I Believe in Jesus Christ
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Introduction:
Introduction:
For this term we’re looking at the Apostle’s Creed, which is a document that comes down to us from the Early Church. The reason this document exists is that it serves as a summary of Christian belief. In other words, this document outlines all the essential parts of Christian belief. Those things that, if you don’t believe them, you’re not a Christian. The necessary conditions for being called a Christian.
In our first study we looked at what it means to believe, and what things make up Christian belief. We saw that belief has three parts. Firstly, it needs to change our minds so we see that what Christianity claims is true. We need to actually regard the claims of the Bible, and the Bible itself, as true. Secondly, it needs to change our wills. It’s not enough to simply think that what the Bible says is true, we also need to let those truths change the way we live, so that we are obedient to what it says. Finally, it needs to change our emotions. We can’t simply know the truth and obey it, we need to actually love it, and we need to love God. He is very much the centre of Christianity, and thus, as Christians, the centre of our lives. Thus, it is appropriate that we love him.
Then, for the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at God himself. We saw that the creed tells us a few things about God. Firstly, he is our Father. Now, he is everybody’s Father in that he is the source of all being, but there is another, deeper sense in which he is the real loving Father of those who come to him and believe in him through Jesus Christ. Secondly, he is almighty. In this sense, God is able to do anything that is logically possible. He is powerful, supreme and sovereign. Finally, we see that he is the maker of heaven and earth. Now, this means that he created all the material reality we see around us. And we saw that this has one really awesome side-benefit. It means that everything has meaning. If God doesn’t exist, and the world came into being in some other, impersonal, way, then everything that happens is meaningless. Guided by nothing, and pointing towards nothing. But the fact that God, a personal being, is in control, means that everything that happens is being guided by him for a particular purpose. What a joy to serve such a God!
Now, this week what we’ll be looking at is Jesus Christ. If you look at your creed, you’ll see that he takes up a large section of it. And this is for good reason. You see, Jesus himself is nothing other than the very centre of our Christian faith. Even our name, Christian, means little Christ.
What the creed has to say about Jesus can be broken up into three parts:
Who he is
What he has done
What he is doing/will do.
For tonight, what we’ll be doing is looking at who he is, and what he has done.
Who He Is
Who He Is
So, our first question is who this Jesus is. You say, Dylan, that he’s the centre of the Christian faith. But who is this guy anyway? What makes him so special? Well, what I want to show you here is that this person is God’s Son, and he is our Lord.
So, let’s first see what it means for Jesus to be God’s Son. I’m going to say up front that this idea is a bit tricky. It’s not a simple thing to understand the Trinity, but it is a good thing to apply ourselves to every now and again. To take a look at this, we’ll be looking at John 1:1-4
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
And John 1:14
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
So here you see that there is this being called the Word. This being is with God, and yet is God. Complex, but the idea seems to be that they are at the same time one beind but different persons. But then later on we see that this Word is the one who dwelt among us, and here he is called the Son. Then he became flesh and dwelt among us. This is clearly referring to Jesus.
And we mustn’t lose sight of this. This is a big claim, but it’s also awesome. As Christians, we claim that the founder of our religion is no less than God himself, come in the Flesh. He is highly exalted, and we should praise him as such.
But the other thing we learn from the creed is that Jesus is the Christ, and our Lord. Now, I had somebody in Bible class the other week ask me if Mary and Jospeh were Mary and Joseph Christ. In other words, if Christ was Jesus’ last name. Now, this isn’t a silly thing to think. The way we talk about him it does sound like a surname. But it’s actually not. To call Jesus Jesus Christ is exactly the same as calling him Jesus the Messiah. It is, in other words, a title given to him showing that he is this figure the Jews were waiting for called the Messiah. Now, what did it mean for Jesus to be the Messiah? What ideas were encapsulated in this? There are three OT ideas that are included in this idea of Jesus as the Messiah.
The first is the idea that the Messiah would be the son of David. Now, David is considered to be Israel’s greatest ever king. He was a warrior par excellance. He was the one who extended the boarders of the promised land to the extent that they were promised by God. He was the one who kept them safe from the Philistines. He was also a man described by God as a man after God’s own heart. Now, the Jews were expecting somebody from the line of David to come again and reestablish the glory days of Israel. We see this in texts like Psalm 132:11
The Lord swore an oath to David,
a sure oath he will not revoke:
“One of your own descendants
I will place on your throne.
