The theme of this camp was the question the Lord Jesus asked in Luke 18:8: when Jesus comes, will he find faith? He does not expect to find faith in the world — in that world of people who care nothing about God and his kingdom, whose feet are firmly on what they call solid ground, who are practical people with no time for fairy tales. When you became a Christian and you talked to your friends — yes, even your Christian friends — they said: "Oh, let's not go too far. A little bit of Christianity mixed in with a little bit of Cadillac, that goes just nicely. One eye on faith, that's fine; the other eye still has to be practical, right?" We are in a state of affairs where compromise comes upon us, not necessarily as force, but as temptation, day after day.
Especially to those of us who are serving the Lord in a full-time capacity. Sometimes you look at the car you drive and you look at other people's cars, and you know the difference. Brother Guy was with me when he was telling me about the car the Hong Kong team used to drive — it had a unique feature by which on a rainy day a jet of water came straight upward from the bonnet, so that passersby could admire not only the traffic on the road but a fountain emerging from the fender. And people always said: "Look at your qualifications. The team put together can list so many degrees. And you have to drive this piece of junk?" This is the kind of compromise that pressurizes full-time workers all the time.
Yesterday we saw that this kind of compromise makes us unfaithful to the Word of God, and yet we try to fool ourselves that we are still faithful. I will denounce one more time the sickening thing that is called Christianity in Hong Kong. How can people like this dare to talk about the cross and clinging to the cross? They should rip that kind of song out of their hymn books and never disgrace the word of the cross again. But it is precisely the cross I shall talk about. The whole Christian church can rise up in arms against me, and I shall not waver so much as one second on this matter.
I am going to challenge you today. When you go out of this camp, take your Bible and a marker pen and mark every reference to suffering in the New Testament. I wonder whether by the time you have gone through ten pages you will still have the stomach to carry on. Mark every page that is not marked on the subject of suffering — I can tell you in advance that you will find very few. And you will say: why did nobody ever tell me about this before?
Do you want to have spiritual vision? Do you want to be able to see the things which are eternal? Do you want to walk here on this earth walking with the living God? I am not talking about some notion of heaven as a grand concert hall where angels play violin. I have not been to a concert in I don't know how long, and if that's what heaven is I'm going to say: Lord, do you have a baseball park? Or at the very least a swimming pool? The point is: do you want to know the living God here and now? If the answer is no, there is nothing in this message for you. This message of the cross is only for those who know there is something more than crawling through life, whether in Cadillacs or not in Cadillacs. That something more is the living God, whom to know is life eternal, and whom to know is the one thing that matters when the curtains on your life are closing.
The church is full of hypocrites — that's no new news. Watch a person die and you will know whether he is a Christian or not. The person who has said all his life how much he loves God, who when the moment comes to meet the one he loves cannot run away fast enough — Lord, please not yet, I haven't been to Australia — that person is a hypocrite, and the church is full of them. And I want to say to you: watch me die. And I hope that not only in life but in death you will see one who meets death with joy and expectation, saying: Lord, here I come, how long have I waited for this. That is not exaggeration — that is what the apostle Paul was saying. He said: if you give me a choice to stay or to go, I want to go.
A fellow pastor known to me and very well known in Western churches was dying of cancer. He tried everything not to die — going from one country to another looking for those with gifts of healing, with whole churches mobilized to pray that he would not go to God. I felt sick in my heart. You who preach the gospel, who say how wonderful Jesus is — you don't even want to see him. Hypocrite. We pastors are also hypocrites, are we not? May God help me: watch me die, and may it be that my life will show forth more glory in death than in life. That is what the apostle Paul said — that whether we live or die, he bears in his body the marks of the death of Jesus and does not try to run away from it.
