Even as followers of Christ, we can short-change the big picture story of what the coming of Jesus was all about. If we are not careful, we can reduce it to simply the story of how God could get you and me to Heaven when we die. And when we reduce the story to that limited perspective, we run the risk of making the work of God more about us and our wellbeing than about God and His glory. And so America’s largest “church” has as its theme, “Discovering the Champion in You”, and its pastor has written three books (note the theme): Your Best Life Now; Becoming a Better You; It’s Your Time. Interestingly, some people mistake these books as being remotely “Christian”.

And so it’s critical that we not understand the coming of Jesus to earth primarily to be about us; rather, our

Big Idea:
The purpose of the coming of Christ was to accomplish God’s plan to reconcile sinful people to Himself.

In preparing for this message, I took a look at all the Scriptures in which Jesus is recorded as having said, “I came”, or “I have come”, to…and when you do a study like that, you get some interesting results. I have incorporated most—not all—of those passages into today’s message, so that the words of Jesus Himself determine the answer to the question.

I. The Anticipation of the Mission
Jesus came on a mission from God, fulfilling the Old Testament promises of a Messiah/Deliverer.
Here’s what Jesus had to say in His Sermon on the Mount: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” – Matthew 5:17.

Jesus understood Himself to be the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament had pointed to in terms of a coming Messiah. It’s critical that He’d say something like this; many folks in listening to His words would have been tempted to hear Him saying that He was doing away with everything that had come before, and was starting over. After all, He said and did some very radical things, confronting the religion boys, going against their traditions and conventions, slaying some of their sacred cows and acting in ways that a “religious person”, as they understood it, wouldn’t act. In fact, in a message in which we are talking about why Christ came into the world, let’s hear one particularly upsetting understanding of His mission that Jesus shared:

34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” – Matthew 10:34-39.

That doesn’t come off as either a limp-wristed girly man Jesus, such as some folks envision, nor does it sound like a Messiah Who is going to come and deliver Israel from its oppressors. And yet, His message was that He was in perfect harmony with what had been prophesied.

Further, if it’s God’s plan, God’s mission, then it’s God Who receives the glory when He pulls it off. We have to drive this stake down deep into the marrow of our Christian understanding and experience: it’s not about you. And it’s not about me.

II. The Purpose of the Mission
The mission was to accomplish reconciliation between the living God and sinful, dying man.
Jesus saw Himself clearly as coming to do the will of God. He was on a mission from God; listen to John 6:

“I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” – John 6:38-40.

And the work God had in mind from eternity past was the work of bringing back to God the Father those who had been estranged from Him due to their sin. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself”, the Scripture says. Reconciliation connotes estrangement, that something has taken place between God and man to drive a wedge, and that something is sin. That’s not unusual; we experience estrangement from other people, and it’s always—always—caused by sin. I was speaking with a young man this week who is estranged from his mother, and this was certainly the case. Man’s biggest problem is that the God Who created him is, according to Scripture, His enemy—not because God has done the estranging, but because man has turned his back on God and sinned, creating the chasm between God’s holiness and man’s sinfulness. And nothing man can do can bridge the gap—hence Jesus.

III. The Center of the Mission
The mission centered on Jesus’ atoning death on the cross as the sacrifice for our sin.
Down the road several weeks, we’ll further unpack the significance of the cross, but for now, we state that it is at the very center. There are branches of so-called Christianity which downplay the cross, the atonement, which look almost with embarrassment that anyone would consider the cross to be so central. They focus on the Incarnation instead, at which time God condescended to be identified with us as human beings. In no way do I diminish the fact of the Incarnation of course, but Jesus didn’t come just to hang out with us so that He could prove He was a swell dude who liked to hang with His buds; He came to do for us what no one else could possibly do: give His life as a ransom for many

“…the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” – Mark 10:45.

Only He could accomplish this. No mere man could, by his death, effect anything other than his own death—for no mere man, sinful himself, would have any authority to perform such a task.

It was after the chain of events that would culminate in His crucifixion had already begun that we hear Jesus’ words in John 12:

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” – John 12:27-28.

He knew what lay ahead; it had been foreordained from eternity past: His suffering and death on the cross. There was no denying this; in Scripture after Scripture, it is clear that Jesus knew that the end of His earthly road lay at Calvary, that this was the center of His purpose for coming. If “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself”, as the Scripture says, and the medium was the cross. We cannot speak with any credibility whatever about the mission of Christ without seeing at its heart a cross. This was the means God in His infinite wisdom chose to accomplish His grand purpose of redeeming and reconciling sinful man to Himself. What a strange, incredible choice: to take an instrument of shame and humiliation, a device for exacting capital punishment upon a criminal, and making of it the very symbol of our faith. But this wasn’t man’s plan; it was God’s. Jesus came to reconcile us to Himself, and it was through the cross of Calvary that He paid the price for our redemption and accomplished the work. Finally, see

IV. The Result of the Mission
Jesus created a new race of people: citizens of the Kingdom.
The purpose of Christ in coming was to reconcile sinners to Himself through His death on the cross, but it was not to leave them as unconnected sinners doing their own things with relation to God. Rather, in reconciling the world to Himself, God opened the door to reconciling man to man in the same way.

Look at the people, then, who Jesus reached out to, inviting them into His kingdom:
• Simon the Leper – social outcast
• Woman who wiped His feet with her hair
• Tax collector (Matthew, Zacchaeus)
• Insurrectionist (Simon the Zealot)
• Rough-cut fisherman (Peter, etc.)
• Adulteress whom Jesus pronounced forgiven (2 of them, actually! John 4,
• Women in general
• Children in general

Jesus broke social taboos and rules and didn’t seem to care one whit for the considered opinions of the religious shakers and movers of the day. Philip Yancey calls it the “Great Reversal”, Jesus standing convention on its head as He announced in the Beatitudes; Jesus knew no undesirables, never met an unwanted person, for God’s love desires to make itself known to all, and there is a place in God’s heart for those who are rejected by the power brokers of this world. What passage did Jesus read in the synagogue in Nazareth at the inception of His ministry? From Isaiah’s prophecy He read,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

But what’s more, Jesus came not only to bring into God’s kingdom all sorts of people who were outcasts among Jewish society, but to extend God’s kingdom to Gentile outcasts as well. Ephesians 2:11-22:

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— 12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Jesus came on a mission to fulfill God’s purpose: reconciling man from sin to Himself, and building a people out of every facet of human society into a people for Himself and His glory. This is who we are—we find ourselves in the story line of God’s gracious eternal plan. And God continues that plan today, calling men and women, boys and girls to join Him in the fulfillment of that plan.

Questions for Group Study
• It surprised the “religion boys” that Jesus spent so much time hanging out with, and seemed at ease with, some of the “riff-raff” of society. He didn’t “act religious”.
o What does that tell us about Jesus?
o What should that teach us about us, His followers?

• Liberals focus on the Incarnation as being the critical component of faith. Why do we say that the Incarnation, as important as it is, is secondary to the Atonement?

• The following Scriptures all involve Jesus telling us why He came into the world. Read them, and fit them into the basic outline of why Christ came:
o Luke 5:29-32
o Luke 19:10
o John 10:7-10
o John 12:46
o John 18:33-38

• Read Hebrews 10:4-7. Why was it necessary for Jesus—God come in the flesh—to make the sacrifice for our sins? Could another human being have done it? Why not? And what did His sacrifice accomplish?

We might term this series an “apologetic” series of messages; apologetics is the field of study that seeks to bolster our faith by talking about evidences for the validity of Christian faith. The point of this series is developing a deeper understanding of God’s Word and a deeper knowledge of Jesus, with the upshot being that my desire is for each of us to love Jesus more, because I’m convinced that the cure to what ails us as individuals and as a church is in truly loving Jesus more, because when I love Him more, I worship Him more deeply and serve Him more faithfully and follow Him more closely.

I am indebted for the sermon title today, as well as some of the thoughts for this message, to Professor Darrell Bock of Dallas Seminary. Professor Bock’s thinking is very cogent and helpful, and I thank the Lord for good instructors in the Word like this brother.

How can we really know what Jesus said? Look at the stakes here: as Christ-followers, we’ve staked everything on the truthfulness of what Jesus said and did. Christian faith is very much a history-linked faith: it teaches that certain acts took place in history, and it purports to make sense of those events as being part of God’s plan of redemption, rooted in real history. If the history is wrong; if the facts are bad; if the events of Scripture didn’t take place, we’ve got bupkus, zero, zilch, nada, nothing. And so, first,

I. The Issues
• We have only a fraction of Jesus’ words recorded.
When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things. 35 And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the hour is now late. 36 Send them away to go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat” – Luke 6:34-36

Jesus spoke for hours at a time, apparently—and we don’t have anything nearly that long recorded in the Bible. So Jesus said a lot that didn’t get recorded.

• We don’t have a record of nearly all that He did.
Here is how John concludes his gospel: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written”
– John 21:25

The gospels contain only a fraction of Jesus’ actions. A lot of times, what we read are words like Matthew 9:35: “And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.” It’s a summary statement, talking about His teaching and His healing, but not giving specifics on every detail of those healings, of that teaching, and so on. But there is plenty we do have—the question there is, how do we know it’s accurate? Next,

• The gospel accounts do not line up chronologically.
When you read the same events described in different gospels, it’s clear: there is little chronological agreement between the different authors; frankly, every gospel author steps outside of chronological precision at one point or another. Finally,

• Sometimes, the wording differs from account to account.
That’s just undeniable fact: different gospel writers use different terminology to frame the words of Jesus. Their phrasing doesn’t contradict, mind you; it’s just different. If I say, “the Saints beat the Colts in the Super Bowl Sunday”, you’ll hear some cheering and others softly weeping, but saying “the Saints beat the Colts” is no different than saying, “the Colts were beaten by the Saints.” I’ve conveyed the exact same message—hold that thought for later…

Further compounding this entire issue, Jesus spoke in Aramaic; the New Testament was written in Greek. Jesus’ words were already a translation by the time they were recorded by the Gospel writers!

Put all of these items together, and there are those who ask, can we really know what Jesus actually said and did? Did the gospel writers write selectively, or worse, did they tidy up the stories, or did they insert their own words among those of Jesus in order to gussy up the story in order to fit their agendas?

II. The Options
As I said earlier, I borrowed the title of the message from Professor Darrell Bock: “Live, Jive, or Memorex?” When we come to the things that the Bible records as true of Jesus’ life and words, is which of these three approaches will we take? Which is really most faithful to what we understand about Scripture?

