Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ - Part 1

I believe that Jesus Christ is as alive, in fact, ten thousand times more alive today than you are, that he's more real than you are, that he's certainly more helpful to me than you are, because you were all asleep when I needed you last night, but he, as I sing to my little girl every night, never sleeps. And so this morning, after I was trying to put the final touches on these few minutes together, I said to him, okay, I'm going to take some time, Lord. I don't have all the time that I would like to take, but I will take some time just to let you talk to me, and this is where he does that. And so I opened my Bible to the appointed reading, which was in Mark, and with a sense of desperation about whether I would have the physical and mental capacities to do what we have to do here today, I read the next paragraph, and it was the story of the disciples, twelve of them, getting into a boat to go to the other side with Jesus, and they forgot to take bread, and they were upset about that. And Jesus heard them talking about how disturbed they were that they don't have bread, and he said, why are you discussing the fact that you don't have bread? The five loaves, when I fed five thousand, how many baskets full did you take up? And they said, twelve. And the seven loaves, when I fed the four thousand, how many baskets did you take up? And they said, seven. And he said, don't you understand? And that's the end of the story. I used to love Jesus. He says, Piper, I don't care how much sleep you got. I don't care how much preparation you've done. How many baskets were left over when you started with these crummy fish? And just enough, one for each disciple the first time, and seven—for whatever reason, seven, I don't know. Haven't got that one figured out. But Jesus came to me this morning. He's alive. He comes to you. He speaks to you. He ministers to you. He meets your need. He knows everything about you right now in this room, and He's here, and He's magnificent, and He's glorious. He's worth singing to. He's worth talking about. I'm going to invite you to turn to John chapter 12 before I pray again and ask for His help. I don't presume upon His blessing. I ask for it all the time. John chapter 12—I'm just kind of assuming you have Bibles, I guess. This will set the stage for our theme, Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. Start at verse 20 of John 12. Now, among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, Sir, we wish to see Jesus. I hope that you're saying that as you come. I hope you're sitting in your chair saying that. Philip went and told Andrew. Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. So they went to Jesus, and they said, There are some Greeks here, and they want to see you. And Jesus said—I'm going to fill in some blanks here—They want to see me? They want to see me? Yes, that's what we just said. They want to see you. And Jesus answered them, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Which I take to mean, They want to see me? I'm on my way to become infinitely worthy of seeing. I'm on my way to do something that will so add to my manifest glory that then I will be for them infinitely worthy of seeing. Because these people never show up in the story again. He never has a word to say to them. They never appear again. They just said they want to see him, and Jesus is off talking about something else, which is what he does a lot. And you just love him for it, because nothing is quite expectable. You're always off balance when you're around Jesus. I am. So he says, when they say, They would like to see you. And he says, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. The way I will become infinitely worthy of being seen, infinitely glorious, is by dying. I'm on my way to die, and you can tell the Greeks that I'm going to save them by dying and bear much fruit. So when I have done what they need me to do in dying for them and bearing fruit in Gentiles and Greeks and Jews all over the world, then maybe someday my final prayer will come true. Father, I desire that those whom you have given me may be with me where I am to see my glory. But first, I have to finish the glory. Well, Jesus, what should we tell them? What should they do? Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me, and I'm going to the cross. So if they want to see me someday, they must go with me. They must hate their life in this world, in this world, because someday I'm coming out of that grave, and when they hate their life in this world and follow me to the cross and deny themselves and take up the cross, then they will rise with me, and they will see me. And I will then be infinitely worthy of being seen. I will be infinitely worthy of being waited on to be fully seen. Let's pray. Father in heaven, I want to see your Son as much as a fallen, justified sinner in an age that his groaning can see him, and so do we all here. That's why we're here. And so I ask again for your help that I would say things that the Holy Spirit would be pleased to make the instruments of the awakening of the eyes of the heart to behold