Christ Magnified In My Body # 1

Christ Magnified In My Body # 1

Philippians 1:20, "According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body..."

I used to think that in the second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 5, Paul gives a summary of his theology. He believes that if we are absent from the body, we are present with the Lord. Knowing the terror of the Lord we persuade men. We must all appear at the judgment seat of Christ.

Dear Keith Green said one day in my office, as we were talking about the roads, "All roads lead to the judgment seat." It's true. They do. Whether we are slaves or free men, intellectuals or ignoramuses, black or white, rich or poor: All roads lead to the judgment seat." Without exception.

Then verse 14 expresses what I always considered to be the thing that really motivated him. He out-preached everybody, out-suffered everybody, out-prayed everybody. I thought that 14th verse, "For the love of Christ constraineth me," was the motivation, with the obligation to present Christ in all His majesty and glory.

Now I've come to the conclusion reading recently our verse in Philippians, that the motivator of the apostle in his zigzag course - in prison, out of prison, in weariness, in fastings, in painfulness, in tribulations, in distress, in perils of his countrymen, in perils of the deep, in perils of robbers - the one thing that motivated him is here in this 20th verse: "as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body (or as some put it by my body), whether it be by life, or by death."

The thing that gripped me as I read it this week, Christ may be magnified - not in my ministry - not in my miracles - not in my super-love but, he says, that Christ might be magnified IN MY BODY.

If you turn over to chapter 4 verse 6, this explains his life, I think. He says, Be careful for nothing. Be prayerful in everything. Be thankful in anything. That covers a lot of territory, doesn't it? The King James version, says "Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God." I believe that's the territory in which he lives, and moved, and had his being.

Now, this epistle is very beautiful. You know why? Because it is a love letter. Some of you ladies remember the first one you got. A fellow in our church fell in love with my sister. He wrote a letter to her. Boy! Shakespeare couldn't have done better! She had eyes like stars... her cheeks were rosy... I never knew it. I lived with her for twenty years and never noticed one of those things he said she had! Because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

This is a lovely epistle. For one thing, there is no mention of sin in this epistle. I think Paul is actually saying here that in the greatest suffering you can have the greatest joy. (We like the bonuses, but we are not too anxious to have the burdens, are we?) If you read the epistle carefully, you'll find that fourteen times he mentions "joy", and  he was in a stinking hole of a prison that we wouldn't even put a dog in these days! No bed. No creature comforts. The rottenest food. Just a hell-hole. Yet here he is sending a letter of greeting and cheer to other people who should be writing letters to him. So with all the greatness and all the pressure, he says it is possible to have this boundless joy. Again, he does not mention sin. He mentions flesh once, and then dismisses it. He is showing us that there is a grace of God far more exceedingly abundant than all that we can either ask or think.

Some of you know that great hymn, "The sands of time are sinking..." Mrs. Cousins extracted phrases out of the wonderful diary of the great old Scottish saint, Samuel Rutherford and put that marvelous, marvelous hymn together. I think its maybe the greatest hymn ever written. He said "I have to go into the kings cellar to find the kings wine."

I remember old houses not far from where we lived. We got in one, one day. The oldest son was a friend of mine. He said, "Have you ever been in our huge underground cellar?" I said, "No." We went in. There were all the old wine racks. We searched dozens. They were all empty! But he said, "Look at the old wines they used to keep." Labels from Portugal, Spain, and here and there, champagne from France and all the rest of it. But they're not stored upstairs in the refrigerator. They are stored in dungeons. In the dark places. And we would like God to serve up, as it were, the wine of heaven just like we are, living on the level, without any interruption of trial or tribulation or testing. But that's not the way that God works.

You know Romans 12. I'm thinking of places where Paul talks about his body. He doesn't talk about yielding your mind merely. In Romans 12:1-2, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice." Not your brain. Not your emotion. Not your spirit. But if I said to somebody, "Look. Here's my watch." - Well, this one is a fairly modern one. I don't have to wind it up. But the old ones had "works" in them, you know. They were marvelous old things. They used to call them "stem-winders." They're collectors items now. If I gave a man my watch, I gave him the works, the hands, the face. I gave him everything.

Well, if I present my body a living sacrifice, surely I'm presenting everything that I have. My spirit, my soul, my body. For which Paul prays in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, "the very God of peace sanctify you wholly: and I pray that your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of the Lord. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it." So I give my body in its entirety to God.

A girl in England, years ago wrote a beautiful hymn:

All for Jesus, all for Jesus!
All my being ransomed powers;
All my thoughts and words and doings,
All my days and all my hours...

She goes on to say,

Let my hands perform His bidding;
Let my feet run in His ways;
Let my eyes see Jesus only;
Let my lips speak forth His praise.

Then she says, so beautifully,

Since my eyes were fixed of Jesus
I've lost sight of all beside.

Vision is so vital in the Christian life. On that Damascus Road... I don't believe the apostle Paul ever recovered from that experience of being blinded. Physically he did. His eyes were opened, sure enough. But I believe he was blinded to all the treasures of this world, as this girl says:

Since my eyes were fixed of Jesus,
I've lost sight of all besides;
So enchained my spirits vision,
Gazing on the crucified.

~Leonard Ravenhill~

(continued with # 2)

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