Now we are talking about this wonderful Christ, Who is God's Son and our Lord. Do you actually in the heart, as a result of a revelation from God to you, for coming to Christ in saving faith is God's gift. Do you actually believe that He is the Saviour and the Lord of sinners? Who do you say Jesus is? This question was asked of the disciples and Peter answering for them said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God. And, Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 16:16-17). Oh, do you know Who Jesus is?
Who do you say Jesus is today? Millions confess that Jesus is the very anointed sent Messiah, the Saviour and the Lord of all mankind. I John 5:1 says: "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God" – Here believing that Jesus, the man, is really the sent One from God, the Saviour and Lord is said to be an evidence that one has had an experience of the new birth. But today the tragedy is that we have so few who give evidence that they have received the new birth, although with their mouths they confess that they believe that Jesus is the Christ. Matthew 15:8: "This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me." Some, we are afraid, say it because they have been taught to say it; others really believe it because they have been made subjects and recipients of God's wonderful revelation, and they thus have seen with their inmost being and eyes and experienced the power of the Lord Jesus Christ. You know a confession that Jesus is the Christ must come from the heart if it is any good.
If just a confession would save us, then the demons would be saved, for they were the first to cry out "We know Thee Who Thou Art, the Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24). You know James, the apostle said, "The devils believe and tremble." But the sad fact today is, that so many confess the Christ but tremble not at all. You know my dear ones more is involved in the confession of Christ than we seem to think in these days. In the early days of the church, a man entered into a spiritual revolution, when he believed and confessed Jesus as the Christ. Such a confession in those days caused the Pharisees to boil in anger, one of them by the name of Saul heard about it and became a persecutor and a Christian killer. The Gentiles in those days thought that the disciples were either fools, babblers or that they were mad. In those days the confession that Jesus is the Christ turned the world upside down, because with the confession the Spirit of God added His confirmation and power.
I must remind you that something has happened; the name of Jesus Christ is profaned and confessed today without producing any drastic and noticeable affects on those who either profane His Name or confess it or those who hear it. I was interested to read an article by Brother Tozar, a man of God, who does call men in churches today to think. He has a prophetic voice, he is not satisfied with the great numbers of professing Christians today. He had an article on "The Misunderstood Doctrine of Faith," he called the attention of the importance of faith. Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by Grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; Not of works, lest any man should boast. "He called the attention to the fact that the revelation of God in Christ is received and perceived only through faith, and blind eyes cannot see Christ in the Gospel. That Christ has revealed God, but only eyes that have been opened can see God in the face of Jesus Christ. And he writes to the point that the modern conception of faith is not the Biblical teaching about faith. He says when faith is used today it doesn't mean what the Bible means by faith.
I want to list seven causes of the uneasiness Mr. Tozar professes about this matter of faith. He says the things that cause him great uneasiness are (1) the lack of spiritual fruit in the lives of so many who claim to have faith; (2) the rarity of a radical change in the conduct and general outlook of persons professing faith in Christ; (3) the failure of our Bible teachers to define or even describe the thing to which the word faith is supposed to refer; (4) the heart-breaking failure of multitudes of seekers who never find faith, be they ever so earnest; (5) the real danger that a doctrine that is preached so widely, and received so uncritically by so many; the real danger is that it is false as understood by them; (6) he says that faith is used as a substitute for obedience; it is used as an escape from reality; it is used as a refuge from the necessity of heart thinking; it is used as a hiding place for weak character; (7) he says plain horse sense tells us that anything that makes no change in man who professes, makes no difference to God either; the change from no faith, to faith makes no difference in the life of so many today.
Then Mr. Tozar has these words to say about what faith is: He says faith is not believing a statement that we know to be true, for faith has to do not so much with the mind as with the will. And faith rests upon the character of God, and no other proof is needed for real faith. Faith is confidence in God and in His Son and therefore a response of the soul to Him in Whom we have confidence. Then Mr. Tozar says what I have said so many, many times that faith is impossible apart from the work of the Spirit. He says that faith is the gift of God to a penitent one. It has nothing to do with the senses or the evidence afforded. Faith is a miracle, he says it is the ability God gives to trust His Son. Faith that does not bring the life unto obedience to Christ as Lord is inadequate and must betray the victim at the last. The man who believes what Mr. Tozar says will obey, and failure to obey is convincing proof that true faith is not present. He concludes by saying: God must give faith or there will be no faith, and He gives faith to repentant hearts.
