“Basic Christianity, Part 24" by Romans
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We are continuing in our Series, “Basic Christianity.” Tonight, we are going to review and examine another facet of Basic Christianity: our Christian walk. To walk is to be in motion. Walking is not standing still, and walking is not hesitation or faltering or retreat. Jesus warns us about staying focused in our walk: “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). The Christian Walk is a walk in a determined direction, and with a fixed destination in mind.
Old Testament believers were also taught about a godly walk. We read, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye” (Psalm 32:8). In Proverbs 4:24-27, we read, “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.” In the New Testament, believers are taught to walk a specific path, a safe and a proven path established and identified by Jesus Christ when He said, “I am the way...”
The word translated “way” in Jesus' above statement is the Greek word “hodos.” According to Strong's Concordance, “hodos” means “a road, a route, and, by implication a progress.” The word “hodos” is also used in literal reference to the roads in Israel and elsewhere: In the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:4 we read, “And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side...” In Matthew 15:32, Jesus said, “I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.” On the original Palm Sunday, we read that “a very great multitude spread their garments in the way” (Matthew 21:8).
Jesus' words, “I am the way,” might well have also been correctly translated, “I am the path...” It gives added meaning and depth to the words He used when He called first disciples: “Follow Me.” Following Jesus involves our actions but also our reactions. He told us to expect opposition: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). And Peter tells us how to respond when we are confronted with opposition and hatred: “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing” (1 Peter 3:9).
Peter also instructs us, “For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:20-23).
Jesus is the Way... the path, and we are to follow Him in our walk, in our actions and reactions, in our priorities, in our choices, in our preferences, and in our habits. Jesus is our example in all things. His example includes not just having lived a perfect life without sin, but a life without deceit, a life of suffering without threatening, and a life without retribution in the face of opposition. If we are ever singled out and persecuted as Christians, in school, on the job or even in the family, Jesus' example to us, for how we should react to hostility, is clear. “Love, do good good to, and bless your enemies” (Matthew 5:44).
The Sermon Bible says Peter's words: “The Great Exemplar. I. That which strikes us first in the example which Christ has left is its faultlessness. We are startled by His own sense of this. He never utters one word to God or to man which implies the consciousness of a single defect. Read the lives of the great servants of God in the Old or New Testament—of Abraham, of Moses, of Samuel, of David, of Elijah, of St. Peter, of St. Paul. They all confess sin. They all humble themselves before men. They implore the mercy of God.
Think of any great man whom you have ever known, or whose life you have read. He has feared God, loved God, worked for God through long years; yet he is full of the sense of his inconsistencies, of his imperfections, pervading his life and his conduct. He is profuse in his acknowledgments of his weakness and of his sin. Nay, if he were not thus willing to confess his sin, you yourself would question his goodness, for what he says is, as you instinctively feel, no more than the fact. But Jesus Christ reproaches Himself for nothing, confesses nothing, regrets nothing.
He is certain of all that He says and does. "I do always those things that please the Father." In this sinlessness He is, although our model, yet beyond our full reach of imitation. We cannot in our maimed and broken lives reproduce the complete image of the immaculate Lamb. The best of men knows that in his best moments he is beset by motives, thoughts, inclinations, from which Christ was utterly free. "If we say that we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
But this does not destroy—on the contrary, it enhances—the value of His ideal example. In all departments of thought and work the ideal is, strictly speaking, by man unattainable. Yet man may never lose sight of the ideal. In the Gospels ideal human life appears in a form of flesh and blood. It is the ideal, and, therefore, it is beyond us; yet it is not the less precious as a stimulus and guide to our effort at self-improvement.
II. And then, again, we are struck by the balance and perfection of excellences in our Lord’s human character. As a rule, if a man possesses some one excellence in an unusual degree, he will be found to exhibit some fault or shortcoming in an opposite direction. Now, of this want of balance in excellence, of this exaggeration of particular forms of excellence, which thus passes into defect, there is no trace in our Lord. Read His life over and over again with this object in view, and, unless I am mistaken, nothing will strike you more than its faultless proportions.
III. Consider, again, a feature which runs through His whole character: its simplicity. In nothing that He says or does can we detect any trace of striving after effect. The number of men of whom anything remotely like this is true is very small indeed. The effort to create an impression is the result sometimes of timidity, sometimes of vanity, but it always impairs moral beauty, whether of speech or work. Our Lord always says what He has to say in the most natural and unpretending words.
