If you were to ask most people in Canada, Nova Scotia or Bedford today what religion they are the ultimate answer that you would receive would be “Christian”. That particular answer would in no way reflect a relationship they had or didn’t have with God, nor would it reflect any solid concept of theology or biblical knowledge. All it would mean is that the person you asked did not identify themselves as a Muslim, a Hindu or an Atheist. They are a Christian whatever that means. But what does it mean to be a Christian?
Christian means a Christ Follower or more accurately in the original language it meant “Little Christ.” In Acts 11:26 we are told that it was in the city of Antioch that believers were first called Christians and it would appear that it wasn’t a complimentary term at least when it was first used. In Australia Christians were sometimes called God-botherers and the sentiment was probably the same. “Oh they think they are some kind of Little Christ.” But the name stuck and those who followed Christ became Christians. And it meant something, it meant that you believed certain things and it meant you behaved a certain way. Today being a Christian means absolutely nothing, it means that at some point in your genealogy someone, somewhere, at sometime identified with a Christian Church.
But the reality is that people like that aren’t Christians, they aren’t little Christ’s they are pretenders they are posers. And John spoke to that very issue in the scripture that Angela read earlier. There were people who claimed to be Christians and even claimed to be Christian teachers and yet there were some foundational things that they didn’t believe. And John didn’t mince many words about those people. Listen to verse 7 2 John 7 Many deceivers have gone out into the world. They do not believe that Jesus Christ came to earth in a real body. Such a person is a deceiver and an antichrist.
What John is talking about there is what theologians call the Incarnation. Say that with me Incarnation. There you have learned some theology today. According to Wikipedia The doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ is central to the traditional Christian faith as held by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and most Protestants.
Briefly, it is the belief that the Second Person of the Christian Godhead, also known as the Son or the Word, “became flesh” when he was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. In the Incarnation, the divine nature of the Son was perfectly united with human nature in one divine Person. This person, Jesus Christ, was both “truly God and truly man.” The incarnation is commemorated and celebrated each year at the Feast of the Incarnation, also known as Christmas.
In the early church there were those who believed that Jesus was God but he didn’t actually come as human, he simply assumed human form. What is the difference? If Jesus had of just come as God and assumed a human form, kind of like when Shape-shifters assume human forms in Star Trek, then his life and death was irrelevant. He never experienced what we experience; he never felt hunger or thirst or pain, or temptation. His death was simply a sham and the resurrection was a farce.
But the mystery is that he wasn’t simply God playing the part of man, he was 100% God and 100% man and that is the mystery. He experienced birth and all that went along with it, and birth has to be a traumatic experience, no wonder we block it from our minds. Think about it one moment you’re in a warm, dark comfy, quiet place and the next minute you’re in bright, loud, cold room with all kinds of noise and someone is whacking you on the rear end. Not a great way to begin your day or your life. And Jesus didn’t even have the privilege of being born in a hospital, one minute he was hearing the gentle sound of his mother’s heart and the next minute cows are mooing, chickens are clucking and sheep are baaaing. But it had to happen that way.
And if he had of simply been God playing a part then his death on the cross was nothing more then another scene in the play, no pain, no horror and no fear. The cross would have been just a prop.
The admonition is found in the book of 2 John which is the 24th book of the New Testament. It was written by the Apostle John around A.D. 90. In the original John’s name is not used instead the salutation simply reads “From the Elder”. But remember both 2 and 3 John were personal letters, and the people he was writing to would have known who the “Elder” was. In the same way if I received a letter today that started with the words “To Denn, from the DS” I would know right away it was from our District Superintendent Dr. H.C. Wilson. It wouldn’t have to say from the DS, HC Wilson, that would be redundant. HC Wilson is the DS and the DS is HC Wilson.
The reason the letter was written was to warn the recipients about false teachers. And one of the things these false teachers were teaching was that Jesus had not really come as a man. This seems to be fairly important to John because it appears in most of his writings, for example listen to how John begins his Gospel account John 1:1 In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God. John clarifies that statement in verse John 1:14 So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father. And then we read in 1 John 4:2 This is the way to find out if they have the Spirit of God: If a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ became a human being, that person has the Spirit of God.
