Transformed To Be Like Jesus

March 2, 2025 Sermon - “Transformed to Be Like Jesus”

Nature is an incredible thing. Most of us have likely had our breath taken away at the site of something in creation.

Barbara and I spent our 35th anniversary in Jasper, Alberta and I’m frankly still in awe of the extraordinary beauty of that area of the country.

Of course since then, which was in 2022, there have been massive fires in the area.

That’s been a long-standing feature of the Jasper area - massive fires that have caused great havoc,

only to be the actual source reason why the area eventually becomes, over time, so lush and amazingly, overwhelmingly breathtaking.

One of the most impressive though, smaller, wonders is the simple butterfly. It’s lovely and pretty and all that, but the way the butterfly becomes a butterfly is even more incredible.

There’s this amazing metamorphosis that happens. Let’s take a peek. [Show video]

I thought today we could have a look at one key verse from the passage in 2 Corinthians 3 that we read.

3:18 And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

As I read the Bible in my daily devotions and along with you fine people who join us in one or more of our many weekly small group Bible study gatherings,

I feel this strong connection to the stories and the hopes and aspirations and even tragedies of the people of the book. It is truly an epic read.

The Jews are the spiritual forebears of the Christian Church, they are the ones who received and carried God’s promises,

and the ones through whom God chose to bring about His incarnation in Jesus Christ, who was born to a young Jewish teenager and her husband, the step-father of Jesus.

So when I read the stories in the Bible, I really feel like I’m reading the story of my people.

When I say I read it as the story of my people, I mean by that that I take it quite personally.

I see myself in their struggle, in their disobedience, in their obedience, in their tendency to wander from God and in their continual returning to God. It all rings true to me at a very deep level.

One of the challenges of reading the New Testament accurately is that the writers of the NT were themselves steeped in the Old Testament, which is also called the Hebrew Bible.

They wrote the New Testament having been deeply familiar with the Old Testament. They experienced the new thing that God was doing, in the sending of Jesus Christ and in the sending of the Holy Spirit.

And they experienced all that they went through in the light of all that God had done already as conveyed in the Old Testament.

So it’s necessary for us as Christians to read and, I would suggest, become steeped in the stories of the Old Testament if we really want to grasp a fuller picture of what the NT talks about.

One of the reasons that I enjoy the Chosen TV show is that in that show they spend a lot of time showing the reality of what life was like in the days of Jesus.

They show, more than any other film or TV production related to the life of Jesus, just how Jewish Jesus was, how Jewish his disciples were, and how Jewish their entire world was, religiously, ethnically, and as relates to their history.

A strange historical fact is that the Jewishness of Jesus was generally minimized once the church got started, after say the first few hundred years.

And that’s despite the fact that nearly all of the first 5000 or so believers in Jesus were Jewish, mixed in there with some gentle converts and Samaritan converts.

This, it could be argued, came to head among German theologians in the 1900s who seemed to work overtime to de-stress the reality of the Jewishness of Jesus.

Of course, that was because of the deep antisemitism that was a part of German culture at that time, which we know, incredibly sadly, culminated in the Holocaust during World War II.

So in today’s passage that we’ve already looked at, for the purpose of helping the Corinthians better understand what God was doing among them, Paul refers to something really important in the Old Testament.

It’s important in part for how much things have changed now that Christ has come.

2 Corinthians 3:13 We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. 14 But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away.15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.