His sentences unfold themselves without effort or system, just as persons and occasions demand. Every situation offers an opportunity, and He uses it. He attends a wedding; He cures a paralytic; He stoops to write upon the ground; He eats with a Pharisee; He raises a corpse to life; He washes the feet of His disciples, just as it comes, just as is right from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute.
The most important and useful acts follow on with the most trivial and ordinary. There is no effort, no disturbing or pretentious movement. All is as simple as if all were commonplace. It is this absence of anything like an attempt to produce unusual impressions which reveals a soul possessed with a sense of the majesty and the power of truth. Depend upon it, in the degree in which any man becomes really great, he becomes also simple.
IV. And one further point to be remarked in our Lord’s example is the stress which it lays upon those forms of excellence which make no great show, such as patience, humility, and the like. As we read the Gospels we are led to see that the highest type of human excellence consists less in acting well than in suffering well. The ancient world never understood this. With them virtue was always active force.
Yet the conditions of our human life are such that, whether we will or no, we are more frequently called upon to endure than to act; and upon the spirit in which we endure everything depends. Our Lord restored the passive virtues to their forgotten and true place in human conduct. He revealed the beauty, the majesty, of patience, of meekness, of uncomplaining submission.
Experience has shown that Christ’s Divinity is no bar whatever to an imitation of His life as man. And this imitation is not a duty which we are free to accept or decline. "The elect," says St. Paul, "are predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son of God." If there is no effort at this conformity, there is no note of a true predestination. We cannot enter into the designs of God in giving us His Son if we are making no effort to be like His Son.
Like the law, the life of Christ is a schoolmaster to bring us to the cross of Christ. After gazing at Him we come to Him out of heart with ourselves, emptied, happily emptied, of self, crushed by a sense of our utter unworthiness to bear His name, to wear His livery; and He once more stretches His pierced hand to pardon, and offers the chalice of His blood to strengthen our souls for such work as may remain to make them more like Himself.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1091. References: 1Pe_2:21.—R. Balgarnie, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxix., p. 407; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 152; Ibid., The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 218;
Preacher’s Monthly, vol. v., p. 354; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 91.
Christ our Example. I. While our salvation is specifically described as the effect of our Lord’s greatest obedience—that is, His death—yet, viewing the subject of redemption generally, our salvation is the fruit of His whole obedience. This is apparent from the plan itself of salvation, as revealed to the enlightened mind of a Christian in the Scriptures of truth. It was necessary that the High-priest of our profession should be holy, harmless, undefiled; that of Him, the Victim who suffered for us, it should be asserted and proved that He did no sin, and that guile was not found in His mouth.
II. His history has been before the world for more than eighteen hundred years. For eighteen hundred years the world has frequently made the attempt to imagine a faultless character; but no faultless character has ever been exhibited to mankind but that of our Jesus. His charity, His piety, His purity, His fortitude, His self-possession, His self-denial, His self-government—all prove the perfection of His character and confirm the judgment of His very enemies.
They could not even ground condemnation on the frivolous accusation of the false witnesses, but condemned Him at last for that fact which is the very foundation of our hope: they condemned Him because He declared Himself to be the Son of God, thereby, as they correctly and logically reasoned, making Himself equal with God. The Lord Jesus was condemned for asserting His Divinity.
III. He is now held forth to us as an example, that we should follow His steps. The precise point marked out for our imitation is not obedience simply, but obedience attended with suffering. Our virtues are never to be trusted until they are tried, and they are never tried without suffering. The Christian, then, will bear his trials thankfully.
He will thank God for removing from his heart even that which rends his heart asunder, because he knows that God does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men; that He only sends affliction to effect for us or in us some ulterior blessing; and that it is good for us to be afflicted, affliction working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” W. F. Hook, Parish Sermons, p. 226.
