Sermon Tone Analysis

Let us Consider

Who is this Christ?

Have you ever considered Him?

Let us indeed consider Christ.

I believe that every thing in creation hinges on who Christ is.

We have been journeying through the book of 1 John, and in that letter so much thought and exhortation is devoted to esteeming highly who Christ is.

Jesus of Nazareth was, and is a real man who was born in the town of Bethlehem, a town overshadowed by Jerusalem, the city of kings.

Is it possible that anyone of importance could be born in a haystack in Bethlehem?

Many of us have varying levels of experience with farm animals.

But if you’ve never raised farm animals, if you ever have driven through Casa Grande, or any dairy farm on a hot day, you know what Jesus’ entrance into the world smelled like.

But the infant would have smelled and heard other things.

He smelled His mothers hair as she held Him.

He would have felt his father’s rough carpenter hands carefully touch his cheek.

And then the sustainer of all life, who was yet sustaining all life, was sustained by His mother’s breast.

How could God have planned this?

How could God send His son to be humbled in this way?

The originator of the celestial lights we call space, who Himself is the fullness of light, was ushered into a dark world, the silent planet, by a great light not yet seen nor seen again.

The Alpha and the Omega had become the incarnate infant.

I AM was here.

I AM is here.

Jesus is the eternal Son of God.

What does it mean to be eternal?

We think of eternal as something that never ends.

In fact this is immortality

But who would someone be if they also had no beginning?

They would have to be the first.

Only one thing could come before everything else.

They would have to be God

God tells us His name

Eternity is nestled in that name.

I AM

Not I was and not will be

Not I will be but was not

I AM

To be I AM is to be absolutely first and last.

The same man who arrived as an infant in Bethlehem, appeared to His friend some 90 years after His birth.

The boy Jesus grew up.

The boy Jesus learned about life.

He learned about skinned knees, good food, and warm beds.

When He was a man he single handedly in a matter of a few years permanently altered the course of human culture, theology, ethics, and worldview.

This man, who had been a baby in Bethlehem stood before the Jews, who were waiting for a warrior king Messiah, and categorically declared His divinity.

He also permanently altered the human condition of those who love Him as he gasped His last on a Roman cross.

He also permanently altered the human condition of those who love Him as he gasped His last on a Roman cross.

He altered their condition from Death to life.

After Jesus died, He was resurrected by His Father, the one true God, and after visiting His disciples and commissioning them with making disciples of the whole world, He ascended into heaven where He sat down at the right hand of his father.

Two cannot be Alpha and Omega unless they are one.

The same man who arrived as an infant in Bethlehem, appeared to His friend some 90 years after His birth.

John, who wrote the letter we have been working through, was visited by the glorified Christ.

This Christ is the Jesus that will be seen by the world when he comes to gather His harvest.

This is the warrior king that the Jews awaited.

But he did not come to kill the Romans.

He came to kill death.

And He will come again to bring all things under His dominion, and forever banish the serpent, our adversary to the place prepared for those who hate God.

We are mortals.

We are seeds grown and hardened for planting, intended for the ground, and for a glorious Easter harvest after.

The first Reaper is a foe, rending soul from flesh, and oh, how we run from him, how we stop our breathing and cower behind locked doors in our mortal darkness.

But when our Brother takes up the scythe, there will be drums and sun and sweat mixed with laughter.

Then we will beg not to be Passed Over.

- N.D. Wilson

This Christ...

Revelation 1:12-

Revelation 1:

On appearing to His friend, John fell on his face.

Revelation 1

This king, this warrior, this man who was an infant once in Bethlehem, says that He is the first and the last.

Two cannot be Alpha and Omega unless they are one.

Revelation 1:

"Seeing and savoring this glory is the goal of our salvation."

- John Piper

We are to enjoy the radiance of the glory of God, forever.

“Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.” - C.S. Lewis

I long to kneel in a resurrection body, free from sin, before the glorified Christ, and for Him to touch me, and say “Do not be afraid.”

We do indeed look forward to this as Paul says in Titus

Titus 2:13

What do you look forward to and why?

This has been a year of maturity for our family.

Two ways that you take a tree from adolescence to maturity.

Pruning

Watering farther out.

God has pruned us and made us stretch for water.

Desert Son is not the only church, we are a small branch of the baobab tree that is Christ’s church.

Sometimes when a branch dies, the best thing to do is to remove it completely from the tree.

Your decision is determined to be good or bad when you cut the branch.

Was it dead?

Or was it alive?

My favorite example of this in literature comes from the Secret Garden.

In The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett, when the character Mary asks the servant Dickon if a particular plant was still alive, he replied: "It's as wick as you or me,"; and Mary remembered that Martha had told her that "wick" meant "alive" or "lively"."

In the following chapter, Dickon shows Mary how to tell if a branch is wick or dead.

… "A body might think this is dead wood, but I don't believe it is-down to th' root.

I'll cut it low down an' see."

He knelt and with his knife cut the lifeless-looking branch through, not far above the earth.

"There!" he said exultantly.

"I told thee so.

There's green in that wood yet.

Look at it."

"When it looks a bit greenish an' juicy like that, it's wick," he explained.

"When th' inside is dry an' breaks easy, like this here piece I've cut off, it's done for…"

Desert Son is wick.

The global church is wick.