Over the summer we looked at what the Bible had to say about false teaching and teachers in our series Testing the Spirits. This led us into a study of the person of Jesus Christ as we looked at what the Bible had to say about His preeminence and supremacy.
We looked at verses like Colossians 1:15 where Paul refers to Jesus Christ as “the image of the invisible God” and emphasizes that to created beings, Christ is the visible representation and manifestation of God.
Jesus is God in the flesh. Yet, He wasn’t always manifested in the flesh. At some point in time, Jesus, as God, had to invade time and space and take upon Himself a body.
John 1:14 says, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
The Bible not only teaches that Jesus is God, it teaches that He is King over us and over His creation.
John 18:37 – “Therefore Pilate said to Him, "So You are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say correctly that I am a king For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."”
Isaiah 9:6 – “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
John 12:15 – “Do not fear, O Daughter of Zion! Look! Your King is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” (A fulfillment of the prophecy found in Zechariah 9:9)
1 Timothy 6:15 – He is “the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords.”
Revelation 19:16, “And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, "KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS."”
Jesus is God and He is King of kings yet He decided to become flesh and dwell among us.
In this sermon I would like to attempt to answer two very important questions: “What does this mean for Him?” and “What does this mean for us?” Chris Tomlin’s Christmas song, A King Like This answers both these questions. I’ve been listening to it on and off for the last few weeks and will lift some of the verses from it as I preach through this message.
What does this mean for Him?
My heart is still feeling the effects of the events that led up to my mother home going. Over the last several months she was declining in her health and began to lose her mobility and cognition. There would be times when she would constantly refer to me or one of my siblings as “Donald” and then correct herself. Donald was her brother that had died some 15 or 20 years ago. She knew her mind was having difficulty processing information and remembering things and she would start crying each time she had problems with thinking or communicating.
She was also losing her ability to walk, yet up until a few days before she passed, she persistently removed her hospital gown in an attempt to “get dressed” so she could leave that place. We found ourselves wrestling with our mother and pushing her legs back into the center of the bed and struggling to find a way to keep her from removing her garments.
Jesus, who had come to earth as God and King, put on a body. He was God but He restricted the independent use of His deity, His divinity, His omnipotence, His omnipresence and His omniscience so that He could put on and confine Himself to a frail human body in order to one day do His redemptive work on a cruel rugged cross.
But He didn’t put on the flesh of a fully grown and matured human being, He put on the flesh of a weak, very much dependent embryo who would grow in the womb of a woman named Mary, who would one day give birth to Him and lay Him in a farm animal feeding trough that served as a crib.
A King like this, majesty laying in a manger.
Only 400 years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Augustine of Hippo said, “Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.”
A King like this, the highest Name and the song of heaven; A King like this born of
Flesh into our suffering.
Jesus not only took upon Himself a body of flesh, He entered into our suffering.
He suffered by experiencing all the spiritual, emotional and physical limitations of flesh—
* Satan and his demons sought to tempt Him to sin just as they seek to tempt us to sin.
* His flesh yearned for food and drink just as our bodies do.
* He was subjected to feelings of loneliness just as we are.
* He got tired and needed to rest and sleep just as we do.
* When people betrayed Him, He felt the pain of that betrayal just as we do.
* When people got sick and died, He wept just as we weep when we lose a loved one.
Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted just as we are, yet without sin.”
C.S. Lewis wrote, “God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance. We should also have missed the all-important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage, that would have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incarnate at all.” ? C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis
Not only did King Jesus come into this world in order to enter into our suffering, He entered into this world to suffer for us.
1 Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.”
He came into this world to suffer for sins, our sins!
Imagine the holy Son of God, who never sinned being made sin. Imagine the holy Son of God, who was from all eternity one with the Father, now in a state of separation or exclusion from the Father?
In the Gospel of Matthew 27:46, the author records these words, “And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is, My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?”
