Red Oak :: An Evangelical Free Church

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

Matthew 16:13-16
January 10, 2010

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?

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The Greatness of Knowing Christ

Philippians 3:7-14
January 3, 2010

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!

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