OPEN: (I put a copy of the covers of the “National Enquirer” and the “Globe” on screen side by side)
How many of you ever seen these magazines at the supermarket? These are what are known as “tabloid magazines.” As you can tell from the headlines, these are not reliable news sources. In fact, they are the original fake news outlets.
Now, would you expect me to go out buy these magazines? Of course not. Most if not all the material inside their pages are sensationalist stories which are entirely made up. I can’t trust them, and so I don’t want to build my thinking around what they tell me. I don’t want them influencing how I think.
In fact, there are many resources that I’ve got to be careful about. I once read that Abraham Lincoln had warned “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
And over my lifetime I’ve found I can’t trust everything a politician tells me, and I can’t always trust everything a salesman tells me. But oddly enough, over the years I’ve learned to even question things that experts tell me: Theologians, Ph.Ds., and even some scientists. It’s not that I believe these people are necessarily lying to me, but I’ve noticed that even these people can have biases they don’t realize they have. Or they may have built their thinking around false information that they believed they could trust.
But if that’s true – that I I can’t always trust even the experts - who can I trust? Who should I listen to?
Well Hebrews tells us I can trust Jesus. I should listen to Him! “In these last days (God) has spoken to us by his Son…” Hebrews 1:2
In the Gospels we’re told of the time Jesus took Peter, James and John up on a mountain where “he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. LISTEN TO HIM!" When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. "Get up," he said. "Don’t be afraid." When they looked up, they saw NO-ONE EXCEPT JESUS. Matthew 17:2-8
Jesus is the one we should look to. He’s the one we should listen to because He is the truth of God
John 1:17 says “For the law was given through Moses; grace and TRUTH came through Jesus Christ.”
At one point Jesus said “I AM the way, the TRUTH and the life…” John 14:6
So, if I want TRUTH in my life, I’ve got to start with Jesus. We can’t have REAL TRUTH in our lives… if we don’t have Jesus…. But what truth can Jesus give us that is superior to anything the world can give? Well, I thought about that, and discovered in this text today truths that the world can’t give to us and often doesn’t understand.
And the first truth is this: Jesus shows us WHO God really is. Hebrews 1:3 says “(Jesus) is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature…”
In essence, when you’ve seen Jesus you’ve seen God because Jesus IS God. In fact, that is the core of who we are. You can’t accept the fact that Jesus is God, you can’t be a Christian. That’s what Jesus said when He declared “I am the way, the truth and the life. NO ONE COMES UNTO THE FATHER except through me.”
Now, the rest of the world doesn’t agree with that (that Jesus is the only God). They look at all the other world religions and say: “You can’t be serious. You can’t say possibly say there aren’t any other gods. I mean…. seriously? How arrogant and self-righteous can you be?” They often view us with contempt and mock the very idea of Jesus being the only God.
Back in the 1800s there was a famous poem called “The Blind Men and The Elephant” (by John Godfrey Saxe). For decades Skeptics have used that poem to attack the idea that there’s only one way to view God (I put a graphic on screen that depicted the 6 blind men around the elephant touching the various parts of the elephant as described in the poem). As you can see, one blind man is near the ear, flaps like a fan, and deciding that the Elephant that he’s never seen must be like a fan. Another blind man is at the tusk, feeling it to be long and sharp and obviously like a spear.
I’m not going to read the poem this morning, but it starts out like this.
“It was - six men of Indostan - to learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind).”
As all 6 blind men touch the elephant, they sense the parts they touch are like a fan, a spear, a wall… etc.. For example, one of the lines says: “The Fourth reached out and felt about the knee. "'Tis clear enough the Elephant is very like a tree!" And the goes on and on like that.
And then, after all the blind men make their conclusions, the author says: “And so these men of Indostan disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was PARTLY in the right… ALL were in the WRONG! So, oft in theologic wars (conflicts over the nature of God), (people) rail on in utter ignorance of what each other means, And (prattle on) about an Elephant (that) not one of them has seen!”
The moral of the poem: Everybody who tells you that they know what God is like is partly right… but they are COMPLETELY wrong because no one has seen God.
But there one serious flaw in this poem, and the flaw is this: yes all the blind men in the poem were wrong, and all of them came to wrong conclusions. But no matter what conclusions they may have come to… IT WAS STILL AN ELEPHANT! The fact that they were wrong in what they concluded, didn’t change the fact that it was still an elephant!
