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[wind] This is Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman titled, "God in Paperback." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message.

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This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use, in full or in part, requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourselves or others is heartily encouraged. [music] The name of Jesus is so sweet.

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I love its music to repeat. It makes my joys full and complete. The precious name of Jesus. Jesus, oh, how sweet the name.

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Jesus, every day the same. Jesus, let all saints proclaim its worthy praise forever. Lovely is his name, lovely is his name.

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Sweeter than a thousand angels can proclaim. Speak it tenderly, oh, speak it tenderly. Lovely is his name to me. Oh, lovely name divine.

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And I know he's mine. Brighter than a million stars could ever shine. He's my rock, my shield, my tower. I will praise him every hour.

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Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Lovely is his name. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. There's just something about that name.

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Master, Savior, Jesus. Just like the fragrance after the rain. Jesus, Jesus, oh, Jesus. Let all heaven and earth proclaim.

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Kings and kingdoms will all pass away. But there's something about that name. Jesus. The mere mention of that name has calmed the storms,

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healed the broken, raised the dead. In the name of that one Jesus, sin-hardened men have been softened, melted, derelicts transformed,

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the lights of hope restored to the eyes of drug-crazed people. In the name of Jesus, hatred and bitterness turn to love, forgiveness, arguments cease. How often a parent is at the bedside of a child,

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perhaps delirious with fever, called upon that name. And I've sat beside the bedside of people whose moments have been numbered on earth,

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who used the last portion of their strength to call upon earth's sweetest name, Jesus. Jesus. Emperors have tried to destroy it.

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Mental men, philosophers have tried to stamp it out. Tyrants have tried to wash it from the face of the earth. The very blood of those like you and I who proclaim that name. And there shall be that final day when every voice that has ever uttered a sound,

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every voice of Adam's race, shall raise in one grand chorus to proclaim the name of Jesus. For in that day, every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

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So you see, it just wasn't chance that one day long ago, the angel came to that Virgin Mary and said, "You shall call his name Jesus." You know, there is something about that name.

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Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. There's just something about that name. Master, Savior, Jesus. Like the fragrance after the rain.

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Jesus. Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Let all heaven and earth proclaim kings and kingdoms will all pass away. But there's something about that name.

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Yes, there's something about that name. Let us hear the words that the Apostle Paul wrote about that name. There in his letter to the Philippians, the second chapter, they begin with the verse which is numbered five.

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"Have this mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,

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being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him

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and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

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to the glory of God the Father." And may God bless to us and to our hearts this reading of his word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,

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and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I want to talk with you this morning about my favorite subject. I want to talk to you about the Lord Jesus Christ.

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And I want to speak to you of him in terms of the Apostles' Creed. I told you almost two years ago that I wanted to explore from this pulpit all of the more than 20 affirmations which are part of the Apostles' Creed, that we wouldn't do this as one extended series,

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but every now and then we would touch upon another of its truths. To this point we have considered the phrase which announces that Jesus ascended to his Father. We have pondered the words, "the Holy Catholic Church,"

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and we have thought together about the communion of the saints. But today, and for the next four Sundays, I want to think with you particularly about what the Creed says about the birth of Jesus, about his entering into our mortal experience,

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about his nativity. I want to talk with you about what I have chosen to call the Christmas in the Creed. And we begin this morning with just two words, the words, "Jesus Christ."

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I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord,

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Jesus Christ. The first of these words, "Jesus," was a very common name in the first century, just as common as Tom, Dick, or Harry are today.

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By the middle of the second century this was not so. The Jews would not use the name because they hated Christianity, and the Christians would not use the name because the name was so holy to them they would not think of giving it to their children.

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So within a hundred years of the earthly experience of Jesus, the incarnate experience, the name was no longer common, but when he had it, it was a very common name. And it is significant that those who wrote this Apostle's Creed

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chose to include this name in the Creed. The Creed, you see, was written in opposition to a heresy, which was perpetrating havoc within the Church. This heresy was called Martianism.

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And the Martianites believed in the deity of Jesus, that he was God, but they denied his humanity. They denied that he was a man, just like other men. And therefore, those who wrote this Creed put into it

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many phrases which speak about Jesus' humanity. They say he was conceived, that he was born, that he suffered, that he was crucified, that he died, that he was buried. All of those are very physical terms.

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And the truth is further accentuated by their alluding to him by his very common proper name, Jesus. In doing this, the Church was testifying to what the Scriptures so painstakingly and carefully announce,

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that God in his fullness entered fully into this life, that he came as a man who was not different from other men. Now as soon as you recognize that, you have to put to death in you any tendency toward what I call "area code" theology.

