II CORINTHIANS 4:10-12

JUNE 28, 2009

EXORDIUM: There is something we all have in common, but we seldom talk about it – the Christian life and how to live it. That may be part of the reason that we stumble sometimes, or make little progress or alienate others along the way.

Perhaps we haven’t really learned how to walk, in the way Paul meant in Ephesians when he said, “walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called.”

Fortunately, we have guides here. Our Lord Jesus is the Chief, and right behind Him is the great Apostle Paul. Listen to this word of his: “Always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” (II Corinthians 4:10)

The dying of the Lord Jesus- Of course He was subject to death and threatened by death from His infancy. He carried death around as He lived. So Paul is saying,

• “ I die daily”;

• “I am being killed all the daylong”;

• “I want to know the fellowship of His sufferings being conformed to His death”;

• “I want to fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ in my flesh.”

These verses speak of the intimate union between Christ and the believer at the point of His dying and His death. This is built on the unity between the Jewish High Priest and the people of Israel. The priest became one of them by bearing their names on his chest in the holy place and by having the anointing oil of His consecration flow down from his head on his robes, representing the union between priest and people. In the same way the believer is united to his High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ.

It was this concept of Scripture that shaped John Calvin’s doctrine of the Christian life- He found it explained and applied in many parts of his Bible. He walked by this truth so that his theology and his life were “all of one piece”, (J.I. Packer’s phrase) and were his life and his thought both founded on the Word of God as the Holy Spirit had led him to understand it.

How useful Calvin was walking by this rule. Though he died at age 54 so that he only had about 30 years of service he left a tremendous amount of work done and influence exerted. So, that now after 500 years, we stop to remember him and give thanks for him. He gave us over four thousand sermons, two thousand letters, five volumes of articles, booklets, and catechisms which he wrote, 88 missionaries sent out from his church in Geneva, and many students deployed into The Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Germany, England and Scotland.

Geneva, Switzerland had been transformed from a city that had been full of drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution to center of piety and enlightenment. Its effect reached the United States and affected the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and later, in England, George Whitfield and Charles Spurgeon.

Let’s unfold further this insight of Calvin’s that can be so helpful in our Christian living.

1. LET’S START AT THE BASICS:

THE BIG PICTURE SURROUNDING OUR CHRISTIAN LIVES

God created us as an order of beings in His image, and had for us a pattern of life we were to follow. Summed up we might say it was. “Be holy as I am holy.” You will find your peace and happiness and eternal life in coalescing your will into mine. His will for us was that we should glorify Him and enjoy Him always.

But our sin destroyed God’s order for us. Our love turned to lust; our God-centeredness became self-centeredness; our peace turned into anxiety and worry. Instead of serving others, we became self-serving. The order is gone and the pattern is broken. Man is fallen by his own will.

God who is rich in mercy chose to restore the pattern and gave us His Son to be an example, a model, and a template of what life is to look like once more. We were not able to follow Him in our fallen nature. Merely having His example was not enough for us. We lacked the power within to make that change. Left to ourselves we would reject that pattern.

It was God’s will that His Son should suffer and die as the payment of the penalty for our sin, and that He would rise again and ascend back to Heaven. This action of His, His death, Resurrection, and Ascension would be the pattern as well as the enabling of the restored life, the new life for His people. It is the Holy Spirit’s work to show Christ’s death and resurrection to us in such a way that we believe on Him. The Spirit unites us to Him in a way so deep that we become as it were, members of His body.

Our union with Him is so vital and strong that we participate with Him in His Death and Resurrection and Ascension to Heaven. Our faith joins us to Him so that we are identified with Him in the cross, in Easter resurrection, and in His going up to Heaven.

We are conformed to Christ on our level, as He is conformed to us on His level, in something of the same way as the candidate for office is related to the average voter. The former shows up at the polls and there are cameras waiting to film his voting. But, not so for “John Q. Public”. They both vote and their votes are equal but each on its own level.

1. LOOK WITH ME AT THE PLACE OF THE CROSS IN YOUR CHRISTIAN LIFE

The reason that the cross is so necessary is what Calvin called concupiscence, that root of evil deep in our souls. It is that which gives rise to desire and evil lusts.

You may be able to feel it your self. It begins with fluttering a fantasy across your mind, which has some kind of interest for you. Then you find yourself beginning to desire this and want to know more about it. You ponder how would that come about? Then at last your will decides to do the thing and you set in motion the wheels to actually carry it out. The beginning of that thing is called concupiscence.

How shall that ugly thing in us be overcome? It can only be rendered weak and inoperative by our being crucified with Christ. That is, realizing that we were in Him when he died and in a sense we died with Him.

That happens in two ways within us. Recall how Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up His cross and follow me.” That is how Jesus came to the cross; willingly. He denied Himself and His own love of life. He denied all the vital forces of his own survival and laid down his life voluntarily for us.

