We have been considering the real spiritual presence of Jesus Christ.  His presence is in His mystical body – His true Church, and in the heart of every believer.  Now,

Third, there is a real spiritual “presence” of Christ wherever His believing people meet together in His name.  The smallest gathering of true Christians for the purposes of prayer, praise, holy conference, reading of God’s Word, or church disciplines, is sanctified by the best of company.  The grandest buildings that men have reared for religious uses are often no better than whitened sepulchres, destitute of any holy influence, given up to superstitious ceremonies, and filled to no purpose with crowds of formal worshippers, who come unfeeling, and go unfeeling away.  No worship is of any use to souls at which Christ is not present.  Incense, banners, pictures, flowers, crucifixes, and long processions of richly dressed ecclesiastics are a poor substitute for the great High Priest Himself.  However, they who worship God in spirit and truth never draw near to Him in vain.  What is the secret of such?  They have had with them the great Master of assemblies, even Christ Himself. 

Fourth, there is a real spiritual “presence” of Christ with the hearts of all true-hearted communicants in the Lord’s Supper.  We reject with all our hearts the baseless notion of any bodily presence of Christ on the Lord’s table, but we can never doubt that the great ordinance appointed by Christ has a special and peculiar blessing attached to it.  That blessing consists in a special and peculiar presence of Christ.  “Take, eat: this is my body.”  “Drink ye all of this: this is My blood.”  Our Lord did mean to teach that every right-hearted believer, who ate that bread and drank that cup in remembrance of Christ, would in so doing find a special presence of Christ in his heart, and a special revelation of Christ’s sacrifice of His own body and blood to his soul.  He sees more clearly what Christ is to him, and what he is to Christ.  He understands more thoroughly what it is to be one with Christ and Christ in him.  He feels the roots of his spiritual life insensibly watered, and the work of grace within him insensibly built up and carried forward.  It is a matter of experience, which no one knows but he who feels it. 

Fifth, and last but not least, there is a real spiritual “presence” of Christ vouchsafed to believers in special times of trouble and difficulty.  That is the presence that Paul received more than one occasion.  He says in Acts 18:9-10, “Then spake the Lord to Paul in the night by a vision, Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace: ¹⁰ For I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee: for I have much people in this city.”  When his life was in danger in Jerusalem, it is written, “The night following the Lord stood by him and said, Be of good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of Me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome” (Acts 23:11).  Again, he said in 2 Timothy 4:16-17, “At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. ¹⁷ Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.”

This is the account of the singular and miraculous courage which many of God’s children have occasionally shown under circumstances of unusual trial, in every age of the Church.  Do you remember the story of three young men cast into the fiery furnace and preferred the risk of death to idolatry?  King Nebuchadnezzar saw what had happened to them in the furnace and exclaimed, “Lo, I see four men loose walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God” (Daniel 3:25).  When Stephen was beset by hatred-filled enemies on the very point of stoning him, he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).  This special presence was the secret of the fearlessness with which many early Christian martyrs met their deaths.  These men died as they did because Christ was with them.  Many are overanxious and overcareful about what they shall do in their last sickness and on the bed of death.  Let us believe that when the need comes, the help will come also.  Let us not carry our cross before they are laid upon us.  The Lord who told Moses, “Certainly I will be with thee,” will never fail any believer who cries to Him.  He will say, “Peace, be still.”  We will be able to say as David said in Psalm 23:4, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me.”  The children of this world neither know nor understand the real spiritual “presence” of Christ.  It is one of such cases that Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 2:14, “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto Him.”  Let us not doubt the real spiritual “presence” of Christ.  Rather, let us hold it fast. 

III.      So far, I have been talking about Christ “spiritual” presence with us.  Now we are going to think about His bodily presence.  Where is it?  What should we think about it?  What should we believe or reject in the doctrine of the bodily presence of Christ?

First, there was a bodily presence of our Lord Jesus Christ during the time that He was upon the earth at His first advent.  He spent 33 years between His birth and His ascension.  He was present in a body in this world.  If anyone rejects this doctrine, he is not of God but of anti-Christ.  1 John 5:2-3 reads, “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: ³ And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.”  In infinite mercy to our souls, the eternal Son of God was pleased to take our nature on Him, and to be miraculously born of a woman, with a body just like our own.  He was made like unto us in all things, except without sin.  Like us, He ate, drank, slept, hungered, thirsted, wept, and felt fatigue and pain.  He had a body which was subject to all the conditions of a material body.  While, as God, He was in heaven and earth at the same time, and, as man, His body was only in one place at one time.  In a real, true human body He lived, and in a real, true human body He kept the law and fulfilled all righteousness.  In a real, true human body He bore our sins on the cross and made satisfaction for us by His atoning blood.  He who died for us on Calvary was perfect man, while at the same time He was perfect God.  This was the first real bodily presence of Jesus Christ. 

This mysterious truth gives us unspeakable comfort and a heart-cheering thought that the “One Mediator between God and man is the man Jesus Christ.”  He is able to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.  Thus, He was able to finish the work of redemption.  “By man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21).  In the body, He was born for us, lived for us, died for us, and rose again.

Lovingly,

Your Pastor

More Lively Hope

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