Before we get into
our Bible study, would you help me
welcome, joining all 12 locations
and church online, our 13th Fresh Life
Church location in Deer Lodge, Montana, meeting
for the first time this week. Come on, let's welcome them in. Everybody at Fresh
Life Deer Lodge, we are so glad
that you are here. And we just speak
and believe and pray grace upon what God's
going to do as we now have church inside a prison. And we're so excited,
so again come on. It's really a thrill
and a privilege and a special opportunity. And our prayers are just
going to God, asking him to not only work in the
lives of those who are serving out a prison sentence and all
of that and the reality of life with your family, your
wife, and kids outside or whatever it is that's
brought you to this moment, we just want to say, we speak
life and strength and peace over your soul. And so you just have
people on the outside who love you and
are praying for you. So thanks for being
a part of this. Thanks for coming. [APPLAUSE] We hope that you
feel welcome here. This is not a church
where you have to believe in order to belong. And so it's a safe
place to listen to what scripture says
about Jesus and to worship, and hopefully receive the love
that you're no doubt feeling from our Fresh Life Impact
Team, from a few different of our churches who are
driving in each week to make this possible,
so we're really grateful. [CHEERS] And I want to just
throw out there how thankful I am for the
entire prison staff that's accommodating this, and also
the Department of Corrections in the state of Montana,
that you would allow us the privilege of coming
in and navigating through the complexity
and realities of having church inside of prison. So we're excited about it. We know there's going
to be some kinks we're going to need to work out. But we believe in
the years to come, as we have a chance
week in and week out to put on these
worship experiences inside the walls of
the prison, that God's going to do great things
through it to His glory and to help people. And we all say grace,
grace on that, amen? Amen, amen, so good. All right. So the title of my
message this week is Not a Good Person,
Not a Good Person. I know you have to act really
like, you have it all together. But I think we've all
thought that meaning some of God's special
children, you know, like we've all just,
we've been smiling nice, but we're not a
good person, right? Colossians, chapter 1, what
I'm really talking about is, have you ever
met a Cowboys fan? All right. So here's what we find in-- just reading the
Bible here, guys-- here's what we find
in Colossians 1, verses 15 through 19. I'm just talking about
the arrogance really. Here's what verse
15 says, "He is the image of the invisible
God, the firstborn over all creation." He's talking about Jesus. "For by Him, all things were
created that are in heaven and that are on earth,
visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or principalities or powers. All things were created
through Him and for Him. And He is before all things,
and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of
the body, the church, who is the beginning, the
firstborn from the dead, that in all things, He
may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father
that in Him all the fullness should dwell." You may be seated. And what we're doing
in this series, and this is week two of a
series, what we like to do is we like to take a
collection of talks, and they're all lumped
together on the same topic. And so this collection of
talks, we've called Creed. And what it is is an examination
of the load-bearing walls of the Christian faith. It's important to
identify, especially when you're doing any sort of remodel
or construction work, what are the load-bearing walls. And that's where you
want to be mindful, you're not removing them. It's, like, can we kind
of remove this wall and make the kitchen
and the dining room into just sort of a great room. It's like, that'd be great,
but the roof would fall down. So, no, you cannot
remove that wall. It is important that it stays. It is essential to the
structural integrity of this facility. That wall is a
load-bearing wall. What the Creed is
is it's basically identifying for us,
out of this whole Bible and what we believe. And within the diversity
of Christian churches that have existed, and that
I believe bring God glory and have been since Jesus
walked this earth, you know, the churches that see
different things stylistically and different ways of doing
things that are different and maybe not how we would
do it or not our conviction, but we all agree on
these things, right? There's the unity of the
historic Christian faith and what we would say the
load-bearing walls are, and that's what we're examining
in this series between now and Easter. If we call ourselves
Jesus' followers, what do we mean by that? And we're sort of
nailing that down. And if you didn't catch the
talk that began the series last week, please do grab
our YouTube account, YouTube.com/FreshLifeChurch,
or our podcast or app, which are freely available,
where we see 60,000 to 80,000 people will listen to
messages each week, just listening into what we get
to be a part of here at church online and Fresh Life
Church every single week. And so it's amazing
that you can do that, so check it out because I
took a good amount of time, really nailing down some
of what the creed is, what the creed isn't, what's valuable
about them, what they don't do. One of the things we said was
that it's a consolidation not an incantation. So it's not like a Harry
Potter thing, where if you say, the big bad spider leaves
because you said something, you know. And neither is it punitive,
where it's like, oh, I sinned last week. I'd better say the Creed 14
times today, instead of 11. And God's like,
good, OK, good thing. 14? OK, we're good, because if
it had been just 12, no. You know, there's
not value in it except so far as where it's
truth about scripture that informs our mind and
encourages our hearts. We're basically taking
a big book of truth, and we're nailing it down to
what is essential about it. Or as we said, it's the
irreducible minimum when we talk about following Jesus. But if you missed last
week, listen to that because I'm not going
to go through all of that every single week. As we have new
people jumping in, I'll just point you to that. And then we'll just kind
of continue as we go. Now the phrase in
the Creed that we're going to be kind of focusing