the glory of Christ your Son. So I'm not—depending upon my preparation here or myself—I'm seeking present help, because you're alive, and you're in this room, and you want to do some amazing work here in hearts and minds and marriages and parenting and children and jobs and physical health and relationships and hope and guidance that I can't even dream about. So be pleased to turn my mind and turn my heart and turn my tongue so that I am maximally useful to these God-exalting ends, I pray through Christ. So we're talking about seeing and savoring Jesus Christ in these couple of hours together, and here's the plan. We'll see how it goes. The first session before we take a break will be devoted to what are you talking about, seeing and savoring? How do you pursue it? Why does it matter? So that's kind of where we're going the first hour. Then we come back and we're just going to talk about Jesus. First hour is kind of internal, methodological, how do you live this? How do you pursue this? What is this? And then second hour, we should look at Him, okay? So that's where we're going. Number one, question one, the what, how, why, almost everything I think about, what is it? How do you do it? Why should I care? I just approach life like that, and so here we are with the issue of seeing and savoring Jesus, and I want to ask, what are you talking about? What is the seeing that you have in mind? So let's answer that first. Matthew 13, 13, you need to look this up. I'll holler at you when I want you to look something up, because otherwise I'll probably go over it too quickly. Jesus tells the parables that seeing they may not see. Just take that phrase, seeing they don't see, seeing they don't see. So there are two kinds of seeing, right? This kind, and what would be the other kind? I heard John pray it, maybe I heard Scott pray it. The other kind is the Ephesians 1:18 kind. Paul is praying, just like we have, and he prays that we would be given a spirit of wisdom and a revelation in the knowledge of God that the eyes of our hearts would be, the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened to know the hope of our calling, the inestimable measure of our inheritance, Him, and the greatness of the power that is at work within us. So, evidently, our hearts, in Paul's way of thinking, have eyes. That's very strange, isn't it? That's remarkable. Hearts have eyes. That's the seeing I'm mainly interested in. I know these are important, although there may be a blind person in the room, and if there is, blind people often see better than seeing people, because deprived of one sense, other senses are more awake and keen, and the key sense is the sense of the heart. And that's what we're talking about, a sense, a spiritual sense or apprehension of the glory of Christ, which these eyes may have seen when they were on the earth with Jesus, or they may in reading the Bible, but natural people without any Holy Spirit help at all see with ease. They often see better with ease and are lost, and that does them no good at all. So I'm most interested in what Paul means by the eyes of the heart seeing spiritual reality. And it's interesting, isn't it, in Ephesians 1 that he is talking about the riches of the glory of our inheritance and the exceeding greatness of the power. Evidently, there are dimensions of hope, dimensions of inheritance, dimensions of power, which you can't apprehend except by the eyes of the heart. Words like riches of glory, exceeding greatness of power. And one of the reasons there's so little passion in the church for the riches of the glory of our inheritance and the exceeding greatness of power is that the eyes of our heart are so dim, or perhaps for many still blind. So it matters a lot that we understand what's up here, and more important than understanding what's up is to experience the awakening of the eyes of our heart to behold the glory of Christ. Here's another verse. This one was also prayed because it is programmatic, I think, in Paul's understanding of sanctification, of growing in grace and being conformed to Jesus and being what the world needs from us. 2 Corinthians 3:18, we all, with unveiled face, are beholding—beholding as in a mirror—the glory of the Lord and are being changed by that beholding from one degree of glory to the next into the image of Christ. So right now, the only hope for our churches and the only hope for your family to become more like Jesus is to behold him. We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed from one degree of glory to the next. Beholding glory, we're being changed into glory. Beholding is becoming. If you haven't devoted your life to beholding Christ, you're probably not making much progress in becoming like him. So this beholding is a spiritual beholding because Paul said, right now, we walk by faith and not by sight. Not by sight. So where are you, Jesus? And he says, don't say that. I'm not going to show up. I'm not going to be there for your physical eyes, but I can be seen. I can be beheld. So just make the distinction, first of all, between seeing—they do not see. There is a seeing here, a reading with these eyes, a hearing with