CONSIDERING JESUS AND CONSIDERING ONE ANOTHER
Alan D Munro
Hebrews 12: 3; 10: 24
Proverbs 31: 16, 18
I have been carrying a very simple impression, dear brethren, since the meetings at the weekend as to the matter of considering things. When a person made a remark, our brother did not answer immediately: he considered what he was going to say. There was a considered approach in his answers, which is a very wise thing. It came into my mind that if we are to make progress in Christianity we need to consider the Lord Jesus. We should probably have read verse 2 also, “looking stedfastly on Jesus the leader and completer of faith”. I think “looking stedfastly” is the same thing as considering well.
The Lord Jesus is the One with whom we would start in this matter of consideration, which means that you take time to think about Him. These Hebrew saints might have slipped a little, or might have grown a bit cold; things had almost got too much for them. The writer of the epistle encouraged them to “consider well him who endured so great contradiction from sinners against himself”. If we consider the path of the Lord Jesus in His life on earth, we are very privileged to have four accounts of His glory set before us by the four gospel writers. They all give us a slightly different view of the glory of the Person, but nothing of what they saw, or nothing of what they said, nothing of what they wrote, in any way conflicts with the others. It is a perfect blend from four persons who had considered the pathway of Jesus. His pathway included the way He went into death; there was nothing in Him that merited death.
But the writer here is speaking of what the Lord endured in His life: His rejection, the way He was ridiculed, the way He was betrayed, the way He was ignored, the way persons turned away from Him. But, thanks be to God, there were persons who were attracted to Him. I do like the word ‘magnetism’, but the woman in John 4 found that there was an irresistible charm about the Lord Jesus. Although her past was exposed to her, she did not go away; she was drawn with “bands of a man, with cords of love”, Hos 11: 4. She saw something in Him that she had never seen in any other man. No one else had been able to give her satisfaction. I remember a preaching here many years ago from John 4 referring to the well being deep, and the preacher likened that to the woman’s experience of the world of sin. It got deeper and deeper, and the deeper she went, the less satisfying it was, but then another Man came into her life. He “sat just as he was” (John 4: 6); I think that is exceedingly attractive. I trust we have all proved it and not only proved it, but I trust we are proving it. That is why these occasions are convened, so that our hearts should be freshly attached to the Lord Jesus in all His glory, in all His power and His majesty. We sang hymn 185 on Lord’s day morning:
Majestic, Almighty and Glorious.
I love that hymn, for it is centred on the Person of the Lord Jesus.
When we are thinking of Jesus, we “consider well”. You might say it is on a higher level; in fact it is on a supreme level because there is no greater Object to be occupied with. He will never disappoint us; He will never let us down.
When I was young, I was very fond of David; I loved reading scriptures about David. But then when you read them a bit more closely, there are times when you are very disappointed in what David did. That is because he was not perfect. David was sometimes a type of Christ but in other cases he was a type of ourselves and was marked by grievous failure. But God did not give him up; He bore with David, who came to a judgment of his sins. Psalm 51 shows us that. He came to the depth of repentance. God does not overlook or bypass sin, but there is a means, there is a remedy, in the work of Jesus for our sinful history to be dealt with. Sadly, as David shows, we sin after we have been converted, and sometimes very grievously, but the gospel is able to meet that as well: “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin”, 1 John 1: 7. That is an absolute statement. Sometimes if you feel shaky it is good to get back to what is absolute and we do that as we “consider well him who endured so great contradiction from sinners against himself”. Whatever view you get of Jesus, He is perfect, whether in His path amongst men, or in His devotion that took Him to the cross, or in His ability to exhaust the wrath of God against sin, which was poured out on Him, that which should have been poured out on us. He shone in all these ways. He exceeded in every circumstance; so you can understand the writer saying, “consider well”.
Now when you come to chapter 10 it says, “consider one another”. That is an interesting thing and it is “for provoking to love and good works”. I think that involves that before you say anything, you weigh over what you are about to say and you ask yourself whether this will promote the work of God in the person I am going to speak to or whether it will stumble them? Our brother spoke at the weekend about having to admit to a sister that he had spoken unkindly to her. Thanks be to God for the spirit of forgiveness that is found amongst us, but let us consider before we say things and then we will say them as empowered by the Spirit of God. If we are going to be like Jesus, He is “holy, harmless” (Heb 7: 26); the Lord Jesus in all His activities was “harmless”: I would covet to be like that. I know I am not, but this is an incentive to “consider one another”, so that we might promote and foster and encourage the work of God in each other.
Now, the “woman of worth” in Proverbs 31 is really a type of the assembly in the sense that she “considereth a field, and acquireth it”. She would evaluate it; this is consideration in the sense of judging what is valuable. We all know how much time we spend on things that are of little value, even things that are of no value; I might even go further and say we may spend time on things that are harmful. As you read through this chapter, the “woman of worth” was not in any way occupied with what was harmful but she was considering for her household. All she did would foster the work of God in them and would develop spirituality because that is really the great end in our assembly gatherings, that we should really become more spiritual, that we should grow in likeness to Christ and become formed after Christ. That is what this woman did: she considered a field. That would really be, in the application of it, like the local company. She made it her own and she did what would be beneficial in that field. Her activities were all for the promotion of the work of God in the locality in which she was set.
I say these things as a challenge to myself but may we all think about them and in all our activities may we promote the work of God in each other.
May the Lord bless the word!
Word in a Meeting for Ministry, Grangemouth
13th November 2018