A. “Jive”
Some folks treat the words of Jesus like they were so much jive, at least as regards the words recorded in the Bible. When a liberal scholar approaches the Bible, he sees in it a book written merely by men, a book with a mixture of truth and error, good and bad, prejudices and the like. And so when he comes to the words of Jesus, he doesn’t necessarily accept anything in the Bible attributed to Jesus to actually have been said by Him. To the liberal scholar, the writers of Scripture took liberties with Jesus’ words, put into His mouth things He never said nor meant. Basically, the gospel writers are spinning a story in order to establish and build this human organization known as the church, and if they have to fudge the truth, well, that’s just what they’ll do. This is the viewpoint of those who see the words of Jesus in the gospels as just so much “jive.”

B. “Memorex”
Some folks treat the red-letter words of Jesus like they were Memorex—the very exact, word-by-word rendering of what Jesus said. But there’s a problem with that. What are we to make of the fact that gospel writers, recording the very same events, put different words into the mouth of Jesus? Here’s an example (ESV—chances are your translation does something similar. The context is Jesus pronouncing that Bartimaeus, the blind man, is being healed:

“Recover your sight; your faith has made you well” – Luke 18:42
“Go your way; your faith has made you well” – Mark 10:52

OK…so which did He say? See the problem for those who take the “Memorex” approach? This does happen with decent frequency—and this leaves these well-meaning folks with a difficult dilemma. But let’s look at a third option, what Bock calls the “live” option, one that maintains an ironclad belief in the fact that the Bible is telling the truth in all that it affirms, but one which also recognizes the way we use speech, as well as the way the Scriptures were written; Bock calls it

C. “Live”
How ‘bout a little Latin? Two similar terms for your consideration:

• Ipsissima verba – “The very words”
We have some examples in Scripture that are clearly “ipsissima verba”, such as what Jesus cried out on the cross: “Eli, eli, lama sabacthani”, which translated means, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” Basically, the idea of “ipsissima verba” suggests what we’d call “verbatim”; in other words, word-for-word perfect reproduction. This is the “Memorex” option.

• Ipsissima vox – “The very voice”
This suggests a way of understanding the words used by the gospel writers as capturing the exact essence of what Jesus was saying, that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And it seems to me that ipsissima vox, rather than ipsissima verba, is the correct understanding of the way the gospel writers wrote. Remember my Saints/Colts analogy? I’ve said the exact same thing two different ways. And it wouldn’t be incorrect, had I only said it one way, for you to render it the other in telling it to a friend. That’s ipsissima vox.

Note what Luke says of his gospel, from the first four verses of that gospel: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, 2 just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, 3 it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.”

So what was Luke trying to accomplish in writing his gospel?
• To tell the truth about Jesus (“certainty”, v. 4)
• To gather from eyewitnesses as much information as he could so as to get the gist of what Jesus said and did
Some of what Luke wrote was not firsthand information—it was information gleaned from others who were eyewitnesses. Again, let us say with complete conviction: Luke and the other gospel writers were writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

But understanding the way the gospel writers went about things, working from an “ipsissima vox” approach rather than a rigid “ipsissima verba” approach, helps us also with the fact that the writers choose to emphasize different things, place events in a structure that is not rigidly chronological, and the like. Depending on one’s vantage point, one might see and stress different aspects of the same story, and in retelling it would be likely to emphasize those things of significance to him. The idea that what we have in Scripture is “live” is that we have a faithful rendering of the words and life of Christ. And this is what matters, that we base our faith on truth.

III. The Significance
• We ought to understand the Bible on its terms and not ones of our own making.
There are some people who feel that in order to guard the Bible, they have to almost ignore certain clear evidence, or to engage in literary gymnastics, bending over backwards to try to explain things instead of trusting that God knew what He was doing. They hang their hats on a certain understanding of things instead of just trusting that what we have is God’s perfect Word. And thus,

• We ought to claim for Scripture what it claims for itself: perfect infallibility.
Jesus’ own claim was that not a jot or a tittle, not the smallest diacritical mark in the Hebrew language, would pass away until the entire truth of God’s Word was fulfilled. Paul makes the claim that “all Scripture is inspired by God”, and inherent in that is the understanding that if God inspired it, it cannot have errors in it. This is what we believe, and defend, which leads us to our final point:

• We ought to be ready to give a defense—a knowledgeable, reasoned defense—for what we believe (I Peter 3:15).
This is a Scriptural requirement; this is why a message like today’s is important to our faith. The core of our faith is the work of Christ on the cross, His death for us and resurrection whereby we can have forgiveness of sin and a right standing with God. Part of giving witness to the gospel of Christ is being able to answer the sincere questions raised by others. That’s the bottom line: we must know the truth, be prepared to defend the truth, and eager to share it with others.

Questions for Study
• This entire series deals with apologetics. One definition says “Christian apologetics is a field of Christian theology that aims to present a rational basis for the Christian faith, defend the faith against objections, and expose the perceived flaws of other world views.” What is the value of apologetics? Are there limits to its value, and what might these be?
• Jesus spoke Aramaic; the gospels were written in Greek. How might that fact alone cause two different writers to render Jesus’ words differently? If you speak a foreign language, your insight might be especially helpful in answering this question!
• Do you understand the difference between “ipsissima verba” and “ipsissima vox”? Does it make sense that some Christians might be concerned when we speak of using “ipsissima vox” rather than “ipsissima verba” to understand the words of Christ? What would you say to a Christian with that concern?
• Read Luke 1:1-4 together.
o How did Luke go about putting together his gospel?
o How might the inspiration of the Holy Spirit have worked in conjunction with Luke’s work?
o Does the fact that this passage sounds like the same process any chronicler of history might use lead you to trust the Scriptural accounts more, or less? Why?
• A person says to you, “The Bible was written so long ago. Different writers give the timeline differently, and record Jesus’ words differently. How can you trust what it says?” How might you answer?

Think back to your first memories of hearing about Jesus. What do you remember thinking of Jesus? How did He “come across” to you?

Jesus is popular these days—at least people’s sometimes misinformed perception of Him. He is regularly thanked by those scoring touchdowns, acknowledged by those accepting awards, and invoked by politicians seeking office. Jesus even has a radio call-in talk show in Los Angeles; a man named Neil Saavedra fields calls on Sunday mornings in the guise of answering questions as he thinks Jesus would answer. We could go on to speak of the portrayal of Jesus in film and popular music, even finding His image on t-shirts and other paraphernalia!

It’s just things like this that make it vital that we get the right answers when we ask the Big Questions about Jesus.

The Big Idea:
If we don’t get Jesus right, we don’t get anything right!

The passage we read earlier takes place on the heels, in Matthew’s account, of two particular things. The first is a confrontation with the religious leaders who, true to Jewish form, asked Jesus to give them a sign to demonstrate that was indeed the Messiah. Ironically, signs and wonders were a hallmark of His ministry; none of the religious busybodies demanding a sign from Jesus were able to perform the miracles He had—but still, they expressed their desire for more. Jesus upbraids them for their inability to see what was right in front of them, that the kind of miracle-marked ministry that He had carried on was itself a sign of the times. But even there, Jesus indicates that there will be a sign—the sign of Jonah. As recorded in Matthew 12, Jesus explains for the religious leaders—and for us—that sign: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” The verification of Christ’s life would take place after His death; He would be raised to life again from the dead. Ironically, Jesus points out in that same passage that the people of Nineveh, “that wicked city”, would rise up in judgment against those religious leaders in Jesus’ presence because these supposedly religious folks didn’t get it, while the wicked Ninevites repented at Jonah’s preaching! And so the first element of context is these hard-hearted, strong-willed, dull-of-hearing religious leaders rejecting Jesus’ because He didn’t measure up to what they expected, because He was unwilling to ape some trick or perform some other sign just to garner their approval.

The second element of context is Jesus rebuking His followers for their lack of understanding at a reference He made to what He called “the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees”. Their false doctrine had the effect of permeating everything they said, as leaven permeates, and rendered tainted even the things they got right—and there were some things they got right, of course. Jesus is teaching His followers that right teaching matters, and that if they give credence to false teaching, they will suffer greatly for it.

And thus it is on the heels of an instance of the Pharisees misunder-standings and Jesus’ warning His followers to beware their teaching that He decides to give them a pop quiz. Question 1: “what’s the word on the street about me?” He didn’t ask because He didn’t know, but rather to set up the second question. And they give their report, that some folks have Jesus confused with John Baptist; others believe Him to be Elijah or Jeremiah or another prophet come back to life. Jesus doesn’t say much about this, because His concern isn’t the popular understanding of the masses, but rather whether or not these apprentices into whom He’s poured His life understand Who He is. “Who do you say that I am?” We can take this passage as the touchstone for our entire series: who do you say Jesus is? More critically, what does the Bible say of Jesus?

Notice that Jesus asks as question of His followers. We will be asking questions of Jesus over these next several months, and so I want to talk a bit today about asking questions.

I. On Asking the Right Questions
People have always asked questions of Jesus and about Jesus. And Jesus welcomed those questions:
• “Are you the One, or ought we to expect someone else”, asked a befuddled John Baptist when Jesus’ actions puzzled him.
• “How do you know me”, asked a shocked Nathanael when Jesus called him to follow.
• “How can these things be”, a puzzled Nicodemus exclaimed, when Jesus told him that he must be born again.
• “What’s this living water all about—and where do you get it”, asked the woman at the well.
Jesus asked questions; Jesus’ words and actions prompted questions. In fact, I did a little survey of the book of John, and in nearly every chapter, someone asks Jesus a question (and He asks a lot too!).

The evangelical church has gotten a bad rap, though it is likely deserved in part; here it is: “when I was in church growing up, I was told never to ask questions, but just to shut up and believe.” Ever hear anybody say that? Ever said it yourself? And for some, there is truth to it. But a couple thoughts about asking questions:

A. Truth need not fear honest scrutiny.
If our faith cannot withstand honest questioning, then it’s not a faith worth having. When we come to faith in Christ, we are not asked to check our brains at the door; to the contrary, we ought to encourage people to look at the facts—all of the facts—honestly. I believe that Christian faith stands the tests that the world throws at it.

B. The value is not in the asking, but in finding the right answers.
We live in this postmodern world where doubt has become a value in and of itself, where the mere asking of questions is hailed as praiseworthy. Now as we said, there is everything right with asking questions, but granting the importance of an inquisitive spirit—inquiring minds do want to know—it’s nonetheless true that the goal of asking questions must be to arrive at the right answers.

II. On Getting the Right Answers
Getting the right answers is critical to several things we can mention:
A. Our Understanding of God
“No one has ever seen God; the only God, Who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known” (John 1:18). We know what God is like by understanding Who Jesus is—because if Jesus is God in the flesh, as we understand the Bible to teach, then there is no contradiction between Jesus and God the Father (and the Holy Spirit, for that matter). Jesus never did anything in His time here on Earth that God the Father wouldn’t have done in exactly the same manner. If that’s the case, then understanding Who Jesus is, knowing Him better, is a critical concern, and to the degree that we get the wrong answer to any of the questions we raise these next few months, we misunderstand God.

