Was Jesus Really Man?

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I invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to 1 John chapter 4, 1 John chapter 4.
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Not the Gospel of John, but the first letter of John, which would be near the end of your Bibles.
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Chapter 4.
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In a moment we're going to be reading verse 2.
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At this point in the calendar year, just like with every other year, we are busy with the events of the season.
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We have family get-togethers, company parties, church gatherings, all meant to celebrate the season.
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We sing songs of the season.
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There's even a radio station that plays 24-hour Christmas music.
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You can just turn it on and it's always there.
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We greet people in the shops with the words of Merry Christmas.
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We go about using our spare time collecting gifts, adorning our houses, getting ready for the big day of celebration which comes on the 25th.
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Yet in the midst of the hustle and the bustle, it is easy for us to forget the purpose for all of the festivities.
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We say that we are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.
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We say that He is the reason for the season.
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But yet at the same time, we must ask ourselves the question, why is His birth so important? And why is it worth such a huge annual celebration? This is the biggest day of the year.
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Why? Well, some would say it's because we're celebrating a miracle.
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He was born of a virgin.
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That's worth celebrating.
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And while that is certainly true, the virgin birth is a true doctrine.
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It is truly in Scripture, but yet at the same time, that is only part of the grand miracle which occurred 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem.
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The miracle in Bethlehem is more than a genetic miracle.
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So I think people get hung up on the fact, well, the virgin birth is the miracle.
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The virgin birth is part of it, but it's not all of it.
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The virgin birth was a genetic miracle, but the real miracle was that the eternal took on flesh.
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That's the miracle that we celebrate on Christmas.
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That's the miracle that we must never forget.
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So as a result, I have decided, as being led by the Spirit of God, to preach these next two weeks on the subject of something called the hypostatic union.
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The hypostatic union, as we will see, is the reason why we celebrate, because it is the belief, it is the doctrine, that Jesus Christ is both fully man and fully God at the same time.
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So that being said, let us turn again in our Bibles to 1 John 4, verse 2, and let us stand for the reading of God's Word, giving it its due honor and reverence.
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1 John 4, verse 2 says this, By this you know the Spirit of God.
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Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.
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Father God, we thank You for Your Word.
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We thank You for its truth.
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I thank You that You have given it to us to be preached.
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And I pray, O God, that as I seek to preach Your Word, that You would keep me from error, as I certainly am capable of preaching error.
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I pray that You would keep me from that.
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I pray also that You would open up the hearts of Your people to the truth.
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And Lord God, that ultimately Your Holy Spirit would be the teacher today, and that He would minister to our souls the Word of God.
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We thank You for all of Your truths.
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And we just ask, Lord, now that we be ready to receive them.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.
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I imagine, if a survey was done with the average American churchgoers regarding Christian doctrine, and the average American churchgoer was asked, What is the hypostatic union? That the vast majority of them would be unable to properly articulate the definition of this doctrine.
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And even less would be able to understand and articulate why it is the very reason for the celebration of Christmas, the remembering of the birth of Christ.
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Now, for some of you, I know, I get teased a lot for using big words and theological terms.
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And sometimes, I know some of you are poking fun at me.
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But the reality is, while hypostatic union may sound like a fancy English word, it's really a fairly simple term.
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Hypostatic simply means essence or nature.
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Thus, the hypostatic union is the combining or the union of the two natures in one person, which is Christ.
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Jesus Christ has two complete natures.
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He has two complete essences.
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He is fully human, and He has a fully human nature.
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And yet, at the same time, He is fully divine.
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He has a fully divine nature.
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And together, in His one person, is what we call this union of natures or the hypostatic union.
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Jesus is simply the God-Man.
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He is not two persons.
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He is one person.
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And again, the hypostatic union is the joining of the divine and the human in the one person of Jesus Christ.
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And this is among the most crucial of Christian doctrines, because it is how we understand who Christ is.
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Gone are the days when Christians could simply sit in pews and not understand these truths.
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Our faith is constantly being assaulted from all sides.
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And those who assault our faith often do not understand what we believe, and thus they paint caricatures of what we believe.
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And we must be able to articulate what we believe if we are to fulfill the scriptural command of being able to give an answer for the hope that is within us.
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Shortly said, we got to know why we believe what we believe.
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Because the world is no longer allowing us to sit in ignorance.
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They're challenging us at every turn.
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And if we don't know, we will not be ready to face the challenge.
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When Jehovah Witnesses come knocking at the door, as they've done twice to me in the last month.
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I don't know, I must have a mark on my house.
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They haven't been there in years, but I've had them twice over the last couple of weeks.
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We need to understand that the fundamental flaw of the Jehovah Witness is a denial of the hypostatic union.
