The Cross of Christ - Part 3 — Art Katz

Bearing the Cross and the Necessity of Believer's Suffering

And tonight's message is bearing the cross. If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. This has been a kind of a spiritual adventure for me because something is being worked even as I speak.

So I'm waiting myself to hear what's going to be the summation of these nights. Shall we join our hearts together for it? Pray the Lord's blessing. Hallelujah. Thank you for that precious statement, Lord, which we read in Spurgeon, that only he who died on the cross is really able to speak about it.

And so much as it's possible, Lord, in the wonder and glory of a holy God speaking out of earthen vessels, let it be so tonight, Jesus standing and sharing out of his own heart with his own people the final thoughts and sentiments that he would express in these nights.

Gracious God, may I just be beside myself. May it be utterly transparent, simple, pure, expression of the Lord from heaven, bearing some of the dear things that pertain to the Holy Cross for our own lives as we seek to follow you.

Bless this night, Lord, and fulfill all your intention for it. To you be all glory and honor and praise and acknowledgement, now in this night and forever. In Yeshua's holy name we pray. Amen. I quoted Spurgeon in my prayer, and I want to quote him in my opening remark.

He writes, Jesus does not suffer so as to exclude your suffering. He bears a cross, not that you may escape it, but that you may endure it. And I think one of the rivals against the cross in these days, against the gospel of the cross, is the idea that suffering for the believer is negated, it's unnecessary.

It seems to me it's always expressed by those who equate godliness with gain. And it's usually stated in the following way. Quote, Jesus took all the suffering upon himself, that we might be free of it and enjoy all the benefits for which he died for us.

Well, in a certain sense, and in a great sense, that's true. All that he worked in his suffering and death for our atonement cannot be duplicated or added by any suffering on our part. But there's an area of redemptive suffering which we are called to fill, which needs to be mentioned.

The implicit and unspoken assumption is that those who make mention of the suffering of the present time are somehow masochistic. I don't know if you know what that means. Those who take delight in suffering.

There's something sickly about those who have taken upon themselves the theme of suffering. Perhaps they're psychologically bent, that somehow they may even be enemies of the true gospel, keeping God's people from the benefit and enjoyment that is due them.

And while it's true that there's nothing that we can add to the sufferings of Christ to an already perfect and accomplished atonement, it would constitute almost a criminal neglect not to refer God's people to the many references to a suffering required of them as the body of Christ that needs to be filled up.

That which is behind of the afflictions of Christ for his body's sake, which is the church. You may want to make a note of some of the scriptures that I'm now going to read. And this isn't exhaustive, but it'll give you some of the pertinent statements of God that pertain to a suffering that needs to be filled up for his body's sake, which is the church.

That scripture is Colossians 1, 24. 1 Peter 2, 21. Even here unto were you called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow his steps. 1 Peter 5, 10. But the God of all grace who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that you have suffered a while, make you perfect.

Romans 8, 17. Joint heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together. Philippians 1, 29. For unto you is given in the behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake.

2 Timothy 2, 11 and 12. It is a faithful saying, for if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him. If we suffer, we shall also reign with him. 2 Timothy 3, 12. Yea, and all that live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.

Philippians 3, 10. That I may know him in the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his death. The last, 1 Peter 4, 13. But rejoice in so much as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings, that when his glory shall be revealed, you may be glad also with exceeding joy.

Christ's Suffering Before His Glory

In a certain way it would be possible for the Lord to rebuke this generation as he rebuked his own disciples. Slow of heart, fools not to believe all that the prophets have written. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and then to enter into his glory?

And he said unto them, thus it is written, and thus behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day. There's a certain corresponding attitude today between the disciples of that day and our own.

They coveted the glory of the kingdom of Israel that was to be restored. But they were blind to a necessity for a suffering that preceded the glory. They forgot that there's a must, that there's an ought, that there's something that behooved the Messiah that behooves them also.

And I think that a like kind of disposition is to be found in the rapturists of our own generation who have an eye to the glory of God and to the establishing of his kingdom, but have omitted any necessity for suffering and trial in entering into that glory.