B. Our Continuance in the Truth
“Whenever the church forgets its call to engage in the task of understanding more and more fully Who Jesus actually was, idolatry and ideology lie close at hand” (N.T. Wright). Jesus is the Center of our faith; take Him away, and we have nothing left; the whole system of belief centers on Jesus, and everything else is secondary to knowing and honoring and worshipping Him. When a false Jesus is promoted, such as the “Jesus” promoted by the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or others we’ll talk about in a moment, we have ventured into idolatry. And thus, we can say that on this hangs

C. Our Eternal Destiny
As much as it may be true that there is more to know of Jesus than we’re capable of learning in a lifetime, it’s still true that, as Jesus said in John 17, “this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” False gospels don’t deliver; false Christs don’t save. Our eternity hangs on getting Jesus right. But there are

III. Obstacles to Getting the Right Answers

A. Woeful Biblical Ignorance
The majority of Americans are Biblically ignorant. Even professing Christians don’t know their Bibles—and some don’t seem too concerned about that fact! Theologian J.I. Packer says that the challenge is convincing people who don’t read much to read more, and those who don’t read at all to begin.

One of the most important things you can put into place in 2010 is a commitment to read the Bible. You can use the Bible-in-a-year plan we have available on the front table; you can use one of your own. You can avail yourself of devotionals from Walk Thru the Bible or some other excellent ministry. But we have to get the Word into our lives!

B. Terrible Distortion/Disinformation

1. The “Jesus” of Liberalism
Have you heard of The Jesus Seminar? These guys came on the scene a few years back, and their task was to sift through the statements that the Bible records Jesus as making, and then determine which ones He actually did say, and which ones were fabrications. They exist in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, who literally took a pair of scissors to a Bible to excise all the parts that didn’t fit into his idea of Who Jesus was. The Jesus Seminar is but one example of the wreck that liberalism makes of the Scripture and of Jesus. Similarly, there is the so-called

2. The Quest for the Historical Jesus
Here’s the idea: there is a difference between the real Jesus, the “historical Jesus”, and the “cultic Jesus”, the Jesus that was created by Paul and others as one to worship. To these deconstructionists, what we need to do is to unearth the real truth about Jesus, to discount the Bible’s witness to Jesus as being biased by men who wanted to create a religion about this man. Herman Reimarus might be credited with beginning this nonsense back in 1778, when he wrote a book arguing that a pious Jew named Jesus went around calling people to repentance, but accidentally got himself killed. His followers then stole his body, concocted a story about resurrection, and voila! We have Christianity. Many writers have followed in this train, and the ideas have grown more fanciful in recent times. The DaVinci Code popularized a conspiracy theory about Jesus, for instance.

3. The “Jesus” of the Health and Wealth “gospel” – Osteen, Oral Roberts, etc.
Then there’s the “Jesus” you can get when you turn on Sunday morning TV and catch Joel Osteen or Benny Hinn. This “Jesus” was introduced to us by the late Oral Roberts and others, who ripped a few select Scriptures out of context and thus began to suggest that Jesus intended for His followers to be uniformly healthy and wealthy. And people are eating this stuff up; Osteen’s church packs ‘em in on Sunday mornings; his Lakewood Church is the largest in America.

4. Even PETA has weighed in, proclaiming Jesus a vegetarian.

5. The “Jesus” of Political partisanship –
Republican Jesus isn’t Jesus, nor is Democrat Jesus. This is nothing new; when the English fought the French in religious wars, the English would shout, “The pope is French, but Jesus Christ is English!” Chew on that for a minute…

We could mention some other items:
• The devaluation of rigorous thinking
• Sentimentalization
• Political correctness

Point is, there are many ideas about Who Jesus is. With all of these competing images, the question is, “will the real Jesus please stand up?”

We spoke last week about the greatness of knowing Jesus. Paul said that this was his consuming passion in life—and it ought to be ours as well. If so, there is a place for questions, for seeking answers. I’m Byron, and I’m a seeker of the truth. Are you?

Further, you and I need to know Jesus better. “But I know Jesus! ‘And, He walks with me, and He talks with me…’” Question: whom do you know best on this earth? If you’re married, chances are that the answer is “your spouse”—probably better than you know yourself in some respects. Next question: do you sometimes have misunderstandings, disagreements, even arguments with your spouse? Or, are you ever surprised by your spouse, by a word or an action or a reaction? Now, I speak as a guy, and any guy who suggests that he’s figured out women is lying through his teeth. But there is plenty about my spouse I do not know, and plenty about me that she doesn’t. It is always good/appropriate for us to get to know each other better. How much more so is this true of Jesus, our Lord and Savior?

Introduction: Confidence in the Flesh (:1-6)
The context of this passage is the warning of Paul to watch out for people he calls “dogs, evil workers, mutilators of the flesh”. These are the same people—note first, though, that Paul doesn’t hesitate to call the proverbial spade a spade; unlike some in our generation who see Jesus as some pussyfooting wimp who is “tolerance personified”, Jesus used the very same term, ironically in Matthew 6, which contains the most-beloved passage of Scripture for those whose intent is to twist Scripture in the first place. In this case, Paul uses the term “dogs” not to refer to cuddly puppies, but rather to false teachers who “dogged” the apostles everywhere they went, seemingly, by introducing the devilish doctrine that suggested that faith alone in Christ alone wasn’t enough. No, for these “Judaizers”, for a Gentile to become a Christian, he had to come first through the doorway of Judaism, and particularly by undergoing the covenant ritual of circumcision. Paul will have none of it; it amounts to nothing more than the mutilation of the flesh when it comes to an attempt to add “religion” to simple faith for salvation. And Paul gives the strongest warning possible, knowing that to mix good works or religious ritual or anything else into the simple salvation equation is to pollute it beyond recognition.

These particular false teachers were placing their faith, not so much in Jesus, but in something done in their flesh: circumcision. Paul adds in verse 3 that, in a “religious” sense, circumcision isn’t a matter of something done outwardly, but rather involves an inward transformation (and this is nothing new; the same is said in several Old Testament texts). There is simply no reason to place one’s trust in outward rituals or good deeds. Paul suggests that if anyone has ever had reason to trust in himself, it is Paul himself. Paul was a religionist of all religionists; he was devout as devout could be, and had the merit badges to show for it! Nobody outshone Paul insofar as fleshly goodness was concerned. And what is Paul’s summation of all of that goodness and religiosity he possessed? Note

I. Paul’s Profit/Loss Statement:
The Relative Values of Christ & Religion
The Cure for Self-Confidence
The very things that he had considered to be great advantages were in fact great hindrances to knowing Christ—which is the ultimate thing. If we really become right with God by virtue of the things that we do, then those things Paul claims for himself in verses 5 & 6 would be of great value—but that’s not how we become right with God, and those things actually can so easily distract us from the value of knowing Christ. How many people are trusting their own supposed goodness, or their upstanding image, or their heritage, or their baptism, or what-have-you? Sometimes it is the nicest people, the most upstanding in the community, the ones who do the most in service to others or give the most money to charity, who are the hardest to come to Christ, precisely because they see no need of Christ, particularly when they look at the lives of some professing Christians and compare their morality favorably with those Christians!

Paul will have none of it. Paul is clear: all that stuff is not only a big zero, but a negative in the light of Jesus. What, then, is

II. Paul’s Priority:
The Greatness of Knowing Christ
The Cure for Self-Indulgence
Nothing else matters to Paul nearly as much as this: knowing Christ. It’s more important than getting his way, indulging his flesh (even in wholesome pursuits), pursuing his happiness, or anything else. For Christ’s sake, Paul has suffered the loss of all things and considers them trash. “All things” involves terminology in the Greek which suggests that Paul is talking about more than just the things he has enumerated regarding his own life; he’s including anything and everything which would conceivably be a rival to Jesus in a person’s life. Paul uses the term, “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ”, and this “surpassing worth” is not just in relation to the things he’s listed in these verses; rather, the worth of knowing Christ is of more value than anything else.

“Knowing Christ”: what’s he talking about? In this passage, Paul is talking about not only “knowing Christ” in the sense of a past-tense experience—and my, he had one more of those, didn’t he?—but he’s also talking about what Homer Kent calls “blessed enjoyment in the present and the challenge and excitement of increasing comprehension of Christ in personal fellowship.” “Knowing Christ” is about more than being able to give a testimony of the distant past when one “got saved”; folks, it’s about growing to know and love Jesus more and more.

III. Paul’s Profession:
Righteousness Through Faith in Christ
The Cure for Self-Righteousness
“Believe in yourself”, say the headlines, and it seems axiomatic to say that “believing in oneself” is a good thing. But Paul’s counsel runs directly counter to this supposed “wisdom”. “We, who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus…put no confidence in the flesh!” Paul, in Romans 7, echoes this: “I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” That sounds like the summary description of people who make New Year’s resolutions; they understand that they don’t measure up in some way—they eat too much, or they cuss too much, or they drink too much, or they worry too much, or they give too little or they save too little or they…there is that element of knowing that things aren’t as they ought to be, or as they could be, but the harsh reality of our own sinfulness—whether we speak of it in those terms or not—sets in, and we again blow it, perhaps worse than before!

The term “flesh” that Paul has used back in verses 3-4 refers to what man is outside of Christ; on our own, we are “of the flesh”, merely human; nothing supernatural about us other than the fact that we are created by a supernatural, awesome God. In that condition, apart from Christ, we can accomplish nothing of eternal significance. And so we put no confidence in the flesh; we agree with Paul that we cannot in our flesh or by our resolutions or by our rule-keeping hope to please God. We cannot measure up to His righteous standard through any efforts of our own. If we can, then Jesus is superfluous.

Paul says, “I want to be found in Him”. On that day of judgment, Paul wants the divine scrutiny of God to reveal that he lived his life in a vital union with Jesus. A right standing with God, Paul makes clear, comes about as a result of faith in Christ, and not through vain attempts to keep the dictates of the law of God. Paul doesn’t want the verdict to be that he was a good person, a moral person, a person with “family values” who always voted the right way; he is clear that the only verdict that matters is that Jesus is what God sees when He looks at Paul’s life. Earlier in Philippians, Paul says that “to me, to live is Christ”. We could do worse than adopting that as a motto for life!

IV. Paul’s Potential:
Experiencing the Christ-Life
The Cure for Self-Protection
Paul is expressing the potential that he might come to know Christ in an intimate and experiential way, to have his own heart beat with the heartbeat of God, to have his own words and actions reflect Jesus’ work in his life. He wants to know the power of God pulsating through his words and life and ministry, but he is also willing to experience what it means to suffer as Christ suffered, even to the point of death, as Christ did. Paul is convinced that there is something about living in such close communion with Christ that makes suffering something worthwhile, something to be gained from rather than despised or even merely endured.

