“The Personal Gospel” (1 Timothy 1:8-17)

Sunday, September 1, 2019

            Allen Langham saw a flock of birds take off from the sill outside the window of his prison cell.  In that moment, he knew God was real.  How did this convict become a follower of Jesus?

            Growing up, he was abandoned by his father and, though his mother truly loved him, her discipline was severe.  He saw her abused, and he himself was abused by neighborhood bullies.  It filled the young man with anger. 

            He started skipping school.  He excelled in sports, especially the violent sport of rugby.  But, he constantly got in fights.  He ended up becoming a very tough scrapper who sold drugs and fought for money.  Landing in prison at 17, he became a hardened criminal.  Then came a series of incidents where he’d determine to turn his life around only to fall back into violent crime once he was out of jail.

            His safe place was the prison chapel worship service.  Church had been his refuge growing up and the prison chapel provided the same support.  So, when he landed back in custody again, he felt it was truly rock-bottom.  Through tears he cried out to God, “If you’re real … put a white dove outside my window.”  The next thing, he looked out and the birds took off and he gave his life to Christ. 

            His journey into salvation and the disciple life had some setbacks, but the three steps forward outnumbered the two back and today he has reconciled with his family.  He is now an author, a chaplain for several sports teams, and someone ready at a moment’s notice to tell you about Jesus.  

Allen went from violent brawler to passionate Jesus follower.  This journey from lost to saved is the heart of the message in 1 Timothy 1:8-17.  Paul writes that the law – the Law of Moses found in the Old Testament, Exodus – Deuteronomy, is good.  The law convicts us of sin.  Then Paul lists types of sins including idolatry, disobedience, sexual sin, kidnapping and slave trading, and dishonesty.  It’s a representative list, not an exhaustive one.  With this list, Paul makes two very clear points. 

First, we don’t tell God our lives are not sinful.  We look at where our own lives fail to conform to God’s standard and we confess.  When it comes to sin, we do not justify it.  We do not try to reframe our sins or say they aren’t sins.  We just confess them, ask for forgiveness, and turn away from the sin.

The second point established by Paul’s enumeration of sins is that when we talk about salvation, we have to talk about our sins. We have to take sin seriously.  Paul did.  In verse 13, he says, “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.”  He’s referring to the days when he denied that Jesus is Lord.  He tried to have followers of Jesus arrested.  And when one of the original deacons, Stephen, was stoned to death by angry mob, Paul cheered and held the coats of the stone-throwers (Acts 7:58; 8:1).  For this reason, in 1 Timothy 1:15, Paul calls himself the foremost of sinners.  In his own mind, he truly believed he was the very worst.

Allen Langham, the rugby player and brawler from London I talked about to open the message would have said the same about himself.  He was not into justifying his sins.  He tearfully confessed them.  I read his story in the June 2019 issue of Christianity Today magazine.  The monthly has a back page feature that shares the story of how individuals become followers of Jesus.  Paul went from Pharisee and Christian-persecutor to tent-maker and apostle.  Allen went from criminal tough guy to sports team chaplain and Christian author.  What are some other stories of conversion?

Rosalind Picard is a scientist and professor at MIT.  She has always been academically gifted.  In high school, she loved science and actively opposed religion or the idea that there might be a God.  So, she was shocked when the family for whom she was a baby-sitter invited her to church.  She really respected this couple because of their intellect.  The dad was a doctor.  How could smart people go to church? 

She resisted going to church, so they tried convincing her to at least read the Bible.  She started with Proverbs.  She was amazed by the wisdom she found in the Bible.  It surprised her and forced her to think. She did not have a vision or any supernatural experience.  She just felt that as she read scripture, someone was speaking to her. 

She resisted God.  She resisted faith.  But when she got to college and reconnected with a high school friend, he invited her to church.  And he was so smart she actually needed his help with her physics homework.  So she went to church and resumed her exploration of faith until, many weeks later, something in the sermon brought her to a point of decision.  The pastor challenged the congregation to stop trying to be masters of their own lives and instead let the Lord be master.  She decided to accept the challenge and gave her life to Jesus.

She writes, “my world changed dramatically, as if a flat, black-and-white existence suddenly turned full color and three-dimensional” (Christianity Today, April 2019).  Becoming a disciple of Jesus actually made her a more curious scientist.  She says, “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God.  Now I know I was an arrogant fool who snubbed the greatest Mind in the cosmos – the Author of all science, mathematics, art, and everything else there is to know.”

