And at this time, if you're able, please stand for the scripture reading out of respect for God's word. Our scripture reading this morning comes from Luke 1, one through four. And as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us. 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, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. This is God's word, it is true, and it is given out of his love. You may be seated. - Awesome. Thanks, Patrick. Appreciate you pinch-hitting for the announcements like that. Oh, yes, wanna continue to just welcome you all to church is so good to be worshiping with God's people this morning. Tagging up on that announcement about the DCLT thing. So the reason we do six of those trainings is because our church has six priorities. And the thinking is if as leaders in our church and as members of our church, if we can grow in each of those six priorities, we will become a more mature disciple, someone who is able to live out the mission that God has called us together in a more robust way. And so even if you're not a DC leader, I think that those six trainings are super beneficial way to lean into what God is calling our church to be here today. So this morning we're gonna continue our study through the book of Luke, the Gospel of Luke. If you have your Bibles, turn to Luke chapter two. If you don't have a Bible, turn to page 858 on the table Bibles. We're gonna go through the end of chapter two and we're gonna kind of bounce around a little bit. So it'll be really important to have it open for you in front of you as we are getting going. While you're turning there just a little bit about our family, one of the hobbies that our family has really been enjoying lately is watching videos of the kids when they were little. The little baby videos has been bringing us a lot of joy. Our personal favorite right now comes from when, Anderson was three and Jackson was two. They didn't know I was gonna tell this story. So if I stop halfway through, it's 'cause they're not giving me permission to tell this. So Anderson's three, Jackson's two. Kelly's asking them how old they are. So Anderson says three. She asks Jackson how old he is. Jackson says three and he holds up four fingers while he's two. So he got it wrong on so many levels. While Jackson is trying to work through that question of how old he is, Anderson spots out of the corner of his eye the ball that Jackson's playing with and he decides that that's the perfect moment to swipe that ball and to have all the fun that he wanted to have. Jackson responds by screaming, "ball ball ball" and gets the ball back. And we just think that is the cutest thing we've ever seen. Like it shows you a neat little peek into each of these young men's lives and their personalities and how they love each other so well. Here's the interesting thing. No matter how many people we show that video to, they don't seem to get the same joy out of it. The Kelly and I do. And I can't, as a millennial, that loves our kids, I can't understand for the life of me why people aren't, I was obsessed about my kids as I am kind of thing, right? The reason I tell all that story is because the passage we have in front of us this morning feels a little bit like Mary is showing us a kid video. It's something, it's from Jesus' childhood, it's this story that we only find in the gospel of Luke and you can be tempted to read this story, to hear some details about Jesus' childhood and to say to yourself, "Oh, isn't that cute?" And then walk away unchanged. Just as if you could watch some family videos of ours or I could watch family videos of yours and we could all just kind of shake our heads and say, "Isn't that sweet?" And then walk away completely unchanged. But what we're gonna find as we studied this passage this morning is that there's a real particular reason why God and his sovereignty chose to include this story about Jesus' childhood for us to study as followers of Christ. Or if you're here and you're someone who's just exploring Christianity or if you have doubts about Christianity, I think this passage this morning gives you a really unique insight and a unique peak into the character and the identity of Jesus. 'Cause on one hand, we're all kind of curious about Jesus' childhood, right? It's kind of a natural curiosity. I wonder what Jesus was like as a kid. That curiosity led some people in the fourth and the fifth century to just make up some stories about Jesus' childhood and write them down. These are called the apocryphal infancy gospels. The most famous one is the infancy gospel of Thomas. In that gospel, it's again, it's a fake made up story written several hundred years after Jesus' death and resurrection. But in that fake account, Jesus is a little kid. He's making clay birds and he decides that it'd be better to play with these if they were real birds. So he turns the clay birds into real birds and they fly away. Meanwhile, his neighbor bumps into him and that makes Jesus so angry that he kills the kid on the spot. The parents of that kid are somewhat troubled that Jesus would kill their child. So they start yelling at Jesus and Jesus responds by blinding these parents for a while. And then he tells them, "I hope we've all learned our lesson." And then he restores their sight and he brings the kid back to life. And you read that and you're like, what? This doesn't in any way line up with anything that I have seen about Jesus. If you read through the four canonical gospels, the stories that we actually have about Jesus that are true to his identity, you see that the fake Jesus that that author presents and then the real Jesus that we encounter and the scriptures are completely different. And so the interesting thing this morning is that of all the stories of Jesus' childhood, this is literally the only historical account we have of Jesus before his ministry began, right? Where he is as a young man making decisions, he is speaking for the first time in the gospel of Luke and we get this unique glimpse into who Jesus is and some of his character and his identity. But what I want us to do as we study this story is to ask ourselves the question, why is this in the Bible, right? 