Follow Me III: Imitating Through the N.T. | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and I'm here again this week with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany, and the author and teacher in our Behold Your God series by Media Gratia.

We're on week three of a three-part series talking about what it means to follow Christ. Again, one of these very simple things essential to Christianity, but we often feel that it's so, maybe the danger is that it's so simple that we don't think about what it really means.

And if we're not clear on that, then we really miss, again, one of the most central parts of what it means to be a Christian and how to live the Christian life. We've talked about that there are two things that are required in following.

We have to observe. We keep our eyes on someone and we see how they do, and then we imitate. It actually takes more than just seeing. We go and do and we follow. And if they, the car illustration, if you're following a car, you're observing what they do, but then you do it as well.

You can't just observe them go off the exit ramp of the interstate and just keep right on going. You're no longer following them. So as long, as soon as you stop doing either of those things, you're genuinely no longer following.

So we've also talked about the reason for following, which in the Christian life comes down to love. It's love to Christ. We want to be like Christ. We see no greater or higher good than Christ likeness.

And so for that reason, we do want to stick close and we want to walk that path that he walked to enjoy communion with him, which we know is God's own self-expression found in the moral law, which we now say is good.

So last time we observed the Lord Jesus in these silhouettes, in these sort of darker black and white pictures that we see in the Old Testament that are sometimes a bit fuzzy. They take a little effort to make out the details, but they're absolutely wonderful for the Christian.

So I do want to encourage you if you haven't heard episodes one and two of the podcast to go back and listen to those, because this week we're going to talk about the New Testament. How do we see and observe and follow and imitate Christ in the New Testament?

And we've used this illustration of a documentary. But unlike maybe a documentary that you watch to fall asleep at night about, you know, the migration patterns of certain birds or something that's completely irrelevant to your life, you're just watching it to watch it.

This is absolutely relevant to every aspect of our lives. We get to watch original footage, so to speak, of Christ in the Gospels. And then we get to have expert commentary from those who walked with Him and who were given this apostolic office of explaining all that Christ taught there in the epistles.

So that's our subject this week, the New Testament picture.

The Four Gospels as Windows on the God-Man

Yeah, in the Gospels, of course, we have four Gospels. So it's such a privilege that God Himself, you know, through the Spirit guiding the writers, He takes us into a room, maybe we would say, and this square room, and on each wall is this giant plate glass window, and He points us out.

And we have four different angles of looking at the perfection of the God man. And so it's not just that we're watching Him work out our redemption, which is so sweet, but we are also watching Him live in a way that we're going to have to imitate.

We're not going to be Messiahs. We're not going to pay for anybody's sins. But we want to know from love, as you said, how did He as the God man live the human life? How did He respond to the Father? How did He live among people?

Now, of the Gospels, John is really unique. The synoptics they see through one lens, through one eye. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, very similar. John is unique. John is giving us a lot of material that the others don't.

And one of the unique aspects of John's Gospel is it contains more of the personal descriptions by Christ regarding the interiority of His life. In other words, God has given us a look into the soul of the God man to know how and why, not just what He did, but how did you come to that?

Why did you do it that way? And the wonderful thing about it is it is a pattern, because it's a true human, that is imitatable by the believer who has been made alive and indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

What an amazing gift, and when we think of it as you just described it for what it is, that God has given us that window into the interiority of Christ. Why did He make the choices that He made? So, before we jump into looking at passages, primarily from the Gospel of John, there is an issue of Christology that we should say, and we don't have time to establish why we are coming from a certain Christological standpoint, but we are.

We trust and hope that we are coming from historically Orthodox Christology. And that may not be something that you have given much thought to. And so, you may be very confused as we're going through these illustrations, thinking about what sustained Jesus and why did Jesus do the things that He did?

What was the initiative behind it? You may just think, well, He did what He did because He was God. And so, suffice to say for now that there are Christological heresies that are so common. In fact, it's very likely that if you're listening to this and you haven't thought through a lot of these things, you will probably be afraid, surprised, shocked to find how much of some aspects of them you maybe have picked up just in middle American or American evangelicalism over time.

