What is it to truly “know” Jesus?

Much of a ritual or a festival most of you make of the lent season. Lent is the 40-day period of time, beginning on the Christian calendar with Ash Wednesday, and it’s a 40-day period in which we are to experience the denial and the suffering, and to enter into that experience with the Lord, whether it’s spiritually by way of meditation or physically in a denial that we make upon our own lives in reference to identifying with Christ. Lent celebrates his suffering, his giving. I always try to go back to the New Testament and read the one-quarter of the New Testament gospel scriptures, which speak about the Lord’s Passover. In fact, you’ll find that 25 of the 89 chapters of the four Gospels deal with the last week of Jesus’ life, and it’s an extremely significant passage. Every year as I read and reread these passages, there are new details which speak to my own spirit, and of course, most of that experience concerns the suffering and death and ultimately the resurrection of Christ. It’s the heaviest dose of teaching, and it’s the hardiest application of example to my mind in the entire world.

This year, my lent exercise has been outlined by two revelations, which are given and shared by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the first of these is found in Hebrews 5:8-9. “Though he were a son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered and being made perfect, he became the author of Eternal Salvation unto all them that obey him.” What a tremendous passage. Though he were a son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered and being made perfect or having matured or perfected God’s purpose, he became the author of Eternal Salvation.

The second is in Hebrews 12:1-2. “Therefore, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin, which doth so easily beset us and let us run with patience, the race that is set before us looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, Endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Again, you could just take those two verses and spend the entire lent season trying to understand all that’s wrapped in those verses. But there’s a common expression in both of those. I’m sure you noticed it in chapter 5, verse 9. It says, “he became the author of Eternal Salvation,” and in chapter 12, verse 2, it says, “looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher.” No author is not in the original language, a manuscript writer, or a storyteller, but in the original Greek, it’s the word archēgos, which means the first goer, the forerunner, the leader originator.

And this is so appropriate for our study from Philippians, which is now in our fifth Sunday of sharing from that passage, because Paul, in writing from a prison cell to his dearly beloved friends in the city of Philippi, shamelessly encourages them to imitate Jesus Christ. In fact, in Philippians chapter two, verse five, which has got to be a theme for understanding the book of Philippians, he cries out, “Let this mind, let this mental attitude, let this disposition be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God, not something to continually grasp to, but he emptied himself, became of no reputation and being found in the form like as if man, he humbled himself and became obedient onto death, even the death of the cross.”

You see, the bondslave of Jesus Christ or the servant, which is what all Christians are to be, is to be a replica of him. Have you read Romans 8:29? “Those he did for know he did Predestinate, that they should be conformed to the image of his son.” Now you can play whatever religious games you want. We’re going to have to make some comments about religion in this passage today. You can play whatever religious games you want. There’s only one direction for the man that’s been truly born. Again, he is being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

Philippians chapter three, and that’s where we are this morning. If you’ll turn there with me, is the greatest episode of personal experience with Jesus Christ that is found anywhere in the scripture or anywhere else. It is discerning. It is revealing. It is challenging. It is convicting. Philippians chapter three walks out the Apostle Paul’s personal, transparent journey to follow the great first goer, Jesus Christ. That’s what “Archi ghost’s author” simply means. He went first and we follow him. Let’s read this passage. In fact, would you stand with me as we read from Philippians three, and I want you to just follow me. I’ll do the reading so we can read a little faster.

“Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same thing to you, indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe. Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision. For we are the circumcision which worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinks he has whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, those I counted.”

Loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ. What an expression! And be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God.

By faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death. If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead, not as though I have already attained, either were already perfect, but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus, brethren.

I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before. I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Let us, therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded, and if anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.

Nevertheless, whereunto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing, brethren. Be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an example. For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things. For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.

