The Soul for Which God Became Man

Enoch B. Mnisi, DD27 September 202640 min read

Simon Peter wrote his final letter as a man who knew the hour of his departure was near. The Lord had shown him that his death was coming, and with the little time left to him he chose not to say something new. He chose to say again what he had already said. "Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance; knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me" (2 Peter 1:12–14). There are truths the Church does not outgrow. She does not learn them once and file them away; she must be reminded of them, and reminded again, because the drift of the human heart is always away from them. The truth I want to set before the reader here is of that kind: the condition of the soul is the first business of the Christian life.

My thesis is this. The soul of man is the most precious thing in creation to God, and we know it is so because God became man to save it. Because the soul is the purpose of the Incarnation, no Christianity that neglects the state of the soul can be the Christianity of Christ. The sign that a soul is being saved is that it lives in continual repentance, what the Greek New Testament calls metanoia, the turning of the mind and the whole self back to God. And the soul so turned is kept, nourished, and made to share the life of Christ through His body and blood in the Eucharist, which is both our communion with Him and the one sacrifice the Christian offers to the Father.

I will argue this in stages. I begin with the Incarnation, because everything else is measured against what God did there. From there I turn to the words of the risen Christ to His churches in the Book of Revelation, where the command to repent is addressed not to pagans but to believers. I then consider the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the danger of a heart that has lost its capacity to feel its own sin, and after that the nature of divine judgment and the mercy that repentance opens. I examine the way material wealth veils the soul from its true condition, and then the corruption that follows when faith is spoken but not lived, in the pew and in the pulpit alike. Finally I come to the Table of the Lord, where the soul that has returned to God is given the bread of immortality.

The stakes are not small. We live in a generation that treats Christianity as low stakes, a stage on which anyone may do as he pleases so long as he says the right words. The truth is the opposite. The stakes are eternal, and a man who exchanges his soul for anything this world offers has made the worst trade a human being can make.

The Soul as the Measure of the Incarnation

What God Laid Aside

If we want to know what is most consequential in the whole of human history, we must look to the moment when God the Word entered His own creation. The eternal Son, who had no need of anything, descended into the material world, subjected Himself to its elements, and finally submitted to death. The Apostle Paul describes this descent in words the Church has never exhausted: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:6–8).

The Son laid aside the prerogatives of His divine glory and took the form of the creature He had made. He did not do this for spectacle, nor to satisfy some need in Himself. He did it for the salvation of mankind. That single fact tells us more about the value of the human soul than any philosophy could. When the uncreated God takes on flesh, suffers, and dies for a thing, that thing is revealed as His most prized possession in the entire universe. The soul you carry is the soul for which the Logos, the eternal Word of the Father, became incarnate.

The Lord Himself placed this value before us in the starkest possible terms: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Mark 8:36–37). There is nothing in the whole cosmic order that can be set against the soul in the balance. The world entire, with all its kingdoms and wealth, weighs less. It follows that there can be no world in which the neglect of the soul is acceptable to God. To diminish, undermine, or disregard the condition of the soul for which Christ died is to despise the very sacrifice by which it was purchased. I will say it plainly: any profession of Christianity that does not continually attend to the state of the soul and its preservation is enmity against God.

The Name Above Every Name

Because Christ humbled Himself in this way, the Father exalted Him. "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:9–11). The exaltation follows the humiliation, and it follows because of it. Jesus becomes the centre, the fountainhead, the Saviour of mankind and of creation, precisely because He descended to save.

This means that Christ can never be pushed to the margins of the Christian life. A Christianity in which the Saviour and the theology of salvation are not at the centre of the believer's mind is not the Christianity of Christ, whatever else it may call itself. He told us plainly why He came: "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). Here we have the barometer by which every doctrine, every theology, and every ministry must be weighed. Is the soul being sought? Is the soul being saved? If a church, a ministry, or a pattern of teaching does not probe, examine, and diagnose the heart, it has departed from the purpose for which its Lord took flesh.

God Became As His Creature

The heart of the Christian confession is that Christ has come in the flesh, and the Apostle John makes this the test of every spirit: "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: 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" (1 John 4:2–3). To deny the Incarnation is not merely to oppose Christ in argument. It is to stand as His enemy.

