Clough Proverbs Lesson 14

Christ in the Heart (Maturity)

Let’s turn back to Genesis 2:7. Genesis 2:7 is the model verse again that we have been building off of time and time again to show and illustrate the nature of man. It’s necessary that we do this because we want you to remember that we’re basically going into the book of Proverbs and we are going to get there in 2 or 3 more weeks. We’ll have a short intermission next Sunday as we have a one-shot series on what is the local church and the offices in a local church and how a local church is supposed to function as we introduce the new boards. We find a lot of people very confused about authority and the lines of authority in the local church. We’re trying to gradually move the authority over to the board more and more where it should be in the first place. I do not have the right to vote in any board meeting, I have no more power legally in this congregation that the average congregation member. The board is an autonomous operating unit under the constitution and it’s only board members that have the right of decision and vote in a business meeting of the deacons and we want more and more to develop men who will take their spiritual gift, accept responsibility and lead in the congregation. That’s a desperate need today in the local church.

In Genesis 2:7 we go to the classic text that teaches us about the nature of man and as we study this study and the Sunday after next and finish up this introduction to Proverbs where we have dealt with the nature of man, we have dealt with the words heart, soul, spirit and so on, and then we get ready to move into Proverbs, as I have been exegeting it in the first 9 chapters for the first 2 or 3 weeks you will understand why we have had to take so much time in going through these terms. Proverbs 1-9 presupposes that you underhand all of this. Proverbs was written to a group of people, it was actually written for instruction of young people. Actually the original recipients of the book of Proverbs were teenagers; it was written to train the young men and young women of the nation Israel and it does so through various systems of analogies and so on, which some of you are just going to be shocked out of your seats at some of the analogies that are used in this books, and of course I’m going to make maximum use of all of them; the reason is because some people have a very prudish attitude toward what is in Scripture; well you’ll find out just how prudish Scripture is when we go into the first 9 chapters of Proverbs.

Genesis 2:7, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” The Bible presents man as a body that is inherited physically and the Bible, contrary to Greek philosophy, does not downplay the body. We are not talking about emphasis on the soul like Plato spoke of. The emphasis on the body is very real, and because of this Proverbs is actually going to build off of certain of these concepts and if you don’t know these concepts you’ll miss the whole point of Proverbs. Proverbs presupposes you understand this. So the body is the first thing that God makes. Now here in verse 7 it is at the point of creation and so it is unique in some respects in that the body is formed external to a womb. Adam didn’t have any mother and so obviously the womb is God’s hands at this point. But forever after in God’s Word the womb of the female, as she carries her young is always looked upon in the light of verse 7, in that… and the classic text on it is Psalm 139, it describes what is going on during the period of pregnancy, the woman’s womb is always aligned with the earth. This is why in ancient mythology the earth goddess is always a female, or generally speaking.

So you have the earth and the body from the earth, and this is underscored by the fact that man is called Adam; the Hebrew word for earth is adamah. Later the earth is cursed, adamah receives a curse and out of the curse comes thorns and thistles and so because our bodies are made of adamah our bodies are cursed. This is the corruption of the body. Now be careful, we are not saying what the Greeks said. The Greeks said that matter itself was bad; the Bible does not say that, the Bible says matter itself was originally good and became bad through the fall. So now we have the body and the body is inherited, so forever after people inherit Adam’s image; they are made after Adam’s image which is of dying flesh. So you have a sin nature propagated. Biologically this is the inheritance of an acquired characteristic, in spite of what the dogma says; this is what the Bible says. And then God breathed into this body a human spirit. And you notice in verse 7 again, as we have tried to point out over and over again, that the human spirit is aligned with a physically observable phenomenon. We are not talking about some ethereal abstraction some place, some ghostly like thing; the spirit is something though itself cannot be seen, the effects can be seen, felt and measured. And here the effect of the presence of the human spirit in the body is said to be breath.

