The Thread - Jesus is THE Answer

Despite human sinfulness, people trusted in the LORD, and the LORD remained faithful to those who trusted Him. Our faith is an objective faith. We put our faith in Jesus: There are many things we could trust in life. Jesus is the only One worthy of complete trust. The LORD is a communicating God: We can know for certain the object of our faith, Jesus, because God has communicated with us. He has spoken our language. And we don’t need any new revelation. Jesus is the final and complete revelation of God to humanity. Angels are not worthy of being trusted with eternal things: Angels are created beings, and as such don’t have a permanent place in our salvation history. They are below Jesus in every way. Jesus is superior to angels and therefore the proper object of our faith: The message Jesus brought is an eternal, enduring message. Because it is eternal, the need to obey it is much greater than the messages brought by angels.

http://hospchap.sermon.net/main/main/20694846

Highlights

We often remember our lives through the "highlights," those moments when we felt the best. Or at least that is the way we would like to remember our journey. But for many of us we have some pretty painful bumps along the road. So what do we do when our "highlights" turns into "The Greatest Disasters of ...."?

It is very hard to not get consumed by the difficult things in life. Most of us have gotten sucked up into sadness, depression and perhaps even despair at some point in our lives. We allow our minds to drift between those painful moments as if flipping through the old photo album, turning pages almost out of obligation, feeling compelled to dive deeper.

One of the most powerful things we can do to keep our heads up in life is to follow the example of Scripture. The LORD instructed His people to "remember" repeatedly. They would be facing a time of uncertainty and change. The LORD would tell them to "remember" His faithfulness and take courage.

I think we all need a way to remember the highlights of our journeys. Perhaps today is the day to begin that list of things to remember. We can begin with Scripture and read of His faithfulness to His people down through history. Then we can take an honest look back and focus on those moments when the LORD showed up in our lives. Then we can gather the moments from others who are also traveling this pilgrim road.

But having the list is not enough. We must choose "fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2) We can move our minds. We can "take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ." (2Cor 10:5) We don't have to drift aimlessly in our thought life. We can take charge.

We are now eight days from our flight to Okinawa, eight days to a new adventure with Him. We could focus on the fourteen hour flight from Dulles to Tokyo, sitting in coach. Or we could see the faithfulness of the LORD to place a supportive community around us, ready to support our launch into the direction of God. We can choose to see His hand at work and anticipate His working through us. We can choose to remember the times when He showed up and received the glory, and get ready to pass the glory back to Him.

I say to you, "Remember!"

Puzzled Isn’t Faith

Mark 6:19-20

      Lots of people admire people from a distance. They learn a few things about them, and then they form a mental picture about who they think the person is. And then they admire that mental picture. Of course the picture doesn’t even have to be an accurate picture of that person. It can leave out large chucks of reality. It can be terribly distorted. And yet it leads to admiration.

      I will give you an example: Princess Diana of England. For many she is the beautiful woman walking down the wedding aisle with the world’s most beautiful wedding gown. Her image is frozen as she waves to the crowds, or holds a baby. Her charity work is all that is remembered. The affair she had, and the difficult relationship she had with the British royal family seem to get forgotten. She lived a lifestyle of contradictions. We all live lives filled with contradictions.

      But people pick and choose what they want to remember and believe. This is true of everyone. We can’t remember everything that has happened and bring all the facts to the table on every topic all the time. We have to summarize and make judgments. That is life.

      People made and make many judgments about Jesus. They have since His birth jumped to conclusions about who He was as what He was doing. Even those who were alive often missed the obvious.

      As Jesus’ forerunner, John the Baptist also had people who saw him from a distance and drew conclusions. King Herod was just such a man. Even though John had pointed out his unlawful marriage to Herodias, he still wanted to have a connection with John. He protected John from his wife’s anger and desire to kill him. He feared John. John’s life was radically different from his. John lived his talk. He was a righteous and holy man, as our text states, very different from Herod’s life.

      Herod had two different reactions to John: he was puzzled and he liked to listen to him. Notice that it doesn’t say that he believed what John said about life, death, or God’s Kingdom. Being puzzled by someone is not the same as faith. Admiring someone is not the same as emulating them. Observing someone from a distance is not the same as knowing them intimately.

      Even today people are selective about what they want to believe about Jesus. They want to believe He was a great moral teacher, but they don’t want to obey His teaching, at least not the inconvenient parts about sin, righteousness, judgment, money, heaven, hell, obedience, sacrifice, marriage…. They want to hold Him at a distance, admire without getting to know, being selective about what they choose to believe. That way, they are in control. They can remain puzzled and say they like to listen to Him, but never accept.

