We saw yesterday how the religious experts who read prophecy day in day out, still got it wrong when it came to Jesus.  They missed that one of the ancient prophecies about the Messiah was happening before their eyes.

So what did they miss?  They missed grace and hope.

Religion at its worst can be about building a ladder to heaven, trying to make ourselves acceptable to God under our own power.

But what Christmas means is that God has come to us.  No ladder required.

Two weeks ago, we contrasted grace and law as part of our Becoming Like Family series.

Grace means we have hope.  It’s not primarily about what we do for God, it’s about what God has done for us, and everything we do is a way to say thanks.

The problem is if you’ve invested a great deal in self-help, you may not recognize or accept true help when it comes.  You can be so sure of your hard work that you brush off help saying “I’ve got this!” when you really don’t.

Who would have expected God to come as a baby, much less a homeless baby born in questionable circumstances, with the most common name at that time, Jesus?

But people didn’t just call him Jesus, he called himself God, and others came to do this as well.

Yes, Jesus claimed to be god.  That is a claim that no other leader of a major world religion has made.

Jesus didn’t go around standing on street corners shouting “I am God” in language that plain and simple,  but when you look at what he taught and claimed, he was conscious of, and claiming to be God in some more subtle ways.

And he was subtle for good reasons.  In the culture of his day, saying he was God would have been considered blasphemy – a crime punishable by death.

So he showed it in all sorts of interesting ways:

He spoke of himself using “I AM” sayings – a deliberate hint to the Jewish name of God – Yahweh, which means “I am”.  He also said,

  • he was one with the Father
  • he was the Son of God.
  • he had the power to forgive sins
  • he was greater than the temple – the most important place of worship for the Jews and God’s presence on earth

In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is asked directly by some religious leaders “Are you the Christ (anointed one), the Son of the Blessed One ?”  Jesus said  “I am …”

Jesus was making an incredible and dangerous claim to be God incarnate—which means God in the flesh

One of the central truths of Jesus’ religious context was that there is only one God.  When Jesus started to talk in this way, it was dangerous, but it was also life changing.  He wasn’t claiming to be a new God, a second God, even a demigod.  He was claiming to be the God, their God – the God who created, and then stayed with the Israelites through their history, there with them in an entirely new way.

Question:  Do you know people who change when their boss, or parents, or another authority figure enters the room?  How would the world change when God entered the room?

Reminder: We have a great Christmas event coming December 14th, 2013: The Original Christmas Party.  Hope you’re coming!

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - October 22, 2013

Tuesday - Study It - Becoming Like Family

We asked yesterday if you could list of what comes to mind when you hear the word “church”. Our lists probably included buildings, events and services. It may have included organ and choir music, stained glass windows, dusty books, bake sales and more. It may evoke good experiences, or bad ones. But not how the Bible usually sees “church”. Church is described in several cases as a family. This is why our vision is to become a church made up of many groups who are “like family” with one another. But you might immediately think this means something strange and cultish, usually because our ideas of family today is pretty narrow. We think of family as the nuclear, immediate family in isolation. But in Jesus’ culture, in some cultures today, and not so long ago in Western culture, the family was the word used more naturally to describe an extended network of relations, often living in the same area. That was the context for family in Jesus’ day, and Jesus had plans to develop a new kind of extended family. Here’s a striking moment when he described his plans to create an alternate family: Matthew 12:46-50 While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” On the one hand, it seems Jesus just put down his mother. I just saw “Guilt Trip” where Barbra Streisand plays Seth Rogen’s overbearing mother. She calls several times a day, tries to get him to drink water constantly, and so on. In the middle of their road trip, he finally snaps, and tells her off. It seems like that might be what Jesus is doing to his mother here. Is he putting her down, in his plans to join another family? Look at it another way. Jesus is actually elevating his disciples to family status. His followers, fellow practitioners of his kingdom, are his family. She’s not excluded. Later in the story of Jesus’ life and death, we see Mary his mother appearing as a devoted member of this extended family, and Jesus even assigns one of the disciples to look after her after his death, saying he’s her new son, and vice versa. Jesus isn’t narrowing his definition of family to exclude blood relatives. He’s broadening it, to include his extended family of followers as if they are blood relatives. Question: Imagine your immediate family suddenly adopting a dozen new members. How would it change your way of life? What would be the pros and cons?

From Series: "Becoming Like Family"

This series looks at becoming “like family” with others learning to follow Jesus. We're exploring how the church is not a building, institution or event, but a community of people. It's important that explore what church means as we prepare to launch a new church in Ajax in 2014.

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