Why Jesus?
Colossians 1:15-23
Who was Jesus video?
Title Slide On the one hand we are part of a culture which has discredited Jesus and who he was. On the other hand, we live in a culture which has distorted and watered down the teachings of Jesus. We have been told that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere. But the suicide bombers in Iraq and Israel are about as sincere as you can get. You see, sincerity doesn’t equate with truth in one’s beliefs and spiritual journey. So this question today Why Jesus? What makes Jesus unique is not only important to what we believe but it is at the heart of who we are as Christians. Today, we’re going to look at the uniqueness of Jesus through four names associated with Jesus, names that Jesus either used of himself or that the Gospels used of Jesus.
First Slide Point 1 The first is the son of God. Colossians 1:15,19. “The son is the image of the invisible God (in other words, Jesus is the picture or photograph of the God whom no one has seen). For God was pleased to have all of his fullness in him.” Have you ever noticed that there are some people you can look at and just tell who their parents are? You can look at a child and say with assurance, I know who your father is or I know who your mother is? Children carry the genetic code of their parents. You know the old saying, A chip off the old block. This is what the Bible means when it says that Jesus is the exact replication of God’s being. Slide: Jesus is the exact replication The disciples knew they had never seen or been around someone like Jesus before. So much so that when they looked at Jesus they knew they were seeing God. To know him is to know God. To experience him is to experience God. To believe in him is to believe in God. So seeing Jesus as the son of God allows us to see God in a way that nothing else can.
Slide Picture of God as Judge. When you have an encounter with Jesus Christ, it revolutionizes your picture of God. Before Jesus, the Jews understood God as someone who was far off, all powerful and judge over the world. Slide: He is our Father, we are his children. But then Jesus came along and called God ‘Abba’ which means father or more appropriately, daddy. In fact, calling God Father was one of the things that got Jesus in trouble with the religious authorities of his day. It was one of the reasons they wanted to crucify Jesus because they said, How can you as a human being dare to talk to God in such intimate terms? They couldn’t believe that Jesus would address God who was all powerful, holy and judge over all. But Jesus said, No, call him father or daddy. This is the type of relationship that God wants to have with you. You can think of God as only judge but when you see God as Father or daddy, it radically changes your outlook and understanding of God.
Slide: Picture of Jesus and the adulterous women. John 8:1-11 Do you remember the story of the adulterous woman and she has been caught in act and brought in the middle of town to be stoned to death for committing such a horrendous crime against God. With stones in their hands and ready to throw, Jesus comes to her and says, “I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more.” This is the image of God Jesus painted for us in his words and actions, not a God who condemns but one who redeems and restores and heals.
Slide: I am the way….. When Jesus says, “I am the way , the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” The problem has been that the institutional church has used this as a gate or door to an exclusive club of believers. This is what Jesus meant by “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Giovanna and I have been married for 14 years and we dated 5 years prior to that though she says it was much longer than that. See what she has to put up with? But for her or anyone to spend almost 20 years with me, I know she loves me. But if I don’t trust her love, then who loses out? Me. I’m never going to enjoy the fullness of her love or the depth of intimacy with another person unless I fully trust her love. And that is exactly what Jesus is saying to us. Unless you come to me, you will never know God as daddy and instead always know him as judge. You will never know the liberating love of a father. Jesus shows us that a relationship with God is not something formal and distant but rather something close and intimate. An encounter with Jesus revolutionizes your thinking of God and your experience of Him. So Jesus as son of God gives us a picture of God like we have through none other.
Slide: Point 2. Second is son of man. Where son of God allows us to see more clearly God, son of Man helps us to see ourselves better, our value and our potential. Christians have two major holidays, Easter which we celebrated last week and Christmas. Christmas is the time when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the incarnation, when God decided to become flesh. “the Word became flesh.”
