Beyond the Basics 4 - The Person of Christ (Pt 2)

Father, what a blessing it is to be here this morning, even as we stepped outside of our homes this morning and really got the first bit of fall chill, just a reminder of how you sovereignly work in your creation, how you bring change to us, how we are completely dependent upon you.

One cannot even imagine a winter here in New England without homes, without the comforts of modern life.

Father, we praise you for those things. We praise you for having a building to meet in, for brothers and sisters of like -minded faith to gather with.

Lord, as we turn to your word this morning, I pray that you would use this time to bolster our confidence in the scripture, to remind us of the things that we already know and to encourage us,

Father, to be faithful proclaimers of Christ and him crucified. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

All right. Well, the last time we met, we talked, we started talking about the person of Jesus Christ and my good friend,

Wayne Reese, is Wayne here this morning? I think Wayne is here, but I think he may be serving somewhere else or he may have, you know, signed up for the

Kamikaze class, also known as Pastor Mike's Discipleship class. I closed in prayer last time and Wayne came up and he says, you know,

I feel like I've been cheated out of 10 minutes and I looked at the clock and I'm going,

I let you guys out early. I never let you out early. And I'm telling you, I looked at the clock twice before I close and I go, oh, it's like two minutes before, you know, meltdown time.

It's 948. I don't want to go. I don't want to move on. Twice I looked up there and both times it was 948.

I should have known better because it wasn't really 948 at all. You know, it was just the little hand getting close to the 10 and Pastor Steve can't tell time.

So it was, I'm just like, wow, we still have lots of time. So Wayne told me that I, you know, took 10 minutes from you guys and no,

I'm not going to tack it on to the end of this class. All right. All right. We talked about, uh, some of the names of Jesus, what those names mean, you know, and I think the key thing that we talked about is point

E last time, our mediator first Timothy two five, which says that there is one mediator between God and men, the man,

Christ Jesus. And why is that so important that there is one mediator between God and men, anyone at all?

Okay. If there are two mediators, how do you know they're both saying the same thing? Certainly. I see a hand,

Dr. Binnie, or were you just adjusting your glasses? Okay. All right. Anybody else?

Why is it so important that we have one mediator? What does that tell us? One God?

What's that? One way to God? Yes. One, let's say one means of access to God also.

Right? So what's that? One truth. A lot of truths congealed together in that one fact that we have one mediator.

We talked about, I'm sorry, one master. Absolutely. We talked last time about, uh, praying to saints, about praying to Mary.

What do you suppose Mary's doing right now? Worshiping God.

You know, do you think, I mean, here's the problem. If you start saying, listen, you can pray to Mary, you can pray to Jude, you can pray to, who are some of the other saints,

Christopher, Joseph. Now I won't tell you my joke about the perpetual virginity and about Joseph, but you can kind of fill in the lines.

I mean, it's just that it's absurd to think that any saint, no matter how good they were or are, first of all, it's absurd to think that they could somehow contribute to a treasury of merit that then would be applied to us.

Like somebody could have more than enough merit to get to heaven on their own. What does that imply? Works.

In other words, there are some people who are so good that they deserved heaven all on their own.

And you know what? They not only went, let's just use a football metaphor. They not only went the hundred yards and got a touchdown, they went 120 and guess what happens that extra 20 yards, you can lay claim to it by praying to them.

That's absurd. Nobody could do that on their own. Not one single human being who has ever been born that was just human.

Only Jesus Christ could do that because he wasn't just a human being. God in the flesh went an infinite number of yards and it is his merit on which we depend to get into heaven.

One other point about there being possibly one, more than one mediator, what does that imply?

Let's, let's just use Mary since the current trend in Catholic theology is to call her the co -redemptrix, the co -mediatrix that she mediates.

Here's the picture that a current Roman Catholic theology paints is that you pray to Mary and then

Mary intervenes. She mediates with Jesus who then in turn says, well,

I can't turn down my mother. So I'm going to go to the father on behalf of the request of the mother that was made to her by whomever.