May God add His blessing to His Word. You may be seated. Keep your Bibles open, please, to that passage today. As we have already mentioned, Palm Sunday is a strategic moment biblically; it is one of the most strategic. I know there are a lot of things on the Christian calendar that inspire no more than a yawn from the average Christian, but Palm Sunday is a specific biblical event, and may I say this to you, it is the most dramatic documented fulfillment of biblical prophecy in the Scriptures. For the Prophet Daniel, praying, seeing, and ultimately writing about what he saw almost 600 years before Christ, gave a clear revelation concerning Jerusalem, the Holy City, and the people of God. Now, you may want to turn there to Daniel chapter nine, verses 23 through 27, and let me just very, very quickly tell you that he specifically describes a time schedule.

The angel to Daniel and then Daniel in writing says in verse 24 of chapter 9, “70 weeks are determined upon the people in the holy city to finish transgression and make an end of sin and to make reconciliation for an iniquity and to bring an everlasting righteousness and seal up the vision and prophecy into anoint the most holy. 70 weeks or the Hebrew is Hep TAs, 70 periods of seven were yet to deal with the history of Jerusalem from the time of Daniel to the end.” Then he says in verse 25, “Know and understand that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem, that was, remember Daniel was in captivity, Jerusalem had been destroyed. That from the moment that Cyrus would say you could go home and build Jerusalem until the Messiah, it shall be seven weeks and three score and two weeks.”

“The streets shall be built again in the wall, even in troubles times, and after three score and two weeks shall the Messiah be cut off, but not for himself and so forth.” 600 years before the day was given, there is exactly if you add up using 360 day years, which is the year schedule that existed in biblical times, the exact number of days, 173,880 days. We know that on Palm Sunday, April the sixth, AD 32, Jesus made a move by his will, surrendered to the father’s will, and claimed all that the prophecy had said concerning him as the Messiah and the King of the Jews. When he did this, he dramatically confronted the religious and political system in order that the father’s will would be accomplished.

He set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem, and this is what I call the constructive use of free will. My first of four simple points from Philippians three is that there is no spiritual maturity or moving on without an understanding in the Christian life that you continue to be involved in the choice. The moves of Jesus on Palm Sunday were deliberate, as he said, “Go to the village, find an ass tied with a colt and say, ‘The Lord has need of him.’ And said specifically, ‘I am doing this to fulfill the prophecy from Zacharia, tell you, the daughter of Zion, the king, come to the meek and sitting upon an ass and a colt, a full of an ass specifically.'”

And the Word goes on to say, specifically when they reached a certain point, that the great multitude of the disciples began crying out, rejoicing in God and saying, “Hosanna, blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord,” and he deliberately rides into Jerusalem to begin that last week of events that are going to lead him in a very direct way to a confrontation with the religious system.

If there is one thing that Palm Sunday says so deliberately, and even I think the whole choice, as I was trying to mention to the boys and girls, the whole choice of the donkey, especially the untrained and unbridled donkey, is to say to us something concerning Christ. Now go back to Hebrews again in your mind. “He learned obedience by the things that he suffered.”

And it’s one thing to say, “Well, Jesus was the Son of God,” but he was also the Son of man, and there was a surrender specific and momentary to the will of God. The Apostle Paul in Philippians 3, in this great statement of personal faith and commitment to Jesus Christ, is constantly talking about what choices he has had to make.

He’s had to bury things, set aside things, forget things, refuse to be caught up in things, press towards other things, be surrendered to a magnificent obsession in other things, moving forward, all of which are choices of free will. And I want you to understand something about this Palm Sunday, friend, before you leave this service.

As I asked you in the beginning, in saying that the Palm branches should identify the very clear fact that a lot of religious people have unbent wills, and they are only religious for the purpose of what God is going to do as a result. That’s what was happening to this crowd. They were saying, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of God,” but under their breath, they were saying, “And we want to be delivered from Rome.”