Make note of these different salvation stories.  Allen’s story is of rough and tough guy whom God gave a sign – birds on the prison window sill.  The Apostle Paul’s conversion came in the context of religion.  He went from persecuting what he thought was a false messiah cult to realizing that Jesus truly was Israel’s Messiah and the Lord of all creation.  Allen left behind his life as a brawler and became a chaplain.  Paul left behind his life as an up-and-coming Pharisee and legal scholar to make tents and himself receive threats and beatings as he traveled about preaching that salvation is found in Jesus. 

Rosalind Picard did not leave anything behind except her skepticism.  Before she turned to Jesus, she was a brilliant scientist.  After she gave her life to Christ, she was still a brilliant scientist.  The point is every story of conversion to Christ is unique.  You story doesn’t have to be more or less dramatic than someone else’s.  It’s you story.  What every story does need is that moment when we make faith in Jesus our own – not our parents’ or best friends’.  We don’t become Christians to please a spouse or make a pastor or Sunday school teacher happy.  We turn to faith because we realize we are sinners and are lost without Jesus leading our lives.  His death on the cross and his resurrection are what each one of us needs no matter what life we live.

Casey Diaz was a high level gang-member in Los Angeles.  Within the gang’s system, he had the authority to order hits on people, and he did.  Then Jesus met him in a vision in his prison cell: a vision.  He turned his life from crime, drugs, and violence to faith.  Now, he is a part-time pastor and owns a sign-making company in LA. 

Kim Cash Tate is lawyer from DC who landed a really good job with a federal judge in Madison, Wisconsin.  Though she didn’t grow up in church, her mother instilled in her Christian values that stayed with her even as she strayed from those values in her young adult life.  She also attended Christian schools growing up, so she had some context for Christianity when she arrived in Wisconsin.

She hated living there.  An African American, she felt very disconnected from black culture.  All she saw around her was white people and white people are OK, but she felt isolated and just wanted to get back to DC.  She also felt something inside her was looking for something more and though she couldn’t clearly articulate it, that something more that she needed was God. 

She and her boyfriend decided living together outside of marriage was wrong.  So they got married.  It was the first time in her life she made a decision based on what she thought God wanted her to do.  Later, her husband found a new church while she was out of town and when she returned, she went with him.  She writes, “For the first time, I heard the true gospel preached and it rocked me.  Finally, I saw myself as God saw me – a sinner in need of redemption.  I asked God to forgive me, and I received Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  For all my prayers that God would save me from Madison, WI, his plan all along had been to save me in Madison” (Christianity Today, July/August, 2019).

A brawler, a Pharisee, a scientist, a gang member, and a black lawyer living in a town of mostly white people; each story is of someone coming to faith and new life in Jesus.  Some instances involve supernatural interventions, others invitations to church, and others recollections of morality instilled from childhood.  Each is a story of salvation.

What concerns me most this morning is the story of your salvation.  How would you write the “from this” to “that” as your think of your own faith journey?  I was an 11-year-old kid when I realized I could no longer live the faith of my parents.  I needed to take what they had taught me and claim it for my own.  I needed to give my life to Jesus.  I did that in the summer of 1981 and have never looked back.  An outsider might not be aware of the change that started in me, but I know from that moment, I lived in a God-awareness that has stayed with me.

Your conversion might be like this: From “church attendee” to “born-again follower of Jesus.”  As 1980’s Christian singer, Keith Green put it, “going to church makes one a Christian about as much as stepping into a McDonald’s makes you a hamburger.”  You’re not a Christian because you show up in church on Sundays.  Paul writes that “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with faith and love that are sure in Christ Jesus; … Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1:14, 16). 

We realize that grace, mercy, and love as we confess our sins, turn from them, and turn to Christ.  It’s a conscious step we must take.  We are among the saved when we actively turn to Jesus and receive the forgiveness and salvation he offers.  Until we take that step, we are not among the saved.

I invite you, if you know the Gospel but have never turned to Jesus and asked Him into your heart, to do so today.  This can be that moment when you receive new life in Christ.  If you have never made the decision to follow Him, I pray you will today.