in on and guiding our time today is the line that says,
"I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the
power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary." Hello, that's awesome. Would you just real quickly,
put your hand towards me, if you believe in such things,
and say a quick prayer. Ready, repeat after me. Dear God. Dear God. Help this guy. Help this guy. Preach stuff. Preach stuff. That is way the
heck over his head. That is way the
heck over his head. In Jesus' name, amen. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. All right, because that's some,
that's some stuff right there, man, right? We've now come in our
study of the creed to the part that
focuses on Jesus. And the Creed is
basically an enlargement of what Jesus said when he
told us how to baptize people. It's so helpful
being a pastor, when Jesus said, hey, you
want to baptize somebody, here's what you do. You baptize them in the
name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And that's the
outline for the Creed. Because the first paragraph--
what we studied last week-- is all about the Father. Who is that guy, right? Who is He, right? And then the end of the
Creed is a paragraph all about the Holy Spirit. And that'll be what
we'll be focused on as we get to
Easter Sunday, where it ends with this whole
thing about, I believe in the Resurrection of the body
and life everlasting, amen. Drops mic, walks off stage. I mean, amazing, right? Great, great ending,
really nailed it. But the middle portion
and what is the most bulky of the whole Creed is the
paragraph in the middle that's all about Jesus. And we're now in it now. Now of the 24 statements
that the Creed has, a full 14 of them are
dedicated to Jesus. Why is that? Because at the
center of the Creed and at the center of
the Christian faith is the person, the
Lord Jesus Christ. He is the center. And in fact, He said-- you want
to nail down the Bible even further-- He said, you want to read
the whole Bible looking for religion. You want to read the whole
Bible thinking you're going to find everlasting life? He goes, if you miss Me,
you miss the entire thing because Christianity and the
Bible, according to Jesus, is all about Him. And by the way, He said that
to highly religious people, who thought they were so
holy and so special and really God's
gift to this planet, but they completely missed
Him and didn't like Him much. And so what He said was,
you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong if
you can read scripture but miss Jesus because
it's all about Him. And so, as we come
into this portion now, we're asking the question,
who is Jesus exactly. Who is Jesus? That if we miss Him, we
miss the whole thing. Or as one theologian put it
and put it well, "Take away from Christianity the name
and person of Jesus Christ and what have you left? Nothing! The whole substance and
strength of the Christian faith centers in Jesus Christ. Without Him, there's
absolutely nothing." One author in scripture actually
said, if you miss Christ, then we're wasting our time. No Jesus? Then what are we
even doing here? There's better things
we could be doing. It'd be a waste of
our time and energy. All right. So who is Jesus exactly? I was in the grocery
store this week. And while checking out, the
bottles are being slid across and being scanned, and
the containers and things are going by. Beep, beep. There's so many funny things
about the grocery store experience, you know, like
picking a lane, right? You ever been there? Where you're, like,
which one should I go to? Oh, you should just
pick the shortest one. No way, no way, that's
a novice mistake because you could
be in a short line but be behind some
coupon-clipping, check-writing, chatty Cathy, you know. And, hm, I've made that mistake. And so it's not about
just length of line, it's really what
you're looking for is you're trying to size
people up for efficiency, you know what I'm saying. And if you see a
lot of friendliness, no, just pick a different
lane, you know what I'm saying. And so, I'm going
through all this. And as the checkout
thing's happening, I'm getting ready with
my money because I want to be quick on the draw. And a bottle falls over,
literally just tips over. She's, like, just
grab that, bluh. And it just completely
just, uh, and both of us, it was, like, we saw
in each other's eyes, like, time stood still. And we're, like, nooooo. And just as she
grabbed it, the words just flew out of her mouth,
"Jesus, Joseph, and Mary." To which I wanted to
respond, and Alexander Hamilton and Adolf Hitler. Like, are we just
grabbing historical people and citing them? Like, what's
happening here, right? Amelia Earhart, I can
do it, too, right? Here's someone with a hammer,
the Wright brothers, right? It's, like, what is this? Like, why Jesus? Out of any name that
could be spoken, out of anything that
would fly out of our lips, here's the question. Who exactly is Jesus? Well, let's start
with His name, Jesus. That's His first name. And by the way, His last name
is not Christ, all right. That's important to understand. It's not like it was Mary
Christ and Joseph Christ. And they had a baby, well,
they named Him, Jesus Christ. No, listen, Christ is His title. Jesus is His name. And it was actually the
name God picked for His son when He was born
into this world. In Matthew's gospel, chapter 1,
verse 21, speaking to Joseph, the angel Gabriel
said, "And she," Mary, "will bring forth
a Son," because he was getting ready to
divorce this chick, man. I mean, they were betrothed. But in that day, you had
to have a form of divorce to cancel an engagement. Our version is
called engagement. They called it being betrothed. But you had to go through a
divorce to break that off. And he was getting
ready to do so, but the angel is, like,
no, no, no, it's good. She wasn't cheating on you, bro. This was actually
God's doing, and you should be his adopted father. "She'll bring forth
a Son, and you need to call his name
Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins." Now that's a pun, and it
speaks to the destiny of Jesus. Because the name Jesus
means "God is salvation." So he said, you need to
name Him "God is salvation," for that's what
He's going to do. God always intends for
us to name something based on what we believe
is going to be, right? God brought animals to Adam. He was to name them. And what he called
them, so they were. So there's an importance
to how we speak. How we speak really
