Emmanuel: God With Us

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Well, it didn't take too much to convince me to adopt a slightly different topic than would normally be scheduled for Matthew 24, especially since I'm preaching next week.
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So, I think Brother Callahan will be up in the morning, maybe,
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I don't know, we'll see. He could be off taking Dominion over the earth and killing some other type of animal that we have not eaten on a
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Sunday evening yet. Who knows, it's a possibility. But, you never know there.
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At least I didn't bring any bear meat back from Alaska. We didn't have any bear tacos for the next fellowship meal.
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You can take some delight in that, I suppose. But, thinking that it is the 18th of December, most folks will have some opportunity of gathering with people over the course of the next week that you normally don't have during the course of the rest of the year.
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Some will be family members, some will not be family members, you know, all depends.
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Some will be believers, many will not be believers. And, no matter what your tradition is around your house and your family at this time of year, it is that one time of year when, for a brief period of time, there might be an opportunity, rather naturally, for things to be discussed concerning who
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Jesus Christ was. This is the one time of the year when even country music stars say the name of Jesus in a non -profane way.
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So, you can actually raise the subject without necessarily automatically getting shut down in the process.
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The problem is there is a lot of misunderstanding. There is a lot of fiction that exists out there that might get in the way of your having an opportunity to say something meaningful in the brief period of time that we might have.
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Let's face it. Some of you who are older can think back to younger days when people talked to each other.
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Didn't just, you know, didn't sit in a room and go, see?
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Right, like that. You know, see? Almost on cue. I mean, I did not pay anybody to do that, but everyone's grabbing their phones, and I'll turn off, silent, quick, quick, quick, you know.
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I love those phones where people haven't figured out the silent button and they hit the volume up, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, you know, like that.
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Anyway, remember those days when people actually... I honestly believe that if we did a study, we would see that actual conversations between most human beings have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter over the past number of decades as our attention span has, what was
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I talking about, gotten much shorter as well. Squirrel. Squirrel, yeah, squirrel. Yeah, squirrel.
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Exactly right. You do that way too well. Squirrel. It's true.
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I mean, that's the way we are. And so the problem is, for a lot of people today, you have this amount of time to say something before they're looking for a new topic to shift the conversation over to.
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And so it really takes some effort on our part to say something meaningful, and they can actually catch the attention and so on and so forth.
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So what I wanted to do this morning is do something very practical over the next 40 minutes, and that is look at some barriers that might be in the way and look at some
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Scripture passages that you might want to be familiar with to speak with someone concerning what it is
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Christians believe about this person, Jesus Christ, and the fact that we believe what you see, well, we believe part of what you see in that manger scene.
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If they've got the wise men there, and that was a couple years later. I know it makes it a lot more interesting to have the wise men there, but that was like two years later.
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But we believe that he was born as a child, that he actually came into this world, that he was truly a human being, but we believe much more than that, and that's where the problem lies, is that a lot of people want to keep him just there in the cradle and don't want a
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Jesus that goes beyond that, because babies in mangers are not at all scary or challenging, and the baby in the manger is safe.
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As long as you don't really understand what it is we believe about that baby in the manger, who he really, really was, and that's scandalous to the world, because we really do believe that he was the
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God -man, that God invaded his own creation into the modern scientific mind, that is just such a scandal, how can you believe something so foolish as that?
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But let me set aside, while I bring in the fan to get some hold of that thing there.
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Thank you very much. Let me mention one thing to sort of put it aside before we look at John chapter 1.
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If you're looking for a place to turn your Bible, you can turn there. We'll get there in a moment. Many people will tell you, one of the conversation stoppers right off the bat, we all just know that, and there are many
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Christians who will say this as well. Well, we all know that all this really is, all this celebration really is, is evidence that the early
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Christians were willing to take any story that was floating around out there, and pull them all together, and cobble them together, and make up their religion.
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There are people who will say that Jesus was a myth, that he didn't exist. I will note in passing, it's interesting to note that Bart Ehrman, one of the leading critics of New Testament Christianity, is coming out with a new book that will only be published as an e -book.
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There will be no paper version of this, which is very, very interesting. The fact that a major publisher would do that indicates that text readers, book readers, are becoming almost ubiquitous.