these ears, and we could say hearing—they do not hear, but we're not into that metaphor this morning. It's mainly these eyes beholding that about him which is most important, and it was not what could be seen with the physical eyes. Many ordinary people can be seen with the physical eyes. That isn't the main glory of Jesus Christ. So we focus on seeing the glory of Christ, the beauty of Christ, the perfections of Christ, the worth of Christ, and it's not synonymous with physical sight, physical hearing, physical reading of the Bible. So what is it like? We still haven't said what needs to be said totally yet. Let me read you a quote from Jonathan Edwards. Stu was right to say he's my main mentor outside the Bible, and he's dead, you know. Most worthy mentors are dead, and I hope you don't limit your being mentored to living mentors. They are very valuable, and you should care about those, but if you don't have one of those, please don't feel adrift, because I would be willing to share Edwards with you. Here's what he wrote, "'Thus the soul may have a kind of intuitive knowledge of the divinity of the things exhibited in the gospel.' Not that he judges the doctrines of the gospel to be from God without any argument or deduction at all, but it is without any long chain of arguments. The argument is but one, and the evidence is direct. The mind ascends to the truth of the gospel, but by one step, that is its divine glory. That is amazingly profound and controversial. It all has to do with the place of apologetics in trying to help people see and know Christ, which he says are valuable but not decisive. One of the reasons he was so concerned to say that formal apologetics is valuable but not decisive is because he cared so much about the common man who had no access. He cared about the Indians in the western parts of Massachusetts. How in his preaching for the six years in Stockbridge could they see and know the reality of the risen Christ? They couldn't even read, let alone entertain any formal long chain of historical and logical argumentation. Can they be saved? Can they see him in his argument? And it is developed in a huge way. This is a tiny little tip of the iceberg. The evidence is direct. The mind ascends to the truth of the gospel, but by one step, that is its divine glory. What he's saying is when the gospel is faithfully preached, unfolded in its fullness — and it takes some time to do that, might take a half an hour in an evangelistic sermon to unfold the gospel, find the common ground, try to make things understandable at the rational level — the Holy Spirit enables the eyes of the heart in and through the rational, objective display of gospel truth to apprehend glory and know it is true. Self-authenticating, self-evidencing word of God over this gospel, in this gospel, through this gospel, as this gospel, and people who are very simple may have profound assurance as the eyes of their hearts behold the glory of Christ shining off of the truth of the gospel. So we are talking about a seeing of divine glory, not a physical or rational display, though you see how important that is. It's so important. A little child may look at a Michelangelo and prefer a comic strip, and that's the way many human beings are when they look at the cross. We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews, foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those who have been called the power of God and the wisdom of God. In other words, two people can be staring at the cross exhibited in the faithful preaching of the gospel, and one person yawns and wants to go back to the comic strip, and the other person goes flat on his face because he has seen glory. Glorious wisdom, glorious power, glorious, perfect, tailor-made salvation for the way my sinful heart is broken and the way my God-shaped heart is hungry. And he sees it. He knows it. So that's the seeing that we're after. I use the word savoring as almost synonymous. Because, and we'll say more about this as we go along. I'll mention it here. Because to see as infinitely valuable is inseparable from embracing, receiving, enjoying, being satisfied by, treasuring, or to use the word we're using, savoring. And you know where we get this, don't you? The only reason I use the word saving is because it starts with an S, and it sounds good with C. What's the biblical word? Somebody tell me Psalm 34:8. Taste and see. Taste and see that the Lord is good. See, taste. Well, it doesn't sound as good. I don't think. That's English. I'm not criticizing the Bible. The Bible's in Hebrew, all right? This is English, so I'm gonna do English. And I think I do English better than taste and see. I think seeing and savoring really has a ring to it. If you don't like it, taste and see's fine. Means the same. So I just want you to know where I got it. I didn't make it up. It's in the Bible, and the Bible is really, really big on this issue of not only seeing God, but tasting God. Because that text is quoted in 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 3. Grow up into Christ by tasting and seeing the spiritual milk of the word. If you've tasted that the Lord is