This is also the point on which the other religions of the world contend with us. They accuse Christians of worshipping a man, and they give no weight to the confession that this man is God Himself, the Creator of the universe and their own Creator. The question they ought to ask is why He became a man, and the Scriptures answer it: "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Hebrews 2:14–15). He came for those who fight Him. He came for those who were enslaved all their lives by the fear of death.

Study the gods of the nations and you will find them centred on themselves. Their worship begins with their own demands and ends with their own glory. The God of Islam refuses the name of Father altogether and counts it an offence to be so addressed. Only in the Christian revelation does God make the whole matter turn upon the soul of His creature. His demand for our worship comes after the fact, not before it. He saw our incapacity to serve Him and our estrangement from His life, and then He Himself came down. This is the core of the wider argument on divine intercession I have been developing: man could not mediate for himself nor repair the treason he had committed against God. Only God could restore the bridge, and He did. The Creator became like His creature, succumbed to the very thing His creature had become enslaved to, and died. The uncreated God died, and He died for every human soul that has ever existed. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). God has no other Son in essence but this one, and He gave Him for the world.

Metanoia as the Aim of All Preaching

If the soul is the purpose of the Incarnation, then the salvation of the soul is the purpose of preaching. On the day of Pentecost, when Peter had proclaimed the crucified and risen Christ, the Scripture records the effect: "Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2:37–38). About three thousand souls were added to the Church that day (Acts 2:41). The preaching pierced the heart; the pierced heart asked how to be saved; the answer was repentance and baptism.

This is the objective of preaching, of the homily, of every teaching given in the spiritual context of the Church. For the unbeliever it is salvation. For the believer it is metanoia, the continual turning of the mind back to God, the return of the whole self to Him. Our minds concerning Christ, concerning God, concerning His doctrine and His Church and His purposes, must be continually cultivated, furnished, and strengthened. If your heart and mind are not being continually probed and nudged back towards God, something is spiritually wrong. And the same measure applies to those who serve: a minister whose life, preaching, and ministry cannot produce repentance in the hearts of his hearers does not serve God. A believer who has no regard for the state and condition of his own soul stands in grave spiritual danger and in grave spiritual darkness.

The Command to Repent Is to the Church

The Doctrine That Refuses Repentance

There are Christians, people who call themselves by the name of Christ, who do not believe in the necessity of continual repentance at all. Repentance, they say, is for sinners. Once a man is in Christ he has already repented, and so he is saved permanently. Once he has confessed that Jesus is Lord, he is untouchable. His faith is concrete, finalised, settled, and whatever he does afterwards can no longer be wrong in the eyes of God, because he has accepted Jesus as Lord.

I answer this with a simple observation. When the risen Christ appeared to John on Patmos, the first thing He commanded him to write was not a vision of beasts or of the end of the age. It was seven letters to seven churches. And to every one of those churches except two, the Lord said, in substance, repent, or else. He did not say it to Smyrna, and He did not say it to Philadelphia. To the rest He issued the command with a threat attached. The command to repent in the Book of Revelation is addressed to believers, to congregations gathered in His name, and it is accompanied by the warning of grave spiritual consequences if it is refused.

Ephesus: The Removed Candlestick

Consider first the letter to Ephesus, and notice to whom it is written: "Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks" (Revelation 2:1). This is a letter to a church. The Lord's charge against her is that she has left her first love (Revelation 2:4), and His remedy is this: "Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent" (Revelation 2:5).

It is a divine ultimatum. The candlestick's place was in the presence of Christ, for He is the One who walks in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. To remove the candlestick from its place is to remove the church from His presence. The Lord is saying to a congregation of believers: if you do not repent, I will take your place away from Me. There are consequences for an unrepentant soul, and they fall upon the Church as surely as upon the world. Repentance is therefore a doctrine of the Church. The Lord of the Church demands it of His Church: when she has departed from His way, she must turn again.

