Calculated to Revolutionize — Major Ian Thomas

Major Ian Thomas, North Fort Worth Baptist Church, November 7, 1966, Noon Pastors Conference, Calculated to Revolutionize, 60 Minutes.

I certainly appreciate the gracious words of welcome, and I'm both grateful and excited. I'm grateful for the opportunity of being with you at this lunch hour, and to share with you the fellowship of our Lord Jesus.

I'm grateful for the opportunity that is mine this week to share with the wonderful people of this church some of the thrilling treasures that are ours as revealed to us by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God that we have in our Lord Jesus.

I'm grateful for the privilege that is mine now to talk to you, and as a fellow minister of the Gospel, simply to share with you some of the good things that God in his goodness has been making known.

Jesus Christ Alive in the Believer

But I'm excited. I'm excited because Jesus Christ is alive. I wasn't always excited about that, even though I was a Christian. I wasn't always excited about it, even though I knew it was true, and believed it, and could provide chapter and verse to substantiate the glorious fact of his resurrection.

But it didn't excite me. I didn't become excited about the fact that Jesus Christ was alive until I discovered that he was alive in me. That's what made it exciting. It was for seven years that I existed as a Christian before I began really to enjoy the Christian life, having for the first time, seven years after my conversion, discovered what it really meant to be a Christian.

One of my colleagues, Stuart Briscoe, who may be known to one or two of you if you were in the Southland Keswick Convention, I believe, a year ago, 18 months ago, speaking to some of our teenager youngsters not too long ago, was saying that he had made three major discoveries in the Christian life.

In the first instance, when he was converted, he thought the Christian life was easy, and found he was wrong. Then he said he thought the Christian life was difficult, and found that he was wrong again.

And the third discovery that he made was that the Christian life is impossible. And it wasn't until, you see, he had discovered that the Christian life was impossible, that he became excited about the fact that Jesus Christ was alive.

It isn't until you and I have got to the place in our Christian experience where we've thrown him a sponge and at last admitted what God's trying to tell us from Genesis to the Revelation, that the Christian life is a sheer impossibility to you and to me, apart from Jesus Christ himself.

Not till then does the fact that he's alive, risen from the dead, really become relevant to us in our day-to-day living. And ever since I made that discovery at the age of 19, which was calculated, as many of you too have discovered, completely to revolutionize one's life as a Christian, life has been the sheer adventure that God, I believe, always intended the Christian life to be.

That's why I'm happy this lunch hour to be sharing with you some of these things. And I don't want, as it were, to preach to you, because many of you have many, many years of rich experience in the service of the Lord Jesus.

I'm not a pastor. And I wouldn't for one moment presume to try to teach you how to be a pastor, because I've never been a pastor. All I want to do is just to share with you some of the good things that are our common heritage in the person of the Lord Jesus who died for us and who rose again from the dead to live in us.

The Defeated Pastor and the Life of Christ

Some years ago, when I was invited to speak in a church in Rochester, Minnesota, the pastor of the church, whom I'd never met, was given the opportunity, just before I was due to arrive, to engage in some additional postgraduate studies.

So I never met him. But in his absence, the church officers had invited another young pastor to assume certain responsibilities. They had a morning broadcast, a quarter of an hour each morning, at the threshold of the day.

And they kindly invited me to participate in this program and lead it for the week that I was there. And this was just after this young pastor had been invited to assume other responsibilities, and having been told that these would be numbered amongst his responsibilities, somewhat to his dismay, he discovered that all at once they had handed these responsibilities over to me.

And this irked him a wee bit. Now, what do they mean? Am I or am I not going to do this thing? You know how easily you can get a little bit sort of ruffled. Anyway, he was courteous and correct. He took me to the studio and introduced me to the manager, showed me where the records were, and intended to lead me to it.

But he decided to sit it through. And afterwards, over a cup of coffee, he suddenly blurted out what I've heard on the lips, alas, of many another. He said, I'm sick and tired of being a useless, defeated pastor.