In almost every religious tradition we demean or deny what it means to be human. They look at the body and say it is corruptible and sinful. But there is something good about flesh. We do not believe in the spiritual resurrection, we believe in the bodily resurrection. So often it seems we forget what the Bible begins with and that we are made in the image of God. I don’t believe God was saying that just spiritually or even metaphorically, but also our physical bodies are in the image of God too. There is something good about our humanness. Too often I have heard Christians say they can’t wait to die and get to heaven. Well, I can wait to get to heaven. I mean there’s alot of life that I have yet to experience. I want to experience my kids growing up. I want to experience what it is like to grow old with someone. I want to experience grandkids. Not everything in this life is bad. We are not here just to survive life but to enjoy it for what it is: a gift from God.
Charles Spurgeon recounted the story of a group of missionaries who went in the early 1700’s to Greenland desiring to convert the indigenous people there. He quoted them as going with this determination on their tongues, “These people are in such darkness that it cannot be of any use to preach Jesus Christ to them at first. They do not even know that there is a God, so let us begin by teaching them the nature of the Deity, showing them right and wrong, proving to them the need of the atonement for sin, and setting before them the rewards of the righteous and the penalties of the wicked.” Spurgeon said they went on for years without a single convert to Christianity. Here is Spurgeon’s account of what came next. “One day, one of the missionaries happened to read to a poor Greenlander the story of Jesus bleeding on the cross and how God had sent His Son to die, ‘that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life’. The Greenlander said, ‘Would you read that to me again? What wonderful words! Did the Son of God die for us poor Greenlanders that we may live?’ The missionary answered that it was so, and clapping his hands, the simple native cried, ‘Why did you not tell us that before?’”
Slide: Picture of ordinary Jesus. God thought so much of your humanness that he made the commitment to experience life as you. The Son of Man was born as a vulnerable baby. He lived life as a poor Jew. Isaiah said about the messiah, when he comes, you will have a hard time noticing him because there will be nothing special or extraordinary about his appearance. The Son of Man came as an ordinary person like you or me.
W. Paul Jones tells the story a woman who shared this story from her childhood as a polio victim: “When my mother left me in Sunday School, I always asked to wear her locket. She thought I like the locket. That wasn’t it at all. I knew I wasn’t worth coming back for, but I knew she would come back for her locket.” The little girl didn’t realize how valuable she was. She didn’t realize that the Son of God had come to earth so she might have known her real worth.
What Jesus does as the Son of Man is allow us to see and embrace our possibility and potential. “The things I do, you’ll do, and greater things than me.” If Jesus, who was fully human, could accomplish the things he did in his life, then imagine what you could do in your life. Jesus says, “Step out! Take risks! I’m going to be with you!” As son of Man, Jesus calls us to live life as a gift from God and do something incredible with it. “The Son of Man came eating and drinking and you say here’s a glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus didn’t just come to save us for heaven but he came to liberate us to live life. We need to live our live as if today was our last.
Slide Third is servant of all. Jesus came as a servant of all so we can understand and find life’s meaning. Matthew 20 says, “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many” The kingdom of God that Jesus came to establish stands in great contrast to world which says that value comes from the accumulation of things, experiences and the pursuit of happiness. Jesus says when we follow him with purpose and serve others then life explodes with meaning. It’s filled with adventure. Jesus calls us to join him in being life giving by serving others in this life. It’s through Jesus that we find life meaning like we can in no other. Jesus calls us not just to come and celebrate and lift up his name, but to embrace his servant lifestyle. It’s so easy to fall into the thinking that all we need to do is come to worship each week and we’ve fulfilled our God commitment and done everything he’s asked of us. You don’t come here on Sunday mornings to receive, you come here to get recharged so that you might have something to give, in a world that too often and too easily just sucks the life right out of you. There is no such thing as a non serving Christian.
Pay it Forward is about a 7th Grader’s plan to make a difference in the world. On the first day of school, his social studies teacher challenges the class with this assignment: “Think of an idea to change our world—and put it into action.” Trevon’s idea is called “Pay it Forward”. He immediately puts it into action by helping a homeless drug addict. As the scene opens the homeless man is trying to explain to Trevon’s mother what is going on.
