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The scripture reading of the morning is from the Acts of the Apostles, the 17th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and for three weeks he

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argued with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, "This Jesus whom I proclaim to you is the Christ." And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few

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of the leading women. But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked fellows of the rabble, they gathered a crowd, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the people. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brethren before the city

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authorities, crying, "These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another King, Jesus." And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard this, and when they had taken

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security from Jason and the rest, they let them go. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I'd like to talk to you this morning about my favorite subject, Jesus our Lord.

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I said to you some months ago that it was my hope, across the brief time that we would have together, to explore with you all of the phrases of the Apostles' Creed, that creed we use so often in worship. To this date, we have explored only two, the phrase "the Holy Catholic Church" and the phrase "the communion of

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the saints." I begin this morning an Advent series of five sermons, which I'm calling "The Christmas in the Creed," and which focuses upon the phrases in the Apostles' Creed that particularly pertain to this Advent season. I begin today with the phrase "Jesus Christ." We say, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of

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heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ." The first word, of course, "Jesus," is our Lord's name. He was Jesus of Nazareth. The second word, "Christ," is his title. Some people make the mistake of thinking that Jesus and Christ were his first and last names. That is not so. The first word is his name. The second word refers to his

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status. The first word speaks of his humanity. The second word speaks of his deity. What we're concerned about this morning, then, is the relationship of the human and the divine in Jesus Christ. And let's think first about the manhood of his person. The name Jesus was a very common name in the first century, but by

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the second century it was popular no more. The Jews would not use it because they had come to despise the name of Jesus, and Christians would not give the name of Jesus to their children because the name had become so holy and so precious to them. The name, then, Jesus, speaks to us of the humanity of Christ.

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It says to us that when he was tired he felt like we feel when we're tired. It says that when he wept his tears tasted like salt just as ours do. It says that when he cut his hand in the workshop it bled in the same way our hands would bleed. It says that he was a tradesman who sometimes had trouble collecting the

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bills that were aided to him and who was cheated by some people who sought his services. It says that he loved friends just as we love friends. It says that he was concerned with unemployment just as we're concerned about unemployment. It says that he loved children just as we love children. He entered into life in

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full humanity, and that's a very important thing to hold on to. For when we say that Jesus was fully human we are saying that he entered into the whole spectrum of the human experience. There are some people you see who develop a kind of area code theology, and they suggest that Jesus is only interested in

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things like religion and church and conversion. But the fact of the matter is that Jesus entered in to the totality of human experience. The Bible says that all things were made by God. It says that at the beginning. It says at the end that all things will be fulfilled in God. The Bible is concerned from the beginning to

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the end about all things, and when Jesus entered into the human experience he entered into it in terms of all things with the exception of sin. He was without sin. The incarnate Christ then speaks to us about the most worldly concerns. We read in the scriptures about how he's concerned about poverty. He has words to

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say about foreigners. He speaks about the proper use of one's money and cash reserves. He speaks about the treatment of captives and slaves. He's concerned about taking the few things that widows still own. He treated women in an altogether remarkable way for the first century. He speaks about labor and the

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laws that apply to the fair use of labor. Everywhere he went he set up an outpatient clinic for those who were ill. He speaks about justice. He says to us again and again, "You cannot say you love God if you do not love others who are about you." He's not interested in just those things which we commonly

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enumerate as sin. You don't find him talking much about smoking or swearing or using alcohol. You don't find long dissertations on prostitution or pornography. All of these things are sin and all of these things he was concerned about, but he was just as concerned with every other area of human experience. I

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heard about a priest, one of whose responsibilities was to hear the confessions of nuns in a certain convent. And somebody asked him on one occasion what it was like to hear the confession of a bunch of nuns. He said it's very much like being stoned to death with marshmallows.

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Well, Jesus wasn't only interested in the things that we so readily describe as sin. He was also concerned about international relations and economics and the race question and political things and all of the things that are of the warp and woof of human experience. There was a case that came up in Canada

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about six years ago. Some farmers were delivering tainted milk to a dairy. They were allowing fecal material from their cows to get mixed in with the milk. Now when the dairy discovered this, they would pour out the milk so that it couldn't be used. And then they would place a large red spot on the can,

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because the name of the farmer who delivered that can of milk was on that can also. And this was supposed to embarrass him in front of others. There's the big red spot and that would force him to clean up his dairy and to deliver a pure product. Well, there was one farmer in the area who was well known as a very

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devout Christian, but he delivered on two different occasions tainted milk to the dairy. So they put the large red spot on his cans. And when he saw this, he broke into a long string of oaths and profanities. The next week, he was put out of his church. He was not put out of his church because he was offering a product

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which would take cow manure into the sweet mouths and stomachs and intestines of little babies. He was put out of his church because he swore. The fact of the matter is, Jesus is concerned about the misuse of the tongue, but he's just as concerned about the poisoning of little children. He enters into every dimension

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of the human experience. Louis Casals tells about a man who was a theist, believed in God, but he did not believe that God had become incarnate in the person of Jesus. He could see no reason for such a thing. His wife and his children believed, but he did not believe. And so on Christmas Eve, when they went