Now, he'd only been a pastor for five years. This was only his second charge. But already he was flat in his faith. And over that cup of coffee, we began to talk about the exciting news that Jesus Christ was not only alive, to which fact he'd always given his mental consent and theological credence, but to the exciting fact that Jesus Christ was not only alive, but alive in every believer in the person and power of the Holy Spirit, and that the Christian life involves nothing less than sharing his life on earth, 24 hours a day, for every situation, always relentlessly discovering that he's never less than big enough for any situation that can ever arise at any time in any circumstance.

And that's what makes the Christian life so incredibly exciting. And over that cup of coffee, in those few moments, something happened in his heart. That was eight or ten years ago. But just four or five weeks ago, it was my privilege to conduct a series of meetings in his church, of which he's pastor now on the outskirts of Milwaukee in Wisconsin.

And that was a thrilling experience. Because he took over that pastorate three years ago, just a handful of people, they didn't have enough church building, they met in a school classroom. It was so dead, they were thinking of closing it down and forgetting it.

But three years later, when I was there just four or five weeks ago, it was my joy to be in the midst of a vibrant community of new Christians. 85 of his congregation have been converted in the last 18 months or two years.

It's a small community. There were only about 280 in church membership. Then the process of building another church to seat 500, and they anticipate that'll be full within the next one or two years. And they'll all be new Christians.

And you know there's something uniquely refreshing about ministering to a bunch of new Christians, who are not weighted down by long evangelical traditions, who haven't got their roots deep in old-time patterns, but Christians who are new Christians because they've been led to Christ by other Christians.

The thrilling thing about that church is that they're not only 85 new Christians, but probably 70 of the 85 had been led to Christ by other members of the church community. Now, this is what happens, of course, when an individual is led to Jesus Christ, not as the one simply who died for him, but as the one who rose again from the dead to live in.

The Gospel as Christ’s Indwelling Life

But I want to share this with you. And I'm sure it must, on many occasions, have been your experience to discover how many soundly converted evangelical Christians there are who know that their sins are forgiven, who've registered a clear-cut decision to accept Christ as Redeemer, but have never really come to understand the spiritual content of their faith.

And the result is they've never been able to do anything but struggle along to conform to those Christian patterns of procedure that have been superimposed upon them by the particular church context in which they have found themselves, which by the accident, as it were, of their new birth, they adhere.

And I believe that in the preaching of the Gospel we need to present the glorious fact that the Lord Jesus not only died for us, that we might be redeemed, but that he rose again from the dead, that in the power of his Holy Spirit he might credit us with nothing less than all that he is in his overwhelming sufficiency for every step that we take and for every situation to which that step takes us.

This is calculated to be revolutionary. You know, there was a time when certain men came to the Lord Jesus and they posed a question, what shall we do that we might work the works of God? That was a sincere question, I believe.

Maybe it was legitimate. But it was a question to which the Lord Jesus Christ didn't give them a direct answer. And I've sort of filled in time hoping that the orchestra would finish its overture so that we can really get down to business.

This was the question. What shall we do that we might work the works of God? The Lord Jesus answered and said to them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he has sent. And that wasn't the kind of answer that was calculated to satisfy their question.

This, said the Lord Jesus, is the work of God. Or he might have put it another way in the sense in which he projected it. This is God at work, that ye believe on him whom God has sent. You see, the work of God is God at work.

If it isn't God at work, it isn't the work of God. And there's much activity that we credit to ourselves as being the work of God, which is nothing more nor less than the work of man on God's behalf. But to be legitimate, all work of God must be God at work.

And this, of course, was the point that the Lord Jesus Christ here was making to them. This is God at work, he said, that you believe on him whom he has sent. But immediately that statement in itself would call for a new definition of believing on Jesus Christ.

Supposing I were to say to you in the course of casual conversation about somebody else, Is he a believer? What would you understand by my question? Wouldn't you probably understand by my question, is he converted?

Has he registered a decision for Jesus Christ? Has he accepted Christ as his Saviour? Because, by and large, in our normal connotation of that particular expression, we think of believing on Jesus Christ as a specific act whereby we appropriate, savingly, his redemptive work upon the cross.

But, of course, that definition wouldn't do for this particular context. For the Lord Jesus Christ said, this is the work of God, that you believe on him whom God has sent. That doesn't speak of a crisis.

That doesn't speak of a historical decision that has been registered simply to claim forgiveness. Therefore, we need to understand something more by believing on Jesus Christ than simply that of accepting him as Redeemer.