Slide: Fourth is savior of the world. It is through Jesus as Savior that we can experience true peace. Happiness is a false goal in life. What is the purpose in life according to the world: happiness and meaning through the accumulation of things. The problem is that happiness depends on your circumstances. I’ve never had all the circumstances lined up right at the same time in all of my 42 years. There is always going to be something that’s not right or not where I want it to be. The key is independence of circumstances that you may find yourself in. Some of you in this room right now may be going through the most difficult time of your life yet Jesus Christ promises you a peace in your life in the midst of the worst trials of life that defy comprehension. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven by making peace (not happiness) through his blood shed on the cross.”
Christian Cheong tells the story of a pastor’s wife who was very afraid to fly. Her husband asked to pray for her and her fear. "Let Him know you’re afraid of flying, and God will help you." Over time, she overcame the fear. One day, she was flying with her friend through a violent storm in a small plane. He was sweating it out while she was fast asleep. When they landed, he asked her, "How could you sleep so peacefully?" She replied, "I’ve learned to trust Him. He changed me. He has given me that kind of peace." And then he writes, Sometimes God calms the storm, but most of the time He lets it rage - and calms us! Don’t be discouraged when you have to turn your fears over to God, again and again. That’s how trust is learned.
Slide: picture of Jeff Streuker In 1993, Jeff Strueker was a US Army Ranger posted in Mogadishu, Somalia. Today he is Chaplain with the 82nd Airborne. But for him Oct 3-4, 1993 were the defining moments of his life. He was one of the troops called on to go into the center Mogadisu to secure a building as part of a larger operation. The movie “Black Hawk Down” came out about a year ago chronicling the events of those two days. In the first trip into the city he and most of his friends got out through a hailstorm of bullets. One man was shot and killed. It was then that he felt the fear. He began to pray. The humvee was painted with blood as they escaped the city with their dead and wounded comrades.The news soon worsened. A helicopter was shot down. The team received orders to return to the melee. Yet, his men understandably couldn’t fight in the bloody humvees. Struecker spent the next 30 to 45 minutes cleaning. No running water. Only sponges and buckets. "I began to talk to the Lord. I thought I was going to die," he said. Feeling his fear grow, he began to ask God to protect him. But his prayer soon changed.
"I’ll never forget this for the rest of my life. ... A scene appeared in the landscape of my mind. The scene was Jesus in the Garden. ... He clearly and honestly knew that he was going to die. ... He also showed that he did not want to go to that cross and die. And I knew that I didn’t want to die that night. But Jesus courageously said, ’God, not my will, but yours be done.’ "If I die tonight, that’s fine, as long as your will is done," Struecker said. For the first time in his life, Struecker -- who had been a Christian since age 13 -- was prepared to die. "God spoke to my mind and my heart and said, ’I’ve been protecting you every day of your life,’" Struecker said. "He did not tell me, ’You will live through the night.’ He simply showed me my life has always been in his hands."
Struecker and his men returned to the field of fire in Mogadishu that night and fought with a God-given courage. The sergeant first class would later be awarded the Bronze Star Medal "V" for valor. "I fought differently that night than everybody else ... because of my faith," Struecker said. God had given him a "supernatural peace" in the midst of pandemonium, further firefights and an ambush that nearly blew his humvee off the road. "I began to understand God’s omnipotent power," Struecker said. "He was orchestrating every single bullet that was fired that night. ... The peace that I had was not only for my own life, but for the lives of my soldiers. If any of them were to get shot, I still knew we were in God’s hands." And God chose to preserve Struecker that night.
Mike Slaughter tells the story of attending worship in Red Square in Moscow, one of the first public worship services since Lenin. There is a red brick building there and in it is Lenin’s tomb. Lenin is the modern father of Marxist ideology and the leader of revolution. Not long after the revolution, he declared God was dead and that Jesus never raised from the tomb. On that day, there was a banner of the risen Christ hanging over Lenin’s tomb, declaring Communism was dead. And Mike says, As I looked at this and realized there will be many religious leaders and political leaders who come and go. But there is one to whom the grave could not contain who always had the last word and his name is son of God, son of Man, the servant of all and the Savior of the world.