Notice also the order of things in this letter. The Lord tells Ephesus what she has done; she has fallen, she has left her first love. Yet He still commands her to repent. To be told of one's fault is not the same as to acknowledge it. Salvation does not come merely because a man has been informed that he has done wrong. It comes when he owns the wrong, for it is that acknowledgement which leads to soteria, the deliverance and preservation of the soul. I can tell you of your fall, and Christ Himself may tell you, but you must recognise it and claim it as your own.

Pergamos and Sardis: The Sword and the Thief

The same pattern appears in the letter to Pergamos. Again it is addressed "to the angel of the church in Pergamos" (Revelation 2:12), and again the Lord says: "Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth" (Revelation 2:16). There is the ultimatum a second time. Those who say repentance belongs only to sinners must reckon with the fact that Jesus speaks these words to the church. An unrepentant believer is not merely a weak believer; he stands as one against whom Christ fights with the sword of His mouth.

To Sardis He writes in the same vein: "Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee" (Revelation 3:3). Repentance and watchfulness are joined together here. The unwatchful church will be overtaken as a house is overtaken by a thief in the night. Only the few names in Sardis who had not defiled their garments receive the promise that "they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy" (Revelation 3:4).

When God tells you to repent, it is because He has found a fault in you, an imperfection that is unacceptable to Him and grave enough to incur judgment. He would not command repentance if He had found nothing. How then can anyone presume upon His acceptance while living in the very thing He has rebuked? Only Smyrna and Philadelphia are spared the command. To Smyrna He says, "be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (Revelation 2:10); to Philadelphia He presents Himself as "he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth" (Revelation 3:7), and He sets before her an open door. To the other five He says: repent. If the risen Lord spoke thus to the churches of the first century, I cannot imagine that He speaks more gently to the churches of our own, and it is only when we truly repent that we come to see the real state of our spiritual condition.

Thyatira: The Responsibility of Those Who Suffer Evil

The letter to Thyatira shows us something further about how the Lord assigns responsibility. "Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols" (Revelation 2:20). The charge is laid against the church, not first against Jezebel. Thou sufferest: you permitted this; you allowed it to happen among you. Jezebel will receive her own judgment, but the Lord holds the congregation accountable for tolerating her.

Then comes a verse that reveals the breadth of divine mercy: "And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not" (Revelation 2:21). Even Jezebel was offered mercy. Even the wickedness of the wicked is met with an open door, for through repentance men may gain access to the mercy of God. I note in passing that this Jezebel was a literal woman and not merely a spirit, for Christ does not grant spirits time to repent. But she refused the space she was given, and so the sentence fell: "Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works" (Revelation 2:22–23).

He will give to every one according to his works. He will judge a man as He finds him. If He finds you in sin, He will judge you in that sin. And again, notice the rhythm of the whole passage: the church is told to repent, Jezebel is told to repent, those who sin with her are told to repent. The opportunity is given again and again. What is refused is not the mercy of God; it is the turning that would have received it.

The Conviction of the Spirit and the Anaesthetised Heart

Conviction as the Movement of Grace

Repentance is an indicator of the movement of the Spirit of grace in a human life. The Lord promised that when the Comforter came, He would bring precisely this: "And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment" (John 16:8). The Holy Spirit convicts. He brings sin to mind and sets it in the light; He brings righteousness to mind and shows us what we lack. When the heart is no longer convicted of the error of its ways, we may be sure that the movement of the Spirit in that soul has been diminished.

The Apostle John writes, "For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things" (1 John 3:20). The condemning heart is not an enemy of salvation. It is one of its instruments. It is the faculty by which the soul registers that something is wrong. Imagine a brother or a sister who sins, knows that he has sinned, and yet feels nothing. His heart does not condemn him, does not trouble him, does not fear. Something is gravely wrong with such a man, because the organs of his spiritual faculties have died.

The Hand on the Stove

Consider the body. You cannot touch a hot stove and fail to react. You cannot strike your foot against the corner of a chair and feel nothing. Pain in the body is a mercy; it is the signal that damage is being done, and a man who has lost the capacity to feel it is in mortal danger precisely because he no longer knows when he is being harmed. The same is true of the soul. A man who collides with death, with destruction, with spiritual danger, and yet feels nothing, and then justifies his numbness by saying that God accepts us as we are, is not at peace. He is anaesthetised.

