Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 14, 2017 | Christianity 101: "Back To Basics" - Who Is Jesus?

Transcript

May 14, 2017 | Christianity 101: "Back To Basics" - Who Is Jesus? · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Such a pleasure to worship with you here this morning.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Superheroes capture our imagination with their superhuman abilities.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Wolverine heals so quickly from injury.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Storm controls the weather.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Look, Skywalker, I guess he's not a superhero, but he can sort of telekinesis things.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: He can make things move.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Spider Man can climb walls.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Superhuman strength.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: There would be Thor and the Hulk.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and my favorite when I was young, my favorite uh hero was Flash.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Superhuman speed.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I always wanted to uh flash through my slides like that.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So much fun.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh Nightcrawler has uh can teleport, mystique can change shape, Superman is absolutely invulnerable.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: But the great thing about this morning and about Christian theology is that we have our own superhero who actually lived in history whose powers are greater than all the superheroes.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And today we're gonna talk about.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited that I get to talk to you about Jesus today, our super superhero, our superman.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to be a Christian to think that this is an important topic.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know some of you here today aren't Christians yet, and and but but you know that Jesus is pretty important when you go shopping.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Every few months you'll go by the tabloids and the magazines and you'll see the Time or Newsweek has slapped Jesus on the cover again.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Their sales are low, they're looking for a little bump in income, so they put out an issue on Jesus, a search for Jesus, it may be called, or Jesus uh at the year 2000 or whatever else.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and these issues, when you open them up, they uh they're they're not evangelical at all, but they begin this way.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: They begin, for instance, the uh a few thousand years of Jesus, not that long ago, said for believers, he is the hinge of history.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But even by secular standards, Jesus is the dominant figure of Western culture.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Time magazine went even farther in its first few sentences.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: It said one of the useful ways of recalling the past two millenniums is by listing the people who acquired great power.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Muhammad, Catherine the Great, Marx Gandhi, Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Mao come quickly to mind.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's no question that each of those figures changed the lives of millions, but it's impossible to deny that the single most powerful figure, not merely in these two millenniums, but in all human history, not just Western, human history, has been Jesus of Nazareth.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're going to talk about.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's the central message in our series Christianity 101, back to the basics, and it's about the central figure of human history.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason we picked this, actually, it was a number of young couples who'd asked me some months ago to do a series on Christian basics, Christian worldviews, that they said we're really interested in a Christian worldview.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're interested in how people think about the world.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a good question, isn't it?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Once in a while we should ask ourselves, what is my worldview?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Worldview is simply being the mental lens through which you view the world and your place in the world, your perspective on all of reality.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Worldview is like colored glasses, we said last week.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Look at something through green colored glasses, you'll see it as green.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else, orange glasses, sees it as orange.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: People, different worldviews seem same facts in a very different way.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: For example, here people, let's say, over on this side of the street, and they say, they say your gender is determined at birth.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is given by God.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: God created them male and female.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It says it's not something that's adjustable that you can decide about.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from God.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: The people on this side of the street, and they say, no, it's a human right.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I have every right to declare whether or not I feel more like a guy or feel more like a girl.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: That may change.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: You see, and the difference, and they yell at each other from either side of the street for good reason because they have two completely different and competing worldviews.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the comforting thing is that worldviews can change.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if if you've read Tom Sawyer, you know that's true.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: At the beginning of chapter two, Tom and everyone else, all his buddies, felt like that whitewashing a fence would be the worst possible way you could ever waste a summer day, right?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But by the end of that chapter, they're waiting in line around the block because Tom Sawyer's changed everybody's view.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now painting a fence white is the most desirable thing anyone could do.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So your worldview can change.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And our worldviews need to change.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Every person's worldview needs to change because God says, my thoughts are nothing like your thoughts.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: As the heavens are higher than the earth, Isaiah 55, so my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so graciously God revealed his thoughts to us in the law, the prophets, the writings, the gospels, the epistles, and so we can open the Bible and we can find out what God's thoughts are, and that's why we come up with Christianity 101, the basics of Christianity.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So two weeks ago, as we did this, we asked the question, well, who is God in Christianity?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Who is God?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we answered that question by saying, well, to capture a God in a sentence, you need to think as high as you can possibly think and as low as you can possibly think.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And keep these two in balance that God is high and holy, that he is completely other and different from us and omniscient and omnipresent and infinite, completely way above us.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, he is, he reveals himself as Papa.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: J.I.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Packer said, the New Testament's view of God can be characterized as he is both holy and father, or Papa is probably the best way of describing Abba, Father, to us.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So he's very high and very low.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then last week, when we looked at man, we said, you know what?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The same is true.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you really want to understand man, you need to keep intention the fact that man is high, he's dignified, he's even has a spark of divinity from the image of God in him.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's a divinity and a dignity about man, but at the same time, and of course, some people just focus there.