good, if you've tasted that the Lord is good, well, what's that? That's just another metaphor for the eyes of the heart beholding the glory of Christ. It's an affective, emotion-laden word that penetrates through the rational powers of the brain down to the heart where we not only think, as the Bible says the heart does, but experiences beauty in a spiritually aesthetic way that is only possible by the heart through the work of the Holy Spirit. That's all I want to say about the first question of what are you talking about? No, how? What do you look at? I mean, you've said it's not with these eyes, or this ear, or this brain. It's a spiritual perception, apprehension, tasting, seeing. You've said that, but now what do I do? I've got eyes here. I've got ears here. I've got a brain, and I want this to happen. I want to know Him the way He must be known. What do I do? Where do I turn? Do I look at anything with these eyes? That's what we're talking about now. I think you should open your Bible now to 2 Corinthians. This text for me is so huge, 2 Corinthians 4, and there's much we can do with it. I'm only going to do one little thing on trying to answer the how question here. So, let's read 2 Corinthians 4, 4 through 6. Keep everything I've said in mind as you read with me. In their case, that is those who are perishing, in their case the God of this world, that's Satan, has blinded the minds of the unbelievers. Now, that's spiritual blindness because unbelievers are really smart. They can get us to the moon. They can heal diseases. I thank God for the common grace of unbelievers when I ride in an ambulance or get a shot that keeps me from getting the flu. I mean, praise God for unbelievers who use their God-given brains in God's common grace and providence to not only kill each other but save lives. So, that's who he's talking about, and that's the kind of blindness he means. They're not blind in every way. He's got in mind a certain blindness. Satan has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing. There it is. That's what I care most about in my life and your life. Keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. I hope lights go on for you everywhere right there because that's what I've been talking about for the last little while. Who is the image of God. That's why His glory is so glorious. It's divine glory. And then verse 5, for what we proclaim. Okay, so you do proclaim something for the human ear. Yes, I do. For we proclaim not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake, for God who said that light shone out of darkness has shone in our hearts. This is what has to happen. Has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. The only thing I want to get out of there now, instead of preaching for an hour on that text which would be easy to do, that's rich, is to just get the word gospel because that's my answer mainly, not only, but mainly to the how question. How do we see? Where do we look? What do we listen to? Where do we go? What do we do with this book? And I just want you to see the word gospel in verse 4 again. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. So my answer to the how question is going to be that we should mainly look at and listen to the gospel. A little parenthesis here. Somebody might ask, so Paul proclaims with his mouth, his vocal cords, and it lands on the eardrum and goes to the brain. What's that got to do with seeing? That's hearing. And the Bible says, faith comes by hearing. And I'm right now saying, amen. However, there's a verse, really helpful, there's a lot, but this one says it most clearly in 1 Samuel 321. I'll read it to you and you can look at it later. 1 Samuel 321, the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord. The first two verbs sounded like seeing verbs. The Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh. And then you get this, by the word, which I take to mean we see with our ears. The eyes of the heart see with the ears, which is why the Bible says faith comes by hearing. When you hear the gospel, statements made with mouths, articulated from brains, landing on — what's this called? — eardrums that go into other brains, and thus you transfer statements about Christ crucified. That is the instrument that the Holy Spirit will use to grant sight to the eyes of the heart. Don't separate them. Don't separate hearing and seeing. Don't separate the images of auditory and the images of sight. This is all one event, because it is spiritual. Spiritual seeing happens through hearing the gospel. So, how would you then pursue spiritual seeing? The answer is — let's just start general and then go specific. I would say to a person, an unbeliever, who said, I don't have a clue what you're talking about. I don't think I've experienced anything like a spiritual apprehension of glory or anything like that. I'm willing to pursue it. What should I do? I would say, read the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You've got to know Him. And by reading, reading is just adding, you know, turning words into the hearing thing or the seeing thing, whatever. Get the knowledge into your head, because the