So we have the spirit in the body and then man becomes a soul; notice the word “becomes” a soul. So the soul is the product of body plus spirit and forever after is associated with this. Now some have asked what happens at the time of death, when the spirit leaves the body; obviously the body is corrupt so does that mean the soul is destroyed. It appears that the soul momentarily, so to speak, on a temporary basis, has an existence of its own that goes with the spirit after death. However, this is not what we would call a happy situation because our salvation is not said to be complete until the body is restored at the point of resurrection. So this is why, then, we have to understand these three terms.

Today we are going to come to the objective of the book of Proverbs for us today in this age; the objective for Proverbs in the Old Testament was slightly different. The objective Proverbs is basically to teach chakmah or wisdom, and this goes back to the nature of what man is. Now earlier in this series we distinguished between the plant, animals and men. Contrary to evolution which does not fundamentally distinguish between these three categories, and I repeat though evolution allows for the obvious difference in characteristics of plants, animal and men, on the evolutionary premise they are not fundamentally different for they all have come out of the same thing.

Now that is the point where the Bible and evolution cannot be meshed, you cannot mix oil and water, you have to go one way or you have to go the other way, and you have to be willing to take the baggage that goes with the position. If you’re going to go with evolution then you must say that there is no morally significant difference between man and animal. And logically taken forth this means if you can hunt animals and not be charged with murder, then you should be able to hunt men and not be charged with murder, for how you treat men is basically no different from how you treat animals because men and animals on the evolutionary premise are not morally significantly different.

Now in the Bible it’s different; the plant in the Bible is not said to be living; it’s minus nephesh or minus soul; the word “soul” in the Bible, the Hebrew thinking, mentality, means just life. So if you want a word in your mind to switch, if “soul” gets you scared or you feel you can’t control the meaning of it, just substitute life. So plants are not said to have nephesh or not said to be living. This is a tremendously different concept than most of us are used to. Most of us are used to thinking of the boundary between the living and the nonliving below the plants. The Bible say no, it’s between plant and animals. Even though plants have cells and are organic they are not said to possess nephesh. Animals are so you have plus soul for animals; so animals and men share soul, they both have a spirit, they both have a soul. The same word is used for both; if you don’t believe me read Genesis 6 and 7 where Noah is bringing in the animals in the ark and it says right there that animals have a spirit and animals have a soul.

Now we come to men. What is the difference with men? Men have a plus soul but there’s a feature about man’s soul that is different from animals. And it’s said the soul is made in God’s image. That is it is able to communicate with God. The Bible never makes statements that can’t be checked, usually; some statements like forgiveness of sins and so on you can’t go up to heaven to check your record right now, but the point remains that most of the biblical statements are checkable and so therefore let’s look at this for a moment and look and understand this image of God thing.

If we look at men, how do men differ obviously from animals? What is the one thing that we can point to that all men have that no animal can ever have? And that one thing is language. Now be careful how I’m using the word language; we’re not talking about signals that communicate information. Animals have a signal system, but only men have a language system. What is the difference between signals and language? Signals communicate perception and information only. Language communicates that plus concepts and absolutes. Animals do not have concepts; animals can be taught to recognize patterns; animals can be trained to do certain things; animals can be trained to respond to signals and you can train animals by communicating information through signals, but with men you have concepts. You have, for example, a man saying is this true or is this false; that question never can be asked by an animal; is that true or is it false. Another question that can never be asked by an animal but all men ask it is, is this right or is this wrong.

So two questions surround the problem of language and concepts that animals do not have no matter how sophisticated their signal system is, they still do not have a sense of truth and falsehood and rightness and wrongness. You say well I have a dog and when I beat him he sure looks like he has a guilty conscience. Yes, but that is a training to your particular standard, your particular learned behavior pattern that the animal has picked up. We have expressed this elsewhere by saying that animals have as they come to a stimulus and they respond to that, they do so through a learned behavior pattern; animals also have an instinctive behavior pattern, they have two kinds. But animals, because they have soul have some area over which they can learn how to respond to something.

