Christology Matters

Announce the text. I love how the Holy Spirit uses John to write his gospel account. We know John and James were given that nickname “sons of thunder” by Jesus, and its almost like you get a sense of that in his writings. The synoptic gospel accounts start off with the genealogy of Jesus, and the birth of Jesus or the birth of John the baptist. While John just kicks your door in with this intense statement about Jesus as the word and these 18 verse of dense theology about Jesus and his divinity, so lets read the text. READ

If you look up the greatest sermon Billy Graham preached, at least according to you tube views, you will find the sermon “Who is Jesus?” Its a fun sermon to listen to, I don’t listen to a lot of Billy Graham sermons to be quite honest but this one is fun to listen to. In the middle of his sermon he bellows out in his great Billy Graham preaching voice, which I am not going to try and impersonate, “Who is Jesus? that's the question? Jesus Christ who are you?” What a question that is. That’s the biggest question for all those people in that stadium whatever year Billy Graham gave that message. That’s one of the biggest question we can ask our neighbors. In Wilkes you’re probably not going to find somebody that has never heard of Jesus. But if you begin to ask outside of our church community “Who do you think Jesus is?” you’re going to hear an array of things. We start asking that outside of Wilkes and into a city, into a city on the west coast, into a city in another country and the answers get more diverse. At the university it may be his is part historical figure that has been mixed with myth. In the middle east you may hear he is a prophet, and if you go down to the Church of latter days saints building that is near me house or the local Jehovah witness population that are quite active in Wilkes the answers start to get even more muddied. So who is Jesus, and what does scripture say about who Jesus is. In the verse 18 verse John makes some very theological statements about who Jesus is. This is a dense passage, but there are three specific views about Jesus this passage reveals to us that I want to discuss.

Jesus is God

As demonstrated by the text...

The line in the sand

Why does this theology matter?

The cross

Salvation

Satan's perversion of the truth into the hope of Jesus.

Jesus is our Hope.

Jesus as light

the light overcomes darkness

the world is blind

Those who received him

born of the will of God

this drives me to my knees

Grace upon grace

Jesus can be Known

God can be known. The father can be known

Jesus dwelt among us.