Monthly Message

Do you know ‘The Way?’

And where I go you know, and the way you know.” ⁵Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” ⁶Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.                                                    John 14.v4-6.

Unlike any other religious leader before or since, when Jesus wanted to direct His followers on the right way to worship God, he did not direct them to His teachings but to Himself. God calls man to rightly relate to Him and the only acceptable way to God is through relationship, not religion. For this purpose Jesus came; that mankind through the power of Christ’s shed blood, could be placed into right relationship with God.

Men though history have tried to place themselves into right relationship with God through religious observance, through ideas they have had that they think will please God. Most of these ideas revolve around harsh treatment of their physical bodies. It seems that the best we can do is to try and change ourselves from the outside in. Some have tried this so hard that they have drawn their own blood, like the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, who slashed themselves with knives and cried out for hours in an attempt to make God answer their prayers. This sums up man-made religion; it is an attempt to manipulate God for our own ends, to better our lives.

But if we really want to worship God, then we must begin by recognising that it is God who sets the agenda, not us. It will be He who determines how we are to relate rightly to Him and He has declared that there is only one way and that is through faith in Jesus Christ. When Jesus told Thomas that “no one comes to the Father except through me”, He was confirming that God’s way to rightly relate to Him is through relationship, not religion.

But what exactly do we mean when we say that we rightly relate to God only through ‘faith in Jesus Christ’? What does it mean to have faith in Jesus, to have a living relationship with God through Him? Think for a moment of people that you have a living relationship with. Are they dead or alive? You cannot have an active life-giving relationship with a dead person because they cannot communicate with you. To be in relationship is to be in communication (in communion). How can you be in a living relationship with someone whom you never hear from personally? Many folk are sitting in Christian churches with the idea that sitting in a building and giving intellectual assent to doctrine means that they are in right relationship with God, yet they do not hear from this God they claim to know. Listen again to Jesus’ definition of a disciple of His which He gave in John 10.v27. “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.”

We are saved not by what we know, but by whom we know. Salvation is not an event, it is to know Him. These are Jesus’ own words recorded in John 17.v3  And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

So many churched people will claim that they ‘believe in God’, yet the biblical definition of believing, what Jesus understood by believing, is to be in a living, hearing, following relationship with God, a relationship where He leads our lives not ourselves.  

To know God means more that simply knowing what He once said, it is to hear His voice. At the time of Jesus earthly ministry, if you asked the man in the street “Who here believes they know God?”, you would probable have been pointed in the direction of the religious class who spoke most about God and quoted His Word most often. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day ‘knew’ the Word of God so well

 that they memorized off large sections of it. If a stranger went up to the man in the street today and asked the same question, asked to be pointed to those who ‘knew’ God, he may well be pointed in the direction of a ‘Bible-believing church’. Each of us in such churches need to listen again to what Jesus said to the ‘Bible-believers’ of His day.

 “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. “But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life. John 5.v39

What a terrible truth, that people who knew the Word of God off by heart ended up crucifying the living Word. How many of us too, speak of knowing or having the truth, yet the lives we are leading bear little resemblance to Christ?

The Church worldwide is being called to account in this hour, for substituting church life for Christ life. The Lord wants to lift up His name in the nations through His people, but there will first be a great humbling of His people as we realize through the move of His Holy Spirit, how far we have fallen below what He died for us to have; His life. None of us are qualified to stand and point the finger at any other Christian or church. We each must take personal responsibility for the state of our lives and the state of our nation. We were not saved to sit and sing of our salvation as a past event, but to walk on ‘The Way’, the way of transformation from glory to glory, so that Christ is formed in us to such a degree that people no longer see us, but Him, for when we speak out comes the words of God full of grace and wisdom and power.

If our nation is not being changed, it is because the Church is not changing!

This humbling of the Church is not to bring the Church ‘down’ but to raise the Church up to where she should be w

alking, in the spirit of power and holiness. We were saved for this purpose; to be conformed to the likeness of Christ that we would be one with Him and the Father, that wherever a community had believers living there, then Christ would be living in their midst. When Jesus came to a town, His holy presence in power turned that place upside down. But we forget that believers did this too in the early Church. When a deacon called Philip went to Samaria, multitudes in that city came to Christ (Acts 8.v5-8). When another called Stephen began to speak of Christ he brought Jerusalem into an uproar because of the wonders and signs he did and because none could resist the wisdom and power by which he spoke. (Acts 6.v8-10)

Truly it matters little how long we have been in a church or carried the name of Christian or how much we can quote His words, for when Christ returns there is only one thing He will be looking for in us; His nature. Will we have His character, will we be lovers of our enemies? If we cannot find that love within us today, let us repent of our religion and cry out to Him to fill us with His Spirit. Then we must choose, however we may be feeling, that we are going to trust Him and walk on with Him even when that walk appears to lead us into the death of everything we have tried to save for ourselves. Repentance, like salvation, is not a past event but a life of choosing daily to trust God, for it is through faith and grace that we partake of His life and His nature. (2 Peter1.v4).

This is the Way. It is the Way of salvation, the Way of the Cross, the Way of eternal life, the way to the Father and it is the life of Jesus in us, our hope of glory. Let each of us examine ourselves and if we do not find His love, His life in our hearts, let us repent of our powerless religion. Let us let our egos, the old man in us die. Starve him of the attention he craves and lives off. Christian stop thinking of yourSELF and what you want God to do for you, for the truth is that you were baptized into the death of Christ so that the old you would no longer live through you.

Meditate on this truth; The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you, but not so that you would continue to live your life, but that you would die and Christ would live. If this nation knew the truth of what power God has placed in their midst, they would turn to the Church and cry as one “Hurry up and die, that we might see Christ and live”.