Christ Our Life: Mike Reeves

Christ Our Life notes and thoughts.
Introduction: Christianity Is Christ

Great opening description of Jesus:

Jesus Christ, God's perfect Son, is the Beloved of the Father, the Song of the angels, the Logic of creation, the great Mystery of godliness, the bottomless Spring of life, comfort and joy. We were made to find our satisfaction, our heart's rest, in him. 

Commenting on Paul's words: 'For me to live is Christ' & 'What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.'

Startling words, all too easily dismissed as religious overexcitement. But Paul was not raving; he was speaking plainly the deepest wisdom: that life is found in Jesus Christ, the author and source of it, and if we know him rightly, we will find nothing so desirable, as him.

There's too many quotable things in this book that I could end up typing up the whole thing. Here's another beauty that follows on from the previous:

It's not just our self-focus, though; we naturally gravitate, it seems, towards anything but Jesus - and Christians almost as much as anyone. Whether it's the 'Christian worldview', 'grace', 'the Bible' or 'the gospel'; as if they were things in themselves that could save us. Even 'the cross' can get abstracted form Jesus, as if the wood had some power of its own. Other things, wonderful things, vital concepts, beautiful discoveries, they so easily edge Jesus aside. Precious theological concepts meant to describe him and his work get treated as things in their own right. He becomes just another brick in the wall. But the centre, the cornerstone, the jewel in the crown of Christianity is not an idea, a system or a thing; it is not even 'the gospel' as such. It is Jesus Christ.

Beautiful! Jesus is all in all. I am sitting here bursting with delight in him as I write that. I find it so strange (from an objective point of view) that such fierce and strong emotions could be felt simply by reading such words off a page. Yet it isn't the words that excite me but the truth they bear witness to. Jesus is my saviour, my Lord, my God yes - but he is so much more. He is the life in my veins, the song of my heart, the delight of my soul. His goodness to me, his richness, his kindness his mercy, his happiness shared, his compassion, his leadership his teaching, his rebuke everything about him fills and enriches every part of me. I cannot comprehend not least explain the richness and the strength of such feelings. It may be fuelled in part by a good cup of coffee or some favourable circumstances but I know that it is much richer and more substantial than that.

Robert Murry M'Cheyne, wrote to a friend with this advice:

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love and repose in his almighty arms... Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in him.

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Behind the curtain. There is no God behind Jesus' back. Reeves introduces the chapter by saying that the words 'In the beginning the word was with God... and was God.' John brings about a revolution of thought about God:

Here then, is the revolution: for all our dreams, our dark and frightened imaginings of God, there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus. 

No God who is unlike him. That means that the only God in heaven is like him, is him, that there is no other. Brilliant.

Let us be rid of that horrid, sly idea that behind Jesus, the friend of sinners, there is some more sinister being, one thinner on compassion and grace. There cannot be!

Then, talking about how seeing God as 'the word' he says:

if we do not go to this Word to know God, then all our thoughts about God, however respectful, worshipful or philosophically satisfying, will be nothing but idolatry.

Spurgeon, on God:

Is not God the Father of lights, the supreme truth, the most delectable object... Is he not light without darkness, love without unkindness, goodness without evil, purity without filth, all excellency to please, without a spot to distaste? Are not all other things infinitely short of him, more below him than a cab of dung is below the glory of the sun? 

Ho! Ho! Homoousis!

Before the mushy tales of Santa's sleigh and his sack of presents got going, the stories told about St Nicholas were rather different. The one Christian mothers loved to use to comfort their little ones was of the venerable bishop, not shaking his belly like a bowlful of jelly, but rosy-cheeked with ire, smiting the arch-heretic Arius at the Council of Nicea.

For some years, Arius had been broadcasting his belief that the Son was not eternal, God himself; he was instead a created thing, made by God to go and fashion a universe. Alarmed by the division this teaching caused, the newly converted Roman emperor, Constantine, called for a council of bishops to discuss the matter at Nicea in AD 325. It was there, they said, that Nicholas of Myra heard Arius for himself; and there, unable to contain his anger at such blasphemy, he let fly.

The argument was over the nature of the Son. Arius taught that the son was a created being. They quotes psalm 2 & Hebrews 1 where God says 'today I have begotten you.' Arius argued that there must have been a day before 'today' a day when he wasn't the Father's son. Reeves points out that:

1 - Paul quotes this about the resurrection
2 - and yet before the resurrection God proclaims 'here is my son'
3 - Paul says that 'God sent forth his son into the world' in other words he was his son before he was sent.

St Nic. saw that Arius was throwing away the God of love and the gospel of grace in exchange for a steely idol who lacked any real conception of kindness:

According to Arius, God had created the Son so as to do the hard graft of dealing with the universe for him. Fait enough, but that said something profound: it was not that the Father truly loved the Son; the Son was just his hired workman. And if the Bible ever spoke of the Father's pleasure in the Son, it can only have been because the Son had done a good job.... God is simply The Employer. But that is no fatherly God of true relationships and heartfelt kindness. 

