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FBC Travelers Rest sermon from December 15, 2024 by Pastor Rhett Burns.
Well, I want to begin this morning reading from First Timothy chapter two. First Timothy chapter two, and we'll go to one verse there. We went through the same passage not too long ago in our series through First Timothy, but I wanna return to one verse.
I'm gonna make a sweep through a wide variety of a whole lot of verses here in just a minute, but I want to begin and anchor our sermon time this morning in First Timothy chapter two, verse five. And God's word says, "'For there is one man and one mediator "'between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus.'".
The man, Christ Jesus. Throughout Advent, we're going through a series called Knowing Christ, using Mark Jones's book by that same name, Knowing Christ, giving us a little bit of an outline for our sermons.
And today we come to talk about Christ's humanity. A few weeks ago, we saw and focused our time and our attention on Christ's divinity, that God is there, that Christ is truly God. And today we look at Christ and his humanity.
We'll come back. It says here in verse five, there's one God and one mediator. So we see that Christ is a mediator between God and man. And we'll come back to that in just a little bit, but focus in on those four words, the man, Christ Jesus.
A few weeks ago, we saw Jesus was the word of God, the word that was in the beginning and was with God and was God, that he is very God of very God, truly God. And today we see that Christ is fully and truly human, the man, Christ Jesus.
And so the first thing I want to do is just assert this truth that Jesus Christ is man from the scriptures. I want to see the humanity of Christ in the scriptures. See that the Bible presents Jesus Christ as fully and truly human.
And so let me do that. I just want to quote from Martin Jones's book as he just tours the New Testament for the evidence of the humanity of Christ. Let me read this paragraph. He says, the evidence for Christ's true humanity is as conclusive as the evidence for his full divinity.
Born of a woman, Galatians 4 .4. Jesus was called the son of Mary, Luke 2 .7. He was a descendant of David. According to the flesh, Acts 2 .30 and Romans 1 .3, he experienced physical reactions such as hunger, Matthew 4 .2, thirst, John 19 .20, fatigue, John 4 .6.
He wept, John 4 .35, wailed, Luke 19 .41, sighed, Mark 7 .34, and groaned, Mark 8 .12. We can also look to Hebrews 2 .14, where we see that Jesus shared in flesh and blood in order to defeat the devil.
Then we go to Hebrews 2 .17, where we see that Jesus was made like his brethren in every respect that he might be our high priest. We can go to Hebrews 4 .15, where we see that he was tempted and tried as we are, yet without sin.
You can go to the crucifixion account,.
Where we find the body of Christ.
Nailed to a tree and blood dripping. We see his humanity. There's a lot of verses I just referenced, and in all of those verses, we find evidence of the humanity of Jesus. Now, from our position here in the year of our Lord, 2024, it's pretty easy for us to see the evidence for the humanity of Christ.
We're well-acquainted with that language that Jesus is fully God and fully man, that he is truly God and truly man.
We know that.
We confess that. We believe that. We talk about that in Sunday school.
From when we're knee-high to senior saints.
But it wasn't always so. In fact, the first several hundred years of church history are full of struggling to articulate just who Jesus is, struggling to articulate and teach an orthodox understanding of the person of Christ.
You see, the most important question in the whole world.
Is who is Jesus? Who is Jesus Christ?
There's not a more important question in the world that you will ever answer than who is Jesus Christ. The gates to heaven and hell swing upon that question. It's the hinge that eternal destiny swings on.
It's the most important question in the world. Who is Jesus? And when it came to his divinity and his humanity, many throughout the first four centuries of the church struggled to answer correctly. And so there were many false views of who Jesus is that were taught.
I wanna give you a rundown of a few of those. It's gonna be like a little bit of a church history lesson for you for just a few moments. So in the first century, there were those who taught docetism. This was the belief that Jesus is spiritual.
He only appeared human. He wasn't actually human, but he took on the appearance and made it look so. And in this view, Jesus was God, but he was not man. He only appeared to be a man. He God in the appearance of man, but not actually man.
And this is false.
And you get to the second century. There were the Ebionites. They denied the virgin birth and denied Jesus's divinity. So the pendulum swung hard in the other direction from the docetist. In this view, Jesus was man, but he was not God.
This was false. Then you get to the third century. Paul of Samasota taught that Jesus was an ordinary man inhabited by the Lagos. So Lagos, that's Greek word for word. You read it in John chapter one, and the beginning was the word and the beginning was the Lagos.
This is Greek concept here. Third century, Paul of Samasota taught that Jesus was an ordinary man, but he was inhabited by the Lagos. He was a man who became the son of God at his baptism. The spirit came upon him.
And so this view tries to make sense of both the humanity and divinity of Jesus, but it does so in a way that really strikes his divinity by saying he wasn't always God. And it also tries to make sense of it by saying something untrue about man.