does shape reality. It shapes how we think. One of the things
that really showed us God was calling us
to start this church originally was we
really believed that God wanted to do a fresh work. God wanted to do a new thing. And the word, Fresh Life,
was-- if you've ever heard our story-- essential to us
being here and not remaining in Southern
California, where we were ministering happily
or starting this church somewhere else. It was really an
assignment, we believed, that God was going
to use what He was going to do here at Fresh
Life to bring fresh life. It was named that
way because that was what it was intended to be. It wasn't just like
some flippant thing. We truly believed that. And names are significant,
and names are important. But in Jesus' day, that
was a really common name. That's the funny thing. The equivalent would be in
the Old Testament, Joshua, to name Him Joshua. And there would've been 20
Jesuses in his kindergarten. Isn't that funny to think about? You know, all the
lunchboxes hanging up, Joshua, Joshua, Joshua. It was a super,
super common name. Like, today, Noah
or Liam, those are the number one and number
two boy names in 2019, by the way, right? Why? Because that's what celebrities
are naming their kids. That's usually how it goes. But the interesting
thing, and I always hated that, because when I was
a kid, no one was named Levi. So whenever you'd go
into those gift stores, at the tourist attraction, they
had the little license plates on the carousel, never a Levi. I still usually check, and
I'm hoping, now that in 2019, Levi is number 16 most
popular boy name-- how do you like me now-- that eventually they're
going to show up. But hearing that, please
do not mail me one, right? I just say that because I'll
get 17 this week in the mail, and I don't like knickknacks. All right. So clean and streamlined
is how I want things to be. All right. So what were we talking about? Jesus' lunchbox. I said, Joshua. "God is salvation." And that is His name,
a God-given name that spoke of His assignment. Then, Christ is His title. And this goes all the way
back to the Old Testament when the world first got broken. You and I know that
the world is broken. That's what we see and feel. We sense it, don't we? There's a hundred things that
we interact with, that we're, like, that's not right. This shouldn't be. This is horrible. This is awful. There's goodness in it. There's beauty in it. But a broken clock is
still right twice a day. The original beauty of this
world that was infused, we still see moments of it. We still see pieces of it. We still see parts of it. I have a drone that
I like to fly around. It's super fun to
do, and I crashed it. And when it was broken,
there were parts of it that still worked. This world is damaged
because of something. There was a collision. There was an impact. And as you read the
Bible, the Bible doesn't tell us, oh,
this world's so nice. We just need to, we just
need to make the best of it. The Bible tells us, this
is not a good old place. It was a wonderful, glorious
place that's been broken. And God promised that
He was going to fix it. And that promise, as it's
revealed in scripture, always came through
someone who would have the title of Messiah. Messiah, there's a Messiah. You need a hero. There's a Christ figure. It literally means, "shining
one" or "anointed one." Someone's going
to show up, and He is going to set things right. He is going to deal with
the real issue internally in our souls and
then externally. The Bible speaks to a day--
if you read the back of this book-- where everything
ends well, where there's a glorious
renewing of this world. Heaven, where we know of it
now, is not the long term. Come back on Easter Sunday. We'll talk a little
bit about that. Heaven is not the
end of everything. I want to go be
up in the clouds. No, no, listen, it ends
back on this earth. The Bible speaks of
and what it ends with, before happily ever after, is
this world but without cancer. This world without
people that we love just having a stroke one day. This world without someone that
you care about, that you just said goodbye to, getting in
a car accident, and then just the pain of it. This world without
someone putting a GoPro on and walking into a mosque
and gunning people down while they're praying. I'm telling you, Jesus
Christ is coming again to judge the living and
the dead and to breathe out a power of creation
over this world, and God's restored
people in perfect bodies living in a perfect place. That's the ending
that we're longing for and that God promises. And it was through the
Messiah any of that was ever connected,
as we read scripture. So Jesus is the
promised snake crusher. Because it was through the
snake lying and deceiving mankind originally, that
everything went wrong. And God said, hey, I'm
going to send my Son. And you, serpent, are
going to bite His heel. We just sang it. You're going to bite
His heel, but He is going to crush your head. And Christ is that
snake crusher. He's the one all through the
history we've been hoping would come. And He's the one
who indeed came. Jesus, the Christ,
is His identity. That's the first point. I'm going to give
you four words I hope you'll jot down, if
you take notes in your phone or whatever. Identity is the first one. It's the identity of Jesus. And whether or not you
like Him or follow Him, you have to appreciate
the historical impact His life, His single solitary
life, has made on the world. He hasn't just changed the
world for Jesus followers. Jesus Christ just straight
up changed the world. And He's in the dictionary. I mean, that's a
big deal, right? All right. So one noted historian
put it this way, "Regardless of what anyone may
personally think or believe about Him." And I'll just pause there
and say, if you're here and you don't believe in
Jesus, you're welcome here. We welcome and
appreciate your presence that you would feel safe enough
to come and hang out with us, as we lift up Jesus. And we willingly, gladly let you
know what that life looks like. Not that we're better
than you at all. It's just that we
found something that's changed our lives. And so we would be selfish and
rude to not want to share that to you and offer it to you,
just like I would tell you about a killer
app I found about. I'd be, like,
dude, get this app. It's ridiculous. It's the best thing I've
ever heard in my life, right? We don't just evangelize
when it comes to God. We evangelize when it comes