And so, I'll just mention three quickly that we want to avoid. These are common errors. There's one, adoptionism. So, this is the idea that Christ is just a human and He does so much good. He listens to the Father.

His ears are open. He follows what He sees. And He obeys so well that God adopts Him and makes Him His Son and sends the Spirit to fill Him. And so, that's probably not a very common one in our day because we've come, especially in conservative circles, we're strong on the divinity of Christ.

And, you know, probably so much so that we're weak on the humanity of Christ. And those two things are not in competition with each other. So, one of the issues that we may be in a little bit more danger of is this issue of docetism.

So, the word comes from the idea of illusion. That it was just so Christ is God, but it's just kind of an illusion that He was man. So, He's, you know, floating a couple inches above the dust of the street not to sully His holy and perfect, you know, God feet.

That He wasn't truly a man. He didn't really have to eat. He didn't really have to sleep. He didn't really have to, you know, He wasn't tired. He was never tempted to be grumpy because He didn't get much sleep.

That's also a common place where wrong thoughts of the Savior can come into our mind. And another speaking of mind is this issue of Apollinarianism. So, that's in simply put, it's that Christ is a real man, but that He had a divine mind.

So, that the mind of God is His mind. And so, He has eternal knowledge. He knows all things at all times. Which is not the picture that we see. We see a true human who has to learn to walk. There was a time that Christ, the God-man, didn't know how to walk.

And He had to learn that. He had to learn to read. He had to learn as we do. And He had to open the scriptures, the scroll. He had to study and the very same spirit that inspired the scriptures, that He is co-eternal with, is now teaching Him in His humanity all that He comes to see.

And so, these are, you know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread here. And we don't want to say too much too quickly. And that's really my point is we don't have time to establish why we're coming from a certain Christological perspective, but we are.

And so, if this is something that you haven't given much thought to, we want to make a couple of recommendations for you. A good starter place, if you haven't given much thought to the issue and the theology of Christology, would be a book by Mark Jones that The Banner of Truth publishes called Knowing Christ.

And it's very short chapters that deal with these issues, but right in the center of historic orthodoxy. If you want to go a little beyond that, you can go into Warfield's section in his whole... It's in a collected works, but what's the actual title?

It's The Person and Work of Christ. Right. So, really, really good stuff. We would encourage you, if you have questions, why are they saying that Jesus had to be sustained? Well, go back and you will not find yourself bored the more that you look into the realities of the person of Christ.

What Sustained Jesus: Doing the Father's Will

Well, what we've done is we've just collected some of the self-descriptions of Christ from the Gospel of John. So, I'm going to ask Matt if he would... And we've kind of, as we've collected, we've put them into categories to simplify it.

So, I'm going to ask Matt if he would just read passages, examples from a category, and then we'll look at two questions. What do we see here of the true humanity of Christ as he's relating to the Father?

And is it something that we can imitate?

Let's start with this category of what, as I mentioned already, what sustained Jesus? So, the passage that we'll look at is John 4, verses 32 to 34.

So, wonderful, very simple picture. What sustains Christ? What is the food of the life of Jesus of Nazareth? It reminds us of another passage, you know, in the temptation in Matthew chapter 4, where he is actually fasting from physical food and Satan offers him a shortcut.

Well, you can just turn stones to bread. Why don't you just do it? And the wonderful statement that men don't live just on what you can stick in your mouth, you know. You live on what proceeds, every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

That's a wonderful picture of what sustained Christ, but here's an added element of that. It's not just I live upon the words of the Father or what the Father declares for me and I trust Him. It's that I, Christ would say, life to me is doing what He says to do.

Now, that may sound just, you know, immediately like, well, that's right. That's doing good things, that's religion. There's a very different aspect here. Notice what he says, to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.

