SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
Deuteronomy 18:1-5: Hebrews 12:1-14
It is important to bear in mind when thinking about how we make spiritual progress, how we become spiritual persons, that God has great thoughts in mind for us. God has not merely considered us for salvation from our sins, but He desires that every man should be like Christ. We cannot elect ourselves out of that. God desires that every person – you, me, every one in this room and every man, woman and child – should be just like His own beloved Son. There are two orders of men introduced in Scripture; one is Adam and the other is Christ. The history of Adam is that he failed, and the history of Christ is that He entirely satisfied God in every respect. When we are young Christians, we may desire to do things to please the Lord Jesus and to please God, but as we get older we realise that what God really wants is to work in our souls and work in our affections to make us like His own beloved Son. We might desire to do some great thing for God, but God desires that, in our own places and in our own lives, we should walk and sow to the Spirit so that we become like His own beloved Son. That is what pleases God most. To this end, He has given us of His own Spirit, and we spoke of that in the reading this afternoon. The Spirit glorifies Christ, and the only way in which we can follow these scriptures which I have read is in the power, and with the help, of the Holy Spirit.
The first scripture in Deuteronomy speaks of the food which the priests ate. Priests speak of spiritual people who approach God, who have links with God. So it tells us that if we want to be spiritual and please God, we must eat the right kind of food. If we want to become spiritual, dear brethren, we need to discern between good food and bad food. The priests’ food was Jehovah’s offering by fire, the sacrifices. They speak of the Lord Jesus Himself and the precious work which He accomplished on the cross. So we see these offerings in the gospels. John’s gospel gives us the burnt-offering and Luke the oblation; it is great food. One point that I would like to make is that the priests ate of the sacrifices – what had come through death. They also ate of the oblation, although even then the part which was offered to Jehovah was burned on the altar, suggesting that the fragrance of that life came out in the laying of it down; and they ate of the devoted things of which we also read. There is nothing in this world that can be fed on in this way, dear friends, only what is of Jesus Christ. What blessed food He is for us, the One who went into death to save us from our sins, the One who took on the whole will of God and fulfilled it to God’s eternal satisfaction.
While these offerings, speaking to us of the Lord Jesus, are presented to us as light and as food, and as knowledge and understanding, yet we see in the next section something that is very important; that is that the priests ate of the shoulder, the jawbone and the maw. That tells us that to become spiritual, we need to put our strength into it – that is the shoulder, showing that we cannot drift into these things. The jawbone speaks to us of the need to chew our food; we do not just swallow it straight away. We enjoy this food and take it in; we take time to eat it. The world would take away that time and would give us no time for anything else, but we need to spend time to eat good spiritual food and grow, and understand, and enjoy it. It goes from just being in our heads to our understandings. Then the meaning of the maw is that the food goes down further into the stomach and begins to be taken into our inwards and our affections. A cow will chew its food, eat it and swallow it, and then it will bring it back up and chew it again and swallow it several times. That is how spiritual food becomes formed in us. We feed on it, we enjoy it, we take time and the Spirit helps us to work it out in our lives. Then we feed on it again; it keeps working. The more we feed on and enjoy this food, the more we appreciate the pathway and worth of the Lord Jesus. It comes into our inwards as we feed and are formed like that blessed Man. We become like the One on whom we feed; so we must get other men out of our sight, and have only Christ before us, then we will become like Him. As we feed on this food, we see that the first fruits are ours – the corn, the new wine and the oil. The very best belongs to us, and we begin to discern and understand that the very best things belong to spiritual persons, persons who have the Spirit and enjoy these things.
Hebrews helps us on another side of this matter. It shows us how in our circumstances and in matters that come up in our lives, we get help as we turn to Him to be formed like the Lord. That is, we come to know God and to know the Lord Jesus through our experience with Him in our circumstances. A man in the world may fall into bad circumstances, ill health or something like that, and he can become bitter against God, but the believer turns to God and finds that he gets the knowledge of God through turning to God in these circumstances.