This is Personal

Matthew 16:15

Jesus is a different kind of religious leader. With all the other religions in the world, the focus is on the content of the teaching. With Christianity, the focus is on the person of Jesus. For Jesus and His disciples, it was a personal matter.

Jesus asked His disciples, not what they thought of His teaching, but who they thought He was. These are two very different questions. As I read the Gospels I hear Jesus again and again asking questions that focus the discussion in this direction.

In Matthew 22:41-46 and the parallels in Mark 12:35-37 & Luke 20:41-44, Jesus focuses the religious leaders on this question. They had developed a theology of God that rightly included the Messiah as the one who would come and again make things right. But they had concluded that Messiah was just a human king.

Jesus confronts this belief when He quotes the Old Testament Psalm, and shows that Messiah is more than just a human king. He is more than a descendant of David. David calls him Master, something a father would never say to his descendant. Even the original language of this passage demonstrates clearly that the writer of Psalm 110:1 spoke of someone to whom David was subject in addition to God, someone with whom God communicated.

Jesus invites them to examine more carefully what they believe and why. Jesus says the Messiah is more than just David’s descendent. This Lord is asked to sit at God’s right hand, the position of power and authority. He is told that enemies would be subject to his power. They would be under his feet.

In recent years we in the West have learned that many modern cultures, especially Muslim cultures, have very different standards of insult. A shoe-throwing incident with former President Bush comes to mind. For us a shoe is just a shoe. For them, showing someone the bottom of your feet is a grave insult. As helicopters flew overhead, they were insulted by seeing the bottoms of soldier’s feet hanging out of the aircraft.

This practice goes back into antiquity when defeated enemies were held under the victor’s feet as a way to humiliate them. The leader of the victor group would often place his feet on top of the loosing group’s leader. This is the image used in our passage. Do you remember after Saddam Hussein was defeated and the Iraqi people pulled down his statue and stood on top of it, or trampled his picture with their feet?

The Psalmist says that David’s master will sit at the right hand of the Creator God until his enemies are defeated. And Jesus is recorded as saying that this greater status afforded to Messiah should be given to Him. Jesus’ questioners are silenced.

What status do we afford Jesus? Just a really good guy, or something much more? What else does the Scriptures have to say about the person of Jesus?

Jesus Is God in the Flesh

John 8:58

There are some things we must believe or we really aren’t Jesus-followers. The first is the identity of Jesus. C. S. Lewis made popular the line of argument called “Lunatic, Liar or Lord.” In a nutshell, if we believe the Scriptures, then Jesus can’t be just a good moral teacher. He can’t be someone to model our lives after. He claimed to be more than that. How much more is explained in this passage of Scripture.

Jesus in chapter eight of John is in a long discussion with the Jewish leaders of His day. They are challenging His own claims about His identity. They even get personal in their attacks (v19). Jesus continues to ramp up His claim to being someone more than just a good teacher. He started with claiming He is the light of the world.

The Jews of Jesus’ day hear something in those words that sets them off. They react to what He says. I see this firsthand knowledge as enlightening. We might react to His words very differently, but they knew the culture, context, language and they reacted.

Note also, that Jesus did not back down from His claim. There are repeated times when Jesus could have said, “Hey, wait a minute. I didn’t mean that. What I meant was…” but He didn’t. He could have retracted and corrected, but instead He ramps it up.

And the reaction of the Jews also ramps up to the point where they want to stone Him for blasphemy, claiming to be God. They are pushing for a reason to kill Him, and they find one. They are insulted by what Jesus says, because it is true. They feel the sting of His words. Jesus is pushing for clarity and understanding (v43), and I think he gets it. They just don’t want to believe what He is saying.

Again, I want to emphasize, Jesus had many opportunities to retract what He was saying during this conversation, but He didn’t. Jesus raises His importance above Abraham, the father of the faith. Abraham rejoiced at Jesus’ coming. Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s words to Abraham.

But this is not all. Jesus claims to be the “I AM” that spoke to Abraham. If we go back and read Exodus 3:14 we see the God of the burning bush introducing Himself to Abraham and to the people of Israel. He is beginning a covenant relationship with them and introduces Himself as the One who exists independent of anyone or anything else. Jesus claims He is this person, this “I AM”. They want to immediately kill Him.

Christianity is based on the belief that Jesus is God. We will continue to look at this in the coming days. What we believe about Jesus determines our eternal destiny. It is important to know what we believe and why we believe it.