And I will intercede for those for whom my mother asked me to intercede for.

Now is there any scriptural warrant for that? No. In fact, first Timothy two, five would tell us the exact opposite.

But the other issue that I want to raise this morning is think about this. What does that say about Mary? If let's say right now, 10 ,000 people across the globe are praying to Mary.

She's very, very busy. In fact, we would say that she is omnipresent.

She's omniscient. She is the fourth person of the Trinity. That's a real problem.

Three people in the Trinity, not four. Very key scripture, first Timothy two, five.

Great truths revealed to us about God in it, about Christ.

Any other comments or questions, Pam? Yeah. She was just saying that some

Catholics will describe, they'll say, yes, Jesus is the head of the church, but Mary is the neck.

And we can find that in many places in, I don't know where we would find that. Yeah. First assumptions.

I know Charlie and I are going to be talking about a Steve Martin thing later, but yes. Good point.

Yeah. One of her, well, why can't

Mary be an intercessor? She's dead. Yeah. That's a little problem. Besides that, again, you know, we get back to first Timothy two, five.

What does it say? There's one mediator. Well, she's not a mediator. She's an intercessor. Whew. Yeah.

There's a, what's that? Splitting hairs. Yeah. It depends on what the word is, is, yeah, it really gets at the sufficiency of Christ.

Is Jesus enough? Is he all we need or do we need somebody else's help? Bruce, scripture talks about Jesus being our intercessor.

Scripture never talks about Mary. Again, you know, if you took all the scripture written about Mary and you put it in one source, how much space do you think that would take?

Yeah. I'd say you'd have a hard time filling a page. You'd have to use some pretty, pretty big font to do that.

Yeah. Yeah. They don't pray to them. They ask them to pray for them.

And again, you know, just a couple of problems. First of all, they can't hear you because they're dead.

Secondly, if they could hear you, they're too busy with other things, namely worshiping the triune

God of the universe who saved them to be bothered with you. And thirdly, it's

God's job. This is what the Lord does. And not to go too far afield, but just to give you an idea, you know, this whole praying to the saint system came about through what?

When, you know, the early church, I'm going to be talking about this tonight, the early church faced a lot of persecution for the first couple of hundred years of its existence, depending on who the ruler of the

Roman Empire was. Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less. And then wonder of wonders, the emperor of the

Roman Empire, and his name is going to escape my, you guys will know, but he became a

Christian. Constantine, yeah. He became a Christian, although I'm not really so certain he did, but he declared

Christianity the official religion. And what did he do to make it acceptable, palatable to everyone? I'm sorry?

He mixed it with pagan practices. And so instead of this pantheon of gods that they all worshipped, he said, you know what, we don't need that anymore, but, you know, basically, what if we assign the saints to what all these gods used to represent, and you can pray to them.

So whatever God represented, you know, sailors at sea was now a saint.

You know, whatever. And so it goes, you know, patron saints for this, that, and the other thing are no more and no less than replacements for the idols that existed before them.

Bruce, do you have another comment? Thank you for asking.

Help me out. You mean praying to the dead? Well, I mean, I don't know,

I'm not, I'm not well versed on that, but let me just say that I do think,

I mean, it's clear in the New Testament, I mean, we don't have any New Testament prohibitions against that specifically, but we would have

New Testament commandments to do other than pray to dead people or to chat with dead people.

I mean, would you go to a seance? No. So why would you pray to dead people?

You know, help me out. It's pretty insane. Yes. Yeah, the

Old Testament, the Levitical law strictly prohibits that, you know, the witch of Endor. What a scary concept, you know,

I mean, if you're praying to dead things, you don't expect to get a response. And if you do run,

I mean, who wants to, I don't want to deal with all that anyway. So we have one mediator, you know, and again,

I mean, there are so many applications. I feel like I could give an entire sermon on this, but just think about some of the other applications.