Holy Spirit was given, Jesus said, I'm sending Him in order to glorify the Son. But He glorifies the Son when objective truth about the Son is made known to the mind, so that the Holy Spirit has stuff to work with. The Holy Spirit doesn't touch the heart apart from the gospel. He doesn't do in runs in some kind of loosey-goosey, fluttering way with your heart. I get really nervous. I was talking to a person just a few — yes, I think it was a young person at the conference we were at in Vancouver a few days ago — was telling me, and I forget where it was. It was the last few days. Doesn't matter, does it? They were telling me that their girlfriend — probably just as well that I don't remember who I'm talking about, because they're going to recognize it on the video — the girlfriend really gets moved and has wonderful, sweet experiences with God when she leaves her Bible behind and goes out to be with Him by herself apart from the Bible. I was getting nervous about that. I'm not saying God can't deal with people apart from the Bible. I'm saying, to the degree that gospel-centered, inspired, word-saturated brains move away from this, the experience they're having is moving away from authenticity. I'll speak in general, proportional terms rather than black-and-white terms there, to just warn you that if you go here and get no buzz, and you go to the woods and get a buzz, you got a problem. And the problem's not with the woods. God made the woods and the woods are declaring the glory of God. You ought to get a buzz in the woods. The problem is not getting one here governing that one, shaping that one, controlling that one. People that have more deep, happy, excited experiences with Jesus apart from the written Word are in trouble. So I'm answering the how question to pursue authentic seeing of Jesus, and I'm telling you, go to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John first. Now think about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They're very strange, because we tend to want to compare them with biographies, and they're very strange biographies, aren't they? Two of them start at age 30 and tell about three years of his life, and two of them have little teeny stories about his birth, and then jump over to age 30. What's going on? That's not helpful. Leave out all that interesting information about age four. Fearsome fours. Jesus at four would be helpful. My parenting. Well, maybe it wouldn't be. You expect me to do that? So what's up with the Gospels? And you know what's up. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to give His life as a ransom for many, and that's all it's about, mainly. I'm here to die. Let's just shorten it down. I'm here to die, and therefore when I say the how of the spiritual seeing of the glory of Christ is in the Gospels, the Gospels themselves, by their very structure, are telling me more about how to do that. They're telling me, make haste to the main thing, which is the Gospel centered at the cross. Let's linger there for a minute, okay? I would dishonor the Lord, I think, if I did not linger at the cross, because here is where His glory shines supremely. I can tell those Greeks who want to see me that I want to be a fruitful person in obedience to my Father so that they could be included in the family that sees the Son forever. So I've got work to do, and I must go die. The seed must fall into the ground, or they'll never see glory. They'll be in hell forever. So what happened at the cross? Number one, the wrath of God was absorbed by Jesus Christ completely and finally and decisively for all of His people. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. As it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. Is it not glorious and paradoxical that the moment when He was most gory, most horrible, most like a lamb with His throat slit, blood coming from everywhere, such that if you were there, you probably would have thrown up or passed out. At that moment, the most glorious act in the universe was happening. And the wrath of God that I deserve because of all of my dishonoring of His glory was falling on and being taken in and absorbed by the Son so that when He said, it is finished, I will never taste one ounce of the wrath of God. Never will God ever show wrath towards any of His children. Discipline, yes, sometimes tough, but filled with love only for their good. Read Hebrews 12, those of you who've had parents who did not do their job well. You have a father who does his job perfectly, and he is never judicially wrathful toward you. If he must spank you, oh, how much love is in his spanking. Because of Christ crucified, absorbing all the wrath of God, behold, your glorious Christ, see Him. Number two, He bore our sins and purchased our forgiveness decisively outside of us. Two thousand years before we were born, 1 Peter 2 24, He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree. Every sin that you sin in Christ, the forgiveness of it has been wholly, decisively purchased, and no more payment can be made to relieve you of it. It is finished by Christ at this moment. Number three, Christ provided a perfect righteousness for