Monthly Archives: March 2023

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 4

Christian Life, ,

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 4

“In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.”  Hebrews 2:10, 11.

Jesus’ final reason for coming is beautifully summed up by the writer to the Hebrews. God is rebuilding His family, made up of all who are forgiven and cleansed of their sin, reconciled and restored to the Father and learning from Jesus how to live now as sons of God.

I am the mother of four sons. As they grew from infancy through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to maturity, the way we expressed our relationship changed. I have never ceased to be their mother, but I no longer have to protect them from the consequences of their childish immaturity or to train them in the basics of being human. They are now married with children of their own whom they must train and lead by example to maturity as I had to do when they were growing up.

Being sons of God is a difficult road to navigate because, firstly, our Father is invisible and so different from us that we need a human being to show us how to be His sons. Jesus is the perfect model whom we can follow.  Secondly, we need to learn how to live out the new nature He has put in us through our new birth. We have been transferred from the kingdom of our old master, the devil, into the kingdom of light where we come under different rule, the rule of love. God has placed His Spirit in us, who witnesses with our spirits that we are the sons of God (Romans 8;16).

However, we do not automatically express God’s nature in our lives. Thought by thought, choice by choice, we change as we learn from Jesus how to live as He did. Jesus did not give us a complicated set of rules. Instead, He gave us one instruction – “Follow me”. Although we may find it easier to have a carefully-worked-out system, God is our Father and He wants us to live in close communion with Him as sons by watching and imitating Jesus.

Sons have free access to the Father. We do not need an appointment to have fellowship with Him (Hebrews 10:19-22)

Sons have all the resources of the Father at their disposal. We do not need to beg for God’s supply. It is ours because we are sons (Philippians 4:19).

Sons are at home in God’s household. We are not strangers or aliens. We are family. (Ephesians 2:19)

Sons live under and have the authority of the Father. We are not slaves, we are sons. Galatians 4:4).

Sons are heirs of the Father and joint heirs with Jesus (Galatians 4:7).

What an awesome privilege to be the sons of God!

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 3

Christian Life, ,

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 3

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” John 14:6

Although this may be, for some of us, a familiar and well-worn verse of Scripture which we use to lead people to faith in Jesus, I think it has more than one meaning. The most obvious one leans on Jesus’ work on the cross.  According to my two previous articles, no-one has access to the Father but through Jesus. He paid the debt and cleared the ground for our return to fellowship with Him and membership of His family.

Hidden in that meaning, however, is one that we may not think about. Not only did Jesus clear the way for us to return to the Father, but He also takes us to the Father. A great deal of our evangelistic effort is to lead people to believe in Jesus as Saviour and Lord, and this is legitimate. But this often leaves people thinking that there is a conflict of attitudes between the Father and the Son. Jesus is the loving and kind member of the Trinity who died for us and calls us to believe in and follow Him. The Father is the angry one who waits to get us when we step out of line.

Way back in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were estranged from their Father and were left as orphans to find their own way in a big and hostile world. God chose and called Abraham to be father of a nation that would experience Him as their Father once again by redeeming them from slavery in Egypt to Himself. They chose to reject His love and followed the gods of the surrounding nations.

Through Jesus’ death on the cross, God confirmed the work of redemption He effected before the foundation of the world. Perhaps Jesus’ simple story of the wayward son who left the father’s house and wasted his life and resources on wild living, most vividly pictures what has happened to humanity. We left home, we chose to disassociate ourselves from the Father and live as orphans until Jesus came to take us back home. Now the choice is ours.

Salvation is not only about the life to come when we will reap the eternal benefits of Jesus’ death. It’s about now. It’s about living in Father’s house now. It’s about enjoying the Father’s presence and experiencing the Father’s joy and peace in a messed-up world now. It is tragic that God’s children so often have an escapist mentality, holding on with white knuckles and waiting for death so that they can “go and be with Jesus.”

As members of God’s forever family, we are entitled to the grace that makes us overcomers and the blessing of fellowship with a Father who passionately loves us. Jesus wants to take us into the bosom and heart of the Father. Will you go with Him?

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 2

Christian life, ,

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 2

“God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them…” 2 Corinthians 5:19.

Jesus’ coming to reveal the Father was the first step in the process of restoring the broken relationship between God and His estranged family. Who would want to be in fellowship with an angry God? It was imperative that God come in person to show people what He is really like.

Bu that was only the beginning. There was a huge obstacle, called sin that blocked the way back to the Father. Sin is an unpayable debt, an unbridgeable chasm that separates us from Him, violates His perfection and prevents us from fellowship with Him. God is a just God and requires just payment for the debt we owe Him. He cannot brush sin aside and ignore the penalty He demands for transgressing His law. To cancel the debt required a perfect human sacrifice for which no one qualified except Jesus because He alone lived a perfectly sinless life as a human being and then willingly laid down His life in our place.

He rose from the dead to break death’s power over man, to prove that He was innocent and that the Father’s justice was satisfied. He was ready and qualified to carry out the next step in His assignment – to reconcile us to the Father. It is one thing to know that there are no more obstacles between us and the Father, but quite another to remain estranged from Him because we have not personally been reconciled to Him.

Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:19, that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, but the effectiveness of that reconciliation is only felt by one’s personal appropriation of what Jesus has done. It is tragic to know that millions of unbelieving people have never availed themselves of the right to fellowship with the Father through Jesus’ death for them because they don’t know or because they refuse to receive His gift!

When two parties are estranged because of offense, it is the offended person’s responsibility to forgive by cancelling the debt, and the offender’s responsibility to seek reconciliation based on the offer of forgiveness. God, in Jesus Christ, not only paid the debt Himself so that He can hold out the offer of forgiveness, but He also takes the next step by initiating the reconciliation that will restore us to full and unrestricted fellowship with the Father as His sons and daughters.

Although there is still another step in the process of restoring the human race to God’s original purpose, which will be explained in another article, up to this point we have seen that the obstacle of sin has been removed, the chasm bridged by God Himself through Jesus, and the way wide open for anyone who believes in Jesus, to return home and to be accepted and embraced as a son or daughter of God in His forever family.

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 1

Bible Study, ,

WHY DID JESUS COME? – 1

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”  Jesus answered, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” John 14:8-10a.

Were I to ask 100 people why Jesus came, I would probably receive 100 different answers, probably all more-or-less correct. At the same time, all those answers would be an expansion of the real purpose for His coming. Yes, He came to save us; yes, He came to give us eternal life; yes, He came to die for our sins etc, but all of these reasons flow into something much greater which was made known to us from the beginning of time.

Why did God create Adam and Eve? He made the first man and woman and instructed them, within the love-bond of marriage, to multiply so that He could have a family of people made in His image to love Him, and to be loved by Him. Things went horribly wrong because man used God’s gift of choice to go his own way.

Over many centuries God revealed Himself to His chosen people through His Law and by His word through the prophets, but they persisted in rebelling and reaping the consequences of their foolish ways. Instead of enjoying God’s love, they felt His wrath for their disobedience until they believed that God could only be satisfied by ritual and sacrifice. They perceived Him as an angry God who thirsted for blood to appease Him. They had completely obliterated their understanding of His desire for a family and corrupted their faith into a religion of rules.

How could God get them to understand how He really felt about them? Since they refused to listen to His word or recognise His kindness and goodness to them, He had only one alternative and that was to come in the person of Jesus to show them by His compassion and to teach them by His words, what the Father is really like and what He yearned to be to them, a loving Father in a loving family.

Throughout the gospels, and especially in John’s gospel, Jesus insisted that He was acting on the Father’s instructions and that everything He said and did was to reveal the true nature of the Father. As an authentic representative of the Father who was sent by the Father, He loved, healed, and forgave the people so that they would be in no doubt as to the Father’s intentions for them. God wanted them free to live under His authority and not to be bound by a suffocating religious system that misrepresented Him.

His message was rejected, and He was executed as a blasphemer, but the resurrection finally authenticated what He had come to do. Jesus is the mirror image of the Father.

THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS

Bible Study, ,

THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS

“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days He was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them He was hungry.” Luke 4:1,2.

The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert where there was no supply of food or water. He did not have to enter a dialogue with Satan to engineer the testing. All He had to do was to set it up by moving Jesus into a place of solitude and extreme hunger and the devil would be there to do exactly what God wanted him to do.

What was the purpose of this test? To strip Jesus of every human provision He could rely on so that He would rely completely on God. It was the expression of God’s love – because God knew the bigger picture. It was Jesus’ first “Gethsemane” – being “pressed” by His physical surroundings to have no-one but God. He was exposed to extreme heat, cold, dangerous creatures, hazardous terrain, and inward testing by the devil. He had to KNOW that God was with Him before He could announce it to the world.

Since the devil is not omnipresent and since Jesus was his chief prize, was he lurking somewhere when Jesus was baptised? Did he hear the voice of God and see the Spirit descend on Jesus? Did he follow Him into the wilderness and hover nearby, waiting for Jesus to be sapped of His physical strength through His prolonged fast? It was quite within his character to hit Jesus when He was down. How prepared was Jesus for this moment? Did He know that Satan was there all the time?

Most of Jesus’ tests came through people, as they come to us as human beings, but this one was a frontal attack – a contest between the kings of darkness and light. This battle was to set the rules of the game from here on. Satan was trying to lure Jesus into taking him on by sheer supernatural power. Why? If he could get Jesus, as representative man, to take him on as God, using divine power to overcome him, it would be declared an unfair contest and Jesus would be disqualified from representing human beings. Satan’s accusation that God is unjust would have been upheld.

This was not a test of will power but of trust. Temptation did not build trust – it tested the trust already built up over 30 years of soaking in the Word of God.

These tests resembled Satan’s modus operandi in the Garden of Eden. Adam fell for the first one – Satan didn’t have to go any further. Failure to trust affects our faith, our family, and our future. Falling for Satan’s lies brings consequences that are far wider than ourselves; they affect all of those who are closest to us, and repercussions that affect our future and future of those we love.