We're talking about necromancy, praying or trying to speak to dead people. Well, how about if we have one mediator between God and men, why would we do things like consult astrology charts, tarot cards?

I mean, what are all those things? They are attempts to find out information known only to God. So every single one of those is some kind of perversion of this truth, that there are ways of getting information, that there are ways of accomplishing things that avoid our

Lord and Savior. All right, moving on to point F, talking about Jesus.

He is our Passover lamb. Let's look at John 1, 29. And who has that?

I do. The next day, John the Baptist, talking about him, John, the next day he saw

Jesus coming to him and said, behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Now what was the picture that John the Baptist was bringing up? Sacrifice, Passover lamb.

They would understand this. If he would have said, behold, the rooster who takes it, it would have meant nothing to them.

Behold, the giraffe. They wouldn't have gotten that. But this was part and parcel of the

Jewish culture, the Jewish religion. They understood exactly what his point was, because a lamb was used as a sacrifice during Passover.

I just get bugged by little things. I notice I miss the parentheses here or there or something, you know, it just bothers me.

I'm fired as my own secretary. The idea, and you've heard this before,

I'm sure, the idea of having a Passover lamb, well, I mean, when did it begin?

In Egypt, right? And one of the plagues was that God put on Egypt was that they were going to have to, that the firstborn of all

Egypt, everyone in Egypt was going to die unless they obeyed what

Moses told the Israelites to do, which was blood of the lamb over your doorpost.

So which meant obviously that you had to do what? You had to kill a lamb. Now did that, killing that lamb, did that grant them forgiveness of sins?

Okay, the obedience did. Why? It covered them.

Okay. Okay, good. Very good.

So really it was symbolic, but it's always in the

Old Testament, you know, well, let's just clear this up right now. How many ways are there to be forgiven of your sins in the

Old Testament and New Testament? Which is substitution of Christ and it is faith, not in your own works.

We've talked about that, how nobody could run the hundred yards, the bad metaphor all by themselves.

It has to be the perfect work of Christ, but there's no amount of effort that could ever get you there. And so it was always by faith alone, you know, just to briefly summarize it, one needed to understand who

God was, that he was almighty, that he was the creator and owner of everything, that he was holy, perfectly holy, that he would not abide sin, that no sin could enter his presence.

Secondly, you had to know who you were. You had to know that you were a sinner, that you were unfit to enter into the presence of God, that you had no claim on entering into heaven on your own merit, that there was nothing you could do to make yourself right.

Thirdly, you had to understand that someone, and obviously the Old Testament saints would not know who, but you had to know that God would make a provision for your sin, that he would bring a

Passover lamb, a permanent Passover lamb on your behalf. And we now know the name of that Passover lamb, the

Lord Jesus. And then fourthly, and of course, when you read the beginning of the

New Testament, you're still in the Old Testament era. Why? Because the new covenant has yet to be inaugurated.

Jesus hasn't been put to death. And what are some of the first things that John the Baptist and Jesus say?

How do they start their ministries? Repent. You need to repent. You have to turn from your own life of sin and relying upon yourself and turn to the

Lord Jesus Christ. So when we talk about him being our Passover, the picture then for the

Jews would be of that great horror, really, that was visited upon Egypt and how

Israel was passed over because they had the blood spread over, I mean, if you've watched the

Ten Commandments and who doesn't every Easter, spread over their doorposts so that the angel of death passed over their house and they did not suffer the judgment that was visited upon Egypt, namely the death of every firstborn in their home.

The picture of a lamb is just spread throughout scripture.

Isaiah 53 talks about this Messiah, pictures the

Messiah Jesus, again, not named yet, but Isaiah 53 talks about how he would be a lamb led to the slaughter.

And what does a lamb do as he's being led to the slaughter? Kick and scream, fight and scratch, it goes right along and that's exactly what the

Lord did. Yeah, he was quiet. Lamb was offered in the daily sacrifices of Israel, if we were to read through Leviticus 14, which we won't.