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So our number one goal in education is to improve everybody's self-image, and we shouldn't talk about sin.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a social construct.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the Bible or the Christian view would say, no, there's another side that we must keep in mind, and that is the side of depravity and dust.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: That man is horribly sinful and has rebelled against God.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And some people, especially the ones who hold signs across the street an hour ago, you know, they they're they're overbalanced on this one down here, but we have to keep them in tandem and intention.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so we come today to Jesus and find that the same is true.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Something very high, something very low.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wayne Grudham in his masterful systematic theology, it's just 1,200 pages.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Read it this afternoon.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: In his first sentence, in his magnum opus on Jesus Christ, in his very first sentence as he discusses Jesus, says this, quote, we may summarize the biblical teaching about the person of Christ as follows.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ, and say this out loud with me, would you?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Together.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man in one person and will be so forever.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great summary.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Very high.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's God most high, man most low at the same time.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, need I tell you that not everyone believes this.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Just to slap up the views of four or five different groups across the world.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Orthodox Christianity, when asked, is Jesus man, God, or what?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Orthodox Christianity says both, fully God and fully man.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: God most high, man most low.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Who exactly was Jesus?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was the second person of the Trinity.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: God's Son come in the flesh.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the second view on this chart is secularism.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Secularism, the predominant view in the West, in America, for example.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be the view of the media primarily, the view that's at least many media are Christians, many public school teachers are Christians, and so forth.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is sort of the predominant overarching view that we all have to have to sort of hear constantly.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that is that Jesus is man and man only.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Who was he?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: A great teacher, a faith healer, the incarnation of love.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Jehovah's Witnesses.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Simply mention them, not because they're a huge group, but because they knock on your door.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh God, man, no, something in between.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: He was an archangel, God's first creation.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's the archangel Michael.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: How about Buddhism?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: The most popular Zen Buddhism, the most popular of all of the Eastern religions here in the West.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Who was Jesus?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he was man.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Who was he exactly?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: A wise, enlightened man who taught many things very similar to Buddha.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Islam, Jesus was man and man only.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Who was he exactly?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: He was a true prophet of God, a prophet sent by God, but he was superseded by a greater prophet, the prophet Muhammad.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have these different views, but Orthodox Christianity, as you can tell, stands out from the others.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And listen very carefully.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's far more important for Christianity who Jesus was, than it is for Buddhism who Buddha was, or for Islam who Muhammad was.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity, or let's say Buddhism does not stand and fall on Buddha, whether he existed or anything.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Islam doesn't stand or fall on Muhammad.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity stands and falls on the person of Jesus Christ.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are a religion.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity is a religion that, for us, the very essence of Christianity is believing in that person right there who came down in history.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He was a very special person, we say, who was divine.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it all stands and falls on that person.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that is why Jesus Christ is so critical to Christianity.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: So let's take these two aspects.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus, God most high, and then we'll take men most low.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was high God.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: You remember once Jesus took a poll, he actually asked his disciples for a report on the opinion polls.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Who do men say that I am?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew chapter 16.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was up at Caesarea Philippi, a sort of a demonic area.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Who do people say that I am?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, George Gallup wasn't one of the twelve, and the disciples weren't expert at surveying people, but they came up with four answers that were common.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: They said, Well, a lot of people think you're John the Baptist.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Come back to life.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: He had been killed.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Others think that you're Elijah.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Third view was that you're Jeremiah.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth is that you're some other prophet.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: As you can see, those views are rather similar to a lot of the world views that I included on that list.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus said, Well, who do you think I am?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how Simon Peter answered.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said, You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Bells went off, whistles, million dollars, Hawaii trip.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, not really, but Jesus did say, God revealed this to you, gonna build my church around you, that confession, uh, whatever.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that was an orthodox statement of the fact that Jesus is more than a man, he is high God.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the rest of the New Testament, you would think listening to Time and Newsweek and shows on TV that the New Testament never implies, hardly at all, that Jesus is God.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Once I was in an Arab country, I didn't mention this in the other services, and a guy comes up to me and says, I believe in Jesus.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Great.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: What Jesus do you believe in?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you believe Jesus is God?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, he said, but I believe Jesus was a great prophet.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you gotta ask, you know, when you're overseas, especially, and someone says, I believe in Jesus, which what Jesus do you believe in?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, but but but but Jesus never claimed to be God in the New Testament.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the Bible doesn't claim that.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, are you kidding me?