The Real Body of Christ

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

There are two ways to meet every challenge happening in our lives. One way is to say to ourselves,
“Alright we need to have God’s help with this, and with his help I’ll tackle this.” And the other
way is to say, “God has already dealt with this.” And the first way is the way we often seem to
tackle things. Some event crops up like the computer breaks down, or the sale doesn’t come through,
or the people aren’t there whom we made the appointment with, or the bank account isn’t where we
thought it was, or somebody speaks to us the wrong way, and we think, “Well I have to tackle this
somehow, and with God’s grace I’ll tackle it. I’m knocked off a bit at the moment, but I’ll gather
myself together and then I’ll deal with it.” And sometimes that involves trying to work out some
way to deal with it ourselves, we think, “The bank balance is lower than I thought. Okay, now I can
do this, and this, and I don’t need to do that. Okay Lord thank you that you can give me grace to
tackle this.” But for those few moments there is anxiety and worry, and in certain situations there
can be a response to somebody else that isn’t from the heart of Jesus.

The other way of course is immediate complete confidence that God has already dealt with this thing.
And there isn’t even a tremor or shake when you see the bank balance, or when you realize the car
has something wrong with it, or you see that the computer has broken down yet again, or someone says
something that shows you that circumstances aren’t going to go the way you thought they would go
that week. There isn’t even that moment of panic, there’s just immediate peace. And of course the
way we usually tackle it is the other way. We certainly think that God’s grace will be available to
us, we certainly think he’ll help us, but way at the back of our minds is the thought God helps
those who help themselves, and for those few moments we think, “Now, what am I,” and sometimes we
don’t even get as far as, “What am I,” and we maybe sometimes don’t get as far as, “What am I going
to do?” But we do get to, “What?” There’s just a moment or a few seconds of panic, worry or
anxiety which actually sometimes can extend longer than a few seconds, and you know that. Sometimes
it can extend for an hour, sometimes it can extend for the afternoon until you sort yourself out on
it or until you devise a system of dealing with the problem.

It’s often not until then that you have the recollection to look up to the Lord and say, “Oh Lord,
you of course can help me.” And then we try to climb out of the pit of our own self help. And of
course, that is utterly contradictory to God’s word and we know that. And it’s the verse that we’ve
dealt with partly already in Ephesians 1, and the statement there is categorical. It’s Ephesians
1:22, “And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the
church.” And he has put all things but an overdrawn bank account. No. And he has put all things
but your computer? No. And he has put all things but your car? No. And he has put all things but
your brothers and sisters, but the circumstances surrounding vacation? No. “he has put all things
under his feet, and has made him the head over all things for the church.”

We joke a bit in Raleigh because I picked up Walter Scott some years ago from the library, and then
found that the whole set were there, and I even I think taught some of Walter Scott’s novels in the
old days, yet I’ve never read a lot of them. But lo and behold I got caught into Walter Scott and
my wife laughs at me because I always say, “Oh another boring Walter Scott novel I’ll struggle
through,” because he’s an antiquary; he delights in old things and gives detail upon detail about
the historical situation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And somewhere in there he gets
a thrill story like Ivanhoe or Rob Roy, but usually it’s boring, boring. Yet it’s interesting to me
because it often shows where linguistic expressions have come from through Old English. And often

it gives the background to some Christian and religious facts that are surprising, and above all it
helps you to understand the history of the time in a human way. It tells you the way people
actually lived.

The last one I read was Ivanhoe, and of course one of the things that Ivanhoe deals with is the
whole code of chivalry that governed the Knights in Armor. In those days there was so little law in
the land, in Europe as well as England, that some of the few people who could be depended upon to
bring order, were these errant Knights; these wondering Knights who were very noble in their own
lives, and their own hearts, and very brave and courageous. So Richard the Lion Heart does stand
for something that is very virtuous. One of the practices that they followed was when they were
fighting with lances or swords or spears and they would get the upper hand of their enemy. In one
instance Richard the Lion Heart had this guy on the ground and his sword pointing at the guy’s
throat because he had broken the other fellows sword completely. And he said, “Death or surrender?”
And then the Knight had to answer whether he wanted death or surrender, and if he said surrender
then Richard the Lion Heart put his foot on top of him so he was under his feet and he was regarded
as conquered. Then at that moment he would let him up, and this man was honor bound not to run
away. And so Richard the Lion Heart told him which cellar to go to and the fellow had to go there
and stay even though his own friends came and said, “Look we’ll rescue you.” He says, “No, I cannot
leave, because I have been defeated.” So it was that code of chivalry.

What came home to me with that was “he has all things under his feet,” they’re there. Now they may
appear to be alive and be in the cellar, but they can only do what he permits them to do. That
Knight cannot do anything that his conqueror does not allow him to do. So the Knight may be walking
around, he may appear to be alive, he may appear to have all his powers, he may even have a sword in
his hand, but he cannot do what the conqueror will not permit him to do, and of course that’s it;
Christ has all things under his feet.