Now men on the contrary face a stimulus and a response and they have three things going for them. In a very small compartment we have instinctive behavior patterns but very small, VERY small; humans have a very, very, very, extremely small area over which we really have instinctive behavior. A large area is a learned behavior pattern and these are governed by understanding. Now Proverbs teaches these two; it teaches understanding and learned behavior patterns together, add the two together and you have wisdom. That is wisdom. Animals in this sense are not wise; men can be wise. This is also why in the book of Proverbs over and over we will observe a stupid man is called an animal. Why is a stupid man called an animal in the book of Proverbs? Or a brute? Simply because he acts like an animal because he is negative on understanding and has negative on +R learned behavior patterns.

Now one term while we’re discussing the heart, soul and spirit, we came to was heart, and it’s this concept that we want to deal with this morning as one of the two finishing out processes of this whole introduction. “Heart” in the Bible means a physical heart. Now it can mean other things that go with the heart but never loose the idea that the Hebrew when he thought he would say how do I respond to the content of my thinking? If you think of something exciting your pulse changes. And in the ancient world, not just with the Jew, in the Greeks, you read Homer and you have the same thing, the heart is that responds. You can’t feel your brain, except with a headache and that’s not really feeling your brain; you can’t feel your brain and so therefore when the Old Testament believer would talk about what he was thinking and he wanted to relate it to something he could touch, feel or sense, he couldn’t relate it to his brain and this is why throughout the entire Old Testament thoughts are never said to occur in the head; they’re always said to occur with the heart, or literally, although it says in the heart, and people say oh, those stupid people, they didn’t realize that our thoughts occur in the brain. The Hebrew word “in” is Beth, this is what it looks like, it’s the Hebrew letter “B”. And Beth does not necessarily always mean locus, it means “in the sphere of” so therefore when they said they thought in their heart it didn’t necessarily say that they were saying their thoughts really were going on in their heart. What it means is their thoughts were connected with a system dominated by the heart, in the sphere of the heart, connected with the heart, and sure enough, every time your heart beats where does most of the blood go? To the brain. And so the Jews were not wrong and this is not the product of some naïve ancient superstitious people like you always hear. People who say that just have never studied too carefully.

So now we come to the heart and to Ephesians 1 for here we get one of the two concepts I want to finish this introduction with. There are two basic concepts that are going to be critical in applying Proverbs to your life as a believer. One is the concept of maturity and the other is the concept of apostasy. Neither of these processes occur overnight. You are basically the one responsible for your maturity or you are the one who is responsible for your apostasy, one or the other. We have developed a terminology here that I will use to describe maturity and apostasy that’s based on Ephesians. The phraseology that I will use to describe maturity will be “Christ in the heart.” We will see this this morning in Ephesians. A second terminology which I will use to describe apostasy will be “chaos in the heart” and both of these words are used in the Greek in Ephesians. And I am picking these up as labels, one for maturity and the other for apostasy.

Now a second bit of clarification about this terminology; as I go through the steps, there are five steps listed in Ephesians for maturity and five steps toward apostasy, do not make the mistake of thinking what I’m telling you is this: that you’ve got to get all of step one before you can move to step two before you can move to step three, before you can more to step four before you can move to step five; that’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is that there may be areas of you life that look like this; for example, there may be areas in the academic world, there may be areas on the job, there may be areas in your home, in your marriage, there may be areas for other areas, work, health, or something, but let’s just take these four areas. Now these areas can be looked upon as individual, just for a moment.

Now suppose you start out your Christian growth and maybe in the area of your job you begin to mature as a Christian and so the first area is that you’ll start to increase, you will meet step one, maturity in your job, you’ll progress to step two, step three, step four and step five. So you’re maturing in that area, in other words, you’re cycling through so that as you got to these various steps in Ephesians this is working on your job, you’re gradually having wisdom, you know how to handle yourself, you know how not to offend people with just religiosity but you know how to communicate the issue which is Jesus Christ not religion. And gradually people around you learn to relax and you can get under their skin with the gospel. You know how to cope with the pressures of a job; you have the framework to work, not just because you know it but because you use it. And so in that area maybe things re going real well for you spiritually.