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There's a Kindle, is that a Kindle or a Nook? Yeah, there's their, let's see, no one's here, and no one's going to be listening to this.
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Anyways, okay, yeah, I'm giving a bunch of Kindles for Christmas too. Anyways, they're becoming ubiquitous, and he's coming out with a book, and it is his book on the existence of Jesus.
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He mocks people who say Jesus did not exist. He says, well, of course he existed. But there are a lot of people who want to say, well, no,
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Jesus never existed. He was a myth based on Osiris, and Horus, and Dionysus, and Mithra, and all the rest of this stuff.
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And I don't think we've watched it yet, but, in fact, I know we haven't. In fact, I haven't brought in one of my debates for a long time now to watch.
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I apologize for that, because some of them I think would be worthwhile. But I did a debate with an atheist about a year and a half ago on whether Jesus was made up of all these mythologies and things like that.
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One of the favorite ones around this time of year is you will hear people say, and I've heard
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Christian pastors say this, well, that December 25th thing, we all know that couldn't possibly have been the date, because actually that was the celebration of the sun god in Mithraism.
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And the Christians just took that over and turned it into a Christian celebration, and then you get the
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Christians who go, yeah, that's what happened, but, you know, we were just going sun, S -U -N, sun,
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S -O -N, isn't that wonderful and lovely, and let's all hold hands, and that kind of stuff. A little bit of a problem historically, unfortunately, with that.
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Anybody know the earliest date that we can find in the extant records that Christians associated with the birth of Jesus?
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What's the earliest date that we can find in the extant historical records that Christians associated with the birth of the
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Messiah? Anyone? Really? No one will guess.
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Not a single guess. Is there anyone out there? Are you all a... anyone?
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April. That's a nice, nice... March! How about December? No, no, no.
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Looking for a specific date. It's January 6th. Now, what is significant about January 6th?
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Anyone? Come on, Mr. Callahan, you know. January 6th.
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What's the date of Christmas in Eastern Orthodoxy? January 6th. January 6th.
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And how many days is it between December 25th and January 6th? Twelve.
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Twelve days of Christmas. Okay? It was a lengthy feast period.
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And January 6th is the earliest date that we have. And so you have a 12 -day celebration,
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December 25th. But people will tell you, Ah, but you see,
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Mithra was born on December 25th, too. And they just stole that from Mithraism. What was Mithraism?
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Anybody here a former Mithraite? Just, you know, anybody? I don't want to cause any former
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Mithraites to stumble today, but I didn't think there were any because it doesn't exist anymore.
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Mithraism was a religion that was primarily associated with the Roman army.
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The Roman soldiers really liked Mithraism. And it came out of the East and it moved into the
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Roman Empire. And people like to draw all sorts of parallels between Mithraism and Christianity.
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And unfortunately, again, a lot of our young people will go off to, some of you young folks are going to go off to university and college, and you're going to have brilliant PhDs standing in front of you saying that everything you believe about Jesus was actually stolen from the
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Mithraic cult of the Romans. Problem is that Mithraism really did not, there's no evidence that Mithraism became overly popular until after the time of the
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New Testament. So it started hard for the New Testament writers to be barred from something that no one really cared about at the time. But it came in at around the same time as Christianity, a little bit afterwards into the
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Roman Empire. And in point of fact, we don't have any evidence of December 25th having anything to do with Mithraism until after Christians are talking about December 25th for the birth of Jesus.
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So when people say, oh, it was stolen from the Mithraic cult, which is more likely? Mithraism, which was associated with Rome, what happens as Rome begins to decline?
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Guess what happens to Mithraism? It begins to decline as well, especially since it's associated with the Roman army.
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The Roman army is shrinking. Not good for Mithraism. And they didn't have any church growth movements, immersion movements, anything like that in Mithraism.
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So it just sort of died out. But will it be more likely that a syncretistic cult would grab hold of stuff they see in an ascending religion, and what's happening with Christianity after 313, and it becomes legal, and then 325,
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Council of Nicaea, Constantine claims to be a Christian. It's on the ascendancy, and you've got a dying out religion, and it's trying to find ways of keeping itself going.