Why are we unfaithful? Yesterday we saw that the reason we could not be faithful is because we do not function spiritually — we depend upon our eyesight, upon what we can see and hear. And we saw that your spiritual faculties will never function at all until the cross is implemented in your life. Now, I hear you ask: is there some easier way? How about transcendental meditation — you sit there and breathe deeply, concentrate your mind. Or yoga poses. I used to stand on my head every day and even do the peacock pose. I used to do all these things for a time because they were said to improve circulation. But I can tell you: there is only one path to life, one path to spiritual power, one path to spiritual perception, and that is the path of faith. And the path of faith is the path of the cross.
We like to stop at "faith" and say: what a beautiful, quotable quote. The path to life is faith. Wonderful. And then you add: and the path of faith is the path of the cross — and you have spoiled the whole sentence. But let me tell you, this is not a matter of argument or theology. Just ask yourself: what is your spiritual vision like? Can you say with Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:18 that you look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen, because those things are eternal? Are those words true in your life? And if they are not true, why not? I will tell you why: because in the Bible there is no faith — no saving faith — without the cross. None whatever. I challenge any theologian, any pastor anywhere, to prove me wrong. I will publish my written confession of error at my own expense if anyone can show me that faith in the Bible, in the teaching of the Lord Jesus, of Paul, of Peter, anywhere in the New Testament, does not include suffering.
The reason we have a hypocritical church today is because we have a faith that has filtered out suffering and let Jesus do all the suffering on the cross — and when somebody tells us about the suffering of Jesus, tears come to our eyes, but we think it is his cross alone. The Lord Jesus said: unless any man takes up his cross and follows me. His cross — not my cross, your cross. The cross I command you to pick up and carry. You cannot be my disciple. I shall show you some scripture in case you think I am making this up. First Peter chapter 2, verse 21: "For you have been called by God for this very purpose: that Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in the steps of his suffering." We would like to have finished the verse at "Christ suffered for you" — those are nice closing words. But if I stopped there I would have been untrue to the gospel. What is the purpose you have been called? Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example to follow in the steps of his suffering.
And Philippians 1:29 Paul says exactly the same thing: "For to you it has been granted, for Christ's sake, not only to believe in him but also to suffer for his sake." Not only to believe. Also to suffer. If you cannot remember anything else from this message, remember one thing: faith in the New Testament is the readiness to respond to Jesus in a way that involves the readiness to suffer for his sake. I dare any theologian anywhere to cancel those words out of the Bible.
# Will Jesus Find Faith? (Second Message, Part B) — Faith Inseparable from Suffering: The Cross Applied to Life, Romans, 1 Peter 2:21, and Philippians 1:29
Why do I believe in the gospel? Not because I am trying to run away into some pleasant land of transcendental meditation. Not to escape from my nasty boss at work or my unpleasant colleagues. There are many preachers who have demonstrated with eloquence that the Christian life is something by which we are released from the pressures of this life. That is not in the Bible. If your pastor preaches that, tell him to go back to his Bible and do the exercise I asked you to do: buy a marker pen and go through the entire New Testament marking every reference to suffering. Maybe by the end he won't want to read the New Testament anymore. Maybe he won't even want to be a pastor anymore — so much the better for the church.
I believe in the cross of Jesus. I believe that he died for my sins. But can you say those two things at the same time — "I believe in the cross of Jesus" — and mean both his cross and your cross? The Lord Jesus says: unless any man takes up his cross and follows me, he cannot be my disciple. Now bear this carefully in mind: the reason why the church has failed so completely is this. Jesus died upon the cross for you and for me, and in this case not merely as an experiment but as our representative — he took all our sins to his heart and died for us. I believe this with all my heart. I have experienced the power of his saving death. That is the essential part of the remedy. But if we stop there we are false to the Lord's own teaching and false to the teaching of the New Testament.