Seeing Jesus and understanding who he is, changes everything

As Christians we can easily stop focusing on Jesus. Jesus can easily become just another bit of the Christian landscape. But:

...if there is nothing more precious to the Father than him, there cannot be any blessing higher than him or anything better than him. In every way. He himself must be the 'very great reward' of the gospel. He is the treasure of the Father, shared with us. Sometimes we find ourselves tiring of Jesus, stupidly imagining that we have seen all there is to see and used up all the pleasure there is to be had in him. We get spiritually bored. But Jesus has satisfied the mind and heart of the infinite God for eternity. Our boredom is simple blindness.

Finding rest in Jesus. Samuel Rutherford put it:

...those who take it shall 'find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship.' 

On the trinity:

To be truly trinitarian we must be constantly Christ-centred.

For eternity, the Word has spoken out, telling of a God of overflowing life. For eternity, the Son was cherished, telling of a God of bottomless love.

Jonathan Edwards, put it unforgettably when describing the Son-centered focus of the Father:

The creation of the world seems to have been especially for this end, that the eternal Son of God might obtain a spouse, towards whom he might fully exercise the infinite benevolence of his nature, and to whom he might, as it were, open and pour forth all that immense fountain of condescension, love and grace that was in his heart, and that in this way God might be glorified.

 A problem for many Christians is that they aren't satisfied by Jesus very much at all:

Sadly, so many Christians have a background virus in their understanding of the gospel here. It's not easy to spot, but it eats away at all their confidence in Christ. It's this: the sneaking suspicion that while Jesus is a saviour, he's not really the Creator of all. So they sing of his love on a Sunday - and there it is true - but walking home through the streets, past the people and the places where Real Life goes on, they don't feel it is Christ's world. As if the universe is a neutral place. As if Christianity is just something we have smeared on top of Real Life. Jesus is reduced to being little more than a comforting nibble of spiritual chocolate, an imaginary friend who 'saves souls' but not much else.

Christ Our Life

For our health, our joy, and fellowship we must take up arms against the insidious idea that we have any identity - background, ability or statues - more basic than that of sharing the Son's own life together before the Father. 

Spurgeon: A man so fruitful and industriose to seem fictitious. The source of his energy, life and joy? Jesus Christ.

His first sermon at the Met. Tabernacle from 1891:

I would propose that the subject of the ministry of this house, as lone as this platform shall stand, and as long as this house shall be frequented by worshippers, shall be the person of Jesus Christ.'

Thirty years later, in his last ever words from the pulpit he said:

It is heaven to serve Jesus. I am a recruiting sergeant and I would fain find a few recruits at this moment. Every man must serve somebody; we have no choice as to that fact. Those who have no master are slaves to themselves. Depend upon it, you will either serve Satan or Christ, either self or the Saviour. You will find sin, self, Satan, and the world to be hard masters; but if you wear the livery of Christ, you will find him so meek and lowly of heart that you will find rest unto your souls. He is the most magnanimous of captains. there never was his like among the choicest of princes. He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle. When the wind blows cold he always takes the bleak side of the hill. The heaviest end of the cross lies ever on his shoulders. If he bids us carry a burden, he carries it also. If there is anything that is gracious, generous, kind and tender, yea lavish and superabundant in love, you always find it in him. These forty years and more have I served him, blessed be his name! and I have had nothing but love from him. I would be glad to continue yet another forty years in the same dear service here below if so it please him. His service is life, peace, joy. Oh that you would enter on it at once! God help you to enlist under the banner of Jesus even this day!

How to become more godly:

You are what you see. Michel Foucault noticed this when he was looking at the use of the confessional in Roman Catholicism. After the Reformation of the sixteenth century, as Rome sought to put its house in order, the practise of confessing your sins to a priest became ever more strongly encouraged. Through acknowledging and confessing their sinfulness, it was thought, people would be spurred on to deeper holiness. What actually happened, Foucault observed, was that people only came to identify themselves more strongly as sinners. Sure, the priest had uttered his absolution, but the whole practice put the focus on the sin being confessed. Through that prolonged look, they bound themselves tighter to the very things they sought to escape. (None of that is to suggest that self-examination itself is a bad thing, of course; it is simply that a focus on self is not the secret of godliness.)

Seeing Christ fixes all. Dr John Owen says:

Do any of us find decays in grace prevailing in us; deadness, coldness, lukewarmness, a kind of spiritual stupidity and senselessness coming upon us? ... Let us assure ourselves there is no better way for our healing and deliverance, yea, no other way but this alone, - namely, the obtaining a fresh view of Christ and his glory, putting forth its transforming power unto the revival of all grace, it the only relief in this case.

He was a man tragically familiar with heartbreak. At one point in the 1650s he was the vice-chancellor of Oxford university, successful and influential; but in the second half of his life he was pushed into obscurity and social exile, hampered and harassed by the new government. Heavily outweighing all that, he had to witness the burial of all eleven of his children, as well as his wife, Mary. After the death of the first ten children, he wrote these words:

'a due contemplation of the glory of Christ will restore and compose the mind... it will lift the minds and hearts of believers above all the troubles of this life, and is the sovereign antidote that will expel all the poison that it in them; which otherwise might perplex and enslave their souls.'