Further, on this point of “death”, it is clear that the Christ-follower is to die to himself on a daily basis; that’s what Paul has said, that he dies daily. Jesus didn’t seek His own good, but the eternal well-being of others; similarly, it isn’t about us seeking or receiving what we want, but rather subsuming our desires under the will of God. Ironically, though, as John Piper makes clear, we can say with Biblical warrant that it is as we seek first the kingdom of God that we find our deepest longings satisfied, culminating in our own pleasure to a degree we cannot experience in any other way.

V. Paul’s Pressing:
The One Thing Paul Does
The Cure for Self-Satisfaction
Paul wants his Philippian readers—and us—to understand that this righteousness that he has experienced in Christ does not constitute the sum total of all of the Christian experience, that somehow once one has settled the question of his eternal destiny through faith in Christ, there is nothing more to experience, as though one had achieved everything including, possibly, perfection. That’s why he says what he does in verse 12. Pau

Because Paul has set his value system up so, he determines that his logical pursuit will be to press on toward the prize that Christ calls him to. Paul says that he hasn’t yet achieved this state, but he continues to make it his all-consuming goal: the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

“Forgetting what lies behind” doesn’t mean that Paul is trying to be oblivious to what God has done for him in the past, but rather that he doesn’t allow either what he thought to be advantages, nor even his previous Christian attainments, to get in the way of desiring to possess everything possible in this life that God has for him in Christ. He uses an athletic metaphor; one commentator is convinced that Paul has the Roman chariot races in mind here, keeping his eyes on the prize and his focus on the goal. If this is the case, the “upward call” referred to here would be analogous to the summons that the race winner would receive to approach the elevated stand of the judge I order to receive his prize. It’s the approval of the judge upon winning the race, reaching the goal, that Paul has in mind—and we can make that connection, can’t we?

But the verbs Paul uses are words like “pressing” and “straining”. We can get so self-satisfied, can’t we? We find a level of spiritual comfort and sort of settle in, willing perhaps to be challenged here or there in some minor point of Christian living, but more or less assuming the spirituality level of the other Christians around us, not willing to vary too much off the norm. I’ve used the metaphor before, but we can settle into a familiar and comfortable orbit of Jesus. This is not the attitude of Paul—and it ought not be ours, either!

The attitude of John Baptist is instructive to us. When Jesus came on the scene baptizing and gaining followers, some of those who had been following John were concerned about this. And what was John’s response? When the best man sees and hears the groom coming, he gladly stands to the side so as to give the groom the attention; John summed up his little word picture by saying, “so, He must increase, and I must decrease.” In 2010, how will you “decrease” so that Jesus, in and through your life, might increase? Because in the end, it’s about Jesus, as Paul has expressed to us the greatness of knowing Jesus. And so,

Run to Jesus. Believe Jesus. Trust Jesus. Obey Jesus. Serve Jesus. Emulate Jesus. Know Jesus. Follow Jesus. Love Jesus. Worship Jesus. Glorify Jesus. Because it’s all about…Jesus!

How we spend our money says more about us than most anything else. It signals what our priorities really are in a way few things do. The Bible says a whole lot about money—several examples:
• Man’s life does not consist of the abundance of the things that he possesses.
• You can’t serve both God and money; you will love the one and hate the other.
• Moth and rust and thieves (and fashion’s changing whims and the stock market’s changing values) are real threats to earthly treasure; nothing threatens heavenly.
• Don’t be anxious about the basic needs of life—you have a Father in Heaven Who values you much more than little birds—and He will meet all your true needs.
• The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
• Those who chase riches are constantly falling into temptations and snares. They are regularly caught by their stupid and harmful desires, dragged down and pulled under into ruin and destruction.
We could find many more without too much trouble. As we today consider how we might spend less, and yet give more, I want to look at

What the Magi teach us:
They are called “wise men”; in the Greek, the word is “magi”; add a letter to it, and you get the word “magic”, which gives us a hint as to who these men were: they were considered to be able to read the skies and make predictions based upon their readings, a form of “magic” in antiquity. Additionally, they were men learned in many fields, greatly respected in their communities as leaders of thought and of superstitious religious observance.

Interesting, isn’t it, Whom it is God chooses to reveal Himself to? It’s not the people we’d pick, and certainly not the people a Madison Avenue ad agency would choose for the task. A teenage girl; a band of ragtag shepherds; an old man and an old woman in the temple, and a group of foreign magicians. It’s not only unlikely people, it’s un-looking people in some instances. But God doesn’t reward people for their goodness or their good sense to seek Him; He chooses and saves Whom He will. Salvation in Christ isn’t a reward for good behavior; it’s all of His grace. You and I were neither smart enough nor good enough to merit God’s favor; there are better people than us and smarter people than us who aren’t followers of Jesus—because it’s all of His grace. And in His grace He chose these wise men, these magi, to leave their homes and make a 1000-mile trek across the desert. Note first:

I. They Gave Costly Gifts.
Gold’s never been cheap! Frankincense was used in worship at the temple, and it represents to us Christ’s deity. Myrrh was costly as well; it was a kind of perfume and used in beauty treatments; further, it was used to anoint a body after death, to prepare it for burial. This gift pictures Christ’s suffering and death. Gold represented Christ’s kingship, then, frankincense, His deity, and myrrh, His humanity. Though the magi probably didn’t understand the significance of these gifts, God sovereignly arranged even the gifts such that they would teach us about Christ. And these gifts weren’t second-rate!

II. Their Gifts Flowed from their Worship.
The Scripture is clear: the Magi came with the purpose of worshipping the Baby King. Interesting: before they found the Christ-child, they had an encounter with a king, King Herod—but nothing prompted them to worship him! What Herod craved, the worship and adulation of people, they gave not to this man, but to the Baby Jesus. It was as an act of worship that they then presented their gifts to Him—but the motive was worship. Stop there: if the motive of the precedent-setting Christmas gift giving was worship—and if our lives as Christians ought to be about worship—then why should anything be different today from the experience of the Magi? The question then becomes, can I say that I am worshipping God when I give Christmas gifts? And how might that one perspective change my gift-purchasing habits?

They gave costly gifts that represented worship. Third,

III. They were Sensitive to God.
This is seen several ways:

• The leading of the Star
Scholars today find the star of Bethlehem intriguing; what was it that the wise men were referring to? Was it, as some suggest, an alignment of stars and planets? Another scholar wonders if this were simply one star, one that can still be seen by telescope today, but which was a bright nova in the time of Christ. Astronomical calculations provide support for the first theory; the testimony of ancient Chinese astronomers for the second, that there was an unusually bright star at the time of His birth. Regardless, these men were led by God to follow—and follow, they did.

• Their Knowledge of the Scripture
They quoted to an oblivious King Herod the prophecy that six-year-old children in Jerusalem would have known—but the king did not. Though they may have been pagan astrologers, something had directed them to the Hebrew Scriptures, and they had studied and internalized the message of the coming Messiah to be born in Bethlehem.

• Their willingness to Obey God’s leading
And when they were warned by God in a dream that Herod’s intentions were not to worship the Christ-child, but to do Him harm, they went home by a different route.

These were men who were sensitive to God, even as neophytes in the way of worship, men whose determination to worship and give inspires us even to this day. Now let’s answer one key question:

Practically, how might we spend less but give more?

1. Acknowledge any idols in your heart, and root them out.
Scriptural terminology for those things that become substitutes for God is very fitting, but it’s not a word that we often use today. That word is “idolatry”. An idol is anything that substitutes for God in my life. An idol is anything that goes in the place that God alone deserves. May I suggest several that rear their ugly heads in our lives, perhaps more prominently at Christmas?

a. The Idol of Wrong Motives
Why do I do what I do at Christmas?
“…whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (I Corinthians 10:31). The root motive of my life needs to be God’s glory. The impetus for the Christian to live life must be to bring honor to Christ. Everything I do in life ought to pass through this filter: do my words/thoughts/actions/ attitudes bring glory to God, or not? Fast-forward to Christmas: why do you make the choices you make when celebrating Christmas?

b. The Idol of Approval
Whose approval am I seeking—God’s first?
Related to the above is the idol of seeking the approval of man more than the approval of God. Question: whose approval matters most at Christmas: our kids’, our friends’, our families’—or God’s? If it comes down to it, would I rather my child be disappointed on Christmas morning, or for God to be disappointed?

c. The Idol of Unconcern
Do you care at Christmas—and at other times—about the needs of the people of this world? These are just three, but I’m wondering, what other idols might be inhabiting your heart this Christmas? Second,

2. Develop Contentment as a Biblical Discipline, and Spread it to Others.
Paul wrote in Philippians 4, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” Paul had learned this…it didn’t come naturally to him, he says—and that’s a good thing, because contentment doesn’t come naturally to us, either. Brian Bill wrote, “Work at wanting what you have even if you don’t have everything you want…the key to contentment is not having everything you want but wanting everything you already have.”

Here’s the truth: as followers of Jesus, we have everything we need to be content. Everything. Period. If I am not content right now, it’s because I’m not living by faith, trusting God with all I have, obeying God with all I am, loving Christ will all my being. But isn’t this contentment the cure to the pagan religion of consumerism that drives us to buy and acquire more and more? It is. Third,

3. Gain a Biblical Grasp on real Value.
a. Eternal v. Temporary
We must live—and make our Christmas choices—in light of eternity.

b. People v. Things
We do need each other; relationships are the stuff of which meaningful life is made, beginning with our relationship with God in Christ, to be sure, but relationships with those made in God’s image comes next, so closely aligned the two that Jesus tied loving others as ourselves with loving God supremely as forming the greatest commandment.

c. All People v. “People Like Us”
I’m going to step out a little bit on this one to ask you to consider something that I honestly have not spent enough time considering in my life, likely because of a fear that to do so might earn me the label “liberal” or something. I’ll urge real caution here; we can sometimes get caught up in causes without doing our homework, and that’s never good, but here’s where I’m going: if my purchases, at Christmas or other times, serve to support human rights abuses in other countries, and I’m aware of it, then as a Christian, am I loving all people if I’m willing to turn a blind eye to it, as though it wasn’t happening? Just this week, I learned that a significant percentage of the world’s chocolate production involves forced slavery of children—and that most of the big chocolate manufacturers, who pledged to do something to bring this to an end, have done little. And so the question that comes to me as a Christian is, is it worth it to me to eat cheap chocolate if eating that candy bar contributes to keeping a kid enslaved against his will? Would I buy that candy bar if your kid was enslaved to make it? Of course not…but is it any different if I know that thousands of other people’s kids are forced into slavery just so I can eat a candy bar? By the way, if you’re interested in knowing more, see me…as a Christian, I am compelled to be concerned, not just about folks like me, but all.