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There are those, you see, who are willing to acknowledge Jesus as the Lord of their heart, or as the Lord of their soul, or as the Lord of the Church. But there are some areas of life in which they do not see him as Lord.

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As soon as you announce that his name is Jesus, you are announcing that he is a man. And as soon as you affirm in the Creed that he is a man, you are affirming that he is involved in everything that concerns men.

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No area of the human experience is outside his sovereignty. No area of the human experience is outside of his interest. No area of the human experience is outside of his involvement. As every man is part of life, so he was part of life.

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As every man is part of all of life, so he was part of all of life. The Bible begins by affirming that God made all things. The Bible concludes by affirming that in the end, all things will be brought to fulfillment.

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That point in history in which God most significantly involved himself with all things was when he came as a man, as a man who was involved in all things. And as soon as you call him Jesus, as soon as you affirm in the Creed that his name was Jesus, you are saying that this God who became man, fully man, holy man,

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this God is interested and involved in every dimension of every life. A few years ago, they had an incident which occurred in Canada, which has relevance to what I'm trying to say. Some milk was showing up at inspection stations in cans which had in them barnyard filth.

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Obviously, the inspectors threw this milk away. It could not be used. But they went on to paint big red X's on the outsides of these cans. The point was this, the same farmer always got back the same cans. And if those red X's were on the outside of his cans,

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other farmers would see that he was not keeping those cans as clean as he ought to, and the embarrassment was supposed to lead him to do what he should have been doing. That was the strategy. A certain farmer who was very devout, very Christian, who belonged to a fundamental sect,

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showed up one day to pick up his cans and discovered that the milk had been thrown away and red X's painted on the outside of the can. And he immediately broke out in a very profane public curse. Now, three days later, this farmer was thrown out of his church,

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expelled from its membership. Not because he had put cow manure into the mouths of babies and into the intestines of little children, but because he had cursed. Now, if Jesus were to confront that farmer, he would say to him,

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"Yes, it was wrong for you to swear, but it was wrong for you to be careless with the lives of little ones. Yes, it was wrong for you to have profaned God, but it was just as wrong, it was no less wrong, for you to have profaned the life of any of these infants. Filthy speech is wrong.

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Putting filth into children is just as wrong. I am Lord not only of what you say, I am Lord of what you do. I am Lord of your business. I am Lord of every dimension of your business.

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I am Lord of every dimension and segment and facet of your life, of your human experience. As you are a man, every part of you is part of me, for I was a man. And no part of you is separate from my sovereignty. No part of you is separate from my lordship.

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No part of you is separate from my rule." And he says that to all of society. There is a story in the Gospel of Mark which makes this crystal clear. Jesus is walking through a wheat field with his disciples. It's the Sabbath day.

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They're hungry. So they take some of the wheat, they rub it between their hands, make a little cake with the moisture from their hands, and proceed to eat it. The religious authorities see them and criticize them for working on the Lord's day.

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Jesus responds, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And I am the Lord of the Sabbath." Now what is he saying? He's saying this.

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God did not establish a Sabbath in order that men might have something that they would have to obey. On the other hand, God wanted to bless men. And therefore he made the Sabbath in order to give men an opportunity to rest. And when Jesus asserted this, he asserted that there is no institution on the face of the earth,

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sacred or secular, religious or irreligious, nothing of the church or nothing of the state, there is no institution that exists anywhere, which exists in order that men might serve it.

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Every institution, Jesus says, must exist in order to serve men. And then he goes on to say, "And as I am man, and the Lord of men, so I am the Lord of every institution, be it secular or sacred, be it church or state, be it inside the fellowship of believers or outside the fellowship of believers.

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It is beneath me, and I claim it." I suppose that I should bring this home to us here in Glendale this morning. Let me do it in this way. At the Horace Mann School here in our community,

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there are some children who are too poor to buy their lunch every day. Now that may come as somewhat of a shock to you, but whether it shocks you or not, it's still true, and I can prove it. There are children going to the public schools of Glendale, California, who not only do not have adequate breakfasts or dinners,

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but whose parents are unable to give them the 50 cents that is necessary for them to buy a lunch. So they go to school all day without any food. The PTA in that school put out a table with peanut butter and jelly and bread for those kids. I guess that's not a very nourishing lunch, day after day after day, but it's better than nothing.

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They did it as long as they had the money, but they ran out of the money and couldn't do it anymore. We are the only church in Glendale which has a ministry in South Glendale, and so the cry for help came to us, and we began that day to provide the funds for those youngsters to have lunch every day.