And he is our once for all sacrifice. Let's look at Hebrews chapter 10, verses 5 to 10, and by the way, here's a little quiz for you apropos absolutely of nothing.

Why do many scholars, including our own

Pastor Mike Scholar, believe that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews?

There's a real easy answer to that. And it's based on, I mean, there are a lot of funny things just in the way the books are placed in the

New Testament. And if you notice it's placed right after the last book that we know that Paul wrote,

Philemon. And so then we have Hebrews and the ancient church did not know who the writer was, but they believed it was

Paul and that's why they put it right after Philemon. So anyway, there you go. There's today's trivia for you.

Okay. Hebrews 10, verses 5 to 10. Who has that? Dr. Bruce.

Okay. So there you have it. He is our once for all sacrifice, our once for all substitute.

Paul writes somewhere else. Well, we'll talk about the substitute part, but he's our sacrifice.

There had to be a sacrifice for sin. There had to be death, the payment, the shedding of blood.

By the way, I think Pastor Mike talked about that a few weeks ago. It isn't simply the blood of Jesus.

Nothing really particularly magical in his blood. Did his blood have to be shed? Yes. But whenever it talks about blood, the blood of Jesus, it's not just talking about him bleeding, it's talking about him dying.

It's a metaphor for the death of Christ. He had to die on our behalf.

Point G, Jesus is our substitute, our substitute.

And this is without a doubt, in my mind, the key issue in all of scripture.

And why do I say that? Anybody? Without it, everything else tumbles.

Without Jesus Christ taking our place and actually us being given his righteousness.

In other words, 2 Corinthians 521, he, talking about God, made him, talking about Jesus, to be sin.

He made him who knew no sin, that's the correct way. So Jesus, without sin. He made him who knew no sin to be sin, to become sin on our behalf.

That we might become pretty good. That we might become neutral.

No. That we might become the righteousness, the righteousness of God in him.

We obtain the righteousness, the perfection. That which is needed to get into heaven, we get because Jesus is our substitute.

All of our sin, all of it placed on him at the cross. All of his righteousness, his perfect obedience, the fact that he never sinned and he never sinned and he did everything right.

All of that credited to us. So the great transaction, the greatest transaction in history is simply this.

Us, wretched, defiled, sinful, hopeless. All of that put on Christ at the cross.

His perfection, his righteousness, his holiness credited to our account.

That we, when God looks at us, he doesn't see our sin, our frailty, our lack of righteousness.

What he sees is the perfection of Christ. And that is how God can be both just, in other words, doing the right thing, doing exactly what is right, which

God always does, and the justifier. He can declare us righteous.

Why? Not because of what we have done, but... I'm sorry?

But because of what Christ did. That's exactly right. I think the, without question, the greatest doctrine ever, because it's something that you just...

And you know what, just as another moment, I've said this before. When I was a Mormon, I can remember being,

I think I was 17, and sitting there one evening with my buddy, sitting on the hood of my 69, my beloved 69

Mustang, which was, you know, was a great machine.

Anyway, sitting there, and we were just talking about the meaning of life, you know, as 17 -year -old young men do.

And I said, you know, I just have one issue. I don't see this whole

God thing turning out well for me, you know, when I'm supposed to perfect myself and become a God.

I can't get through a day without sinning. And Mark said, well, don't worry about it.

You know, you'll be all right. We'll all be all right. Wrong view of Christ.

He didn't make us, he didn't bring us back to neutral. He wasn't a man like we are. He was far more than just a man.

He was our substitute. H, our willing ransom, and I'm watching the clock, and I'm going to get it right today.

He's our willing ransom. Let's look at 1 Timothy 2, verse 6. Anybody there yet?

I mean, you know what, Steve, you do have a list of the scriptures, so you can cheat and go ahead, you know, it's all right.

Stephen, so key to note that, that he, the testimony given at the proper time, he gave himself as a ransom.

Gave himself. Didn't have to, wanted to. What does it mean that he was our ransom?

He paid the price. The price to whom? To Satan? No, to God, Mike.