'Cause we have four gospels written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and in each of those gospels, we don't have this story except in Luke. So the question is if you took this story out of your Bible, if Luke had not written down the story of when Jesus is 12 and he visits the temple, what would we be missing about Jesus' character and about the nature of our faith that we have? I think that's the question that's in front of us. And I personally think as I've studied this passage, this week, I'm just blown away at the unique aspect of God's character and beauty that we get to see in these pages. So I'm really excited for us to study this this morning. Let's say a word of prayer, asking God to bless the study of his word and then we're gonna go through Luke chapter two, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for this morning. We're so grateful that you loved us enough that you had your servants, inspired by your spirit, recount the stories of Jesus and his life. What an amazing privilege it is that we get to read of your work in our world and know that this is your word, that it is true and it has been given to us because you love us. So I pray that as we open these pages, as we read these words, they would be more than words to our souls, that they would ignite a deeper passion and affection for you and we would all leave here more in love with you than when we came. And since in Jesus name we pray, amen, amen. All right, so Luke chapter two, we're gonna pick it up in verse 39 this morning. If you were here last week, Aaron preached on the end of chapter two of Luke, the consolation of Israel, this idea of longing for and waiting for God's salvation to come. And we see this beautifully laid out as Jesus, as a baby is dedicated in the temple and then a prophecy, two prophecies are spoken over Jesus, showing Mary and Joseph the nature and the identity of their son. The week before that, we started this series in Luke by going through Luke chapter one, that passage that Patrick read for us, where we learned that the reason that this gospel has been written, the reason Luke put these words to paper is so that we can have confidence. He actually goes as far as to say, so that we can have certainty of the things that we have been taught concerning Jesus. And so what we're gonna do as a church is take the next couple of years to go, probably about 75 different sermons, to go through the book of Luke, studying deeply what God shows us through this gospel account from his servant Luke. And we get to see the nature of Jesus and have more certainty regarding who he is and how much he loves us. We're gonna, we skipped over that birth narrative, the Christmas story because last Advent, we taught on that for four weeks. So if you wanna catch up to that, you can find those sermons online. But, like I said, as we get going, this is a really fun story. If you grew up in church, or if you're familiar with the Bible, it's probably a familiar story to you, it's one you've heard before. If you're not, didn't grow up with the Bible, if you haven't read this before, it's a really fascinating picture into who Jesus is. So what we're gonna do is a little bit different this morning than we normally do. I'm gonna read through it rather quickly. I'm gonna explain or highlight some of the more important features. And then we're gonna spend the rest of our time together answering that question. Why is this in our Bible? Well, why did God include this in the scriptures and the picture of Jesus? So, like I said, let's pick it up. In verse 39 of Luke chapter two. This says, "And when they, Mary and Joseph, had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him." So this section wraps up kind of the infancy account of who Jesus is. And so if you read the Gospel of Matthew, we know that there's a point where Jesus' life was threatened by Herod. So Mary and Joseph took him into Egypt for some time. When Herod died, they went back into Judea and went up to Nazareth. So that story is fitting in here in this section. We also wanna point out that Nazareth is a town about 80 miles north of Jerusalem. It is the redneck portion of Judea. It is nothing good came from Nazareth. So if you're from Calhand, I think that's what it's talking about. I say that 'cause I went to Peyton and there was our high school rivals and nothing personal. I'm not trying to be too mean, just a little mean. But with that, so Nazareth is this town that nothing good came out of. It had a horrible reputation. And Jesus is growing up 80 miles away from the center of gravity in Israel in this backwater town of Nazareth. We also see that it says that he grew. He became strong and filled with wisdom. He is doing what little boys do, which is developing physically as he grows in age. Let's keep going, verse 41. Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up according to custom. And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, but supposing him to be in the group, they went a day's journey. But when they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances, and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem searching for him. Okay, so what happens here is we learn that Mary and Joseph's yearly tradition is they would go into Jerusalem for the most holy of all the festivals Passover where the people of Israel commemorated God, delivering his people from Egypt and from bondage and slavery and to freedom. And so they would do that every year. That's a sign of Mary and Joseph's faithfulness. Each year there'd be about 200,000 immigrants that would go or visitors pilgrims, they would go to the city of Jerusalem, so it would explode with people for this week, and then they would all go home. And then as they go home, that's all too familiar story for many parents of that moment of realizing, oh no, we left our child behind. It's something that's really common before cell phones and all those things. Our family's version of this story is when my sister was five. We accidentally left her at my uncle's house. My uncle, being the uncle that he was, Uncle Bub, he decided to be great if she watched this movie with him while they waited for mom and dad to come back. It happened to be an R-rated movie. My sister had nightmares the rest of her life until this is the funny part. This is where it gets funny, right guys? She was watching Terminator 2 in college with some friends and she saw Arnold come up out of the molten lava and she's like, that's it? That's the pictures that's been haunting my dreams for decades. So she had some healing and some closure when she realized that that's the movie that she had been seeing in her dream. So the big question there is, I'm not sure what Uncle Bub was thinking of, hey, this is a great movie to show my five-year-old niece, but it is what it is. The thing that we see in this story though is it says that Mary and Joseph didn't know that he was missing, that they supposed him to be with their families and relatives. And so the reason that is is in tradition, the pilgrims would leave the city, the women and children would be in front and the men would be in the rear of the traveling party and there'd be a hundred or so people all going back to Nazareth together. And Jesus is 12 years old, which means he's right on the border between being a child. And then when you turned 13 in Jewish culture, you were seen as a man. So he's right on that edge. So Mary and Joseph each assumed that he was with the other one. It's one of those very natural mistakes. But then when they realized what happened, they're a day's journey out. And so it's gonna take them another day to get back to the city. So you can imagine the anxiety and the tension they're feeling with that. He has a story, he keeps going. Verse 46, "After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress." And he said to them, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?" And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them. So after three days of searching, so the way the Jewish counting works is it's called inclusive reckoning. So day one is their journey out. Day two is their journey back. And day three is them looking around the city for Jesus. If you ever wondered how we can say Jesus was dead for three days when he died on a Friday and then rose again on a Sunday, it's 'cause of that same way of doing math, Friday, Saturday, Sunday kind of thing. So over that three day period, they're looking for Jesus. They find him at the temple. And then we see four different pictures of people being astonished. All right, so there's the people listening to Jesus that are astonished at the answers he's giving to the things. And that word astonished there is really unique in Luke. Anytime Luke uses that word astonished, it's always when someone is encountering God in a specific way, right? That they're astonished in hearing the answers Jesus gives just as someone is astonished when they see God working. The second astonishment we see is the anxiety of Mary and Joseph. It says that they were astonished at him being there among the people. And this is a different word. It means someone who has deep anxiety and they're overwhelmed by the events that they're experiencing. So Mary and Joseph are just feeling this relief and this crushed tension of, oh my gosh, there is Jesus, so he's alive. All the emotion is round up for them. And then the third astonishment thing we see is Jesus. Jesus is astonished that they didn't know to look for him in the temple in the first place. He's surprised. He's like, why wouldn't you have come here first? Of course, I'd be in my father's house. And then the fourth astonishment that we see is his parents hearing Jesus' answer and they leave confused, not understanding the nature of what it is that he told them. So some of the things to note in this that are important. Jesus is shown as asking questions of the religious teachers. That's gonna be really important later on when we talk about why this passage matters. He's asking them questions and he's learning from their responses. And the reason this is unique is 'cause some of those other, like I said, the apocryphal infancy, gospels, the made up stories. And one of the made up stories, the Syriac gospel. Jesus is lecturing the religious leaders about mathematics and about astronomy. He's the one as the 12 year old that has all these answers and he's exposing them to stuff that they had never seen before. That's not the picture you get here. Jesus is sitting among the students asking questions and giving answers