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: So John 1, 1, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that one verse alone tells us that Jesus was what?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: In the beginning tells us that he was eternal.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: With God, face to face with God, literally means he was equal with God the Father, and yet distinct.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then we find two verses later, all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So he was the creator of all.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Means he has to be deity.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next two verses, in him was life.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that life was the light of men.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Light shines in the darkness, the darkness can't overcome it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So he was the light and life for mankind.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is clearly in John chapter 1, something special.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: When I spoke on this topic over at Washburn two years ago to students and talking about the evidences that Jesus is deity, I said the most powerful one for me personally is the evidence of the people that killed Jesus, the evidence of his opponents that he was claiming deity.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, in John chapter 8, these Jews said to him, You're not yet 50 years old and you've seen Abraham.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Abraham said to them, Truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Stealing that descriptive of God the Father, that Yahweh said, My name to Moses is I am.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesus is claiming to be the Yahweh of the Old Testament.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So of course they pick up stones to throw at him.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: You try to eliminate the deity of Christ from the New Testament, you face all kinds of proofs that Jesus was God and claimed to be God.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've listed eight here.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: God the Father says he was, demons said he was, Jesus said he was, New Testament writers say he was.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus has given the names of God, he possessed the attributes of God, he did the works of God.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: People worshiped him as God.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, and yet, what you find is that in our Western world, there is a deliberate blinding of oneself to the New Testament evidence.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Even way back in the days of Thomas Jefferson, a wonderful man, who went to church on Sundays and everything.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: But but he took a Bible and with his New Testament, he used his scissors and he cut out every implication that Jesus might be the.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: No more miracles.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: That was sliced out.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: John 1, 1, that was gone.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: All of the stuff that had to do with Jesus' deity, and then he presented this as the Jefferson Bible, the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or more recently, Peter Jennings of ABCTDV did something very similar in the year 2000.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was, I think, in June, it was like a five or six-part series.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: We were all so excited it was coming.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity Day ran articles about it ahead of time.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: What we didn't know is that Peter Jennings had made a decision ahead of time.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: There would not be allowed any statement or hint that Jesus had claimed deity.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing about his deity at all, just as humanity, a search for Jesus, and no Orthodox Christians were allowed in the series, no evangelicals.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so all you had was these people arguing about how who Jesus was as a man.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: They concluded he was a political revolutionary trying to overthrow Rome.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Going, well, I thought Jesus said, My kingdom's not of this world.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you didn't really write that.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so you well, and now you have to understand that what's going on here is a deliberate drawing, uh building a wall between the Jesus of history, they call it, and the Christ of faith.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what you hear them say is, go to church on Sunday and believe in your Christ of faith.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the religious thing, but that's not scientific, and so we're not going to even talk about that, that he might be God and so forth.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: But you do the religious thing and take your communion and sacraments and so forth.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: But all we're interested in is the Jesus of history.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so immediately what they've done is they've sliced out of the New Testament accounts all of the evidences and out of history that Jesus claimed to be God, and you're left with somebody called the Jesus of history.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it's great to see that's not always done.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: A book was published last month on April the 10th by a political columnist, David Limbaugh.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, his most recent books have all been about Jesus.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: This one's called The True Jesus, and it'll be a bestseller like the others, I'm sure.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I listened to part of it online.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it its subtitle is Uncovering the Divinity, the Divinity of Christ in the Gospels.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And his point seems to be, as I've read summaries, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four Gospels, each in different ways point to the fact that Jesus was God most high, that he was divine.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he quotes C.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, a man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: He would either be a lunatic, said C.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, or else he would be the devil of hell.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: You must make your choice.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's not left that open to us.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: He did not intend to.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesus is deity.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me stop for a second and admit there's confusion about this and difficulty.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: A simple kind of confusion is the kind my youngest son Craig had when he was three years old.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: We used to sit five rows back there, and we used to make the kids come to church.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and they were always wired because we fed them candy or something.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, though, on this particular morning, Craig could not sit still.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've told this story before, I don't know how many years ago, but he was just all jittering, and I was all moving around and so forth during the announcements, and finally he settled down, and I'm looking over, suspicious.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Here's Melody, and this little Craig, three-year-old over there.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's gazing at each of the stained glass windows, and he's just staring at them.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then all of a sudden, in a loud whisper, loud, way too loud whisper, mommy, mommy, mommy, he says, There's and he's pointing at that window right there, the one with Jesus knocking the door.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he points to that and he goes, Mommy, there's Jesus, says it three times, there's Jesus, there's Jesus.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Melody goes, Yeah.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Shh, shh, you know, quiet, got it.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty exciting.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking, that's good.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says in a loud stage whisper, but where's God?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm thinking this is kind of good.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's got sort of he's exploring the Trinity at age three.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: He's positive a little bit.