Now when we open the Bible, it is clear that Christ was the expected One by the Israelites. But the Old Testament prophecies are clear that when the Messiah came, that He would rule the individual. When Peter said: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," he understood what he was talking about. In the Old Testament prophecies we have three claims prophecied for Christ: (1) when He appeared He came with worldwide claims, (2) that when He appears He will come claiming a worldwide throne, (3) when Christ appeared He had eternal claims, He would claim to have a right to sit on an eternal throne. And then it is clear also that when Christ comes He will have personal claims, He will have a personal claim on every human being. And that is the way the Old Testament talked about this coming One. Isaiah 9:6-7: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder.' and His Name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon His kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this."
So when He came .the Jews understood that He would have authority, that He would have the voice of authority, and that He would rule the individual. And the Israelite, who studied the Old Testament knew that when the Messiah came that there was one thing certain: that His Lordship would be a settled issue. And that when He came, to accept Him was identical with accepting His authority. It meant to them that one must render to Him full devotion and faith and obedience. And thus when the Lord Jesus Christ appeared on the scene yonder on Palestinian soil, the question for the Jews was not one of whether the Messiah had the authority to rule, but was one of recognition whether or not the One Who came and said, "I am He," would be recognized and thus His authority be accepted or whether He would be rejected and unrecognized.
And this my friends is the dreamer of the New Testament especially of John's Gospel. Here we have the record of the failure of the Jewish people to recognize their God-sent Messiah. The failure to recognize Him and thus they rejected Him. In John 1:11 we are told, "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. "Here we have the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah and thus the denial of His claims to be the sent One of God. And thus the New Testament soon after we start reading it gives us a portrait of Jesus as the rejected Messiah. "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." They said, "This is not the One, this is not the One," and later on you will hear that piercing cry "We will not have this man to reign over us."
When He came He had to be rejected or received because He came demanding "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent or perish. "So folks said, "He is not the One we have been looking for; He is not the kind of Messiah we want. He is not the One we will bow to; we will not have this man to reign over us." He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.
Why was the Lord Jesus rejected by His own kinsman? My, isn't it tragic, you see a Jew today in his unbelief, he still has the marks of his rejection of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, and if he is an orthodox Jew he still looks for the coming of the sent One from God. He thinks that he is clear on one thing, he says that man Jesus you worship – He is not the Messiah. He is not the One in Whom all authority has been given. He still looks for that One to come. I think it is clear in the New Testament that our Lord Jesus Christ was not rejected by His own race, because of His worldwide claims, nor was He rejected because of His eternal claims to sit on an eternal throne. If you read the New Testament carefully you will find that He was rejected then, like He is rejected now, because He pressed His personal claims on everybody. He said to the leaders of the Jews, your religion is vile, it's perverted, and you need a new life, and you need to be born again, you need repentance and faith. He said the leaders are leading you, they are blind leaders leading you into blind alleys. Luke 6:39b: "Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?" That is what is happening today. If sin is damning its thousands, religion today is damning its tens of thousands.
So we are not surprised how the leaders got together and condemned Him to death. They thought they would get fid of His claims by putting Him to death, that is exactly why they killed Him. He said, "You are not right with God, you are not fit to lead," and they saw that it was either Him or them. They had to repent or kill this One Who claimed to be the sent One from God. They said they would get rid of Him, and that will be the last of Him, and we will still look for Him Who will be our Messiah.
Do you know that a miracle took place? God raised Him from the dead, and when He raised Him from the dead, His claims were fight back facing these leaders again. God enforced Christ's claims by raising Him from the dead and declared Him to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. Oh, my the rejected Christ. It was not a question of these Jews not knowing that if they accepted One they would have to bow down to Him and come under His yoke. They just said we are not going to accept this One. We will accept the true Messiah when He comes, and so they go on today still looking for Him Who has already come. But I had rather be in their shoes blinded as they are, than to be a church member that claims that he has accepted this Christ, and has never bowed in obedience to His Lordship. Christ is the accepted or the rejected Christ. Thank God that even then among a nation of Christ rejecters, there was a remnant of Christ accepters.
