All We Need

Transcript

Alright, thank you very much and hello again my dear radio friend. How in the world are you? There’s something very personal about these broadcasts, it seems. Although at this moment I’m speaking to one microphone and yet by the miracle of radio it reaches out across the country from coast to coast and there where you are, just waking up or just falling asleep depending on when you’re hearing the broadcast or perhaps getting breakfast or making 6 lunches for the family to take with them or driving to work or whatever it may be, it turns out to be just you and I, together in the presence of our blessed Lord with the Word. And that’s a wonderful relationship, I cherish it. Believe me and I know many of you do, too. We sort of belong, don’t we? Thank God for that.

It’s your good friend, Bob Cook, and we’re looking into the Book of Ephesians for a little while. It’s been 8 years, I think far as I can tell since I shared very much of this book with you and I’d like to look at it once again with you these days by way of radio. We just started the last time we got together and we were talking about the spiritual blessings blessed us. God has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ and just as an illustration of what some of them are, I turn to Psalm 103. You remember that? ‘Bless the Lord oh my soul. Forget not all His benefits,’ another word for blessings. ‘He forgives,’ the psalms starts at the right place. You don’t get very far with God until you’ve dealt with the sin question. Everything else is secondary. Deal with the sin question first. What is it that stands between you and God? Deal with that and you’ll find that other things come trooping along in their proper order.

Forgives all thy inequities, heals all thy diseases. Healing, whether or not you use the doctor in medicine and vitamins and hospital rooms and so on or not, it’s beside the point. God does the healing. Many doctors told me that straight out. Physicians and surgeons who are believers as I’ve talked with different ones of them during my lifetime on a number of occasions, they’ve said to me very seriously, “I do what I can but God has to do the healing.” Healeth all thy diseases, redeemeth thy life from destruction, redemption, redemption bought out of the slave market of sins so that you can be free to serve God. Crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies, God likes to be loving and tender to you.

Now in the hurly burly of every day routine, you don’t often have time to express love to your loved ones the way you’d like to but there is a point at which you want to be specially kind and loving and tender to someone who is dear to you, a husband or a wife or a child, and so you do things that are specially loving. That’s what he talks about here. Crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies, bringing a tray to a sick child for breakfast and you’d fix it up specially with the little flower and in a small vase and some of the things you know that child would like. Fixing up something special for mother on Mother’s Day or dad on Father’s Day or whatever, doing something special in a loving and tender way or maybe it’s just the loving touch of a hand as you pass each other in the hallway. Tender mercies, loving kindness, God does that for us. These are part of the things He does for us.

Have you had the experience of letting the Holy Father put his arms around you and just love you? That is one of the most delightful things in all of life. It comes from worship and meditation and adoration of God. You spend time with God and after you’ve been in His presence for a while, you’d be aware of the fact that He’s pouring out His love to you through the indwelling Holy Spirit of God, loving kindness, tender mercies.

Satisfieth thy mouth with good things so that thy youth is renewed like the eagles. Sustaining grace and the provision of all of your needs. Satisfieth thy mouth with good things. There’s a taste I’ve never been able to recapture. It’s strange how does things are. Traveling from Toledo to Chicago on one occasion with my Father in our old jalopy, we’d been driving through the early, early morning hours and we were hungry, it was breakfast time and so he say, “Well you better stop and get some breakfast boy.” And so we pulled off to the first little roadside diner. It was in the hills, sort of a hilly semi mountainous area and here was this little roadside restaurant with a thin wisp of smoke curling up into the morning stillness and we went on in and said, “You got anything to eat? Yeah we got everything you want. What would you like?” Well, it turned out that they had old fashioned raised buckwheat cakes, (buckwheat pancakes made with yeast), and home made sausage and so we ordered that and here came this mountain of buckwheat pancakes and several helpings of homemade sausage that we just lapped it up and finished it off.