Yeah, and that's right. We were held in bondage to our sin.

And you know, when you think about the debt that sin causes, to whom is that debt due? There is a theology out there that says, listen,

Jesus had to pay the debt to Satan. That we owed a debt to Satan.

Well, that's just upside down. Satan's holiness was never at stake.

It's the holiness of God. Our sin is an offense against him. It is him to whom we owed a debt.

And Christ paid that ransom. He paid that debt. Okay, let's talk about the incarnation of Jesus.

His human birth. Him coming into the world. It's a literal miracle.

Let's look at Matthew 1, 23 to 25. I think I briefly talked about this before. I don't know, so many things run together for me.

Yes, we, I said he had a miraculous purpose, but it's good to be reminded of this.

A literal miracle, if a miracle can be defined as God intervening in the time -space continuum and doing something that cannot naturally be explained, then the birth of Jesus, which is how

I would define it, by the way, the birth suspending the laws of nature, that's what God does when he does a miracle.

You know, you wanna talk about crossing the Red Sea. Why is that a miracle? Because it's not normally dry and the water doesn't normally separate in the middle so that people can walk through it.

That's what a miracle is. It's something that cannot normally happen. So, you know, like for example, let's say your team is down seven to nothing and there are a couple outs in the seventh inning and they rally.

That is not a miracle. That can happen naturally. A miracle is something that only

God can do. And God is not a Red Sox fan, sorry. Matthew 1, verses 23 to 25.

Who has that? Pastor Dave. Okay, now aspects of the virgin birth that are a miracle.

First of all, virgins don't have babies. Let's read what Wayne Grudem has to say about this.

This is a fulfillment of prophecy in Isaiah 7, 14 that a virgin would have a child.

In Genesis 3, 15, what does that say? Talks about actually in the curse,

God talking to Adam and Eve and then he talks to Eve and he says that, yeah, your seed shall crush the head of Satan is the idea.

And so this is the seed of Eve, not the seed of Adam and Eve. Why just the seed of Eve?

Because he was going to be born of a virgin. Wayne Grudem says, the virgin birth made possible the uniting of full deity, all of God and full humanity in one person.

This was the means God used to send his son into the world as a man, conceived by the power of the

Holy Spirit inside a virgin. So we have the seed of the woman, fully

God, fully man. I like some of this, so I'm gonna go through it real quickly.

All this is from Wayne Grudem. It probably would have been possible for, I mean, there are a number of possibilities, but this is how

God chose to do this. For God to create Jesus as a complete human being, right, apart from Mary, and send him to descend from heaven to earth without the benefit of any human parent.

But then it would have been very hard to see how Jesus could be fully human as we are, right?

We wouldn't see that. He wouldn't be fully human because he wouldn't have been born of a virgin.

On the other hand, it probably would have been possible for God to have Jesus come into the world with two human parents. But then we wouldn't really see

Jesus as fully God. So then we see in point four, it helps us to understand how

God in his wisdom ordained a combination of human and divine influence in the birth of Christ so that his full humanity would be evident to us from the fact that his ordinary human birth from a human mother and his full deity would be evident from the fact of his conception in Mary's womb by the powerful work of the

Holy Spirit. A miracle, something that cannot happen apart from the work of God.

Now, do you have to believe in the virgin birth of Christ in order to be a Christian? Yes, okay, just checking.

You scratch your head. Okay, number three, the humanity of Christ. Is Jesus fully human?

Is he 100 % human? Well, I thought you said he was also God. Okay, good, good answer.

What does it mean that he's fully human? Well, amazingly, we'll talk about that first, but let's talk about what it doesn't mean.

It doesn't mean that he's born with a sin nature. Why wasn't Jesus born with a sin nature? No human father.

The curse of Adam, his original sin not passed on through the lineage of the father.

Good, notice, we'll just go quickly through this. B, C, and D, he got tired.

He fell asleep, why? Because he was tired. He got hungry. Of course, most of us would be hungry after 40 days.