And I believe this to be the context and the connotation of believing in the whole of God's worth. That to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ involves nothing less than the release of God's divine activity in terms of that man's redeemed humanity.

And, to me, that is evangelism. To preach, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved involves infinitely more than that that individual should escape the punitive consequence of his guilt and his sin and be reconciled to a holy God.

To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and to be saved means that as a reconciled sinner, now at peace with God his maker, his redeemed humanity has become available with vacant possession for none other than Jesus Christ himself that there might be the continuing process of his divine activity now clothed with that individual's humanity.

That would be God at work. And this is what the Lord Jesus Christ, of course, was talking about. He didn't satisfy the Jews because they posed this question out of the pragmatic background of an externalistic religion.

This to them was mystical. This to them was otherworldly. This to them was unrealistic. And the concept of the Lord Jesus himself as God, being God, resident, indwelling, and monopolizing a man's humanity so that he becomes simply the external means whereby Christ as the indweller expresses his divine activity to many who are pragmatically inclined, also somewhat mystical and otherworldly and unrealistic.

And yet, of course, this is the concept with which the whole Bible is permeated. Said the Lord Jesus, this is God at work, that you believe on him whom God has sent. Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life.

He that cometh to me shall never hunger. And he that believeth on me shall never thirst. We need, of course, to understand that verse, the 35th verse of John, chapter 6, to understand what the Lord Jesus was to continue to explain to them in the balance of this particular chapter.

He that cometh to me shall never hunger. When you stop hungry, when you eat. He that believeth on me shall never thirst. When you stop thirsting, when you drink. We may understand, therefore, now that the Lord Jesus will use these terms synonymously.

When you come and eat, you'll stop hungry. When you believe and drink, you'll stop thirsting. So that whether he says come and believe or eat and drink, he'll be saying one and the same thing. Of course, if we don't recognize that fact, and this verse, of course, gives us the key to the exegesis of the balance of the chapter, we shall be confused theologically.

We could almost become a Roman Catholic. To come is to eat, and to eat is to come. To believe is to drink, and to drink is to believe. And, of course, it's a beautiful picture. Because it's the faith that appropriates what he is that ultimately applies the life of Christ to the extremities of our being.

Just as what we drink is that which applies the nourishment that we eat to the extremities of our being. Having made that introduction, the Lord Jesus then went on to say, except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, unless you come and believe, you have no life in you.

You're dead. You're totally destitute of that divine content which makes man, man. Because it's only the life of God within the soul of man that enables a man to function as God created man to function.

Because it takes God himself within the man to be the man that God created man to be. Because all human activity that is spiritually legitimate must have its ultimate origin in God himself. Because if man was created in God's image, it's only because God himself was prepared to be in man the origin of that image, the source of his own activity, the dynamic of his own demands, and the cause of his own effect.

This is basic to the doctrine of man's humanity. Unless we're prepared to adhere to the Adamic creed of self-sufficiency and believe the devil's lie that sought to persuade a man that he can be a man without God.

And all that the Lord Jesus Christ is seeking here to teach his disciples is to restore them to that relationship to himself that enables him, Jesus, as God, to be God in terms of their humanity. That's why he said to them, unless you eat and drink, unless you come and believe, you have no life in you.

Redemption, Regeneration, and the Gospel’s Full Purpose

That's the evangelistic message. This is what we preach when we talk to the unregenerate. We say that unless you repent toward God, unless you claim the atoning efficacy of the vicarious sufferings of Jesus Christ and claim forgiveness before an almighty God on the basis of the blood he shed, you are still dead in your sins.

Totally destitute of the divine life that God can only re-impart to those who have been reconciled on the basis of the redemptive act of Jesus Christ, historically accomplished when he died and rose again for our justification.

This is the evangelistic message. We don't invite men and women and boys and girls to come to Jesus Christ simply that they might have their sins forgiven. To do that would be to delude them. To do that would be to deceive them.

To do that would be cheating Jesus Christ of that for which his blood was shed. Jesus Christ said, I am come that you might have life. He didn't say, I am come that you might have forgiveness. He said that I am come that you might have life.

But you can never have life. You can never have the restored presence of the almighty God within your humanity that makes you a member of his corporate body, that makes your body a habitation of God by his Spirit.

