Introduction
The Christmas season is a joyful time of the year. The colors, the food, presents, celebrations, family, all these things bring excitement. The Christmas season and the approaching end of the year also put people in a reflective mood. There is a tendency to look back at the year and consider the good, the bad, and the ugly of our lives. This morning I want to appeal to this reflective mood and want us to think about our neediness. We are a needy people. Isn't this idea a central part of Christ's mission? Isn't our neediness a reason for the coming of Jesus Christ?
Not only are we needy, but also we are surrounded by needy people who desperately need our help as much as we need their help. And God put us together for our good, so that we could minister to one another by entering their world with love in a similar way to Jesus's entrance into the world on that first Christmas morning. We are called to incarnate Christ to one another.
"Everywhere you look, you will find couples who are struggling to love, parents who are struggling to be patient, children who are attracted to temptation, and friends who battle the disappointments of imperfect relationships. This is 100% of the church's membership!
The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and sanctification center, where flawed people place their trust in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he has designed. The church is messy and inefficient, but it is God's wonderful mess – the place where he radically transforms hearts and lives." Paul Tripp
We are all part of this transformation process!
(This sermon is heavily based on chapter 6, Following the Wonderful Counselor, in Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands by Paul Tripp.)
I. The Foundation for People-Transforming Ministry Is Love.
A. Love is what drove God to send and sacrifice his Son.
B. Love led Christ to subject himself to a sinful world and the horrors of the cross.
C. Love causes him to seek and to save the lost, and to persevere till each of his children is transformed into his image.
D. This love is not just a Band-Aid attempting to coupe with a cancerous world.
1. It is effective and persevering.
2. It is jealous, intent on owning us without competition.
3. It faces the facts of who we are and how we need to change and simply goes to work!
E. Any hope for the problems we face – with our own hearts and with a dark and corrupt world – is found in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ for us.
Rom. 8:31-39 – What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can beagainst us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It isChrist who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: "For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter." Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1. This love offers hope to anyone willing to confess sin and cry out for transformation.
2. Yet this is where we often get stuck.
a. We want ministry that doesn't demand love that is so demanding
b. We don't want to serve other is a way that requires so much personal sacrifice.
c. We prefer to lob grenades of truth into people's live rather than lay down our lives for them.
F. Starting with our heart means understanding and submitting to God's calling to put flesh to our faith.
1. This will shape our life and relationships.
2. God has called us to nothing less than incarnating Christ to others.
a. We are to be rooted in the Word, and zealous to bring the living Word – Christ himself – to lost, blind, and struggling people.
b. We are called to put flesh and blood on whom Christ is and what he came to do.
II. To Understand Our Calling, We Need to Understand the Incarnation, Jn. 1:14, 18.
A. We usually think of the incarnation as an event – that moment when Christ came to earth, took on human flesh, and lived as a man.
1. Yet, as central as the incarnation is to everything we believe, I don't think we fully understand it.
2. The power of the incarnation is that it makes the presence and the glory of God visible, Jn. 1:14, 18.
a. The incarnation was an event– the moment when Christ came to earth, took human flesh, and lived as a man.
b. But it also sets an agendaand issues a calling.
c. By taking of flesh and blood, Christ made known the unseen God.
B. One of the most fundamental problems we have is that we can't see God.
1. This problem is so comprehensive, so deep, so essentially human that it is almost impossible for us to recognize it.
2. We have been blinded by sin and in nature and in practice we live in darkness.
3. In our spiritual blindness as sinners, we do not see God in the sense that we do not recognize the glory of his grace and power operating in, around, and through us all the time – even as redeemed sinners we don't see that.
C. But in the incarnation the light bursts into our darkness.
1. God addresses our blindness by sending his one and only Son to earth.
a. In seeing him, we see the Father.
b. If we know him, we know the Father.
Jn. 14:8-11 – Philip said to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves.
2. The problem is not that God is not here or that he is inactive.
3. The problem is that we don't see him.
4. Our perspective on life is tragically godless.
a. When this happens, our lives are not built on the foundation of God's glory, which was intended to give our lives our starting point and a destination, Rom. 11:36.
1) Every aspect of our existence was meant to be filled with the glory of God.
2) Everything we think, every decision we make, every word we speak was meant to be shaped by a humble acknowledgment of his claim on our life.
3) The bottom line is that we were created to live for his glory.
b. That is why every human pursues some kind of glory.
1) If it is not the glory of God, it will be some sort of earth-bound, pseudo-glory.
a) It may be money, possessions, acceptance, respect, etc.
b) Perhaps it is the power to control people, the affection of a certain person, success, intellectual prowess, or certain standard of living.
2) At the root of many difficulties and disasters in our lives is the pursuit of the wrong glory.
D. The incarnation gets right to the heart of this struggle because it confronts people with the one thing that can make a lasting difference, the glory of God.
1. The revelation of God in his awesome glory is the only thing that exposes the utter emptiness of all the other glories we crave.
2. Personal ministry is not just about bringing principles, theology, and solutions to bear on people's lives.
3. Personal ministry is primarily confronting people with the God who is active and glorious in his grace and truth, and who has a rightful claim to our lives.
