So what is his describing to us? It’s telling us that for those who desire that the father be pleased, he has made a way for that to happen as often as we allow it to happen.
So how many times does that need to happen, once, 10 times, 10,000 times? Ask yourself, how many times does the light of a natural day need to be revealed for us to live in the good of the day? It just for an hour in the morning? Or on the third Sunday of every month? That’s silly. Even in our fallen natural life we still need awareness and knowledge and understanding of where we are to participate in humanity. It has to be constant. The type of knowledge so often proclaimed in the New Testament is a knowledge or an awareness that demands participation, it demands the inward revelation of Christ.
Now maybe I got ahead of myself so let me take a few steps back and talk about faith for a moment. Faith is the beginning of knowledge, faith is where all things of God are accessed and kept. Faith is how you access the full knowledge of the truth. I’m sure were all familiar with the verse in Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ, and I live; yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God.” That is access to the mind of God through the acceptance of your death with Christ. Now I didn’t say your death with Christ starts with the acceptance of it, you’re dead with Christ whether you accept it or not but your participation in the mind of God begins with your acceptance of that death. But that’s just the beginning… You never can stop accepting that death, the death of the cross, if you desire to continue in faith and to grow up in the knowledge of Christ, being conformed to His image, it is a constant putting on of the new which results in a constant putting off of the old, putting off of the old man, the slave to fear. Paul says it this way in the letter to the Ephesians: “for by grace you are having been saved, through faith.” I like the translation in the literal because it says having been saved and not have been, even though both are true, but we’re not talking about the fact of salvation, were talking about the experience of salvation and through faith we are having been saved, by faith we are coming in to an ever growing understanding of the creation we are now occupied with, and occupied by.
This may be a good opportunity to expand on something I said earlier. And what I said was that there was no place in this new creation for the Adamic condition. This condition, simply put, is who we are apart from God. That condition is all we’ve ever known and identified with, in fact, this condition has provided us with everything we know about ourselves and who we’ve grown up to be and that person stands in opposition with God. We were created for purpose; we were created to find the fullness of ourselves in the expression of who God is, God’s identity, not us becoming God, but us becoming a participant in His life. And everything we are, of our self, is in the way. Now I know in the last several weeks we’ve been talking about sanctification, being set apart, being removed from the world, finding our home in Christ, but part of being sanctified from the world is also being set apart from all of the identity the world has given our soul. And really the only identity our soul has apart from God is the worlds identity. Any and all association we have with the world will ultimately make an impression on us and provide us with our so-called unique identity. And it’s not our identity, it’s the worlds, we give expression to the world and everywhere we make a truce with something of this world we have also sacrificed and forfeited something of our inheritance in Christ. That’s true. In all the places we let the world rule our soul we refuse the Lordship of Christ. In effect we say: “not here Lord, this part still belongs to me, it’s under my rule and my authority and I will give it expression.” It’s a terrible thing but we claim to be God all the time in our souls.
Well, so, what’s the way out? Are we tired yet of being our own king? Are we sick yet of this slavery that we like to call freedom? For the Lord’s sake, I hope we are. And if we are, and have been born from above, then we are out, and we are in Him, and In Him we have boldness and access in confidence through His faith to stand in His victory making His victory our own victory. There’s a great verse in first John chapter 5 that describes this. Verse 4 says, “because everything having been generated of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory overcoming the world, our faith.” This verse is absolutely saturated with expectation and confidence and assurance; but don’t just believe the verse, you can’t just read that verse, convince yourself it’s true and go on about your life. This victory requires that you come to know and understand and grow up and experience God’s victory in His Son. You can’t take this for granted. Knowing the Lord can’t be a hobby, it can’t be something just for Sunday mornings, knowing the Lord has got to be something that we are utterly dedicated to because knowing the Lord is how we are being saved. T. Austin-Sparks says “be unreservedly and utterly committed to the increase of Christ” he goes on to say “I think that means something more than becoming a Christian, for many, many who are children of God, yes, genuinely born again, are not utterly committed. No, there are some other interests. They’ve got one foot, or even one toe, in the world, still something where there are alternatives to utterness.”
More recently the Lord has been dealing with me about something that I severely misunderstood, it was having a heart wholly set on the Lord. You hear about Joshua and Caleb having a different kind of spirit whose hearts were fully and wholly set upon the Lord and for a long time I looked at that as an extreme option, being utterly committed to the Lord was definitely the fast track but I actually thought there were other options, the not so fast track, or the back roads. It’s almost like I agreed that there were highways, that being a heart fully set on the Lord was an option, but ignorantly took comfort in the misunderstanding that there is actually such a thing as a heart partially set upon the Lord. The Lord was harsh in dealing with me on that. All other roads are closed, He said. You either have a heart fully set upon the Lord or you’re going down the wrong path. Paul calls this walking as an enemy of the cross of Christ, children of God who truly have a citizenship in heaven, who walk with their mind set on natural desires giving expression and headship to the world in their soul. There is warning after warning throughout the entire New Testament, and the Old Testament for that matter. Those warnings are for us who have partiality in our hearts.