Morality is doing good things, all right, and that's part of the Christian life. Religion is doing, you know, religious good things. That's part of the Christian life, but at the heart of the Christian life, what sustains Christ is to do exactly what the Father gave Him to do, not just the next good thing.

We have many instances where Christ is at a town. He's preaching and the people say, hey, will you just stay and keep telling us? And He said, I have to go somewhere else. The Father is sending me to other places.

His, the driving heart of Jesus of Nazareth was not to do a lot of good. It was to do exactly what the Father wanted Him to do. So that's the heart of Christ. Now, for us, can we imitate that? Yes. I can wake up and say, here I have in Your Word, clearly spelled out, what You want us to do.

How do I treat my wife? It's here. How do I treat my kids? It's here. How do I work? How am I supposed to be different than just the nice guy at work? The moral guy, the hardworking guy that would do anything for you?

How is a Christian distinct? Well, he does what God wants him to do because it's what God wants him to do. And so I follow Jesus Christ. I don't just do nice things. I do what God gave us to do in the Scriptures.

Yeah, so challenging, so helpful for us. But also, you know, I can't not say, look to kind of the liberal version of Christianity that just says, you know, look, I don't know much about your theology stuff and all the preaching and teaching that you guys do.

But I just, look, to me, Christianity is just out here doing good stuff. Like I just want to, whatever it is, I want to feed some orphans. I want to care for some others. And look, Christ was very clear that this is pure religion.

So we don't discount that at all. But as you said, there were a lot of hungry widows who needed help, right? There were a lot of places where Christ could have done. What did he do? He did what the Father sent him to do.

And so our job as Christians is to go and ransack the Scriptures to see what exactly is it that I need to be doing?

Just doing good stuff. Yeah, you can unknowingly spend your entire life doing a lot of good things that you think it's what the Father tells a Christian to do. It may not be.

The Son's Initiative and Perfect Responsiveness to the Father

And that really brings us to the issue of initiative as well. So we need to see what is the initiative in Christ's life. So let's read John 5, 19 to 20. Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, truly, truly, I say to you, the son can do nothing of himself unless it is something he sees the father doing.

For whatever the father does, these things the son also does in like manner. For the father loves the son and shows him all things that he himself is doing. And the father will show him greater works than these so that you will marvel.

And then another passage, John 8, 42, where Christ says, I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on my own initiative, but he sent me.

These are, you know, really, we're just, I feel like we're on the edge of a continent. Yeah. And the continent is the perfect responsiveness of the God man to his father. And it's like we, you know, we're like landing on the beaches and looking around thinking, wow, look at all this.

And we don't know that we're only seeing the edge. But it's what the Lord has given us. It's enough. And it just, it's intoxicating, you know, when we love the Lord Jesus to see glimpses. In these two passages, we have a couple of things.

First of all, we have a moral impossibility. Something is impossible for the son, which we're not used to thinking of. How can something be impossible? I can't do this. The God man can't do something.

Yes, it's a moral impossibility. It is morally impossible. I will not do this. I will not do things on my own initiative. I will not plan out my day and go do what I want to do today. And so that's a wonderful picture.

Christ, not only doing what the father gave him to do, but in a constant responsiveness to a person. Then he says, well, what does he do? He does what he sees the father doing it, he says. And then he says, I also do it in like manner.

So here, another very clear picture. The son does what the father does or the kinds of things the father does. And the son does it in the same way the father does. And so he can say later, like he does in John, if you've seen me, you have seen the father.

I have done exactly what the father does and I do it exactly how the father does it. And then, you know, we find the explanation because he has shown me, he shows me these things. He loves me and shows me.

Now, these are such big statements. Can a Christian really follow Jesus here? And the answer is yes. All right. So first of all, to plead with God that he would give us such a trust in him, such a love for him, that it would be a category of moral impossibility for us, that we would just get up and say, you know what?

What does John Snyder want to do with life today? Now, I'm a Christian, so I'm going to do some good things and I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to do some religious things. But look, John Snyder belongs to John Snyder.