Pastor John MacArthur says, “In this unique and strange miracle, Jesus was crying out in anguish because of the separation He now experienced from His heavenly Father for the first and only time in all of eternity. It is the only time of which we have record that Jesus did not address God as Father. Because the Son had taken sin upon Himself, the Father turned His back. That mystery is so great and imponderable that it is not surprising that Martin Luther is said to have gone into seclusion for a long time trying to understand it and came away as confused as when he began. In some way and by some means, in the secrets of divine sovereignty and omnipotence, the God-Man was separated from God for a brief time at Calvary, as the furious wrath of the Father was poured out on the sinless Son, who in matchless grace became sin for those who believe in Him.
The Old Testament prophet Habakkuk declared of God, “Thine eyes are too pure to approve evil, and Thou canst not look on wickedness with favor” (Hab. 1:13).
God turned His back on His Son when Jesus was on the cross because He could not look upon sin, even-or perhaps especially-in His own Son.”
What does coming in the flesh mean for King Jesus? It means the Creator of the Universe taking upon Himself the limitations of a human body. It means entering into our suffering. It means suffering for the sins of those who would one day believe on Him.
What does it mean for us?
A King like this, a saving love that would not forsake us
Betrayed by a kiss and led to the cross for our forgiveness
Why would King Jesus, God the Son, leave the glory of heaven and take on flesh and enter into our suffering and die on the cross for our sins?
To obey the Father – 1 John 4:14 says, “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.”
To demonstrate His love for us – 1 John 3:16a says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us…”
To redeem us from sin – Titus 2:14 says that “He gave his life to free us from every kind of sin, to cleanse us, and to make us his very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds.”
C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity wrote, “The Son of God became man to enable men to become the sons of God.”
This is why King Jesus, God the Son, would leave the glory of heaven and take on flesh and enter into our suffering and die on the cross for our sins. He would be led to the cross for our forgiveness.
What does this mean for the believer? The follower of Jesus Christ is a recipient of all the graces and the blessings of salvation. Someone has looked through the Bible and listed 53 blessings that come when we trust Christ for salvation. Let me share them with you.
53 Blessings That Come When We Trust Christ for Salvation by Paul Fritz
1.) Access to God’s Grace.....(Ephesians 2:8+18)
2.) We are adopted by God....(Ephesians 1:5).
3.) We get an Inheritance....(Ephesians 1:11)
4.) We are elected (saved)...(1 Peter 1:2)
5.) We become a child of God...(John 1:12)
6.) We get a heavenly citizenship...(2 Timothy 4:18)
7.) We become a servant....(Romans 6:22)
8.) We are heirs of God, joint heirs with Jesus...(Romans 8:17)
9.) We become a new creature...(2 Corinthians 5:17)
10.) We become priests....(1 Peter 2:9)
11.) We are reconciled to God....(Romans 5:10)
12.) We are sanctified......(1 Corinthians 6:11)
13.) We are accepted in the Beloved...(Ephesians 1:6)
14.) We are Baptized into the body of Christ.....(1 Corinthians 12:13)
15. ) We are buried (and raised) with Christ.....(Romans 6:4)
16. ) We have put on Christ....(Galatians 3:27)
17. ) We have eternal life...(John 10:28)
18. ) We have peace with God...(John 14:27)
19. ) We became a friend of God....(John 15:15)
20. ) We get in the Lamb’s book of life...(Revelation 21:27)
21. ) We receive imputed righteousness....(Romans 4:6)
22. ) Our names are written in heaven.....(Luke 10:20)
23. ) We are given a blessed hope of Christ’s returning....(Titus 2:13)
24. ) We are seated in heavenly places.....(Ephesians 2:6)
25. ) We have fellowship with the trinity.....(1 John 1:3)
26. ) We have a mansion in heaven...(John 14:2)
27. ) We are born again with a spiritual re-birth.....(John 3:3-6)
28. ) We have received the anointing (God’s Spirit)....(1 John 2:27)
29. ) The Holy Spirit will live with us now and forever....(John 14:16)
30. ) We’ve been sealed by the Holy spirit unto the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4:30)
31. ) Our bodies become the temple of the Holy Ghost.....(1 Corinthians 6:19)
32. ) We are forever forgiven.....(Luke 7:48)