4. Give the gift of Yourself.
The gifts that the wise men gave were costly gifts for the purpose of honoring and worshipping the Christ-child. The Gift that God gave on Christmas was a relational Gift: Himself. “Incarnation” isn’t a word we find in the Bible, but it is a truth that is clearly there: God took upon Himself human flesh. Jesus, His Son, Who had existed from eternity along with God, was “born of a woman, born under the law” at a given place and time some 2000 years ago. He made His dwelling among us. He became present in a way unlike ever before. The very name used in Matthew’s account, “Immanuel”, means “God with us.” That’s the Christ-child in the manger: “God with us”. What were the words of the angel to the shepherds on the hillside? “Today, in the City of David, a Savior has been born to you.” The gift of the Christ was relational and personal. Can I suggest that a fitting way to celebrate that “with us” aspect of Christmas is to find ways to connect people with you, and even more importantly, with the Christ Who lives within you.

a. Your Time
Jesus spent time with people. His ministry was out and among people, face-time with both His 12 apprentices and among the populace at large. He welcomed the outcasts; He hung out with the down-and-out to such a degree that the religious leaders found fault with Him. He welcomed little children, who were typically overlooked in His culture. He had a conversation with a loose-living Samaritan woman at a well in Sychar, breaking about every social taboo imaginable—but because He valued people, He spent His time with them.

b. Your Wisdom/Experience/Counsel
One of the most encouraging things about this generation of young people is their willingness to listen to the voices of experience that have walked the path of life ahead of them. What experience can you share?

c. Your Talents
Do you have a talent that God has given you, that you might in turn use to bless others?

d. Your Money
This goes without saying: use your money to be a blessing to others. My hope and prayer is that you’ll use it in ways that provide for others personal blessing rather than impersonal.

Giving is a good thing. Honoring God at Christmas through giving is a powerful way to worship. The idea behind Advent Conspiracy isn’t about giving less, not by any means; it’s about giving more:
• More genuinely
• More meaningfully
• More lastingly
• More compassionately
At the same time, we can accomplish these things while spending less money—if we are willing to get “outside the box”, to trade the easy way of VISA and MasterCard for the more meaningful path of thinking, to consider how to give of ourselves in ways that foster relationships and bless others. If the word for last week was, “make the effort to do something this Christmas as a response of worship to the One Whose birth it is we are celebrating after all”, the word for this week is to think before you shop, to not fall into those easy-to-fall-into traps of doing what we’ve always done, but rather to give of yourself to others—and maybe, to save some money in the process—money we might then use in turn to bless people whom we’ve never met, but who can benefit greatly from our selflessness.

Jesus offers us a gift beyond riches this Christmas season; He offers us the gift of eternal life, found only in Himself. It’s all bound up in Him, His sacrifice for our sins. May our giving this Christmas season reflect well on our worship of the One Who gave all for us!

FLOCKs Homework
For the week of December 13-19

In what practical ways does it make a difference that the gifts given by the wise men flowed from their worship? How might this differentiate the Christian’s giving from that of the non-believer?

The wise men were sensitive to God, shown in several ways. What are some Scriptural teachings that might guide our spending?

Read I Timothy 6:17-19.
• What does this passage say to us as American Christians about ourselves?
• About God?
• About the way we ought to understand and live life?

Read Philippians 4:11-13. Paul talks about contentment.
• What is his “secret”?
• Is it easier to be “content” when we have more, or when we have less—or is that irrelevant?
• How would you counsel a “discontent soul”?

But there are some questions we ought honestly to face this Christmas. To what degree does the coming of God in human flesh color our observance of Christmas, this holiday that has been largely stolen away from us by reindeer, the Grinch, and department stores? How differently does your celebration of Christmas really look from that of your pagan neighbors? We can extend this question to all of life, can’t we, not just Christmas. That’s the telling question, it seems to me: how much difference does Jesus really make? Here’s another way to ask: if Jesus’ birth were ripped out of your celebration of Christmas, or if opening presents on Christmas morning at Grandma’s house were ripped out, which would seem stranger? Which would ruin Christmas most readily for you and your family? What does Christmas—practically—mean to you—and how will you celebrate it this year? I want to challenge us today by considering what Christmas meant to the folks who were there at the first Christmas.

Three responses of people to Christmas:

Ignorance – the vast number of people
Let’s face it: Christmas happened in an out-of-the-way place unnoticed by the majority of the populace of the little town of Bethlehem. It was just another night, on a long journey to pay taxes; people were probably out of sorts (if you dislike paying taxes, imagine having to take a trip to do so!). Mary was just another pregnant woman about town, Joseph just another young father-to-be; we’ve all been there and seen that, nothing odd or unusual in any way. Though we tend to romanticize it greatly, with smiling sheep in the stable, “the ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum”, and though we put a beatific smile on Mary’s face and a halo ‘round her head, the fact is that she was a teenage girl who’d never given birth, and despite the angel’s comforting words as to what was taking place, it was still an ordinary birth with the ordinary pains and the added discomfort of the accommodations being something less than the birthing suite at Kennestone! And most of the people of the town went about their business the next day, except for a few who had been bumped into by some crazy shepherds talking about bright stars, a heavenly host of talking angels, and a baby who was the Savior. Wonder what the shepherds had been drinking up on that hillside?

The truth is that most people in Bethlehem missed Christmas. Ah, but the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Scan our contemporary celebration of Christmas, and I’m afraid we find little that is different about it today, except that in the name of One born in a lowly stable, to celebrate His birth, we give…stuff.

Amid all the hype and buying and selling—Jesus the incarnate God sort of gets lost in the shuffle, does He not? The trite little ditty has gotten old in the saying of it, certainly, but some time back, we had to begin to remind people that “Jesus is the reason for the season”. Surely this is because an awful lot of folks had, for all practical purposes, forgotten that fact. Ignorance of Christmas has always been with us.

Hostility – Herod
I won’t spend a lot of time here, simply because apart from the new breed of aggressive, virulent atheists, I’m not sure this happens a great deal today. But the Scriptural record is that there was a pathologically-insecure king who ruled the region of Judea, living a life of luxury but insanely jealous of his power, so much so that he’d had his own family members killed when he felt they posed a threat to his reign. He’d killed ruthlessly to acquire his power, and when word of a tiny king came to him via the wise men, he didn’t hesitate to order the slaughter of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, in a vain attempt to exterminate this imagined threat to his empire.

But the plans of man do not ever frustrate the sovereign will of God, and the hostility of unbelievers never has, and never will, either.

Worship
Christians certainly aren’t hostile to Jesus, like the threatened Herod. Many Christians don’t ignore Jesus either. They have a cantata and put up a manger scene, and get all worked up about the fact that some municipality somewhere in America has taken down the manger scene from the town square. And then they ignore Jesus. Maybe that’s a harsh word, and maybe it overstates the case, but not by much, I fear.

Our hearts are formed by what we worship. What we worship, and how we worship, will tell more about us than just about anything else we can name. Many people celebrate Christmas with worship, all right, but it is surely the worship of a false god, the god of materialism. Rick McKinley says that the fastest growing religion in the world is consumerism, and that those Christians seduced by it have somehow become convinced that Jesus had it all wrong. We’d never say that, of course, but when Jesus said that “man’s life does not consist of the abundance of the things that he possesses”, many people, subconsciously I’m sure, say to themselves, “Jesus had it wrong”. Or at the very least, they behave as though He did.

But there was no such confusion on the first Christmas. Would you look for the common theme running through these five Scriptural accounts?

First, we hear the words of Mary, who poetically expressed her praise to God in response to her relative Elizabeth:
• Mary – Luke 1:46-55

Note the well-known words about the shepherds on a hillside near town:
• Shepherds – Luke 2:8-20

We probably don’t hear the story of Simeon as often, but it belongs as part of the Christmas story as well:
• Simeon – Luke 2:22-35

Anna was a prophetess whose response was the same as that of the others:
• Anna – Luke 2:36-38

Finally, some time later, the wise men came bearing gifts:
• Wise men – Matthew 2:1-12

The thing that was the constant, through each of these accounts of Christmas, is that people worshipped. Their attention was directed to God on the first Christmas. This is what it was all about. Sure, there were other things going on: the shepherds saw angels; Simeon saw the fulfillment of God’s personal promise; the wise men, when they came on the scene some time later, followed a star and brought gifts. There were other things going on, but the one constant was the worship of God because of the event of the incarnation.

What accompanies worship? Obedient submission to the will of God; we see this clearly in all cases except Anna (and little is said of her). Mary humbly accepts God’s lot for her (Luke 1:38); the shepherds go to Bethlehem searching, and leave Bethlehem witnessing; Simeon thanks God for His faithfulness, and humbly accepts His will; the wise men follow God’s leading in not returning to Herod.

But might I suggest that obedience is worship. In Romans 12:1, worship is tied to the obedient offering of ourselves to God—and that’s not unusual, because what we see happening in the Scriptural accounts is people worshipping God through doing what He says, through submitting to His will, through doing what He tells them. And this Christmas, specifically next Sunday, I’ll be challenging each of us to obey God, perhaps in doing some things that depart from the norm…

Finally, note that Christmas is good news for all people. All people, from the kings to the shepherds, from a teenage girl to a couple of old folks. Question: how can this Christmas be good news for all people? In your celebration of Christmas this year, what can you do to make Christmas more than good news for kids and for retailers? We’ll talk more about this one in a couple weeks…

But back to the main point: we celebrate Christmas aright when we worship Jesus fully. Remember our definition of worship? I’ve given it now enough times that even if you don’t have it memorized, it ought to begin to sound familiar: worship is an active response whereby we declare to God the glory due His name. We have not worshipped until we have considered something of God’s inestimable worth, and crafted by some means a response to His worth. And that’s what I want us to do this Christmas: craft a response of worship to God. I want to challenge each of us to do something—something—original as an act of worship this Christmas season.

• Write something.
o A written prayer
o A letter of thanks
o A poem
o An original piece

• Compose something.
o Take a familiar tune—perhaps even a “secular” Christmas tune—and put different words to it (and we’ll sing it!). “Deck the Halls” screams for a Christian rewrite.
o Compose your own

• Craft something (art).
o Sculpt it
o Draw it
o Paint it

• Do something!!!

The point is to take some time this Christmas season for an outside-the-norm, personal worship expression to God for His great Gift—a Savior, Who is Christ the Lord. And do it soon—before the rush of Christmas gets too intense, before you get preoccupied and bogged down, before another Christmas is here and gone and…you’ve gotten caught up in the trappings and missed the point of Christmas: Jesus. Worship—fully, this Christmas season!

Questions for FLOCKs
Share a favorite Christmas memory with the group.

Do you still look forward to Christmas? In what ways? Are there aspects of Christmas that you dislike, even dread? What are those?

Read Luke 2:8-20.
• How are shepherds typically portrayed in Christmas programs?