If you have, tell your story as Paul did, as I have, and these writers in Christianity Today magazine have.  They aren’t famous, and we need not be.  Just tell your story.  The first act is coming for baptism.  Next, in our lives, we share with others who we are in Christ.  The Gospel is Jesus is Lord.  The personal Gospel is your own account of how Jesus is your Lord and Savior.  Share your personal Gospel with someone today.

AMEN           

God-Sized Prayer for the Community

The truth is I have repeatedly asked God to send more people to our church.  This year we have experienced more departures than the normal attrition our church cycles through.  In any given year, we see a dozen or more people move whether it is because of graduation or moving to a new town.  Or, people leave the church for other reasons.  As that happens, new people join us.  Families move to the area.  People already living here decide they want to give our church a try.  In over decade, we have not had significant numeric growth or decline – until this year. 

            This year, our new arrivals are not keeping pace with our departures.  As the lead pastor of the church, this has troubled me and I have prayed fervently for God to do something about it.  However, recently as I walked through the neighborhood near our church property, I experienced a paradigm-rattling thought.  I may have been praying the wrong prayer.

            Does God want people to attend HillSong?  Maybe.  But more than filling the seats in our building with bodies on Sunday mornings, God wants people turning to Him in faith.  God wants the hearts of people turned to him for salvation. 

            There’s a middle school a block from our church campus.  There are hundreds of homes within a one-mile radius of our location.  I walked across that campus praying for the kids who would be taking year-end testing.  I prayed for cafeteria workers, teachers’ classroom aides, the school nurse, the janitors, and the resource officer.  I prayed for office staff, the principal, and assistant principals.  And of course, I prayed for the teachers.  From the school, I walked up and down residential streets praying, asking God to send a wave of revival through this community. 

            Our church is not influencing or affecting this community in which God has placed us.  A few families are core members of our church family, but for the most part, the community is indifferent to the church.  I know.  I live in the community. I talk to my neighbors every day.  As I walked and pray, it hit like a thunderclap.  I need – we all need – to be praying for something much more important than increased attendance at our church.  We need to pray for a bigger impact in our community. 

            The second entry for “impact” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary reads that this is a noun which means “the force or impression of one thing on another.”  What Gospel force is our church exerting in this community?  What Godly impression are we making?

          People in our town don’t know how much they need Jesus.  They don’t realize they are lost without him.  I know.  I live here.  One of the nicest men I know decide Sunday morning was the perfect time an amusement park.  He’s a great dad and I love it when my kids play at his house because I know they’re safe, they’re having fun, and they don’t spend the time staring at screens. 

I love my neighbor.  But, it never occurred to him that Sunday morning is a time for the church to gather and worship God.  It just isn’t in his mind that his children need to be formed in the image of Christ and part of that formation is the teaching that comes in Sunday School, in extended session, and in worship services.  I hope my friendship with him is a witness.  He knows who I am and what I do.  But whatever effect our friendship has, in our half a dozen years of acquaintance, his family has been to our church exactly 1 time.  And they’re not missing our church to worship elsewhere.  In his life, Sunday morning is time for taking kids places or for working out.  He is but one example of the people around us – our church’s mission field.

We not called to encourage people to be nice.  We are called to help people become disciples of Jesus.  One of the most important and maybe one of the most overlooked passages to inform our calling is Luke 19:41-44.  Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem and knows he will soon be arrested and executed.  He knows this is coming, but he also knows he will have a week where he is able to teach in the temple’s outer court.  It is his last chance to give his vision for life in God’s kingdom before he goes to the cross.

As he approaches the city from the outlying village where he spends his nights, Luke writes he weeps. He weeps for Jerusalem.  His tears do not fall because he desperately wants to see better temple attendance for Sabbath day worship services.  He’s crying because he says of the people of the city, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!  Because now they are hidden from your eyes.  … You did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”

Jesus was God-in-the-flesh and too many people in the city could not see it and totally missed it.  This broke God’s heart.  We are nearly 2000 years removed from Jesus’ time in Jerusalem, from the crucifixion and resurrection.  Today, we live in the age of the church.  The Holy Spirit has come (Acts 2) to empower the church to draw people to Jesus.  We are the witnesses to what God has done and is doing – saving men and women from sin and from an eternity apart from Him.  Our testimony is meant to convince people to render a verdict: they are guilty and their only hope of rescue from judgment is Jesus. 