However, you take another area, suppose it’s academic, maybe it’s in the home and maybe things aren’t going so well there, and so in this area you may be moving toward apostasy. So it’s possible to have a trend toward maturity in one area and a trend toward apostasy in another. Now obviously these two can’t coexist and after a while one or the other wins out and you’re in trouble. But, the point remains, don’t think of these areas as comprehensive all over the board; these are trends that will build out in certain areas.

For example, to put it another way, when we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior we are put into union with Him, that’s our position in Christ, which we’ll study tonight and this position never changes. This is your destiny that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit has decreed for you and that doesn’t change; never changes. However, there is a sphere which it does change and whereas this diagrams your eternal relationship to God, you have a temporal relationship to God and that could also be represented by a circle and that circle does change from day to day and from moment to moment. For example, when you become a Christian you may have become a Christian under some very bad circumstances. Some of you may have become a Christian where you were asked to sign a card, come forward while they play 40 stanzas of Just As I Am and everybody else was forward and you were in the last pew and you didn’t know what to do and the door was locked and you couldn’t get out so you had nothing else to do so you finally traipsed down the aisle. Or maybe you were in a group of Christian friends and here you were standing there minding your own business and all of them were looking at you wondering when you were going to go forward, and so finally you yielded to group pressure and maybe you came forward. If you became a Christian under some of these bully-boy tactics you have my sympathies; it’s too bad because you have come to Christ with a bad taste in your mouth and you forever identify Christianity with that kind of stuff and that is a shame and it’s all over fundamentalist circles, unfortunately, primarily because most of the people in charge never study; they’re too interested in gimmicks.

So we have the temporal area; now this temporal area starts out like this; when you first become a Christian that’s about the maximum area where you know what’s going on and where you have confidence in the Lord, and you get outside of that area you’re falling all over the place spiritually. And then as you grow this area expands. Now I’ve always drawn this in a circle but somebody pointed out to me recently that there’s a better way of drawing this and so instead of drawing this as a circle it will be far more accurate to draw it like this, sort of like an amoeba, because you can move out in certain areas and be retarded in other areas. And you may be growing here and you may be growing here but here you’re stagnant; here you’re stagnant; there are various areas of your life you do not grow over a smooth perimeter all the time. You have spurts; this is just the way Christian growth is. And you may have areas over which you will be retarded in your growth. For example, it may look something like this; you may be losing in this area and gaining in this area and that kind of a process can only go on so far before you’re in trouble, serious trouble. So all I’m trying to say in these few minutes of introduction to this is don’t presuppose that this nice little scheme I’m showing you is a perfect model. What I am showing you is only an idealized picture of trends that occur and you’ll be confused if you try to use these as idealized models of the Christian life.

But to simply and bring some order out of chaos let’s look at this process of maturity as is described in Ephesians and there are five steps to it. Beginning in Ephesians 1:15, this is the first step, “Wherefore, I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints, [16] Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers.” Now the first step is actually given in verse 15; remember this epistle was written to real live believers. It wasn’t written to some theological seminary some place, this was written to real believers and they had real problems. And you know what; they looked pretty much like you look; some good, in good shape and some in pretty bad shape. But they were people and Paul makes a general statement about these believers in verse 15; he said that they were already going on with the Lord and so we’ll say they were on positive volition. In other words, they were responding to what they already knew, they were not waiting for something new, they were responding to what they already knew. They were going on and evidently they were responding so well that their faith and love were known in the ancient world; it was communicated through the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and they’d say hey Paul, do you know what these people are doing up in Ephesus and they’d tell the stories about what these early believers were doing in the city of Ephesus and surrounding areas. So their testimony had gotten back to Paul and this teaches us one thing and that is maturity must begin with obedience. That’s the first step, you can’t go any further without obedience, and obedience can’t be to something you don’t know, it’s obedience to what you do know. In other words, start with what you know and move to the unknown. So maturity begins with obedience.