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When the Mormon missionaries come to our home and into our neighborhoods, we need to understand that they have outright rejected the hypostatic union.
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They've rejected monotheism.
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They've rejected historic traditional Christianity, biblical Christianity in toto.
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In fact, I make people mad by saying this.
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A Muslim is closer to biblical Christianity than is a Mormon.
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Because at least a Muslim is a monotheist.
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A Mormon is a polytheist.
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In fact, it is the most polytheistic religion in the world.
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They believe in infinite gods.
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At least the Hindus have numbered their gods.
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We who claim to believe the Bible, we who claim to believe the Scripture, ought to be able to articulate the doctrines we claim to believe.
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Recently, there was a Muslim teacher who was on video, and he was shown during a lecture teaching to a group of Muslims, why it is a sin for Muslims to say Merry Christmas.
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I thought this was interesting, so I sat and watched the video.
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In his lecture, he says that Merry Christmas is, and I quote, the belief that God was born on the 25th of December, end quote.
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And that it is shirk.
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Shirk is polytheism.
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The belief in Merry Christmas, the belief in Jesus as the Christ, as the Son of the Living God, that that's polytheism.
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And it is copper, which means that it is unacceptable to God.
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He went on to say that for a Muslim to say Merry Christmas is worse than fornication, it is worse than drinking alcohol, and it's worse than even killing someone.
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It might make you wonder why if you've ever said Merry Christmas to a Muslim, they don't reciprocate.
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Because to them, it is the greatest of sins.
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Now, my challenge to that Muslim, and to all of them, is that that teacher does not even understand what Christians believe about Jesus.
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But the sad thing is, he's not alone, because a lot of Christians don't understand what they believe about Jesus.
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So yeah, he articulated it incorrectly, but he's not by himself.
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Now, why did I say he articulated it incorrectly? Well, because he said that saying Merry Christmas is the belief that God was born on the 25th of December.
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Well, beloved, that's not what Christians believe.
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And I'm not talking about the date.
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The 25th of December, it doesn't matter.
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I know he probably wasn't born on the 25th.
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He was probably born sometime in the spring due to the calendar and all these things.
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It doesn't matter.
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You get what he's saying.
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He's saying Christians believe God was born.
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No, we do not.
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That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian teaching of the nature of Christ.
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We do not believe that God was born.
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We believe that Christ was a union of two natures, the divine and the human.
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We do not believe that the divine nature was born.
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We believe that the divine nature is eternal.
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Do you see the fundamental flaw when he says God was born? He's saying as if God didn't exist before December 25th in the year zero.
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Which I know that's silly, but you know, they're saying that that's the point that God started to exist.
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We don't believe that.
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We don't articulate that.
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We don't have any doctrine even close to that.
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But when we say Jesus is the God man, that's what they hear.
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And why we need to be able to articulate our faith is because they don't understand it.
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We need to understand it.
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The human person of Jesus of Nazareth was born.
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Whatever day it was and whatever year it was, he was born through the womb of the Virgin Mary.
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But the divine nature of the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God, the divine nature has always eternally existed.
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This is why, and we're going to study this next week, Jesus could say before Abraham was, I am.
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He has eternally existed.
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We say the divine took upon flesh and dwelt among us.
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That's the special thing that happened.
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John 1.14, the Word became flesh.
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And dwelt among us.
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That's the miracle.
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What makes the birth in Bethlehem so special is that it's the union of two natures, the human and the divine.
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Which, of course, again, we call the hypostatic union.
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So we see the reason why it is so important to be able to articulate these truths about the nature of Christ.
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Because it's necessary for combating error.
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The world is standing poised and ready to speak error about Jesus Christ.
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And we need to know the truth.
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We need to be able to articulate the truth.
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So that being said, here's what we're going to do.
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Today we are going to discuss the human nature of Christ.
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And then next week we're going to discuss the divine nature of Christ.
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Not because I feel like Christ can be divided, but because I believe that understanding who Christ is is to have a fundamental understanding of his two natures.
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That they are not divided, but they are united in his one person.
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And that is why we have begun in 1 John 4, verse 2.
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By this you know the Spirit of God.
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Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.
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This is a very important Christological text.
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Because the context of this particular scripture is very simple.
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John is concerned with false teaching.
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He's concerned with heresies.
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Something, a word we don't use a lot anymore, but I think needs to come back in vogue.
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Because there's a lot of heresies out there.
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And we don't want to say it because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.
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But the reality is that was John's concern.
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Was that there were heresies which were being taught about Jesus.
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And here's the interesting thing.
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The initial heresies which were involving Jesus Christ.
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The earliest heresies about Christ was not that he wasn't divine.
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The earliest heresies was that he wasn't human.