This is spiritual delusion. The man who has made his peace with unconvicted sin, who has learned to feel nothing where he ought to feel alarm, is closer to the gates of hell than to heaven, however confident his words may be. The loss of conviction is not the sign of a mature faith that has moved beyond guilt. It is the symptom of a faith whose life signs are failing.

Watchfulness Over the Soul

The sign that you are being saved, then, is that you are continually repentant in your walk. You are watchful over the state of your soul. You do not fall into the traps of delusion and deception that would persuade you that you are exempt from the judgments that attend unrepentance. The Christian who lives this way is not morbid or anxious; he is awake. He takes regard for his soul because he knows what it cost.

Judgment and the Mercy That Waits Behind It

What Judgment Is

To understand why repentance matters so greatly, we must understand what divine judgment is. Judgment is the exposure and manifestation of the deed. It is the bringing into the open of what a man has done, together with the consequences his actions have produced. Judgment does not invent something foreign to the sinner; it reveals what he has already set in motion.

The only way to avert the judgments of God is repentance. There is no other way to escape the calamity that must fall upon a soul as the consequence of its deeds. The prophet Ezekiel states the principle without softening it: "Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). And of the wicked man who is warned and will not turn, God says, "he shall die in his iniquity" (Ezekiel 3:19). The soul that sins and does not repent dies in its own sins. That is the reason for judgment. That is also the reason for prophecy: God announces His judgments beforehand so that men may turn before they fall.

Nineveh in Sackcloth

This is why God sent Jonah to Nineveh. Jonah's message was blunt: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown" (Jonah 3:4). The point of the mission was not whether Jonah suspected that God would relent; he did suspect it, and he resented it, for he confessed afterwards, "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil" (Jonah 4:2). The mission was not about Jonah at all. It was about bringing the sin of the people into the light and giving them the opportunity to acknowledge it, to claim it as their own, and to cast themselves upon the mercy of God.

When the king of Nineveh heard the word, he proclaimed a decree throughout the city: "Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way" (Jonah 3:7–8). That was repentance, and it was answered: "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not" (Jonah 3:10). The judgment was pronounced; the people repented; God forgave and stayed His hand.

Ahab in Sackcloth

The same mercy was shown to one of the most wicked kings Israel ever had. Ahab led the nation into idolatry and the worship of Baal, and he took the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite after Naboth had been put to death through the scheming of his wife Jezebel. Elijah was sent to him with a word of judgment. And the Scripture records: "And it came to pass, when Ahab heard those words, that he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly" (1 Kings 21:27).

The Lord's response is astonishing: "Seest thou how Ahab humbleth himself before me? because he humbleth himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days" (1 Kings 21:29). The wickedest of kings, confronted by divine judgment with the wrong he had done, humbled himself, and God stayed the calamity in his lifetime. If repentance availed for Nineveh and for Ahab, no soul need despair of it. And if the refusal of repentance condemned Jezebel of Thyatira even after space was given her, no soul may presume upon God by withholding it.

The Veil of Mammon

Treasure and Masters

When we are too focused on the material world, too entrenched in the world of doing and accomplishment and trading, we enter a condition in which the consciousness of God becomes veiled. There is a standard of truth, a measure by which a man may take the temperature of his own spirituality and discover whether it burns or has gone cold. The Lord gave us that measure when He warned: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal" (Matthew 6:19–20). In heaven there is the total and eternal preservation of what is stored there.

He then drew the line that no believer can straddle: "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Matthew 6:24). Mammon was the Syrian name for wealth, personified as a god of material prosperity. The Lord was directing us not to hold the material world in higher esteem than our spiritual destiny. A man may work, trade, and prosper; but when prosperity becomes a master, it has become an idol.

Laodicea: Rich and Naked

This was precisely the condition of the church in Laodicea. She believed that because she had accumulated riches, possessions, and status, she had no further need of growth, no need to pursue the spiritual life. The Lord's verdict upon her is among the most searching words in Scripture: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Revelation 3:15–17).