If you hold the place you’ll find out that this should not strike you as something new that Paul cranked out. In fact, Jesus predicted this pattern of maturity in his last briefing before He died, to the disciples. Turn to John 14, the upper room discourse where Jesus Christ gave His final briefing to the disciples before He left them, before He went to the cross to die for the sins of the world. And in this upper room discourse He covered many, many principles. Probably most of the disciples did not remember the principles but one of those principles was they would be given supernaturally the power of total recall, so therefore days and weeks afterwards, even though they had apparently forgotten what Jesus told them in the upper room discourse, they remembered and gradually it dawned on them that what they were experiencing as believers was exactly what Jesus Christ predicted.

So in John 14:21, actually this is nothing new, this just follows forth from the Old Testament principle, He says “He that has My commandments, and keeps them, he it is that loves Me,” now the word “love” in the Bible doesn’t means some gushy sentimentalism, it means an obedience when you love an authority higher than yourself. It was used in international treaties of the day, King So and So, of, say Tyre, would love Pharaoh. Now that doesn’t mean they’re a bunch of homosexuals, it means that the king of Tyre is responding and obeying the dictates and will of Pharaoh, that’s all it means. So the word “love” had a more… well, shall we say objective, more colorless content to it than the way we load it in our own day. And so Jesus said, “He that has My commandments, and keeps them, he it is that loves Me,” we’ll get into that later on when we get into Proverbs because in Proverbs the image of sex is used over and over and over and over again to teach why the believer must chase after wisdom. It was taught to teenage boys, actually, and he said look, if you’re going to chase girls, chase wisdom. And so over and over and over again in Proverbs 1-9 it says go after wisdom, she’s crying for you, she wants to respond to you, now you go and make love to wisdom. And this is part of the tremendous sensual imagery that is connoted in Proverbs. Do you know why? Because it had to be communicated to young people and Solomon and David knew how to communicate to young people; you use imagery with which they respond and which they understand, and they did. Some of you will be very shocked when we get to Proverbs.

John 14:21, “He that has My commandments, and keeps them, he it is that loves Me; and he that loves Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.” Now the last part of that verse it talks about Christ responding to the love of the believer. Now this is a very unusual metaphor because usually in the Bible Christ is pictured as the male and the believer as the female. Remember the two roles in the Bible; the male role in the Bible is that the male basically is the initiator and the female in the Bible is always seen as the responder. Wherever the roles of the sexes are used it will always be in this relationship; the female is what she is because she’s responding to the treatment she receives. And so the male, and of course the male is the one that initiates. Now in this case notice the roles are reversed; here the believer is loving Christ and as a result of a believer’s loving Christ, Christ then loves the believer back, and so then He says, “I will love him, and show Myself to him.” In other words there will be a deepening relationship after there is obedience.

Verse 23, “If a man love Me, he will keep My words; and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him,” again, it teaches that Jesus Christ enters into a very dynamic and very, very intimate and personal relationship with the believer. Now obviously Christ indwells the believer from the point of salvation onward, but what this is speaking of is the kind of relationship that exists between Christ and the believer.

So now back to Ephesians and we’ll watch how Paul amplifies John 14:21 and 23. Those two verses from John are the content that Paul amplifies in this Ephesian epistle. So he begins with the concept that these believers are going on with what they know. But then in Ephesians 1:16 he moves to the second step and he says, I “cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers, [17] That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may given unto you a spirit,” not “the” as those of you have the King James, it’s “a,” “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. [18] The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye my know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, [19] And what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power,” etc. etc. etc.

Now jam packed into these three verses is a phenomenal amount of material. But one of the things that we want to point to this morning is this second step on the line and that is that you can be obedient, obedient, obedient, obedient, obedient and you still, without grace, aren’t going to get to first base. Otherwise what we would have is sanctification by works. And I want you to see that always it’s grace, grace, grace, grace, grace, grace. What is grace? God does for you what you can’t do for yourself, and if you’re convinced that you can live the Christian life by yourself you are not going to receive grace. You will receive grace only when you get to the point where you realize you can’t do it yourself. And when you finally get to that point and some people get to that point easily and other people have to have their head banged against the wall for maybe five or ten years before they realize they can’t live the Christian life by works. I don’t know why, some people are really stupid, but if you know what God’s will is for you and you try to live out the Christian life on the energy of the flesh, you should learn within five minutes that you can’t do it. But some people evidently never wake up, never. But for those who do wake up… for those who do wake up there’s a tremendous promise of provision in the Bible and that is this grace.