Now how did that come about? Look back to Isaiah 53:4 a well known verse “Surely he has borne our
griefs,” and the footnote reads “sicknesses.” “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our
sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” The whole world with
everyone in it, with every situation that has ever occurred in it, was made inside Jesus, and Jesus
bore all its sins and grief’s and pains and sicknesses inside himself. I don’t know if you realize
it, but Nero at his garden parties had a way of providing light for his guests. He brought in
Christians, covered them with tar and set them alight; he used them as torches to light up his
garden parties. Christ bore the pain of every one of those men, women and children who burned as
torches in Nero’s garden parties.

Moreover the guilt or the doubt or the wondering or sometimes the anger, sometimes the hatred,
sometimes the complete irresponsibility that Nero felt in his heart — Jesus bore that in his heart.
He bore that sin and grief. He not only did that but he bore all the circumstances that needed to
be changed and adjusted so that the little children who did survive would develop lives that were in
accordance with our Father’s will. Jesus brought all that about, but not only that, the hard words
that you have spoken either to parents or to other people, Jesus has borne those inside himself.
And the guilt that you have felt and the regret and remorse that you have felt at times in your
hardness and harshness, he has borne that also in his heart. He has borne all those things inside
himself. And because of that, he has completely faced all the wrong things that have happened in
our world and in our lives. He has borne them, and endured them, and experienced them fully, and
because of that his Father has put all those things under his feet as things that have already
passed, that have already been dealt with.

That’s why there is that verse in the lesson that we read in Joshua 6:2, “And the Lord said to
Joshua, ‘See, I have given into your hand Jericho, with its king and mighty men of valor.’” “See, I
have given into your hand Jericho,” well Joshua could well have said Joshua 6:1, “Now Jericho was
shut up from within and from without because of the people of Israel; none went out, and none came
in.” He was fully justified in saying, “Lord, Jericho is shut up, nobody can get in, nobody can get
out and you say, ‘I have given it into your hand.’” But he had given it into his hand already
because Jesus had borne all that inside himself.

He had endured the power of the people inside Jericho, he had brought about the destruction of the
walls inside himself, and he had borne all that inside himself; that was already all done. It’s
already been dealt with. And if you say to me, “How could it be? Jesus doesn’t know that I have an
ancient computer. Jesus doesn’t know that I’ve had a car that had a flat tire, or a motorbike that
broke down, unless he was able to bear everything that would ever happen. And of course that’s what
happened.

All the years of your life, every day of them, was written in his book before there were any of
them. And inside himself Jesus has borne all your life, every event in it, every situation, every
pain that you have or will have, everything that will go wrong in your life he has borne it so that
you would be free from it. So that you would be free. So that the very moment that you heard the
air going out of the tire, at that very moment you could know this is happening to reveal to you yet
one more thing that has already been dealt with by Jesus — that has already been cleared up.

You can see how proud we are that we actually think that we do anything or bring anything about or
can solve anything. The conceit is incredible that we have where we think we can handle it. So we
screw a screw in a nut, and we say we devised the screw and we devised the nut and of course that’s
the way it works. But let it break for some reason or other, or let it become unthreaded, or let it
break the thread, and we just say, “Oh well we don’t know why that happened.” But we convince
ourselves that of course, we brought the whole thing about.

We know fine well that there’s no solidity in that screw, that it’s a lot of protons and neutrons
flying around but we glibly say, “Oh yeah, well that’s the way it works, you know. We know the way
it works.” The whole thing is a miracle, but we keep convincing ourselves that we bring something
about, or that we can solve something, or that this situation that has come up is something that is
utterly undealt with. God has never seen it before, nobody has ever dealt with it before this is a
first time only, and we have to sort this thing out.

No. We don’t have the wisdom to do that, we haven’t the ability. That has all been done already by
God in his son Jesus. And so there is only one way to deal with the events and happenings, either
in the business, or in our own personal lives, or just in our little fiddling lives that we live
around the house. There is only one way to deal with every event that happens and that’s to see
that God has already dealt with this, he’s already solved this. There’s really only one thing you
can say, “Surely he has borne our sins, and carried our sorrows.” That’s it, that’s really the only
thing you can say, “Surely he has already borne this sin, carried this sorrow, borne this pain, and
borne this sickness, and I can relax and can just thank him for it.”

He may let the Knight get up, he may allow him to appear as if he’s still alive, but you can know
that that is all under his control, and that enemy can do nothing that Jesus does not allow him to
do. So whatever way God solves the thing is up to him, but that he has solved it is the center of

our peace now, loved ones. So really there’s only way to operate and I think you know I’m preaching
to myself as much as to you. There is only one way to operate, and that is; not a shadow, not a
cloud in the sky, not one second of anxiety, not one second of uncertainty or worry, not one second
of panic, but absolute peace, absolute confidence that God has put all things under his feet and has
made him the head over all things for the church, and all things have already been accomplished.

Let us pray.