As we begin the actual focus of the Study, namely our Christian Walk, I want to quote, first, from an Old Testament Book that I don't believe I have ever cited previously in these studies. In Micah 6:6-8: “Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
Matthew Henry tells us of this: “Here is the proposal for accommodation between God and Israel, the parties that were at variance in the beginning of the chapter. Upon the trial, judgment is given against Israel; they are convicted of injustice and ingratitude towards God, the crimes with which they stood charged. Their guilt is too plain to be denied, too great to be excused, and therefore,
I. They express their desires to be at peace with God upon any terms (Micah 6:6-7): Wherewith shall I come before the Lord? Being made sensible of the justice of God's controversy with them, and dreading the consequences of it, they were inquisitive what they might do to be reconciled to God and to make him their friend. They apply to a proper person, with this enquiry, to the prophet, the Lord's messenger, by whose ministry they had been convinced.
And it is observable that each one speaks for himself: Wherewith shall I come? Knowing every one the plague of his own heart, they ask, not, What shall this man do? But, What shall I do? Note, Deep convictions of guilt and wrath will put men upon careful enquiries after peace and pardon, and then, and not till then, there begins to be some hope of them. They enquire wherewith they may come before the Lord, and bow themselves before the high God. They believe there is a God, that he is Jehovah, and that he is the high God, the Most High.
Those whose consciences are convinced learn to speak very honourably of God, whom before they spoke slightly of.
Now, 1. We know we must come before God; he is the God with whom we have to do; we must come as subjects, to pay our homage to him, as beggars, to ask alms from him, nay, we must come before him, as criminals, to receive our doom from him, must come before him as our Judge.
2. When we come before him we must bow before him; it is our duty to be very humble and reverent in our approaches to him; and, when we come before him, there is no remedy but we must submit; it is to no purpose to contend with him. 3. When we come and bow before him it is our great concern to find favour with him, and to be accepted of him; their enquiry is, What will the Lord be pleased with? Note, All that rightly understand their own interest cannot but be solicitous what they must do to please God, to avoid his displeasure and to obtain his good-will.
4. In order to God's being pleased with us, our care must be that the sin by which we have displeased him may be taken away, and an atonement made for it. The enquiry here is, What shall I give for my transgression, for the sin of my soul? Note, The transgression we are guilty of is the sin of our soul, for the soul acts... and the soul suffers by it; it is the disorder, disease, and defilement of the soul, and threatens to be the death of it: What shall I give for my transgressions? What will be accepted as a satisfaction to his justice, a reparation of his honour? And what will avail to shelter me from his wrath?
5. We must therefore ask, Wherewith may we come before him? We must not appear before the Lord empty. What shall we bring with us? In what manner must we come? In whose name must we come? We have not that in ourselves which will recommend us to him, but must have it from another. What righteousness then shall we appear before him in?
II. They make proposals, such as they are, in order to it. Their enquiry was very good and right, and what we are all concerned to make, but their proposals betray their ignorance, though they show their zeal; Let us examine them: -
1. They bid high. They offer, (1.) That which is very rich and costly - thousands of rams. God required one ram for a sin-offering; they proffer flocks of them, their whole stock, will be content to make themselves beggars, so that they may but be at peace with God. They will bring the best they have, the rams, and the most of them, till it comes to thousands.
(2.) That which is very dear to them, and which they would be most loth to part with. They could be content to part with their first-born for their transgressions, if that would be accepted as an atonement, and the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul. To those that had become vain in their imaginations this seemed a probable expedient of making satisfaction for sin, because our children are pieces of ourselves; and therefore the heathen sacrificed their children, to appease their offended deities. Note, Those that are thoroughly convinced of sin, of the malignity of it, and of their misery and danger by reason of it, would give all the world, if they had it, for peace and pardon.
2. Yet they do not bid right. It is true some of these things were instituted by the ceremonial law, as the bringing of burnt-offerings to God's altar, and calves of a year old, rams for sin-offerings, and oil for the meat-offerings; but these alone would not recommend them to God. God had often declared that to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams, that sacrifice and offering he would not;
the legal sacrifices had their virtue and value from the institution, and the reference they had to Christ the great propitiation; but otherwise, of themselves, it was impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sin. And as to the other things here mentioned,
(1.) Some of them are impracticable things, as rivers of oil, which nature has not provided to feed men's luxury, but rivers of water to supply men's necessity. All the proposals of peace but those that are according to the gospel are absurd. One stream of the blood of Christ is worth ten thousand rivers of oil.
III. God tells them plainly what he demands, and insists upon, from those that would be accepted of him, (see Micah 6:8). Let their money perish with them that think the pardon of sin and the favour of God may be so purchased; no, God has shown thee, O man! what is good. Here we are told, 1. That God has made a discovery of his mind and will to us, for the rectifying of our mistakes and the direction of our practice.