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What's more likely, that it's going to borrow from the popular stuff, or the one that's getting more popular is going to borrow from the dying stuff?
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I mean, really, when you think about it, it's not too much of a brainer, but not too many people even bother to take the time to think about this.
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You just see it repeated over and over and over on TV and all the rest of this stuff. One other thing, before we get to John 1.
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And that is the dating of things. People go, this is so silly, you Christians. Don't you know that it's cold in Israel around this time of year?
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And that means there wouldn't be any lambs out in the field. The shepherds wouldn't be out abiding with their flocks by night.
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Well, actually, the sacrificial flocks stayed out all year, but that's another issue. What is interesting is, a couple of years ago, unfortunately, this stuff is written in books that almost no one ever reads, except weird people like me.
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And I ran across this book on ancient calendars. I'm not talking about the ones you put on the wall.
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Here were the Roman soldiers. I like that kind of calendar. But how they did things, because remember, we have a nice standardized calendar now, but they didn't back then.
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For example, most of you know that the year of the birth of Jesus, we think is zero, but actually that doesn't work, because it has to be about 3 or 4
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B .C., because Herod croaked about that. And it's off by about that much, because the
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Gregorian calendar, Julian calendar, people didn't have the kinds of astronomical ways of observing things we do today to keep track of time and stuff like that.
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And so there was lots of different calendars back then. And people, you know, the
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Jewish calendar, you'd put in a month every few years to make up for the fact it was a lunar calendar, so it was much shorter.
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The Islamic calendar to this day is lunar, and they do not add in anything. And so a year for them is much shorter.
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It's 11 days shorter than ours, and they don't make up for it. So it just keeps moving. Ramadan, for example, keeps moving 11 to 12 days forward in our calendar every year.
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And so when they talk about something that took place 1 ,300 years ago in their calendar, that's not 1 ,300 years ago in our calendar.
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So you've got to actually go online and find calculators. You can figure out what the dates were and stuff like that, which, of course, before online meant something very different.
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Anyway, there were these different calendars and all the rest of the stuff. So I was reading this book, and there was an article in it by a guy
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I got a lot of respect for as a historian and researcher by the name of Roger Beckwith. That's not
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Francis Beckwith. That's Roger Beckwith, different Beckwith. He wrote the book, The Old Testament Canon and the
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New Testament Church, if you ever want to read it. I mentioned it, I think, a couple weeks ago. If you ever want to read a rather thick but pretty comprehensive book on what the canon of the
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Old Testament was for the New Testament Church, his book is the book to read on that.
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It's, like I said, not light and enjoyable reading, but it's good stuff. Anyways, he wrote this chapter in this book relating to the time of the birth of Jesus.
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And he approached it from a way I'd never even heard anyone talk about it before.
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But what he did is he went back into the records, because this was before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, and looked at when priestly families were ministering in the temple.
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Because they had a rotation. They had a specific rotation of when the priestly families would minister in the temple.
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And why would that be relevant to us? Think with me for a moment.
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How could that be relevant to the timing of the birth of Jesus? What's the connection to a priestly family?
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Anybody? This is where I actually make you think. I just don't stand up here and yammer the whole time. What? Zechariah.
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Priest. And what happens with Zechariah? He's ministering in the temple, and he has a vision, and he's struck dumb.
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And who is Zechariah? He's the father of John the
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Baptist. And we do know exactly what the time frame is between John the Baptist's birth and Jesus' birth.
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His wife's pregnancy and Mary's pregnancy, right? And so what he does is he traces when
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Zechariah's clan, family, would have been ministering in the temple at that time.
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And then you just do the nine -month bath from there.
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And he came to the conclusion that the most likely period of time was the end of December.
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Now, you can't get, well, 1234 a .m. You can't quite get that specific.
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And given that none of my kids came anywhere close to when they were supposed to come, you've got those factors as well.
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But that kind of stuff never even gets mentioned. What you hear is just, ah, it's just a pagan cult, blah, blah, blah.
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Keep that in mind that even when you hear that from Christians, there's more information out there.
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And the professors at the universities just love throwing that stuff out. And they never mention any of that kind of stuff.
