The School of Christ

The School of Christ

BEFORE EDITING, SEE ENTRY ON SCHOOL OF CHRIST IN NAV’ DIARY

I am Indebted to a gentlemen name T Austin Sparks, wrote a number of books. One called the school of Christ. Sparks means that the Holy Spirit does a great work in the heart of the believer. This book is excellent especially for men who have been called to the ministry. He talks about how Christ puts the man through a series of tests, trials and inner difficulties designed to mortify the idol of self and its accompanying narcissism and bring a man through the application of the cross to a place of only wanting passion for the glory of the Lord and not himself and that takes a great deal of work.

The school of Christ involves a necessary responsiveness to these tests and trials. If were not aware of what God is doing and not responding accordingly then it becomes easy to think that God is not for me. That He isn’t truly for us but that’s not true, He actually is for us (Rom 8). When I picture in this school of Christ I think of many passages of scripture emblazoned upon the walls. One of those passages of scripture would be Philippians 2:12-13. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God at work in you to will and to work for His good pleasure. So, our responsiveness to God at work in us involves a certain reverential fear and trembling and wonder that the third person of the godhead is dwelling within us to accomplish the great task of making us like Christ. So, the Spirit’s working in us has a primary aim; the sole purpose of conforming us into the likeness of Christ. So, He saved us that we might gain the glory of Christ. This is spoken of in 2 Thess 2:13-14.

This gaining of the glory of Christ is to take place by sanctification by the Spirit through faith in the truth. So, we always acknowledge that our progress in practical sanctification is through the Word and the Spirit and also of course the fellowship of the saints. Our preparation to live in the presence of God and have Him dwell with us as is described in Revelation 21 is an amazing thing that God is at work in us to glorify us and amazingly have us share in His communicable attributes. Now this is only possible because our great representative the Son of God is the perfect image of God, the exact representation of Almighty God. All the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily and in Him we are complete in Him (Col 2:8-10). We are being prepared to be in the presence of this glory. In fact, we think of Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17 and He is longing for that day when we will behold the glory He had with the Father before the world was created John 17:24.

But for the time being we are surrounded by the world’s stimuli and that stimuli tends to call out to our affections and those affections are often mixed with carnal desires and as we are occupied with the world’s stimuli it tends to produce a kind of dullness. Our hearts can become like hardened oak and we can become blind or indifferent to our telos of glory—and because of that it takes a great deal of divine work to get into our heart our minds our affections that we are being prepared for this incredible event of beholding the glory of God in human nature, that is the glorified Christ.

We are way too much like that anxious character in Matthew 6, “what will we eat, what will we drink, what will we wear, where will we live…?” And the perception of our physical needs tend to swallow up the perception of our spiritual needs and of course this is accompanied by a dualism that tends to shove spiritual realities into an upper story—a place of mere theory, thus, an impractical category. Think of all the ads that come to me on my iPhone, how to improve your golf swing. Think about how many hours a week men and women are devoting themselves to just pure vanity. But Paul by contrast says there is one thing I do, I press forward not looking behind and I press forward to answer the upward call of God, Philippians 3:13-14. For I am a creature made for glory. To behold glory, to reflect glory, to ascribe glory and to be satisfied and utterly fulfilled by His glory. But in order for us to continuously recognize that that is our purpose, the eyes of our heart must be enlightened. That is spoken of in Paul’s first prayer in Ephesians (Eph 1:18). We need a spirit of revelation in the knowledge and wisdom of Christ’s glory. We need to be able to respond to the infinite worthiness of His glory, and without the eyes of our heart being enlightened we’re like a little child sort of lisping and murmuring—able to repeat some syllables he’s heard but having very little clue as to their meaning. So, we think of Job’s trials. What did Job say at the end when the Lord began to rebuke him and reveal God’s perfect design in the creation. He said, I had heard with the hearing of the ear but now I have seen who you really are. Job sort of summarizes all his knowledge about God as coming to him second hand, or via hearsay. I heard it through the grapevine compared through the revelation of Yourself through these intense trials and personal instruction.

Well, the Lord has some trials for us here as well. We are to learn much through these trials and one of the lessons we are to learn through these trials is how to handle true treasure. Of course, the Apostle Paul describes how to handle this true treasure by discarding what he describes as childish things and focusing instead on that which is genuine treasure (1 Cor 13:11). So, it requires spiritual eyes of the heart being illumined to be even able to see what is called ‘this weight of glory’. This is something Paul introduces in 2 Corinthians 4:17 – This momentary light affliction is working within us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison and this weight of glory is tied to the fact that we are to be continuously occupying our time with unseen things. Unseen things are eternal and tied to the heavens. So, affliction enlarges our hearts to take in a greater weight of glory—deepening our eternal value system. We are in turn to set fire to our personal scorecards that we have relied upon to minister to our Adamic brokenness. For some, that may be degrees, promotions, an enlarging bank account, fitness obsessions etc..