It wasn’t a surrender of will. It was a manipulation of God to get what they wanted. And something that needs to be understood about the spiritual man is you never enter into a relationship with God calculating what that experience is going to mean for you. I read from 2 Corinthians, Paul’s description of what had happened in his life: shipwreck, beaten with rods, stripes, prisons, in jeopardy from his own friends and comrades and so forth.

There is no way that one says, “I will do the will of God if it doesn’t hurt.” Jesus set his face like a flint. There were a few moments of exaltation in which he saw the people involved in worshiping him and realized that was a vouchsafe of the true worship that would come later.

But then he was to plunge into the suffering and confrontation of the last week leading to Calvary. And you might say, “All right, Howard, what does all this have to do with Philippians 3?” I think it’s a great deal. Christ as the first goer, as the servant of the Father, clearly was showing the necessity of our life being lived specifically, and by our will to the purposes of God.

I read the Hebrews passages to set the stage for you. Again, he learned obedience as a son and he endured the shame of the cross for the joy that was set before him. Jesus lived his life specifically to a goal or purpose for the father’s will, and for that will to be accomplished in him. And that is exactly what Paul says in Philippians 3.

Turn with me or look in your Bibles to that passage. Beginning with verse 11 and through verse 15, Paul speaks about a goal, about a high calling of God in Christ Jesus, something which consumes his life. And just like Palm Sunday is the most dramatic and courageous example of a selfless setting of someone’s life toward the father’s will.

So Paul in Philippians 3 is expressing that same possible place. He uses the imagery here of the hard-breathing runner, the language that’s taken from the athletic field. “I press on, I’m forgetting what lies behind me. I’m straining toward what lies ahead. I’m pressing towards a specific goal.” And this is coming on the basis of Paul’s having stretched himself in that place for 30 years towards that gleaming goal.

And what is the goal? The word “perfection” would have to be the goal. He uses it in two ways in this passage. At one point he says, “not as though we were already perfected,” but he turns around and says, “but as many of us as are perfect.” The reason is perfection is not some kind of a sinless understanding or some kind of a totality of perfection, but it is maturity.

And maturity comes basically from understanding how one’s life can be lived in focus.

Jesus Christ had that focus. In fact, beginning in the middle of Luke’s gospel, you hit the words, “He set his face towards Jerusalem.” There was focus. One of the great tragedies of life is life that is just spilled upon the ground, life that is lived like a tale that is told that reacts from one wave to the next, which never finds that sense of purpose.

And writing on the spiritual man as Paul is in the third chapter, he says, “the spiritual man is a man whose life is focused. It’s almost obsessed.” I wouldn’t recommend all the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, that relatively intellectual, almost mad Dane in his theological writings. But he wrote a little book called “The Purity of the Heart is To Will One Thing.”

That’s the title of the book, and I want to give you one quote from it. It’s a prayer at the end of this little book, so may thou give to the intellect wisdom to comprehend that one thing, to the heart sincerity to receive this understanding, to the will purity that wills one thing in prosperity. May thou grant perseverance to will one thing amid distractions, collectiveness to will one thing and in suffering, patience to will one thing. End of quote.

God has such a concern for you that you would be able, as Paul is able here to say, “I have been apprehended for a purpose. I know the goal. I understand what maturity would look like in my life. I have a concept of what it would be. I have a notion. And it has become a one-will focus for me that Christ be exalted in my life, and I understand what that experience would be like.”

One of the contemporaries of John Wesley, a man by the name of William Hunter, wrote these words. He was talking about a spiritual crisis in his life and he said, “I found unbelief taken out of my heart. My soul was filled with such faith as I had never felt before. My love to Christ was like fire, and I had such views of him as my life, my portion, my all. It swallowed me up, and a change passed upon the powers of my soul, and I felt a great increase of holy and heavenly temper.”