to a great restaurant. Bro, oh, oh, my, you're
going to Houston? Well, have I got
the Tex-Mex for you. You see what I'm saying? I love to recommend
things that are awesome. And why would I not,
it's not arrogance that would lead me to evangelism. It's the fact that God's
done something wicked awesome in my soul, and I want
to tell you about it. [APPLAUSE] So where was I? Oh, right, Jaroslav Pelikan. He said, "Jesus of Nazareth
has been the dominant figure in the history of
Western culture for almost 20 centuries. It is from His birth that
most of the human race dates its calendars." I'll pause there and
hashtag that, no big deal. "And it is by His name
that millions curse and in His name millions pray." Think of it. You don't ever hear of someone
just getting really frustrated and being, like, "Buddha
Muhammad," right? I mean, it's just, what is it
about the name of Jesus Christ that triggers such an intense
reaction in you for better or for worse? That's because of His identity. That He is what God said would
be the savior of humanity. Now let's talk for a second
because the Creed goes to next about His ancestry. That's all the rage, isn't it? Ancestry, spit in
this tube and find out if you really can blame
your bad temper on the Irish that you say is coursing
through you, right? All right, St. Patrick,
so off it goes. And you find your real family
tree is devoid of Ireland, right? It's a little bit of a
disillusionment really. You've been telling
everybody that you're part Cherokee Indian for
all this life, right? And then you're, like, argh,
where'd that go, right? I haven't done it personally,
but my brother did. It came back 1.7% Nigerian. And that explains my love for
hip hop, I just feel like. So the ancestry of
Jesus, the Christ. All right. Here we go, Son of
God, Son of man. Or as the Creed puts
it, God's only Son was conceived by the
power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. Now, what this is is tension
because here's two things we're told about Him. The Creed is telling us that
Jesus is fully God and fully man. Hang with me. I know, it hurts a little bit. We should be offering Excedrin
during the meet and greet, you know, today, right? But what this is is a
theological doctrine called the incarnation. And what the incarnation refers
to is the in-fleshing of God, that when Jesus stepped
into our humanity, it was God who made the
world now entering the story. It was God, the author,
who at the keyboard, said, "Let there be light,"
and there was. Who at the keyboard
of everything said, "Let there be life,"
and there was. He now typed Himself
into the story. And He entered into the theater
of our space-time continuum, a world that He
upholds by the word of His power, the strong nuclear
force, the weak nuclear force, right? The gorilla tape
nuclear force, right? In Him, all things consist. And yet He enters into the
womb of a teenage unwed mother in a peasant city, who probably
most of them illiterate, her neighbors. And here He is,
God in this world. It's un, it's un,
it's unfathomable, and yet it's what God says
took place when Jesus walked this world, the
in-fleshing of God. The incarnation, it was not
the subtraction of divinity. It was simply-- used
very generously-- the addition of humanity. So He was still fully God,
even though He laid aside voluntarily the use of
His divine privileges. So while He walked this
world, He was fully God. Yet in His miracles,
it was Him relying on the power of
the father working through the agency
of the Holy Spirit. And in Jesus' life,
we see Him honoring the Father in
yielded submission, working through the
power of the Holy Spirit, Himself still being fully divine
yet at the same time being a human just like us. Now some who would say, you
know, this virgin birth, come on. Come on, like, even
if that's not true, we can still be inspired by Him. Even if that's,
no, it's not true. You see, it's a
load-bearing wall. Even Larry King admitted
this, who himself, outside of what we would call
the realm of Jesus followers, he admitted. You know, in his
storied career, he interviewed everybody,
presidents, everybody, you know, sat there across the table
from Larry King's suspenders, right? And he was asked one time, if
you could interview anybody that you never
got to interview-- and in fact, they opened
it up-- they said, if you could interview
anybody in human history, who would it be? You know what Larry King said? He didn't skip a beat. He said, I would interview
Jesus, and I would ask him, were you really virgin born. And he followed it up because
the person was, like, whoa. He said, if I could get
the answer to that one question, that would explain
and make sense of all of history for me. And someone named Ravi
Zacharias, whose writings have shaped and helped my
world view, as he has written on Christianity, he grew
up in India as a Hindu, but he has since become
a Jesus follower, is one of the smartest
people alive on this planet. He wrote a book called, "Jesus
Among Other Gods," that changed my life when I first read it. He has a new book out called,
"Jesus Among Secular Gods." Anyhow, he, through
a mutual friend, wanted to dig into this to
see if it's really true. And so he was able to write
to Larry King and say, did you really mean
that, you know. And can I have permission to
quote you on that, you know? And Larry King wrote back,
I absolutely meant it, and I wasn't being
facetious a bit. You see, he understands that how
Jesus entered into this world is essential to us
being able to believe how He exited this world. And once we start
playing fast and loose with what the
Bible declares, all of a sudden, what do we find? This house, this structure,
we remove the wrong wall, and everything topples down. Do you have to have a pipe
organ in church or can you have a rock band? Look, that's a style issue. That's an open-handed issue. But when we're talking about
the virgin birth of Jesus, who needed to be fully God, but
also needed to be fully man, otherwise He couldn't take
the hand of His Father and take the hand of
a sinful humanity, and that's exactly what
He did on the cross, and bring us back
into connection and bring us back
into relationship. [APPLAUSE] So as later developed,
and what we're doing in the Creed is we're
going back to the original, going back to how
it was communicated by those who walked with
Jesus, heard Jesus speak, and then were with Him after
He rose from the dead, that's what they preached. As time goes on, people start