33. ) We are justified in God’s sight.....(Romans 5:1)
34. ) We are redeemed....(Revelation 5:9)
35. ) Indwelt by the Holy Spirit.....(Romans 8:9)
36. ) We have an advocate with Christ...(1st John 2:1)
37. ) We now have the possibility to have victory over sin....(Romans 6:14)
38. ) We become Christ’s ambassadors.....(2nd Corinthians 5:20)
39. ) We are blessed with spiritual blessings..... (Ephesians 1:3)
40. ) Our every need will be supplied by God....(Philippians 4:19)
41. ) Given an inner strength to accomplish necessary things (Philippians 4:13)
42. ) A good work has been done in us....(Philippians 1:6)
43. ) The Lord becomes our helper instead of our judge..(Hebrews 13:6)
44. ) We get abounding grace...(2 Corinthians 9:8)
45. ) We get eternal love....(Romans 8:38-39)
46. ) Everything that happens to us will be for our good....(Romans 8:28)
47. ) A promised faithfulness regardless of our faithlessness....(2 Timothy 2:13)
48. ) A promise given to be able to resist temptation....(1 Corinthians 10:13)
49. ) We are made kings and priests (Revelation 1:6)
50. ) We became saints....(1 Corinthians 1:2)
51. ) We have been delivered from the power of darkness....(Colossians 1:12-13)
52. ) Our hearts are unblamable....(1 Thessalonians 3:13)
53. ) We get the power of a sound mind....( (2 Timothy 1:7)
That’s what it means for the believer and so much more.
But there is one more thing that it means for the believer. Christ’s redemptive work (His incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection) should elicit a response from the one who has been lavished with all these blessings. It should elicit worship! It should provoke us to adore Him! It should cause us to humble ourselves before Him!
He is Christ, the Lord
He is Christ, our Savior
I bow my heart before no other name
I bow my heart before no other King
Now what about the unbeliever? If you are not a follower of Jesus Christ, you don’t benefit from anything on the list I just read. In fact, the Bible has a list for you too:
Condemnation (John 3:18, Mark 16:16) – Jesus Christ said that whosoever does not believe on Him will be condemned.
Wrath of God (John 3:36, Psalm 79:6, Rom. 2:8, Rev. 19:15) – The wrath of God is the accumulation of His anger. This wrath will come upon those who reject the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Destruction (Jeremiah 12:17, 2 Thess. 2:8, 2 Thess. 1:8-9, 1 Thess. 5:3) – Isaiah 57:21 says “there is no peace to the wicked”.
God’s Judgment and Fiery Indignation (Hebrews 10:27; 9:27, Rom. 2:5,8) – After death, the bible says, there is the judgement. For the believer, there is reward but for the unbeliever there is punishment.
God’s Vengeance (2 Thessalonians 1:8, Romans 12:9) – The Bible says that in flaming fire, God will take vengeance on them that know not God and those that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But you can move from being a recipient of the last list to one who is graciously a recipient of the blessings of the first list.
As we embark on the Christmas season, let’s remember the real meaning for the season. Jesus Christ, God the Son, the sinless Lamb of God, took upon Himself human flesh so that He would be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.
He is Christ, the Lord
He is Christ, our Savior
I bow my heart before no other name
I bow my heart before no other King
"A King Like This" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OsAKBFtEr4
Chris Tomlin
A King like this, majesty
Laying in a manger
A King like this
Unto us is born a Savior
The Light, the Light has come
A King like this, the highest
Name and the song of heaven
A King like this born of
Flesh into our suffering
The Light, the Light has come
He is Christ, the Lord
He is Christ, our Savior
I bow my heart before no other name
I bow my heart before no other King
A King like this, a saving
Love that would not forsake us
Betrayed by a kiss and led
To the cross for our forgiveness
The Light, the Light has come
He is Christ, the Lord
He is Christ, our Savior
I bow my heart before no other name
I bow my heart before no other King
We lift up our eyes, the
Light has come!
We lift up our eyes, the
Light has come!
We lift up our eyes, the
Light has come!
We lift up our eyes,
lift up our eyes,
Lift up Your Eyes!
He is Christ, the Lord
He is Christ, our Savior
I bow my heart before no other name
I bow my heart before no other King
A King like this, a throne of grace
That will stand forever
The angels sing glory, glory, hallelujah
The Light, the Light has come
The Light, the Light has come