So what does that mean to acknowledge that Jesus Christ, God became a human being? Well it means several things.
1) It Means Acknowledging His Virgin Birth. There are churches out there who claim to be Christian Churches and yet they start right off by denying the Virgin Birth. Like why? If you can’t believe that he was born of a virgin then what do you believe. But they say that’s impossible, Virgins can’t have babies. They’re right Virgins can’t have babies and when Mary was told by the Angel Gabriel that she was going to be a mother she offered up the same objection. In Luke 1:34 Mary asked the angel, “But how can I have a baby? I am a virgin.” And the Angel didn’t tell Mary, “look you can stop pretending, I’m an angel I know you’re not a virgin.” Kind of like the girl they called Snow White but then she drifted, that’s ok, we’re here every Sunday. And Gabriel didn’t tell Mary that all she had to do was sleep with her fiancé, by the way sex is supposed to be reserved for when you are married, not almost married. Instead what Gabriel said is found in Luke 1:37 “For nothing is impossible with God.” Not even virgins having babies. Cause face it if God can’t pull off something like that then He not much of a god. And the virgin birth wasn’t something the Gospel writers pulled out of a hat, listen to the Prophet Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.
Now this goes back to what we had talked about before concerning the virgin birth. You see it had to happen this way, cause this is the way it was predicated. If you go all the way back to Genesis 3:15 after Adam and Eve had fallen, the curse that was pronounced on Satan stated that it would be the seed of woman who would bring about his ultimate defeat. Not the seed of man and woman. Just the seed of woman.
2) It Means Acknowledging His Divinity To some people Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a good man, but he wasn’t God. He was in the same category as Mohammed, or Buddha or Confucius. C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity” “I’m ready to accept Jesus, as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God” This is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with a man who says He’s a poached egg, or else He would be the devil of Hell. You must make the choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God or else a Madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us, He did not intend to.”
If we read through the Gospels we see that Jesus allowed people to call him the Christ, and the son of God, he said he could forgive sins, he never stopped people from calling him the Son of God, he promised to rise from the dead and said he would be the ultimate judge at the end of time.
History tells us that all of the original disciples died martyr’s deaths; they were killed for their faith, and all they had to do to save their lives was to say that Jesus was just a man, that he wasn’t God. Would you die for a lie?
3) It Means Acknowledging His Humanity If some people make the mistake of taking away the divinity of Christ other’s take away his humanity.
Christ was a person and had to contend with the reactions and prejudices and opinions of His peers, they never viewed him as an ideal, or something abstract. I doubt if on His first day at school if His teacher said, “Class, I would like to introduce Jesus the Christ, Prince of Peace, King of Kings, Son of the Almighty God.” No for all intensive purposes He was Jesus, Joseph the carpenters kid.
Christ didn’t come as an example, nor as an ideal, nor as a pattern. He came as a man, and nobody who ever met him doubted that.
In order for Jesus to be the sacrifice he needed to be for us he needed to experience all the things that we do. And so for thirty three years he lived as a person just like we do. He laughed and cried, went to school and played with his friends. He probably fell and scraped his knees and Mary probably wiped his nose when he got a cold. He went through all the torments of puberty and the angst of adolecence. There may have been girls who had a crush on Jesus and there may have been girls that Jesus had a crush on.
He grew up and worked as a carpenter just like Mary’s husband Joseph had done and at no time did people ever doubt that Jesus was a person.
Max Lucado has twenty-five questions that he wants to ask Mary the mother of Jesus, here are a few of my favourites.
What was it like watching him pray?
When he saw a rainbow did he ever mention a flood?
Did you ever feel awkward teaching him how he created the world?
When he saw a lamb being led to the slaughter did he act differently?
Did you ever try to count the stars with him . . . and succeed?
Did he ever come home with a black eye?