E. Only when our hearts are transformed by this glory, will the principles of the Scriptures make sense to us.
III. The Son of God in the Flesh Is the Ultimate Marriage of Grace and Truth, Jn. 1:14.
A. In his life, death, and resurrection, we come to understand the grace of God.
1. God sends his own Son, as the second Adam, to face the full range of temptations in a fallen world.
2. He does so to keep the law on our behalf, thereby satisfying God's requirement for life.
3. He willingly offers up himself as the perfect sacrificial Lamb, so that the penalty for sin is fully paid.
4. He rises from the tomb, purchasing new life for all who trust in him.
B. We see that all the Scriptures flow into the incarnation and flow from the incarnation.
"Since the central character of the great story of Scripture is Christ, a central theme of the story is grace. It must be a central theme of our personal ministry, biblical counseling, and discipleship as well." Paul Tripp
1. We point people to a God who not only sets the goal for their lives, but also who enables them to do what they have never done before.
2. His grace results in reconciliation, restoration, and peace.
3. The impossibility of sinners becoming godly becomes possible through his grace.
"By his grace parents can pursue rebellious teenagers with patient, persevering love. By his grace a wife can put away bitter memories and fully forgive her husband. By his grace people can exit the prisons of depression, anxiety, and compulsion to live in hope-filled freedom. By his grace those bound by lust, greed, fear, or vengeance can live the purity and courage of faith." Paul Tripp
C. Biblical personal ministry has as its central focus the Redeemer who rescues people from the power of sin and progressively eradicates its presence from their lives.
1. We are simply agents of his grace.
2. Our goal is to help people understand it and follow where it leads as they serve their Redeemer.
D. The glory revealed in the incarnation was also full of truth.
1. Sin not only makes us helpless rebels and idolaters, it also reduces us to fools.
a. We tend to love lies, to be self-deluded, to be the strongest believers of our own empty arguments.
b. We are vulnerable to Satan's tricks and temptations.
c. We live for what is already in a state of decay and ignore what will remain forever.
d. We tend to hide, ignore, or be blind to our own sins, at the same time obsessing about the sins of others.
2. Grace addresses the moral results of the fall (our rebellion and inability), grace addresses the noetic effects of the fall, sin's impact on how we think about life and interpret it.
E. In Christ, the truth of God takes on flesh.
1. Jesus is the ultimate exposition of how God intends people to think and live.
a. In his life and teaching, he confronts our foolishness with true wisdom.
b. He calls us to a way of life that is the opposite of where our sinful instincts lead us.
c. Who would naturally choose to live for what cannot be seen, to do good to someone who has mistreated us, or to believe that there is greater blessing in giving than receiving?
2. Personal ministry must offer people truth that destroys their old way of thinking about themselves, relationships, circumstances, suffering, and God.
a. The foolish things people do are rooted in a worldview riddled with foolishness.
b. Our problem is not just wrong behavior and its results, but the thoughts that produced it.
3. In personal ministry, we offer a whole new way of making sense out of life – a worldview in which God is central, where unseen things are of the highest value, and where eternity is what makes sense of the present.
a. In confronting people with truth, we confront them with Christ.
b. Living a godly life means trusting him, following him, and living like him.
F. Personal ministry weaves the threads of grace and truth through every part of a person's life.
G. In that it is truly incarnational because grace and truth will always lead people to Christ.
IV. The Incarnation also Establishes a Set of Plans to Accomplish a Goal – An Agenda.
A. God's agenda is for the Church to be an incarnational community on earth, so that our very presence would reveal his grace and truth-laden glory.
1. The Church of Christ is to be the infleshment of Christ while he is not physically here.
2. The members of the church are to the infleshment of Christ.
B. Right before his crucifixion, Jesus prays that his followers would be characterized by such deep love that the covenant community would be as unified as he is with his Father.
Jn. 17:20-23 – I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.
1. Notice that the purpose of this unity is to reveal the person and work of Christ to a watching world.
2. This unity has a greater goal than enjoyable friendships – the world to see and know Christ.
C. We are called to achieve a quality of unity that can only be compared to Christ's relationship with his Father.
1. His disciples for whom he is praying give us a good example of the power of this unity.
a. On one side of the room is Matthew, the tax collector, a Jew who collected Roman taxes from his own people and was despised by them.
b. Across the room is Simon the Zealot.
1) The Zealots were the radical extremists of their day.
2) They were convinced that the Roman government would be overthrown by violence, and they were ready to provide it.
3) There was no one a Zealot hated more than a tax collector.
c. Christ's purpose for Matthew and Simon was that their relationship display such an amazing unity and love that the surrounding world would take notice – and in doing so, see Christ.
1) Does this seem completely unrealistic?
2) Isn't it enough for these two to sit in the same room without coming to blows?
3) For Christ this is not enough.
4) Christ's prayer tells us that he had provided what is necessary for his people to be truly one, v. 22.
Jn. 17:22 – And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one….
5) Christ, the glory of God incarnate, has given that glory to his disciples so that they may incarnate it.
2. Perhaps the best way to think of the incarnation is as an ongoing event: God made known, no longer in the physical presence of Christ, but in the glory of his work through this people as we live incarnationally.
Conclusion
That is really what we are celebrating at Christmas. The incarnation helps us understand the purpose and character of personal ministry – people are changed by seeing Christ in new ways, ways that reveal the bankruptcy of their own agendas and the emptiness of the glories they seek. We drive each other to the love of Christ because we are driving by the love of Christ. In doing that, we become Christ's presence in this world. http://olympiabp.blogspot.com/2015/12/grace-truth-john-11-14.html
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