Laodicea said, we are rich; we have acquired goods; we lack nothing. You will hear preachers today who say the same, who boast of their wealth and power from the pulpit. Christ answered: you do not know. You do not know how wretched, how miserable, how poor, how blind, how naked you are. Not all is as it appears. What hid Laodicea's true state from her was her material standing. Her wealth answered every question she thought to ask, and so she never asked the one that mattered. When a man has accumulated wealth and status, it becomes very difficult for him to see the vacuum in his spiritual condition. Many Christians stand in exactly this place, blinded and deluded by their possessions, unaware of how truly depraved, poor, and naked they are.

And yet even this rebuke is love. "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent" (Revelation 3:19). The Lord does not scorch Laodicea because He has abandoned her. He rebukes her because He loves her, and His rebuke ends, as all His rebukes to the churches end, in the command to repent.

The Rich Young Man

The same veil lay over the young man who came to Jesus asking, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?" (Matthew 19:16). The Lord directed him to the commandments, and he replied that he had kept them from his youth. Then Jesus looked at him and said, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me" (Matthew 19:21). And the young man could not. "He went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions" (Matthew 19:22).

The Lord was exposing something the young man did not know about himself. He did not truly want eternal life as he claimed to, for if eternal life had been precious to him, he would not have esteemed his possessions and his net worth above the eternal state of his soul. And so Jesus said that a rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:23), because of what the kingdom requires. In the kingdom a man must first become poor in order to inherit: "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" and "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:3, 5). The world casts a veil over the heart, and wealth is its thickest fold.

Do not rely, then, on your accomplishments as a measure of your spiritual stature. What truly matters is not what you have achieved materially but what you have done for the attainment of spiritual perfection: what you have traded, spiritually, to lay hold on the blessedness of the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to attain to the Spirit of grace, to take hold of the word of life.

The Oil of the Wise

The Lord told of ten virgins who went out to meet the bridegroom: "And five of them were wise, and five were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them" (Matthew 25:2–3). We learn why the foolish were foolish when the cry went up at midnight. When it mattered most, they had no oil, and they were reduced to begging from others: "Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out" (Matthew 25:8). They had given little regard to the possession of sufficient oil while there was time.

The oil is the Holy Spirit, and the possession of the Spirit is the great aim of the Christian life. After the soul has been sought and saved, it must be purified, sanctified, and perfected for communion in the divine nature, and every one of these works requires the agency of the Holy Spirit. The foolish virgins were not unbelievers; they were waiting for the same bridegroom. Their folly was that they assumed their lamps would be enough.

The Wisest Trade

Yes, you are in this world. You are required to make a living, to work, to do business. But it would be unwise to trade in the things that yield the least profit. When a man enters into trade, he should trade in what yields the greatest return, and the thing in this world that yields the greatest profit, the thing that can secure your life, your future, and your destiny, is Jesus Christ. Live, then, not as one who merely stands near Him, but as one who communes with Him, serves Him, and worships Him, for He died as God and as man that He might save you. By His death He demonstrated how much you are worth.

Do not be like Judas, who valued the Lord at thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). Do not be like Judas when the woman broke her alabaster box of precious ointment over the head of Jesus, and the objection went up, "To what purpose is this waste?" (Matthew 26:8), the objection that John tells us came from Judas himself (John 12:4–5). What looked like waste to the calculating eye was the only fitting response to the One before her. The best use of your soul, in honour of Christ, is to contemplate Him. The contemplation and worship of our Lord Jesus Christ is the highest employment of the soul, the offering for which He gave His life.

Faith That Keeps Its Vows

Bought With a Price

The Scripture is explicit about the price of the soul: "Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Peter 1:18–19). And again: "For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's" (1 Corinthians 6:20). Your soul has been paid for.

In honour of that sacrifice we keep ourselves chaste. That is why husbands love their wives, "even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it" (Ephesians 5:25), and wives submit themselves to their husbands "as unto the Lord" (Ephesians 5:22). That is why employers do not treat their employees as slaves, and why employees serve their employers "as unto Christ" (Ephesians 6:5–9). Our conduct on earth is meant to reflect the salvation we have received and the sacrifice by which it was purchased. That is Christianity: the metamorphosis, the transformation, of the soul that has accepted the lordship of Jesus. It is a life, not a set of words. The life you lead is the testimony you leave.