And I wonder if this is not that fleeing from the scandal of the cross of which the first disciples were guilty, the avoidance of the implication of the cross of suffering for us who believe. I think what it reveals is a failure to understand, to apprehend a clash of kingdoms.

That somehow if we could perceive this, we would know that inevitably there has got to be a measure of friction, of trial, of struggle for those who represent the kingdom of heaven in a world that is inhospitable to God.

The Cross as Separation From the World

And the strange thing is that we are not sufficiently separated from the world to understand in the way that we should that the world is at enmity with God. It's the very avoidance of the cross that has kept us from the separation from the world that would have given us to understand that those who are in the world, though not of it, must of necessity suffer a certain measure.

Paul said it's the cross that separated him from the world and the world from him. There's a precious book that's available on the bookstands. I hope you'll not miss it. It's a great bargain. Love not the world by Watchman Nee.

In it he just brings together all of the scriptures that pertain of the hostility of the world against God. He speaks of the things that are opposed to God that are in the world. The spirit of the world, the wisdom of the world, the fashion of this world, the corruption that is in the world, the defilements of the world, all that is in the world.

The world, the world, the world. He paints a picture, which we need desperately to see, of a system which is utterly opposed to God in spirit and content and in every way. Though in many features it is very beguiling and attractive.

It has even an aspect of religion. It has culture. It has an ethic. Morality. It has things that appear good. I think we need to ponder the rebuke that Jesus gave Peter when after Peter was the first to describe that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God.

It says from that time forth Jesus began to teach the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and there be apprehended by men and suffer and die and rise again in the third day. Then it says that Peter took him and rebuked him and said Lord let this be far from you.

On the face of it it's a beguiling statement and it seems to suggest something that is sympathetic and warm and humane and indeed the world would applaud that kind of sentiment. Yet how many of us have understood the severe rebuke that Jesus gave Peter.

Get thee behind me Satan for you favor of the things which be not of God but of men. He said that of a sentiment that was well intending of some kind of expression of concern of a disciple for his master and yet he saw right through the deceptive aspect of that sentiment and saw what was at its heart.

It had its origin not with men but in hell. It was the wisdom of Satan. It's something that appears to be good but is inimical and opposed to the kingdom of God and there wouldn't be a one of us sitting here tonight if Jesus had responded to that counsel.

How many of us have pondered the radical implication of what that says. Get thee behind me Satan for you favor not of the things which be of God but of men. Evidently in the simplicity of Jesus he equates the things which be of men with the things which be of Satan.

We need to let that settle into our hearing because natural man is always the instrument by which satanic things are brought into being in the collision between kingdoms. And I praise God for one who has seen so deeply into the matter as this precious saint and that we need to be reminded that there are kingdoms in collision especially as it is our generation that is going to see the end of this age.

If this conflict has in some degree been cloaked if it has been muffled if religion has been used as a kind of a sanctifying effect for society if it has been used to open and initiate the sessions of Congress if the world has somehow tolerated it we're going to find that increasingly diminishing and an increasing bitterness rise up in the world against the children of God.

In the favorite journal of intellectuals one which I used myself to read in times past the Saturday Review of Literature in an issue only a few months old the cover story was dedicated to the evangelicals in America the threat of the evangelicals to American society.

The cover picture showed believers with their hands in the air and it was not a complimentary depiction. Interesting that the article was written by the son of a Baptist minister and in it he tries to show the danger that is growing with the resurgence of evangelical life in America and especially in the charismatic movement.

He sees it as a danger and a threat for all that is rational, all that is orderly all that civilization has applauded as right and good. When I read that article something stole into my spirit as if it were a handwriting on the wall and it wasn't long before I found that that article was reflected and re-echoed by journalists and newspapers and those that are active in our culture have been released by it also to begin to speak the same themes.

There are kingdoms in collision and we have not ourselves the radical understanding of this fact which would prepare us for the friction, the conflict, the trial and the suffering that must inevitably follow.