(1.) It is God himself that has shown us what we must do. We need not trouble ourselves to make proposals, the terms are already settled and laid down. He whom we have offended, and to whom we are accountable, has told us upon what conditions he will be reconciled to us.
(2.) It is a discovery of that which is good, and which the Lord requires of us. He has shown us our end, which we should aim at, in showing us what is good, wherein our true happiness does consist; he has shown us our way in which we must walk towards that end in showing us what he requires of us. There is something which God requires we should do for him and devote to him; and it is good. It is good in itself; there is an innate goodness in moral duties...
2. What that discovery is. The good which God requires of us is not the paying of a price for the pardon of sin and acceptance with God, but doing the duty which is the condition of our interest in the pardon purchased. (1.) We must do justly, must render to all their due, according as our relation and obligation to them are; we must do wrong to none, but do right to all, in their bodies, goods, and good name.
(2.) We must love mercy; we must delight in it, as our God does, must be glad of an opportunity to do good, and do it cheerfully. Justice is put before mercy, for we must not give that in alms which is wrongfully got, or with which our debts should be paid. God hates robbery for a burnt-offering. (3.) We must walk humbly with our God. This includes all the duties of the first table (The first Four Commandments), as the two former include all the duties of the second table (the last Six Commandments).
We must, in the whole course of our conversation, conform ourselves to the will of God, keep up our communion with God, and study to approve ourselves to him in our integrity; and this we must do humbly (submitting our understandings to the truths of God and our will to his precepts and providences); we must humble ourselves to walk with God (so the margin reads it); every thought within us must be brought down, to be brought into obedience to God, if we would walk comfortably with him. This is that which God requires, and... is more than all burnt-offerings and sacrifices.”
In Psalm 143:8, King David offers a prayer that speaks to our need for direction in Christian Walk: “Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.”
The Sermon Bible says of this: “The text may be said to comprise every other prayer. If God gives His servant to "know the way wherein he should walk," and strength to walk in it, peace, and order, and liberty, and joy will soon come. Life is a daily difficulty. Think of the number of things that are to be believed, that are to be renounced, that are to be examined, that are to be distinguished in themselves and from other things, that are to be tentatively dealt with, that are to be done, that are to be left undone, that are to be waited for, that are to be suffered. All these are included in the "way wherein we should walk."
I. Opinions and beliefs. There can be no living way for a man that does not involve these. We are bound to form them, and the point is that there is very great difficulty in forming some of them or in keeping them when we have them. Any one of us, if we will, may be of them that believe to the saving of the soul. How? By bringing the whole case fully and earnestly before God.
If we come really to Him, we have solved the difficulty, we have come into the new and living way, and God will make that way more and more plain before our face; whereas if we abide among the exterior things—examining, considering, comparing, putting this opinion against that, and working the whole matter simply as a high intellectual problem, without ever making the last and highest appeal—we have no certainty of a good and true issue.
II. Conduct. In respect of conduct also we find life to be a scene of constant difficulty. Even those who know the way they should go, so far as it consists of beliefs, convictions, principles, find it still in their practice to be a way of continual difficulty. What can we do? We can pray.
We can use this text and get the benefits it carries. The solution of all difficulty, be it what it may, is "to lift up the soul to God." God is the God of peace; and to lift up the soul to Him is to rise out of storm into calm, is to leave the self-made troubles of life beneath us while we mount up on eagles’ wings into His eternal and {immeasurable} tranquility.” ~ A. Raleigh, From Dawn to the Perfect Day, p. 190. References: Psa_143:8.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 564. Psa_143:9.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Genesis to Proverbs, p. 169.”
As long as we are in this flesh, there will be occasions in our Christian Walk when we will cave to temptation. Jesus was sinless; we cannot be sinless, but we can sin less through the indwelling lead and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. And each victory over individual sin, even over our own besetting sins, strengthens us against yielding to future temptations. Slowly, one step at a time in our walk, one victory at a time in our walk, we can identify with the “more than conqueror” description of the believer spoken of in Romans 8:37, as we are also empowered by the unfailing love of Christ.
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Basic Christianity, Part 24.”
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on March 10th, 2020.
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