You cannot have that life until your sins are forgiven. Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see. If you want to know the premise upon which you can be restored to life, this is the premise.

The wounds in my hands and feet. That's true, said Jesus, unless you have come in repentance toward God and you have put your faith deliberately and specifically in me. You have no life in you. You're destitute, you're bankrupt, you're dead.

You're alienated from the life of God and you're in the condition in which you were born, dead in your sins. Is that true? But is that gospel? Now that's the introduction to the gospel. But from that premise, which is the threshold over which any individual, boy, girl, man or woman, must cross if ever they are to be raised out of a state of lifelessness in which all the fallen seed of a fallen Adam were born in their unregenerate condition, dead in trespasses and sins.

That's just the baby language of the gospel. And the Lord Jesus, of course, now has turned his attention from the Jews who posed the initial question. And he's now focusing his attention upon his own closest circle of disciples.

And he goes on to say this. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, the one who comes to me and by faith appropriates all that I am to whom he has come, dwelleth in me and I in him. In other words, before you have come and believed, you're dead.

You have no life in you. The life of God hasn't been restored to the soul of man. But says the Lord Jesus, I want you to know this, that the moment a man has come and believed, the moment a man has eaten and has drunk, there has been precipitated in that man's spiritual relationship to God this unique situation.

I am in him and he is in me. Now what is this relationship? It's the very relationship which the Lord Jesus constantly claimed existed between himself and the Father. Again and again the Lord Jesus said, the Father is in me and I am in him.

And says the Lord Jesus, when you have come and believed, the relationship that is to exist now between you and me is identically that relationship which exists as between me as a man and my Father in heaven as God.

As he is in me and I am in him, so I am in you and you are in me. And of course it is to precipitate this amazing relationship between the redeemed sinner and the risen indwelling Lord that we preach the gospel.

I wouldn't preach the gospel to get sinners out of hell and into heaven. I rejoice with all the angels in heaven over every sinner who repents and who through the sheer grace of God, through the shed blood of Jesus is acquitted and to whom God no more will impute iniquity.

But in the discharge of my responsibilities to the Lord Jesus, I wouldn't preach the gospel simply to that end. For the purpose of God in sending the Lord Jesus Christ was not simply an escape mechanism.

The purpose of God in sending the Lord Jesus Christ into this world to accomplish the redemptive act was that the regenerative purpose of God might be put into operation. The regenerative purpose of God that restores the life of God to the soul of man so that man as man can be man as God intended man to be in the power of the indwelling life of deity.

I, said Jesus, am in you and you are in me. And if you want to know what this is going to involve, I'll tell you. It's in the 57th verse of the same chapter. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him.

As the living Father hath sent me and I live, literally, through the Father. So he that eateth me has come and believed, shall live through me. Not just come to life through me, but shall live through me.

As the living Father hath sent me and I live through the Father because I am in him and he is in me. So he that eateth me shall live through me because he is in me and I am in him. Well, I don't need to underline the sheer importance of this statement.

The Lord Jesus declares that as the living Father sent him and he lives through the Father so we, the moment we put our trust in him are to live through him. Can there be anything more important than that?

In terms of being the Christian that you've become on the basis of his atoning death. What it means of course is this. That until I have discovered how Jesus Christ on earth as a man lived through the Father by virtue of the fact that the Father was in him and he was in the Father I haven't begun to understand how I as a redeemed sinner am now to live on earth through him because he is in me and I am in him.

Christ’s Humanity and the Believer’s Dependence

Isn't that true? In other words, if I want to know how to be a Christian as opposed to becoming a Christian priority number one is for me to discover how Jesus Christ as a man 1 ,900 years ago lived on earth as a man and I think one of the areas in which as an evangelical constituency we have been robbing ourselves is in an adequate examination of the humanity of Jesus Christ.

In some ways it's understandable. Such attacks have been made upon the deity of the Lord Jesus that we have been jealous of the doctrine of his eternal deity in utter identity and in co-equality with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the dry unity of the Godhead.

And it's reasonable that we should have contended for the faith once delivered. But you know in our defense of the deity of Jesus Christ we have forgotten that he became a man. And we have tended to credit to his humanity a superlative sense in which he was not just man but superman.

