Christ Church

Finding and Following Jesus

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INTRODUCTION

If God were to become a man, it would be at turns surprising, offensive, wonderful, and strange. And so it was. We are made in His image, but His goodness and justice and beauty and joy are far beyond what can even imagine, and therefore, He takes the initiative. He is leading us to become what He already is in fullness. Which is why we must follow Him.

THE TEXT

“And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him. Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover…” (Lk. 2:40-52)

MISSING AT PASSOVER

Luke frames this episode with summaries of Jesus growing up (2:40, 52) which means that this is one of the central points of this episode. Luke indicates the ongoing faithfulness of Mary and Joseph in their attendance of the annual feast of Passover (Lk. 2:41), and his note about Jesus being twelve and going up to Jerusalem “according to the custom” may refer to his bar mitzvah – when a Jewish boy came to be recognized as a “son of the law” (Lk. 2:42). There were probably around two hundred thousand pilgrims for the feast in Jerusalem and another hundred thousand sheep for sacrifices. The city would be full of bustle and singing and family reunions and feasting. On the great night of Passover every house would celebrate the feast with the sacrificial lamb and the story of the Exodus would be recounted. When the feast was over, Mary and Joseph began the journey home with a number of their family members and neighbors. Some records indicate that it was customary for the women and young children to travel up ahead while the men and older sons brought up the rear, but regardless, at the end of the day’s journey when they all came together, it was a classic, “I thought he was with you” moment (Lk. 2:43-44). It would have been a full day’s journey back to Jerusalem and then another full day and night of searching before he was finally found (Lk. 2:45-46).

DIDN’T YOU KNOW?

On the third day, His parents found Jesus in the temple. Luke sets the scene by noting that 12 year old Jesus is in the midst of the teachers of the law, and He was listening to them and asking His own questions (Lk. 2:46). And everyone who heard Jesus was amazed at His understanding and answers (Lk. 2:47). Now when Mary and Joseph saw Jesus they were also amazed. On one level, they are amazed like any heart-sick mother and father would be to finally find their son lost for three days, and yet they are also amazed like everyone else, that He is conversing naturally with trained theologians (Lk. 2:48). Mary asks what every mother would ask, “How could you do this to us?” And she appeals to Him to sympathize with their plight: “your father and I have been looking for you with great sorrow.” And yet, His reply, the first recorded words of the Savior of the world, is: “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be about my Father’s business?” (Lk. 2:49) But they did not understand what He was talking about (Lk. 2:50). But the point is unmistakable: Mary asks why he was not being mindful of his father, and Jesus insists that he was.

GOD WITH US

Luke demonstrates here that Jesus was a normal human being who grew up and learned (Lk. 2:40, 52), and that He was simultaneously God (Lk. 2:49). This is not something the apostles made up later to make themselves feel better. Luke is building a case for this outrageous claim, and this introductory episode of 12 year old Jesus is part of the evidence for that claim. It should also be pointed out that the Jews should have known this: The entire narrative of the Old Testament is this truth wound through the story of Israel, the covenants and sacrifices point to God coming down into their midst, and finally the promises of the Messiah to come. He would be the Lord’s servant, and somehow in Him, it would also be the Lord Himself going forth like a mighty man, like a man of war to save (Is. 42:1, 13-16).

HE CAME FOR US

The Bible teaches that humanity’s most fundamental need is to be reconciled with our Maker. This is the origin of all of our deepest hurt, angst, and hatred (Rom. 3). This is why people harm themselves and others. The religion of secular humanism must deny the reality of this spiritual death and throw purely material cocktails at the problems. Even though we can’t really control material reality, we think we can, but regardless, all manmade religions try to manufacture a way back to God (or ultimate peace or justice or harmony). But only Christianity has the audacity to tell the unvarnished truth: that’s impossible. Sinful man can’t get back. This is like an expedition to the Sun. There is no going to God. The only possibility is God coming to us. And Luke along with the rest of the apostles sealed with their own blood and the testimony of their lives, that He has. And the wonderful thing is that because He has become one of us, He sympathizes with us in our weakness. He was tempted in every way and yet remained sinless (Heb. 4:15). And He learned obedience through the things that He suffered (Heb. 5:7-8). He came for us.