So John Snyder is going to do some John Snyder things. But to say to God, I don't want to live that way anymore. I want to wake up and like Christ say to him, what do you want me to do? I open the word.

Again, we see what he spells out for us. And I say, okay, that's God's initiative. I am to do these things for love of him. And not only do I do what he wants me to do, but I do it in the way. Think of how many times as individuals or as churches, we want to do what God wants us to do.

So like evangelism. How do you do it? I don't know. Well, what do the people around me want? You know, do they want this? Then I'll give them this. What about this? What about this? Have we ever stopped and thought that actually following Jesus Christ means not just doing the right kind of things, but doing it in the way that reflects the Father?

So I want to make sure that the way I talk about Jesus Christ to my kids, to my coworkers, the way we worship, it's the way he wants it to be done, not just what he wants to be done. One of the wonderful things about the moral impossibility here of Christ, that he cannot just do what he wants to do because he delights to do what the Father wants him to do.

One of the wonderful pictures here is the word sent. I didn't even come on my own initiative, he says. I was sent, and that's a wonderful picture of submission. I voluntarily place myself beneath my Father's will, and I don't even come here on my own initiative.

I am sent. And for the believer to think that way, I go to work today, but really, it's not me that just goes and does what John wants to do today. I am sent by the Father to do these tasks today. I am under another's authority, and I delight to be that way.

Christ's Ambition: To Do the Father's Will

Yeah, amazing how the enemy has such a crafty lie about freedom. Freedom, the ultimate expression of freedom is to just get to wake up and do what you want to do and live for yourself. And Christ, who is the only one who has ever known perfect freedom, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there's freedom.

And here He is with freedom, with the Spirit without measure. And what does He say? I don't do what I do. I do whatever I see the Father doing. And there's our pattern. So what about Jesus's ambition?

What was it that He was hoping to accomplish? Well, we can look at a few passages to see what that is very clearly. In John 6 and verse 38, we read, Right, so let's take those two passages.

Again, we're just giving some examples to try to suggest how a person might approach the Gospels, observe Christ, and then plead with the Lord, show me how to imitate this and give me the grace I need to do it.

So let's look at what He says. Why did Christ get out of bed? And is that the same reason we get out of bed? So I haven't even come from heaven to do my own will. I came to do the will of somebody else.

Before our feet hit the floor, what if John 6, 38 was a fundamental part of our life? Father, I am not going to even get out of bed. I am not going to get up this morning and get dressed to do my will.

I am going to get out of bed. Whatever task I have today, whether it's taking care of the kids, running here and there, doing errands, going to work, going to church, I'm going to get out of bed to do your will.

And that's the one unalterable aspect of my life today, Father. And it doesn't matter which task comes my way, because there will be things that we're not expecting. You know, they hit us all the time.

But when they hit us, what if we stop? And on the interior of the heart we say, God, I didn't know this was coming today. I didn't know this emergency, you know. I didn't know the water heater was going to break and my house was going to be flooded, you know, a few weeks ago, right before we were supposed to film that happened to you.

So what do I do with this? I exist to do the will of my King. And if it means getting a plumber over here and sitting down with him and fixing this problem, I will do it out of love for Christ. So what a wonderful picture of the fundamental unaltering task of Christ.

Whatever the specifics I do, my ambition is to do what pleases my Father. Also notice here a picture of the intimacy. As a man, Christ has always cultivated a perfect intimate harmony with the Father.

He could easily have said, He who sent me is with me. He's not left me alone. Because I'm God. I'm God the Son. He's God the Father. Can you explain the Trinity? No. But I can tell you this, we're never separate.

That's not what He does. How would we follow Him? He says, I walk in such perfect harmony. You know, the Jews doubt that Jesus is in harmony with the Father at all. You're a heretic. No. I walk with the Father.

He is with me. He never leaves me. Where does that intimacy come from? As a man, I do what pleases my Father. And we see later in John 14 when He says, He who has my words and does them, my Father and I, we will dwell in Him.