So, in regard to the infinite value of unseen things, the apostle says we walk by faith and not by sight 2 Corinthians 5:7. So this value system faith continuously replaces sight. But that’s not an easy thing to accomplish. You can’t just flick it on like a light switch. It requires a systematic setting of the affections on things above and not on things on the earth Col 3:1 and on. So, in the school of Christ the Lord uses afflictions to keep the man from clutching straw and dust and animal refuse. He wants to release his grip from that in that he might have his hands clean and free to handle true treasure and be a steward of true treasure. And so, God’s servant will be certainly taken through this curriculum of the school of Christ that he might be able to handle and speak of true treasure. For, the man of God is to speak of the riches and glory of God with such passion, such clarity, such zeal, and authority that is befitting the reality of the true treasure that his hearers are stunned beyond words that they have never perceived the reality of these true treasures!

This is our calling men, to communicate this life-giving truth and wealth to a world that is stuck, dead in a transitory existence. Like Plato’s analogy of the cave, our hearers have been in this dank cavern and have never really contemplated sunlit fields of grain, a continuous feast of dining with the King and so this true treasure is not something that comes about by simply hearing or clinging to a promise or two. Ongoing repentance is connected with apprehending this treasure. So, when we as men of God are speaking of true treasure, we are calling men and women to repent from what they’ve regarded as true treasure and exchange it for true treasure. ‘But how that is accomplished’, that is a very important question. To whom will God entrust true treasure? If they’ve been unfaithful with earthly mammon, how will they be entrusted with true treasure? (Luke 16:11-12).

This valuing and esteeming of true treasure is spoken of in Philippians chapter 3. I believe Paul regarded this mind shift concerning lasting value as a reassessment, or reappraisal of what is truly valuable. But that requires a willingness to lose, before gaining. Jesus said the only way to gain heaven and be my disciple is to lose your life. That is taught in Mathew 10:39, Luke 17:33 and Mark chapter 8:35. So the school of Christ teaches a man how to interpret loss, and in doing so, the school prepares a man to speak of true treasure. To handle true treasure and to teach others that their suffering is a necessary stepping stone to valuing true treasure.

Now I believe that Job’s friends were true believers even though they gave him bad counsel at times, and one of those friends was Eliphaz and he says something like this in Job 22, 24-25, If you hide your gold among the stones of the brook then God will be your true treasure. So here the whole idea of calculated loss in order to gain is in view. There is a necessary suffering of loss or calculation of loss in order to gain this treasure. That perspective predates Moses.

Now this is very much tied to our sanctification, for our sanctification is joined to our religious affections. Our sanctification can’t be reduced to mere virtue or even the putting off of sinful habits. Our sanctification is linked to the fact that we are temples of God, set apart by God as vessels to contain honor and glory and grace and the fruit of the spirit. This is much different than reducing holiness to just abstaining from something. Paul was very concerned that his converts in Galatia would be protected from a counterfeit spirituality—Paul even goes so far as to illustrate his concern for them by making a comparison of a pregnant mother in labor—having birth pangs until Christ is formed in the Galatians. It is painstaking to cultivate this telos of glory. I think of some of the positive doxologies of promise that Paul writes in His epistles including 1 Thessalonians 5:23, in which he talks about the incredible blessing of entire sanctification before a person reaches glory, or more accurately, upon reaching glory.

The school of Christ is a place of experience wherein we learn these timeless treasure lessons— especially this paradigm in which loss is necessary in order to gain. So compelling was this perspective for Paul, he even says that loss is required in order to gain Christ.

Now let’s set this up against the trend in hyper-grace churches that infers that you can keep some of your sin, your treasures here on earth, the praise of this world, and still gain eternal treasure. What a misguided idea this is, for the loss-gain paradigm of true treasure involves a very active and zealous faith. The eyes of the heart must be enlightened to think in this manner. And thus, we men who are being taken through the school of Christ in many ways are fitted to analyze what Is going on in the modern church today. Namely that there are countless souls that think they are right with God but in reality, are controlled by a great deal of covetousness. No wonder Christ says in Luke 14:33 that unless you renounce all that you have, or give up control of all your possessions you cannot be my disciple. So, the school of Christ is about perceiving true treasure, possessing and handling true treasure, and warning about, and teaching others how to handle true treasure and what its source is.