Would I love it if our church got bigger (had more people)?  Most definitely!  That’s why I have continuously asked God to send more people to us.  God responded to that prayer by challenging me to pray something much bigger and more important.  God wants the hearts of the people in this community.  We as a church need to pray that we would have a God-sized influence and a resurrection-persuasion.  We need to impact this community for Christ. 

That’s why I am urging you to make salvation prayer a crucial part of your daily prayer life (and if you don’t prayer daily, then start.  Now!).  Pray for the salvation of the people in our community who don’t know Jesus.  Pray for our church to be an effective witness.  Have your heart burn for people like many of my neighbors.  These are wonderful, upstanding folks, but without a sense of how much they need Jesus.  Pray that God will work through our church to help people find their way to Jesus.  If it means many end up attending our church, that’s great.  But that’s not the prayer.  The prayer is that people’s hearts would turn to God through faith in Jesus Christ.  Let this burn in you.

God Wants you at the Party (Luke 15)

Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 31, 2019

            You love the punch.  It’s ginger ale and some kind of sherbert and something else.  You can’t quite place all flavors, but it is fantastic.  Does the wonderful conversation you’re having make the punch taste better, or is it good by itself?  You’re not sure, but you’re enjoying both, the tasty drink, and the conversation. 

You’re surprised that you are talking with the person you’re talking with.  It’s the mayor!  This surprises you because the mayor is not usually at your church, or any church.  When he was elected, he was very public about his atheism.  And just last week, he was involved in a public scandal of a sexual nature.  It wasn’t enough to have him removed from office.  But he was painted with embarrassment and shame.  It likely killed his political ambitions.  Would he ride out his term in seclusion?

No!  Here he is, the scandalized, atheist mayor in a delightful conversation with you here at your church’s reception.  You talk about how much you both love the town and how you both enjoy the spring weather.  Eventually he moves on to talk to other people.  As you contemplate why he might be there, a friend from church sidles up.

“Can you believe that scumbag has the nerve to show up here?”  She asks, her face joyless.  Her negative mood has thrown a wet blanket onto your warm feelings. You look into her eyes, peering out from her frown.  She looks down and grumbles, “This is too fruity.”  She throws out a full cup of the punch you’ve been enjoying. 

In Luke 15, Jesus has something for all the party poopers in the church.  God wants you at the party, whether you a scandalized mayor, a self-righteous church busybody, or whomever you might be.  God wants us to understand that church is a party with laughing, drinking, dancing, good food, and good conversation.

There are people outside who don’t realize the gathering of God’s people is supposed to be a celebration.  Worse, people inside the church don’t know that either.  In some churches, the people inside who don’t know are the ones who run the church.  They think church is for them.  It’s not.  Church is the body of Christ.  We in the church who have already put our trust in Jesus are to spend our lives getting to know Him.  To know Him, we have to be with Him.  To be with Him, we have to be where He is.  Luke 15 makes it clear that Jesus is out in the world, looking for people who don’t know Him so he can help them find their way to his party.

“Tax collectors and sinners were coming near” Luke writes.  The Pharisees and scribes - religious leaders, kind of like pastors, elders, and deacons - grumble.  “This fellow welcomes tax collectors and sinners, and eats with them.”  Tax collectors was a catch-all phrase for the immoral people decent individuals avoided.  When Jesus welcomed them and ate with them, he invited them into intimate circles of friendship.  When he heard religious leaders complain about his sinner-friends, he told parables of lost things, a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son.  

In these stories, we see three ways of being lost and three ways of seeking the lost.   Among the many lessons of Luke 15 are these certainties.  People are cut off, far from God, and in that condition, they’re in trouble.  God seeks the lost and expects His church to do so.  And finally, many of the lost are lost inside the church. 

Jesus begins with a lost sheep.  How does a sheep get lost?  It wanders off.  It is a stupid animal.  It’s not willfully ignoring the shepherd.  It just doesn’t pay attention to Him.  Due to the animal’s own carelessness and ignorance, it ends up lost.  It didn’t know where it was going. 

So many people within blocks of our church are in this exact condition.  Having grown up in the church or at least with a sense of who Jesus is, people don’t understand how important it is to be connected to Him.  Spiritually, they know they’re hungry, but unaware of how to be filled.  So they try this religion or that church; they try to be filled by wealth or status; maybe it’s an obsession with fitness or extreme sports; maybe drugs and partying.  How does God respond to us when we are oblivious and blindly wander away from Him?

