Alone, learning 'He's all I really need'

We know of God’s omnipotence but what about His wisdom? The reason for the methodology of the revelation of the plan is because it’s all about His wisdom.

Paul writes in Ephesians 3: [7] Whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power.
[8] Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ;
[9] And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:
[10] To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God,
[11] According to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord:

We have the privilege in our lives, even in the smallest details and the quietest moments, to demonstrate the glory of God. God the Father is glorified when His Son is exalted; when you name Him Lord it’s to the glory of the Father, says Richard Jordan.

So to glorify God is to cherish His Son. It’s to say He’s more important, more valuable than anything going on in the details of my life right now—than any of the pressures of the moment, the heartaches of the moment.

Philippians 3:9: [9] And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:
[10] That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;

You see, that’s life without religion because that’s real life. That’s God’s eternal life. Sometimes when you teach grace to people, they have a tendency to say, “Well, you’re just saying God doesn’t care about how I live.” That’s not what grace says. Grace says, “This is real life. All that other stuff is an illusion! That other stuff isn’t real life; it’s really death in disguise.”

Religion is a performance-based program where you try to make spiritual progress in your life, or you try to get God’s blessings based on how you act; what you do. It’s all about you, about your behavior, about what you do and don’t do.

Grace, this thing that the wisdom of God devised, this plan, is a system of living based on what God has already done for us, in which God blesses us because of who we are in Christ. We’re complete in Him. We already have His life and we let that life be our life.

That’s what Paul’s saying when he says, “That I may be found in him, not having my own righteousness, but that which is through the faith of Christ.”

That’s me reaching out and taking by faith that identity God gives me in His Son. That’s what it means to “be found in Him.”

Have you ever heard the name John Gibson Paton? I love to read biographies; go find Paton’s.

He was a missionary in the New Hebrides, the islands just north of Australia. If you draw a line between Honolulu and Sydney it will go straight through the capital city of the New Hebrides.

They were discovered in the 1770s by explorer Captain James Cook. He actually gave them the name New Hebrides because they looked like the New Hebrides coastline off of Scotland. In the 1980s they gained their independence from Britain and now it’s called Vanuatu.

In the 1830s, a group of people went there for the first time to take the gospel and then in the 1850s Paton went there. He landed on the islands with his wife and then spent 40 years among the pagans there.

There was no Christianity there at all and he went in among cannibals, people who had already murdered . . . The first contact any missionaries had with the New Hebrides, two guys went in there and the day they landed the natives killed them and ate them.

About four months later another group of missionaries came and they lasted two months before they were driven off the island.

Paton eventually had tremendous success. When he was 90-some years old and leaving to go to Australia to die, he wrote a report in his autobiography and said, “The whole of the island has come to Christ. The chiefs that were cannibals and savages have now come to Christ.”

One chief came to see Paton before he left and said, “I came to tell you goodbye. I’ll no longer see you now, but I’ll see you with Jesus in heaven in the by and by.”

Paton had taken their language and written it down; it was never done before. He translated the Bible into their language and started orphanages in a culture that was filled with infanticide, in which if you were a wife and your husband died, they killed you too so you could be there to serve him in the afterlife. It was a rather interesting concept.

He reformed those issues and trained teachers in the orphanages to raise the young children in Christ. Before he died, they had trained teachers and sent out 130 preachers, trained to carry the gospel not just there but to all of the islands of the New Hebrides.

Because of his ministry there, his story went all across the Christian world and people were challenged because of his story.

Paton had given up a ministry in Glasgow; for 10 years he had a very successful and fruitful ministry there before he went to the mission field and that’s part of the story because when you hear about Paton and all the glory he had accomplished, the wonder of it, you have to remember something.

When he first got there he didn’t go to the island where he had all the success. He landed on another island with his wife, Mary, who was pregnant with their first child. The got there in November and his wife died of a fever in February. Twenty days later his baby, Peter Robert, died, leaving Paton alone with all these savages who were constantly attacking him.

He said in his autobiography that for those first four years he was on that island he didn’t have one day where someone didn’t come and threaten him. Many days a chief would come and bring hostile crowds of warriors with him and surround the home he’d built with Mary.

He spent four years by himself in an environment that was far more hostile than anything I could describe to you in a few minutes. The sickness, the constant threats on his life. He didn’t have a lot of this “kickback time” that preachers like to talk about.

Every day was a day of life-threatening stress. At the end of four years, he was finally physically run off of the island into the ocean. It just happened, by the grace of God, that a ship came by at the same time and picked him up. Otherwise, he would have died at sea.

Four years of loneliness, of loss, of no fruit—not one convert. You say, “What would have made him keep going?” When he left Glasgow for the New Hebrides, one of the deacons in the church said, “Son, you can’t go there. You’ll be eaten by the cannibals.”

Paton had been invited to go back to Scotland to a life of ease and a popular ministry, but he didn’t go back. He went on to have one of the most stellar, exciting stories of triumph in mission history. But it began with those four years of toil, loneliness, loss, deprivation, fear. Four years of the courage of faith.

When you read his autobiography, you can’t help but ask, “John, what was it that kept you going?” The first line he wrote was, “What I tell you here is for the glory of God.”

I think, “Yeah, that’s right, and God gets glory when His Son is exalted, and His Son is exalted when we cherish Him above everything else and that’s the heart of John Paton’s story.”

I want to read you a couple of paragraphs from the autobiography, taken from when he was at the mercy of one of the savage chiefs and hundreds of angry natives hunting him to kill him.

He had a friend who suggested he should hide in the trees, so he recalled, “I climbed into the tree and was left there alone in the bush. The hours spent there live all before me as if it were but of yesterday.”

He wrote this when he was 91 years old; this event took place when he was 35. He wrote, “I heard the frequent discharges of muskets and the yells of savages as I set there among the branches as safe as in the arms of Jesus. Never in all my sorrows did my Lord draw nearer to me and speak more soothing to my soul then when the moonlight flickered among the chestnut leaves and the night air played on my throbbing brow as I told all my heart to Jesus.

“Alone, yet not alone. If it be to glorify my God, I’ll not begrudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence and to enjoy His consoling fellowship. My friend, if thus thrown back upon your own soul, all alone in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will never fail you? In Christ you do.”

I don’t know where you are today. Maybe you’re in a tree, but you’re not alone. You have Him. You never know that He’s all you really need until He’s all that you really have. When you come in life to find that He’s all you really have, you’ll discover with great joy the fact that He is really all you need.

In the midst of the clutter, busyness, God help you and me to make that realization true and be found in Him alone. That’s real life; that’s life in Christ.