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Melody's smart.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't try to answer that question.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: She says, Shh, be quiet.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: He keeps looking, keeps looking.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he gets around to that window right there where Jesus is a shepherd holding lamb in his arms.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden he grabs his mother's face.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know how little kids are there.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he moves her face toward the window.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Mommy, he says, there's God.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's God.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: She makes a critical mistake.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: She says, No, that's Jesus.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Should have let the heresy just slide.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: She says, No, that's Jesus.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, No, that's God.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: I know, cross my heart.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Which sort of took care of it.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: We knew at that point he was going to be a preacher.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Even if he was wrong, you know, he could bang the pulpit a little bit, make it loud, try to be convincing.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: So there, you know, it's really difficult balancing the Jesus and the God and the Trinity thing.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And another, another mistake.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: We make uh is illustrated, and I think this is really common in the church, is illustrated by what a friend of mine told me when I was in my twenties.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to a uh um, I was gonna say a church of a different denomination, but this is no denomination.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, it was a church where they don't get really deep in doctrine, but it's really, really a lot of fun.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um, with healings and and miracles and music and all that.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, and and and we're talking about deed of Christ.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: This guy said to me it's a little bit, and he explained it with sort of like a football game.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Listen, the way to understand the whole Trinity says it was it was like God played the first half of the game.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And like spirit and Jesus were on the sidelines.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And from Genesis 1 and the creation and everything to the end of the Old Testament, it was all God the Father.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, and then Jesus, after halftime, put himself on the sidelines and he sent in Jesus.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he sent in the Son of God.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the Son of God, you know, had these assignments and he did these great miracles, and he died on the cross, and he rose again, and he did everything just fantastic by the end of the third quarter.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: He'd completed his mission.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: So God the Father pulled him and he sent in the Holy Spirit for the fourth quarter.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Holy Spirit in the church.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, the Holy Spirit's invisible, but he appears once in a while to kick field goals and stuff like that.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that was his actually his explanation.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, a lot of Christians sort of think in that, it's called in theology, modalism, that God, there were basically three gods and they appeared at different times and so forth, and they don't read the Bible carefully and realize, no, the whole team, all three of them, were on the field for the whole game.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the Spirit was the creator, says Psalm 104.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Christ was the creator, says Colossians 1.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: They've all been on the field the whole time.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how that works with the three in one, and Jesus being both God and man at the same time, that's uh was it Martin Luther who said there are three great paradoxes in Christianity?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Trinity, Jesus being both God and man, the hypostatic union it's called, and the sovereignty of God and the free will of man, he says, he says, if you don't believe any of them, you'll go to hell.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you try to understand them, you'll go to the lunatic asylum.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I disagree with him about the hell, because but uh but anyway, so so so I'm not telling you it's easy, but I am telling you you have to hold intention the fact that Jesus is God most high, and now the fact that he was man most low.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the one sometimes that we Christians, Christians sort of let slide.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: We so strongly are defending the deity of Christ, we forget how human he was, that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory full of grace and truth.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Philippians 2, 5 through 7 that have this mind in you which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was the very form of God, didn't count equality with God as something that he held on to, but emptied himself, born in the likeness of man.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you see this combination of God most high, man most low, and in the virgin birth, which is so physical.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Don't be afraid, Mary, the angel told her.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: For you've found favor with God, you'll conceive, so physical, so human, and give birth to a son, and you'll name him Jesus.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, he'll be very great, and he'll be called the Son of the Most High.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the next two verses there in Luke 1, Mary says to the angel, How can this be since I'm a virgin?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, listen, you say to me, Do I have to believe the virgin birth?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, not to go to heaven.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a lot of people that haven't, but listen, the virgin birth is important because it makes possible, it's what made possible, this full uniting of God most high and man most low in one person.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: This two states, the hypostatic, united in one person.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the virgin birth made possible Christ's true humanity without the sin, the inherited sin of Adam.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, that's all the time I'll spend on virgin birth.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: But at every juncture in Jesus' life, you see, there is this revealing combination of God most high.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: He steals the storm and man most low, just before the storm.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: He was fast asleep, exhausted in the boat.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: He raises Lazarus from the dead.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Only God most high could do that, but before he did that, he's weeping like a man would.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, that's a human nature over the over the ignorance and the lostness of people.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: His weaknesses and limitations, let's not forget these friends.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: He had a human body, he had a human mind, he had a human soul, he had human emotions.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: People near him saw him as only a man.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: He walked around like you and me, not looking.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: We would not stare at him if he was sitting in this auditorium.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: If we didn't know who he was, because he looks like you or me.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: He looks ordinary.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was unprepossessing, prep prepossessed.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: So nobody pointed at him across the street and said, Hey, there goes God.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because he was very ordinary.