NOTES: We Would See Jesus - Roy Hession

We have since learned, however, that we do not need to itemize the Christian life; it is enough to see Jesus. Seeing Him we are convicted of sin, broken, cleansed, filled with the Spirit, set free from bondage and revived. Each aspect of Christian experience is made real in us just by seeing HIM. He is both the blessing we all seek and the easily accessible way to the blessing.

"Grace" is not a blessing or an influence from God which we receive, but rather an attribute of God which governs His attitude to man, and it can be defined as the undeserved love and favor of God.

Grace permits us to come (nay, demands that we come) as empty sinners to be blessed: empty of right feelings, good character and satisfactory record, with nothing to commend ourselves but our deep need, fully and frankly acknowledged. Then grace, being what it is, is drawn by that need to satisfy it, just as water is drawn to depth ( by gravity) that it might fill it. This means that at last when we are content to find no merit or procuring cause in ourselves and are willing to admit the full extent of our sinfulness, then there is no limit to what God will do for the poor who look to Him in their nothingness.

The struggle, of course, is to believe it and to be willing to be but empty sinners to the end of our days, that grace may continue to match our needs.

What is the purpose of life? - It is to know, and to love, and to walk with God; that is, to see God.

But the love of God is such that , when man throws His love back in His face, God yet purposes man's recovery, and He stretches out His hand the second time, this time to redeem. To create, God had to but speak, and it was done. But to redeem, He had to bleed.

We direly need to leave our lusting for ever larger spheres of Christian service and concentrate on seeing God for ourselves and finding the deep answer for life in Him.

But if we will bow to what God has allowed, and repent of our sinful reactions, we will find that that very situation has led us into a deeper experience of His grace and of His power to satisfy our hearts with Himself alone.

All the time the One who alone can satisfy the heart is by our side, longing to be known and loved and proved. Allow Him to bring us back to the old relationship of submission to Himself.

Nowhere else can we fully see God but in the face of Jesus Christ.

God has confined Himself to what He has manifested to us in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God has said, you will find what I am and what I require. Nowhere else, neither in heaven nor on earth, will you discover it but in Christ Jesus the Lord.

In Jesus, we see that God's glory consists in the very reverse--not so much in His ability to reveal Himself and humble man, but in His willingness to humble Himself for the sake of man; not so much in a mighty display of power that would break in pieces those that oppose Him, but rather in the hiding of that power and the showing of grace to the undeserving when they turn to Him in repentance.

To see Jesus is to apprehend Him as the supply of our present needs and believingly to lay hold on Him as such.

The acknowledgement of need and the confession of sin is always the first step in seeing Jesus.

Where there is sin there is always Jesus seeking to forgive sin and recover all the damage that it has caused. He is not shocked at human failure; rather, He is at home in it, drawn by it, knowing what to do about it, for He in Himself and by His blood is the answer to it all! So it is, whenever we think of Jesus, we must think of someone whose coming was necessitated by the offensive business of our sin.

Apart from seeing ourselves as sinner, we shall see no beauty in Jesus that we should desire Him ( Isa 53:2). He has no meaning except as the answer to sin. "To see thyself a sinner is the beginning of salvation," said St. Augustine, and we may add, To continue to see ourselves as sinners is the continuance of salvation.

Seeing Jesus is not merely attaining an objective knowledge of Him; it is something subjective and experiential. It is seeing Him by faith to be just what I need as a sinner; as a failure, as a poverty-stricken weakling, and allowing Him to be just that to me in this hour. And it is not selfish to seek to see Him thus. Never! It is in His being that I need as a sinner that He is truly revealed and known.

Jesus Christ is made to me, all I need, all I need; He alone is all my plea, He is all I need; Wisdom, righteousness and power, Holiness this very hour, My redemption full and sure; He is all I need.