And here Paul says you must be the recipient of grace and this grace must come because Christ, through the Holy Spirit enlightens you. So this is talking about the enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit, technically known as illumination. “The spirit of wisdom and revelation,” now that’s talking about your human spirit and this focuses attention as to where Christian growth occurs. Again, going back to our diagram, if Paul says that he wants the believer to have a “spirit of wisdom and revelation,” what, then, component of the body is the critical component that must grow to affect all other components? The spirit; the spirit is behind all Christian growth. All Christian growth starts with the human spirit.

And you are and I am what we are solely because of the state of our human spirit at this point. And you can have a weak human spirit; you can have a strong human spirit. When we went through the care and nurture of the human spirit you remember the human spirit has needs like your body has needs; your human spirit has a need for nutrition; that is taking in the Word of God; it has to feed on God’s revelation. It has a need for exercise through the faith technique, applying what we know. And it has a need for elimination of guilt. We don’t want constipated spirits around and that is when people do not know how to handle their guilt and they meditate on their personal sins and they go to some psychiatrist that gets paid $25 and hour so they can dredge up all their crud. Now that is just the human spirit that’s just loaded down to the gills with waste material. And that has to be gotten rid of and that is gotten rid of through confession and restoration.

Now in Ephesians 1:17 Paul goes on and defines what a “spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him” is like. He says, this is, verse 18; verse 18 is in apposition with verse 17, and so he says this is “the eyes of your heart,” literally, “being enlightened.” In other words, there is an inner perception that is needed. You will look upon something; how many of you… you don’t have to raise hands but I know most of you that have been believers for some time have had the experience of reading over a text of Scripture, maybe 20 or 50 times, you’ve gone over it, you’ve studied it, you’ve heard messages on it and then someday you might have some real big difficulty; you quietly go to your room, you op en up the Bible and you read that passage and all of a sudden you see something in the passage that wasn’t there before, you thought. It was there all the time; you just didn’t see it until now. Now that’s the kind of spiritual perception that’s needed. Now is it that the Bible was suddenly added to, five minutes before you walked up to your room to open your Bible God the Holy Spirit beat you to it and said I’m going to add a little bit in here, she needs it, and so He adds a little bit in the text? Huh-un, the text was always there. Well, then what was different? Your perception of it; you saw something. Where was the change, in the Bible? No, the Bible never changes. What changed? You changed. Why did you change? The Holy Spirit did some work in your heart.

Now that is the enlightening ministry of the Spirit and this is why, when you come down to the point in your prayer life where you say well, gee, I haven’t got anything to give God thanks for… you don’t? You can thank Him for everything you’ve ever learned because if He hadn’t opened your eyes you would never have learned; you could read the Bible, read the Bible, read the Bible, read the Bible and read the Bible, it wouldn’t mean beans. You have to have the Holy Spirit open your eyes so you can give thanks right away for everything that you’ve ever learned from Scripture and from putting Scripture into your experience. So this is the second step, then, the enlightening work of the Holy Spirit.

Now if you’ll turn to Ephesians 3:14, we come to the third step, again Paul prays for the believers and he says “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, [15] Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,” now you see he’s praying again for believers. Notice what’s not in his prayer, so and so became a Christian and I pray that so and so would get involved in some church activity. Where’s that in the prayer? I pray that so and so would start doorbell ringing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, got to get a big visitation program in Ephesus, got to get these believers involved, and so forth. You don’t see that gimmick stuff in the New Testament. What do you see? One thing—growth! And so in verse 16 he says, I pray that “God would give to you,” there’s grace again, see the element of grace entering in, I would pray that “God would give to you,” and then he’s actually talking about the second step, “according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by means of His Holy Spirit,” so which member of the Godhead is giving the grace here? It’s the Holy Spirit that’s doing this gracious work; “in the inner man,” which is a synonym for heart in the New Testament. So we’ve located where this strengthening occurs, it occurs inwardly and it is done by the Holy Spirit and it is done through the principle of grace.