us that becomes ours when we're united to Him by faith, but the finishing of the righteousness that I do not have and must have was completed two thousand years ago. Philippians 2, He was obedient unto death, even death on a cross, and thus brought to completion and perfect consummation a whole life of exquisite obedience, heart and mind, fulfilling all of God's demands, all of God's laws, so that when I believe Him, trust Him, see Him as glorious in this moment of gospel presentation, that obedience is counted as mine, and the Father looks upon me in Christ as perfectly obedient. That was finished at the cross. Behold your God. Behold the one that you should live for and savor forever and ever. Number four, He defeated death when He died. Hebrews 2 14, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise took the same nature that He might through death destroy the one who has the power of death. So your liberation from death was decisively accomplished two thousand years ago before you were ever born on the cross and in the resurrection. Number five, He disarmed Satan when He died. Colossians 2 14, the record of debts that stood against us, He set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities, put them to an open shame by triumphing over them in Him. When Christ died, the decisive, undamning blow, that is, undamning you from Satan's damning influences was delivered. This is troubling to people and glorious because people say, well, I think Satan's quite alive and well because he's beating me up all the time, he's lying about me, he's accusing me, and that's true. Shooting these fiery darts at us all the time according to Ephesians 6. Devices that we're supposed to know about so we don't get tripped up by them. So what's the deal with Colossians 2 14? He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to an open shame by triumphing over all these demonic forces, including Satan, in the cross. How so? In two senses, profoundly relevant for you. Number one, Satan only has one damning power, and it is the accusation of you with your unforgiven sin. That damns you, and it would make him very happy. If he can accuse you of unforgiven sin, you're damned, and he's satisfied. And guess what happened at the cross? That weapon was taken out of his hand. He cannot damn anybody who is in Christ, whose blood covers us. And the second sense is that decisively he's finished, and he will be thrown into the lake of fire someday, precisely because of what happened at the cross. Do you remember what the devil said to Jesus when he arrived? They said, we know who you are, the Holy One of God. Why have you come here before the time? Ever wondered what that means? Before the time? Now you know what it means. There's a time coming, and they know it. They know they're finished. They know they're going to the lake of fire. That's why they beat up on us as much as they can. You're here too early, because it's supposed to happen later. And Jesus is the strong man, and he's going to bind the one who is strong against us, and he did it decisively at Calvary. Look at the gospel when you want to see Jesus. Number six, he purchased our final healing and holiness. Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and by his stripes we are healed, not completely now. Sometimes now we should pray for healing for each other and expect God to do remarkable things, even heal cancer and awful things. Ask him, because he bought it. Just don't do what some charismatics do by saying he bought it all for now. They just got their timing wrong. He bought it all, but not all for now. Some of it now, all of it later, because Paul says in Romans 8, we groan now, waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies. And what he meant was his back hurts, because he'd been whipped with thirty-nine lashes five times, and he can hardly move because of the scar tissue on his back. Maybe that's the thorn in the flesh, I don't know. But he groaned every day of his life. I'd die every day, Paul said, and Christ totally bought my healing. So look to the cross and admire your Savior. Number seven, when he died, he purchased our sure access to God in all his glory. 1 Peter 3:18, Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. That's the capstone of the gospel. All these other things are means to this. He suffered once, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to the fountain where we will be satisfied forever, himself and his Father. So, my answer to the question of how, what do you do, if you want to see, is go to the book, especially in the book, go to the Gospels, notice that the Gospels themselves are so structured as to get us to the cross, and then I would say go to the Epistles, which unpack the achievement of the cross more than the Gospels. You can think about the Gospels as they're narrating the event, and the event is indispensable to the gospel. No event, no gospel. But the Gospels do not unpack nearly as fully as the Epistles, what happened at the cross? Some but not much. These are to tell us, look at this event. Why does seeing and savoring Jesus matter? Here are the reasons. Number one, saving faith