Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

During our men’s prayer time this past Tuesday morning, one of the men brought up dealing with growing pains in their child.

I am sure anyone here who is a parent has gotten that wake up call from one of our kiddos about leg pain in the middle of the night.

And if you don’t have kids, I am sure you probably remember some of that leg pain yourself as a child.

Growing hurts my friends!

Today we are going to cover the entire childhood and young adulthood of Jesus available to us.

We start today off with him being 40 days old, then 12 years old, and when we see him next appear in this book - Jesus will be around 30 years old!

That sounds pretty daunting at first glance.

But if you notice, we are only covering 14 verses today!

We aren’t given a ton of information about Christ’s childhood and transition into manhood.

But we are given some key insights into it which we will seek to explore further today.

Join me as we read God’s Word today.

Read Full Scripture:

Prayer

Today we will see some of the growing pains that Christ experienced by being both fully God and fully man.

We will also see how He grew in His humanity all the while continuing being fully God.

The first understanding that we can glean is…

I. Christ Being Fully God and Fully Man… Grew in Strength (39-40)

We see that after satisfying everything according to the Law of the Lord regarding purification, they went back to Nazareth.

And then Luke gives us an overarching verse that describes Jesus from 40 days old until 12 years old when we pick up in the following verses.

Jesus grew and became strong, filled with wisdom.

And the favor of God was upon Him.

Jesus grew in strength.

It is difficult to consider God made flesh needing to grow in strength.

See Colossians 1:15-17

This same God is now also fully man.

He has humbled Himself in the form of man and now has to grow in physical strength.

This same God that literally holds all things together - meaning that He maintains gravity, the universe, the earth, and everything by His glorious strength and power - is now having to learn to crawl and walk and toddle and eventually learn how to labor with His father as a carpenter.

Luke’s primary focus in this is to proverbially put some flesh on Christ here.

His goal is to let the readers know that although Christ is still fully God - He also became fully man.

But we are also told that not only did Christ grow in strength, but He grew in wisdom.

Again, looking at our verses in Colossians, by Him all things were created.

He knows everything and He has created everything.

Yet, His human mind had to grow like ours.

He had to grow in wisdom and knowledge.

This does not negate His deity.

He continued with two distinct natures.

As we see Him minister on earth, there are many moments when His divine nature informs His human nature.

He understands the thoughts of man as we see in one of His dialogues with the religious leaders:

His divine nature is also at work in His miraculous healings and in His casting out of demons as we will see as we move throughout this book.

But His human nature is also fully present as He needs rest and sleep.

The church formally addressed those who sought to teach erroneously regarding the two natures of Christ by forming a council in 451.

This council was the “Council of Chalcedon.”

The Council affirmed that Christ is “the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man.”

Council of Chalcedon - 451 AD

This Council was incredibly important because many sought to explain away that Christ was fully God or fully man.

And others tried to intermix the two natures.

These were heretical teachings that were not consistent with Scripture.

By making this statement of faith clear, it became easier for the church to recognize truth and error.

Before moving forward, I think we have another important teaching to consider in understanding how to read and interpret the Gospels.

For those of you who have read the Gospels multiple times, you might have noticed something that Luke omits between Day 40 of Jesus’ life and 12 years old.

This series of events is highlighted in great detail in Matthew 2 but isn’t mentioned at all in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew goes into great detail about the wise men visiting, the escape to Egypt, and King Herod’s slaughter of the innocent.

Omissions like these have left some to criticize the Bible.

They assert that if God wrote the Bible, then why are there omissions like this?

One cannot miss that although this is the inerrant Word of God, it was men that He wrote it through.

And we cannot miss the fact that each author had a certain audience that the book was written to.

Matthew, addressing the Jews, spent much of his gospel highlighting the Messianic prophesies - one of which was that Christ would come out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1, Matthew 2:15).

While Luke was writing primarily to a Gentile audience and wanted to stress that Jesus was fully human as well as fully God.

The Gentile audience would have been heavily influenced by Greek mythology and would have likely erred on the side of dehumanizing Jesus.

So Luke emphasized the incarnation.

But despite some heterogeneity of the Gospels, there is uncanny consistency in the accounts when taken as a whole.

J. Warner Wallace, author of Cold-Case Christianity, is a homicide detective who investigated the claims of the Gospels.

And his study concluded that the Gospels are accurate and reliable.

His book details many of these reasons, but I want us to hone in on one in particular.

He actually turns Gospel-critical scholars on their heads with his argument regarding corroborating evidence.

He asserts that true and reliable witnesses to a crime - when multiple witnesses are present - never have accounts that are exactly the same.

There is always some heterogeneity in what they remembered.

There is also the issue of perspective.

Each witness might have been in a different location and saw the incident from a different angle and view.

If multiple witnesses gave the exact same account to the letter, this would actually mean that they all got together and made up a story.

True witnesses remember different parts of the account and investigators take each part and put them together like a puzzle to understand the full account.

The fact that the Gospels are not verbatim, have some heterogeneity, and yet remain remarkably consistent actually serves to show that they are more reliable!

I pray that you always hold the Scriptures in high regard and understand them to be the inerrant Word of God.

Getting back to our Scripture and next point we see that...

Scripture References: Colossians 1:15-17, Luke 5:22, Matthew 2, Hosea 11:1, Matthew 2:15

II.

Christ Being Fully God and Fully Man… Grew in Subjection (41-51)

Time would fail us to go through the Christological significance of the Passover in the depth it deserves, but the Passover is seen instituted in Exodus 12:1-19.

It is here that the Israelites are set free from slavery in Egypt during the tenth plague sent upon the land.

Those in Israel are commanded to sacrifice a lamb and place the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of their homes.

This blood sacrifice allowed for “the destroyer (Exodus 12:23)” to pass over their homes.

Those without the lambs blood, or the Egyptians, were not so fortunate and every first born was killed by the destroyer.

The lamb was a foreshadowing of Christ who is the sacrificial lamb as John the Baptist proclaims in John 1:29:

How beautiful is this parallel and understanding here as Jesus, along with His parents, goes to the Feast of the Passover.

He is celebrating the feast that points to His own death on the cross that is to come.

We now know that by His death on the cross, death can now passover those who are in Christ.

Those who have believed, placed their faith in Jesus Christ, and repented of their sins.

And being twelve years old as seen in verse 42, they went up according to custom.

At twelve years old, Jesus would have been beginning to make the transition into manhood.

Although 13 years old was the official transition into manhood, 12 was pivotal in making this transition.

This trip was also significant because it was tradition that the parents of a 12-year old boy would bring him to the temple to show him around and get him acclimated and prepared for the following year transition into being a recognized man in Jewish culture.

As we read this, we cannot help but think ‘how did they lose Jesus!’

Actually, in my dad-like humor, I spent a little time trying to place myself in these frightened parent’s shoes.

Can you imagine going to God and telling Him you lost His one and only Son?

I can imagine that being terrifying!

Luckily, God knows where He is.

He wasn’t searching for Him.

But these poor parents sure were!

And they had already went a day’s journey or some 25 miles away before they noticed He was absent!