Persecution as the Witness of a Separated Life

Those who live godly lives in Christ will suffer persecution. And one of the earliest remarks that a Jewish colleague made to me as a young believer just back from Jerusalem stunned into the kingdom of God though I was not seeking Him taking my place again in the teaching profession and sharing what little understanding I had with my Jewish colleagues.

I remember one time in the faculty dining room as we were eating and I was at that time strangely silent the Jewish woman who was opposite me became restless and edgy waiting for me to say something and I didn't.

And finally she couldn't contain herself longer a woman who lived on pills to put her to sleep pills to wake her up twice a week at the psychiatrist's in a perpetual living death steeped in the spirit of the world looked up at me and said even when you're silent you're a living accusation.

I've never forgotten that statement and I expect that the world is going to be speaking things like that increasingly. It will not if the world is too much with us. It needs to say something of the glory of the kingdom of heaven the heavenly graces of God in God's people here on earth and it will incite the anger and the resentment the irritation and worse of those who are steeped in this present world.

The only thing that will bring us to this heavenly place is the cross itself by which the world is separated unto me and I unto the world. I don't know what's happening to me and maybe there's a corresponding thing that's happening with you but I find myself increasingly indifferent to what I'm wearing where I am how I'm traveling how I arrive how I get to my next destination what's to eat or not eat what is the state of our physical security.

I haven't calculated these things but as the cross is being worked into my spirit and life I find somehow that the world is growing strangely dim and so I anticipate and suspect that God is working the same kind of things in his people because it's an unhappy thing to find those who palpitate over the things that are to be found in the world and one of the beautiful things that Watchman Nee says in this book love not the world nor the things that are in the world for it's the things that will inevitably bring you to the spirit of the world itself.

The thing may be harmless in itself but you can be assured that the spirit which is in the thing will be like an invisible cord to bring you to that wellspring which is the world itself which world lieth in the wicked one.

The whole world lieth in the wicked one. We need to be reminded of these things and to find our refuge and safety against it at the cross. Quoting this German theologian who has inspired me greatly in this thing he writes.

Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which he lived but incited it against himself by his message and the life he lived. The suffering of Jesus was not an accident it was inexorable suffering.

It was suffering that had to come because of the nature of the man the character of his life the way he walked and the things he spoke. Suffering was the necessary consequence. And I think that we who are called to walk as he walked need to know also that if our character shall resemble his character and our nature his nature and our message his message what then must we expect from a world that treated him.

So Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which he lived but incited it against himself by his message and the life he lived. This is not some kind of sickly passive resignation that's to be found in eastern religions.

But the logic of those who will take up the same cross going into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature to represent God on the earth and to take up his message and actively follow him is to invite the fellowship of the sufferings.

Apostolic Suffering and Opposition to the Gospel

Maybe I can speak this with a certain conviction and reality because to a degree I'm on the front line of this encounter with the world in my relationship with my own Jewish people. Will you not think me anti-semitic if I say that the spirit of the world is to be found most profoundly with them.

They indeed have been the architects of the modern world and have given it its incisive spirit and its content. If you remove the three greatest Jewish geniuses of the 20th century there's not a way that you can recognize our age Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.

And the great irony is and the melancholy that more of us have been affected by these men than we realize. More of us who call ourselves Christians and are sincere are raising our children in the light of Sigmund Freud than in the light of the scripture.

And perhaps more devastating than the atom bomb which the physics of Albert Einstein made possible was the theory of relativity that was applied not just to the realm of physics but to our life which is to say that there's no such thing as absolute truth and that everything is relative.

I'll tell you that that has done more harm and has been more destructive of life in earth than the bomb itself. I'm not saying that these men are consciously malicious. I'm saying that because they are separated from that spirit which is of God they are eminently involved in the spirit which is of the world.

And I'll quote you another Jew who said in 1st Corinthians but we have not the spirit of the world. We have the spirit of God. And if I can add a postscript I would say that we have the spirit of God to the proportion that the spirit of the world is not with us.