without which we perish includes savoring Christ. Does that make it important? It makes it infinitely important. I'm not here to do a seminar on peripheral things. Like, if you savor Christ, things go better. If you don't, still go to heaven. That's not true. I'm arguing now that the first reason that seeing and savoring Christ is important is because saving faith includes it. Let me say it like this. Almost everybody would agree, wouldn't we, that faith is a receiving of Christ. To all who receive Him who believed in His name—notice the paralleling of receive and believe—to all who received Him who believed in His name, He gave the right to become the children of God. So I don't think we're going to have any argument that at the heart of what faith is, is receiving. That is the heart of what it is. It's a receiving. A receiving. It's not a performing. It's not a doing. It's not a being. Oh, how many heresies come from messing up what faith is in how it gets saved. It turns it into a virtue, and then the virtue becomes worthy of something, and now we're into works. Faith is essentially receiving something, and I just want to make sure you understand the two ways it receives Christ. It's all one, but I'll split it out so you can make sure it's happening. First, Christ, according to the gospel, finished the work of salvation 2,000 years ago, such that the wrath is removed, the holiness of God is satisfied, righteousness is provided, God's law is fulfilled, sins are covered with blood, and that all happened outside of you by another, and you desperately must have it. You must be punished for your sin. You must have a perfect righteousness to enter into God's presence, and you don't have it, and you don't want to go to hell and be punished for your sins. You want to be saved. How then does the gospel explain we are saved? And it says, by faith alone, which is a receiving of the one who is the righteousness, a receiving of the one who died my death, a receiving of the one whose blood covers my sins. If I receive him, I have in him the righteousness I need. I have in him the death. I have already died in him. I have passed from death to life, and I am clothed with righteousness, and it all happened because I received a gift. That's faith. I hope everybody agrees with that. I hope you're all right now doing it. It's not something you just do when you're 6 or 36. You do it every day. Every day you receive him. You just live on the ever-coming arrival of Christ. And the second thing is that he, in doing all of that gospel work, is infinitely valuable, and faith receives him as such, or doesn't receive him at all. That's controversial, but let me press it, because if you wonder why there's so much nominalism in the churches, one reason is because we have not understood what receiving Christ means. Here's a way to describe the problem. Many people—these people are in grave danger, so test yourself—receive him not as supremely valuable and thus savored, but they receive him as sin-forgiver because they hate being guilt-free, not because they love Jesus. They receive him as rescuer from hell because they don't want to burn. They receive him as healer because they love being disease-free. They receive him as protector because they love being safe. They receive him as prosperity-giver because they love money. They receive him as creator because it would be better to have an orderly and personal universe. They receive him as Lord of history because order and purpose in the universe, history is steadying. They don't receive him as supremely, personally valuable to them. They don't receive him as more glorious, more beautiful, more wonderful, more satisfying than everything in the universe, which is in the gospel shown most clearly. They don't prize him, treasure him, cherish him, delight in him. They just treat him like—oh, see, I've come up with one here, just, you know, just something tattered. Where's something tattered? Yeah, it's just kind of tattered. There you go. There he is. So, am I going to heaven? Of course I'm going to heaven. Look, I got the ticket. I signed the card. I prayed the prayer. I keep it in my wallet. I sit on it. I pull it out if you want to know about it, I pull it out, but love this, cherish this, savor this. That's stupid. It's a tattered car. I just want to go to heaven, that's all. That's what our churches, I fear, might be filled with. Another way to say it is this. They receive Christ in a way that requires no change in human nature. They don't have to be born again to receive Christ this way, because every fallen person with no change whatsoever loves being guilt-free, pain-free, disease-free, safe, and wealthy. So, if Jesus can get me there, take him. Of course, why wouldn't you? He's the means to the end. You step on him, you get what you want. Go from here to there. Fine. What do you want me to do? I pray. I come to church. But to embrace Jesus as your supreme treasure requires a new nature. Fallenness means mainly, sin means mainly savoring non-God. Anything, family, health, money, job, fame, ministry, success, savoring it above him. So, if we don't preach the essential nature of