Now, I don’t believe in the Wesley doctrine of perfectionism of sinless perfectionism. John Wesley began teaching that, not because he was convinced of a doctrine, but because he saw an experience. And though I don’t believe that there’s ever a place by any religious experience in which a man is forever separated from sin in his life, and I think that’s wrong to teach that, but I do believe this. I believe there’s an experience as Wesley called it. He called it the doctrine of perfect love. There is a place in a man’s life, as Hunter testifies, when religion becomes fire, when even salvation, being born again, as we say in this era, becomes a consuming flame. And when a man’s life suddenly focuses in such clarity that with Paul, that man can say there’s a high calling of God in Christ Jesus. And I see that goal, and I’m willing to forget everything that’s been accomplished in the past. I’m willing to turn my sight from everything that’s been a failure in the past, and I’m willing to focus on this one goal, that high summons of God, that vision that changes you.

Specifically in Paul’s words, it is a vision concerning who you are. I think if there’s one thing most of us lack, it’s that word. Most of us are willing to be convicted. We’re willing to deal with sin when it comes to our consciousness, but for some reason, albeit self-image or whatever it is, we are unwilling to understand that God has apprehended us in Christ Jesus for a specific purpose.

Jesus himself never lacked an idea of who he was on earth. It says in John 13, on the last night of Jesus on earth, when that quarreling, warring group of disciples fought over who had forgotten to get a servant to wash their feet, Jesus girded on the servant’s towel, took the basin, and washed their feet. But it says that Jesus, knowing from where he came and where he was going, took the basin and washed their feet.

Paul says, “I have not yet apprehended that for which I was apprehended in Christ Jesus.” Do you this morning have an idea that you were chosen for a reason? Do you understand that God apprehended you much in the way a football player is apprehended in the modern draft system or a baseball player? The right talent, specifically God’s computer, put it together. Do you have any concept of that?

I never hear Paul talking about being saved so that he could go to heaven or so that he wouldn’t go to hell. It’s never a part of his concept. His spiritual life is that God apprehended him for a purpose, and his whole life came into focus on that vision. There is a great tremendous goal in the Apostle Paul’s life that could be summed up in one word. He says, “I don’t want to fail to apprehend that for which I was apprehended.” I never see anywhere in Paul’s writings fear that he’s going to backslide.

Some Christians hold their Christian experience so tentatively that their whole experience is kind of icky. That’s what Martin Luther meant when he said, “sin boldly,” you know, get off the seat and do something. Most Christians are so afraid that what they’re going to do might be wrong that they just kind of exist as nice people going nowhere. I never hear that in Paul’s writing. The only fear I hear Paul constantly expressing is that he might be benched, that the purpose for which he was chosen might not be accomplished in his life.

Paul says, “That’s the high calling of God. That’s the goal of my life. I dare not stop short of having that fulfilled in my life.” Do you know why you were apprehended this morning? Does your life have this focus, in Kirky Guard’s word? Have you come to that one-will experience?

I’ve heard Christians constantly asking, “What’s the will of God?” and “How do I know, Pastor?” and “Why don’t you preach on guidance and how we can know the will of God?” Listen, I came to know the will of God 26 years ago. It has never changed. It has never altered. The will of God was that Rick Howard would be a servant-disciple of Jesus Christ. The geography has changed. The position has changed.

The momentary instructions have changed, but I want you to know that if I’m digging ditches tomorrow, preaching the next year, writing books the third year, and completely off in a cabin in Timbuktu the next year, that the will of God hasn’t changed. The will of God is that my life be consumed towards the total purpose of Christ’s Lordship in my experience.

Do you know why you’re apprehended? Is life in that kind of focus? So I’ve said free will number one is in this passage and in Palm Sunday. And full purpose. Full purpose. I’m not talking about all the little minute details. When you get married, you don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. You don’t know whether you’ll have children, what they will be like, or what the physical conditions of your partner will be like, or what their personalities will be like as they go through the experiences of life itself.

But you make a commitment to that experience. That’s what God’s asking you: to be apprehended by a singleness of purpose. Jesus said, “If the eye is single, the body’s full of light.” But when the will and the eye are divided, then there’s a constant lack of fulfillment and purpose. That’s the way a man becomes a spiritual man.