I'm not talking now about hair and lipstick and hemlines but our attitudes and our way in bringing up our children the various things that we don't think to consider and for which we will never be faulted because it conforms so much to our American civilization and is approved and applauded by many as good.

But if Jesus were here to say it he would say of it the same that he said to Peter. It save us of the things which be not of God but are of men. Its origin is satanic and God would have us more severely to come to a place of separation from the spirit of the world.

Apostolic suffering and death cannot be attributed to the suffering and death of men in general. The poverty and suffering of Christ are experienced and understood only by participation in his mission and in the task that he carried out.

I've seen the most civil Jews precious, refined people who would never dream ever to raise their voices with their wives and are willing to discuss any number of questions with perfect equanimity and poise until the challenge of the kingdom is pressed upon their consciousness.

And I've seen these masks of civility taken away and teeth bared upon me in bringing this message to them. I'm saying that not so much to acquaint you with the response of Jews when the power of the gospel is presented to them but I say it to prepare you for what shall be also the response of the world when the same mission and the same message is brought in the same power and the character of Jesus men are going to gnash their teeth and the fact that we have not experienced it is itself some indication of the anemic quality of our life and our evangelism.

The crucified Christ this writer goes on to say becomes a present reality in the experience of fellowship with Christ on the part of those who follow him. The call to follow him is associated with his proclamation of suffering.

And he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected and be killed. How many of us have answered with Peter in our spirit. Let this be far from us. Because though we may not see it the Lord saw accurately that this statement was not only an expression of sentiment it was an expression of self-loving it was an expression of self-protection.

Let this be far from you Lord really says in its deepest sense let this be far from me. Also children there's an ought there's a must. It was so for him and it must be so for us. Also if we somehow sidestep this belief can become for us merely a matter of giving credence to doctrines and carrying out ceremonies.

If this is our fundamental condition the addition of charismatic aspect to our life becomes a kind of outward adornment and contradicts the very purpose for which the graces of the spirit are given. And you shall be witnesses unto me.

And I know and understand that the word witness means mother. One of the most precious testimonies that I have ever heard for the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues is given by the wife of Richard Wombrund who like her husband suffered many years in communist prisons.

And she describes an episode in a book called The Pastor's Wife in which he was put in a box lined with spikes in which almost every victim who was placed there went berserk. She would not break under their grilling.

She was a woman of enormous conviction of tremendous character. She did not give them any information nothing that they could say or do could intimidate her. And their last resort was to place her in this infamous box.

Too short to stand direct too narrow to lean. And if you become faint and you begin to move towards the sides you become impaled on these spikes. The very blackness and the suffocation of that box was enough to drive men insane.

And she describes how she began to quote scripture. She sung hymns and little by little her capacity to do that left her she was struggling desperately to clutch to something that would connect to the God and to keep her sanity until she came to a place where in the panic the terror the confinement the asphyxiation the heat she began to go.

And in that last desperate moment when her sanity was about to leave her she heard something work up from her spirit and come out through her mouth. She was praising God in other tongues and she said that saved me.

May I speak, I know as what if there's something vestigial in me as a Jew if my name cast by some happenstance does indeed speak of the Kohen Sadek the priest of God may I say that my jealousy is for the purity and the holiness of the spiritual gifts of God not given as an adornment not given as something to spice up our denominations or to awaken sleeping churches so much as a grace of God for us who are called to fill up the sufferings that remain for the body, the church sake.

And my prayer for us who have delighted in these days and exulted in the liberality of God that he's made available to us by his spirit shall also be able to rejoice and to praise him by that spirit not only in the comfortable circumstances which we've enjoyed in these days but also in the lonely, solitary places of suffering to which our message our character and our following of him and bearing the cross will bring us one of the most precious texts.

Paul and Silas Singing at Midnight

It was the first message that God ever gave me and I love it with a passion. And were I the darkest atheist. And the whole Bible had somehow been scorched. And there was but one fragment left that is to be found in the book of Acts in the 16th chapter.

That one fragment and that one verse would have saved me. You know the circumstance when men were obedient to the vision of the Holy Spirit and they left the place in which their ministry was successful.