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How many of them even know about it? Probably not many at all. But it's thrown out there, and a lot of Christians are left sort of cowering and going,
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I hadn't thought about that, and so on and so forth. Now, you have the opportunity. Maybe no one has brought up the alleged pagan stuff.
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And someone says, well, why do you celebrate, or why do
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Christians even find significant the birth of Jesus? Because if he was just a prophet, then
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I suppose, you know, like, my birthday was yesterday, and I had a few people say, you know, happy birthday, and la, la, la.
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And, but, you know, so what? Same thing with prophets, you know.
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Is it really all that important? Why would anyone really, really care? Well, where would you want to go?
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A couple of places I would suggest to you. Now, obviously, in our society, if you pull out the
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ESV study Bible, well, let me tell you, now this huge massive thing comes.
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It's twice the size of Codex Rigotonius. It really is. It doesn't look nearly as old as Codex Rigotonius.
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But it's, they even have one? Is that the full study
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Bible? That doesn't look all as big as some of them. Well, yeah, yeah,
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I know. I realize that. But I've seen some of those. Man, they're just, the thing is just,
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I see, you can tell who carries one because they walk like this. You know, it's just, things are huge.
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But you go whipping that thing out, and you might have 30 seconds in our culture today.
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So, great advantage if you actually happen to have these texts memorized, which
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I would highly recommend to you. Prologue of John. Prologue of John.
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Let's take a look at it. John 1 -1. We all know the text, right? Hopefully most of us, if we've been
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Christians for any period of time at all, we've just by general exposure have memorized
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John 1 -1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
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Word was God. John starts his gospel off talking about the
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Word. And that's not a book. This Word is personal.
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In the beginning was the Word. As far back as you want to push the beginning, the Word already existed. The Word is eternal.
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The Word has eternally been in relationship with God. And the Word is as to His nature,
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Deity. Not a God, but Deity. And this
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Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was nothing made.
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And so, He is involved in the creation of all things.
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Now, why would someone find that to be relevant? You have to make a connection quickly.
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If someone were to say, what about the birth of Jesus are Christians so excited about?
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You might say, well, we believe, as the Gospel of John says, in the beginning was the
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Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Those opening words tell us that the Word was eternal.
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The Word was eternally in relationship with the Father. And the Word was as to His nature, Deity. And the amazing thing is, see what
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I did there? I've said the three things. I've made the assertions. He was involved in the creation of all things.
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But now I have to keep the attention and say, and the amazing thing is that that same
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Gospel goes on to say in verse 14, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
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And so this excitement on the part of Christians is due to the fact that we believe that One who existed eternally, and literally through Whom everything came into existence, that this
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One became flesh, did not cease to be the eternal Word.
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That's the Logos, in case you're wondering. Please do not mispronounce it as Logos. Or Logos, especially.
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If you want to say Logos, I'll let you. That's the modern Greek pronunciation. I'll let you get away with that. But whatever you do, don't say
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Logos. This is not possible. You hear folks say that. Imagine chalkboard.
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Only the old people are going, no, no, no. The young people are going, what? What is that? You can't use the fingernails on a chalkboard illustration with young people anymore because they've never seen a chalkboard.
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Can you imagine that, folks? You folks my age and older, isn't it sad? Have you ever seen a chalkboard?
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You have seen a chalkboard. You guys have some chalkboards? Ever pulled your fingernails down a chalkboard?
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Not anymore? One time was enough, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, there you go.
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Okay. But a lot of places have gotten rid of chalkboards. They're gone. So that's a great illustration that unfortunately doesn't work all that well anymore.
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But the insistence has to be immediately.
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This Word entered into, invaded what
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He Himself had made. He is the Creator. He is the One through whom all things were made. And then
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He became flesh. He did not cease to be the eternal Word. He became flesh and dwelt among us.
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And that's what we're saying. And we have to realize that's an amazing, amazing claim.
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And there are a lot, sadly, maybe the people we're talking to, they may even be a part of churches where they don't believe that anymore.
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I mean, we drive, I drive across Indian School Road to get here. And I know
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I drive past a church that's going to have a candlelight service on Christmas Eve. But I know they don't believe this.