CONCLUSIONS

This episode is unmistakably a preview of another scare that will come at the end of Luke’s gospel. This is not the last time Jesus will go missing for three days. And on that third day, Jesus will once again ask two heartbroken disciples why they don’t know what’s going on (Lk. 24:25). He was to be about His Father’s business. And in both instances, Jesus is found doing Bible study. If Jesus seems to be missing, if you need to find Jesus, He will always be in the Word.

There’s also a subtle but significant point being made about authority and leadership. Jesus was being obedient to His parents by being obedient to His Father. True authority only comes from God, and therefore true obedience and submission is always ultimately to God and His Word. Mary and Joseph and all disciples have a responsibility to know the Scriptures in order to recognize Jesus, in order to know who He is and where He is leading. You can’t assume you know where Jesus is leading. You must not assume that He is accompanying you on your business. He is leading all of us on His Father’s business, even when we have to turn around.

All true authority is leading others in obedience to Christ. Faithful leaders are only as good as they are following Christ. His plans and designs are sometimes very surprising, but He always sticks close to the text. So if you want to know what He is up to, look for Him there.

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How to Give Your Testimony

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INTRODUCTION

The message today is on being ready to give an answer for the hope that is in you, and in particular, being ready to give your testimony. By God’s grace we are seeking to live together in this place and time such that we provoke questions and accusations, and we want the center of our answer to be a testimony of Christ in us.

THE TEXT

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: having a good conscience; that whereas they speak evil of you, as of evil doers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ” (1 Pet. 3:15-16).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

The first task of preparing to give your testimony is to sanctify the Lord God in your heart (1 Pet. 3:15). You most revere God there. You must honor Him as Your Lord and Master. It is that reverence that drives you readiness to give an answer (1 Pet. 3:15). Notice that the center of our answer is a “hope” that is in us (1 Pet. 3:15). Christian hope is not light and fluffy optimism. Rather, Christian hope is a joyful, gritty patience expectant for glory (Rom. 5:1-5, 15:4, 13). The answer we give is to be done with meekness and fear, which is what grows when you set the Lord apart in your heart (1 Pet. 3:15). Having a good conscience doesn’t mean sinless, but it does mean forgiven, clean, and put right (1 Pet. 3:16). And you know you’re doing this correctly when their accusations only fall back on themselves in shame (1 Pet. 3:16). If you are feeling shame, either you don’t have a clean conscience or else you don’t understand how God makes you clean (1 Jn. 1:9). And remember “a good conversation in Christ” has never stopped people from making false accusations (1 Pet. 3:16). Jesus said that the false accusations come precisely because you follow Christ (Mt. 5:11, Jn. 15:18-21).

SANCTIFY GOD IN YOUR HEART

As you know, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). It is holy space because God lives there. But our bodies are not generic temples, they are unique and varied. And think about your body as the shape of your entire life. That shape comes from God working particular stories of grace in each one. This is Paul’s testimony: “And last of all he [Jesus] was seen of me also, as one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Cor. 15:8-10, cf. 1 Tim. 1:14-16). The first task of sanctifying God in your heart is simply submitting to Him as a holy God, admitting your sin, and turning to Christ in principle. But then you have to do the same thing in particular with everything in your life: your parents, your childhood, your vocation, your spouse, your children, and everything else, including your failures, weaknesses, trials, and sin. Your testimony is telling how the holy God has been at work, how you have contributed sin, how Christ has forgiven and restored, and all by His grace in order to display His grace in you.

IN PRAISE OF BORING TESTIIMONIES

You have heard us say before that we are aiming for boring testimonies for our children in our community. What we mean by that is that by the grace of God, we want our children growing up in the faith of their parents and embracing it, with faithfulness passing from generation to generation like runners in an Olympic relay race. By faith and God’s great grace, we want our children growing up in Christ, which will often mean that they don’t remember the exact moment when they first trusted in Him. And by that same grace, we pray that our children will never know a time when they were not walking with God. It is glorious to always walk with God, to have no rebellious phases. Some Christian traditions so emphasize the dramatic conversion story (biker gang rebellion followed by Damascus Road experience), that it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. And kids who grow up only hearing those kinds of conversion stories wonder how they could possibly be a Christian since they haven’t even started selling drugs yet. But Scripture is full of ordinary covenant conversions: John the Baptist was filled with the Spirit in his mother’s womb (Lk. 1), David learned to trust God on his mother’s breast (Ps. 22:9), Samuel came to know the Lord as young boy (1 Sam. 3), and Timothy was taught the scriptures from his youth (2. Tim. 3:15). We want a culture of cultivating and encouraging faith.