Vows and Deeds

Consider the marriage covenant. When a man marries his wife, he speaks vows before the Church, and those words are a testament of his commitment. But the meaning of those words is carried by what he does afterwards. Suppose he says to her, I will love you in sickness and in health until death parts us, and then goes out and commits adultery, and comes home to tell her that his vow still stands because he spoke it. His words have been emptied of meaning. Love is demonstrable. It is not merely vocal; it must be shown. "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth" (1 John 3:18).

The same holds for the confession of salvation. A man cannot say, I am saved by grace, I am saved by faith alone, and then treat that confession as the end of the matter while he does whatever he pleases. The truth and efficacy of his words depend upon his actions. If I say I am saved, I must demonstrate it, and the demonstration is in deeds. Without repentance and without conviction, our profession becomes a mockery.

Carry the analogy one step further. Imagine a man whose wife has just discovered his unfaithfulness, and he walks into the house and tells her to cook his meal, with no regard at all for her grief, as though nothing has happened because she is, after all, his wife. What manner of evil is that? How far gone must a man be to behave so? Yet we take that very posture and replicate it towards God. We betray Him, we sin, we do wrong, and then we approach Him with easy familiarity as though nothing has been broken. Scripture has a name for such a soul. It calls it a harlot, and it treats spiritual unfaithfulness as adultery against God.

What About the Soul

This disregard runs through ordinary life. A man enters into an underhanded business deal and tells himself that all that matters is that he gets the money. Yes, he will get the money; but what of his soul? A married man decides to amuse himself with other women; he will enjoy it for a moment, but what of his soul? When men commit crimes, they reckon only with the consequences that touch this life: prison, a fine, a ruined name. Very few give any regard to the soul, to eternal life, and to its antithesis, which is eternal damnation, eternal death, eternal destruction. That is destruction without end. There is no timeline to it; the suffering has no terminus. We exchange the eternal for the temporal, and we tell ourselves that as long as we are known, as long as we are successful, as long as we are comfortable now, nothing else matters.

Take Heed Unto Thyself

The same corruption has entered the ministry. Paul charged Timothy: "Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee" (1 Timothy 4:16). The order is deliberate. The minister must first take heed to himself. It is more important that anyone who wishes to serve in the ministry learn about soteria and repentance than that he learn about ministry, because ministry is irrelevant when the minister himself has no knowledge of the state of his own soul. We live in a generation where men seek to save others while they themselves are going down into hell.

This is why so much of modern Christianity has become a farce, a theatrical performance in which the stakes seem so low that anyone may do as he likes. Preachers go about in sin, abusing young women and committing every kind of wickedness, and their followers defend them: he is a man of God, he is a man of God. He is no man of God. Such a man is what the Lord called "the child of hell" (Matthew 23:15). Where is holiness? Where is purity, sanctification, piety, godliness? The Lord warned that "the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service" (John 16:2), and in the same spirit men now sin and imagine they are doing God a favour, as though God needed them. It is spiritual delusion.

The Traffic of the Sanctuary

I heard one preacher declare that the number one principle of the kingdom is sowing and reaping. On the stage beside him he had arranged the props of a harvest, a bag of potatoes and a basket full of seed, and the message was that the congregation must sow the right seed, which meant give. The first principle of the kingdom is not sowing and reaping. Such men are charlatans. They are the priests God showed to Ezekiel when He brought him through the hole in the wall of the temple and said, "Go in, and behold the wicked abominations that they do here" (Ezekiel 8:9).

Jesus wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), and when He entered the temple He overthrew the tables of the money changers and said, "It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves" (Matthew 21:13). The prophet's indictment fits our age exactly: "Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick" (Ezekiel 28:18). We speak of human trafficking, of sex trafficking, of drug trafficking; yet inside the Church there is a spiritual trafficking, in which men merchandise themselves and use the name of Christ to do it. When men want to be more important than Christ Himself, they become like the Pharisees who compassed sea and land to make one proselyte and then made him "twofold more the child of hell" than themselves (Matthew 23:15).