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And we will continue to do that. Why? Because we cannot imagine Jesus standing by while any child went hungry. And if Jesus would not stand by under such circumstances, no disciple of his can stand by either. He as a man knew what it was to be hungry.

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Anyone who reads the scriptures with any seriousness understands his involvement in all of life. He cared about poverty. If you've ever read the Bible, you know that. He cared about foreigners and the citizens of other countries. If you've ever read the Bible, you know that. He cared about captives and prisoners. If you've ever read scripture, you know that.

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He scored those who took the property of widows and old people. If you've ever read the scriptures, you know that. He defended the sanctity and the unity of the family. If you've ever read the Bible, you know that. He lifted women to a level above every other segment of that society in those days who disparaged them so commonly. If you know anything at all about scripture, you know that.

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He cared about children. He loved them. He played with them. He protected them. If you've ever read any scripture at all, you know that. He cared about laborers, how many hours they worked and how much they were paid while they worked. If you've read the Bible, you know that.

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He cared about citizens and justice with regard to those citizens in the kingdom of heaven or in any earthly kingdom. If you know anything at all about scripture, you know that. Jesus said again and again that your love of God will be measured by your love of men. And John picks up the theme, "If you say you love God and don't love men, you're a liar and the truth is not in you."

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Jesus, the man, says we must be concerned about men. And that means little children who don't get anything to eat at Horace Mann School in Glendale, California. And I charge the Church and Society Committee of this church to find out why that goes on in Glendale, California. Why does any child in this city have to sit hungry during the day?

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Why aren't we a part of the federal programs that will supply youngsters with the food that they need to learn? Let's take hold of that and press it to the end. Let's take every ounce of strength and reputation that this church has behind it. Let's demand an answer.

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And until we get an answer that is a right answer, let's sing it loud. Children aren't being fed in Glendale. And in the name of Jesus, we'll feed them or demand that someone does. For he was a man and concerned about the things of men.

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Christ. We say Jesus Christ so easily it's almost like it was his first and last names. Of course it isn't. Jesus was his name. Christ was his title.

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The word Christ is the Greek form of the Hebrew word Messiah, which means the anointed one of God. So the first is his name, the second his position. Messiah, the anointed one, is the king of everything that is. He is the one toward whom history moves and from whom all history proceeds.

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That's the reason we divide time with his coming into B.C. and A.D., before Christ and in the year of our Lord. Jesus becomes the hinge of history, the climax of history. That one who draws up within himself everything that history is to be. That one who is the perfection of holiness and justice and goodness and wisdom and truth.

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That one who is nothing less than God himself. The Messiah is God. The Messiah is the wholeness and the fullness of the divine. Now it's true that Jesus never described himself as the Messiah. There's very good reason for that.

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You see, in that day the Jews had been conquered so many times that they came to think about the Messiah as some kind of a military hero whose function it was to get them out from under the heel of the Romans. Had Jesus announced himself as being the Messiah, they would immediately have tried to force him into some kind of role of military leadership and he wanted nothing to do with that.

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So he never used that word of himself. After he had ascended to be with his father, however, the disciples and the early church went out and began to teach the Jews that the picture of the Messiah in the Old Testament is not that of a military hero, but rather of one who would suffer and die and would rise again and would bring to men completeness and wholeness not only in life but outside of it.

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But don't make the mistake of thinking that because Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah by using that word, that he did not claim messiahship in other ways. He most assuredly did proclaim his own deity. He claimed, for example, ultimate authority. He said, "A man is to leave his father and mother and follow me."

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Now, no other leader of men has ever said anything like that. Alexander never demanded that kind of an oath. George Washington never demanded that. St. Francis of Assisi never demanded that. Hitler was probably the most demanding dictator, authoritarian that ever lived, but Hitler never required that.

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Jesus is the only one to claim ultimate authority. Everything else stands aside and I am first. He claimed to be ultimate truth. He even called himself "the truth."

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And he went on to say that everything in life would fall, collapse, fade away, except what he said. The heavens and the earth, gone. The sun will fall, the moon will fall, the stars will disappear, the earth will be rolled up like an old newspaper and thrown onto the fire.

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But my word, he says, will endure forever. That's the claim to ultimate truth. He claimed to be ultimate love. There was no shadow in this love. There was no darkness in this love.

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This was a complete, bright, burning love that would be extended to us forever. They stopped Niagara Falls. They stopped the Niagara River long enough to make necessary repairs on Niagara Falls. They stopped those rainbows from over the water.

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They stopped the tremendous roar of that organ of sound which comes out of those cascades. They stopped Niagara Falls, but no one will ever be able to stop the love of Jesus Christ. That's what he affirms. He claims to be ultimate justice.