And to this degree we are robbing ourselves of the know-how of being Christians. Because if there was one thing that the Lord Jesus wanted to demonstrate more than another in the course of his sojourn for 33 years on earth it was that you and I might know how to be men who have been restored on the basis of the redemptive act to our true humanity by the release of the regenerative purpose of God that enables God once more to be God and behave like God in a man.

Now if I preach a gospel that is weaker than that I will introduce people to the redemptive act of Christ in such a way that they will claim forgiveness and be made fit for heaven and be left thereafter for the rest of their days on earth though regular and loyal and dedicated members of a church community totally unfit for earth.

Because it is the death of Christ that gives you the power to become a Christian it is only the life of Christ within you that gives you the power to be the Christian that his death has given you the right to become.

And this is the part of the gospel in which we have been sadly lacking. We have preached a weak gospel. Come to Jesus and have your sins forgiven. And then Jesus Christ, the historical Jesus who died historically 1900 years ago to accomplish the vicarious atoning sacrifice that makes it possible for guilty men to be at peace with God their maker is now relegated beyond the clouds to appear only in eschatological glory one day when we see him in the far distant future or by dint of our physical death when we meet him face to face in his eternal presence.

So that by and large the average evangelical Christian has got a Jesus who was buried and risen from the dead the Jesus who is the historical redeemer and a Jesus who is an eschatological hope one who one day we shall see in his presence forever in the place that he has gone to prepare for us.

But between the Jesus that was historically dying that we might be redeemed and the Jesus that will be whom we shall see vindicated in his deity in the day that every eye will see him and every knee will bow between the Jesus that was and the Jesus that will be we leave people to live in a spiritual vacuum and seek to conform to certain church practices that make them acceptable within that particular religious society.

And the measure of their conformity to the demands that we project upon them as a Christian community by and large will be the measure of their spirituality. And of course nothing could be farther from the truth.

And this of course was the point of emphasis that the Lord Jesus was here laying. How did Jesus Christ live through the Father? In his first apostolic address Peter speaking of the Lord Jesus Acts chapter 2 and verse 22.

You men of Israel hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth a man. That's how he introduced him. On the first day of Pentecost filled with the Holy Ghost Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God. Now what's the characteristic of a man approved of God?

Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did. How? By him Jesus, a man approved by miracles, signs and wonders which God did by him as you yourselves also know.

Is Peter in this apostolic address detracting from the eternal deity of Jesus Christ? No. Not one tiny whit. For the Lord Jesus was never less than God never less than in total and eternal equality in the trite unity of deity.

But the amazing thing is this, what is so crushingly humiliating is that the Lord Jesus was prepared, though God to be and behave like a man. And the characteristic of man as God made man is that only God within the man can be the origin of his own image source of his own activity dynamic of his own demands cause of his own effect.

And if Jesus Christ was to be less than a play actor if his humanity was to be anything other than a mere front in setting aside those divine prerogatives that make Jesus Christ and God, God he had to submit himself deliberately and voluntarily to those limitations that make man, man.

And the primary limitation that makes man, man is his utter unrelenting dependence upon God and his willingness to let God be God in him. And the amazing thing is this this was exactly what the Lord Jesus Christ was prepared to do as a man in the second chapter of the Philippian epistle.

Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus. In other words, let this attitude be characteristic of you which was in Jesus. Because remember as the living Father sent him and he lived through the Father so we now are to live through him.

So whatever attitude it was that he adopted as a man toward the Father that allowed him to live through the Father has got to be now the attitude that we adopt towards Jesus that allows Jesus to be the one who lives through us.

For as he lived through the Father we are now to live through Jesus. So we need to understand the mind that was in Christ Jesus we have to comprehend the attitude that he adopted. What was the attitude that he adopted?

We are told this that though being essentially one with God and in the form of God and possessing the fullness of the attributes which make God, God he did not think this equality with God was a thing to be eagerly grasped or retained.

But he stripped himself of all privileges and rightful dignity so as to assume the guise of a servant in that he became like men and was born a human being. And after he had appeared in human form he abased and humbled himself still further and carried his obedience to the extreme of death even the death of the cross being essentially one with God he stripped himself so as to assume the guise of a servant.