When the disciples owned Him in Matthew 16 as the One they had been looking for, the expected Messiah, they owned Him as their King, and their absolute Lord and Saviour. Also they came to see that they owned Him as their rejected Lord. For my Lord understood what it meant to receive Him, the rejected One. It meant for them a cross. After Peter made that great confession in Matthew 16:16: "And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Verse 24: "Then said Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me." Thus it means if you are a Christian, now that you have accepted not only the expected Christ, but the One Who didn't meet the expectations of the people of that day, and thus became the rejected Christ.
And so the confession of the Lord Jesus Christ today must be as revolutionary now, as it was then. The expected Christ, the One prophesied in the Old Testament and the One Whose credentials proved to be the One the Old Testament talked about. And yet He hung on a cross outside the very religious city of Jerusalem. The expected Christ, the prophesied Christ must rule over us entirely and the rejected Christ, this One the world rejects must be followed in self-denial and in full obedience to His absolute authority. Anything that falls short of that is a mockery of what salvation is.
You know my friends there is no middle ground in this business. You either have accepted this rejected Christ and taken up the cross and living a life of denying of yourself and following Him; all out for Him or you haven't at all. Christ must be all in all or He will not be Lord at all. I say it with a sob in my heart that our preaching today much of it is preaching another Jesus and another Gospel. The Apostle Paul warned of that in his days. I have been going up and down America for years now, saying that we are mighty close to preaching not the expected Christ of the Old Testament prophesy, not the rejected Christ of the Jewish nation of His day, and not the accepted Christ of the early Christians. But most preachers have preached another Jesus and another gospel. I have had to pay a little price for this, oh, I wonder if I am right, I wonder if in the popular preaching of the Gospel today, as we call it, everybody talks about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour. And nobody says anything much about surrendering to Christ, absolute authority in your every day living. I wonder if we haven't got another Jesus, this One we separated His Saviourhood from His Lordship. I hear it preached now that we are saved if we accept Jesus as our Saviour, and when I say the Scriptures don't talk like that, people say I am not preaching the Gospel. Oh my soul, you mean to tell me this Jesus the Old Testament prophesied of was prophesied just as somebody to keep you from going to hell? No, sir. It was prophesied of Him, that He would have the voice of authority, it was prophesied of Him that He would sit on an eternal throne, and that the heathen and the nations have been given Him as an inheritance and a possession. It was prophesied of Him in Isaiah that every knee should bow and every tongue confess and Paul refers to that in Phili 2:9-11.
"Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a Name which is above every name: That at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
Where is this Jesus, the expected Jesus of the Old Testament, the rejected Jesus of the New Testament, and the accepted Jesus of men and women who know Who He is by revelation? I say to you, they have taken away our Lord and we know not where to find Him. This little Jesus that will save you and leave you with your pride and your old will never having been bent, doing as you please, and refusing to bow to His Lordship, and dividing salvation and discipleship; and justification and sanctification, I say to you "that Jesus" is another Jesus and not the Lord Jesus Christ. The only Jesus the Word of God talks about in the Old Testament and announces His arrival in the Gospels, and as the old preachers told the significance of His life, His death, His resurrection, and His present reign in the Epistles. He is the One Who has throne rights in our lives everyday. And I tell you to accept Him as Saviour without facing the fact that He speaks with authority, and His sheep hear His voice and He rules them, and they will not listen to another fellow's voice. For to do that is at the peril of your soul.
Who do you say Jesus is? The Old Testament said He would be the absolute Lord, the Jews turned Him down because they didn't want Him to rule over them, what about you? What about you? Do you confess Him as Christ? Do you confess Him as Lord? Do you obey His commands? Listen to the plantive cry of the Lord Jesus. In Luke 6:46 it says: "Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" The Jesus of the Bible is the Lord of all. Who do you say He is? Who do you say He is? May God help you to answer that rightly in daily living.