That is that man can become God. Man can't become God. And so this view too is false. Then fourth century, you have a guy named Apollinaris of Laodicea. And he taught that the Lagos assumed a human body, but not a human mind or a human soul.
And so this is, you may have heard it described as God and a bod. You know, it denies the full humanity of Jesus. It's God, but it just kind of wears human flesh as a suit. This too is false. Then you have also in the fourth century, a man named Arius.
He denied that the Lagos was co-eternal and constant substantial and co-equal with the father. He said that there was a time when the son was not, thus denying the full divinity of Jesus. And so you can see throughout church history, there's been those who have gone this way, denying the divinity of Christ.
Those who have gone emphasize things over here that deny the humanity of Christ. And there were the attacks on this, on the doctrine and the person of Christ throughout. You see the Sunday school answer hasn't always been the Sunday school answer.
You know what I mean? My Sunday school answer is so common. We've heard it so many times. We know it, yeah, Jesus fully God, fully man. It wasn't always like that. It wasn't something that everybody just knew.
And so how was the problem solved? How did we get it to where there was a Sunday school answer that Jesus is truly God and truly man? Well, there were a series of church councils where the church leaders were called together to hash it out and to hammer out a statement.
So the first one was the Council of Nicaea. You've heard of the Nicaean Creed. This was in 325 AD. At this council, it was affirmed that Jesus was of one substance with the Father. And anyone who taught that there was a time when the Son was not, they were anathematized.
Then you get to 381, you have the next great council of the church, Constantinople. This council affirmed the full humanity of Jesus and opposed the Apollinarians, Apollinaris that I mentioned earlier, they opposed them.
Then you had the Council of Ephesus in 431. This council condemned the view that there are two persons in Christ instead of affirming that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures. Maybe you've heard that phrase before, one person, two natures, human nature, divine nature, all together in one person.
Comes from the Council of Ephesus. And then you have the last great ecumenical council in Chalcedon in the year 451. As a fun fact, Chalcedon is in the neighborhood of what's now known as Istanbul that our oldest daughter, Caitlin, was born in.
She was born just down the road from Chalcedon. But at that council, the church affirmed two natures of Christ. That Jesus has a human body and a human soul. That is, he is fully human and Jesus is fully divine, including all the attributes of God that we talked about two weeks ago.
So what I wanna do, if you'll just bear with me for a second, I wanna read the definition of Chalcedon. It was written over 1 ,500 years ago and the church for 1 ,500 years has confessed this. So if you just bear with me, I wanna read this to you.
I want you to notice some of the robust language that describes the person of Jesus Christ. Listen, this is the statement. Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body, of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood, like us in all respects apart from sin, as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood, begotten for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person in subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and only begotten God, the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.
Even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creative of the fathers has handed down to us. That's Chalcedon definition of Christ. I think one thing I want you to see there is, yes, there were lots of false views about Christ that were taught, but this was handed down, meaning there were true believers who had a true and accurate unorthodox understanding of Christ throughout this whole 400-year period.
And it was handed down by the fathers and passed down the faith. But here at Chalcedon, we get some precise language. I want you to notice the robust language affirming both the divinity and humanity of Christ.
Notice the teaching about the two natures of Christ coming together to form one person, not two persons, one person with two natures, union, and it doesn't negate his Godhood or his manhood in doing so.
Notice the phrasing that we still use today, truly God and truly man. You see, the Chalcedon definition was the climax in a centuries-long battle for orthodox Christology. It settled the question for the church.
Now, that didn't mean there hasn't been attacks on the doctrine of Christ since then. There has been, still going today. But it settled the question for the church.
Of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And we use these creeds and these statements from these early councils to define and defend our doctrine. They're useful for defining and defending our doctrine. Now, up to this point in this sermon, you could be forgiven for thinking that this sure seems more like a church history lecture.
Than a sermon.
That would be fair. So why am I giving you a church history lesson this morning? Well, there are a few reasons. One is that most modern Christians are completely unaware of their history. We just don't know what happened before us.
We don't know what Christians in previous eras did or what they believed or what the threats were or what the questions were that they had. We're ignorant of it. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way at all.
I mean it in the most literal sense of the word.
We just don't know.
We're not aware of it. And so we don't know how things came to be, how church developed, doctrine developed, how it became articulated and things like that. So I want you to be aware of your history. I want you to know about Nicaea and Constantinople and Ephesus and Chalcedon.
We're downstream from that. We still use language from that. I want you to know where it came from. I want you to be thankful for our church fathers. This is one way we keep the fifth commandment to honor our fathers and mothers.
We honor those who came before us. There were many courageous men who fought hard for orthodox doctrine, orthodox Christology. We should give thanks that they handed it down to us. We give thanks for those in the first four centuries that handed it down to those who came together at Chalcedon and then put it together in this document that we still use today.