BUT NOT REALLY BORING

Nevertheless, and even celebrating the ordinary “boring” testimonies of our children, we really must run back around the other side and insist that there are no boring testimonies. This is because amount of sin is not what makes a testimony amazing or powerful, but rather, the amount of grace. How much grace was needed for your salvation? Every son or daughter of Adam deserved death and Hell, and therefore, every Christian was purchased with the infinite price of the blood of Jesus. There is nothing boring about that. And when we say “grace,” we mean the presence of the Father beaming at the work of His Son in you, sealed and secured by the Spirit. The Triune God is the most extravagant, adventurous, creative, brilliant, gracious Being of all. If He is present, nothing is boring, nothing is ordinary. To sanctify this God in your heart is to see the presenceof this God in your life. Every salvation is also a salvation to an unspeakable glory. Eye has not seen, ear has not heard what God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor. 2:9). The process of a Red Wood sapling growing up into a towering tree may not look explosive, dramatic, or glorious in any given snapshot, but if you could see the whole thing from God’s perspective – all the atoms firing over decades, it would make you close your mouth with awe. And that is the hope that is in you.

CONCLUSION

Everyone in this room who knows Jesus has a testimony of His grace. For many of you, it is a testimony of growing up surrounded by the grace of loving parents, sibling, teachers, and friends. But do not take that grace for granted. Perhaps you do not remember when you first believed, but you should absolutely remember times when you have believed more. Maybe you don’t remember the first time you were forgiven, but you absolutely should remember many subsequent times when you were convicted of sin, confessed, and were cleansed. Maybe you don’t remember the first answered prayer, but do you remember the many others? Maybe don’t remember the first time His word encouraged you or helped you during a trial, but do you remember many others? That is your testimony, that is the hope that is in you. Christ is in you.

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Truth & Lies (Good Friday 2021)

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Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? (Jn. 18:37-38).

And you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free (Jn. 8:32).

Freedom and truth go together, hand in hand. Freedom is not merely lack of constraint or the power of choice. Because it if were, truth would have no bearing on freedom. You wouldn’t need truth to be free. But Jesus says that you cannot be free apart from the truth. The truth is what makes a man free. And therefore, lies are what enslave. Lies are captivity. “Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge…” (Is. 5:13).

The truth is what makes people free because then they may act and live in a way that corresponds to reality – the world as God actually made it. Truth is solid ground. Truth is true all the time, everywhere. Truth is granite. It holds fast. Truth reaches all the way to heaven. If something is really true, it is even true to God. Francis Schaeffer called this “true truth.” It’s true all the way the down, all the way up, all the time, everywhere, absolutely. So we may build on it. We may live in light of it. In this way, we may say that freedom is simply living honestly before God.

But a lie wants the world to be different than it actually is. If you lie about what happened yesterday, you are lying about history. If you lie about who you are, what she said, what he did, what you have done, what belongs to you, you’re attempting to twist the world into your control. A lie lays claim to rule the world. It may be a very small lie, a very small part of the world. But in that one place, a lie declares war on God and His world. And you cannot start only a very small war with the Ruler of the Universe because to declare war, any war against God is fundamentally to declare war on all of it.

A lie is also a false claim to absolute truth. It’s false, but it necessarily collides with God and His truth. Therefore, lies divide. And lies divide in the same way that truth divides. Either you believe or you do not. A lie makes an objective claim that people will either live according to it or not, just like the truth. But a lie hobbles you, hampers you, and ultimately enslaves you. In this way, a lie is always necessarily violent and coercive and full of malice.

“A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin” (Prov. 26:28). While God often restrains the impact of many lies, they all fundamentally are at war with God and His world and therefore are always ultimately attempts to ruin everything.

You may have seen the story on CNN this last week reporting on Gov. Kristi Noem’s executive orders in South Dakota prohibiting biological males from playing in women’s athletics. Quite apart from whatever is going on in South Dakota, in the article, the CNN reporter wrote: “It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.” And as far as I know the writer still has his job at CNN, as do his bosses.