But this requires first that the cross of Christ be applied to us. It says in Galatians 5:24 that those that belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. To be freed from the world’s control is to be animated by the love of Christ (2 Cor 5:14). Just think about how disastrous sin must be that it required the Son of God, the ultimate servant whose hands fed and blessed, and cared for the poor, and ministered to the sickly, had to be spiked to a Roman cross in order to purchase and ransom us out of sin’s grip. Now those hands in glory are leading us, feeding us as His sheep and taking us from dust to glory. That is a huge part of our content as true treasure. But our hearers are going to have to experience trials if they are to be freed from fixing their minds on earthly things. They’re going to be humbled, their going to suffer heartbreak, and how are they going to interpret these difficulties if they don’t have the treasure principle? How are they going to properly interpret these trials if hyper-grace churches have coddled them by extoling temporal peace and prosperity and left them unprepared for trials and affliction?

What we are learning in the school of Christ is a seminary like no other. It isn’t something that can be taught in a classroom. It isn’t a seminary of man. In the school of Christ, we are being prepared to preach and teach like He did. We are being prepared to teach and minister the Word and power in order to wake the dead, startle the slothful, awake the sleeper, and arouse the dull from his spiritual sleep. We must first have that treasure principle instilled in us if we are going to be effective witnesses. This goes far beyond knowing about Christ but instead means knowing Christ experientially (Grk, epiginosko). Everyone has an accounting system and will our hearers be sufficiently awakened to be able to identify as vanity what the Lord calls vanity? It says in Luke 16:15 that which is highly esteemed by men is highly detestable in the sight of God.

Consider that the world regards worthless things as treasure, and that misguided affection tends to suffocate their hearts if they are Christians. The overvaluing of earthly things is like a robotic arm with a steel grip—and we will not get people to release that steel grip unless we preach Christ and Him crucified, for that message alone has the power to undo that death grip. It is so important that as we begin to value the eternal treasure set before us in Scripture—for linked to this treasure principle is the fact that we have a crop to bring to harvest. A crop that can only be harvested if one is steadfast in the Word of God and steadfast in faith and obedience with patience and sincere intentions according to Luke 8:15.

Like Joshua who said, “If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Josh 24:15). --the Son of God is standing at the wicked gate and standing at the narrow way and calling his hearers to strive to enter that narrow gate. But there are countless church goers that will not be able to squeeze through for they are still holding on to that idol of Baal or Dionysius or Aphrodite. They are still holding on to that idol and will not be able to squeeze through because they did not repent of their worship of temporal treasure. Thus, in light of this impenitence, and damnable double-mindedness, the man of God is to impart to his hearers the importance of eternal wealth and just how much is at stake in choosing to value eternal treasure.

Now we know what clouds the vision of church goers: honor, status, false comfort, pleasure, leisure, worship of self, false securities, the world’s man-centered philosophies. There’s a host of carnal objects and ideas that are obscuring their vision of true treasure. Consequently, we would ask a question in connection with evangelism, ‘who is preaching against these idols that are preventing people from entering in through the narrow gate?’ What would keep a man from faithfully preaching repentance? We know the reason why pulpits are cowardly in this matter—it’s regarded as legalism today to preach in such ways. But we must preach against the very sins which block entrance to the narrow way—and why must we do so? Answer; so that our hearers might know what they are to repent of! People used to go to church for that reason: to find out what sins God was calling them to repent of.

My friends, only a heart that belongs fully to Christ will escape this world without dying as an idolator, how true that is. Praise God that the Lord Christ is King and He’s purging out of His people their double mindedness. He’s shining the light on the hidden shelves of their heart that contain secret idols. He’s refining His people, he’s consolidating their loyalty to Himself. Whom the Lord loves He disciplines so be zealous and repent (Rev 3:19). Therefore, we as men enrolled by our Savior in the school of Christ are being further equipped to be messengers meant to proclaim Christ who is Himself the treasure. We are sent to build up, to edify those that are truly His and to proclaim this message to those that are to become His. We are sent to speak the things that make for renewal. Speak to this central truth of the true treasure and to the things that make for true treasure—proclaiming how to guard true treasure and how to find and mine out more true treasure. It is of pivotal significance that we do not enroll ourselves in the school of Christ, but this is a regimen that the Lord has for those He’s appointed to be on mission. The Lord is the one who matriculates us into the school of Christ and once we find ourselves in that school, we discover ourselves to be the objects of intense lessons that come thick and fast. Thank the Lord for James 1:5 which says that when in these trials of testing we can freely cry out for wisdom and insight into the Lord’s telos for these trials. Lord, what do you want me to learn, what are you teaching me? It is certainly appropriate to do that, making that request a part of one’s prayer.

Thus, we think about our hearers who do not have this treasure principle and so consequently many are unable to interpret this suffering as being one that is designed for them to begin to treasure what is truly to be regarded as treasure. That means, by the Spirit’s illumination of the Word, understanding that weakness, trouble, affliction, trials, actually form the gold mining tools. That these trials are tools for us to mine out this treasure. We need to help our listeners understand that their difficulties are actually preparatory to mining that which is true treasure.