The shepherd in Jesus’ parable leaves 99 sheep in the wilderness to go find the lost one.  That’s crazy!  Won’t they all get lost too?  Probably.  When they do, the shepherd will go into the wastelands to find them.  This shepherd is reckless and that’s Jesus’ point.  Being lost is so dangerous for the sheep, the shepherd will search recklessly because he is urgent to save the lost one.  When he does, he celebrates!

God expects us to be just as urgent in our concern for people who don’t know Jesus.  If we truly want to follow Jesus and love others, we have be driven to help others find their way to the salvation Jesus offers.  When we do that we are truly sharing hope.  We are called to recklessly seek out the lost as Jesus does. 

In the second parable a coin is lost.  The sheep got itself lost by ignoring the shepherd.  Nothing the coin did led to it being lost.  Someone else lost that coin.  We know so many people who have been raised in families that have no connection to Christianity at all.  Or, we see people raised in abusive church situations.  In church, they don’t experience love.  They don’t meet Jesus.  Church is a place of judgment and guilt.  They end up driven from the church. These poor souls, these lost coins, are far from God because people have driven them from Him.

Note that Jesus compares God to a woman who will stop at nothing until she finds her coin.  The shepherd recklessly sought the lost.  The woman relentlessly searches.  She is determined to find the lost coin, and God is determined that your non-Christian neighbor will come to faith in Jesus and be saved.  Furthermore, just as God wants us to care about lost people the way the reckless shepherd did, God also wants us to evangelize with relentless determination like the woman.

We are to seek out the lost that they might meet Jesus and be saved!

The third story in the Luke 15 trilogy is the most familiar, the lost son or the prodigal son.  The sheep got itself lost by being careless.  The coin was lost by someone else.  Both needed to be found.  The lost son willfully turned away from the father.  He knew who the father was, what the father was like, and still he turned away.  He knowingly chose to reject the father in favor of a life partying and sexual promiscuity.  His was open, honest defiance. 

How does God react to this overt rejection?  Differently.  Unlike the shepherd and the woman, we do not see the father go out to the far country to seek out the lost son.  The son made a choice and the father honors that choice.  That doesn’t mean the father has given up on this wayward one. 

The son’s life falls apart as our lives always do when we reject God.  He finally realizes his only hope is to go back to his father.  While he is still far off, the father runs to him.  The father could only do that if he had been watching for him.  The father could not have known which day the son would come if he ever came home.  So, the father spent time every day watching instead of doing his work.  He should have been managing all his holdings, overseeing his business, but to him, watching for his son mattered more. 

The shepherd sought the lost sheep recklessly.  The woman sought the lost coin relentlessly.  This father watched for his lost son restlessly.  He couldn’t go on with life.  He harbored a foolish hope that his son was alive out there and would one day come home.  When we turn from God and reject Jesus, God keeps an eye on us longing for that day when we will choose to turn back to Him.

The body of Christ, us, God’s church in the world today, needs to live with that same watchfulness.  We never know if today will be the Sunday God has led a lost soul through our doors.  So every Sunday, we have to be ready to heap the love of God on everyone who comes through our doors.  Through prayer and worship, we have to present our hearts to God that we may be transformed, moved from the competition and destructiveness of our society to the grace of God.  We need to be a community of grace ready to receive and love and encourage the lost when they find their way to us.  That’s our work as a church, helping the lost meet Jesus and be saved.

Church is supposed to be a party, a gathering of people who are joined together in Christ.  He didn’t just tell tax collectors and sinners how to be saved.  He welcomed them into the deepest levels of friendship, sharing the table with them and doing so with loud laughter and deep draughts of joy.  

God wants church to be a party when we gather.  Furthermore, God wants us to know we’re at a party and experience the happiness of not just any party, but the best of parties.  The older brother in the prodigal son story missed the joy of the father.  He spent all his life in the father’s house and never entered that joy.  He didn’t leave, but he was as lost as his younger brother.

Many churches are full of older brothers like that, complainers.  Many who have spent their lives in church are like the member I mentioned in the opening story, the one who complained that the scandalized atheist mayor would dare show up at church, at my church; when they are done griping about the sinfulness of lost people, they mutter about the way punch is too fruity.  They’ve spent a lifetime lost at church. 