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They don't believe, literally, that God became flesh.
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They just don't believe it. The Eastern churches.
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You know, it's interesting some of the differences between Eastern and Western churches. The Eastern churches very much focus upon the
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Incarnation. From our perspective, almost to the detriment of the centrality of the cross.
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But, of course, from our perspective, we have to remember that without the Incarnation, the cross would not be what we believe it to be.
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In other words, if Jesus was not the God -Man, if Jesus was not the eternal Logos made flesh, then the nature of the cross has to change.
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Once you lose who Jesus was, once you lose the...
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John starts his gospel off with this, so we read all the rest of his gospel in light of these statements.
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This Jesus was the Word who became flesh. That's why at the end of John, what does Thomas say when he sees the resurrected
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Lord? My Lord and my God. And Jesus does not rebuke him. He identifies his statement as a confession of faith.
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But that cross, once you abandon the view of Jesus as the
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God -Man, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word become flesh, then you've got to do something different with the cross.
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Its significance has to change. It is a man, a creature only, whether a perfect creature or a highly exalted creature or whatever else, he's still a creature.
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And so the death that is being died has a different nature in liberal
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Christianity because of the abandonment of the view of who Jesus is. And you end up with all the lesser theories of atonement.
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So, back to our conversation. You assert who the
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Word is. And then you say, and the amazing thing is, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
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And you might do something like this. You might say, have you ever, do you remember the Christmas plays? I remember,
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I'm so old now, that we did Christmas plays in public school. Can't do that anymore,
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I don't think, very much. And you actually had to quote from the
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Bible. So there might still be some people you're talking to. You can at least say, have you ever been to a
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Christmas play or something like that. And you hear the story about how in the days of Caesar Augustus, a decree went out that all the world should be taxed.
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There's some questions about what all the world meant there. I really don't think Caesar sent off a decree to Nome, Alaska.
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He said, you're going to be taxed out there. There is a contextual meaning as to what that actually meant.
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And there's lots of historical stuff that we can get into about that. But the point is that Luke places these events in time.
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Remember what Luke also says, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and all this stuff that, let's face it, most of the time we just sort of go, yeah, really, yeah, okay, yeah,
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Quirinius, yeah, I'm sure he was a great guy. What? That's the stuff where our minds just sort of skip over that.
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And our minds should not skip over that. Because what's going on is the writers are placing the events of Jesus' life, including his birth, in time, in space.
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One of the things that the pagan gods and the devotees of pagan gods never did was try to associate the events of the lives of those deities with ascertainable historical events that could be checked out.
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Because myths don't work well that way. And so it would sort of be in a general time frame, you know, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, you know, that kind of thing.
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That's the easiest way to start a fictional story. You don't want to tie it to something where someone would go, excuse me, but there's really no room for that, because we know this was going on and that was going on.
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No. The writers of the Gospel all the time, this is one of the major, major, major differences.
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Have you heard of the Gnostic Gospels? You know, the Gospels written over a hundred years later by people who thought Jesus was just sort of a phantom and he didn't have a real body.
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And people are writing around talking about the Gnostic Gospels all the time. And there are people trying to put the Gnostic Gospels in the
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Bible and all the rest of the stuff. You look at them and there are telltale signs these are works of fiction from a hundred plus years later.
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Because their authors do not attempt to put Jesus into first century
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Judea. They're not saying he was here and then it took him so long to travel to here, which happens to be, remember
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John 11? Jesus is in one place and people come and Lazarus is going to die and he waits and it takes him a certain amount of time to get there.
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Well, if you figure how long it takes to walk, that's how long it takes to get there. You can figure these things out.
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It's not only, you can also check out how they use names and place names and all the rest of this stuff. All those
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Gnostic Gospels, the writers didn't know anything about how far it was from here to here. They didn't know the names of the towns and cities.
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They didn't know how people called each other by names back then. None of that stuff. They're someplace else writing a lot later and they're just making stuff up as they go along.
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The Gospel writers give clear indication. They were there. They were in that place.
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They knew how people talked. They knew how long it took to get from one place to another. I mean, if someone was narrating something here in Phoenix, you know about how long it takes to drive from Peoria to Scottsdale or something like that, depending on the time of day.