Paul says, thirdly, and this is obvious, the first goer, Jesus, had to confront religion. A frank confrontation on the issue of truth. When I read this passage, Philippians chapter three, about the spiritual life, I am confounded by how much of this describes what some of us think would be wonderful.

When Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, that lonely figure, that ruggedly handsome Galilean riding this ass’s foal down the trail of the Mount of Olives, he was making a direct and deliberate encounter with religion. I have stood at this place, and it is the most moving place for me in Jerusalem. I have visited all of the shrines in Jerusalem, multitudes of times, and many of the lesser-known sites in our various archaeological tours there with students.

There’s a chapel built there. It’s probably the least conspicuous of all the shrines. It’s a chapel dedicated to Jesus weeping, for the Word of God tells us in Luke 19 that just as he rounded the top of the hill and saw the magnificence of Jerusalem spread before him, he wept. Did he cry for Jerusalem?

“Jerusalem, if thou hadst known, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes.” In this day, the word for weeping here is not the word that means to shed tears. “Eulogon” is the Greek word that talks about a bitter wail. “I, Dick, cried against this dearly beloved city because they did not know the time of their visitation.”

I’m amazed when I read Philippians three how much religion has to be absolutely jettisoned if we’re to know spiritual reality. Eel Bruner wrote these words, and I’ll read them just before coming specifically to Philippians three. I ask you to listen carefully to them. You could misunderstand them if you’re not listening carefully.

He said, “Religion expresses not only the inner reality of the holy, but at the same time always its externalization. It localizes the holy, making it administrable and manipulatable. It makes a man a claim partner in the affairs of God, instigating him to demand what can only be a free gift of grace. Thus, it kills the idea of the servant of God who is free from the law and from the self-righteous attitude imparted by many. Hence, the kingdom of God represents the overcoming of religion just as much as its consummation. For it is the kingdom of him who is executed and executed as a criminal offender against religion by religious men. But by the best of religious men, it is said of the city of God, ‘I saw no temple there.'”

Now, let’s go back to Romans or two, Philippians three. Paul talks about three forms of religion here, and I want to pinpoint them for you. First, in chapter three verses two through eight, he talks about all the Jewish legalism and tradition that was his. Paul was a social and religious aristocrat. He names all of his credentials: Hebrew of the Hebrews, Pharisee, touching the law, blameless concerning zeal, persecuting the church, speaking Hebrew. But he said, “In order to be a spiritual man, I had to discount that.” We should read this passage without making it personally applicable. What is the religion of your life that, in Bruner’s words, prevents you? What is the religion in your experience that keeps you from true spirituality? That’s a heavy question, but it’s a heavy truth.

Second, in verses 9 through 14, Paul talks about his moral achievement since he’s been a Christian: all the fine things, all the records, all the places he’s gone, all the sufferings he’s suffered, the books he’s written, the churches he’s established. That form of religion is also an obstacle to true spirituality.

Third, in verses 17 and 19, Paul names a third form of religion, one very popular among Californian Christians: sensual self-indulgence, whose God is their belly, who does whatever they think. The more we do, the more grace there is. After all, we’re saved by grace. In each of these three religious expressions, Paul says they are bankrupt. They will not produce true spiritual experience.

Paul says it’s a travesty that there cannot be spiritual experience through religion. Let me ask you, how frank are you about that in your life? How frank are you to come before the Lord and say, first of all, religion and church and all the kinds of nice little moral things that go with being churchy? I understand that even though that may be a nice tradition, and even though it may be a nice kind of heritage, I understand that it’s useless, and I totally detract myself from any dependence upon how I was raised and how morally good I am and what I do or don’t do. I totally separate myself from any dependence on that whole tradition.

