On a Mission from God
Today we tackle the question, “what did Jesus come to do?” Much as we might assume that most “church folks” could give a ready answer to that question, the fact is that there are many who couldn’t give the right answer. The world certainly has a lot of varied ideas:
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?
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