Most of us would be dead. That's where the God part comes in. D, he experienced emotion.

He wept. You know, there's your memory verse for this week. John 11, 35, Jesus wept.

Take it home, memorize it. Verse four, we could go on.

There are many other things we could say. He grew in knowledge and in stature. There are many things in scripture that would lead us to understand that Jesus was fully human.

Human. He's also fully man, point number four, or fully

God. The deity of Christ. Emptying of self or kenosis is the 25 cent word.

Let's look at Philippians 2, verses six to nine. And by the way,

Guido, how do you deal with Mary's sin?

Okay, well, there are a few ways to go on that. One is you can make up a doctrine where Mary was born without sin, which would be the

Catholic way of doing it. Or you could do kind of, was it Pastor Lewis or Pastor Dave, someone who said that,

I think it was Pastor Lewis, was talking about how because he had no human father, he does not receive then, if we read

Romans five, you know, it is through one man that sin entered into everyone, you know, into all humanity.

So if we were to take his genealogy and were to put moms on this side and dads on this side, well,

Jesus has no male genealogy. And so Adam isn't up there. And so in essence, the curse that was brought upon all mankind through Adam is missing in Jesus because he doesn't have that lineage.

So that's the point. Do you have a further, a bit, and I think we'll probably get deep into the weeds if we, you know, it's probably like a theological journal article, but that's the, well, she would be correct.

So that's, it's a tough class,

I'm telling you. The 25 cent word for emptying of self is kenosis.

And by the way, you know, we frequently will sing the altered version of, and can it be, the yellow ones in the back.

And the reason we do that is because the, the version we have in our hymnal contains what

I, what I call the kenosis with a vengeance. When it says that he, yeah, that he emptied himself talking about Jesus, that he emptied himself of all but love.

Well, that's not really true. If you read scripture carefully, you'll see that he did not cease being

God and he didn't get rid of all of his attributes except for love. So what is the kenosis?

What does it mean? Okay, he gave up the independent exercise of his prerogatives.

Independent is a great word, because basically what did Jesus say over and over again? I'm not, in other words, he didn't say, he didn't say,

I'm not independent. What he said was, I came to do my father's will.

So he was saying, I am dependent upon the father. I'm doing what he tells me. And so when it says, or when

Pastor Lewis says that he set aside the independent exercise of his prerogatives of, you know, being

God, what that means is he only did what the father allowed him to do, what the father wanted him to do.

So when he knew their hearts, we might read in different passages, it was in fact him being

God and he knew their hearts because it was the father's will that he know their hearts. Let's read

Philippians 2, verses six to nine. Who has that? What intrepid soul, Pastor Lewis.

In verse nine, when

Jesus came into this world, he did so, he was sent by the father, true?

And he did so to complete, in fact, the father's will.

And what we see there is, you know, he made himself nothing or what else does it say? Emptied himself.

It's that humbled himself. The idea is, think about it. He left the father's throne.

He left that perfect communion. I mean, one of my favorite passages in all scriptures, John 17, where he talks about Jesus praying to the father and he talks about basically, he wants to be restored to that perfect relationship that they had before.

And you'd get just a little picture of the relationship between the father and the son and you realize what a love there is, what a bond there is and what obedience really means.

Humbled himself, made himself a bond servant, a bond servant of whom? Of the father.

Came here to do the father's will. Set aside, I mean, you know, the idea that Jesus is a baby, here's a little

Christmas insight. I don't really think he never cried. I don't really think he came out of the womb, you know, talking and telling people what to do and walking around and, you know,

I don't think it was that way. I think he was just like any other baby. Why? Because he voluntarily laid aside those prerogatives.

B, sovereignty. Jesus Christ was sovereign.

What does it mean to be sovereign? What does it mean to be sovereign?

To have authority. Did Jesus always have all authority?

Yes. Did he always exercise it? No. I mean, if he had, the whole, you know, crucifixion scene would have gone down a whole lot differently.