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Isaiah the prophet wants us to know that by saying, He grew up before him like a tinder shoes, like a root out of parched ground, no stately form or majesty that we should look on him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: But but don't misunderstand me for a moment.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: He may have had a common ordinary appearance, but his personality, as William Kirk Kilpatrick of Harvard put it years ago, was the greatest, most compelling personality that has ever existed.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I know this is flawed, but this is the way I personally think about it.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: I compare it to Abe Lincoln, who was rather ordinary in appearance.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh let me share with you an excerpt from a letter that that was found, Abe Lincoln, about Abe Lincoln's first visit to New York City.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was his famous Cooper Union speech or something, just 1859.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And listen to this descriptor of Lincoln.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was tall, tall.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, how tall, and so angular and awkward that I had for an instant a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: But as he pressed on with his speech, said this observer, his face lighted up as with an inward fire.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: The whole man was transfigured.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet like the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus had an absolutely compelling personality with an ordinary appearance.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: He was as human as you can get.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: Human body, mind, soul, emotions.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: People saw him as only man.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now notice the one thing he didn't have that we have is that he was sinless.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: He was his ability to be sinless, not inherited, he did not inherit the sin of Adam because he was virgin born.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: And also he did not, he was not really, he could not sin.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's a big argument in theology.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Was it that Jesus did not sin or that he could not sin?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: He answered he could not sin.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: He was impeccable.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think of it as this human nature being like a copper wire that was flexible, and his and his divine nature would be like a steel rod.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And those two were welded together in him so that our bendable, our flexible, our succumbing to temptation, the copper wire that we're made of was combined with that divine steel rod.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: So he could not, he was sinless.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: He was absolutely unique as both a man and as God.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so we come, I come to moving to the end, and I find myself saying uh to myself, listen, I desperately don't want my listeners this morning or whenever you're listening online to leave this message just getting theology.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I got it.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was fully God and fully man, and I've got to keep those both in tension.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm driving in this morning and I'm thinking, okay, it's been kind of a not a very good week.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in some ways, you know, the mower breaking down and somebody stealing my trash can and this and that.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, but you know what?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: I get it happier and happier.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking, I get to talk about Jesus this morning.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, wow.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: I got to talk about the single individual in all the universe that God the Father thinks about most often and absolutely loves.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that we're gonna be, and that He's that we're gonna be looking at and thinking about forever and ever.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is the central person of history.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody agrees that, but this is the central person of eternity as well.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so many evidences, friends, that he is both God and man.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And let me speak for just a second, very briefly, to those of you that are not sure what you think about Jesus, haven't made a decision about him yet.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Josh McDowell, years ago, wrote a book called Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and a verdict is demanded.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: What you think about Jesus will make all the difference.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm bothered when I hear people just speak casually about what he might be.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: When I hear these specials and so forth, I can't help thinking of the story of the person who went to the some of you have been to the luv, and you've been in that room that has the Mona Lisa, and you know how you're going, not a very big picture.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: There it is, it just sits there on the wall.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: And a man was at that picture, and he was staring at the picture, and the curator was right there, and he says to the curator, well, I don't get what all the fuss is about.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: It just looks like an ordinary picture to me.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the curator's response was priceless.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: He said to the man stiffly, it is not the painting that is on trial here, sir.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Friend, Jesus may seem like an ordinary person, and if all you've ever cared for is his search for who he is in history, then he's not all that remarkable.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, the trial here is not about Jesus.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is you who are on trial here for how you deal with the claims of Christ and the and the overwhelming evidence that he actually was God and creator and savior and resurrected Lord.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say a word to those of you who have made that decision.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: You've decided that Jesus is your savior.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: You must you must sort of adopt an idea that Jesus is far more than just God and man.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: He is someone you love.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Edwards, Aristotle said it that education is not about the mind, it's about the heart.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Edwards said it, religious affections, the Bible says it, it's about what you feel.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: The religion, true religion is all about who you love.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about what you think.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is, do you really love Jesus?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Do you long to see him?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Do you try to do you try to remind yourself during the day, I need to love Jesus, I need to think about Jesus, I need to long to see Jesus because this is who God, God the Father, loves and longs to seek.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so to help yourself to help me.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: What I do is I'll sing or I'll recite words, Ferris Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: O thou of God and man the Son.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: There it is.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: O thou of God and man the Son.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor, O thou my soul's glory, joy, and crown.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe more recently, a song that I love to sing, be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, not be all else to me save that thou art, thou my best thought by day or by night, waking or sleeping, thy presence, my light.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of Jesus, and it concludes, Thou and thou only be first in my heart, high King of heaven, my treasure thou art.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: You're constantly telling yourself, I need to value and love the things that are most important in the world, that God the Father values and love.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: Do I love Jesus the way I should?