We should be thankful for those who have fought those battles for the truth.
Because here's the thing,.
If you lose the humanity of Christ, you lose the gospel. If you lose the divinity of Christ, you lose the gospel. We need to be able to hold those things together and teach those things and proclaim that message.
To the world.
We should be thankful for these church fathers. I say this because I want you to appreciate doctrine, to realize that doctrine is not an insignificant trifle. It's not something that you don't need to be concerned.
With that, no.
If you lose it, you lose the gospel in many cases. It's something that our fathers were willing to die for. I want you to appreciate doctrine. I want you to see that the church grows and develops over time.
Doesn't mean the truth changes, but it does mean the church changes. The church grows and develops and matures. The way we articulate things and understand things grows and develops and matures. So you might think the doctrine of Christ, you've known that Jesus is fully God, fully man all your life since you were knee high in Sunday school.
It's an elementary doctrine. And that's true, it really is. But we need to see the church was in its infancy in those days. And now, over time, the church grows up. And you get to another point in church history and they hammer out other things.
You think about the Reformation, and the church grows and develops in its understanding of justification by faith alone, by the grace of God. We'll probably mature in our understanding and articulation of doctrines more in our own days.
And so the point is, we should not look to stay in infancy, but we should give ourselves to diligent study that we might mature and make progress in our own understanding of the things of God in our own day.
And then lastly, I give you this church history lesson because I want you to meditate on the humanity of Christ that these councils affirmed. We'll come back to that in just a bit. Turn over in your mind what it means for the Son of God to become man.
So now that we've seen the humanity of Jesus in the scriptures, and we've seen how the early church developed that doctrine and came to formulate it, I now want to return to that four-word phrase from 1 Timothy 2, 5, and ask, what does it mean for the Son of God to be the man, Christ Jesus?
What does it mean for him to be the man, Christ Jesus? Well, the first thing is that, first thing to say is that Jesus had both a body and a soul. Human beings are not just bodies, we're not just souls.
We are body and soul together. And so if Jesus was truly man, that means he had both a human body and a human soul. We often, we recognize that he had a body, but we often make a similar mistake as Apollinaris who said that Jesus assumed a human body, but not the human mind.
We think the body was human, but the mind, heart, and soul was divine. But Jesus had a human soul, human mind, human heart too. This is why it said that he grew in wisdom and stature before God and man.
This is why it said that he learned. In his divinity, Jesus knew all things, but in his humanity, he had to grow and develop and learn like all of us. He didn't come out of the womb speaking full sentences in Aramaic, he had to learn to say mama and abba, just like the rest of us, like all the babies did.
This is important for our salvation too, for where does sin arise?
In our hearts.
If Jesus didn't have a human heart, human soul, then he could not have obeyed in our place such that his obedience could be counted towards us because obedience is from the heart. He had to be fully human.
And that means having a body and a soul. A human soul, human mind, human heart. Second thing I wanna see is that Jesus walked by faith. We often think, you know, Jesus was able to do things he did because he was God.
But he's human body, human soul. He's a fully human and he had to walk by faith. He had to because he was human. In his humanity, he didn't know everything all at once. We tend to think that of course Jesus could do that thing.
He's God, well yes, but he's also a man. He lived as a man. He did not live as God simply indwelling a human body, but as God indwelling a human body and soul and mind and heart as we just saw. And so in his humanity, Jesus had to walk by faith.
Jones notes that any view of Jesus that essentially robs Jesus of his humanity also, excuse me, that robs his humanity also robs him of his divinity. If you put those two things together, that you kind of fold his humanity into his divinity, you end up losing both.
And it robs us of our mediator. First Timothy 2 .5, there's one God, one mediator between God and man. We lose that mediator, the man Christ Jesus, because we need a fully human savior. So he's one man, two natures.
Third thing we see is the natural gifts of Jesus that were given to him by his father. We see that Jesus Christ is the greatest man who's ever lived. I want to read from First Kings chapter four, a description of Solomon.
Solomon, the great man of all time. I want to set the bar at Solomon. I want to show you how Jesus surpasses him. First Kings chapter four, verses 29. And God gave Solomon wisdom and exceedingly great understanding and largeness of heart like the sand on the seashore.
Thus Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the men of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all the men, like Ethan the Ezraite and Heman and Chalcol and Dard of the sons of Mahal.
And his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He spoke 3000 Proverbs and his songs were 1005. Also he spoke of trees from the cedar tree of Lebanon, even to the hyssop that springs out of the wall.
He also spoke of animals, of birds, of creeping things and of fish. And then of all nations from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom came to hear the wisdom of Solomon. This is a glorious description of the wisdom and the fruitfulness of Solomon.
Pretty high bar.