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That Jesus Christ was not fully man.
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As I said, that's the opposite of what a lot of people struggle with today.
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A lot of people today have a problem with Jesus being divine.
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But the earliest heresies were the argument that he was divine, he just wasn't man.
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He wasn't really human.
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At the time John is writing, there are those who are teaching that flesh is inherently evil.
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That flesh is evil.
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And thus, if Jesus came in the flesh, then he took upon himself evil.
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And because God can't do that, then he couldn't be flesh.
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Makes sense, right? If flesh is evil and Jesus took on flesh, then Jesus took on evil.
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Thus, the belief is sound in the sense that it's a logical argument.
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It's just based on a fallacious premise.
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But to them it was logical.
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It couldn't be flesh because flesh is evil.
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But John's response to that was powerful and convicting.
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And I want us to read the whole context of the quote, because we've only read verse 2.
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I want us to read verse 1 through 3 and see how verse 2 fits into that.
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Because verse 1 says, Beloved, do not believe every spirit.
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This is John's commendation to us.
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Do not listen to everybody who says that they're a Christian teacher.
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I say this all the time.
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You know, the guys on television and not all of them are bad, but some of them are.
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And we need to have discerning spirits.
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We need to know that there are people out there who are preaching untruths.
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And this tells us, beloved, do not believe every spirit.
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Do not believe every person who's talking to you.
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But test the spirits to see whether they are from God.
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For many false prophets have gone out into the world.
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By this you know the Spirit of God.
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Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.
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You see, John is focused on something.
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He's focused on Christ having come in the flesh.
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It's from God.
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And every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.
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This is the spirit of antichrist which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
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This is not talking about the antichrist or the beast from Revelation 13.
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This is talking about the spirit of antichrist which is always in the world.
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The spirit of anti-christian teaching.
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Anti-christ like teaching.
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Anti-christ teaching as we say.
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This spirit is in the world.
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It's been here and continues to be here.
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John is adamant that a person must confess that Jesus has come in the flesh.
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If he is to be confessing Christian orthodoxy.
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But why is the humanity of Christ? Why is the fact that he came in the flesh so important? Why would it be a damnable heresy to say that Christ was spirit only? That he was some sort of phantom? That he was some sort of angelic being? Why would that be heresy? Well, simply put, because it would undermine the very purpose for his coming.
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Jesus Christ came to be our high priest.
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He came to make a propitiatory sacrifice on our behalf.
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He came to represent us to God as our mediator and advocate.
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And all of these things require that he share our nature.
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To be a representative of a group, you have to be part of that group.
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Thus, he takes on flesh to be one of us so that he can represent us to God.
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He cannot just seem to be a man.
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He must be a man.
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Thus, the Gnostic heresy, and that was the early church, the heresy in the early church was the Gnosticism.
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This Gnostic heresy was a false teaching, and John condemns it.
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If you cannot say that Christ has come in the flesh, you are the spirit of Antichrist.
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Now, I want to show you one of the most beautiful expressions of the truth of Christ coming in the flesh in all of Scripture.
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I want you to turn with me from 1 John.
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I want you to turn to Philippians, under the pin of the Apostle Paul.
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Philippians chapter 2.
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And I want you to look at something called the Carmen Christi.
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I know it's not a city in Texas.
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Philippians 2, verse 5.
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This is the Apostle Paul's expression of who Christ is.
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And many scholars believe that these words did not originate with the Apostle Paul, but that this was an early Christian creed, which had been passed down from the time of Christ's ascension, that Christians were saying these things to one another, and that Paul is here saying something that all Christians believe.
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He's simply quoting to us a belief among Christians.
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He says in verse 5, he says, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.
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See, when he was here, when he was in the flesh, Christ prayed to the Father.
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Christ expressed worship to the Father.
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Christ was doing what men are supposed to do, as he was a man.
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He didn't come here and lord over others, but he came as a servant.
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And that's why it says in verse 7, But he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.
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Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
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You see, this is the expression of who Christ is.
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Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself, and he took the form of a servant, so that he could die for us, and in his death, God raised him up and glorified him.
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You see, Christ humbled himself from his position on high.
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He took a position among humanity for the purpose of going to the cross.
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Some have asked this question.
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They say, well, Paul here says he emptied himself.
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Does that mean that he gave up or he relinquished his divinity? No, it does not.
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Jesus was still divine, which we will focus on next week.
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He never stopped being God the Son.
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What happened, however, is that the divine nature took on flesh, stepping down from the exalted position on high, and humbling himself on our behalf.
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It is the most humbling reality in the history of man that the very Creator of men would wrap himself in flesh and live among men.
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Beloved, it is understanding that condescension which helps us to make sense of some of the most perplexing questions which people often ask about the nature of Christ.