In the New English translation we are told that he made himself nothing. In the authorised version we are told that he humbled himself. In the German translation we are told that he emptied himself. In other words when Jesus Christ, though God came into this world to become man he became all that a man is without God.

How much is that? Did you ever ask yourself that question? If God created man in such a way that only God within the man can be the origin of his own image only God within the man can be the source of glory.

For in him was life and this life was the light of man. If it takes God really to behave like the man that God created man to be and Jesus Christ came to the world to behave like a man he had to become all that a man is without God.

And that is nothing so that the Father as God could be everything and let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. So we have two pictures of the Lord Jesus this picture of his becoming which is further described for us in the tenth chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews.

Christ entered into the world and said sacrifices and offerings you do not desire but instead you have made ready a body for me to offer. Then I said lo here I am come to do your will oh God to fulfill what is written of me in the volume of the book.

In other words he said Father you have prepared for me a body a body conceived miraculously of the Holy Spirit and fashioned in the womb of Mary. Thank you Father for this body that you have prepared for me to offer that in this body there may be accomplished all that has already been written of me in the volume of the book.

I haven't come to exercise my initiative Father on your behalf. I haven't come to lift a finger to redeem a damned humanity. I have simply come Father to offer to you the humanity that you have prepared for me in the womb of Mary that you may tell in terms of my humanity that redemptive and regenerative purpose as recorded in the word of God now to be told in terms of my yieldedness placing myself unreserved at your dispose.

Jesus Full of the Holy Spirit

This is how the Lord Jesus Christ presented the body to the Father in which he became man. And Bethlehem was his becoming conceived of the Holy Spirit. But the second picture that we have of the Lord Jesus is not his becoming by spiritual conception of the Holy Ghost to inhabit a body that the Father prepared for him to offer.

You have the next picture of Jesus being what he was born to become. And of course that's what is of supreme importance to us isn't it. This is what is of supreme interest to us. How was Jesus able to be what at Bethlehem he was born to become.

And the answer to that is given to us in the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel. And if we pause after the third word we get the sense of it in Luke's Gospel in chapter 4 and verse 1 it says. And Jesus be being what?

Being what he was born to become. Man superman? No, man. God man? No, man. Jesus being what does it take to be what you've become if you want to fulfill the function for which God made man, man. It's very simple.

Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost. That's Jesus being. Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit being the one through whom a man offers his humanity to God. And the Holy Spirit being the one through whom God offers his deity to a man.

And as some of us this morning read in the paraphrased New Testament in the second chapter of the epistle to the Colossians we saw all that God is in the humanity of a man, Jesus Christ in him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead body.

All of God in one human being. All of God in one human being that was Jesus Christ. But when you look at him, Jesus Christ on earth with his two feet on the ground when you look at him and see all of God in one human being what are you looking at?

Man. Just man not superman. Just man. As God created you and me to be all of God by the Holy Spirit who is indivisible in whose person there is comprehended all the triunity of deity God the Holy Ghost indwelling the total personality of a man so that he becomes a body holy filled and flooded with God himself.

That is man as God intended man to be. And Jesus was the second man. The only other man that ever walked this earth as man by God was intended to be. That's why he is the last Adam Jesus full of the Holy Ghost.

What did this involve for the Lord Jesus? It involved total submission to every demand that the Father could make upon him in his humanity through the Holy Spirit. Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.

Led by whom? Led by the Spirit. Do you mean to tell me that Jesus Christ didn't have the right to exercise his own initiative? Couldn't he plan and program and promote on God's behalf? Never, not. As a man as God, yes, he could throw the universes into space.

He could throw the stars into the far corners of the night as God he was the creative deity by whom all things were made and without whom not anything was made that ever was made. But as a man he could only be full of the Holy Ghost.

The Lord Jesus might well have put it this way. Father, my office is to be, it's your office to act. And my humanity I place now unreserved at your divine disposal so that there may be the unblemished, untarnished unsullied expression of what you are and all your relentless purpose in terms of my humanity Jesus being led of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, he was told what to do. And he did as he was told. And Jesus says, as the living Father sent me and I live through the Father he that eateth me is going to live through me. And being led into the wilderness, tempted forty days and nights.