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or back to the first song that we sang today.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Love was when God became a man.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's our message today.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: He became a man.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when I see his love for me, maybe I'll respond in love for him.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Dear friend, this is important.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is so important because if you allow clouds to get in the way of you and the sun, I grew up on a farm.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: We had bees.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was remarkable.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: We'd be out there, you know, in the pasture all day and so forth, my brothers and I.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: When a cloud would come on a hot summer day between the sun and the earth, and it would get, and you see it today, you can see it today.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: All the bees were zooming around and so forth, going to the clover and going to the blackberries.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, when the cloud covers the sun, you'd watch them, the bees just sort of start moving slow, and all those buzzing flies, you even see it, the flies just start moving slow.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're sort of like on, you know, they they put it on neutral and they sort of float for a while.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then the cloud leaves the sun, you see it, and then all of a sudden they go fast again.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can read about it in Science Digest if you want.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: But that same thing happens with Christianity, dear friends.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you allow clouds to get in between you and the sun, the son of God, the son who has saved you, then, dear friends, your spiritual life will go on hold.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: It'll go on neutral.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you really want to keep growing, you need to keep nothing in between you and the sun.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: You need to keep galvanizing and gassing up your love for him.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let me close with one story.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is a story about a Jewish believer named Disraeli, who was the prime minister of England well over a hundred years ago.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Disraeli, Benjamin Disraeli fell in love with a woman who was 12 years younger than he and absolutely loved her.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: She loved him.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Their marriage became this sort of uh this sort of uh story for everybody in the kingdom of how much two people in a marriage could love one another.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they loved one another enough that they teased each other a lot.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Benjamin liked to say to Mary, like to say, you know, the only reason I married you was for your money.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which was kind of true.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: She was extremely wealthy.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And her response, right on the money, would be, yes, but if you had it to do over again, you'd marry me for love.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Which, of course, was right.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I would guess that among all of the people in the sound of my voice, very few of you trusted Jesus Christ and got married to him out of love.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was for the reason I did.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was a boy and I wanted to go to heaven with my daddy and mommy rather than the other place, you know.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or some of you may have trusted him for forgiveness of sins, or maybe for the reason Bill Burton, who we just whose testimony we just buried him a week ago, he was in the Air Force in 1957, and and an injury put him on his back, and he for a long time he was just facing up.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I looked up and I finally saw God, and I finally realized and needed to trust him as my Savior.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: But for whatever reason that you trusted Jesus Christ, you need to go back to him now, every single day.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And now as you go back to him, go back to him out of love.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: Not for what he can do for you or the prayers that he can answer, but go back to him for the same reason now that you go back to your wife or your husband and you hug them.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, maybe it was for other reasons, but now it's out of love.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Do you hear me?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's love the Lord Jesus Christ more than we've ever loved him before and desire him with a kind of a desire that will last beyond death and into eternity.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for your son Jesus.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the example of how you speak about him in Scripture when he was on earth, how he would break open heaven, and you could you just had to let everybody know how much you loved him and for some of the things you you say about him in the Bible.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, we want to feel that way.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: We want to feel as you feel about him.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: I pray for these dear brothers and sisters of mine, Heavenly Father, to be a Bible church and those who will listen.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: I pray that we will value what is most valuable in the entire universe, and that is your Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming today.