The Hebrews were Jews who had converted to Christianity. As Jews, they had previously had the Jewish temple, they had the sacrifices, they had the robes, they had the priests. Ostensibly they had God; they had a status in this world, and these Jewish believers had given all that up to become Christians. Outwardly, or publicly, all that it would seem they received in return for giving all this up was persecution, suffering, loss of houses, their families casting them out, the synagogue casting them out. They might have wondered if they were on the right path, and if they had done the right thing. We may find difficulties in our lives and we may wonder if we are really doing what is right. But the writer seeks to encourage them, to show them that the path they were on was the same way that all these persons of faith in the previous chapter had followed. These great men, Enoch and Moses, Isaac and Joseph, had all been on that same path of suffering that the Hebrews were on. But this scripture says, “having so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, laying aside every weight, and sin which so easily entangles us, run with endurance the race…”. The writer says in principle, ‘You are on the right road that leads to Christ in heaven. Do not let these weights and sin and other obstacles hold you back. You are on the right road’. He shows us that the Father allows circumstances for our chastening so that we should be partakers of His holiness. Mr. Coates has said that as Christ is formed in us, and as we grow up into Him, we become partakers of God's holiness, and thus more and more suited to His house1. If we are partaking of His holiness, it means that we become like Christ, the very Man that God loves. God is holy and He has found in that blessed Man such holiness that He delighted in.
God the Father would allow things to come into our lives which would help us to see that man after Adam’s order is not pleasing to God, but to see the need to accept Christ, the Man before God for His pleasure. So the writer says, “laying aside every weight, and sin”. We leave aside the things that will hinder us in this race, things that will not help us to run towards Christ, things that are not profitable for us. Sin will hinder our link with the Lord Jesus and stop us in this race. It says here that the Lord loves whom He chastens, so that when difficulties arise in our lives, we can turn to divine Persons and They help us. The writer says, in effect, that the chastening of the Father, which we often think of as hindrances and difficulties, is actually the Father helping us. Often when we look back on our lives, we find that the times when we were brighter and most enjoyed our link with God were when things were most difficult for us. We find then that God is a God who is for us, and can help us, and would bring us near to Him, and our links with Him become so much better.
Dear brethren, if we want to progress and make spiritual progress we must do it despite the presence of evil. What is of God in us is greater than the flesh. We must first learn to deal with the flesh in ourselves and turn to the Lord for help. We must get help against the evil outside ourselves by the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews says here that, in the presence of difficulties and evil, we must go on whatever the circumstances, and the motive for us to go on is Jesus, the Leader and Completer of faith. He endured the cross and despised the shame. He was not turned aside by the most terrible evil, and He is so great that God has put Him at His right hand. That is the goal for everyone who walks in this pathway of faith; they are on a moral road to heaven to be with Christ.
Then it goes on, “For consider well him who endured.” Consider Him! Think of that blessed One who endured and went on despite such contradiction. The end of all this is given in verse 11, which says, “but afterwards yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those exercised by it”. Men in the world do not get this benefit, they do not worry about sin in themselves, they do not think about God in their circumstances. They turn against God when things go wrong, but dear brethren, the Christian knows that God is towards us; He never allows more than we are able to bear, and He is going to bring us through to glory. God is going to make us like Christ as long as we maintain our links with Him. So the writer says, You have all this suffering now, but “lift up the hands that hang down”. Go on the right road and God will bless you, and remember that the end of the race is Christ in glory. We are in the race morally from earth to heaven! The end for every believer is glory with the Lord Jesus. Let us use our time here to be formed like Christ and to make spiritual progress in our souls by feeding on Christ. Let Him sink into our understanding and into our affections, through the quiet contemplation of divine things, and by going on and progressing in the presence of difficulties and evil here, considering that these difficulties are only matters that the Father has allowed for our own chastening. Dear young believer, if God allows something in your life that you find very hard, then if you accept it from the Father and turn to Him, He will help you and form you like Christ to be able to deal with it. We will not be overcome by it, because if we are like Christ, we will overcome evil, not be overcome by evil.
Well, brethren, let us be encouraged by these things and go on, run the race with endurance, look to Christ and maintain our links with Him by the Holy Spirit. May we do so for His name’s sake.
Address at Anand, India
27 December 2013
N.C. McKay