Celebrate Jesus!
05/02/04
THEME: Jesus Christ is worth celebrating
INTRO: Today we begin a month of celebrations. Over the next few weeks we will be celebrating moms, volunteers, life and heroes. We celebrate a lot of things in our lives. Weddings, birthdays and anniversaries are all reasons to celebrate.
Today, we are going to look at why we should celebrate Jesus. Why should our lives be a living party for God? Why should Jesus have such an important place?
I- Celebrate Jesus For Who He Is
We should celebrate Jesus just because of who he is. He is God and we should celebrate that. Who he is makes him important. So, who is Jesus?
1) He is an earthly picture of our heavenly Father.
“Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.”
Colossians 1:15 (New Living Translation)
Jesus shows us what God is like.
“To see me is to see the Father.” John 14:9 (The Message)
2) He is the path to God.
Jesus is the way for man to connect with God.
“Jesus said, ‘I am the road, also the truth, also the life. No one gets to the Father apart from me.” John 14:6 (The Message)
3) He is the friend of those who follow him.
“Greater love has no one that this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves…… But I have called you friends.”
John 15:13-15 (New American Standard)
Jesus is worth celebrating because of who he is.
NAR: Tossing the Queen
During the heyday of the Napoleonic era, French troops fanned out around the globe to share the “best” of France with their colonies and to bring the best things from those colonies back to France.
Included in this “cultural exchange” was a storehouse filled with ancient Egyptian artifacts. As the empire waned, many of these treasures found their way into the basement of the Paris museum.
In the 1940s some workmen uncovered a burial case squeezed into an obscure corner of the basement. They decided that the box would make an excellent storage space for many of the treasures. Without consulting the museum’s caretakers, they simply emptied the contents into the sewer and filled it with odds and ends of Egyptian artifacts.
Only later did they discover that they had inadvertently disposed of the remains of Egypt’s most famous personage- Cleopatra.
APP: Are you guilty of just “tossing” Jesus in to your life? We need to celebrate Jesus because of who he is.
II- Celebrate Jesus For What He Does
1) Jesus loves us just as we are.
“This is how much God loved the world: He gave his son, his one and only son. And this is why: So that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.”
John 3:16(The Message)
Jesus loved us even when we didn’t love him.
“But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinful.”
Romans 5:8(Contemporary English Version)
2) Jesus forgives the wickedness of our past.
John 8:1-11
“But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law of Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.”
When others condemned the guilty, Jesus restored her.
“’Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.’” John 8:11(NIV)
3) Jesus makes our lives new.
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)
Jesus takes the broken and destroyed and makes it new.
FAITH STORY: AJ Nolan
How do we connect to Jesus?
“If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Romans 10:9-10
The result in our life is turning from your old life and embracing a new life in Jesus.
“…. because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed by us in any way. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.” 2 Corinthians 7:9-10 (NIV)