And you know, they're just wonderful pictures of how a man walks with God.

Christ's Works as Proof of His Claims

Well, finally, and it's too bad we don't have more time to look at so many more aspects of this. Because again, it's thrilling. As you said, it's like we're on the edge of a continent. Maybe long term, there can be a longer study on this whole issue of looking at Christ and studying.

But let's look at how did Christ prove His claims? So He made all of these claims about Himself. How did He prove those things? Well, in John 5 and verses 30 through 36, we can read what He says. He says, I can do nothing on my own initiative.

As I hear, I judge. And my judgment is just because I don't seek my own will, but the will of Him who sent me. If I alone testify about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who testifies of me, and I know that the testimony which he gives about me is true.

You have sent to John, and he has testified to the truth. But the testimony which I receive is not from man. But I say these things so that you may be saved. He was the lamp that was burning and shining, and you were willing to rejoice in Him for a while for His light.

But the testimony which I have is greater than the testimony of John. For the works which the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I do, testify about me that the Father has sent me.

And another brief passage in John 10, verses 37 and 38, where the Lord says, If I do not do the works of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do them, though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I am the Father.

So again, wonderful pattern for the church, especially in the Western culture when we're seeing a shift, you know, we're entering into a period that's really been, in many ways, unique to our country in the United States, a multicultural, multi-religious atmosphere, where people aren't going to, when we talk to them and say, well, the Bible says it, they're not going to go, oh, well, the Bible says it.

They're going to say, which book is that? Because there's a whole lot of holy books. I'm not so sure your holy book is the holy book. Or which God are you talking about? Oh, that's your version of a God.

But there's 10 other versions of God that I've heard about at university. So how do we prove our claims? What we want to do, and what I see often is, you know, we throw a temper tantrum. I told them I was a Christian.

I quoted the Bible. They won't listen to me. Oh, the world has gotten so terrible. Jesus is about to come back any moment. It's so bad. And a lot of that is just that, you know, we're fussy because we, you know, maybe the easy ride that we had 100 years ago is not what we've got now.

Great news is that Jesus of Nazareth proved his claims. Paul proved Christ's claims. Paul proved claims about himself in ways that we can imitate. Really quickly, in the John 5 passage, he says, he gives a number of options.

First of all, the Father. He says, there's another who testifies. Well, first of all, he says, I say, but what if you don't believe me? Then there's the Father. He said it. Well, you can think about the passage where there is a voice from heaven at the baptism.

This is my beloved son. Listen to him. But Christ doesn't say that's enough. He says, well, and John told you who I was, and he's true. So a great prophet. So that's pretty wonderful. What if, Matt, what if you went home and you're talking to, you know, some old friends that you grew up with about Christ, and they think, come on, Matt Robinson, I remember you before you were a Christian.

You say, no, really, I'm serious. This is real. Like, like, I'm telling you. Oh, you don't believe me? Well, what if a voice from heaven came and said, Matt Robinson is telling you the truth. Listen, that'd be pretty shocking.

What if a great pastor, a great preacher from the past said, Matt Robinson is telling you the truth. Jesus said, well, we have all those, but this is the definitive one. He said, the works that the Father has given me to do, these are the works I'm doing right in front of you.

They demonstrate who I am. And that, again, is repeated in John 10, where he says an amazing statement. If I do not do the works of the Father, do not believe me. How can, how can that, how can the God man say that?

But he does. Now, this is the path for the Christian. There is no other option for proving what we say. We can't ignore this and say, well, I just said so. Or there's a voice from heaven, or the preacher says I am who I say I am.

How do I prove my claims to be a follower of Christ? Well, we may not be able to say it to the same degree. Perfection. Everything you see in me demonstrates I am who I say I am. But a Christian's not claiming that we're perfect.

I'm a follower of Christ. I am a sinner who is daily being saved. So, the people that know you ought to be able to look at you and say, okay, yeah, you're still imperfect. I can still see the, some of the old leftovers.