If they could just see the elephant then they would know what it was like. Just as, if you could SEE GOD then you’d know what HE is like! Well, Jesus said: ‘Whoever has SEEN me has SEEN the Father’” (John 14:9). And John 1:14 “(God) became flesh and dwelt amongst us.”
If you want to see what God is like… look at Jesus. Everything Jesus DID in the Gospels were the Works of God. Everything Jesus SAID were the Words of God. Every act of mercy, and kindness, and love that Jesus showed: that was God in the flesh showing us how much God cares for us. So, when you look to Jesus, and you listen to Jesus, you’ve seen and heard God.
All the other world religions will tell you what they think god is like, but in Jesus - God became flesh so we could actually see what God was like. And that’s the first truth Jesus revealed - He showed us what God was like.
Now, the 2nd truth was this: Jesus showed us what WE are like.
ILLUS: I saw a meme on the internet recently that said this: “Everyone makes mistakes in life, but that doesn’t mean they have to pay for them the rest of their life. Sometimes GOOD PEOPLE make bad choices. It DOESN’T MEAN THEY ARE BAD, it means they are human.” (words capitalized by me to emphasize).
Now I understand what the meme was trying to say. But when I read that…and red flags went up all over the place because essentially it was saying – there are GOOD people, and there are BAD people. BAD people do BAD things because that’s what they’re good at… being bad. But GOOD people do GOOD things because that’s they’re good at…being GOOD. Now occasionally GOOD PEOPLE do BAD stuff, but that doesn’t mean they’re BAD people - it just means they made a mistake.
I’m sorry, that’s not the way it works. Romans 3 says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That mean’s you’ve sinned, I’ve sinned, every Sunday School teacher and Elder and Deacon, etc. we’ve ALL sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
In our text today we’re told “After making PURIFICATION for sins, (Jesus) sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” Hebrews 1:3. Jesus came to purify us from our sins – to purify ALL OF US of ALL OF OUR SINS!
That’s why, when Jesus came to earth, He spend all His time with a particular kind of people. Who did Jesus spend all His time with? With the bad people – the sinners, the prostitutes, and the tax collectors. Why? Because He came “to seek and to save what was lost." Luke 19:10
AND that’s a repeated theme in Scripture … we’ve all been bad people. Ephesians 2:3 says “WE ALL once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
We’ve ALL sinned! We’ve ALL fallen short of the glory of God. And each of us knows that’s true. Because every one of us has felt the need for their sins to be removed, cleansed, purified.
ILLUS: Have you ever been off by yourself, and suddenly you remember something you’ve done (ashamed)/said/thought and it’s like a wave of shame sweeps over you? Me too.
Someone once said: “Many people are controlled by past sins, past regrets, and past failures” (Warren Wiersbe).
ILLUS: I once saw a meme (we showed it on the screen) that said “The world drinks to forget. The Christian drinks to remember.” Every Sunday morning when we take communion, it’s the center of our worship. We do it every Sunday because every Sunday we need to remember that Jesus died for us to purify us from our sins. His body was broken and His blood was shed to forgive us of our past.
But the world doesn’t have that advantage. When those in the world struggle with their past – with their sins, regrets, and failure - they suffer from guilt and shame and self-hatred that never seems to go away. They can’t remove the past, so they seek to cover it by drinking it into oblivion. They’ll turn to alcohol, or drugs, or sex or entertainment. ANYTHING to avoid being alone with the badness they feel inside.
Someone once wrote a poem about that: “I wish that there were some wonderful place called the land of Beginning Again, Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches, and all of our poor selfish grief Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door and never put on again.” (Louisa Fletcher)
They WISHED for a place called the land of beginning again. But we don’t have to WISH for that, because we live there. When Jesus died on the cross He made it so we could live in the land of beginning again. And that’s the beauty of truth Jesus told us about ourselves. In voluntarily dying for our sins, Jesus showed us that He felt we were worth dying for. He revealed in that action that you and I were so valuable to God and God loved you so much that “He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
CLOSE: And so Jesus came to die/be buried/rise from the grave to remove all our sins, shame and guilt, and to offer us the land of “beginning again.”
And that’s what baptism is all about. Romans 6:4-5 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might WALK IN NEWNESS of life.”
When we decide to become Christians we have decided to DIE to our sins. And what do we do with dead things? We bury them. We don’t put a little dirt on them, or pour a shovel-full of dirt on them… we bury them completely. And so, in baptism, people are lowered into a watery grave. But do we keep them there under water? No, of course not. They arrest you for stuff like that. The person who has died to their sins and been buried with Christ in that water, rises up again to “newness of life.” That’s our promise from God.
INVITATION