• Understanding that shepherds were considered societal outcasts in Bible times, why do you think God chose to display His glory through the angels to such outcasts? How does this relate to the heart of Christmas?

• The shepherds worshipped with a sense of wonder—yet we too often experience something less than this. What would it take for us to recapture something of a sense of wonder and gratitude this Christmas?

• What did the shepherds do upon leaving the manger—and what does this suggest to us about the right way to celebrate Christmas?

When we left the people of Jerusalem in chapters 9 & 10, they had separated themselves from the pagans in their midst, and humbly come before God in a solemn assembly to confess their sins and claim God’s forgiveness. More than this, they had pledged themselves to some very resolute and concrete promises, committing themselves to the observance of the Sabbath, the support of God’s work, purity in their marriages, etc. The temptation might have been for Nehemiah to end his book on this high note, with everything rolling merrily along as the people praise God and serve Him. But, as Raymond Brown says, “there is an obvious realism about Scripture.”

The people of Jerusalem had experienced real spiritual “highs”. Chapters 8-9 present such promise; Chapter 10 tells of bold promises made to God. Chapter 11 involves the determination on the part of the people that Jerusalem will truly be a holy city. In Chapter 12, the people dedicate the newly rebuilt walls, and pledge support for their spiritual leaders. Even in the first verses of Chapter 13, we see them taking a bold step on the basis of their fresh understanding of the Word. But later in Chapter 13 we see that they became guilty of “inching away” into a comfortable compromise with a pagan world. The message for us today is that we must be on our guards lest we give in to the natural tendency to do the same: to “inch away” into lives of compromise and complacency.

Worldliness acts as a spiritual gravity, always tugging downward on us even as we seek to “press on the upward way”. We can speak of this on a personal level, how we can so easily get into what one Christian group calls a “slow fade”, gradually getting a little further and a little further away from the Lord. We can speak of this on a Churchwide level as well; the American church faces the temptation to accommodate pluralism and relativism and all manner of isms in order to appear trendy and “with it”. It’s the pressure to assimilate ourselves into the godless norms of this culture! The particulars might be different, but the generalities are the same today as in Nehemiah’s day. Let’s look at

Four Areas of Compromise:
Nehemiah had spent twelve years as governor of Jerusalem, from 445 to 433 B.C., and then returned to King Artaxerxes in Persia, his term complete. Now, in 13:4, we find him returning to Jerusalem after a few years away to find things not the same as he had left them. We see the people having inched away from their commitments

1. In their religious life :4-9
”Tobiah’s guest room”
Tobiah, nemesis of Nehemiah, had always had supporters and friends on the inside in Jerusalem (6:17-19). Now, we see that Eliashib, the high priest and probably a golfing buddy, had made this cozy arrangement with Tobiah whereby he could have a guest room right in the Temple, in a room ostensibly devoted to storing the contributions of God’s people.

What does Nehemiah do about it? Notice his response in vv. 8-9. He comes in and cleans house. He knows that there are some things which simply cannot be compromised. Nehemiah might have been the first to act in this seemingly rash way, but hardly the last; we recall how Jesus’ zeal for the house of God caused Him to come in and clean house as well. And notice the sequence, for we see in it a pattern for our own lives as well when it comes to matters such as these:

CLEAR-CLEANSE-REPLACE

He got rid of Tobiah’s junk; he purified the place; he replaced the junk with the stuff that was supposed to be there. Skip forward to the New Testament. We don’t worship God at the Temple in Jerusalem; what does Paul tell us? That God doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands, but rather that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. Question: does your temple need clearing out, cleansing, and then being filled with the things of God? By the grace of God, get the junk out, repent of having it there in the first place, and replace it with what ought to be there, the fruit of the Spirit. Second, they began to inch away from God

2. In their financial dealings :10-14
“Robbing the preacher”
They had compromised by failing in their commitment to support the house and the work of God. They had become gripped by materialism, much as Americans tend to be. A grudging attitude toward freewill giving was a mark of the times. Malachi, a prophet contemporary with Nehemiah, records in Chapter 3 of his book that the people were “robbing God” by failing to tithe to support the work of God. The Levites were dependent upon the faithful support of God’s people, but now they were having to seek a living elsewhere.

Nothing is truly new under the sun, is it? The average American churchgoer gives less than three percent of his income to the church. When giving freely becomes an irksome duty in our lives, we can be sure that something is wrong with our hearts. When our attitude is “how much do I have to give?” instead of the kind of free-heartedness that the Bible encourages, we can be sure we need to take inventory. When God gets ahold of the hearts of His people, it will make a difference in the offering plate! Our giving is one of the most accurate indicators of our spiritual commitment. “How generous am I”” is a good question, but also, “do I give generously with a cheerful spirit?” If either of those elements is missing, then my Christian experience is less than God desires.

Nehemiah didn’t take this turn of events lying down either, but rather called out the people of Judah, who responded by giving as they ought. The people had inched away in religious life, in financial dealings,

3. In their use of time :15-22
“Too busy to slow down”
The prophet Amos, writing centuries earlier, could see merchants chafing at the weekly shutdown of business brought about by the Sabbath. By Jeremiah’s time, the merchants had their way, and the Sabbath was neglected. Upon his return to Jerusalem, Nehemiah found that the Sabbath was being treated just like any other day, and in the surrounding towns as well. This was to be a day of rejoicing in God’s goodness, a day of rest in His presence. Now, the people were secularized and materialistic, and a utilitarian mindset had prevailed. With money and property their idols, they could ill afford to take a day off from buying and selling; the Sabbath was just an inconvenience which could no longer be tolerated. And their witness suffered as well.

This utilitarian approach which the people took has its counterpart today in an approach to life that values our convenience above everything else. Another issue for us in how we spend our time is that we want to segment off our lives into different compartments; we assign time segments to each part of our lives, including our “religion”, keeping our “religion” a healthy distance from other aspects of our lives; we’ll give God an hour-and-a-half on Sunday morning, but that’s a-plenty. But as Christ-followers, we must see all time as a gift from God, and use it to glorify Him, not merely in functional ways to gain advantage for ourselves.

Nehemiah again forcefully acts, and notice in verse 22 that the Sabbath is hallowed not merely by the ceasing of labor, but also by consecrating it as a day to the Lord, a day for feasting and enjoying God.

4. In their relationships :23-29
“Multi-culturalism run amuck”
What’s the problem with the mixed marriages mentioned here? Was God sanctioning racism? No, not at all. The main danger was syncretism, an undermining of Jewish identity as a people set apart for God. Now, yesterday’s enemies were today’s marriage partners. Satan will use more than one means to destroy a people!

Why did these men marry foreign women, often divorcing their Hebrew wives in the process? Likely, financial gain was the reason. Nehemiah cannot stand for this, of course, taking some means we might consider drastic in order to stop the practice in its tracks. He appeals to the example of Solomon, who had been the wisest man to live, but who had made the tragic mistake of marrying foreign wives, and his heart had been turned from God.

It still happens today, and it is no small transgression. Young people, never for any reason date an unbeliever, that is if you intend to have any seriousness about your walk with God. Emotions will begin to cloud your judgment, overriding your common sense and your witness and in some ways your life will suffer ruin. Wise Solomon couldn’t get away with it, and neither are you likely to. It is a tragic mistake!

It’s also important for churches to be places that welcome everyone but admit to membership only those who give profession and evidence to having born again by the Spirit of God. Vance Havner had this to say: “Today the world has so infiltrated the church that we are more beset by traitors within than foes without. Satan is not fighting churches—he is joining them!”

Note Nehemiah’s response: while we might blanch at what amounts to a violent response on his part, we cannot help but take note at the seriousness with which Nehemiah regards compromise. Do we take sin in our lives nearly this seriously? Does it motivate us to radical, even ruthless, action, if necessary? It did Nehemiah—and it ought, us.

We finish our studies in Nehemiah today; I thought that a good way to wrap things up would be to consider together 10 key application points that we’ve dealt with over these past three months.

• The accomplishments recorded in Nehemiah are rooted in a real dependence upon God seen in Nehemiah’s continual praying.

• The motivation for Nehemiah to live as he did was his passion for God; it was the animating force of his life.

Nehemiah was a man under whose leadership the people of Jerusalem accomplished great things for God, and saw God transform their hearts—not once, but twice. It all sprang from a heart that was set ablaze with one holy passion for the glory of God. What is the passion of your life?

FLOCKs Homework
For the week of November 29-December 5

• Compare verse 6 with 2:1. How much time had elapsed between these two chapters?

• What had happened between the promises made by the people in chapters 8-9 and this chapter?

• What do Nehemiah’s responses tell us about him?

• How can we prepare ourselves for a lifetime of obedience? In other words, how can we avoid “inching away”?

• Read Revelation 2:1-7.
o What are some positive things said about this church?
o What does verse 4 say was the problem with the church at Ephesus? How do you think the church came to “lose its first love”? What might that have looked like?
o What is the solution to the problem?
o How might these sobering words speak to us as the evangelical church in 2009?

David Wells, in his book God in the Wasteland, laments the weakness of contemporary evangelical Christianity, and traces it to our shallow understanding of the person of God. He says that the problem is
“that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, His Christ is too common.”

It is as though we have marginalized God, domesticating Him to serve our purposes. His greatness awes us less than it ought; His power we give lip service to but fail to appropriate for daily living. His grace we take for granted, and we are something less than amazed by it. This was not the case with the people in Jerusalem, though, when we come to Nehemiah 9. Here we find the people entering the valley of sorrow over sin—and taking a God-pleasing response to their sin. I want to speak today about

The Nature of True Repentance

I. It is prompted by the Word and work of God.
In our confused age, we want to make much of man and little of God, and this bears being repeated: God’s Spirit convicts minds and hearts through God’s Word. We are not going to be able to understand God’s character nor realize the depth of our sin until the Word of God challenges our minds and the Spirit changes our hearts.

II. It is characterized by genuine sorrow.
The people fasted, and dressed in sackcloth, which was a goat-hair garment which irritated the skin severely. The hungry mourner would sit on the ground in this itchy, clothing and pick up the gray ash and reddish-brown earth and sprinkle on his head. This confession time was not a light/momentary thing. It was the serious recognition of the fact that we are steeped in sin, dominated by it, and as such, abased before a holy God. Isaiah 6:1-5 gives us an insight into what it is like to stand in the presence of a holy God. We read in Luke 5 of Peter’s encounter with Jesus and his reaction of shame at his own sinfulness in the presence of God Incarnate.