But man, you're different. You know, you love God. You didn't used to love God. You want to obey God. You didn't used to want to obey God. And you love people. Why are you different? And you can say that this is an evidence that God is at work in me like I tell you He is.

One very scary question I have to ask myself is this. Would I ever dare to really follow Christ here? What I say to my family, look, guys, if you don't see in me the works of a Christian, if I don't do what I say a Christian, the Bible says a Christian ought to do, then don't believe me.

Just don't believe me. Or would a church say that? If we don't do the things that the Father says a church does, if we don't demonstrate that we are what the Father says the church is, and the church is very imperfect on earth, then don't listen to us.

I mean, would you put that as a banner above your church entrance? If we don't do what the Father gives us to do, don't you dare listen to us. What a wonderfully helpful thing it would be if just that was adopted by every church, so that if a church is lying about Christ, then the people would just walk right out of the building and say, that's a lie, and I'm not going to follow that down the wrong road, you know.

So this is the pattern that Christ has given us, and we've only been able to give just a glimpse. View Christ. Focus on Him. Plead with the Father to show you Him. As you meditate on these passages, and then ask Him, show me how to imitate.

At every conference we attend these days, people stop by our booth to tell us how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their families, or their churches. Eventually, we started asking if they'd let us record those stories and share them with you.

This is Jordan. Anthony Methenia, one of the contributors to the Behold Your God series, gave him a copy of Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty.

What it does, I think, very well is explains clearly the attributes of God, while at the same time connecting them to these great men in history that we look up to and how they were held up by the attributes of God, by the knowledge of God, and then at the same time applying that to your own life in a practical way.

So it's not just scholarly, it's not just historical, it's also practical, and it pulls them all together through the stories that Pastor John tells, through the workbook, through the sermons, and then through the application.

It does it all very well. I would say the Behold Your God series is the best series on the attributes of God, as far as contemporary series go, especially with all the materials that they have. No one's going to take you to the text more consistently, no one's going to connect it to history more consistently, and no one's going to apply it to your life more practically than Behold Your God.

For more information about Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, visit TheMeansOfGrace .org. Well, we've thought a lot about a few, just really a few basic things about the way that Christ lived His life, and we're to observe that, we're to ask ourselves, are we really walking in that way?

Do we want to? We mentioned some resources, and again, there'll be links to those resources at TheMeansOfGrace .org, which will take you to Mediagratia .org. You can see there in the show notes here from the podcast, so we'd encourage you to look at those resources, spend some time getting to know the one that you're seeing in the Scriptures, but most of all, go to the Scriptures and look at the God-man there.

It can be discouraging, but it doesn't have to be. We were just talking about a very encouraging way that what the Lord said to His disciples in John 4 actually has a much more encouraging end than it did when He said it.

Yeah, John 4, He says His food is to do the will of the Father, but before He says that, He says, I have food to eat that you don't know about, not physical food, and that's a true statement. The disciples do not know what it's like to live sustained by the delight of doing the Father's will, but by the time we reach the end of His ministry, by the time we see them in the book of Acts carrying the gospel to the world, we wouldn't say that about them anymore.

He has taught them. He has given them His Spirit. He has trained them, and look, Christian, you may feel that you're a bad student. I feel that I'm a bad student. When we do this podcast, I mean, I think it would be more appropriate sometimes for me to just throw up my hands and say, I have failed, I have failed, I have failed, you know, but then I remember my teacher, the perfect teacher, the one that taught Peter and James and John and Thomas and all of those men what it was like to be sustained by doing the will of the Father.

For that to be their delight, He will teach us, and so that's a really encouraging reality.

Thanks for listening to the Behold Your God podcast. All the scripture passages and resources we mentioned in the podcast are available in this week's show notes at mediagratia .org slash podcast. That's m-e-d-i-a-g-r-a-t-i-a-e dot o-r-g.

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