Into the Heart of God # 3

Oneness with God in His Repudiation of This World (continued)

Jesus made this basic separation from the world when He was baptized, and used His baptism as a means of declaring to heaven, to men and to hell that His heart was separated unto God. At His baptism Jesus took sides with the heart of God against this world, and declared that His heart was not in this world - it was with the Father. Every Christian is supposed to be baptized. You may have different opinions as to what it is, how it should be, but if you are going to take Jesus as your example, and what the New Testament teaches on this matter, you have to recognize that baptism is a declaration that you have stepped over a line and that now your heart is wholly with God and out of the world. No sooner had Jesus been baptized than He began to be tested as to the step which He had taken. Those temptations in the wilderness by the devil were to test Him as to whether He meant what He had done. satan offered Him all the kingdoms of this world and all the glory thereof, and the test was: Was the heart of Jesus out of the world or not? He stood faithfully to the position that he had taken and repudiated the world, and if you want to know what Jesus thought about the world you have only to read one chapter in the New Testament - the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John. There Jesus refers repeatedly to the world and prays that His disciples might be delivered from it. He said: "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world" (John 17:16).

Now notice something: What was the world to which Jesus was referring? The only world that the disciples knew was the religious world, and that was the only world that Jesus lived in in the days of His flesh. What do you man by the world? You see, it can be a very religious thing. There can be a lot of worldly religion - there can be as much of the world in religion as there is out of it. The world is a spirit, a mentality, a power. In one word, it is all that which is NOT in friendship with God.

God was no friend of that religious world in the days of Jesus. The world means independence from God, being able to get on without Him in its own way. It is self-centered, not God-centered; it is governed, deceived and blinded by satan.

Now the point is just this: We shall never get anywhere in this spiritual pilgrimage until we have fully and finally settled this one question. One of he most painful things that we see is the way in which all young Christians do not go on with the Lord. They come to a point where they say that they are going with the Lord, they make a decision for the Lord, and there it stops. So many do not go any further than that - and here is all this immense purpose of God. They have only taken the negative side of His command and have not listened to the positive side: "Unto the land that I will shew thee..."  "I will make thee a blessing and thou shalt be a blessing..." "in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

You see, God has called us "out" for a mighty "in." He did not just say to Abraham "Get thee out!" The separation was governed by the great purpose of being made a mighty blessing to others.

One world is repudiated, but God does not believe in vacuums, so He must put another world in its place. Abraham was God's new beginning for a new world. He was called "the father of a multitude of nations" (Genesis 17:5). The father gives the character to the family, and the very first thing about the character of this man was that his heart was wholly set on God. If we are truly spiritual children of Abraham, we must take his character.

Well, this is where we begin, the first step in the spiritual pilgrimage to the heart of God. Whatever we may say about ourselves, in our faults and failures, may it be true of ever one of us that we have a heart wholly for God, for this is the way that ends with God being able to say, of you, and of me, "My Friend."

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 4 - (Oneness with God in a Crisis Regarding the Natural Man)