And then you take step two and you say, and I separate myself from anything you’ve ever done through me. I’ll never remind you that I’ve preached or that I’ve suffered. I’ll never remind you that these things have happened in my life because I know that any dependence on that is bankrupt. Nor will I find myself in a place of depending on your grace to fulfill some kind of excuse for sensual self-gratification.

Lastly, there is a fresh intimacy. Not only a free will expression, a full-purpose expression, and a frank confrontation with truth, but there’s a freshness of intimacy. Look with me to verse 10, and we’re going to be back here next week on this specific expression, “that I may know him.” You see, there’s a very specific word here in the original language. “SKO” is a Greek word that doesn’t mean the knowledge based on facts. It isn’t simply intellectual theories and principles. It speaks of the closest and most personal knowledge of another person possible. In fact, the Bible continually puts this word in reference to sexual intercourse in marriage. Adam knew his wife. The King James translates the same concept. Peter writes to the Christians and says, “dwell together with your wives.” Husbands dwell together with your wives according to knowledge. It’s that same concept, the most intimate involvement.

Let me tell you something. The prayer of Jesus in John 17, as he was coming to the end, is filled with this word. “No, I have known you, Father. I have made you known. I want them to know you.” Jesus prayed. How absolutely foolish, how absolutely vain would be religion without intimacy, without this kind of knowledge. I’ve said jokingly to you from this passage on several other occasions, when you hear someone like Paul crying out that “I may know him,” most evangelicals would run in with a tract or a four spiritual law and say, “Well, Paul, my goodness, we certainly never believed you didn’t know the Lord.”

You know, I mean, here’s what you do: admit you’re a sinner, confess your sins, and believe, and so forth. And I’m serious with you about that point, as somewhat facetious as it may seem, because it expresses to me that that’s what we think Paul’s talking about. I know we say, “I’m born again,” here, we know we are the sons of God, we are to be no-so Christians, we say, “Absolutely, yes.”

And yet Paul says this goal of knowing Christ is so consuming in his experience that he doesn’t care about blessing or success or power or the fullness of the spirit or being healed or being successful or having men’s eyes upon him. He only wants to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his sufferings, and being made conformable to his death.

This fresh intimacy – the Scots divide their little cottages into have traditionally, even in the simplest days of the past, there was a boot and a bend. The bend was the room of intimacy. And even if it was just drawing a curtain, they made sure that the room had a boot, a common room, a room of eating and receiving general companions, and so forth.

But the boot was the room of intimacy. Only the SKOs understood something. It didn’t mean intimacy purely as husband and wife bedroom intimacy, but they understood there needed to be a way of expressing the difference. And when a friend came to the door, who was that kind of a friend, they received him in the bend, not in the boot.

There was a way of saying, “This relationship’s on a different level. It’s not boot level, it’s not fireplace level, it’s not have a cup of coffee level. This is a bend relationship,” and over the years, they developed the statements among the Scots, “Far bend,” they say, and to express a man, they’ll say, “Oh yeah, you’ll hear it sometimes in the churchyard. Oh, yes, McLaren. McLaren is far bend with God. He’s entered into intimacy.”

I realize that being saved is, from our perspective, the most important thing. And I say the next words that I’m going to say very cautiously to you.

Certainly, eternity without God will be horrible. Eternity with God, at its lowest level of existence, will be blessed.

But I speak about this life here as a believer. To be a Christian only for those reasons, not to have pushed into a place where you know Christ and find that intimacy swallowing up every other purpose, it seems to me, would be the most vain of experiences, to be a Christian simply to go to heaven and escape out, to be a Christian simply because we’ve come to some kind of knowledge of the facts: Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world. He was the Son of God. We repent of sins and confess Him as our Lord and Savior. Ta-ta-ta-da. And on we go, and never, ever to know Him, whom to know aright is life eternal. Somehow that tells me why so many Christians are so frustrated, hard to get along with, and difficult. They have the legalism, they have the religion. They even have faith in the Son of God, but they have never found the intimacy. They have never found that experience.