III. It faces the ugly truth of sin head-on.
Verse 2 says that they “stood and confessed their sins, and the sins of their forefathers.” And when we look at the prayer that forms the bulk of this chapter, we see that they did not take some broad-brush approach to confessing sin. Interestingly, they lumped themselves together with their forefathers, identifying with the sins that they had not personally committed. First, they wanted to acknowledge before God that they agreed with the fact that what their ancestors had done was indeed sinful.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, they were recognizing their own propensity for the same kind of evil existing within them as well. Thus, in this prayer, we see them making a veritable laundry list of their sins and the sins of others. They begin, in verses 16-17, listing their sins, and time and again, they confess their own proclivity for evil. Notice that theirs is not a vague, general confession of sin. This is not a mere “forgive us our debts”. “Oh, but didn’t Jesus tell us to pray, ‘Forgive us our debts’?” Well, yes, but what He was giving us was a model, a template, by which to pray, letting us know what good praying encompasses, part of which is the confession of sin. Real repentance faces the ugly truth.

IV. It acknowledges the unworthiness that sin produces.
Repentance acknowledges that, because of my sin, I am not deserving of anything good from the hand of God. You can’t read this chapter, with the repeated failings of the people and the repeated forgiveness of the grace of God, without the sense of surprise that God would be the kind of deity Who would deign to forgive sin over and over again. God is utterly unlike us in His willingness to extend grace to the undeserving, and we see ourselves as unworthy of such favor as a result.

V. It acknowledges the true nature and character of God.
In verse 5, the leaders called upon the people to “stand up and praise the Lord”. His Name is not to be said or referred to without the proper reverence attached to it. We would likely do well—and it might surprise you to hear me say this—to speak the Name of God with less frequency rather than more, especially if we have acquired the sorry habit of speaking it without thinking about it!

And then, in this prayer, the list of God’s attributes goes on and on. We see God in verses 7-8 as being sovereign, Who chooses us lest we get the idea that we have the good sense in our lostness to somehow choose Him. We see Him sovereignly working in history to accomplish His fore-ordained purpose. And we see Him to be One Who, on the basis of His righteous nature, can be counted upon to keep each promise He makes.

In verses 9-10, we see God as One Who is attentive and responsive to us, an incredible truth when you really think about it. He is One Who deals justly, Who will reward men for their actions, and Who in doing so will bring glory not to those men who do well, but to His own Name, for He delights in doing so.

In verses 11-12, and again in :15, we see God as One Who provides for the needs of His own, leading, protecting, and feeding them. In verses 13-15, we understand God to be One Who deigns to communicate with us, as One Who cares enough for His own glory and our well-being that He establishes the guidelines and boundaries for our living which will both help us and bring Him glory.

Then beginning in verse 16, we see the alternation of two themes: the sinfulness of Israel throughout its history, and the faithfulness of God. And He just keeps doing it again and again, showing us that He is long-suffering. And this really leads us to this major point:

VI. It throws itself upon the amazing grace of God.
Over and over and over again this prayer records words that can be boiled down to something like this: “we messed up big-time, and yet in Your grace You forgave us and restored us.” God’s grace keeps on forgiving, and it never meets a lost cause, a hopeless case, one who has used up his sin quota and finds himself on the outside looking in.

The people of Jerusalem were a people who knew their own sorry history, but they also knew the gracious hand of God which reached down time and again to restore and to heal. His grace accomplished it.

Wonderful grace of Jesus, greater than all my sin, how shall my tongue describe it, where shall its praise begin? Taking away my burden, setting my spirit free, for the wonderful grace of Jesus reaches me! Marvelous grace of our loving Lord, grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt! Yonder on Calvary’s mount outpoured, there, where the blood of the Lamb was spilt! He left His Father’s throne above, so free, so infinite His grace; emptied Himself, of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race. ‘Tis mercy all, immense and free, for oh, my God, it found out me! Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see!!! If grace has stopped amazing you, repent! Finally,

VII. It determines to walk a new path by the grace of God.
Grace is free, but it isn’t cheap, in that it cost Jesus His very life, and in that it calls its own to a life of sacrificial living. Salvation is both free and very costly, then, at the same time. The same Jesus Who told a wretched rebel and a thief on a cross beside Him that He’d see him in paradise in a few minutes also advised those who would follow Him to sit down and count the cost. That same Jesus Who said to the woman, “neither do I condemn you” also said to her, “Go and sin no more.” Grace saves us, but grace also changes us!

There was a preparation for this prayer in verse 2; the people understood that they had to deal with some issues before they came to God asking for forgiveness. These words of confession were more than empty words; to the contrary, they took some difficult steps. The rubber meets the road when we determine to step away from our sin.

These people understood that when grace has been so freely and amazingly extended, the only response of gratitude that is fitting is for one’s life to be changed completely by that grace. And to continue a theme begun weeks ago in this series, again we see the balance between the work of God and the willingness of the people. Chapter 10, which we will not be covering, outlines the details of the covenant they make with God in verse 38. In it, they bind themselves to some very specific promises, including

Taking an oath to keep God’s Law

A commitment not to intermarry with foreigners, so as to be like the other nations

A determination to keep the Sabbath holy

A commitment to keep the Sabbath-year requirement outlined in Exodus 23

Contribution to the house of God, and a determination not to neglect its upkeep

Tithing the first-fruits of all that was theirs

The dedication of their first-born children, and indeed to give God the first and best of all that was theirs

All of these things took place because they gained a clear understanding of just Who this God was Whom they served, and Who had chosen them. Remember the David Wells quote?
“…God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, His Christ is too common.”

Surely Wells is right. But we know the cure. It is in

Gaining a firm understanding of God’s Word, thereby knowing His nature and promises;

Saying “yes” to the Holy Spirit of God every time He prompts you to say “no” to sin and thus grow in obedience to God; and

Reveling in the amazing grace of God which takes us wretched sinners and makes of us people who are ushered into the very presence of God through Jesus Christ!

Study Questions for FLOCKs
Week of November 22-28

How do the people describe God in this chapter?

When you look over their prayer, does it strike you as unusual that they make so few requests of God? Why or why not? What might their prayer teach us about our praying?

What did the people conclude was the outcome of neglecting to serve and obey God?

Consider the practical outworking of the people’s repentance as recorded in Nehemiah 10.
• What are some of the characteristics of a repentant heart as seen in the various promises made by the people?

• There is a particular emphasis upon separating themselves from the people of the land. Why was this important? What might be its equivalent today? Read John 17:14-18. How does Christ’s prayer for His followers shed light on this question?

“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly furnished for every good work.” From II Timothy 3:16, this is a cardinal treatise on the nature and the profitable character of the Word of God. As we saw last week, the people of Jerusalem, having participated in the miracle of the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem in a scant 52 days, now had called for the Word of God to be read to them. Over and over again the witness of the Bible is that it is the truth that sets us free; that faith comes by hearing the Word of God; that it is the renewing of our minds that transforms us. We are reminded that we can walk clean before God by taking heed to His Word; that hiding His Word in our hearts is what enables us to live with less sin in our lives. We are told that it is the Word of God which is the Sword of the Spirit, the only offensive weaponry in the portfolio of our armor. We are told that it is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, that it cuts through all of the nonsense and pretense that we throw up as a façade to hide the real “us”. We established last week that when real revival breaks out among a people, the Word of God is central. The Word of God must judge our experiences, and not the other way around, a word we may need now more than ever in the contemporary evangelical church, I might add.

These people in Jerusalem were responding to what the Law showed them was true. Today, I want to talk about the circle of life in Christ, our Lord. We see it in these verses from Nehemiah 8.

I. Attentiveness to the Word (v.8)
I won’t belabor this as it was the focus of last week’s message, except to stress that this is the starting point. We must certainly stand for the truthfulness of the Word of God, but it is far easier to stand for it than to take it seriously enough to study it as though our lives depended upon it, but they do, and we must. The items that follow in the lives of the people of Jerusalem flow from a decision to take the Word seriously, and to be attentive to it. Your Christian experience will be dry and lifeless apart from being refreshed regularly by the water of the Word. All that follows is predicated upon cultivating an attentiveness to God’s Word.

II. Sorrow over sin—and repentance (v.9)
Nehemiah tells us that the first, dominant emotional response to the reading of the Word of God was weeping. The Bible says, “Godly sorrow works repentance”, and Jesus tells us that, except we repent, we will all perish. The Word of God acts as a mirror to reveal the wickedness of our hearts. The Bible tells us that the natural bent of all men is to proclaim their own goodness, but the Bible cuts through all of that and declares that all of us fall far short of God’s glory. We are natural-born sinners; we are filled with sin; we are enslaved to sin. Apart from the quickening work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we can never come into a right relationship with God, because we are blinded by our sin. When the Law was read, the people came to an immediate understanding that there was something terribly amiss; they had failed a holy God by their sorry living. Weeping was a highly appropriate emotion. Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, begins by saying that it is the poor in spirit who will be blessed, adding that there is blessing for those who mourn. In other words, we cannot hope to have the blessing of God on us until and unless we recognize our own spiritual poverty.

And notice that the weeping comes on the heels of the understanding of
When this reading of God’s Word took place, the holy Day of Atonement was just a few days away. This was a day to afflict oneself, to remember one’s sins and mourn over them. Look for a moment at Leviticus 16:15-16, 20-22. Two goats would be selected; one offered as a sacrifice, presaging the once-for-all atoning sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God, on Calvary, and the other, called the scapegoat, released in the wilderness, symbolically carrying their sins on himself and going far away to be seen no more. Yes, this was a day when sins would be remembered, and mourning was appropriate, but only as a precursor, clearing the air, as it were, for the happier occasion of the recognition of forgiveness! Which is our third point:

III. Rejoicing in forgiveness (vv.9-11)
Nehemiah instructed the people to rejoice instead of mourn! And folks, he didn’t just say, “get happy.” “Cheer up.” “Put on a happy face.” He said, “Party!!!” It is time to feast, not to fast! “Don’t be grieved—because the day is holy!” That ought not to strike us as an incredible statement, but I’m afraid that it does strike many Christians as odd. “Throw a party, because this is a holy day! Oh, and splurge a little! Live it up in the goodness and joy of the Lord, because this is a holy day!”

The Bible had revealed to the people their sin—as it does to us—but it also demonstrated the cure, the forgiveness of God. In the Christian experience, grief and gladness are never far apart, that is if we are to live in the right balance. My fear is that many Christians today miss that balance. I believe that God desires us to live in joy, to live life abundantly, to get a genuine kick out of our experience with God. The Westminster Confession talks about the chief end of man involving “enjoying God forever.” But here is where I’m afraid the balance is missed: while some, as I mentioned previously, seem to miss the element of rejoicing, and equate holiness with somberness, I fear that in this age there are many more who miss the balance on the other side! They want to shortcut the process; they seem to want to live, as I said before, with a spiritual buzz, a blissful life of religious feel-good-ism, without ever going through the mourning and sorrow over sin. Listen to this statement and if you take nothing else away this morning, take this:

We are not created to live in mourning over sin; God wants us to live rejoicing in His salvation. But the path to real rejoicing goes through the valley of sorrow over sin!