Did he have any friends by the name of Judas?
Did the thought ever occur to you that the God to whom you were praying was asleep under your own roof
Did you ever accidentally call him father?
What did he and his cousin John talk about as kids?
Did you ever think, That’s God eating my soup?
Jesus wasn’t just God playing a part, he wasn’t an ideal, he was a man.
4) It Means Acknowledging His Death At the other end of the manger scene is Calvary, and the stark reality of the crucifixion. Christ’s death on the cross was not a philosophical response to an abstract ideal. I mean you don’t deal with an ideal by abstractly nailing Him to a cross, I doubt whether they said, “Hey, don’t take this personally.” They intended for Him to. You can’t separate the politician from his politics, the executive from his business practices, the preacher from his preaching or Christ from Christianity. Christ didn’t come as an example, nor as an ideal, nor as a pattern. He came as a man, and nobody who ever met him doubted that.
And they killed him. It is historical reality that Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth was nailed to a cross under the authority of Pontius Pilate the Roman Governor and even though it is not the politically correct thing to say today Pilate did it because the Jewish religious leaders of the day demanded it. Now in saying that understand that does not make all the Jews of the day guilty of Christ’s death and there are no Jews still alive today who are guilty of Christ’s death. The specific people who were responsible for the crucifixion are dead, and all of us were the reason he had to die and we need to acknowledge that he died, for us.
5) It Means Acknowledging His Resurrection You ever get tagged with a nickname? Especially one you didn’t like. You have to feel sorry for Thomas. This was the disciple that tradition says was responsible for taking the gospel to India. We are told that he was martyred for his faith in the Indian city of Madras. If you read through the accounts of Thomas in the Gospels you see a young man fully devoted to Christ. And yet how do we know him? Not by his first nickname, which is what the other apostles called him. Yeah that’s right 2000 years later we still call him “Doubting Thomas” Why? One mistake, John 20:24-25 One of the disciples, Thomas (nicknamed the Twin), was not with the others when Jesus came. They told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he replied, “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side.”
As if he was the only one who had doubted. When the women first came with the news of the resurrection, listen to what happened Luke 24:10-11 They told the apostles what had happened, but the story sounded like nonsense, so they didn’t believe it.
Doubting Thomas Indeed? But he probably verbalized it better, saying I won’t believe unless I can see it myself. Not a impossible or unreasonable request considering the time and circumstances.
All Thomas was saying was “you’ve seen him, if I’m going to believe than I need to see him too.” Not unreasonable at all. And when he saw Christ he believed, he looked at him and said “My Lord and my God” And do you remember what Jesus said John 20:29 Then Jesus told him, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who haven’t seen me and believe anyway.” That’s you, blessed are you who haven’t seen him and believe anyway. You do believe in the resurrection don’t you? You can’t take bits and pieces of the Bible, believe some of it but not the rest. Augustine said “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.”
If you don’t believe that Christ rose from the dead why are you here? If I didn’t believe I could think of a dozen other things I’d rather be doing than being in church on Sunday morning.
Everything that Jesus Christ said and did could be duplicated or fabricated right up to his resurrection. But at that point it became very apparent that he was not a man, he was not just a prophet or a teacher. He was and still is God. And what does that mean for you on August 14th 2005? Well in Romans 4:25 The Bible says He was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised from the dead to make us right with God. And again in Romans 6:4 And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
Have you been made right with God? Are you leading a new life? That’s why Jesus came, lived died and was raised from the dead, so that you could be forgiven, so that you could believe and so that you could have a new life. And all you have to do is reach out and accept it.
Maybe today you can identify with Lee Strobel author of “The Case for Christ” when he wrote “As soon as I reached that monumental verdict, the implications were obvious. If Jesus overcame the grave, he’s still alive and available for me to personally encounter.”
So the question isn’t who do other’s say Jesus is, the question is who do you say Jesus is?
Hope you enjoyed the message, PowerPoint is available, just email me at denn@cornerstonewesleyan.ca