Philippians 3, this greatest of all personal expressions of spiritual life in the Bible, describes it: an experience not at all uncommon. Paul’s experience was very parallel to that of his Lord. Jesus was the first goer. Paul gives us a second pass at the same kind of surrender and understanding, and then the challenge is ours.

I’m finished with this. Estee Gordon, one of the great Keswick writers, those of you who were with us in our study in the Holy Spirit some time ago, remember I referred to his book, The Ministry of the Spirit, quite frequently. Estee Gordon used to say, and I want you to imagine this with me now in closing, Estee Gordon used to say that in every redeemed heart, not on believers, but in every redeemed believer’s heart, there is a throne, and there is a cross. If self is on the throne, then Christ stays on the cross. But when Christ is placed on the throne, then self must be on the cross.

That is such a simple and yet clear analogy of what Paul is saying and what all true spiritual experience revolves around. I find it very easy to read stories about the past, the Palm Sunday people, and we look at these people yelling and waving palm branches and say, “Ah, yeah, but just wait a few days. I know what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna be the same crowd saying ‘crucify Him.'” Isn’t it wonderful to have the gift of hindsight? So wonderful to read the story when you’ve already got the ending in mind.

But how many are waving the palm in this 9:00 AM service at Peninsula Christian Center? Or maybe not even waving the palm, just standing in the service. How many redeemed hearts, born again, going to heaven, God loves you, you’ve received Christ, you’re a part of the church, but self is on the throne of your heart, and Christ is on the cross because that will is unbroken, that goal is unsettled, that understanding is unmet, that commitment is unexpressed and unknown, and that intimacy is absent. Life is lived to its own purpose, and religion is an added briefcase kind of experience we carry around from time to time.

Would you stand with me, please? As you bow your hearts and heads in prayer, I’d like us to stand in silence for just a moment before the Lord.

Right now, you may crown Jesus Christ. If I didn’t believe this, I’d stop preaching to you. It isn’t in massive emotions standing right at that pew where you are. You can say, “Lord, I want to crown you afresh as an unchallenged Lord, in my life, in my consciousness. I seek to crown you again and again as king of kings and Lord of lords. I want self to go to the cross, and I really want to know you, Lord Jesus Christ.”

Will you pray that with me, just there?

One writer said, “In full and glad surrender, I give myself to thine, utterly and only, and evermore to be oh, common reign. Lord Jesus, rule over everything and keep me loyal and true to thee, my King.”

Just before we pray the prayer of benediction, I wonder if there’s anyone here this morning who has not yet come to that personal place of acknowledging Jesus Christ as Lord of your life and Savior. You say, “Pastor, this morning, this Palm Sunday, personally, I want to enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ. By my will making him Lord.” Would you just raise your hand anywhere in this building and say, “That’s my prayer, and I’d like you to pray for me, pastor?” Yes. Thank you. Anyone else back here? God bless you. I know that’s the prayer of many Christians.

There’s communion prepared in the prayer chapel, and when we have dismissed this service, there’s also a time of fellowship in the patio. Those are important and I wouldn’t in any way detract, but perhaps also there’s to be a moment for you personally letting God’s word and Spirit do its convicting work. Would you just reach out and take the hand of the person beside you? Now, Father, we rejoice that you may convict and deal with us, and we rejoice that we might know you in the intimacy and fullness of your provision through Jesus Christ.

Father, something rises up within us this morning that would find our life fully focused toward Jesus, and towards the purpose of fulfilling that for that apprehension purpose for which you apprehended us in Christ Jesus. God, grant that that may be. Bless those who spend time in the prayer room, who sit in their pew, friends who receive communion. As we go to fellowship, as we spend the afternoon and come again this evening in worship, Lord grant that in all these experiences, there will come a growing sense of your convicting and revealing work. In Jesus’ name, amen.

God bless you. You’re dismissed. Go in peace and the God of peace go with you. Amen.