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But if someone lives in New York, they've never been here, how are they supposed to know? I mean, I suppose they'd get online or something like that, but that kind of information was not available back then.
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There wasn't any online. So, there's all this information that tells us that the writers of the
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New Testament, they're not making up a myth. Because when you write mythology, you don't write it the way they did.
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They were writing in the time period and what they were saying, this is the great scandal, what they were saying was,
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Emmanuel, God with us, in the promise back in Isaiah, was that God is on our side,
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God is with us, God is amongst us. We were worshipping the one true God, but now it has come to the greatest fulfillment in the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
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Emmanuel, God literally with us. And we really mean that that's what happened.
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And so what that means is, that little baby in the manger, as cute as he might be, was truly born.
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He didn't just beam in there. And when I say that, I'm talking quite directly about the
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Roman Catholic concept. And if you know Roman Catholic dogma, you know there's something called the perpetual virginity of Mary.
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And that they accept, I cannot tell you how many times, just over the past four months,
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I have seen people defending the Roman Catholic system, quoting from a book called the
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Protevangelium of James. The Protevangelium of James. Now what in the world is that?
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It's a Gospel in essence. It's a Gnostic work from the second century. And it's the origin and source of the concept of the perpetual virginity of Mary.
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And in essence, there is no real birth of Jesus. According to the Protevangelium of James, he beams out.
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I mean, let's use the Star Trek analogy here, because it's the closest thing I can come up with. He is not born like a child is born.
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Even though Isaiah said, a child will be born to us. It uses the natural terms there.
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That's not what happens, according to the Protevangelium of James. Because, well, they're Gnostics, and that's way too fleshy.
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And Jesus isn't really fleshy. So he just sort of... I don't know if you had the sparkly things like you have in Star Trek.
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It depends on which Star Trek version you're looking at, actually. Because there's different types of transporter beams. Shall we discuss that?
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Because I know all the different types of transporter beams. But anyways, it's just... And he's there.
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And there's none of the associated stuff that comes along with birth, which is a messy process.
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There's no birth. How can you call him the God -man? How could you even tell the difference? God just sort of...
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I mean, could Jesus have just beamed down from heaven as a fully grown 33 -year -old man, and just sort of beamed down to the foot of the cross, and then allowed himself to be crucified?
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I would say no, because he truly wouldn't have been the God -man, and he certainly would not have fulfilled God's law for us, in that sense.
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But anyways, he's truly born. We really believe that that was a baby that was born in that manger, and he grew up...
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The Bible says he grew in stature. Better have. I mean,
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I'm sure he was full grown as a carpenter, son of a carpenter, and he was yay big when he was born.
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And yet, and this is the amazing thing, we believe he was the God -man. Not 50 %
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God and 50 % man. He was the God -man. Remember, I don't know how many months ago it was, we went over the different errors concerning the person of Christ, and people who mix them together.
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Remember Eutychianism, and Apollo... Remember all that stuff? No, you probably don't, but that's okay. You can go back and review that sometime in the future.
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But all the various errors that people have had, 100 % God, 100 % man, one person, two natures.
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And so, absolutely unique. There's never been anyone like him. There never could be anyone like him again.
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The Incarnation is absolutely unique. And what you can do, if you still have someone's attention at that point, and they're not laughing or something by that point, is to directly go to the cross from there.
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I've mentioned it before, but it obviously had a real impact on me. But many, many moons ago, before we came here, when we were at a very large
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Southern Baptist church not very far from here, I remember one
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Christmas, there was a choir number, and we had an incredibly talented vocalist, black vocalist named
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Ruby. Oh, could she sing? Wow, what a voice. And there was a song,
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I've not found it, I really should do a little harder searching. I bet you I could track it down now, since almost all music is becoming available online anymore, called
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The Shadow of the Cross. And what we did, I was involved in actually doing this, was we cut out, we put on one of the lights, with a cut out of the cross, with red, and we actually had that laying across the manger scene.
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And the whole song was about how you have to remember that the reason for that birth, from the very beginning, the shadow of the cross was across that child.
