Who is Jesus?
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Illustration: How do you prepare if you know someone important is coming over for dinner? You’d probably clean and organize and try to make the house look as nice as possible. You’d set the table well and prepare or buy the best meal you could. You’d prepare to impress. Now how about a different situation. You’ve just had a new baby and you’re exhausted. The house is a disaster. Your mother is coming over to support you. That’s a very different situation isn’t it? You’d probably leave the mess and hope that she’d help you clean it up.
Remember the situation we left with this morning? Humanity is exhausted and messy and hopeless to fix the situation themselves. Though most if not all of them aren’t expecting it, God is about to “come over.” He sees the mess that we’re in and He wants to help. So did we receive Him like a dignitary, or like a parent? Let’s see what John, one of Jesus’ disciples, describes God’s coming to earth.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify about the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but he came to testify about the light.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John testified concerning him and exclaimed, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me ranks ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”) Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.
This passage of Scripture is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing ever penned, both for it’s skillful prose and for the amazing truths that it conveys. We are broken and hopeless and doomed to die. God hears us call out for deliverance. Jesus is that Deliverance. Jesus comes to be born on earth as God made flesh, the ultimate humble move, leaving heaven to live on earth and be born as a human being. Then He goes on to live the perfect life, showing us the greatest example of the people that God created us to be. Finally He made a way for all of us to be made children of God, which He accomplished by dying on the cross for our sakes, taking the penalty we deserved and then defeating death by rising from the grave.
Jesus is God Made Flesh
Jesus is God Made Flesh
Illustration: Imagine someone was writing a novel and somehow managed to give their characters free will to make their own decisions. That would be pretty amazing, huh? But then imagine they started getting things all wrong. They started doing evil things and messing up the story all over the place. The author chooses to enter the story himself and set things right.
This is kind of what went down between God and humanity. Now the metaphor breaks down in some places, but the key thing is the idea of the creator entering His creation. God made the world and He made it good, but He gave humanity free will. They used that free will to sin and cause the fall of humanity and took the world with them. Yet God in His love could not abandon them to their fate, and instead decided to enter the world Himself.
Here’s what our passage says about that this morning:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.
So this “Word” was in the beginning with God, but also was God, and everything was created through Him. If we flash back to the creation of the universe in Genesis, we see God create the world how? By speaking. He says “let it be” and then it is. So John is saying that God’s Word that created the universe was with Him and also was Him. But then something truly amazing happens, in verse 14 John writes:
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
The very Word of God, which is somehow with God and is God at the same time, became flesh and lived among people. That’s a pretty huge idea there. Interestingly, the word “dwelt” there is translating a greek word that means basically tented. He set up His tent among the people that He created.
This is too big an idea for us to really truly understand. How could God enter the creation and inhabit a human body and still retain His Godhood? What does it mean to be fully man and fully God? Much of this is left a mystery in the pages of Scripture. There are many things in the Bible which are left mysterious, because they aren’t the main point. The main point is that God loved us so much that He saw our hopeless state and decided to come down Himself and fix it.
Though few if any of the Jewish people predicted this from the prophecies, once you see it and look back in retrospect you can see it clearly. This is what is meant by Isaiah 9:6
For a child will be born for us,
a son will be given to us,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
He will be named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
How could a human born be called mighty God? Only the incarnation can explain it. The incarnation meaning the becoming flesh, the embodying of God on earth. This is who Jesus is.
Likely this is very familiar, seeing as how we celebrate God coming to earth every year at Christmas time. That’s what we’re celebrating. The amazing miracle that the creator of the entire universe loved us enough to come to earth, and to do so in the same way we all do, as a tiny humble baby relying on the help of others. The ultimate act of humility, which should inspire humility in us. If God Himself would be that humble, surely we should too?
From that humble upbringing Jesus would go on to live His life in such a way as to earn redemption for all of us, because:
Jesus is the Perfect Man
Jesus is the Perfect Man
Illustration: I think we can all agree that leadership has a big impact when it comes to teams and groups of people. A good leader can lead people to success and inspire teamwork. A bad leader can drag a whole organization down and sabotage the team members who are doing their best.
This is even more the case when it comes to humanity as a whole. We had an original leader, our ‘head’ who represented all of mankind when it mattered most. His name was Adam. How did he fare as a leader? Well, he did the one thing God told him not to do and made us all sinful and the world a broken place. So now it’s time to fire Adam and find a new leader. The trouble is, he corrupted all of mankind born from him. So where are we to find a human being who can be our new leader? This new leader has to not only be able to live life perfectly the way we can’t, but has to be able to redeem all of us too. Who could possibly fit that bill?
You probably know where I’m going with this, right? It’s Jesus. He’s the only one who can possibly be the new head of mankind and do what Adam could not. He’s the one that John describes this way in John 1:4-5
In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.
He is a light shining into the darkness. The hope of the world. This is only possible because of the incarnation, because He became human. His humanity is how He is able to justly represent us as the new leader of mankind. It’s also how we were able to observe His example of what it means to be the people we were meant to be. In other words,
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John testified concerning him and exclaimed, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me ranks ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”) Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.