with everyone else. Another thing that I wanna point out, two more things actually. One is in verse 48, Mary says, "Behold, your father and I have been searching for you." Okay, lowercase f father. I think the translators do this really well. And then in verse 49, Jesus' answer is, "I must be in my father's house, capital f." All right, so there's some tension going on. There's some distinction between Joseph as Jesus, the man who is raising Jesus. And then Jesus' understanding of God as his father. We're gonna come back to that too. And lastly, the thing I wanna point out is, some translations would say, "I must be about my father's business." I think the ESV has a better translation here by saying, "I must be in my father's house." Okay, that's gonna come back to help us understand this as we move forward as well. So let's keep going verse 51. "And when he went down with them and came to Nazareth "and was submissive to them. "And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart. "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature "and in favor with God and man." Okay, so we see, again, this picture we saw earlier in chapter two, where Mary is treasuring these things. She's pondering the things she's seeing about Jesus. She continues to treasure those. And Jesus continues to grow. He's growing in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. And so that ends that story. From next week when we pick it up in chapter three, that's where the Gospel of Mark, for example, begins. With John the Baptist and his ministry. And we skip over 17 years from Jesus' childhood as a 12 year old to his ministry as an adult, as a 30 year old man later on. And so what we have here is these massive gaps. There's Jesus as a baby. And then we skip 'til he's 12. We have this one story. And then we skip 'til he's 30 and his ministry begins. Sometime in that gap, we assume that Joseph must have passed away because Joseph kind of moves out of the narrative and we don't hear from him ever again and that concludes the childhood of Jesus. That is all the information we have about Jesus' childhood. So go in peace, love you guys, what a wonderful story. Isn't that cute? Aren't you so glad we have this little picture of Jesus' child? You can identify with him, right? Jesus is getting yelled at by his parents. It just seems like the most natural thing that we've all experienced. So the question that we have, I still want us to ponder to dive into now as we look back over these verses, is why did Luke put this story in his Gospel? Why did God put this piece of Jesus' life in this Gospel of Luke and not tell us anything else about Jesus' identity? I think there's some things that we see here that we only see here. If you had removed this from your Bibles, you would miss a very key aspect of what it means for Jesus to be our Savior. So one of the things we see is Jesus' humility is on a unique display, right? So we can read like in Philippians, where you talk about Jesus being the very nature of God, did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself and took on the form of a servant. So that's Paul as a theologian telling us what happened. But there's something different about seeing Jesus' humility when you read a story about him as a young man growing and knowing that he grew up in Nazareth. Nothing cool happens in Nazareth. He was submissive, it says in verse 51, he was submissive to his parents, both Mary and Joseph for 17 years after this incident until he began his ministry. That word submissive is the strongest word possible in Greek of subjecting yourself to someone else's authority. So this gives us a very more robust and a full picture of who Jesus is that we get to see that this was what it actually looked like for him to live with that humility in his life. Again, you can see Jesus' humility elsewhere, but there's something about knowing that that was his developmental process as he grew that gives you a unique picture into his humility. Something else that we see here that I think is important is it shows how Mary and Joseph really were people who honored God. They did their best to honor God with their lives and their decisions. Luke, every chance he gets, he's trying to highlight that Mary and Joseph are faithful Israelites. They're doing the things that God has shown them from his word and they're trying to live a life of obedience to God as their king. So for example, in verse 39, it says that they did everything according to the law. Verse 41, we see that they make this trip annually to Passover, not every Jewish person that lived in Nazareth would go every single year 'cause the trip was so long. And we also learned that Mary makes the trip with Joseph. In the ancient world, there's only the men that were required to go. So Mary going along shows that she is trying to be faithful as well. You didn't have to bring your kids with you. So the fact that they're bringing Jesus with them every year, the extra, the burden of bringing a child with you to the temple shows that they're trying to do everything they can to raise Jesus under the law as they have been taught. They stayed the whole festival. In verse 43, it says that when the feast was ended. So the minimum requirement was you go for two days for the actual Passover. But if you really wanted to just experience God's pleasure and to be with his people and to extend your time of worship, you would stay for a whole week. So we're seeing Mary and Joseph are doing that. They're staying for that whole week. And so at every single turn, we see that Mary and Joseph are