“Therefore, holy brothers and
companions in a heavenly calling,
consider Jesus, the apostle and high
priest of our confession;”
Recently, I
read a story about a man by the name of Hudson Taylor. He was a master
missionary. While he never wrote a book on missions or church planting, he did
write a very small commentary on the Song of Solomon. The key to his success
was that he loved his Lord, and he believed that you could only cultivate love
in aloneness with the one you love.
A. W. Tozer
was one of the few men who preached consistently on the need to be a worshiper
of God, telling the church that worship was the missing jewel in her crown.
C. S. Lewis
believed that God communicates His presence to men in the process of worship.
And Oswald Chambers called worship “the great essential of fitness.” He went on
to say, “If you have not been worshipping…, when you get into work you will not
only be useless yourself, but a tremendous hindrance to those who are
associated with you.”
Worship is
a vital element of our freedom in Christ. I love the idea of worship being a
jewel in our crown. The following excerpt titled “Consider Jesus” is from
Andrew Murray’s classic The Holiest of
All:
Consider Jesus! This is the central thought of the verse,
and of the passage of which it is a part, as it is indeed of the whole Epistle.
It is the one aim of the writer to persuade the Hebrews that, if they but knew
aright the Lord Jesus as the faithful, compassionate, and almighty High Priest
in heaven, they would find in Him all they needed for a life such as God would
have them lead.
Their life would be in harmony with their faith, in harmony
with the life of Him whom their faith would apprehend. The words might have
been taken as the title of my book: Consider Jesus! It is indeed the keynote of
the Epistle.
The word consider, from the root of the Latin word for Star,
originally means to contemplate the stars. It suggests the idea of the
astronomer, and the quiet, patient, persevering, concentrated gaze with which
he seeks to discover all that can be possibly known of the stars which the
object of his study are.
And Jesus, who is God, who became man, and perfected our
human nature in His wonderful life of suffering and obedience, and now dwells
in heaven to communicate to us its life and blessedness—oh, what reason there
is for saying, consider Jesus.
Gaze upon Him, contemplate Him. For some increased knowledge
of the stars what devotion, what enthusiasm, what sacrifices are often times
witnessed. Oh, let the study and possession of the Son of God waken our
devotion and our enthusiasm, that we may be able to tell men what beauty and
what glory there is in Jesus.
Selah.