It’s not their church or mine.  It’s not our church.  It’s God’s.  We are guests at God’s party, invited to stay forever.  We only enjoy it when we realize we are at a party. 

Tax collectors and sinners were coming near [to Jesus] to listen to him.  God wants us to be near Jesus and, with the Holy Spirit, to go out to lost people and help them draw near to Jesus.  Because God wants them at the party too.

AMEN

God has Spoken (Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12)

            Who is Jesus?  Pose the question to your neighbor and you’ll get one answer.  Ask someone else and it will be a different answer.  If you ask friend who doesn’t go to church, and she knows you do, she might feel pressure, thinking you’re looking for a “right answer.”  If we went around the room here and had every person write down their response, we’d get a number of different ideas.  Many would be similar to one another, but there would be different points of emphasis.  Even among 80-100 people who worship in the same church every week, the answers to such a basic question, who is Jesus, would vary.

            We won’t get a complete answer to this seemingly short question in the verses we read in Hebrews this morning.  To get a full picture, we’d have to go through the Old Testament, the four Gospels and Acts, Paul’s letters, and the rest of the New Testament to see it.  And we’d have to understand everything we read and have the capacity to hold together all the aspects of who Jesus is.  The short question is bigger than any we could possibly answer.

            But, please try.  Get a pen and the section of your bulletin for comments, and begin writing your definition of who Jesus is.  It might be worth it to spend the entire time this morning writing your understanding of Jesus.  Your faith life might get a boost if you take what you write here this morning and continue working on it throughout the upcoming week.  Who is Jesus?

            Hebrews 1 doesn’t give the complete answer, but it does give an important part. 

            Hebrews is regarded as an epistle, a New Testament letter, but it’s really a theological treatise which begins, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”  For a moment, stop to digest the claim made here.  God has spoken to us.

            The Raiders of the Lost Ark tells of the adventurous World War II era archaeologist Indiana Jones.  He has to fight Nazis and escape from tombs full of poisonous snakes in order to find his way to God.  When he finally gets to the point that the ark is opened, he has to close his eyes.  It’s too much to see.  In one of the Star Trek movies, the Enterprise under the leadership of Captain James T. Kirk flies beyond the reaches of known space in search for God. 

            You and I cannot match the exploits of the great Indiana Jones, and you and I are not even archaeologists.  We’re not starship captains, and in fact there aren’t really starships, and truth be told, there is no edge of known space.  But these and dozens of other fantastic stories tell the same story, one believed by a lot of people, maybe many who here.  We accept this notion that God is “out there,” “inaccessible,” “unreachable.” 

            In a sense, it’s true.  Human beings cannot work their way to God or figure God out.  But, as Hebrews asserts, there have been prophets.  God has spoken through the mouths of those prophets.  We made this point a few months ago as we studied the prophet Hosea.  God wants us to know His heart and mind.  God has sent prophets.  God has given the Bible.  God has given visions to people like Daniel and Peter and Paul.  We don’t need to undertake a harrowing, death-defying quest.  We need to sit and listen because God has spoken to us.  I am not sure people who don’t participate in church or read the Bible know this.   God loves us and wants us to know it. 

            The primary concern[i] of the author of Hebrews is to show that while in the past God has spoken through prophets and scriptures and kings and priests, in the last days, God speaks through the Son.  The New Testament perspective is that the resurrection of Jesus initiates the “last days,” the end times.  The era of the church, which we are now in, is the prelude to the end of history.  We don’t know when Christ will return to initiate the final resurrection, but we believe he will, and we believe we are living in the end times.  There’s no telling how long it might be, but we are in the last days, God is the communicator, and Jesus is the messages and the way the message is communicated. 

As you’re working on your own answer to the question “who is Jesus,” maybe a part of the answer is this.  Jesus is God’s means of communication.  God is the communicator and shares with us truth, and Jesus is the message but also is the medium, the way the communication is conveyed. 

            He is called “the son” in Hebrews 1 and then is named in 2:9.  The Hebrews author declares 7 affirmations, truths about the person, work, and status of God the Son.  First, the Son is heir of all things.  God bequeaths to His Son, the Lord Jesus, possessions of everything in existence. Second, all that God created, the entire universe, every living thing – all of it – was made through the Son.  Third, when we see Jesus, we see God. “He is the reflection of God’s glory, and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (1:3).  Fourth, also in verse 3, Jesus sustains all things.  Colossians 1:17 says, “in him all things hold together.  Jesus is creator and sustainer. 