How many of us are that close to the cross that God can separate us from our success. And he led them to a pagan place called Europe in which the gospel had never before been proclaimed. And there in the unfolding of the purposes of God in the saving of a woman Lydia who was the seller of purple where they went out of the city on the Shabbat contradicting every evangelical principle that we consider right they went not where the action is but out of the city and there God brought them to the one whom he intended by whom his eye had fallen loathing to and so over the face of the earth.

And she was baptized. And shortly after a demoniacal woman following after Paul and Silas cried out these men be the servants of the most high God and show unto us the way of salvation. And this said she many days.

Interesting how the demon spirits are far more quick to understand the servants of God often times than God's people. And said Paul being grieved turned and commanded the spirit to come out of her. And it came out in that very hour.

And men who had exploited that woman and made of her a piece of merchandise in her demonic gifts seeing that their hope of gain was lost. Brought Paul and Silas to the marketplace before the rulers and the magistrates.

Oh I tell you it's a classic text because it shows all of the ingredients of the things that we shall experience. When you touch this world system by the power of the Holy Spirit you can be assured that you shall again be brought before the magistrates and rulers in the marketplace there is an iron connection between marketplace and rulers.

And when you shake this world system based on gain, lust, ambition power, wealth comfort, convenience you're going to find yourself like them stripped and subjected to many strokes. And then we come to this beautiful part.

Paul and Silas finding themselves in the lower dungeon bound in manacles. And it says. At midnight Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God. Oh hallelujah. Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God.

May I tell you what our utterance will be if we have not been true disciples of the cross. We'll be beating our chest. We'll be moaning and whining. Lord why did this happen? I thought to follow the heavenly vision.

What am I doing here? My back is hanging in ribbons. I've been publicly humiliated and disgraced. Stripped naked suffered these blows cast into this stinking cell. The scurrying of rats and the stink of human feces and urine and vermin.

The moaning of prisoners. How did I fail you? When did I miss it? At midnight Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God. And the next verse says. And the prisoners heard them. I'm just a young one in this.

And in fact I marvel that somehow I'm sharing the same platform with Derek. But I have a sneaky suspicion that there's a powerful theme that we've not understood that has to do with the shout of that centurion and those who stood with him at the base of the cross when they saw this Jesus.

It is suffering and agony yielding up the ghost to cry out as the earth was darkened and the earth shook and the dead came up out of their graves and the stones split and the veil of the temple was rent in two.

That this centurion schooled in the culture of Rome in pageantry and pomp in men who were divinized as gods who were carnal, filthy, lecherous beings who wore olive leaf laurels unlike the spiny cross of Jesus saw in that woe-begone and pathetic figure in his death that this was the Son of God.

There's something about the nature of suffering that reveals truth in a way that nothing else can. And ultimate suffering reveals ultimate truth. And the prisoners heard them. How often have we come back from our evangelistic activities and our gore-knockings to throw ourselves blamely on the bed in exhaustion and despair and say, oh, what does it take.

How often have I experienced that with my own mother fourteen years still unwilling to believe. What is it going to take to reveal God's creation. I think it's going to take another body impaled on a cross of suffering not some sickly masochistic thing but a redemptive suffering filling up the sufferings that remain but a world that has somehow not been able to understand an incarnate God who came down from heaven naked to live a life of rejection on earth and to leave it naked and to suffer excruciating things.

For the redemption of men will glimpse the reality and the truth of that in the suffering of the body of Christ for them. I wonder if Corrie ten Boom is only a symbolic prefiguring of something that God is going to require from the body of Christ.

For the Jewish people in the last days when to be identified with Jews who shall again become a scandal and an offense in the world is to bring upon yourself their suffering. Also how many of us will stand with them.

How many of us will be impaled on a cross for them. Even that same people who have resisted our message and will not hear us. The same ones that will contend with us. The same ones that will accuse us of trying to make Christians out of them and make them to forsake being Jews.