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That means that he can forgive sins, and he does. And you would rejoice and be exceedingly glad. He claims to be ultimate justice. And he claims also to be ultimate presence.

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He says, "I can come from outside of time into time whenever I wish. I can be with you always. There is no place to which you can go. There is no circumstance in which you will be found, which I do not come into at my own will."

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Pete Massaro was a Christian who grew up here in California. He was serving on one of our Navy's vessels. One night, the ship suddenly lurched. He was thrown up against a stanchion, felt a sharp pain in his leg, and then toppled overboard.

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When he regained consciousness, the boat was gone, and he was alone. He could see no one, nothing. His leg was paining him. He pulled it up so he could see, and it was bleeding. He put it back down into the water just as the dawn began to send streaks of light across the surface.

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And he saw, 30 feet away from him, the black fin of a shark. And he knew that the blood seeping from his leg was attracting that shark. Now, because he was a Christian, Pete Massaro prayed. He did not pray to be saved. He saw no possibility whatever of his life being saved.

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He actually prayed that it would be over with quickly, and that he would be able to spend eternity with Jesus. And as he prayed, there came into his mind the image of a life-size cardboard figure of Jesus, which had stood in the corner of his Sunday school room when he was a child. And at the bottom of that statue, as it were, were these words,

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"Behold, I come quickly. He that believes will be saved." And as he thought about this, and he'd never thought about it since the days when he'd be back in that classroom, suddenly he realized that this figure of Jesus which he saw before him was not that cardboard figure, but that he actually saw the Lord Jesus coming to him across the top of that water.

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And on seeing that, he began to swim as vigorously as he could, straight toward Jesus, which was straight toward that shark. And the shark kept backing up as he got closer and closer to his Savior. And then as he swam on, another shark joined the first one,

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and the two of them went apart and began to converge on him from opposite angles. And when they got in very close, he began to kick and to strike out furiously in the water to try to drive them away, with his eyes upon Jesus, trying to drive off these sharks. And it was at that moment that he lost consciousness.

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And it was at that moment that a lookout on a Navy ship, many miles away, saw that splashing in the water. How? And that ship came under forced draft, and those sharks did not touch him during the time it took for that ship to get there. And they put down a boat after driving off the sharks,

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and they pulled him up into the boat, and as they pulled him up into the boat, he regained consciousness for a moment. But he reported later that in that moment of consciousness, he did not see a sailor, he did not feel the touch of a sailor, he did not hear the word of a sailor.

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He saw Jesus. He felt the hands of Jesus, and he heard Jesus say, "Behold, I come quickly. He who believes in me will be saved." Now, Jesus can come into life like that because he's Jesus Christ. He is not only the fullness of the human, he is the fullness of the divine.

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And he can come into life at his will as ultimate authority, ultimate truth, ultimate love, ultimate justice, ultimate presence. This is the capacity which is his. And as soon as you confront that, as soon as you confront this one who is at the same time God and man, well, then you're confronting a mystery.

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How can this be? It does not embarrass me at all this morning to tell you that I cannot explain how this can be. I have no interest in a God who can be compassed by a test tube, or measured in a Petri dish, or somehow determined with litmus paper. It does not embarrass me that I cannot give you some formula which details how God and man can be one.

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Indeed, I'm rather glad this is so. For I think if we could detail it precisely, we might become more fascinated with the detail than we are with him. You know how we are with folks. We get an idea or an attitude or an opinion with regard to someone,

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and every time we meet them, we don't really meet them, we just meet our idea or our attitude or our opinion regarding them coming back at us. I'm sure that I do this to other people because I know other people do it to me. We think we have one another on tape,

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and we respond not really to the person, but to our preconceived notions about the person, and I wonder if we could detail, define, measure precisely how God and man can be one in Jesus Christ, and we become more entranced with our Christology than we are with Jesus Christ himself. All I can say about it is what the Bible says.

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Paul, in the passage read to you, announces that he counted equality with God not a thing to be grasped, that he emptied himself, that he took upon himself the form of a servant, that he was made in the likeness of a man, that he humbled himself, that he was obedient to death, even the death on the cross.

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Now the important word in that series of words is the word "form," "took upon himself the form of a man," for the word "form" is the word "morphe," and it has to do with outward evidences. If you're 49 years old today, you have, according to science, had seven different bodies,

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because every cell in your body changes every seven years. Now you are the same person, you're the same person you were the moment you were born. You, as an individual, have continued to be, but you've had seven different outward manifestations. That outward manifestation is the form, or the morphe.

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Your essence, your substance, is the same, and what scripture teaches is, and what the creed echoes, is this, that the God and the man in Jesus were the same substance, the same essence. It's only the outward manifestation that was different.