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off to the worship service for the newborn king, he scoffed and stayed at home. It was a bitter cold night. And as he was sitting in the living room, he heard a thumping at the window. And he went to the window, and birds, being overcome by the intense cold, were flying into the window, trying to get to the

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warmth and the light where he was. Now, being a very sensitive soul, he promptly went outside and opened the doors to the barn, turning on all the lights so that the birds could enter. But the birds were afraid to enter. So he left the barn, thinking that if he wasn't there, they would come. But they still held back. So

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he took bits of bread, and he made a little trail up to the barn, and then he put the bread in the barn, thinking that that would call them in. But they were still afraid to come. Then he stood in the barn and whistled like a bird, thinking he might be able to call them in. And they still didn't come. And he

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went out and tried to shoo them into the barn. And they flew away in terror. And finally, as he walked away, despairing because not a single bird had come into the warmth and brightness of the barn, as he walked away, he said to himself, "I guess the only way in which I could ever communicate with them would be to become

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a bird myself." And suddenly, he understood what Christmas was all about. Suddenly, he understood what the Incarnation was all about. And falling on his knees in the snow, he thanked God that God has come as a man, entering fully into the human experience in order to communicate with us all the glory which was his to

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give. Jesus, that's the manhood of the Master. But he was also called Christ. And the word Christ means "anointed." It's the New Testament word, which is the equivalent of the Old Testament word "Messiah." The Messiah was the coming of God into history. It was the climactic event of history. And so we see in this

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word, Christ, the acknowledgement that he is very God of very God come into history. Now, interestingly enough, Jesus never refers to himself as the Messiah in the New Testament. And there's a good reason for that. You see, across the centuries, the Jews had been conquered and subjugated for so long that they had come

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to have a certain image of the Messiah, which was not what the Old Testament taught at all. Their image of the Messiah was a military lord who would come in and break the bonds of any that oppressed the Jewish people, someone who would set them free from human conquerors. And this, of course, is not

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what Jesus came to do. So Jesus did not use the word "Messiah," lest the people who heard him in their confused thinking mistake the term. After Jesus ascended to be with his Father, then the early church took on the task of explaining that he was the Messiah. But this is the important thing to remember. Even though

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Jesus never called himself Messiah, he claimed in his ministry all of the authorities which belonged only to the Messiah. For example, he claimed ultimate lordship. He said that "I must be in your life more important than your mother and father." Now, no other leader in history has ever said that. Alexander the Great

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never said that. Ulysses Grant never said that. No leader of men has ever said that "I must come in your life even before your mother and father." But Jesus claimed that kind of authority. He claimed the ultimate authority in truth. He said that what he said was quite ageless and would never pass away. "The

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sun, the moon, the stars, these things," he said, "will disappear, but my word will last forever." He claimed the ultimate authority in love. He said his love would never cease. Now, there are times when even Great Niagara is frozen over and that organ of sound, the falling of that water, is silenced. But Jesus said his

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love is more faithful than Niagara. It will never be held back. Jesus claimed the ultimate authority as judge. He claimed to be able to forgive sins. Now, if someone hits you in the nose and you forgive them for doing that, that's one thing. But if someone hits you in the nose and I forgive them for what they've

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done, that's quite a different thing. Yet Jesus claimed to be able to forgive the sins of all men and that they might not be held against them anymore. He also claimed to be the ultimate presence. He said that he would intrude into time and history whenever it was his desire so to do. That's the reason we write essays

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about Lincoln, but we sing songs about Jesus. There is not only a continental difference, there's a cosmic difference between a great character out of the past like Abe Lincoln and a person who is not only out of the past but is in the present and the future like our Lord Jesus Christ. There was a young sailor in

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the American Navy whose name was Pete Massaro. He was from Pennsylvania and he was on a PT boat. You remember those are those fast little attack boats and on one occasion just at dawn the boat lurched and he was thrown overboard and as he went overboard his leg slammed into a stanchion and was cut. The boat

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roared on and he found himself in the dawn streaked waters with no one about and he felt down and he could feel the blood coming from his leg and as he looked up he saw in the water some 40 feet from him the fin of a shark and he knew that that blood was drawing that shark and as he looked about he saw

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another shark a distance away. They were gathering and so he prayed. He was a believer, a Christian. He did not pray that he would be saved for he saw no possibility of that. He prayed that death might come quickly and that he might be with the Lord he loved and as he prayed he remembered that when he was in Sunday

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school there had been a life-size cardboard cutout of Jesus stood in one corner of the room and on the bottom of it were the words "Behold I come quickly blessed is he who believes." Now he hadn't thought about that thing for years but he saw that image and suddenly as he opened his eyes he saw that image

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become reality and Jesus coming across the waters to him as he struggled there. And reaching out to Jesus he began to splash in the water to reach up to this one who was coming for him so quickly and as he splashed in the water a sailor on a ship which he couldn't see saw with his binoculars the splashing called to