The strength that we need to face life, its difficulties, challenges, and problems is tied up with the joy of the Lord. But you cannot experience the joy of the Lord which will be your strength, and which flows from the assurance of God’s forgiveness, unless you tread the path that leads through genuine repentance over the reality of your sin.

IV. Sharing with others (v.10)
Nehemiah said, “Oh, and by the way, as you are experiencing this joy of the Lord; as you are being party animals for God, splurging on choice food and good drink, don’t forget that there are going to be some who have nothing prepared. Share the joy with them—bring them along in your rejoicing by sharing with them from the overflow!” Let that joy bubble over to others!

Raymond Brown wrote, “The people were not to indulge in groveling introspection when there was a world out there needing the assurance of forgiveness and love.” True spirituality shares with others! Jesus said, “there are two commandments upon which all of the Law and Prophets hang; love God with everything you’ve got, and love your neighbor as much as you naturally love yourself!” Raymond Brown again: “Personal salvation is not a cul-de-sac of individualistic experience; it is an open road of loving service in a world where God wants us to be, in Luther’s words, a ‘Christ’ to our neighbor.”

V. Obeying God (vv.12-18)
And it gets back to the Word, in verse 12. Notice why the people partied; it was not because they finished the walls! It was not because they now had a measure of protection from their enemies. It was because they understood the Word of God! In Leviticus 23, had essentially commanded the children of Israel to have a once yearly, everybody included, weeklong, nationwide campout! We get the impression that the words of Leviticus 23:39-43 came to them as something of a discovery, at least a re-awakening to the significance of this command of God. Notice

a. The Command of God
They were to have a gigantic campout every year, and to feast in the middle of it. Here’s God again commanding His people to have a big party! Now, in those days, there was no Dick’s Sporting Goods, so they would go and collect leafy branches and fashion their own makeshift tents. Basically, this was to be seven days of rejoicing and of hearing God’s Word—sort of the old camp meeting concept, I suppose! Then, at the end of seven days of feasting and partying before the Lord, they were to get serious for a day, calling a solemn assembly. Isn’t it interesting that the people were to feast for seven days and then to fast for one? God’s design is that we live in the joy and freedom of forgiveness. Here, His command was that the people would enjoy a feast in His Name.

b. The Meaning of the Feast
What did this great big campout and feast signify? It was a teaching tool to both the people of Israel and to surrounding nations as well. There were two sides to this feast:
1. It was a vintage festival. It took place at the time of the ingathering of crops. Exodus 34:22 described this party, a time of celebration and thanksgiving to God for His provision for their needs. Perhaps we might roughly equate this to our own holiday of Thanksgiving, minus the turkey, stuffing, and football, but with a stronger emphasis upon God, the One who ought to be thanked.
2. It was to serve as a memorial of the wilderness journey that Israel had undertaken after the exodus from Egypt. During that time, the people had lived in “booths”, makeshift shanties constructed of whatever could be found. This was an acted-out reminder of deep spiritual truths, about God Who was their provider, their protection, their deliverer, and about the fact that, whatever homes they occupied, they were nonetheless aliens as long as they lived here on earth, for they were destined for eternal dwelling.

c. The Significance of the Feast

1. A reminder of their past – It had to be particularly pertinent to these people now to be reminded that God was the One Who alone was their protector.

2. A witness in their present – Traders and merchants visited Jerusalem on a regular basis; some made their homes there, and no doubt would be arrested by the sight of these booths. According to verse 16, they put these booths up everywhere. The natural question must have been asked, “What’s this all about?” And the reply would be natural—“I’m glad you asked!”

3. An illustration of their future – In the words of the old spiritual, “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through…I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” They were reminded that the best was yet to come! And it certainly is for us as well.

The end of verse 17 talks about “great rejoicing”. Verse 18 talks about “celebrating”. Once the work was done, it was probably a blast to have a campout, but even more than this, there was joy to be found in knowing that they were doing what God had commanded. What compares with knowing you are doing what God created you to do? Hey, when God gets ahold of our lives, obeying Him is not a drudgery so much as He changes our desires and it becomes a delight. There was more than a superficial happiness; there was joy in knowing that what they were doing was being done, not out of some perfunctory sense of obligation, but out of a sincere desire to do what God wanted—and that will reap a harvest of joy every time.

This is the circle of life in Christ:
• Take in the Word
• See your sin, and thus sorrow
• Rejoice at the work of God
• Share that with others
• Live in continual obedience to the Word of God

FLOCKs Homework
For the week of November 15-21
• Can you remember a time when the Word of God troubled you in a powerful way? How did you respond to that?

• What, to you, is the most practical and relevant sense in which “the joy of the Lord is (your) strength”?

• What are some ways we can celebrate the impact of God’s Word in our lives?

• Philippians 4:8,9 gives us the guidelines for our thought life.
o What are those guidelines?

o What food for thought can you find in Nehemiah 8 that comports with these characteristics?

o What might each of them mean practically?

November 8, 2009

Saturdays in the autumn we catch a glimpse of something that takes place in Nehemiah 8, as all around America, in stadiums that seat the better part of 100,000 people, the home team comes on the field and the fans rise together “as one man”. “As one man” the people called for Ezra the priest to read to them the Word of God. Now, Nehemiah’s memoirs give way for a few chapters to third-person narratives, and we read of God’s working in people’s lives. Our main question for the morning is this: How did the People of God approach the Word of God? They were:

1. Single-minded
“As one man” they gathered, bound together, no doubt, by many things, but none more important than this, their common desire to hear the Word and allow it to speak to their questing hearts. This cemented them together—a focus on the Word. We further believe that this Word is our final authority, since it comes from God. This book tells me what I need to know to be saved, to live life abundant.

2. Enthusiastic
They asked for the Word of God to be preached to them. They stood for hours to hear it preached and explained. They responded to it in dramatic fashion. The world of my youth was rocked by the Watergate break-in, and the eventual resignation of a sitting president; the world of Nehemiah’s Jerusalem was rocked by a breakout of God’s Word at the Water Gate! The people were enthusiastic for the Word. That word comes from two words: “en”, meaning “in”, and “theos”, which is the Greek word for “God”. These people were into God, and so we say they had enthusiasm.

Ezra brought the Law of God before all of the adults who could understand (assumedly, the kids went to Children’s Church!) and he read it from early in the morning until noon. Third, their enthusiasm made them

3. Attentive
That is what verse 3 tells us. All who could understand shut up and listened up! This is what the Law envisaged: “a wise and understanding people”, people taught from childhood the Scriptures and what the meanings were behind the words of Scripture, and the significance of the rituals they observed. The religion of pagans was mindless superstition, and the downfall of sinning Israel was, according to Hosea, a lack of knowledge. Tthey were attentive because they desired so much to understand the truth of God’s Word. When they heard it, they listened—setting for us a pattern to emulate. How serious are you about the intake of God’s Word, the Bible?

4. Responsive
Notice the first response we see, in verse 5. They stood up when the Word was opened. This was a response of reverence, a response that indicated that they knew that the Scriptures were worthy of respect. This was not the veneration of the scroll, per se, as though it were some religious relic, but it gives evidence of the respect that the people had—they knew this was something different!

Verse 6 tells us how they worshipped, how they responded to God and His Word. They responded physically; they said, “Amen!” when they heard the Word. Think we ought to do that sometimes? They lifted their hands.

And then they bowed down to the ground. They responded by worshipping God in bowing down with their faces to the ground. This indicated a humility which demonstrated a willingness to obey what they were about to hear. All of these things made up their worship: standing in reverence to the Word, shouting “Amen”, lifting their hands to God, and falling on their faces before Him. When we think of worship, we often think of singing—and to be sure, that is one way we can worship God. Remember our definition? “Worship is an active response to God whereby we ascribe to Him the glory that is due His Name”; emphasis on “response”!

5. Teachable
In verses 7-8 we are told that Ezra had assistants, not the ones mentioned in :4, but others, whose job it was to explain the Law to the people. We aren’t certain exactly how this worked, but we do know that we can see from this the importance of the teaching and understanding of the Word, and the importance of having a teachable spirit. Your growth as a Christian will stop in its tracks and you will stagnate and be of little use to the Kingdom of God the moment you become unteachable. Always have a teachable spirit!

Question 2: Why did they approach the Word of God this way?

1. They were hungry!
The pastor is one who is charged with the responsibility of feeding the Word to the flock—the role of the flock every week is to come hungry! These people wanted to hear what God had to say. I’d suggest that there might be a word here for us? There are things which you can do to prepare for the proclamation of the Word of God in such a way that it will be to you like nourishing food—and there are conversely things which can be done to dull our spiritual appetites. I’d give you one simple encouragement to act upon every Sunday: enter this place with a reverent spirit; try to arrive in time to take a moment to prepare your heart prior to anything happening from this platform; tell God you are ready for what He wants to teach you. The people were hungry.

2. It is the Word of God!
We have enough of the so-called wisdom of this world to go around; one thing I hear and see regularly that is an encouragement to me is the hunger that many of our people have to hear the Word of God. It’s the Word of God—and not bells and whistles—that changes lives! And that’s point number last:

3. It changes lives!
Your life need changing today? Yes. God’s Word can change your life when you take it seriously, like the people in Jerusalem did!

I don’t fly much, though I’m not afraid of flying. It can be a little pricey, and my budget doesn’t always accommodate it. One thing I know is that, when you’re getting ready to land, the runway looks like a tiny narrow strip. Some people say that the Bible is narrow; that living by it is restricting and difficult. Maybe sometimes, for it cuts against the grain of the way we think. But next time you hear someone say that, remember the runway. It’s narrow. But landing on it—instead in the cornfield or in the water—is the way to safety. And so it is with God’s Word. When we humbled ourselves before it; when we take it in and take it seriously; when we allow God to work in our hearts through it, it will change our lives in ways we so desperately need! It changed the people in Nehemiah’s day, and it’ll change ours.

FLOCKs Homework
For the week of November 8-14

• The people were hungry for the Word of God. What are some things that threaten to deaden our hunger for the Bible?

• How would you counsel a Christian who came to you and said, “I just can’t seem to get anything out of the Bible when I read it”? What are some very practical things that you might suggest?

• II Timothy 3:16-17 gives us insight into the nature of Scripture, its profitability, and its desired results, among other things.

o What does it mean that “all Scripture is inspired by God”? What are some implications of that fact?

o What are the ways in which the Bible is profitable to us? Why are each of these particular areas important?

o What are some of the ramifications of maturity in the life of the Christian instructed in the truth of God’s Word?

o The Bible has been attacked in each of the following areas:
? Its nature
? Its inerrancy
? Its infallibility
? Its sufficiency
Why is it critical that we defend the Word in each of these areas—and how might we do it?