How much greater is Jesus who Colossians 2, 3 tells us in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Solomon was wise, but all wisdom and knowledge.
Is hidden in Christ Jesus. How much better is Christ? How much more glorious is Christ? Jesus is the one who is greater than Solomon. He's the greatest man who ever lived. I was reading my devotional time, the book of John this past week, and you get to the end of the book of John, there's just one sentence I love.
It says, if everything that Jesus had done, if we were to tell it all, all the books in the world couldn't contain it.
There's not enough books.
That you contain everything that Jesus did. He is the greatest man to ever live. Fourth thing is to see that Jesus was tempted and tried, yet he did not sin. Jesus, he's fully human, but he did not sin.
He didn't inherit a sin nature because he was born of the virgin, conceived of the Holy Spirit, and he never sinned. Hebrews 4, 15, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Jesus experienced the hard realities of human life without sinning. It's really amazing when you think about it. Now, to understand this correctly, we need to make some distinctions. So Jesus suffered the painful infirmities of life, those resulting, you know, just life in this world, life in a fallen world.
He experienced hunger and thirst, cold, heat, grief, and so on. There's another category of infirmities that we might call sinful infirmities. These result from sin, and Jesus did not experience these, for he never sinned.
And this helps us make some other distinctions about Jesus's temptations that we need to. We know that Jesus was tempted externally. That is, he was tempted by the devil in the wilderness. He was tempted by his hunger and thirst there in the wilderness.
He was tempted by those who opposed him physically. When he was nailed to the cross in the pain, he was tried in all the ways that are common to human experience, yet he did not sin. But we distinguish this type of temptation from the internal temptation towards sin that is a result of our fallenness, that's a result of our corruption, because he was not corrupted in the same way that we are.
In other words, Jesus never had any sinful desires, for those are already sinful, even at the level of desire. He said, so Jesus, he was never tempted by lust, for lust is already sinful, even as a desire.
And so we cannot excuse our sinful desires by appealing to Hebrews 4 .15 and saying, Jesus was tempted in the same way. I've heard people use that same verse to say that Jesus, because he was tempted in every way.
He experienced gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction or lust or whatever it is, and it's like, no, that's not what the verse means. Jesus, he was not corrupted by sinful nature in the same way we are, he didn't experience those sinful desires.
But he was tempted and tried, and he never sinned.
He withstood, he never sinned,.
Not even in his internal desires. And then the last thing we see is that Jesus' full humanity was necessary for our salvation. If you go back to 1 Timothy 2 .5, we see that we needed a mediator to save us.
There's one mediator between God and man, a man, Christ, Jesus, we needed a human mediator, we needed a savior, he needed to be sinless because God will not accept a blemish sacrifice, and so our savior had to be God because only God is sinless.
But he also, this mediator savior also needed to be a man, because man was the one who sinned. And only a man could atone for our sin. We needed a new human representative, Adam was our first father, our first representative, our first federal head, and we needed a new one.
And Jesus Christ was that second Adam. And so the salvation riddle was solved.
By the God-man, Jesus Christ.
Fully God and fully man, truly God and truly man. This was the only way for us to be saved and for God to still be just and holy. And so, one starry night in Bethlehem, as shepherds kept their watch over their flocks by night, a virgin gave birth to a baby boy.
And that boy grew, both body and soul, into a mature man, and he was fully man. He had a voice to speak the words of God. He had a mind to learn and grow and develop. He had a soul that suffered anguish and that worshiped the Father.
He had a back to be scourged and a brow for the crown of thorns to be pressed into. He had hands for the nails to be driven through and a throat to be parched with thirst. And eyes to look down from the cross.
And behold his mother.
He had blood to drip down his side to wash away your every sin. There is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. If Jesus were not truly man, we would still be in our sins. We'd be dead in our trespasses, walking according to the course of this world.
We'd be sons of disobedience still. But that starry night in Bethlehem was born in the city of David, a Savior who is Christ the Lord. He is truly and fully God, and he is truly and fully man. And so this Christmas season I want you to think about, meditate on this great truth of the humanity of Jesus Christ.
Let's pray together. Our Father, we thank you that the Son of God became the man Christ Jesus. That he lived perfectly in our place, always obeying you, never sinning, not even once, not even in his desires.
That he died as the perfect sacrifice in our place, that our sins could be atoned for and we could be forgiven. That he was raised from the dead on the third day, victorious over Satan, sin, and death.
And that we too, by faith, can be united to him and share in that victory. That he ascended to your right hand from where he rules the world right now, and that we are invited into that rule. We thank you for these things, and we ask that this Christmas season that you would help us by your spirit, by your grace, help us to contemplate rightly the humanity of Jesus, and rightly the divinity of Jesus.
And that we would give you all the glory and praise for such a great salvation that we find in him. We ask all of this in the name of Jesus. Amen, amen.