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What did Jesus say? It is necessary that I go to Jerusalem. I must go to Jerusalem.
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I must be handed over to the leaders. I must be killed, buried, rise again the third day.
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This was all a part of God's plan. This was all a part of God's decree. And the connectedness between the incarnation and the cross, you can go there very, very quickly.
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And say, you see, the reason that this incarnation is so vitally important is because what it tells us about the sufficiency of his work upon Calvary Street, upon the cross, you can go right into the need for a perfect sacrifice and the law of God and the fact that we have broken that law and there must be some way of having peace with God.
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And the only way that God has provided for peace with him is through this one Jesus Christ. And that he has provided that perfectly.
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That, to me, obviously, would be the direct direction to go. Now, obviously, there can be all sorts of objections that are raised.
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Another text, I didn't end up getting to it, but another text that is,
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I think, a tremendous incarnational text that we've gone over a number of times in the past, is the
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Carmen Christi Philippians 2, verses 5 -11. And so, if there is an interest on the person's part of, well, that's interesting, but, you know,
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I had a friend once who said that Jesus said, the Father is greater than I am.
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How do you understand that? Because that may end up bringing all these questions bubbling up to the surface.
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There is the opportunity to enter into those things and to address those questions.
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And one of the things that I think sometimes causes us to hesitate a little bit before we go into a presentation, even present the
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Gospels, is because of a fear on our part of not being able to answer some of those questions.
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Don't be fearful. It's amazing how many times the Lord will bring to mind things that you have heard in the past.
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Certainly, it should be things that we are seeking to be prepared and to be ready to be used of the
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Lord. That's why scripture memorization is such an important thing and I would so highly recommend it to you.
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But, don't let that keep you from opening your mouth in testimony. And so, if someone raises a question like that,
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I think all of us should be able to answer John 14, 28, which is what that text was, by the way, almost in our sleep.
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Because so many people quote it. The Father is greater than I am. Is that the whole verse? No, it's not.
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Almost just reading the verse is enough. Jesus is talking to the disciples about His going back into the presence of the
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Father and He says, if you had loved Me, you would have rejoiced that I told you
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I'm going back into the presence of the Father because the Father is greater than I am. So, what does that mean? Well, here He is, walking the dusty roads of Galilee.
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He's constantly surrounded by His enemies. He's constantly having people twisting every word He says. Surrounded by the sick and the lame.
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Having to cast out the demons as well as dealing with the hypocritical leaders of His own people.
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And so He says, I'm going back into the presence of the Father. And if you loved Me, you would have rejoiced that the
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Father is greater than I am. That term greater does not mean better as in some different kind of being, but the
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Father is not walking the dusty roads of Galilee. The Father is in heaven, surrounded by the angels who worship
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Him day and night. And Jesus is going back into that very place that He is going to say in John 17, 5, had been
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His beforehand, Father, glorify Me with the glory which I had with you before the world was. And which before John 14, in John 12,
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John had made reference to the vision that Isaiah had of Yahweh sitting on His throne, lofty and lifted up.
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And he said in John 12, 41, these things Isaiah said because he saw His glory and he spoke about Him.
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So John has already told us that Jesus had experienced this tremendously glorious existence beforehand.
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And now He's going back. If you had loved Me, you would have rejoiced because the Father is greater than that. Greater in position, not in being.
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And so many people bring up John 14, 28, but almost none of them...
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I can't remember a single person who has ever quoted that verse in my presence who actually knew the rest of the verse when
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I asked them. Not one. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, Atheists, it doesn't matter.
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I can't remember one that actually knew the content. So we need to know what context is and to give an answer for that.
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Well, I see by the clock that unfortunately my time has run out. But hopefully that will encourage you, if you have opportunity, over this next week.
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Do not be afraid to give testimony to what we really do believe about the person of Christ.
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Let's close with a word of prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank You for this opportunity that You give to us to give testimony to what we truly believe.
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That Jesus was the Emmanuel, God with us. And we pray that as we have opportunity, we will bring honor and glory to You in our testimony.
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pray that You would be with us now as we go into worship. Lift up our hearts and our minds. We pray in Christ's name, Amen.