Sovereignty. Matthew 28, 18, part of the Great Commission, and Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

All authority, absolutely sovereign. I mean, think about the examples, and I mean, there are many examples we could give.

I don't know how many of these I listed, but was Jesus master over creation?

I think that's in our next lesson. Was he a master? I mean, is there anything that Jesus said, you know what,

I just don't have the capacity to do that. Did he stop the waters?

Could he bring the dead back to life? He's sovereign over everything. He's also eternal, not created.

Who can cite John 1, 1? Peggy? I'm just like, gonna fall over here.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was a

God, right? No, sorry. Yeah, New World Translation. I shouldn't have memorized that version.

In the beginning was the Word, who is the second person of the Trinity, Christ. So does that mean that Jesus had a beginning?

What does that mean, in the beginning? What's that? At the beginning of time,

Jesus existed when time was created. It wasn't time created, then

Jesus created. Jesus existed when time was created, why?

Because he was eternal. He is eternal. There's never a time when Jesus did not exist.

Colossians 1, 16 says that all things were created by him and through him.

What can we learn from that? All things, again, include him, all things.

So we know that he was not a created being, that there was not a time that he did not exist.

D, aseity. There's another 25 cents. You know, if you saw all the words that you learned this morning, you probably got yourself 50 cents.

Aseity, self -existence, John 8, 58. Jesus says to those questioning him, he says, before Abraham was,

I am. Very key. We've talked about it in terms of, I know

I've talked about it. I think I talked about it during the Mormon class. Talked about it as an evidence of Jesus Christ's claim to divinity.

Because what he's saying is, look back. You guys know Exodus 3, 14. Of course, they didn't have the numbering system.

But he was talking to a Jewish audience and he tells them, listen, before Abraham was, I am. And they knew exactly what he meant.

They knew exactly that he was saying that he was God. Because I am is a statement of self -existence.

It was what God told Moses, tell them I am sent you. And what he was saying was, listen, I am the eternal

God. I had no beginning. I'll have no end. I go on forever and ever and ever. That is my essence.

Jesus made that claim of himself. He is immutable, unchanging. Hebrews 13, eight says that he is the same yesterday, today, forever.

He is also, now I'm really watching the clock and it's right this morning. He's also omnipotent.

Is there anything that Jesus Christ cannot do? Cannot sin, good.

Cannot lie. But in terms of having the power to do whatever needs to be done, can he do it?

And the answer is yes. Let's look at Philippians three, verses 20 and 21.

And who has that? Seeing no hands.

For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for a savior, the

Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of his glory.

By the exertion of the power that he has even to subject all things to himself.

Think about the power that is talked about in this verse. First of all, to take us from a body that is,

I mean, what happens when you die? What happens to your body? I mean, and how long does it take to start decomposing?

I'm sorry? Immediate, I mean, it's not getting any better. You know, when you die, you know, things start happening.

Really bad things, which we don't need to get into. I got an amen.

All right. But look at that. He is able to take our dead body and bring it into the conformity with the body of his glory.

He's going to make us like him. And then look at that last phrase there. By the exertion of the power that he has even to subject all things to himself.

So what is not subject to the power of Christ? Nothing. When it says all things, does that mean most things?

Some things? Almost everything? All things.

All things. There is nothing that he cannot do, which ought to encourage us.

We're going to end right there. We will finish this and we'll start on the next one. The next Sunday.

Bruce, would you, Bruce left. So he will not, I will. Let's close in prayer. Father, what a joy it is to think about our savior.

To think about the wondrous work that you designed before time began.

That you, the son and the spirit agreed upon before time began. And how with great humility, the son came into this world by an act of your spirit, miraculously in the womb of a virgin.

Doing all things according to your will with the sole purpose of redeeming a people for your glory.

Lord, what a blessing it is to think about that truth, to be recipients of your grace.

Lord, we rejoice in that this morning. Just bless the rest of our day, just thinking about the greatness of what has been accomplished for us by Christ Jesus.