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Now we know from science that substance is made up of energy, so we could say that the energy of God was in the energy of man. And as we think about energy, we recognize that energy is always in motion, and that, it seems to me, is how we have to understand how the human and the divine are related in Jesus,

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in terms of motion. I learned this from Karl Barth, who in turn learned it from John Calvin. If you want to take a picture of a bird flying, so that you can study the flight processes of a bird, you don't take snapshots, you take a motion picture.

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Also, you can't take two snapshots of Jesus, one human and one divine, and try to understand the union of the two. You've got to take a motion picture. You've got to see his life.

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You've got to be studying his life. You've got to see the interaction of the human and the divine in him. While we are studying together the next five weeks, this life of Jesus, I hope you'll be reading "A Good Life of Jesus."

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The best one that's available is "The Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ" by James S. Stewart. I'm going to repeat that. "The Life and the Teachings of Jesus Christ" by James S. Stewart. You can get it at our book table, or you can get it at any bookstore.

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It is an absolutely brilliant analysis of the relationship between the human and the divine. Get hold of that. You see, what I'm saying is a mystery. I'm not saying that a man became God.

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I'm not saying that God became a man. I'm saying that there was one who was at the same time both God and man. And you can only understand that by seeing him in history. By seeing him as he really was.

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You know, you could never master or comprehend everything that's in the Encyclopedia Britannica. You just couldn't do that. It's too big. But if we could bring the Encyclopedia down to paperback,

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well, you still wouldn't be able to understand and comprehend it all. But somehow it's more approachable that way. The theological definition for God is this. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.

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In his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. Now, how do you get personal with that? But when you talk about Jesus Christ, God in paperback, you can become personal with him.

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And that's what faith is, personal relationship. Oh, I know, the Bible nowhere says the words "personal savior." They don't appear in Scripture. But personal relationship is what faith is.

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We may proclaim the Gospel, "God so loved the world," but when we receive the Gospel, it always comes like this, "He loved me and gave himself for me." It becomes personal.

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So a young man says to me, "I don't have enough faith. I don't believe enough." And I say to him, "That doesn't surprise me. Why should you have faith?

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Your parents feed you, they clothe you, they keep a roof over your head, they take care of your doctor bills, your dental expenses, you're going to a good school, you're being taught the things that you need to know in life.

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What risks are you running? What burdens are you bearing? Really? Faith comes as you need it. There's an economy to faith. God gives exactly as much faith as is needed at any given moment.

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You will notice that Job made no great, brilliant theological speculations while everything was hunky-dory with him. But when he got into trouble, and when his wife turned to him one day and said, "Curse God and die!"

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He considered that option for a moment, and then he became marvelously theological when he said, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." You see, it's when you go with Jesus that you come to know Jesus Christ.

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It's when you go with Christ that you come to know Jesus Christ. It's in the going that there's knowing. You've got to throw yourself into the whirling wheels of life like He did. You've got to take up your cross and follow Him as He Himself commanded.

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That's where you discover Him in His fullness. That's where you know Him as He really is. The man who put it better than anyone else I've ever read was a great Christian, Albert Schweitzer.

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Schweitzer spent a good number of years trying to understand Jesus Christ. He wrote a magnificent book about it called "The Quest for the Historical Jesus." This man, who was a genius three times over, devoted years to the analysis of Jesus Christ,

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but at the end, this is all he can say. Yet when he said it, he said it all. And I leave you this morning with his words. "He comes to us as one unknown.

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Without a name as of old by the lakeside, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us. He speaks the same word, 'Follow.' 'Follow thou Me.'

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And He sets us to the tasks which He is to fulfill in our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself

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and the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, He will reveal Himself. As an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience

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who He is." That's the way you know Jesus, in your own experience. That's the way you know Christ, in your own experience. There is no other way to discover this God in paperback.

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Let us pray. O God our Father, it is amazing beyond our understanding that Thou shouldst come down and should take upon Thyself the flesh of man, that Thou shouldst become indeed a man and shouldst be at the same moment Thyself.

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Grant that we might discover Thee in the living of our days. Grant that we might come to know Thee as we go with Thee, claim us totally, with Thy manhood and Thy deity. Swallow us in the mystery of Thyself

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and we shall give Thee the honor and the glory forever and forever. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit the Comforter be with you now and forevermore.

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Amen. ♪ Look now away from my house, O Lord, ♪ ♪ be fresh, renewed with my blessings of this day. ♪ ♪ Keep the Word of truth in our hearts, rejoice, ♪

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♪ may we not forget Thee on our old birthday. ♪ ♪ Amen. ♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]