going, well, the virgin birth wasn't this. And He wasn't fully God. He was actually just a
guy that God really loved. Or He was just fully
God but didn't have a body, or whatever developed. He didn't leave
footprints in the sand. You know, that's when
heresies develop later on. You'd walk on the beach. It's, like, what, where's
your footprints, right? And, man, if you
throw that out, you're throwing out 90% of Christian
Facebook posts from 1990 through 1997, right,
because it's all based on the "Footprints
in the Sand." And we can't not have that. But the point is we
don't have a God who saved us from a distance. We have a God who got
dirt under his fingernails and breathed our air and
went through third grade. And as unbelievable as it is,
a God who endured puberty. Think of Jesus and
His voice cracking. And it really is marvelous to
think about what Hebrews says, Hebrews 4:15, He was just like
we are, tempted in all points, yet without weakness. Therefore He can sympathize
with us as our great High Priest and mediator, not just
conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, also born. Born just like, all
of us have a birth, only difference about Him
is he pre-existed His birth. Eh. What were you doing two
years before you were born? Not a lot, right? Not so with Him. That's what Hebrews, rather
John's gospel tells us, tells us the Word,
who was always there-- that's the word for Jesus,
the Word of God, right-- He became flesh and blood and
moved into the neighborhood. And even popular
Christmas verses, and I think maybe it's
even better for us to be studying Christmas
when it's not Christmastime, because at Christmastime,
there's so much charm and warmth and eggnog, that
it's hard to actually focus for a second. It's one of the worst
days for a preacher. Just trust me, it's the
worst day because everyone's like, we have things to do. This better be really inspiring
and short, pal, right? And so just to take a second and
to talk about the incarnation, the in-fleshing of God,
and the ramifications of it at a time when
we're not distracted by all the parties and all the
gifts we need to be wrapping up is really the appropriate time. But one of those
Christmasy verses is Isaiah, chapter 9, verse 6. And notice, the pre-existence
of Christ is in it. "For unto us a Child is"-- say it with me-- born. But also at the same time,
"unto us a Son is given." He was born, but
that act was God giving Him, meaning He
was already in heaven, already existing forever, but
then given into this story by the Father. And now, again, let me
acknowledge the temple rubbing that's going on out there. Charles Spurgeon said, "This
is a mystery which we must not attempt to fathom,
for it is utterly beyond the grasp of
any finite being. As well might a gnat seek
to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to try
and comprehend the Eternal God, a God whom we could
understand would be no God. If we could grasp Him,
He would not be infinite. If we could understand Him,
then He would not be divine." So there is an element
of mystery to this. So we do not presume to think
we can fully understand it. But what do we need to do? We need to believe in it. Because once we stop choosing
to put our faith in who He says He is, then we've
removed the load-bearing walls that hold everything
up in the first place. What am I trying
to get you to see? I'm trying to get you to see
that without the incarnation, we are not left with a
Resurrection to believe in. Or to put it another way,
there can be no second birth without the virgin birth. We don't have a
God who came down to give us that spiritual birth
on the inside that we need, that we crave, that new start,
that new heart, that new life, that forgiveness of sins. If he wasn't God in the
flesh, as He said He was, then He can't do
what He promised to do inside of your
heart and inside of mine. And we are all still
stuck in our sins, and we should all probably
just exit right now and go find something else. Let's just go get high, or
let's just figure something else out to numb the emptiness. Or as many kind of come to
an intellectual honesty, if there is no God,
there is no afterlife, then there is no point. And we're all just going to die,
and the second after we die, it's just blackness forever. So the most honest
thing we could do would just be to take
our lives now and end the meaningless of it all. But since we do have
God's Son who came and since we do have a Savior,
and since we do have hope and since we do have peace,
now all of a sudden everything makes sense. And work makes sense,
and life makes sense, and art makes sense. And your company makes
sense, and your dreams, they make sense. And the passion in
your heart makes sense. And now everybody you
ever meet, they make sense because they're a
person that God loves, and God has a plan for them. And God wants to
use them, and now we can walk the streets of
this world on a mission and with hope. And you can wake
up tomorrow morning and know that whatever you do,
God cares about it and sees it and knows about it. And no one's so messed up
that God can't reach him. No one's so far gone that God
can't change them and heal them and work in their lives. And we have dignity and
value because we're not a cosmic accident or
the collection of things that banged together
and, boom, here we are. There's intelligent design
and a passion and a creator, and we have life. Now what about the Virgin Mary? What about this
individual that's a part of the story,
the mother who was given this difficult
assignment of giving birth and carrying Jesus
to term and all that? What do we make and
think about Mary? Her presence in the
Creed should cause us to ask the question,
what about Mary? And now here's what I
would say, scripturally speaking, about Mary. She deserves your respect, but
she would reject your worship. Mary is 100, are you kidding,
Mary, she's 100% worthy of your respect. There should be no
denigrating of Mary. We should respect Mary. We should honor Mary. Why? Because she's awesome. Awesome because she accepted
a really hard assignment that was admittedly a
part of a kooky plan. Now, don't hear that
and be, like, oh, that's so irreverent of you. No, it was kooky. Listen, here's what
we're going to do. We're going to
find someone who's never have sex with anybody. She's going to have a baby. Yeah, but she's going
to have a fiancee. That's going to be
great for him, too. In fact, the Bible says
later, God intentionally made the whole thing as