Ephesians 3:17 is now our third step in the sequence; we’ve gotten the obedience, the enlightening work and now we come to the third step, “That,” here’s your purpose clause, all of this “in order that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,” now there’s your third point and to understand this third point we must understand what the word “dwell” means, otherwise some of you will confuse it with indwelling which occurs at the point of salvation. This is not talking about salvation; this is not talking about some post salvation Holy Ghost baptism or something. This is talking about maturity and the word “dwell” really is not dwell; the word means to relax and enjoy. So what this means is that Christ may be relaxed and enjoy Himself in your heart. Going back to that diagram, we drew this small circle, remember I said that circle changes and it may be different shapes, that bottom circle. Well, the bigger it is the more room Christ has in your heart, so to speak. And so therefore the more relaxed he is and the more He enjoys Himself.

Now don’t think of God as some sort of a computer; I had a long discussion with a psychologist on the jet plane when I was coming back from the conference and his big objection to Christianity was that your God is too anthropomorphic. And I said if God was not anthropomorphic I wouldn’t accept Him, simply because only an anthropomorphic God, a God like man, that’s what anthropomorphic means, a man-like God so to speak, only a man-like God is personal, so only with a man-like God can you have a personal relationship. When the Jews are talking about God enjoying Himself they mean it, that God can experience the emotion of enjoyment. And that’s what this is talking about. So it’s not the issue here, whether you enjoy Christ, the issue here in verse 17, does Christ enjoy you. Think about it that way for a moment. Do you think that Jesus Christ enjoys your life the way it is right now? Do you think it’s comfortable for Him, do you think He really enjoys it?

Now the last phrase, “by faith,” tells you how He enjoys it, and that’s the key to the whole third step. That Christ may dwell in your hearts, dia plus the genitive in the Greek, which means by means of, by means or by the agency of faith. So, how does Jesus Christ enjoy your heart? He enjoys it when you believer and “faith cometh by hearting, and hearing by the Word of God,” so our third step is a maximum development of the divine viewpoint framework, that is, you have a maximum understanding of the revelation of God to the point where not that you just know it, not that you just put it on a note piece of paper but that you know it and are convinced that it’s the truth and you can believe.

Now this is where Bible Christianity differs from all this religiosity. In many, many religious circles today you are asked to make all sorts of decisions on the basis of emotion. You are asked to make decisions on the basis of how you feel, or on some other basis. Listen, in God’s Word there is only one basis for decisions—are you convinced this is the truth or are you not? And if you aren’t, forget it. God never asks a person to believe that which he is not sure to be true, never! Faith in the Bible follows knowledge and here you have it. Faith is a product of the divine viewpoint framework, that means that you have absorbed this and you not just absorbed it but you experientially know it to be true and have confidence in it. So therefore you have a maximum use of the faith technique. That is what makes Jesus Christ happy. The thing that makes Him happy isn’t all your self-righteousness. The thing that makes Him happy isn’t all the prudish legalism. The thing that makes Christ happy is the domain over which you trust Him, and that you can relax because you trust Him and now He can relax. Now it’s a picture of a wonderful relationship the believer can have with Christ here, that Christ can relax and enjoy your heart because you are believing, you are applying the faith technique.

Now we come to the fourth step, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,” verse 18 and the first half of 19 give us the fourth step in this maturity and that is that you, believer, “May be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, [19] And to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge,” and stop there. That is the fourth step. What is the breadth, length, depth and height? Again we go to this fundamental rule of Bible interpretation. This is the imagery of a building. Now where in the immediate context do you have a building mentioned? At the end of chapter 2; at the end of chapter 2 of this very epistle Paul is talking about a building and the building is the body of Christ, the temple. So therefore the fourth step in here, verse 18, that you “may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the body.” Now notice the order; first you have to have the divine viewpoint framework or then you cannot perceive the body. Now what do we mean perceive the body, understand or comprehend the body? Here’s what it means; it means that as you grow in the Christian life and as you absorb Bible doctrine… [Tape turns]