John Piper raised some eyebrows a number of years back when he preached a sermon titled, “Don’t waste your cancer.” And people must have thought, ‘now here’s quite the eccentric person who is probably too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.’ and yet Piper was hitting one of the main themes in the school of Christ—and that is that through these trials we develop and eagle-eyed spiritual sight to see what’s really at stake. The man in the school of Christ learns how to discern where our hearers are sort of stuck in a spiritual myopia, and the default position for most of them is to really be fixated on temporal things rather than eternal things (picture a pre-teen holding a fistful of monopoly money, as if he has the world by the tail, absolute folly). So, to develop this eagle-eyed spiritual sight is very much attached to the idea of scriptural mediation. The treasure principle of spiritual sight is the overflow of scriptural mediation. It is the key resource, or spiritual habit to knowing true treasure.

Now I think of the prophet Balaam. Now it is baffling to us that this man uttered such amazing prophesies about Israel’s future and God’s intent for Israel. In fact, Balaam’s prophecies still dazzle the reader to this day in how beautiful they were about Israel’s future blessing. His four prophecies are found in Numbers 22-24 and yet Balaam dies as an apostate, executed by Israel, and becomes an iconic image of a false prophet that sold his soul (also described in Jude 11). So again, big questions are pivotal here, for we have people that profess to know the Lord, and who maintain even some spiritual habits, but unless they have the treasure principle it can show that their true spiritual affections required by our Lord may not be there at all. What is so central in the call upon the man of God is that he is called to speak to the spiritually dead, the carnal, the hard-hearted, and the backslidden. The school of Christ is preparing us for that superhuman task.

Now we think about the Apostle Paul—whose spiritual maturity allow him to regard every difficulty as a potential staging area for the cross of Christ to release its power. He says of himself and fellow apostles: we are always carrying about in our bodies the dying of Jesus that the life of life of Christ might be manifested in our bodies (2 Cor 4:10). And so, the Apostle Paul in the Corinthian correspondence is constantly speaking with passion about unseen things. He is one who has had the eyes of his heart enlightened to speak of this true treasure, and you and I who are going through the school of Christ, know for certain that we are being prepared to speak to the dying of true eternal treasure.

And this is truly challenging, for to describe Christ as our life as Paul does (Gal 2:20; Col 3;1-4), as one who is preaching and witnessing and discipling and praying through me as Luther says is quite an accomplishment—remarkable even to think of Christ in that way. But also, we have to remember that Paul was quite content to think of his trials and difficulties and hardships as avenues to the power of Christ in him (2 Cor 12:10) –“ for when I am weak then I am strong.”

Now when we speak about unseen things were actually telling our hearers that unseen things will fill the cosmos. Unseen things will fill everyone’s experience and unseen things will fill eternity. But to navigate by these unseen things requires one’s heart be enlightened, Ephesians 1:18. We are dependent upon the Spirit sealing these things to our hearts.

Well, I think we are seeing ever more clearly that the man of God is controlled by this eternal value system. He lives in view of this eternity. And embracing this value system is a great miracle. This is the miracle of living as a new man. As a new man that it is being daily renewed (Col 3). I think about what Moses thought when he left Egypt, He regarded the reproach of Christ greater than all the riches and honor, pleasure, and power that was afforded him as being the son of Pharaoh’s daughter (Hebrews 11:26). This valuing of the reproach of Christ is not a mark only for the elite Christian or pastors and missionaries, but this is a mark of all true believers—it describes someone who has this treasure principle operating in his life. What Christ is teaching us in ‘His school’ is vital, for we have to be able to preach this message that God is breaking the strangle hold of the temporal. That is one of God’s major ways of working in order to sanctify His people (1 Cor 1:30).

Thus, in quick summary, this principle of losing in order to gain, Paul learned this from Christ that you must lose your life in order to gain it. How important it is for us to handle true treasure effectively—to do so, we must have clean hearts and clean hands. And praise be to God that in the New Covenant there is boundless provision for ongoing cleansing and as we walk in the light as He is in the light and the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin, 1 John 1:7. So as were handling this true treasure in the school of Christ God expects us to have much patience while we are under trial—some of which are extensive and continuous. Some of these lessons are quite painful, intense, and can be prolonged. So we must guard against impatience in the school of Christ because discontentment can grow while waiting on God —and it is easy to be anxious for a trial to be complete. That discontentment can produce ‘covetousness of every kind’ (as we are tempted to comfort ourselves with worldly things) so we must be reminded that godliness is of great value when accompanied by contentment (1 Tim 6:6). We praise the Lord for these things that Christ is teaching us, and we want to encourage our fellow brothers who are being taken through the school of Christ. For great privilege and responsibility come with deep refining and preparation at the hand of our all-competent, merciful, and wise Savior.