I say this with sorrow and without exaggeration: among the Protestant churches of the West as they now stand, I know of none I could join. Do not lose your soul in such a house. Repentance is the way you keep your soul, the continual return of the mind to God, and that returning is itself a confession that you cannot cleanse yourself, save yourself, or deliver yourself. You need One greater, and God is the One for the task. He is the ultimate Saviour and the keeper of your soul. More than money, more than possessions or accomplishments, you need the security and eternal preservation of your soul, and there is no way to it but Jesus Christ.

The Table of the Lord

The Way of Escape From Idolatry

Having spoken of the keeping of the soul through repentance, I turn now to the means by which the returning soul is nourished and made to dwell in Christ. Paul's words to the Corinthians begin with a warning: "Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it" (1 Corinthians 10:12–13).

The Apostle does not promise that God will never permit us to be tempted. He promises that we will not be tempted beyond our capacity to endure, and that every temptation comes with a way of escape. The temptation he has in view in this passage is idolatry, and so he continues: "Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say" (1 Corinthians 10:14–15). What he offers next is not only a prohibition but a remedy. The way of escape from the table of idols is the Table of the Lord.

Communion, Altar, and Sacrifice

"The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:16–17). The word communion, koinonia in the Greek, means participation, a real sharing in something. Paul immediately grounds it in the logic of sacrifice: "Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar?" (1 Corinthians 10:18). Those who eat of the sacrifice partake of the altar on which it was offered.

He then turns to the pagan altars: "What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils" (1 Corinthians 10:19–20). The idol itself is nothing. Set up an image of a skeleton or any carved figure, and it is only wood or stone. But behind the image stands an entity, and it is that entity which receives the sacrifices of the Gentiles. Idol worship is therefore the worship of demons. And notice how Paul binds worship and sacrifice together: to sacrifice at an altar is to worship there and to enter into fellowship with the one who receives the offering.

Here is the point that must not be missed. When the Gentiles offered their sacrifices to demons, the offering was literal and the fellowship it created was real. Paul sets the Lord's Table directly against theirs: "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils" (1 Corinthians 10:21). If the one communion is real, so is the other. The cup is a real communion in the blood of Christ; the bread is a real communion in His body. Paul attributes a real presence and a real participation to the bread and the cup. The union is sacramental, instituted through a mystery: the bread and the cup are material things, yet they carry a mystical application to our participation in the body and blood of Christ.

The Eucharist is therefore both communion and sacrifice, both worship and offering. It is the Christian's sacrifice to the immortal God, laid upon the altar of God. A table is where people commune and feast, and the Table of the Lord is the bread and the cup. To sit at it while also sitting at the tables of idols is to provoke the Lord to jealousy, and the Apostle asks the question that answers itself: "Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he?" (1 Corinthians 10:22).

The Bread That Came Down From Heaven

There is no merely mental assent in the Christianity of Christ. The reality of a Christian's position is proved by tangible, material, sacramental acts. "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved" (Mark 16:16). Belief alone, stripped of its sacramental expression, is not what the Lord described; He joined believing to baptism, and baptism is a sacrament. The same is true of the Eucharist, which the Lord announced long before the Last Supper in the synagogue at Capernaum.

"This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die" (John 6:50). There is a bread that a man is permitted to eat, and it insulates him from death. Then Christ identifies Himself with it: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6:51). Jesus Himself introduced the language of eating. He is the living bread, the bread of life, the true tree of life, and this bread is to be eaten. He uses this language to transmit a mystical truth, the truth of immortality, and the language is participatory, not symbolic.

His hearers understood at once that He meant something real: "The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (John 6:52). Rather than soften His words, the Lord intensified them:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." (John 6:53–56)

The conditions are stated by Christ Himself. Except you eat and drink, you have no life in you. He that eats and drinks dwells in Him, and He in him. The condition for having life is that you eat and drink; the condition for dwelling in Christ is that you eat and drink. Christians who refuse the Eucharist, or who see in it only a symbol, cannot then claim to possess eternal life, for they do not receive the very means by which Christ said that life is transmitted. The Eucharist does not carry a symbolic meaning. It carries an efficacious one. What it contains is not symbolism but communion.