Just a few weeks ago I did a word search on the word “lest” which by definition means “with the intention of preventing something undesirable or to avoid the risk of something undesirable happening” it’s a warning to describing what’s inevitable for those people who do not take refuge in God’s victory. The only thing outside of God’s victory is defeat and death. Just take the book of Hebrews for example, the word lest occurs nine times after some sort of warning or admonition. Let’s just look at a few.
Hebrews 2:1 Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the things that we have heard, lest we drift away.
And if the words, the more earnest heed, don’t get it done for you, it means a sincere and intense conviction to pay attention or take notice of something. Lest we drift away, or you will be carried away, the current of the world will grab you and pull you in another direction.
Hebrews 3:12 Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.
Beware, be on guard, look out, take warning, and in this particular verse it’s in reference to entering into God’s rest or coming to experience the full knowledge of the truth. Verse 13 goes on to say but exhort yourselves each day (that is urge yourselves each day, encourage yourselves each day, press, push, insist) as long as it is being called today, that not any of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. And what is the deceitfulness of sin? Well I suppose it would start a lot like that parable in Luke with the ignorance that we can reason within ourselves and find anything of truth and satisfaction.
Hebrews 4:11 therefore, let us be diligent to enter into that rest, lest anyone fall into the same example of disobedience.
Here we have a similar warning admonishing us to turn our hearts to the Lord so that we don’t become expressions of everything found outside of Christ, expressions of defeat and what God has already conquered and put away.
Let’s just look at one more verse and then I’ll wrap up.
Hebrews 12:14-15 eagerly pursue peace and holiness with all, without which no one will see the Lord, watching diligently, lest any of you fall short of the grace of God, that no root of bitterness growing up may crowd in on you and through this may be defiled.
I hope we can all feel the intensity of what the Hebrews author is trying to communicate here, not just in this last verse but all the ones we’ve looked at. God has made a deposit in our soul and that deposit is Christ, in Whom is the full knowledge of the truth of God and this deposit was made with an expectation, an expectation of increase, an increase in the form of conforming your entire soul into a habitation of God’s full expression. In second Timothy Paul tells us to guard the good Deposit, but he doesn’t stop there, he tells us how, he says guard it and keep it by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. And the word dwelling is extremely important to the security of the deposit because it requires that we give the Holy Spirit absolute liberty in our soul. To dwell somewhere means to reside there and make it your home and to allow Christ dwell in us by faith we need to relinquish any claim we have in ourselves. Because whether we realize it or not when we were born again we signed over all authority to God. If you like, you can think of it as a real estate transaction, as soon as the title transfers that land is under complete ownership by another person, and in our case that person is Christ. In order for Him to dwell in our soul, He needs to build His kingdom and the land will need to come under His authority.
Do you know why parents usually hesitate to give little children anything of great value? I mean you probably wouldn’t give a five-year-old $100 bill, or an expensive diamond ring or anything of great value without proper supervision. And the reason why is I’m sure clear to all of us, it’s because five year olds are ignorant to the knowledge of value. Here’s a funny story. Last week was Easter and my sister had an Easter egg hunt. And my nephew who is not quite two yet was there with some of his cousins who are older, around 10 or 12 years old. Now hidden throughout the house were these Easter eggs, and in some of the eggs were candy, and some of the eggs were money. And at the end of the hunt after all the eggs had been found, the older kids, having an understanding of money and the value it has found it very easy to trade with my little nephew the money he had found for some of the leftover empty plastic eggs. And of course he didn’t care, a bright green plastic egg looks like a lot more fun than a piece of paper. And you can’t make children grow up faster than time allows, but had he been older he would’ve understood the value of what was contained inside the egg and having understanding and knowledge the contents would have been better protected and not just forfeited for a piece of junk.
I think you can see what I’m getting at. What we’re at risk of handing over is something much, much greater and unlike money, and the only possible reason anyone would ever resist so great a salvation is because we have not come to know as we are known. I’m not talking about losing your salvation, that is not what we’re dealing with here; I’m talking about walking away from the right to have the Spirit Himself witness with our spirit that we are children of God through the revelation of Christ in you. The entire Hebrews letter is about just that, coming out of the first and coming into what God has established in the second. And in fact that’s what your entire Bible is about. Bringing our souls into an ever-increasing understanding of “but now in Christ.”
The Hebrews author insists this is necessary. Chapter 6 starts off by saying therefore, having left the word of the beginning of Christ, let us be born on to maturity. And being born on to maturity is coming to the full knowledge of the truth.
So let me just close by reading first Timothy 2:4 again. And if you have a New King James translation or some other translation it may say come to a knowledge of truth, omitting the word full, but to interpret the Greek word used their correctly it is a full knowledge and in any literal translation it will say full knowledge.
God, who desires all men to be saved AND to come to a full knowledge of truth. Amen.
