Jesus

Open your eyes.

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Open your eyes.

See the grass pushing up through the mud?

See the the crow keeping watch on the city parking meter?

See the man collecting bottles tilt his most recent acquisition and drain it?

Did you see what Jesus has done?

Jesus…

15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.   Colossians 1:15-17

What are you studying today?

It was made by Jesus.

It was made for Jesus.

It is held together today by Jesus.

Maybe your studies are an exploration of the human effect.

Some of that’s good.  Some of that’s not so good.

But at the root of it all, all we’ve had to work with started with Jesus.

He is before all things.

 

Jesus is Excellent!

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Scripture:  1 Peter 2:9-10

9But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Observations:

The church of Jesus is:

a chose race
a royal priesthood
a holy nation
a people for his own possession

For the purpose of:  proclaiming the excellencies of Jesus — He called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

His mercy has made it so!  Before His choosing we were not a people, but now by His choosing we have become His people.

Application:

When Jesus is larger in our minds than our racial profiles, our religious power plays, our self-righteous politics, and our pre-occupation with self-expression and validation, then the church will be what God intends.  That’s how mercy works.  Having been mercied by Jesus I can be realistic about the mess that I am and that we are.  However, its His mercy that also lets me see Jesus with awesome admiration.  Like, Peter in the boat after the miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5) we might be pressed to say, “Go away from me Lord I’m a sinful man.”  However, then Jesus invites us in closer, “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching men.”  Jesus’ marvelous light casts out the darkness and transforms our lives for His glory.

Prayer:

Heavenly Father have your way with me today.  Jesus has been so merciful to me.  You have included me in your people.  I am yours.  I am loved.  Show me again today something admirable in Jesus Christ my Lord.  May your truth and grace generate strength and courage to proclaim the many ways Jesus is excellent!  AMEN.

Regeneration: “You must be born again.”

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It was the Passover and Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night.  In the quiet of that holiday season, surely there were spiritual sensitivities in the heart of Nicodemus.  It’s possible that Nicodemus might wonder if Israel would again (As they did when God rescued the people from the slavery and oppression of the Pharaohs.  As God did when He delivered them from His judgement of the firstborn in the land.) see the power of God on display to deliver them from their enemies.  How long would they have to wait this time? What would be required to again see God’s power on display?

Jesus rocked Nicodemus’s view of the world when He told him you “must be born again” to see and enter the Kingdom of God.  To Nicodemus this was not how the world worked when it came to being on the inside track for God.  Faithful obedience to the Law of God is what made it possible to be on God’s side.  Nicodemus must have found Jesus’ declaration disconcerting.

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.t 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

In order to help Nicodemus, a teacher of the Law understand, Jesus makes a statement, makes an allusion, and gives an illustration.

Statement:  You must be born again.

Allusion:  Jesus reaches back to God’s message to Ezekiel (See Ezekiel 37 and the Valley of Dry Bones.) and the promise of God’s activity in raising up a people for Himself.  Flesh gives rise to flesh.  The Spirit gives rise to flesh.  God will put his Spirit within them and He will cleanse them.  He will be among them.

Illustration:  The wind.  Jesus says the wind blows where it will, we don’t see where it comes from, but we do see the effects.  So it is with people born of the Spirit.  We cannot see the internal work of the Spirit of God, nor are we in control of the Spirit; we cannot even limit the Spirit of God to borders and classes of people.

This sets up the incredible declaration and mind-expanding statement from Jesus about what God is up to in sending the Son of Man, “down” from heaven with all the wisdom and knowledge of being God:  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

God has come down into the realm of humanity in order to love us all.

Jesus disturbs the self-situated moorings of religion and any form of self-righteousness.   However, Jesus, the rabbi, is very kind to Nicodemus.  Teachers teach what they know.  Jesus has pointed out that being born again is an “earthly matter” (John 3:12) and in this matter, Jesus gently points out that Nicodemus doesn’t know about it.  Then he goes on to show that there is urgency in Nicodemus’ need for the healing virtue, salvation, and life available in Jesus the Messiah.  Judgement is a condition all people are in just  as Israel was when the poisonous snakes entered their camp in Numbers 25.  Healing and a prolonged life was available for all who were bitten if they looked on the bronze snake formed and lifted up on a stake by Moses.  But soon (relative to the night of this conversation with Nicodemus) the Son of Man, the form of God in Christ Jesus, would be lifted up (exalted) on an execution stake (the cross) for the healing of the nations.  And all who by the grace of God look upon Him in faith shall have eternal life–life now and for eternity in the Kingdom of God.

On Discipleship

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This past week I continued preaching from Mark 8 at our weekend worship gathering.  The passage is a hinge text for the whole Gospel of Mark.  It is a hinge between seeing the power of Jesus and seeing the weakness of Jesus.   It turns us from the question of Who is Jesus? to the question of What kind Messiah will Jesus be?  In the answer to those questions we realize what it means to be Jesus’ disciple.