foolish as He possibly could, so that it wouldn't cause us to
think, you know, this is great. [INAUDIBLE] It would need for
us to have faith in God's crazy, outlandish plan. So we should give her
respect for that reason. I also would say, she
should be given respect because it was her honoring God
with her body and her love life before she ever knew that
she was being watched that caused her to be able to
take part in this whole thing. And that's inspiring to me. You know, she didn't know
the angel was coming. She didn't know. She wasn't hooking
up with Bro-seph and, you know,
all this, whatever she could have been doing. And so here comes this plan. She thought the fact that her
chastity or her saving herself for marriage was a
barrier to God using her, that she wasn't doing what
would be common in her culture perhaps in that day,
just like in our day, there's different ways
of approaching sexuality. And the fact that she
honored God in this way, she thought was a barrier. She's, like, I can't
have this baby. I've never known a man. God's, like, it is because
of that that I picked you. You see what I'm saying? I'm saying to you today,
I'm not doing this to shame anybody for how you
lived up until this point. But I would say, if from this
moment forward, you said, God, I want to honor
You with my life. I want to honor You with my love
life and my body and all that. I'm telling you, there's
going to come moments when you feel like you're missing out. But there's going to
come a day when you see, you weren't missing out. You were saving up
for God's plan for you that He had in mind
for you all along. And what I always say
is, now yells louder, but later lasts longer. And there's going to
come a day when you're glad that you chose to say, God,
I want to honor You in my life. No matter what's behind me,
from this day forward, I want to honor You
in that way, you will watch, when the day comes,
when you realize, I'm so glad. I'm so glad I chose to follow
God's plan for my love life. So Mary is worthy
of respect, but she would reject your worship. And I say that because in
scripture, anytime anybody was ever tempted to be worshipped,
Paul, one time people tried to worship him, right? Anytime, even an
angel, people tried to worship angels in the Bible
because angels are awesome. Like, if we saw one
today, we'd be, like, may, may I worship you just
for a quick minute? I won't take long. Anytime that happened, the
response was embarrassment. No, no, no, no, no, no,
ah, ah, quit it, quit it. Don't worship me, I'm an angel. Don't worship you me. I'm just a preacher. Don't worship me. I'm just a dude. I'm just a guy. Yeah, God's using
me, great, great. Paul said that, great, great,
I'm a guy, but just a guy. Worship God. They would always redirect. So anybody who's accepting
worship meant for God is not someone who's doing
what God wants them to do. And that is not
what God would have for any part of His
creation, right? So our response, right, should
be to point the attention back to God. I'm on a platform
so you can see me. I'm on a platform so that
the cameras can see me. I'm not on a platform because
I'm better than anybody, you see? So the worship goes to God. We want to direct
the attention to God. And I guarantee you, if Mary
could talk to you today, she'd say the same
thing she said to the servants who ran
out of wine at the wedding that she was at. They were, like, hey,
Mary, what should we do. And she's, like, here's
what you should do. Look at it. It's John, chapter 2,
"Whatever Jesus tells you, make sure you do it!" So we don't see Mary
as a co-redeemer, we see her as a saved sinner,
in fact, from her own lips. Because you will hear
different teaching that Mary is a co-redeemer,
on equal footing with Christ, and she was sinless, and
she's a perpetual virgin, and she was received up into
a Resurrection body the moment she died, and things that
you're not going to find taught in scripture. And so we would not say
we're better than anyone who teaches things differently. But what we are
doing is clarifying what has been the teaching
from the moment Jesus walked this earth. And that is, Mary is, from her
own mouth, the saved sinner. Look at her words
that she said to God. She said, "My spirit rejoices
in God my Savior," meaning, she knew she needed to be saved
from her sins and just like you and I do. She's just a person
and all of us are on equal footing, one
mediator between God and man, and that is the
Lord Jesus Christ. He's the only mediator we got. He's the only high
priest that we've got. So that's how we see it. You don't need to
talk to a priest. You just talk to God because
of what Jesus has done. And so Mary's an amazing
example for all of us and someone God used greatly. All right. So that's the second
point, ancestry. How about the third? Jot this word down, prophecy. We have a reason to
believe in Jesus, and that is because He
fulfilled prophecies. The more stipulations are given,
the more difficult and complex a wager becomes. If you're saying, I
believe Mayweather is going to knock him out, great. What round is it going to be in? Is it going to be a TKO or
it's going to be a knockout? What are the, what's
going to be my decision? You see what I'm saying? And the more you
clarify, no, it's going to be a knockout
in the third, right? You're like, OK,
that, you're going to make more money if you win. You see what I'm saying? And when it comes to
odds and probability, what we have in
the Old Testament is God giving stipulation
after stipulation, making it more
difficult on Himself than He needed to, saying
eight ball, corner pocket. And it's going to be this,
this, this, Bethlehem. It's going to be this,
this, this, virgin birth. It's going to be
this, this, this. He's going to be buried in
the grave of a wealthy person. This, this, this, He's
going to die surrounded by, this, this, this. 300 processes in the Old
Testament, God saying when the Messiah comes,
when the Christ gets here, when the shiny one
shows up, here's what it's going to look like,
so you wouldn't be able to say, yeah, it's just fluke,
just an accident. No, He fulfilled prophecy,
and this is really important. One of the big things that
helped shaped my faith in God was coming across
a little booklet that my pastor when I was
growing up used to refer to a lot called Science Speaks
by someone named Peter Stoner. And he basically took
the chance of anybody fulfilling the processes
given in the Old Testament. He said, 300's too crazy. Let's start with eight. Let's say, there