Jesus lived life the way we all should have. Full of grace and truth and revealing God to the world - being the perfect image bearer that we were meant to be. This is important because it earns what He does on the cross which we will talk about next, but stick with me here. In order to save humanity He had to be perfect. In this way He can be the worthy bridge between us and God. In Hebrews the author describes Jesus as the “great high priest,” a High Priest being the person who represented mankind’s connection with God. In describing Jesus’ qualification to be our great high priest the author of Hebrews says this in Hebrews 4:14-15
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus the Son of God—let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.
In other words He passes the test that we failed. He is worthy to stand before God, but is also truly a human being. So He is the only human being who can represent us before Him and plead our case to Him.
That’s the reason that we follow after Him. That’s the reason we try to be like Him. When I talked in the last point about immitating His humility, this is why. He stands as the ultimate example of what it means to be truly human. He is humanity without the fall, the pattern after which we are called to live. If we are the broken mirror Jesus is the exact image of the God we were meant to reflect, so let’s reflect Him to the best of our abilities.
Yet being an example was not all that Jesus came to do. After all as hard as we try to be like Him, we still fail and mess up. Just showing us how to live the perfect life was not enough to rid us of the just debt we owed for sin or to solve the problem of our broken nature.
Jesus Died and Rose To Save Us
Jesus Died and Rose To Save Us
Illustration: Remember this morning I talked about how some people end up in a hopeless situation where they have a debt they can never pay off? Where they are forced to work for their lenders for pay smaller than their interest? Imagine you were put into this situation, and someone comes along and says to you, “hey, this is how you stay out of debt. I’m going to live as an example for you.” That wouldn’t do much for you, would it? What if instead they said “hey, I’m going to legally take your place and pay your debt for you with my massive riches. You’re free. Now you can live in a better way.”
So if that situation is an analogy for our own spiritual situation, hopelessly in debt and unable to earn our way out of it, than we need someone spiritually rich to step in and pay our way out of it. That person needs to be very, very, very rich to pay for the sin debt of the entire world, don’t they? And consider the nature of the debt we owe. We don’t owe God money because of the wrong we did. What did God say was the penalty for sin in the garden? Genesis 2:17
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”
So the debt that was owed for our sin is death. Someone needed to come and die in order to satisfy God’s perfect justice on all of us who have sinned. So who is worth enough to pay for all of us, and yet human enough to actually represent us? Well I think we’ve seen this answer coming, haven’t we? It’s of course, Jesus Himself.
He came not just to be the perfect example of what it means to be human the way we were intended to be, He also came to pay that debt we owed. And He paid it on the cross. Why? Out of love for us. He didn’t want us to pay the penalty for our sin becaues He loved us, so He paid it for us. As John says in another of His works in 1 John 4:7-10
Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Jesus revealed God’s love for us by dying on our behalf. He was the atoning sacrifice, in other words His death restored our relationship with God. Yet Jesus didn’t stay dead, did He? He not only died for us, but also was raised from the dead for us, making a way for us to live a brand new life the same way that He did. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
As the new representative of mankind Jesus’ resurrection guaruntees our resurrection. It gives us hope that we will live again. If Jesus had only died, we'd know He loved us. But we wouldn't know He had conquered death. The resurrection is God's declaration that the debt really has been paid, sin really has been defeated, and death really has lost its claim. This is the way that Jesus accomplishes what John refers to in our guiding passage this morning in John 1:11-13
He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.
So we go from being broken hopeless sheep, described as never doing what’s right and doomed to death, to being children of God. Born not the ordinary way but the spiritual way, reborn through the atoning death and the victorious resurrection of Jesus Christ, so that we can read this passage as our hope and inspiration for the future, 1 Corinthians 15:54-57
When this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will take place:
Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, death, is your victory?
Where, death, is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
So this is the gift that Jesus is offering all of us this morning. This is what He came for, what we celebrate every year through Christmas and Easter is summarized for us today. The birth that brought God to us, the life that showed us true humanity, and the death and resurrection that rescued us from our sins. So the question remains, will we receive Him?
Conclusion
Conclusion
So let’s put it all together, friends. We came into this evening with a problem. We knew that we were made to be image bearers of God, but that we were broken and couldn’t fix ourselves. We have seen now the solution. Jesus was born, God becoming flesh in humility because of His great love for us. He was the perfect human being, flawlessly showing us how we ought to be living ourselves. And after living the life we should have lived, He died the death that we deserved. He paid the penalty for our sins, but also won the victory over death by rising from the dead on the third day.
So God did for us what we could never do for ourselves. He made a way. Now we see the beauty of the simple words of John 3:16
For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
Those are famous words for a reason. God loved us and gave us His Son so that we could have eternal life. You’ll notice though that this life isn’t given universally. There’s a requirement, isn’t there? It’s for those who believe in Him. God invites us to a response.
Tomorrow morning we’re going to talk about what this response looks like. For tonight I want you to reflect with thankfulness on what God has done for us and seriously consider your belief of it. Some of you maybe have been faithful Christians for years, for those of us who already have put our faith in Jesus tonight can be a reminder of our convictions. We say we believe it, but to we live as though we do? Are we sharing it with others as though it’s true?
For those who have not yet put your faith in Jesus I want you to consider this man who died for you on the cross. Consider the eternal life that He’s offering you. Consider whether you’re willing to follow Him, and we’ll go from there in the morning.
Let’s pray.