I have been told by my own people that I am worse than Hitler. For Hitler they said only sought to destroy our bodies and you seek to destroy our souls. How many times have I stood at the center of a whirlwind at a Columbia University encounter or some such place and have just stood there finally receiving the indignation and the abuse, the anger that has been for two thousand years pent up in Jewish life knowing that it would be then me to seek to answer them, to tell them that I don't represent institutional Christianity that I'm not a representative of the Spanish Inquisition that somehow the pogroms and the Holocaust of World War II is not the result of Christians.

There's no way that I could begin to explain these things but only to stand there and to receive their verbal abuse and indignation. And once that is spit out then comes the first opportunity to begin to speak to them the things that pertain to life.

I'm wanting to see the veil rent. I want to see the rocks of hard human hearts split. I want to see the earthquake and the graves give up their dead that they might enter the Holy City. And I don't think anything less than something that bears a similitude to that first body of Christ hanging on the cross in redemptive suffering is going to do it at midnight.

Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God and the prisoners heard them. Suddenly there was a great earthquake and the doors burst out of their jams and the manacles fell loose and everyone was freed.

And the prison keeper who was thinking that the prisoners had fled sought to kill himself. But Paul cried out do yourself no harm we're still here. And he calling for a light trembling fell down before them and cried out sirs what must I do to be saved.

I think one of the things that has shown our immaturity which is to say our flight from the cross is our glib anxiousness to give answers to men who have not yet asked the right question. We would do far better to produce the question than the answers that are yet meaningless to men.

All our bumper stickers all of that kind of icky stuff that falls so short of these glorious apostolic models need to be rectified at the cross of Christ Jesus. The body of Christ was born in Philippi.

Why? Because two men were obedient unto the heavenly vision unto unspeakable humiliation and suffering. And the prisoners heard them. Dear precious friend Ern Baxter said when God's people find the paradox of joy in suffering they'll sing at midnight.

May I just say that I anticipate that there's going to come a midnight for the people of God. There's going to be a dark hour that's to come over the earth from which we ourselves shall not be exempt.

When God's people shall learn the paradox of joy in suffering they'll sing at midnight and the prisoners will hear them. Truly this was the Son of God is the cry that will come from those who will witness a certain quality of life demonstrated in suffering by those who have willingly taken up the cross.

The Cross as the Death of Self

We've introduced the cross. We spoke of the cross last night as encountering it. We've spoken of it tonight as bearing it. If any man would come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

A .W. Tozer said that any man who ever took up a cross in that generation was never seen from again. You didn't bear it all your life long. You carried it up to a hill of shame and there you were finished and you were done with know of the precious deliverance that has been experienced today.

May I say that in my opinion the final, the total and the ultimate deliverance is that which comes at the cross the place where flesh and self. And the natural man who says let it be far from you finds his end where those who say though all the world deny you yet will I deny you never.

And thus said they all find their end. Cross is the place of death. It's total separation not just from things that are patently evil in our lives or bad temper or things that we want to have removed but the whole of the natural man who even wants to seek to serve God religiously and will fail every time in dark boxes in dungeons in midnight hours.

The key to praising God at midnight is the knowledge of the cross of Christ Jesus. In truth is there any man who would follow him and will deny himself. One of the most powerful factors for the perpetuation of self is the opportunities given it even in religious life.

And if self will not have opportunity in playboy magazine or in the reading of philosophy or in culture or art it will seek desperately for the last opportunity even to be found in religion. But it will in the end always fail.

In the moment of crisis. The cross is the place of refuge and the rich understanding he had of the cross in which Paul glories. He writes, I've taken up my standing and will never quit it. Our crucified Christ has taken such possession of my entire nature spirit, soul and body that I am henceforth beyond the reach of opposing arguments.

Brothers, sisters, will you enlist under the conquering banner of the cross. Once rolled in the dust and stained in blood it now leads on the armies of the Lord to victory. Oh that all ministers would preach the true doctrine of the cross.

Oh that all Christian people would live under the influence of it. And we should then see brighter days in these unto the crucified be glory forever and ever. Precious crucified Christ. Thank you Lord for sharing with us what you have in these sessions.