…I want to take a pill and get in five minutes, the easy way. Now that’s not the way spirituality works and so you see today this is what’s happening, we’re eliminating the third step; we’re trying to go obedience, pray for an enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit so we can have the love and experience the love of God. Now everybody wants to experience the love of God, at least theoretically. And nobody is against this. And those of us, like myself, who insist on the third step before the fourth step, are always pictured as some sort of boogey man and all the rest of it. Now all we’re trying to do is get the cart before the horse, that’s all. You will be prepared to experience the love of Christ only after you have criteria to evaluate experience.

Suppose you go around to one of the metropolitan areas where they’re having this business about everybody gets together in the living room and they lay hands on everybody’s knee and pray for the lengthening of their legs. And that’s supposed to be the magnificent work of the Holy Spirit. Now can’t you just imagine the Holy Spirit, with all the critical problems of the 20^th century interested in putting a hundredth of an inch growth on somebody’s left leg? And this is supposed to be a great sign of the charismatic revival; that’s ridiculous. It’s a great sign of something but it’s not the sign of the charismatic revival of the Holy Spirit. Why do you know this and why can I say that? Simple, because I have Bible doctrine and I can walk into that situation and say this is phony, and I know it’s phony because it doesn’t fir the Word. And so the Word becomes the criteria. On the other hand, we can walk into another group of believers and see some magnificent things. We have some fantastic things going on in this congregation. In the last two months we have experienced some of the most phenomenal things I have ever experienced as a pastor in various people’s lives. It’s been tremendously encouraging. And why is this encouraging? Because we can place the Word against the experience and say look, look at this, it’s this. And so we say now we see the love of God.

So you have to have the divine viewpoint framework in order to see the love of Christ. And obviously once you experience the love of Christ then you can love somebody else. Now you can’t love somebody else, really unless you are already loved. You have the problem with humanism, you can never get the love cycle started. You don’t want to love somebody else if you’re not loved first because really what you’re doing is just approbation, you are loving somebody else because you want love back again, so you can never get a real love cycle started. Now your love cycle starts in God’s Word once we are loved and we know we are loved. If you have the tremendous confidence that God loves you and you daily receive confirmation of this, you can afford and dare to love somebody else and not worry about whether they respond to it or not. But you are in no position to do that unless you first have that inner confidence that God loves you.

Then finally we come to the last step in this sequence, and that is the last part of verse 19, “that,” see the purpose clause beginning again, “that you might be filled with all the pleroma” or “the fullness of God.” That’s the final step in Christian maturity and this means total fulfillment of every human need, the deepest needs of the human soul are totally and completely fulfilled here, “that you may be filled with all the pleroma of God,” the pleroma of God is actually God’s eternal plan. And so this fifth step means that you experientially can join in to the maximum God’s eternal plan. Because you experience the love of Christ, because you have Christ dwelling in your heart, you can, each believer, it gets to this point, can enjoy God’s plan and participate in it. Again, some of you have a tendency toward fatalism; some of you ,because you study prophecy or something think there’s some sort of an IBM program in heaven and then this just kind of automatically cranks out. And you can kind of sit here and join in or be a spectator, it doesn’t make any difference. Huh-un, that’s fatalism, not scriptural. You have confused sovereignty with fatalism. Biblical sovereignty means it will certainly come to pass by means of creatures responsible choices. That’s sovereignty, that’s not fatalism. Fatalism it’s going to come to pass by any means; huh-un. Sovereignty means it will come to pass by means of your personal choices.

So this is why we can say in this fifth step that the believer can join to the maximum God’s eternal plan. What does this mean? It means that you can lose every bit of clothing on your back; it means that you can lose your business; it means that you can lose your loved ones if this country is assaulted or something or lose your loved ones for other reasons. You can stand all of it because deep down in your heart you know you are participating in the most significant thing going, God’s plan for this era. And nothing holds a candle to that. And you can be happy whenever everything else is crashed around you. This comes by Christ in the heart.

Shall we bow for prayer….