were only eight. Let's say, God just
in the Old Testament gave us eight different things. What would be the
odds of one person in human history fulfilling
just eight specific processes? He calculated, and the numbers
that he published in the book were verified by mathematicians
and all the citations there. You could Google it if you
want to look into it yourself. And he basically said,
it would be one in 10 to the 17th power, the odds
of one person just fulfilling eight prophecies. Now, one in 10 to the 17th
power is a really big number, so it's difficult to get
your head around that. So what he said is,
imagine the state of Texas, the landmass of
the state of Texas, which is the second-biggest
state behind Alaska, then comes California, and
then comes Montana, right? And he said, take
the landmass of Texas and cover it two feet
thick in silver dollars. That is 10 to the 17th power. That's how many
silver dollars it would take to cover the state
of Texas two feet thick. Now, imagine he said, if
flying over it in an airplane, you marked one silver
dollar and tossed it into the pile somewhere and
then blindfolded someone and set them out walking across Texas,
and so they're somewhere between Amarillo and El Paso. And they're told, you get
to walk as long as you want, you get to spend as much
time thinking about it as you're walking around
Texas blindfolded. And basically you have to
pick one silver dollar that's the one that we marked
when we flew over the plane and tossed it out at random. And out of the
entire state of Texas covered two feet thick in silver
dollars, the odds of one person in history fulfilling just eight
unique Messianic processes that were laid out ahead of
time, that would be 1 in 10 to the 17th power, or the odds
of that person finding that one unique silver dollar. And Jesus didn't fulfill
eight processes, friends. He fulfilled 300. And that's one of the reasons
that I believe in Jesus, for me personally. That's one of the reasons
because of the fulfilled processes, and that's just
one of many reasons I believe and have made the life decision
to, listen-- last point-- to give Jesus supremacy. That's what I've chosen to do. I've chosen to give
Jesus supremacy. And that means first, and
that means, as the Creed says, He's not just God's only Son. He's not just someone
conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. But He is Jesus Christ-- I'm saying it for my soul-- our Lord. Lord, Lord meaning
above everything for me. I like fashion, above fashion. I like sport, above sport. Money's great, above money. Career's great, above career. Church is great, above,
above all things. First born from the dead,
in Him all things consist, that He is God. He is King. I'm telling you,
here's Christianity. It's someone who makes the
faithful decision to say, Jesus Christ is Lord. And that from the beginning
has been the thing that this is all about. What is Christianity? It's about Jesus choosing
with their life and their soul and their death and
everything to say, Jesus, I fall at Your feet, and
I choose to call You my Lord. And that has always
been the powerful, the irreducible minimum
because that is what Jesus believed about Jesus. Jesus believed that
Jesus was Lord, you see? And that's why He
was put to death. In fact, we're told
clearly in John's gospel-- this was at his murder trial
while he was being tried; I guess it wasn't
a murder trial, but the guy whose cross
he took, it wasn't murder, so it kind of was, anyhow-- it says this. It says, "We have a
law, and by the law He had to die because
He made Himself out to be the Son of God." Jesus was tried and
executed because He claimed to be the Lord. So what does that
cause us to realize? It causes us to realize we
have no space to give ourselves the easy off-ramp of
just saying, well, you know, Jesus wasn't
God, but He was awesome. I like Jesus. Jesus is fantastic. Because what I'm telling you
is, from the very beginning, His followers believed
Him to be God. In fact, the reason
Christians like fish-- not the food, the symbol-- have you ever seen a Christian
wearing a fish necklace or a fish on their car? And you know,
there's a lot I could say about any and
all of those things, but it's not in the Bible. But the reason that icon became
something of significance and import was simply because,
at the end of the day, Christians believed
Jesus Christ was Lord. What do you, I don't see
the connection there. Is it because He did the
loaves and fish thing? No, no, no, it's really simple. The word for fish
in Greek, which is the language that was
spoken in the first century AD, was "ichthus." "Ichthus" is fish. But interestingly
enough, if you spell out "ichthus" in all capital
letters, it's changed. And it is I-X-O-Y-E, which in
that day was an acrostic they realized that spells out Jesus,
Christ, God, Son, Savior, fish. So it was just a
lazy way of speaking to say fish is shorthand
for Jesus, Christ, God, Son, and Savior. And so they would actually use
this kind of as a secret symbol in the days of open
imperial persecution to keep graves from being
desecrated by identifying them as Christian graves, not
by putting a cross on them, but the fish that no
one really understood. That was a symbol
for here lies someone who believes that Jesus Christ
is God, Son, and Savior. And actually I've read--
you can look into it-- maybe it's myth or
maybe it's historical, that Christians, if they were
hanging out and they were, like, I think that guy
might be a believer, but I'm not totally sure,
you might just casually, while you're
sipping your latte-- I don't know if we can
get a wide shot here-- you would kind of draw a
half rainbow in the dirt with your toe, like
you were just talking. It was, like, just
a casual gesture. That's real casual. You don't really notice. You don't really notice. Pay no attention to my legs. My hips don't lie. And if you're that person
who saw it and wouldn't think anything of it. But if they reciprocated,
and with their toe they finished the fish,
you could be, like, yeah. It was, like, Christian
gang signs, you know. It was, like, this way of
being, like, I'm a believer. And you could kind
of wash it away, and you knew walking away
you saw life like they saw life, you both. Isn't that cool? Isn't that a fun thing to learn,
just a random little tidbit? Jesus, Christ, God,
Son, and Savior. So this is what Jesus'
followers believed. But this is really important. It's also what Jesus