            A fifth affirmation of Jesus the Son in the opening verses of Hebrews is purification; sin taints God’s good creation, but Jesus purifies us, washing our sin away and putting his holiness on us.  The theme of Jesus’ covering of our sins introduced in 1:3 will develop in much greater detail throughout Hebrews. 

The sixth affirmation follows the sequence of the Gospel story.  Jesus purifies us in his death on the cross, taking the penalty for our sins on himself.  After the cross and burial, he was resurrected.  After resurrection and appearing to the apostles, he ascended and now sits in body at the right hand of God the Father.  God is currently present in the world through God the Spirit.  The Son is currently in Heaven and will return in His glorified body at the end to inaugurate the final resurrection. 

Seventh and finally, the Son is superior to the angels.  They carry God’s messages to human beings.  They are not restrained by the limits of natural law.  Angels seem vastly superior to us, but, we, not angels, are the ones created in the image of God.  And Jesus, God in human flesh – fully man and fully God at the same time – lived the perfect human life.  He goes before us as the superior one, worshiped by and by Angels too.    

·         Heir of all things

·         Agent of Creation for everything that exists

·         Reflection of God

·         Sustainer of all things

·         The one who makes sinful human beings pure and holy

·         Seated at the right hand of the Father

·         Above all supernatural, heavenly beings

This is the Jesus we meet in Hebrews chapter 1, the means of God’s communication.  He is the messenger and the message.  To hear what God is trying to say, we must listen to Jesus. 

Hebrews 2 adds that though Jesus is now crowned with glory, he has gone through suffering and death.  God is immortal; God cannot die.  Yet in Jesus, God shed divinity and took on human flesh and like you and me was vulnerable to disease, hunger, heartbreak, disappointment, and sorrow.  The end of 2:9 says he tasted death for everyone; for you; for me.  The Son completely identifies with our greatest struggles; sometimes people see pain and evil running rampant throughout the world and have a hard time believing a good God could possibly exist.  In Jesus, that good God suffered in every way that humans do. 

This leads to the third part of the conversation in Hebrews.  It’s the old adage: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noisy crash.  It’s a simple equation for sound.   There has to be a sender, a medium, and a receiver.  The sound waves are produced, they travel through something – air, solid material, water – something.  And then the sound is completed when the sound waves are received.  So, God speaks and the sound travels through Jesus.  Who’s the recipient?  God’s church. 

The moments of divine communication in the Bible fall within the bounds of religious practice.  When Peter met the Roman Cornelius, Cornelius had been praying in an attempt to connect to Judaism’s God.  When Philip baptized the eunuch from Ethiopia, the man had been reading Israel’s scriptures.  When Jesus confronted Saul the Pharisee on the road, Saul’s work of arresting Christians for being Christians was an act of the synagogue.    The reason so many people embrace spirituality while rejecting organized religion is we all have a longing for God, but the church, like human institutions, is broken.

Still, Jesus, the holy God, took on frail human flesh.  The Holy Spirit started the church in the synagogue through flawed people like Peter, Philip, and Paul, and non-Jews like the Ethiopian and the centurion.  Yes, our church in particular and churches in general are imperfect, flawed, and broken. But the God Indian Jones battled Nazis and vipers to find has reached to human beings – those in the church.  God has spoken through Jesus to the church.

This is not to say that God ignores people outside the church.  Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the world.  God sends us to the world first and foremost to announce that people can have forgiveness of sin and salvation from death when they turn to Jesus.  That is the great commission: go and make disciples of people who don’t know God.  Yes, God loves the world.

God’s starting point is the word He has spoken through Jesus to the church.  Hebrews was a theological essay written for persecuted Christians in order to encourage them by clarifying their knowledge of the Savior, Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Begin developing your answer to the question, “Who is Jesus?”  Read Hebrews.  And for that view of the exalted, divine Son, read Colossians 1 and Revelation and the Gospel of John 1.  To move through the exciting, surprising twists and turns of God walking in human flesh, read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the rest of John.  Jesus is the God who loves you and me, the one who gives us life.  I urge each one of us this to invest time in re-discovering Him.

AMEN

---

[i] George Guthrie (1988), The NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), p.54.