Now believe it or not, I can still taste that breakfast and I have never been able to duplicate it. I’ll do a little cooking myself now and then as you know but I’ve never been able to duplicate that special taste of raised buckwheat cakes and homemade sausage. Satisfieth thy mouth with good things. There are some things you just enjoy and one of them is the presence and blessing of God added to the everyday things of life and it quickens and strengthens you. He says, “Your youth is renewed like the eagles.”
Now there are some people who never seem to age. Have you noticed that? And many of them, the secret is not just in their genes, it is also in the fact that day by day, they’re in the presence of God and He renews that youthful spirit by satisfying their heart with His presence and His blessing. Oh to know God so well that you enjoy him, you taste him much as I remember the taste of the buckwheat cakes.

Satisfieth thy mouth with good things. Then He protects you. “He executeth His righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed”. He reveals Himself to you; “He made known His ways unto Moses”. He’s patient with you, “the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, hath not dealt with us after our sins nor rewarded us according to inequities”, He’s patient with you, and then He takes your sin away “as far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us”. He cares about you, “like a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. He knows our frame, He remembereth that we are just dust”. He’s merciful to you. “The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”

Oh hey, what a wonderful layout of blessing that is and we’ve just touched the surface of it. Haven’t we? All spiritual blessings in Christ. Now come over to a New Testament commentary along the same line, and I’m looking now at 1 Corinthians 1:30, “but of Him,” (that is of God belonging to God) “are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: That according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”

He is made unto us. What does that mean? The mystery of the Christian life is that what the Lord Jesus Christ is becomes yours when you trust him as your savior. You take on by faith, His life. It’s what one writer has called the ‘Exchanged Life.’ You take your need and your sinfulness and your weakness and your failure and your discouragement and all that constitutes your need and you exchange that for the Lord Jesus Christ and He becomes to you as your Savior. He becomes to you, the essence of what you need.

This is why Paul can say, “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches and glory by Christ Jesus.” How does he do it? By Christ Jesus. He is made unto us. He becomes to us, our wisdom. Now how does a person become wisdom? Well for instance, let’s say that you’re in the outback, down in Australia, miles from anywhere and you’re lost. You don’t know which way to turn, you’re running out of water, you’re hungry; you have the gloomy prospect of dying of thirst and starvation before you could ever find anything to help you and then you come upon a little Bushman, a little person who has lived all his life in these outback territories. He knows every blade of grass and so you in a halting way, you communicate with him that you’re lost and he takes you under his wing and guides you. Now, you can’t see why he’s turning here and there but he knows where he’s going and by and by he gets you out to where you can find civilization once again and your life has been saved.

Now he can’t read nor write. He can’t operate a computer. He can’t drive a motorcar. He doesn’t have any money, not much anyway. He has very poor clothing, what there is of it but he became your wisdom that day. Didn’t he? See, the idea is that you depend on the Lord Jesus Christ for what you don’t have. You depended on the little Bushman in the outback down in Australia. To be your wisdom and get you back out to civilization. You depend on the Lord Jesus to guide you step by step through this life so that you’re kept in the center of the Will of God. The Lord shall guide thee continually. The Bible says, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” Christ becomes your wisdom in the process of depending upon him, completely for all that you need to know and decide upon. His made unto us. That’s one of the spiritual blessings that Paul is talking about, you see? In wisdom and righteousness, He becomes your righteousness. You accepted Paul says in the Ephesians. We’ll get to that verse later on as we study this book.

We are accepted in the Beloved One, accepted in the beloved. Now He becomes your righteousness. Paul said, “That I may be found in Him not having my own righteousness which is of the law but that which is of the faith of Christ, the righteousness of God by faith.” See? We don’t have any of our own. Do we? And we have to depend on Him, the Lord Jesus Christ. He said, “What things were gain to me, I count as loss for Christ.” I look at everything like refuse that I may win Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law but all the law can do is condemn you, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness of God by faith. Christ has becomes your righteousness. Well, we’ve been talking about spiritual blessings. We come back to this the next time we get together.

Dear Father God, today oh, may the Lord Jesus be to us all that we need. I ask in His name, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!