I did not share all of the following quotes in the sermon, but I have been affected by them.

“The disciples cannot know who Jesus really is without accepting the necessity of his suffering and death.  And they cannot be his disciples unless they accept that fate for themselves.”  William Lane

“To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us.  Once more, all that self-denial can say is ‘He leads the way, keep close to him.'”  Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship p. 97.

“The cross is the heart of the gospel, and bearing a cross is a central requirement of discipleship.”  David Garland, NIV Commentary

Are you beginning to see how radical Jesus is?  It’s not a matter of saying, “I’ve been a failure, I’ve been immoral, so now I’m going to go to church and become a moral, decent person.  Then I’ll know I’m a good person because I am spiritual.”  Jesus says, “I don’t want you to simply shift from one performance-based identity to another; I want you to find a whole new way.  I want you to lose the old self, the old identity, and base yourself and your identity on me and the gospel.”  I love the fact that he says “for me and for the gospel.”  He is reminding us not to be abstract about this.  You can’t just say, “Oh, I see: I can’t build my identity on my parent’s approval because that comes and goes; I can’t build my life on my career success; I can’t build my life on romance.  Instead I will build my life on God.”  If that’s as far as you take it, God is almost an abstraction; and so building your life on him is just an act of the will.  The only that can reforge ad change a life at its root is love.

 

Jesus is saying, “It’s not enough just to know me as a teacher or as an abstract principle; you have to look at my life.  I went to the cross–and on the cross I lost my identity so you can have one.”

Once you see the Son of God loving you like that, once you are moved by that viscerally and existentially, you begin to get a strength, an assurance, a sense of your own value and distinctiveness that is not based on what you’re doing or whether somebody loves you, whether you’ve lost weight or how much you’ve got.  You’re free–the old approach to identity is gone.”    Timothy Keller, King’s Cross, p. 105.

 

the compassion of Jesus

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I enjoy Open Table.  When we share the meal and time together as brothers and sisters inThe Compassion of Jesus Christ  on Thursdays at Cityview for our community meal I get really excited about what Jesus is doing in our lives.  Plus we have really good food!  This week we prepared ourselves for the Lord’s Supper by reflecting on the compassion of Jesus.  Its really a bit surprising.  Our cultural disposition is quite accusatory towards those who preach.  But when it came to compassion that’s exactly what Jesus did.

You see compassion is to be moved toward another person by the reality of their condition.  In this case Jesus arrived on the other side of the lake with his tired and hungry disciples seeking a quiet place.  But instead of quiet they found a crowd.  Jesus “saw the large crowd and had compassion on them because they were sheep without a shepherd.  So he began teaching them many things.”

Obviously Jesus was an entertaining teacher; he taught through the day and past dinner.  But more than that was going on.  He recognized that the most desperate hunger of the crowd’s souls could only be met by truth, by Him, by the good news of His Kingdom.  So he taught them.  The truth could set them free.  Now before you shut Jesus and the church off, see what happens next in the account from Mark.

The disciples, probably being really hungry themselves, recognized that the crowds of people where in a desperate situation for food.  They were away from the towns and villages and the families that had spent the day with Jesus were now very hungry.  The Disciples wanted Jesus to send them away.  This is not compassion.  The disciples were not moved toward the people.  Rather, once they recognized the condition of the crowd, the disciples wanted to be done with them.  I love what happened next.

Jesus told the disciples to feed the crowd.  When they protested that it would cost eight months of wages, Jesus told them to see “what they had.”  In other words Jesus told them go find out what this community had.  When they came back with five loaves and two fish, Jesus took this community offering and fed them all.  They collected twelve baskets of leftovers.  Now that’s hard to believe.  And in case you are wondering the disciples had a hard time accepting Jesus’ authority of nature as well.  Just notice that even within the next twelve hours they were astonished that Jesus had this kind of authority.

My observations here are about the compassion of Jesus.  1.  He was moved towards people because of their condition:  their interior world was lacking  truth, specifically the truth about Him and the Kingdom; so, he taught them.  2.  He was moved towards people because of their condition the physical reality of hunger; so, he had his disciples gather what was already present in the community and share it beyond what one would have thought possible.

I believe Jesus was nurturing the spiritual motives necessary for His disciples to be a movement:  Complete trust and dependence in Him and compassion for the lost.  If we are to join Jesus in His work we must ask the Holy Spirit to nurture these motives in us.  Otherwise, we will keep our mouths shut in a culture that is suspect of truth proclamations and we will run away from people whose needs exceed what we have in our pockets.  Two aspects of our ministry of the gospel of the Kingdom that must be held together tightly:  proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus’ grace and the sharing of our community’s resources in the name, power, and character of Jesus.  Clearly Glenn Beck is not the first to struggle with Jesus’ ability to hold these two realities together, nor will he be the last.