A Hard Saying

"These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" (John 6:59–60). These were not Pharisees or hostile Jews; they were His disciples. And "from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him" (John 6:66). That is a picture of much of today's Christianity. Tell modern Christians that the Eucharist is the flesh and the blood of Christ, and they will answer that it is impossible. Then, by the Lord's own words, they do not dwell in Him, and they have no life in them. They protest that they have life. But the claim belongs to Christ, and it was Christ who laid down the condition.

The question the disciples asked at Capernaum, how He could give them His flesh to eat, was answered in the upper room: "And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:26–28). This is how He gave them His flesh and His blood. This is why the Church confesses that the sacrament does not merely symbolise. It is the means by which we possess the life of Christ, by which we dwell in Him and He in us.

The Only Acceptable Sacrifice

Beyond communion, the body and the blood are the highest sacrifice a Christian can present to God, because they are the only sacrifice God accepted for the redemption of the world and the restoration of all things. By that blood even the heavenly things were cleansed: "It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these" (Hebrews 9:23). In that body all sin was absorbed, and death lost its sting in creation: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Corinthians 15:55). Through it every principality, power, and dominion has been made subject to His name, for "having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Colossians 2:15).

The Scriptures give us a foreshadowing of this in the story of Noah. When he came out of the ark, "Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake" (Genesis 8:20–21). Upon Noah's sacrifice God swore that He would not destroy the earth again. Millennia later the ultimate sacrifice was offered, and upon that sacrifice God declared that whoever believes on His Son, whatever he may have done and however grave his sin, will not perish. There is no sin that the blood of Christ does not cover. With Noah's offering, God said He would not destroy the earth; with Christ's offering, He said He would not destroy man.

The indestructible salvation that Christ brings is experienced in the Eucharist, and a man who refuses it has no part in Him and no communion with Him. At the centre of the Church stands what the ancient Church, in the words of Ignatius of Antioch, called the medicine of immortality. That phrase is my own addition to the argument, but it names exactly what I have been describing: the bread which a man may eat and not die.

Conclusion: The Keeping of What Was Bought

I began with Peter, who in the last days of his life chose to remind the Church of what she already knew. I end in the same spirit, because the truth at stake is too costly to be heard once and forgotten.

The soul of man is the most precious thing in creation to God. We know this not by speculation but by what He did: the eternal Word laid aside His glory, took the form of a servant, and died, so that the soul might be sought and saved. Everything in the Christian life must be measured against that act. A believer who has no regard for the condition of his soul despises the price that was paid for it. A minister whose preaching cannot produce repentance does not serve the God who became man for this very purpose. A church that has ceased to probe and diagnose the heart has lost the thing that makes it a church.

The risen Christ commanded His churches to repent, and He attached consequences to the command: the removed candlestick, the sword of His mouth, the coming as a thief, the bed of tribulation, the lukewarm spewed out of His mouth. These were not words to pagans. They were words to believers. The Holy Spirit is given to convict, and a heart that no longer feels its sin is not at rest but numb. Judgment is the manifestation of what a man has done, and repentance is the only way through it; Nineveh and Ahab found mercy by that road, and Jezebel was given space to take it and refused. Wealth and accomplishment draw a veil over the soul, as they did over Laodicea and over the rich young man, and the foolish virgins show us what it costs to be found without oil when the bridegroom comes. A faith that speaks vows and keeps none of them, in the pew or in the pulpit, has emptied its words of meaning and turned the house of God into a place of traffic.

Against all of this stands the mercy of God, and it comes to us in two gifts. The first is repentance, the continual return of the mind and the whole self to God, which is itself the confession that we cannot save ourselves. The second is the Table of the Lord, where the soul that has returned is fed with the body and blood of Christ, receives His life, dwells in Him, and offers to the Father the one sacrifice He has accepted. Repentance keeps the soul turned towards God; the Eucharist keeps the turned soul alive in Christ.

So take heed to your soul. Examine it, watch over it, bring it again and again to the mercy seat, and bring it to the Table where the living bread is given. Do not trade it for fame, for money, for a moment's pleasure, or for the approval of men, for there is nothing in the whole world that can be given in exchange for it. It is the soul for which God became man, and it was bought with nothing less than His blood.