The Son Of God Was Inconvenienced Series

HoHum:

Oak Ridge Boys sang a song written by Kyle David Matthew called Inconvenient Christmas some years back: Among the bills that I'd received was a postcard marked “Apologies, The Christmas gifts you ordered aren't in stock” So I packed up the kids for Grandpa's house Then a blizzard blew in and the car broke down So, we shared a quart of eggnog at a truck stop And I said, "Kids, this is unfortunate You think it's bad? Well it's inconvenient” But the most inconvenient Christmas ever was, Was the first one, when God came so far to give himself to us

So when the stress hits each December How it helps me to remember , God is with us most when things just can't get worse The most inconvenient Christmas ever was, was the first

WBTU:

When we talk about being inconvenienced, the one most inconvenienced, is the Son of God. Lord willing we will look at the details from the Christmas story over the next few weeks and see many that were inconvenienced, but by far the Son of God is more than inconvenienced, he is incarnated. What is the incarnation? The Zondervan Bible Dictionary says, “The doctrine of the incarnation teaches that the eternal Son of God became human, and that He did so without in any manner or degree diminishing His divine nature.” We could talk about John 1:14 that says, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us..” I believe a fuller treatment comes from Hebrews 2 and I am especially thinking of vs. 17 where it says, “He had to be made like his brothers in every way (in every aspect).”

Thesis: Use this as a starting point to highlight 3 stages of our Savior’s life and ministry

For instances:

I. The Incarnation

God’s Son had to become a man in order to rescue mankind. Vs. 14- Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity… God’s Son partook of “flesh and blood.” Many of us are familiar with the phrase “born to die”- meaning that God’s Son was born into this world as a man so that He could die as a sacrifice for our sins. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:20), placed in the womb of the virgin Mary, and was born in the normal way (Matthew 1:23- The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).). Even so, Hebrews 2 shows that His experience of humanness, temptation and suffering leading up to his sacrificial death is very important. The Bible says that Jesus after the age of 12, “grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). Think of what the Son of God went through. C.S. Lewis said this of the incarnation: “The Second Person in God, the Son, became human, was born into the world as an actual man- a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many pounds. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and created the universe, became not only a man but before that a baby and before that a fetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.” My Epic (a heavy metal Christian band, not fond of the music but love the lyrics) wrote “Lower Still.”: Look, he’s covered in dirt, the blood of his mother has mixed with the earth, and she’s just a child who’s throbbing in pain, from the terror of birth by the light of a cave, now they’ve laid that small baby where creatures come eat, like a meal for the swine who have no clue that he is still holding together the world that they see, they don’t know just how low he has to go, Lower still.

II. Human suffering and temptation

To begin, we see this in vs. 10: In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. “Perfect through what he suffered”. In the infinite wisdom of God, it would not have been fitting for the Savior of mankind to be unfamiliar with suffering. After all, life in this fallen world is so much suffering in the trenches, and we needed Someone to join us in the trenches. We need a “Man of sorrows” who is “acquainted with grief” Isaiah 53:3. We needed a man who would walk the path of faithful obedience, not just in “the world to come (heaven),” but in the messiness of this fallen world where obedience to God’s will is costly. We need a man who would be perfected by “learning obedience from what he suffered” Hebrews 5:8. Don’t trip over the language that Jesus learned and was perfected. In no way did Jesus have moral flaws that needed to be patched up. The point rather is that the sinless Jesus had to be “tested and tried” so that His true moral perfection and moral worth would increasingly shine forth against the backdrop of temptation and suffering. Jesus is unlike some who parachute down from the heavens into the stadium and think they have done something. The players are the ones who do something. Jesus was definitely on the playing field. He had to live the life of a man and build a human resume with moral capital related to actual and ordinary human experience: trusting the Father, loving people, speaking truth, enduring hardship, and bearing the cost. Then, as the perfect and perfected Man who passed every test and was completely surrendered to the Father’s will, He offered Himself upon the cross as the pure and spotless Lamb. Now, as Hebrews mentions in chapter 2, if the mission of God’s Son had been to bring salvation to angels, then He would not have come as a man. But look at vs. 16. Abraham’s offspring are those who live by faith. In order to help Abraham’s family, look at vs. 17. We need someone like us, a man and a brother, to help us, intercede for us, and make things right between us and God. After telling us that Jesus is a merciful and faithful high priest, the next verse tells us vs. 18.