Jesus is…Savior
1 John 4: 9 – 14
Did you hear the story of little Fruit Stand? When the 1960s ended, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district reverted to high rent, and many hippies moved down the coast to Santa Cruz. They had children and got married, too, though in no particular sequence. But they didn’t name their children Joe or Suzie. People in the mountains around Santa Cruz grew accustomed to their children playing Frisbee with little Time Warp or Spring Fever. And eventually Moonbeam, Earth, Love and Precious Promise all ended up in public school. That’s when the kindergarten teachers first met Fruit Stand. Every fall, according to tradition, parents bravely apply name tags to their children, kiss them good-bye and send them off to school on the bus. So it was for Fruit Stand. The teachers thought the boy’s name was odd, but they tried to make the best of it. "Would you like to play with the blocks, Fruit Stand?" they offered. And later, "Fruit Stand, how about a snack?" He accepted hesitantly. By the end of the day, his name didn’t seem much more odd than Heather’s or Sun Ray’s. At dismissal time, the teachers led the children out to the buses. "Fruit Stand, do you know which one is your bus?" He didn’t answer. That wasn’t strange. He hadn’t answered them all day. Lots of children are shy on the first day of school. It didn’t matter. The teachers had instructed the parents to write the names of their children’s bus stops on the reverse side of their name tags. The teacher simply turned over the tag. There, neatly printed, was the word "Anthony."
As we continue our series “Jesus is…”, today we fill in the blank with the title “Savior.” It is more than a title, though. Really, all we need to know about Jesus is summed up in his name, for the name “Jesus” means “Jehovah saves.” The name Jesus is actually the transliteration of the Hebrew “Joshua,” which means Jehovah saves. Names were an incredibly important part of first century culture. The naming of a child was as important as the birth of a child, for the name was to be more than a mere identifier of the child, it was to be a reflection of his/her very character. So it was with Jesus. The prophet Isaiah had predicted long before Jesus’ birth that God would send a savior. We are reminded every year at Christmas: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and he shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Is. 9:6). It would be an angel of the Lord who would appear to Joseph in a dream and reveal this savior’s name—Jesus. In Matthew’s Gospel we find this: “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:20b – 21). Everything we need to know about Jesus—his purpose, his life, his aim—is summed up in his name. Jesus is…Savior!
To proclaim Jesus is Savior suggests someone or something needs saving. When we proclaim Jesus is Savior, it is our acknowledgement that WE need saving. That brings up the whole issue of sin, and we’re just not so sure we want to talk about sin. Sin is so negative, and I want to come to church to get a pick-me-up. I want the preacher to make me feel good about myself. If the preacher tells me I’m a sinner, I won’t likely feel too good. And, I would say, “If that’s all the preacher says, you’re right.” But, how can we hear the Good News that Jesus saves if we don’t first hear the bad news that we need saving? Jesus is Savior means there is Good News!
Let’s look at this thing called sin. We can’t understand God’s story apart from sin. In the beginning, God created everything beautiful. As a matter of fact, God called it “boker tov”—very good. The devil was not content that things should be very good. Aspiring and failing to become God himself, he set about to destroy that which God created very good. His aim was the man and woman God created and placed in the Garden of Eden. It was God’s will that Adam and Eve would have anything they wanted except the fruit from the tree in the center of the Garden—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Satan tempted them to violate God’s will—to sin. Humanity has been sinning ever since!
A sin is any thought or action that falls short of God’s will. God is perfect, and anything we do that falls short of His perfection is sin. The Bible actually uses a number of word pictures to illustrate what this means. For example, it tells us that sin is like an archer who misses the target. The archer draws back the bow and sends the arrow on its way—but instead of hitting the bull’s-eye, it veers off course and misses the mark. The arrow may only miss it a little bit or it may miss it a great deal—but the result is the same: The arrow doesn’t land where it is supposed to land.
The same is true of sin. God’s will is like the center of that target—and when we sin, we fall short of His will or miss the mark. And this is something we do every day; as the Bible says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Even when we aren’t aware of it, we commit sin by the things we do (or fail to do), or by the way we think. This is why we need Jesus, for only He can save us.
Need we do anything else but look at the world around us to realize that something is desperately broken? Desperately broken in our world, and desperately broken in us. We thought education could save us, but we are in the midst of the information age. We have instant access to the great libraries of the world, and can communicate across the globe in immediately. We measure time, not in seconds now, but in nanoseconds. Yet, the more connection we have, the more isolated we become, choosing to spend our time in front of a screen absorbing information that fails miserably in changing us or our world. Well, it changes us, but not for the better.
We’ve foolishly thought politics could save us, but this 200+ year experiment we call America is in danger of being torn asunder because of the divisions that exist among us. Government cannot save humanity. We pour more money into institutions and programs in an effort to transform culture, and the more money we spend the more culture transforms us. The more money we spend on poverty, the more people fall below the poverty line. The more money we spend on education, the further our students fall behind. It’s not the teacher’s fault. We have great teachers doing their best to teach our children, but education is not the answer to what ails us.
My friends, if we are conscious of nothing else, we must be conscious of own weakness and helplessness. We are looking for salvation. We need “a hand let down to lift us up.” We need to be saved from ourselves; we need to be saved from the habits which have become our chains; we need to be saved from our temptations; we need to be saved from our fears and our anxieties; we need to be saved from our mistakes. In every case Jesus offers us salvation; he brings that which enables us to face time and meet eternity.
Watch this! In the center of sin is the “I”. The key to our salvation is deliverance from the “I.” I love what E. Stanley Jones says about this whole salvation thing. He puts it in proper perspective for us. Jones says: “The business of redemption is not to get us into heaven, but to get heaven into us; not to get us out of hell, but to get hell out of us.” We've worked so hard to stay out of hell that we've forgotten about the hell in us, but that's exactly what Jesus came to save us from!
A report came out of California concerning a stolen car. Police were staging an intense search for the car and the driver, even to the point of placing announcements on local radio stations to contact the thief. On the front seat of the stolen car sat a box of crackers that, unknown to the thief, were laced with poison. The car owner had intended to use the crackers as rat bait. Now the police and the owner of the Volkswagen Beetle were more interested in catching the thief to save his life than to recover the car. Our sin causes us to run from God, and we feel it is to escape his punishment. When we run from God, when we reject the salvation Christ came to offer, we’re not avoiding his punishment, we’re missing His love.
As the Apostle John wrote his letter to the early Christians who were scattered across the ancient near east because of persecution, he was writing to remind them that God’s love was the reason for their salvation. God’s love was the reason He sent His Son, Jesus. Throughout this passage in 1 John, he speaks of God’s infinite, matchless love. And, he says it is because we have a share of the Spirit that we know that we dwell in God. It is the work of the Spirit that in the beginning makes us seek God at all; it is the work of the Spirit that makes us aware of God's presence; and it is the work of the Spirit that gives us the certainty that we are truly at peace with God. It is the Spirit in our hearts that helps us to know God’s love.
The key to accepting God’s salvation is surrender. Jesus himself gives us the example. He surrendered himself on the cross. We bring the self and surrender it to him there. Andrew Murray says, “God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.” The Apostle Paul would say it this way: “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
Here’s an interesting point: Jesus is only referred to as Savior a total of fifteen times in the New Testament—FIFTEEN TIMES! Two-thirds of the books of the New Testament make no reference to him at all as Savior, including Romans and Colossians, which are the two most theological writings of the New Testament. But, that’s okay. They don’t have to refer to him as Savior because His name says it all—Jesus is…Savior! Is he yours?