This self-denial is to resonate in us and become the heart of our Christian walk –saying “no” to self- to concupiscence, to pride, to the pleasures of this world. It is what the Book of Revelation means when it commends “those who overcome.” We overcome sin when we crucify self with its demands. That is what is meant here – the carrying around in our bodies the dying of the Lord Jesus. We are to make this practice the main feature of our Christian living.

That is what John Calvin did. He was constantly saying “no” to himself. When his friend, Farel, urged him to stay in Geneva and help with the work of the Reformation, he very much wanted to go on to his beloved Strasbourg, to study in the tranquility and peace of that place. But the godly Calvin yielded and moved to the ungodly Geneva.

Likewise when it came to die, He prayed to God “You are crushing my head, but that it is Your hand is enough for me.” He gave up food, sleep, health, the leisure to study as he loved to do, and laid himself out for the Church and the City to which God had called him. In this, he embodied the heroism which he taught others. In his work on self-denial, He had said to them “the lack of heroic quality in a life is the cause of sin.”

There is another aspect to carrying about the dying of the Lord Jesus. It is the “bearing the cross.” Whereas self-denial is inward, this is an outward practice of the Christian life. It refers to how we handle unwelcome and hard events and conditions that come into our life: afflictions, losses, and setbacks. We identify with Jesus when we carry these hard things, these disappointments, the way He carried His cross.

You may remember how in the Passion of Christ, Jim Cassuli, picked up that rough heavy cross and laying it upon his wounded shoulder, he had a faint smile on his face, as if to say I carry my cross with joy because my Father has appointed this to me. When the stock market slides downward, the car is wrecked or fire changes our lives, are we broken or can we smile and carry that thing for the glory of God?

Calvin and Idolette had three children who died in infancy, one still within the womb, though he had deep grief, his strong composure and trust in God allowed him to go forward with is work.

Once, he was driven out of Geneva for his strong teachings and his stands on civic morals and was in exile for three years until he was invited back by the town fathers. He went right away to the Church and picked up his lectures on Job at the very verse where he had left off when he was sent away. That is “bearing the cross” with the Master. That is part of Christian living.

III. AFTER DEATH COMES RESURRECTION. WE ARE ALSO TO SHOW FORTH THE LIFE OF JESUS IN OUR CHRISTIAN WALK.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

By being united to Christ’s rising from the dead. We read in Romans 6:3, “just as Christ was raised for the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

You will recall from the Easter message how we are called not only to stand up as Christians who have been raised from death to life, but also to stand out, because we go on to walk according to the new life Christ has given us. In this, we are showing forth His life in our mortal bodies. Jesus comes alive to those around us. He becomes visible and real because we are so deeply united to Him that they can see his living presence in us.

The other way in which our union with Christ affects our daily walk is His ascension. Forty days after he rose from the dead, He was taken up into Heaven and His followers saw Him go. He ascended to draw us with Him, to bring us to glory with Him. He had promised “where I am there you shall be also.”

Whatever Christ has promised us, we already possess. We are even now with Him in heavenly places, spiritually. So, we live that out by meditating on heavenly things, and future glories with Christ. We lay up treasures in heaven instead of being tangled up with things of this earth. In the Christian life the stress is always on the future things. We look upward and onward.

It must be our intense aim to focus on Him. It is not natural to us to meditate on Him in His heavenly state, to pray to Him there, to commune with Him there. We must put away our picture of Jesus by the seashore, in fact all pictures of Jesus. He is high and lifted up. Eye has not seen nor ear heard yet of His great majesty.

This kind of meditating on the risen and ascended Christ is a vital part of our Christian walk. Calvin used the example of the unjust steward of Luke 16 to spur us on. Think of how keen that fellow was to prepare for his future, to plan and work for what would happen when he was out of job. That kind of intense focus on the future life will change our conduct in the here and now.

Calvin practiced what he preached. He preached of the vanity and troubles of this life and kept pointing people to what was ahead. He lived a spartan life, using every moment in the preparation of himself and others for eternal life, passing out evangelistic tracts on the streets of Geneva to tell people of the folly of living only for this world, and not focusing on the life to come.

He taught as well the enjoyment with gratitude of the life we now have. But we are to see it as passing and unhappy in so many ways when compared to what Christ has prepared for us. He taught us that when we taste the sweetness of this world God is whetting our appetite and our hope to seek after the full reality of God’s good gift in the life to come.

This absorption with future things will help us overcome the fear of death. He taught that our faith will compel us ardently to seek what our human nature dreads. In death, we are returned from exile to dwell in the “homeland”.

All this cannot be done unaided by the human mind. We need the Holy Spirit to use the sacramental worship of the church to be a ladder by which our thoughts can ascend to Heaven and we can deny ourselves and bear our crosses valiantly. Worship is the hand of God stretched down to us in order to lift us up to the heavenly places.

Glen C. Knecht