a man and a woman who are giving their lives to live in faithful obedience to God. Now here's what we know from studying the Bible. Your obedience does not make God love you any more than if you were disobedient. He loves you because that's his identity and because that's the favor that he has set on you by grace through faith because you became a child of his through the death and resurrection of Jesus. But there is something uniquely wonderful about seeing God work through the fertile soil of an obedient heart. You cannot earn God's affection by being obedient. But there's a unique kind of joy that comes from saying, I want to live my life and humble submission and obedience to what God has called us to do. That honors God and it gives us joy in a unique kind of way. And so we see that Mary and Joseph are really giving their best effort. Here's the other thing though. We see that their best efforts are not nearly enough. Their best efforts are not nearly enough. I haven't done much babysitting in my life but I think if you've been asked to babysit the Son of God, the first rule is don't lose the kid, right? If you have done some babysitting, it's not like the best thing you can have happen when the parents come home is, hey, your kid's still here. So they were asked to babysit Jesus and they lost him. That's not very good steward of what they were entrusted with. Another story about one of my sisters, my other sister in college, she asked Kelly and I to watch her fish while she went home for Christmas break. It was negative 30 in Chicago. And within two hours, that fish was in a block of ice in our car. We had killed Horatio Hornblower in two hours or cryogenically frozen him until the technology can develop to thaw Horatio out and restore him to life. But that's a hard conversation to say, hey, you know that life or that fish you entrusted us with? It's dead, it's gone, that's my fault. But Jesus, being entrusted to Mary and Joseph, they had this one job to do and they left him at the temple. And so it's an only human mistake, right? We read the story and it makes so much sense of how this happened. We don't want to blame Mary and Joseph. But what we see in Mary's distress in particular, right? When she finds Jesus, you don't know the tone of her voice in this, but you kind of get the image that she's so frantic, she's probably scolding Jesus "How could you do this to your father and I?" We've been worried sick over you these last three days 'cause you've been staying here. And in that distress and anxiety, you get this sense that Mary and Joseph did their best and their best wasn't nearly enough, right? I think deep down Mary knows we're probably not doing a very good job of raising the Son of God. I think something is not going the way that it should here. And that's seen also in their confusion. When Jesus answers, I'm not with my lowercase F father because I'm in my capital F father's house. When he does that, the confusion that Mary and Joseph feel shows that there's just something that's not clicking in their understanding of what it means to be raising Jesus in their home, that job that they were entrusted with. So they gave their best and their best wasn't nearly enough. And I think this is probably the perfect place to use that phrase, they're only human after all, right? Mary and Joseph, they're only human, it makes sense. You and I would have done no better, probably far worse than they did in raising Jesus. But again, there's that feeling of something isn't quite what it's supposed to be. They're only human after all, but at the end of the day they are human and their humanity comes through in the way that they have kind of mishandled this situation. Another thing we see in this story that's unique to here is we get a unique glimpse into Jesus' identity and his own self-understanding, okay? So in contrast with Mary and Joseph, you see that Jesus seems to be cut from a little bit different cloth, right? So he's not lecturing on astrophysics and science to these people, but he's giving answers to the teachers in a way that is astonishing everyone about his intellectual abilities. We also see that Jesus has a self-understanding of his intimacy with God that is completely unique, right? So when Jesus says, "Did you not know that I must be "in my father's house?" And when he says, "My father," that is the first time in recorded history that a Jewish man ever referred to God as "my father." Okay, so that's an astounding concept. And in the Old Testament, Israel is referred to as God's son, the nation in its entirety, and God refers to Israel as "my child," and so it's our father. But there's something unique about Jesus saying being the first person to ever say, "God in heaven is my father." It's a unique intimacy he has with him, and so then because of that unique intimacy, his desire is to be in his father's house. So the temple in Jerusalem is where God had told his people that his presence would be uniquely manifest through the sacrifice of the Old Testament sacrificial system and all those things, it was a unique chance for God's people to commune with and connect with God by being in the temple. And so Jesus sensing that intimacy with God and saying, "I have to be in my father's house." It shows us that he is something completely different than you and I. He had a self-understanding that's completely different than every Jewish man that had ever lived before him. But here I think is finally why this passage is included in our Bibles. And I think this is the part that when you first hear it, it feels uncomfortable, and