saving faith as including a receiving of Christ as infinitely valuable, we're going to fill our churches with non-born-again people who are here for the payoff, not the king. Jesus says, therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Renounce him because he's been discovered of superior value. Be thou my vision. He said, whoever loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. That's not adding works to faith. That's describing the nature of faith. When we receive him, we receive him as more valuable than mom or daughter, Talitha. Christ is more precious to me than my 11-year-old. Otherwise, she couldn't be as precious to me as she is. That's another sermon. The second thing I said is that you're made for majesty. And here I have in mind trying to find common ground with unbelievers. How do you talk to them about such things? If they asked you, what did you do this weekend? And you said, I went to talk about seeing and savoring Jesus. And what in the world would you say to them? And so I'm kind of on the alert for newspaper things and magazine things that provide me some common ground with people that look at magazines and don't go to church, don't read their Bible, don't know anything, don't care. And so this is a little illustration from the world that everybody you know is wired by God to find their deepest satisfaction in seeing and savoring Jesus as majestic, so that they feel small and enjoy making him big. That's what they're made for. They don't know it, and so they find substitutes, right? Big ones. I mean, there are some people who only do lechery, but most people have this little fragment left over in their fallen heart where they are moved by majesty. Might be a big cinematographic movie. Everything's blowing up these days in movies. And you just, you want to go, you pay eight dollars to get scared, get the blankety-blank scared out of you at the movies. What's that about? Why do people want to be scared? It's because they're made to fear God. That's why. And if you fear God and you're saved, it feels good. Well, they're figuring that out, but they don't know they're figuring it out. So I saw in a National Geographic adventure magazine—it's not the real deal, but it's another one—this advertisement for Nature Valley Trail Mix. You ever look at these? This is phenomenal. This is the most amazing advertisement I've seen in years. So it's Nature Valley Trail Mix. A granola bar, a little thing here. Fruit and nut. And this is a picture of a mountain. I don't know whether we can, whether I should be holding this out. There's a picture of a mountain right there. You can't see it, but right at the top of that mountain, this vast stretch of territory stretching off, there's two guys. I think they're guys. I can hardly tell. They look like guys to me. And the one is standing up, makes your knees wobble, just to look. He's standing on the pinnacle up there. His arms are stretched out like this with a rope hanging over there. They just climbed the sheer face here, right? And they're standing up there like this. And you know what it says at the top of this? You've never felt more alive. You've never felt more insignificant. I just dropped my jaw when I saw that. You mean you're telling me that the world knows this? That to feel insignificant on the top of a mountain is glorious? Never felt more alive than when I felt fragile and small and vulnerable and insignificant? They know. They know. There are ways to make these things plain. There are ways to get into people's hearts. This one, somebody sent me. I don't know. I don't read the cartoons. That's not where I do my research. I should, though, evidently, because Arlo and Janice, I've never heard of Arlo and Janice. They look to me like an old Swedish couple. Is that Swedish, Arlo and Janice? Maybe not. But anyway, they're old. And so here they are, and they're standing together. It's kind of like me and Noel standing together in the snow. It's quiet. They're not saying anything, just standing there. And he says, it's so quiet. And she says, yes. And then he says, hey, blank, last one as they're walking hand-in-hand away, ever notice that the best moments make you feel insignificant. Why? Because we're made for majesty, not in here, but out there. We're not made to be majestic. We're made to see majesty and be caught up into it. It's evidently in the mind of these advertisers and this cartoonist, it's evidently a very happy thing to be insignificant. That's highly countercultural, because there are echoes of the truth everywhere in the fallen world. So that's what I meant by number two. It's important to think about these things and understand them because you're made to see and savor the majestic Christ. I think I will pass over the next two and not say any more about them. Three, it matters because when you behold, you become. And therefore, if you want to make progress in Christlikeness, you must see Christ. And that means lingering here a long time, memorizing it, meditating on it, getting your mind saturated by it. And the last one was that God is most glorified when you are savoring him most, or when you're most satisfied in him.