There are of course the surface lies about whether it’s possible to know someone’s gender identity at birth and whether there has been any consensus on assigning sex. But there are other lies underneath those lies: the assumption that a gender “identity” is even a thing to be discerned or that sex is something that is “assigned.” But underneath those lies are additional lies about the glory of male and female, the glory of the image of God. And beneath it all is a seething hatred of God, His image, and His world. But what is ironic is that all of these lies are begging for submission, begging for consensus. There is not consensus about whether someone is a boy or a girl, he claims, beckoning everyone to agree with him.

Lies always invite belief. The truth invites belief and freedom; every lie invites belief and slavery. But of course lies do not advertise the slavery part. Lies are almost always full of flattery. If you eat this fruit, you will become like god, knowing good and evil.

“For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue” (Ps. 5:9). Speaking of Israel, Psalm 78 says, “Nevertheless they did flatter him with their mouth, and they lied unto him with their tongues.” Flattery and lies go together. But the flattery and the lies are always a set up: “A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet” (Prov. 29:5).

The set up is this: if you don’t go along with my lie, there will be consequences, maybe initially just awkwardness, no friendliness, no compliments, no flattery. And if it’s just one person, that can be odd or challenging, but what we are witnessing in our day is the multiplication of lies on such a massive scale and widespread belief in them, such that now, to not believe the lies is to be considered a threat to the peace and unity of society. If you don’t believe that a man can put on a dress and become a woman, if you don’t believe that two men can be married, you are now a threat. You are a threat to the attempt to remake the world with lies. You are a threat to the consensus.

And many Christians say, why won’t they just leave us alone? You can do your thing over there, and we will do ours. But this is to radically misunderstand and underestimate the claims of truth and lies. And as the lies multiply, the liars frequently understand far better than the truth-tellers, that lies are absolute claims. Lies are necessarily absolute claims because they contradict God’s absolute truth.

This is why Christians must hate all lies. All lies, all deception, all falsehood is an attack on the living God, His world, and His people. Liars may not be consciously aware of the full extent of their rebellion, but it is there, all the same. Lies aim at the destruction of everything. To put up with a little bit deception is like putting up with a little bit of poison, a little be of nuclear fallout, a little bit of murder.

So tonight, we gather with Christians throughout the world to celebrate and proclaim the truth. We gather to sing and pray and hear once more the Truth of the crucifixion of the Son of God. But this is not just a small truth. It is the Truth, the truest Truth of them all. That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. And that Son, who is the Truth of God, willingly laid His life down for the sins of the world. The Truth became a Man so that the lies of men might condemn Him, slander Him, mock Him, beat Him, and kill Him. And that True Man let them do it because He intended to take all their lies, all our lies and crush them.

If you are a descendent of Adam and Eve, you have been born into a world full of lies. And you have trafficked in them from time to time, whether in the world around you, whether in your own heart, or in your words, or in what you have been willing to think or do or believe. And that world of lies is not freedom. It is only chains, and snares, and threats, and ruin.

But Jesus came to set you free. He came to set this world free. He did not come to flatter you. He did not come to tell you lies. He came to tell you the honest truth, which is that you are the problem, your sin and rebellion are the problem, and you have committed treason against God and you deserve to die. But the truth is also that God is love. He is not the love of Hallmark movies or Disney. He is not the fake love that is only sentiment and feeling and emotion. He is not the fake love of mask mandates only wanting everyone to feel good or look like He was doing good. No, He is true love, truthful love, honest love, and He came to actually do good. He came to do what needed to be done, not what anyone thought He should have done. He came to take to the penalty for your sin. He came to bear God’s wrath against your rebellion. He came to tell the truth about your lies. He came to suffer what you deserved.

And so He did. And it is finished. If you look to the Truth on the Tree, the Lamb of God, you can see your sins there. You can see all of your lies there. You can see your guilt and shame there, dead on the cross. And you should also notice that Jesus is no longer there. He is alive. All of this is true. It is true all the way down, and all the way up, and all the way into the throne room of God, now, and every day, and forever. And all the lies in the world cannot change it. Nothing can take it away. Nothing can separate you from that love.

And so, all of this is why Christians must not put up with lies: whether pronouns, or history, or creation, or sex, or marriage, or money, or Christ. Christians may not go along with any lies. Lies are at war with God. Lies are at war with His Cross, with His Christ, with His church. And so we are at war with all lies because we have been made free by the truth.

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