if I be honest, it almost sounds heretical if you listen to it. But what I think this passage is in our Bibles for is because it gives us a unique picture into the humanity of Jesus. In this section, we see that Jesus learned and grew just like every other human ever has. Okay, so we see Jesus grew physically. So if you look at verse 16, it refers to Jesus as a baby and verse 40, it refers to Jesus as a small child. In verse 43, it refers to Jesus as a boy or an adolescent. And then in verse 52, it uses Jesus' adult name as a grown man. And so in that progression, we see Jesus growing physically. That's what it means. It says Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature. Growing in stature means that he grew physically. I think we're kind of used to that idea. If you're familiar with the incarnation that Jesus took on flesh, he had to go from being a baby to being an adult. The thing that I find truly fascinating about this section, though, is that that growth and development included his mind, his understanding of the world, his understanding of language, his understanding of the Old Testament, his understanding of his self-identity, all of those things developed as well. I think for some reason, I grew up thinking, Jesus must have just been born with the Old Testament downloaded into his brain. As a 12-month-old, he was probably lecturing Mary on the meaning of the Torah and the law and all those things. And then by the time he got to the temple, he was explaining things to the religious leaders that they never understood before. But that's not what Luke shows us here. It says that he was sitting among the teachers. And this is the only time in the whole gospel of Luke that that word teacher is used to describe the religious leaders of the day. Everywhere else, he calls them the lawyers or the scribes. Here is the place he's using teacher. And every other time Luke uses the word teacher, he's talking about Jesus explaining who he is to everyone else. And so what Luke is wanting us to see is that when Jesus is sitting around these teachers' feet, asking them questions, do you know why he's asking them questions? It's 'cause he needed to learn something. He needed to acquire knowledge. Now, Jesus' brain was not encumbered by sin. He was the only perfect person who ever lived. So his brain being unencumbered by sin, he would have been so much more adept at learning and growing than you and I ever are. But the thing that's fascinating here is, Luke is showing us Jesus had to learn from these teachers in the temple. And that's the part that I think makes some of us uncomfortable. It's like somehow we're worried that we're diminishing Jesus' divinity by saying he had to learn from these religious teachers here in the temple. But because of that, Luke tells us in 52 that he increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor of God and man. So we understand that he grew physically. And what Luke is showing us is he also grew mentally in his wisdom. And wisdom means the understanding of how God works in the world. Somehow, Jesus had this growing self-understanding of what God's purpose was for him as the son of God in the Messiah who came to save everyone. And so when we talk about Mary and Joseph being only human, those traits of humanity, Luke is trying to get us to see in a very unique way, those traits of humanity also apply to Jesus even though he was without sin. Okay, he grew physically. He grew in understanding. He grew in his awareness of what God was doing in the world just like you and I have to grow in those things as well. And so when you put this together, the reason this feels so uncomfortable is because most of us have been heretics for most of our lives and faith. Okay, so there's this heresy, I'm gonna teach you a word this morning, it's called docitism. Okay, and docitism is this heresy that says, Jesus wasn't really a human, he only seemed to be human. Right, he was always fully God and he only appeared or looked to be human because that's what it meant for him to take on flesh. That is a heresy that the church has condemned for hundreds and hundreds of years. I became convicted of that for myself when I was in college. I asked my college pastor, a guy named Kent Hughes who's just a wonderful godly man, super kind, super intelligent and I asked him, I was like, so do you think Jesus had to learn as a child? And as only he could he leaned into my face and he's like, you are a moron for asking that question. What are you talking about? No, not really, you know how your pastor talks to you and says you're stupid, those things. That's not at all what he said. He so kindly told me this heresy, this docitism and this idea that if I somehow thought that Jesus didn't have to learn, what I've done is I have diminished a key aspect of the incarnation, that Jesus is truly human. All right, so this is what theologians call the hypostatic union. That means that in Jesus' identity, he is truly God. There is no part of Jesus that is not divine and part of the triune godhead and in the incarnation, in his flesh, he is truly human. Jesus is truly human and so he is truly God and truly man and that together is what allows him to be our true savior. Okay, so the idea I want us to see from this is that it's okay for you and me and Mary and Joseph to be only human. All right, we're going to make mistakes. We are sinners in need of grace because we're only human. The reason it's okay for us to be only human is because Jesus was not merely human. He was not merely human. He was fully God and he was fully man. He was truly