In the book of John we have three steps in the building up of this world of illusion about ourselves. Step 1 is in verse 6 where we have the words, " We lie, and do not the truth." In other words we give an impression of ourselves which is not the truth. We act a lie even if we do not tell a lie. Step 2 is in verse 8, we we have the word, "We deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." This means we have acted a lie for so long that we have come to believe our own lie. We begin by deceiving others, and end by deceiving ourselves. We really do believe now that we are the sort of people we have given ourselves up to be. We are quite sure that we " have never done anybody any harm" and that we are not jealous or proud as other people are, and that we are truly consecrated to the Lord. The Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as other men were, honestly thought he was telling the truth. He was, however, just as covetous, unjust and adulterous as anybody else, but his own heart had deceived him. He was living in this realm of illusion as we are. Step 3 is in verse 10 where we have the words, "We make Him a liar." All this leads us to the place where, when God comes to show us our sin and our real selves, we say automatically, "Not so, Lord." We feel God has made a mistake and pointing to the wrong person. Of course, we all admit theoretically that we are sinners, but when God comes close, either through a message or through the faithful challenge of a friend, to show us that our hearts are "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jer 17:9) and to do so on specific points, we cannot see that it is right. However to say we have not sinned when God says we have , is to make Him a liar. That is always the end of this blindness, and while we are there God can do little further for us. We have become strangers no only to God, but also to ourselves.

Jesus Himself is the truth. Therefore, truly to see Him is to see the truth.

So in like manner, Jesus says from the cross, "See here your own condition by the shame I had to undergo for you." If the moment the Holy One took our place and bore our sins He was condemned by the Father and left derelict in the hour of His suffering, what must our true condition be to occasion so severe and act of judgement! The Bible says Jesus was made in "the likeness of sinful flesh" (Rom 8:3), which means that He was there as an effigy of us. But if the moment became that effigy, He had to cry, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" what must God see us to be? It is plain that God was not forsaking the Son as the Son. He was forsaking the Son as us, whose likeness He was wearing.

What is done to an effigy is always regarded as done to the one it represents. That derelict figure suffering under the wrath of God is ourselves, at our best as well as at our worst. There, for all to see, is the naked truth about the whole lot of us, Christian and non-Christian alike. If I cannot read God's estimate of man anywhere else, I can read it there. Yes, truth, painful and humbling, has come by Jesus Christ, enough to shatter all our vain illusions about ourselves. However, not only has the truth about ourselves come by Jesus Christ, but also the truth about God and His love toward us.

We see God, not charging us with our sins, as we would have thought, but charging them to His Son for our sakes. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." (2 Cor 5:19) What we thought was the big stick was really His outstretched arm of love beckoning us back to Himself. In the face of Jesus Christ, marred for us, we see that God is not against the sinner, but for him; that He is not his enemy but his friend; that in Christ He has not set new and unattainable standards, but has come to offer forgiveness, peace, and new life to those who have fallen down on every standard there is. "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." This is what one writer has called " the surprising generosity of the cross." It not only surprises our guilty consciences but also melts and draws us, compelling us to return to Him in honesty and repentance, knowing that nothing but mercy is waiting for us.

Sin in its beginning is the sinner forsaking God; but in its ultimate penalty it is God forsaking the sinner, and that is hell. Hell was the place to which Jesus went on the cross, the place where God forsook Him, And He did so because that was our place. Our hell was the curse that He bore. Our hell was the God-forsakenness which He endured.

What impurities, immoralities and perversions stain so many lives today; yet so carefully are they concealed! But there, it is openly declared on the cross before all men by the very place that Jesus took for us!

Everyone that does evil hates the light, neither do they come into the light, because their deeds would be reproved." This means that when we have sin to hide, we shun the light---that is, everything that would expose us. Then it goes on to say, "But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made known, and that it would be made known they are born of God."

Plain truthful repentance and frank confession of the sin that we been committed will take us to the cross of Jesus for pardon. In this place of humble truthfulness about ourselves we shall find peace with God and man, for there we shall find Jesus afresh and lay hold as never before on His finished work for our sin upon the cross.

Let us welcome Jesus today as the truth. Begin with the first thing that He is showing you. It is probably the thing that is on your mind now. The reward for your obedience to light will be more light on further sin.

As long as I know there is a fountain for sin and uncleanness, I can face the light about myself and my sin. And the wonderful thing is that when we love the Lord Jesus as truth we will find that He is just as precious in that relationship as in any other.