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Because people do ask, and I've sat in debates, I've listened to Muslims and Christians debate this subject.
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I've listened to non-Christians and Christians debate this subject in formal, moderated debate.
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And I've listened to these discussions.
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And here are the things that you hear from those who reject the divinity of Christ and the humanity of Christ.
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They say, well, God can't get hungry, and God can't die, so Jesus can't be God.
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Because Jesus thirsted, Jesus hungered, and Jesus died.
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And because God can't do these things, Jesus can't be God.
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And what they are doing is fundamentally misunderstanding this most central and powerful truth about Christ, that while He is divine, He took upon Himself flesh so as to become fully human.
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And in His humanity, He hungered.
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In His humanity, He thirsted.
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In His humanity, He grew in wisdom.
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He prayed to the Father.
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He experienced temptation.
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He had a real corporal body.
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And He died a real death on the cross.
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You see, the humanity of Christ is the great condescension.
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He stepped down to us so as to bring us up to God.
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Now, there's something extremely important about the humanity of Christ which is important for us to know and understand.
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And this is one thing that I wanted to make sure that I included because I think that it can be confusing.
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Jesus Christ had a completely human nature, but that does not mean that He possessed a sinful nature.
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That's so important that we understand that He had a completely human nature, but that does not mean that He possessed a sinful nature.
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Because one Muslim teacher that I heard actually argued that.
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He said that humanity is inherently sinful and if Jesus was divine, that means He took on a sinful nature.
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And because God can't sin, Jesus can't be God.
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That was his argument.
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But here is the fundamental flaw.
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And listen closely, because I know some of my good theology students may want to argue with me.
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Let me finish before we debate.
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Sin is not an inherent human quality.
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Sin is not necessary to make someone human because Adam was created without sin.
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Now, once Adam sinned, he had a sin nature and he has passed that sin nature onto all of his posterity.
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We are all sinners in Adam, the Bible tells us.
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But Jesus was not born of Adam.
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Jesus was born of God.
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Jesus was born of a virgin and many scholars have argued and I agree that that shielded Him from the Adamic nature.
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This is why Jesus is called in 1 Corinthians 15.45 the last Adam.
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The first Adam brought death, but the last Adam brought life.
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The Bible is adamant that Jesus Christ was completely sinless in His full humanity.
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2 Corinthians 5.21 For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
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Who knew no sin, the Bible says.
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1 Peter 2.22 Written by the apostle Peter.
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The one man who knew Jesus probably better than anyone.
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What did he say? He committed no sin, neither was there any deceit found in His mouth.
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No sin.
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Hebrews 4.15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
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Hebrews 7.26 For it is fitting indeed that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unsustained, separate from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.
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He is holy.
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He is unstained.
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He is separate from sinners.
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He is sinless.
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1 John 3.5 You know that He appeared in order to take away sins, and in Him there is no sin.
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The consistent testimony of Scripture is that Christ is sinless.
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So thus we can say He is fully man and fully God.
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So what does all this mean to us? Understanding who Christ is and understanding His nature is a vital part, not just of the Christmas season.
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It is a vital part of being a Christian.
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Throughout the years, people have made many false claims about Christ.
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Some claim He was a Gnostic, that He married Mary Magdalene, and He had many children.
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That was Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code argument.
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Such a fallacious, silly argument, but yet people want to believe anything they can about Jesus except for what the Bible teaches.
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Others claim He was a heretic who taught falsely about His own position as Messiah.
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And some claim He was just a mere Rasul, a mere prophet.
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That's the Muslim position on Christ.
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Some claim that He was not divine at all, and others claim that He was not really human.
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But the consistent Christian teaching throughout the history of the church among the godly saints was simply this, that Christ is the union of two natures.
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Fully divine and fully man.
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And during this season and beyond, my prayer for you is that you would come to a deeper understanding of this, and it will help you grow in your own faith.
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That when you are challenged about what you believe about Christ, that you will be able to stand firm upon the Word of God and know your Christ as He has been given to us in His Word.
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Our Father and our God, we thank You for this opportunity to have studied Your Word together.
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I pray, O Lord, that we would all have a right understanding of Christ.
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That we would be able to stand up against the challenges of our faith and be able to articulate that Christ is fully God and fully man.
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I thank You for this season wherein we are encouraged to study these things again.
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And we are encouraged to remember who Christ is.
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And I pray that now, as we begin to just get ready for another week, that we would, as the body of Christ, seek to be conformed to His image.
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And that begins, O Lord, with a better understanding of who He is.
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And it is in His name we pray and for His sake.
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Amen.
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Beloved, stand with me now.
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We're going to sing our final song.
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If you have a need for prayer, we encourage you to come forward as we sing.