God and he was truly man. And so with that we see that by diminishing Jesus' humanity, if you somehow think of Jesus as some kind of like demigod from Greek mythology or Thor kind of thing, what you're doing is you're putting him on a different level than the Bible does. You're saying that he wasn't really a man like I'm a man. He wasn't really a human like we're human. He was some other category. And by putting him in a different category, you diminish his ability to not only save you but to also sympathize you in your need for being saved. Okay, so here's what I want us to do. This is a theologian named Wayne Grudem who's done a great job of laying out why it matters that Jesus was truly human. I want to give us five reasons why this passage is a unique blessing to us 'cause it shows us that Jesus was truly human. Okay, so listen to this. Hebrews 218. Jesus being truly human matters because he can sympathize and he can help us when we're tempted. Hebrews two. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is also able to help those who are being tempted. Another reason is that Jesus can represent you to God and God to you. Look at 1 Timothy 2.5. For there is one God and there is one mediator between God and the man Christ Jesus. That's what Jesus being fully God and fully man is what allows him to represent God to us and us to God. He can bridge that gap. The third reason is that Jesus can be an example for us to follow. 1 Peter 2.21. For to this you have been called because Christ also suffered for you leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. Another reason is that because Jesus is truly human, he can obey in our place. So the reason we are sinners at birth is because Adam as our first father sinned and we have all inherited that sin. But Jesus as a true man could obey in our place. Romans 519. For as by the one man's disobedience, Adam, the many were made sinners. So by the one man's obedience, Jesus, the many will be made righteous. And then lastly, the most important reason that matters that Jesus was fully human is that he can die in our place. Hebrews 217. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. Propitiation means atonement in the sense that it removes your sin and your guilt and it gives you instead Jesus' favor and blessing and the obedience that Jesus had in your place. Okay, so I think I have all those on a slide. Those five things are those references for you to see because what I'm wanting us to see is that it's okay that you're only human because Jesus was not merely human. He was fully human, but he wasn't only a human. He was God and man together in the flesh. And that unique identity, the fact that Jesus was fully God and fully men is what allows him to be all five of those things for us. If we think that we can somehow view God in a more holy way by diminishing his humanity, what you're actually doing is you're cutting off the branch you're sitting on and you're losing the ability to find comfort in the fact that Jesus can sympathize with you in your humanity. Again, because let's go back to that story of Jesus being left at the temple. What do you think the tone, so the tone of Mary towards Jesus was probably one of anxiety and fear, right? She was in a really tense spot. What do you think the tone of Jesus to his mother would have been? Was he yelling at her saying, "Leave me alone woman, you don't know what you're talking about." No, I can't imagine the Jesus we read about in the gospels, having anything other than tender compassion and kindness as he speaks to his mother about what she's feeling. And the reason we can have confidence that that's the same tone he speaks with us when we come to him in confession of our sin, when we come to him asking for help, is because it's okay for us to be only human because Jesus was not merely human. He was fully man and he was fully God. And the benefits of that we see in two different ways. I wanna end here. And the fact that he was in the temple and the fact that the temple was his father's house. Okay, so my father, he's the first person to have ever talked to God that way or about God that way. But then when you read through the New Testament, what does Jesus invite us to do? He invites us to call God father as well. All right, how does he teach his disciples to pray? When you pray, say, our father who art in heaven, right? He's inviting us into that same adoption where we can become sons and daughters of God, just as Jesus who was not adopted, who was fully God the whole time can have that same relationship for us. And the reason Jesus was at the temple is because the story of Jesus is going to end at the temple as well. When his sacrifice is complete, when he takes upon the sins of the world and dies in our place, what happens at the temple in that moment? The curtain separating the holy of holies, the presence of God from the rest of the world is torn into an all of creation. Anyone who comes to God and faith resting on his grace can have that same access to God that Jesus himself had. And all of that is true because Jesus wasn't only human, he wasn't merely human, he was fully God and fully human at the same time. Let's pray. God, I thank you for this passage. Jesus shows us a unique aspect of your character and your love for us. And so I ask that as we go to our discussion tables that you would make it clear what you have for us from this passage, there wouldn't be any confusion. It seems as we learn new things about how beautiful you are, we can often drift into some misunderstandings. So in your kindness, God, would you protect us from any misunderstandings here today? Would you keep us rooted and grounded in your word and the truth that it shows us? At the same time, God, may you show us a beautiful glimpse of who you are. And may you astound us in even more fascinating ways than we can yet think to imagine. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen, amen. All right, well, as we do every week, we're gonna go to our discussion tables now. And the reason we sit at these tables is so that after we've processed a passage like this, we can go to one another and we can encourage each other and show each other what God is showing us. So in line of this idea, we wanna ask, where are you at in your understanding of who Jesus is? And I wanna ask that question very bluntly because there's people here that you're not yet followers of Christ and I want you to know that this is a completely safe place for you. We're so glad that you're here processing your faith journey with us and you're so welcome here and it's a safe place to share where you're at in your understanding of who Jesus is. Secondly, would you be more likely to forget that Jesus was truly human or to forget that he's truly God and how does forgetting either of those things lessen your joy, right? If you lose an aspect of God's character, you lose an ability to have joy in him. And then lastly, how is the message that it's okay for us to be only human because Jesus is not merely human? How is that good news for my neighbors? And that idea, good news for my neighbors, what is about this message that should connect with people who don't yet know Jesus? And I wanna be careful there with that phrase, it's okay to be merely human under the forgiveness and grace of Jesus on the cross, right? This is not an excuse for sin. This is not an excuse to live a life independent of him. But when you come to him in faith, how is it that this message that he's not merely human, how is it that that gives us a foundation of good news for our neighbors? So we'll do that for about 10 minutes and then continue our time of worship. Thanks. - Now will be our time to share the Lord's Supper, communion, a breaking of bread together as we heard in the message from Colbert. Jesus is fully God, he is fully human. Fully God, perfect, the perfect sacrifice can die from my sin, my sin, okay? Perfect sacrifice, he can die for your sin. He's also fully human, he can identify. And therefore, in Jesus, we believe in him, if we believe in him, we can live forever with him. So he identifies totally with us. God and the flesh, a truth that many of us, me, I've been walking with the Lord for 50 plus years, still learning, still growing in that understanding, still marveling, still in awe of the wonderful savior that we have in Jesus Christ. Jesus died for our sin. Jesus said that he is the bread of life. He comes, he has come, that we may never be hungry. In Jesus, there is no longer that inner emptiness that the first encounter with him has met. When I first came to Jesus many years ago, he satisfied a longing, he forgave my sin. He identifies as God and the flesh. Yet I still walk with him, I still desire to know him more and more. The fulfilling, or the fulfillment of this satisfaction comes as we read in Revelation chapter seven. Never again will they hunger, never again will they thirst because the son of man has come, the bread of life. The water, the fountain that comes from heaven quenches all thirst as we see Jesus speak to the Samaritan woman, drink of the water that I give and then you will never thirst. So often we think of Jesus as satisfying physical longings and that was a problem there in his day. Many came to him because he gave him bread, satisfy their physical hunger, but he came for a greater purpose. He came the bread of heaven to die for our sin. And during this time of communion, the Lord suffered the breaking of bread, we remember what he has done for us on the cross. We remember that. Jesus says, "Come, come to me, I am the bread of life." Jesus says, "Come to me, I will quench your thirst." Jesus says, "Come to me, be one with me and the Father." Jesus says, "Come, and you will have peace, and you will have rest." There is forgiveness of sins in Jesus. If you haven't yet come to Jesus, as Corber said, "We beg you, we plead with you, come to Jesus." He's the only one that can satisfy that longing in your heart. He's the only one that can satisfy and fill that emptiness. Come to Jesus. This time that we celebrate, this time that we remember, is for those who have been born of the Spirit, who have come to Jesus. We invite all who know Jesus as Lord and Savior to participate and to share together. And if you haven't yet come, we ask you to receive Jesus. Debbie and I, at the end of the service, at the end of worship, will be in the back and pray. Be willing to pray, we'd love to pray, okay? Just want to let you know also that there's gluten-free options here. Just take, if you want to kind of separate yourselves, your spouse, friends, you can do that. But we'll be sharing in the bread, sharing in the juice, okay, as we're singing. Let me pray, gracious and loving Father, we do thank you that in Jesus, we have forgiveness of sins. We thank you that Jesus is the bread of life that satisfies, that he is the living water that quenches all thirst. We pray that you would continue to give us understanding. We thank you for the forgiveness that we have in Jesus, the grace we thank you for eternal life in Jesus Christ. We pray that we will lift him up in our lives. We thank you in Jesus' name, amen. (gentle music)