Let me give you an analogy. If you were diagnosed with a terminal cancer and you went to the doctor, and the doctor said to you: "I've given you the diagnosis. Just take a few aspirins and the bad feeling will go away." You would say: "But what about my cancer?" "Never worry, my friend, take a few more aspirins." What would you think of a doctor like that? Now, how do you treat sin? His death upon the cross did bear the guilt of our sin — but his death upon the cross will never free us from the power of sin in our own experience just because we believe it with our heads. Nowhere in the New Testament is that thought. Have you never read Romans? The apostle Paul says: we will live with him and because of him, if we first die with him. You water that down and cut out that last statement and you have disfigured the gospel.
Jesus died upon the cross for our sins, and then what did he say? Follow me. It is not just believing in some intellectual sense that Jesus died. It is following in the same footsteps. First Peter chapter 2, verse 21: "For you have been called by God for this very purpose — that Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in the steps of his suffering." And Philippians 1:29: "For to you it has been granted, for Christ's sake, not only to believe in him but also to suffer for his sake." The church today has changed the gospel. As Paul warned us in Galatians, if any man comes to you and preaches another gospel — a gospel without a cross in your life — a gospel without our cross has become the standard gospel of the church today. Is it not so? When Jesus comes, we already know the answer: will he find faithfulness? No, he will not.
I believe in the cross because only when the cross, like a surgical knife, comes into your life and cuts away the cancer of sin, can you ever be freed from that dreadful power of sin. It must cut the sin away. That is what baptism is. Those who are baptized today — I beg you to understand that baptism is a symbol, not of having a nice time, but of death. You go down into death so that you can come up in newness of life. That outward action represents a deep occurrence inside your heart. If that deep happening has not taken place, you can go into the water and out a hundred times and swim in it all day and believe in Jesus with all your heart, and you will come out of that water the same old person you were before.
This is why it can be said: in the Bible there is no faith, no saving faith, without the cross. And I say this on the basis of some considerable time in the ministry of God — no one is ever transformed simply by believing that Jesus died. You must believe that, yes — that is the first step. But you cannot stop there. You have to believe that Jesus died and that that death must become effective in your life. Have you been crucified with him? Or would you like to reduce this to a mere legal status? As Paul says in Galatians 6:14: by the cross of Christ I am crucified to the world and the world to me. There has been a fundamental change of relationship.
When I came back to Canada about two months ago, I walked into a bookshop and saw Spycatcher — a book by Peter Wright, who was assistant director of MI5, the British intelligence agency. He was trying to prove that the British Secret Service had been penetrated by the Russians. His own boss — the director of MI5 — Roger Hollis, who had been in the secret service virtually all his life and had been head of the department for two or three decades, was, he claimed, the KGB agent. This kind of thing makes us sick, does it not? Because there is a word for this — perfidiousness — in which a person betrays his own country and has no sense of values, working for the enemy from within. But unfaithfulness is what Jesus is going to find in most of those who call themselves Christians.
Another story, in the Hong Kong newspapers in February of this year, on the 22nd of February. There was a husband and wife who had been married for twenty or thirty years. The wife found out the husband was running around with another woman. Her bitterness and anger rose to such a level that she killed him, and then — having bought an electric saw — sawed him into little pot-sized pieces and boiled each piece in her cooking pot and threw it all in the garbage. Her husband literally vanished into the cooking pot. Does that make you sick? Yes, it does. Both husband and wife were desperately sick with the cancer of sin. Everybody is desperately sick with the cancer of sin. And do you think that this kind of problem can be cured with spiritual aspirin — singing a few hymns in church and being told how much Jesus loved us? So long as he keeps his cross out of our lives, we will believe in him gladly.
Do you want faith? Some of you have become Christians and found that everything the preacher promised turned out to be untrue — he promised peace and joy, and when you got into the Christian life everything went wrong and your world fell apart. You said: where is the peace and joy? Of course — because he never told you that to have the new life you first had to die. You must understand that in order for him to save you from sin, you must not only believe that he died for you but that his cross will be applied into your life, so that you can say with the apostle Paul: I have been crucified with Christ; I no longer live; he lives in me. Not as a doctrine but as a living reality. May that cross become effective in each of our lives. Let us be quiet before God in prayer.