Another place is Psalm 89:33-36
but I will not take my love from him,
nor will I ever betray my faithfulness.
I will not violate my covenant
or alter what my lips have uttered.
Once for all, I have sworn by my holiness—
and I will not lie to David—
that his line will continue forever
and his throne endure before me like the sun;
So the Jews were waiting for a king like David to come and redeem them. By the time of Jesus they were waiting for a king to kick out the Romans. Now, the gospels are full of references to Jesus as son of David. In the genealogies of Matthew and Luke David is listed as one of Jesus’s ancestors. But there are other places as well. For example, in Mark 10:46-48
Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus (which means “son of Timaeus”), was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
The purpose of including this is to show that Jesus is indeed this son of David that the Jews have been waiting for.
The second one is the Son of Man. Now, this is Jesus favourite self-designation. He repeatedly refers to himself as the Son of Man. Now, this sounds like a reference to his humanity. He’s saying that he’s a human being, right? Well, sometimes it is. But a lot of the time, when Jesus is talking about himself in this way, he’s actually pointing to his divinity by referencing a figure from the book of Daniel who made up a part of the Jewish Messianic expectations. This comes from Daniel 7:13-14
“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
So you see, this Son of Man is a figure who approaches God and is given power to rule. Indeed, he accepts worship. He is clearly a divine figure. And so Jews, having read this chapter, were expecting somebody called the Son of Man to come. As I said a minute ago, Jesus gives himself this name regularly, and one of the clearest uses of it is in Mark 14:60-62
Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer.
Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”
“I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
Here you see Jesus at his trial claiming this important title for himself. He is being tried, about to be put to death, and he claims for himself the one title that will get him killed.
The third and final OT expectation that the Jews had of their Messiah came from the book of Isaiah. And it’s around a bunch of texts in that book that are all based around this character called the Suffering servant. Two important texts for this are Isaiah 61:1-4
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the Lord
for the display of his splendor.
They will rebuild the ancient ruins
and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities
that have been devastated for generations.
Here the servant outlines his role as the one who will proclaim the Lord’s favour. Again, in Luke 4 this is exactly the text that Jesus uses to draw his opening sermon from. He is claiming this role for himself. But the clearest joining of Jesus and this text comes in Isaiah 53. I’m not going to quote it, because it’s long. But read it for yourself. It describes the death of the servant for the sake of others, and it sounds so much like Jesus that as soon as Christians began working with it, they understood that Jesus was the one to whom it was referring.
So, what we’ve seen is that Jesus is God’s Son, and he’s also the Messiah. And his being the Messiah means he is the son of David, who will establish a new Israel. He is the Son of Man, who is divinely given all power and authority to rule, and then he is te suffering servant, who suffers and eventually dies for the sake of bringing people to their God.
What Jesus Did
What Jesus Did
Okay, you may be thinking, but how do I know that this person that you’ve been describing is the Jesus from the New Testament? Well, that’s when we look at the creed again. You’ll see that from the creed that there are a couple of historical events that are mentioned. These are mentioned so that we see that this Jesus who is the Son of God and the Messiah is also the one who lived on the earth. Firstly, there is the virgin birth, and secondly there is the resurrection.
Now, the virgin birth is one of the stranger aspects of the New Testament, but the fact that it is strange is certainly not reason to doubt it by itself. The simple idea is given in Matthew 1:18-19 and Luke 1:31-33
You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
The fact that Jesus was born this way is certainly evidence that he is no ordinary individual, but even more significant to this fact is his death. The creed gives us a barebones account, much like the one given in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-5
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.
Now, this is the very centre of the Christian faith, that this man Jesus, the Messiah and the Son of God, not only came to earth and performed a ministry of miracle working, but actually died on a Roman cross for our sins. More than that, that he was raised again in power.
Thing is, while this is all very cool, it doesn’t seem super significant to us. Why do I care if Jesus is Lord, or if he died and rose again? What does this mean for me? Well, it is super significant, but what we’re going to do is explore this next week.