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Scripture Readings: John 1: 1 to 18; and First John Chapter 1.
Text: "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls." Matthew 11:28-29
"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life; for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us; that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. First John 1:1-3
The only Christ I know is the personal Christ with the nail prints in His hands and the spear wounds in His side. I teach Christ, not just for a short time two thousand years ago, but from eternity to eternity. "Jesus the same yesterday, today and forever. And those words "the same" mean just this that He is the same through all eternity. When He said "He that seeth me seeth the Father also it means that the eternal, unchangeable "I Am" who inhabiteth eternity, is always and forever, in goodness and loving kindness, just what Christ is. "No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, hath declared Him." "No man knoweth the Son but the Father and He to whomsoever the Son may declare Him." We have seen and bare witness to you that this infinite immortal, fulness of live (life) and love was with the Father, was revealed unto us in the Son and manifested unto us in the Son and it is now the Divine desire that it should be manifest in us by the Son. "Jesus said, as the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, even so He that partaketh of me shall live by me."
This is eternally so. And Christ, the personal Christ, "wounded by our transgressions and bruised by our iniquities and in whose stripes there became healing for us" was just as much a personal present fact in Isaiah's time as in ours. Christ Himself is "the living law". "The Law made flesh," the Sabbath and all. He is the law magnified and made honorable. He is to the ten commandments what the perfectly builded house is to the mere architectural plan of a house. Christ then, is the law in so much better, so much more plainly visible, understandable form, why should we go back to the ten commandments to preach the law? Why not preach just the personality of Christ and never go back to the principle of the Law? It is because theology has misrepresented the personality of Christ and have set Him in antagonism to His own and His Father's law. They take advantage of such texts as "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one who believes", to make it appear He is the end to every one whether He believes or not, they set Christ in opposition to the perpetuity of law, whereas the text teaches the sublime spiritual truth that by writing the law in our hearts, all of it, making it spontaneous and internal, he establishes the law in our lives and magnifies it in our hearts.
To show this we have to go back to the law which we would not do otherwise. But when we are thus driven back to the law by our Sunday friends, in spite of our utmost care, we lay ourselves open to their criticism that we are preaching abstract principles of legalism, instead of preaching in the personal Christ. Perhaps in every extreme position taken by Christian men and called heresy by the triumphant ecclesiasticism of the time, if we could get back past the misconception of its enemies, we should see that there was much truth. Satan never asks any one to tell a lie straight; he sugar-coats it with a half truth.
Calvin's doctrine of the eternal and absolute decrees, magnified to mean that most men were predestinated to be damned and a few to be saved, had in it an element of truth, but God's absolute foreknowledge does not in the slightest degree interfere with the freedom of the will to will against God or with God. And even in the great truth of Wesley, whosoever will may come" there is nothing to the truth in what Calvin taught; but only extreme error of the one in contradiction to the extreme error of the other. The latter was a spiritual reaction from former, and so through all the centuries men's teaching of the truth has ever been the subject to action and reaction. There is no saving truth connected with the character of God, or with the gospel of Christ, but what is best of all revealed and illustrated in the character and personality of Jesus Christ. Yielding the life into His keeping, allowing Him unhindered to live His life in us and to express His personality through us, this is the all of Christianity. "In Him is all the fulness of the God-head bodily." "In Him is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." And all our spiritual growth is just "Growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
The Sanctuary and its service of old meant every spiritual, saving truth of the everlasting gospel of Christ, but it was lost out of it by externalism, and formal ceremonialism. God had to let their enemies take them and the Ark also to show them how futile their formalism was and win them back to seek the spiritual understanding of the Sanctuary service. Just so men have lost the personality of Christ. Almost all the eternal, spiritual truth it stands for, has been replaced by some magic idea that if one believes hard enough and makes the sign of the cross often enough they will be delivered from evil. This has only shown them defeat time and again.
Instead of His removing from the Sabbath the crushing burden of human tradition and showing us in His teachings and in His life how the Sabbath was designed to be a blessing for us all, they have been taught that He kept it instead of us so we do not have to keep it. Instead of magnifying the law and making it honorable, as Christ did in His own life, they substitute something else. We are taught in His word "All thy commandments are righteousness." So theology in almost every respect has not only left out the eternal principles of truth of the personality of Christ, but have placed His personality in direct conflict with these principles in our lives.
God, at infinite cost, revealed His personality to us in His Son, Jesus Christ. "We will come and make our abode with you." God knew the hunger of the heart after personality and so He made personal all the saving fulness of His truth and of Himself in Christ. There have been noble men and women who have willingly died for an abstract principle of truth but God, in His mercy, has not put us to quite such a test. He has embodied all principles in Christ's personality. Millions can love a loving personality who cannot see an abstract principle. The everlasting arms are open, Come to Jesus, just now.
George E. Fifield
We can conceive of a Father punishing his child to discipline and correct him, in order to prevent him from doing something that would cause him greater pain or loss or destruction, but the instant that man punishes his child when none of these desirable results can hope to be gained thereby the punishment becomes revenge and the man ceases to be a father and becomes a fiend. Even in our jurisprudence we are coming to see that all punishment that is not corrective of the punished, or protective of others, is utterly wrong, inhuman and evil. And yet men still teach this and profess to believe in the Bible and that God punishes through all eternity for the sins of time, and that He punishes after all just reason for punishment other than revenge is entirely past. - From the Sermon Eternal Punishment
Nothing is clearer than that the Bible teaches that a separation of true Christianity from the false, so-called Christianity will take place prior to Christ’s return to this earth. Some people believe this separation will take place over the day that will be observed as the Sabbath; and, so they go about devoting almost their entire effort to getting people to observe the right day, and necessarily paying little attention to getting people to experience the spiritual meaning of the Sabbath, since they have not had that experience themselves. In other words, they put the sign before the experience signified, just as the later Jews did with the sign of circumcision, and just the opposite from the way in which, it is clearly stated, God gave circumcision to Abraham. This inevitably puts the Sabbath into the Old Covenant, just as the Jews put circumcision there, and teaches the people to seek their righteousness through obedience, instead of seeking to be made righteous by the divine indwelling, so they can truly and spiritually obey.