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the ship's attention it came over and pulled him out of the water. The sharks kept away until that time that he was pulled out of the water safely. Now no one comes into the present out of the past like that except Jesus Christ. He claims you see ultimate authority in truth, in love, in justice, in presence and

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these are things which only God himself can claim. This speaks to us you see of the majesty of his deity God and man. Now how these two things are mingled together in him is of course a great mystery. Very very hard for us to understand. Paul tries to explain it to us by saying that he emptied himself of

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his deity in a sense and took on the form of a servant. The word form that he uses there is a word which refers to outward appearance. In other words what Paul says is that he appeared outwardly as a man but at the center of himself his essence was still divine. I don't know if that helps or not. Christ in the

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form of a man with both a human and a divine essence. I am helped by thinking of it in these terms. We know through our study of physics that all substance is made up of energy. So one can say that Jesus has within him not only the energy that belongs to all of us in our created natures but he also has the

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energy of God. See you've got to be careful you don't make a mistake here. Jesus was not a man who became God and Jesus was not a God who became man. Jesus was God and man both at the same time. His substance, his essence, his energy was both human and divine. You know that the energy, the electrons and protons and

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neutrons that are part of us and every other material thing, those things are constantly moving about. Well I think of Jesus in those terms. If you want to see the human and divine in him you have to think of him not in terms of a snapshot, a still picture, but rather in terms of a moving picture, a motion picture. It's

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like a bird. If you take a picture of a bird in flight, you with your camera taking that snapshot stop the bird as it were and you catch it with its wings extended and it's still. But looking at that picture you're not going to see the flight of the bird. You're not going to see the bird moving. The only way in

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which you can get a picture of that bird flying is to take a moving picture when you can follow him as he moves through the treetops. All right. It's as you watch Jesus moving through life, as you see the things that he did, as you hear the things that he said, as you become part in your involvement with him of his

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movement in time. It's in this way that you can get in touch with him both as a human being and as the divine. In a sense God is like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now no one can measure and master the Encyclopedia Britannica. But in Jesus Christ, God has come to us in paperback. Now that doesn't mean that we can now

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measure him or master him. But it does say that we can confront him and be in touch with him and be in relationship with him in a way which is much closer to our level. It is a matter of personal relationship. Now we talk a lot about personal relationship with Christ and interestingly enough the phrase "personal

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relationship" never appears in the Bible. But that doesn't mean it's not true. The fact is that it is as we experience him as a person in the movement of our lives that we come to know him both on his human side and his divine side. I had a college youngster say to me on one occasion, "I would like to have much more

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faith than I have." And I said to him, and I suppose this was a bit rough, but I said to him, "If you had much more faith what would you do with it?" The fact of the matter is you live a very comfortable life. You live in the midst of great ease and luxury. There are no challenges. You do not risk anything for your religion.

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You do not adventure anything with regard to your faith. As a matter of fact no one who did not hear you say you were a Christian would even know that you were a Christian insofar as your conduct is concerned. So what would more faith do for you? Faith moves into the lives of the people who spend the faith that they

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have. The people who come to church on Sundays are the people who have been expending their Christian energy through the week in the service of Christ and they come to have their tanks filled again. Those who do not come are those who have never used enough of the fuel to have the need to be refilled again. Now

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it's as you plunge yourself into life, as you get caught up in the whirling wheel of the human experience, as you take up your cross daily and follow Him, as you shed some blood and some sweat and some tears in His behalf, it's when you do this and do it in His name and do it out of commitment to Him. It's when you cry

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out to Him because He is the one you have to find your strength in when no other strength is satisfactory. It's when you need Him with all your hearts and with all your soul so that your very body is tired until His energy flows into you. It's in that kind of service that you discover Him in both His

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humanity and His deity. He says, "Follow Me!" And when you follow Him, you begin to know. He says, "Do this!" And when you do it, respond to His commands, you begin to know. It is to these that He reveals Himself. In their toils and in their sufferings, in their joys and in their sadnesses, they learn in their own

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experience who He really is. What I'm saying to you is, you cannot know Him either as Jesus or as Christ until you can call yourself disciple. If you'd like to become a disciple this morning, if the Holy Spirit is softening your heart, I invite you now in this time of prayer to offer yourself to this One

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who stands so ready and willing to be your Master and your Savior, your friend and your Lord, Jesus Christ. Let us pray. If you are so led of God, make this prayer yours. I have heard about you many years. I've heard songs about you and words about you. Some people that I've

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known and loved know you and love you very much. But I have never, I have never until now offered myself to be your disciple. I realize that to serve thee I must be cleansed. I confess to thee my sin, my weakness, my fear, my anxiety, my pride, all those things of which I am ashamed and those things of which I'm

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not ashamed but ought to be ashamed. I ask you to take them all from me. I know that your death upon the cross was not for your sake but for the sake of men. So Lord, I claim the blood of your cross and I want to be your disciple. If you will, by your grace, enter me in some special way so that I may know in my heart and

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it might show in my life that you are Jesus and you are Christ and you are mine and I am yours forever and forever. Lead me to those who can help me grow as a disciple. Amen.

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...you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves. His peace. [Music]

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