believed about Jesus. And that leaves us no room
for this whole kind of, like, you know, Jesus is cool
because he was so earthy. Like, I just love him. I love His Birkenstocks. And he looked like he's
a guy from Coachella. He's, like, unwashed. And, like, you just love that. Like, He's just, like, you know
He just ate granola and used essential oils. And He probably drove a Subaru. Oh, Jesus is so great. I just, oh, I love it so much. I love, ooh, I love Jesus. He's just, ooh. The problem, listen, listen,
this is just so important. The problem with turning Jesus
into Mr. Rogers with a beard is that if we see Him
as a moral teacher, then we have no way to deal with
the horrible things He said. Because moral teachers,
listen, good examples, who walk up to funerals
and say, you're going to see your brother again
because I'm the Resurrection and the life are
not good people. If you'd have walked up to
me at my daughter's funeral and said to me, it's OK,
Levi, that your daughter died, because I'm going to
rise her from the dead, I'd have probably
punched you in the face. But I certainly
wouldn't have said, that's a good
person right there. And Jesus didn't stop there. He said stuff like,
if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. He said, if you eat My flesh
and drink My blood, you're good. You're whole on the inside. If you partake of what
My essence of life is, you're going to be fine. Good people don't
say, I am going to judge the world
at the end of time. We put them back
in their bathrobe and check them back
into their padded room. So it is intellectually
dishonest to look at what Jesus said but then
just go, oh, that's nice. He's just another good example. CS Lewis, an avowed
atheist, he recognized that, and he identified that as
what's been called the Trilemma. He said, no, no, we can't say
Jesus is just a good person. Someone who says the kind
of things that Jesus said is not a good person. They're either a liar because
they know that's not true, but they're saying it anyway. There's been plenty of those. Or they're a
lunatic because they believe what they're saying, and
they don't know it's not true. Or this is the only
other possibility, He's saying what He's saying
because He believes it's true, and it is true. But then He's not a
liar or a lunatic. He's, in fact, the only
option left, he's Lord. So you have a choice in
front of you in life. And the choice, when you
actually look at what Jesus has said and the life that He lived
and the fulfilled prophecies-- please do come back next week
because we're going to continue on, if you'll be here, same
bat time, same bat place; I'm excited to get
into the next part, and the next part is
going to get better-- but the choice
you're left with is either to write
him off as a liar, to describe him as a lunatic,
or to do what I've done and bow before Him as Lord. That's really the only
option that Jesus gives us. Either He's mad, or
He's bad, or He's God. Now one quick question,
then we're done. Why would He go
through all this? The virgin birth, the
cross, why would God go through any of this? The only answer I can
figure is because He knows that I'm not a good person. I'm not. I've done things that
I'm not proud of. I've done things
that are sinful. I've done things that are
wrong and hurt other people. And if you're like
me, you have, too. Now, I know that's not,
it's not really popular. But the Bible says, there's no
such thing as a good person. Now that's different than
how we define goodness because we define
goodness as more bad than good is bad, and more
good than bad is good. The Bible says, look at it,
"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." The goodness
defined in scripture is you've never done anything
wrong because any sin brings deadness into life. Any sin brings a
separation from God. And so what Jesus came
to do was to heal us at the fundamental core
issue by paying for our sins. Because "the wages
of sin is death," Romans 6:23 says,
therefore He died for us, to pay the bill for our sins,
so that the free gift of God, which is in Christ,
Jesus Christ, might be the eternal life
that we could all have, not just on this
earth but forever. And so my question
to you is, would you like to give your
life to Jesus Christ. And if so, there's going to
be a space in this prayer that we're about to pray for
you to make that exact decision. Would you pray with me? Father, we're grateful
for your presence here, your love here, your life here. Thank you for what you've
done in Your Son that can make us whole. If as we're praying, you
would be honest enough to say, no matter what you've
done, no matter where you've been, that you want
to make the decision to make Jesus your Lord, to give
him control of your life, so that He would
forgive your sins and give you hope
and give you Heaven, and then you'd get
to be a part of Him restoring all things
as His ambassador, His son, His daughter. I'm just going to ask that
right now, while we're praying, you would raise your hand
up, if you would say, I want to give my
heart to Jesus. If that's you I'm
describing, just put your hand up in the air,
just put it up right now, just as we're praying,
heads bowed, eyes closed. Just raise your hand up. God bless you and
you and you and you. Hands going up all
across the room. Church online, every location,
Deer Lodge, raise your hand up, God sees you. God loves you. God cares for you. You can put your hands down. And I'm going to
say a quick prayer, and I want you to pray
it out loud with me. The church family's
going to pray it with us. And I want you to
say this to God. Dear God. Dear God. I know I'm a sinner. I know I'm a sinner. I can't fix myself. I can't fix myself. Please come into my life. Please come into my life. And make me new. And make me new. I give myself to you. I give myself to you. In Jesus' name I pray. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Thank you so much. I hope that was a blessing
to you on your faith journey. If you live in any
of our areas where we have churches, all over
Montana or in Salt Lake City, Portland, Oregon,
or Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we sure would love to see
you in person at Fresh Life Church, where there are
amazing small groups and programs for kids. And God's doing so much in
our students' lives as well. You can also click the
FreshLife.church website and then hit the Give button
if you want to give and support this ministry financially. Well, God bless you and
have an incredible day.
