Who is Jesus? (Mark 1.1-15)

We’re excited to be starting a new series on the gospel of Mark today—this will be the first gospel we’ll have done beginning to end since doing Luke, which we finished back in 2020. We took almost three years, and eighty-one sermons, to finish that series; I promise, this one will not be as long.

Now let’s talk a little bit about this book before we get into it.

According to early church records, Mark was the attendant and record-keeper for the apostle Peter. So Mark wasn’t himself an apostle, but he kept written accounts of what Peter told him concerning the life and ministry of Jesus.

This gospel was the first to be written (likely around the mid- to late-50s A.D.), and it was used as a kind of blueprint for the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Large chunks of Mark’s gospel are quoted almost verbatim in Matthew and Luke.

So what is Mark’s objective in his bare-bones version of the story of Jesus?

Mark’s first goal in writing this gospel is to tell us who Jesus is. And he goes about fulfilling his goal by giving us a kind of episodic view of Jesus’s life and ministry. Instead of trying to present everything, Mark gives us snatches of moments, teachings or events. The result is a kind of mosaic of the life of Christ, in which we’re able to get a really quick, easy-to-digest presentation of who Jesus is, what he said, and what he did.

To whom was he writing? He’s writing to the church as a whole, but likely, he’s particularly aiming at Christians who are facing the imminent threat of persecution in Rome. It’s important to keep this context in our minds as we move forward, because this gospel would have reminded these Christians of the salvation they had in Christ, which would give them courage for what they would need to face. It would also give them a potent reminder that whatever suffering they were enduring, Christ endured first. He went before them, in order to save them.

And we can see that fact from the very beginning of this gospel. So let’s get started.

Our passage today tells us four things about Jesus, and there’s one question I want you to keep in your mind the whole time we move through this passage today: Why does it matter? When Mark tells us anything about Jesus, we want to ask ourselves, What difference does it make?

I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you—everything Mark tells us about Jesus here all adds up to one thing, and that one thing changes everything.

Jesus Is God’s Promised Savior (v. 1-8)

Mark wastes no time starting his gospel. His very first sentence is a thesis statement for his entire book. Look at v. 1:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Mark’s entire agenda is summed up in this one very succinct phrase.

First of all, this is “the gospel”. It might be helpful to clarify something quickly, for those of you who are new to the Bible. Even within the Bible itself, you’ll see the word “gospel” used in two different ways.

The word “gospel” simply means “good news.” Sometimes that word is used as a title for one of the four books that tell the story of Jesus: the gospel of Mark, the gospel of Matthew, Luke or John. But most of the time, the meaning is more general than that: most of the time, when we talk about “the gospel,” we’re simply talking about the “good news”, the message of what Jesus Christ did. When we talk about proclaiming the gospel, or sharing the gospel with others, that’s what we’re talking about: sharing the good news of what Jesus Christ did.

In this verse, Mark is sort of using the word both ways: this is “the gospel”—this is a book recounting the life and ministry of Jesus, and the story of his life and ministry is very good news.

Secondly—notice he says that this is the gospel of Jesus Christ. He doesn’t just say that this is “the gospel of Jesus.” That word “Christ” isn’t Jesus’s last name; it’s a title that means “Messiah”. That might not be helpful if you don’t know what “Messiah” means—the Messiah was a figure who had been prophesied in the Old Testament; he was the Savior that God had promised to send to save his people. What that salvation would look like was a big question mark for a lot of people at the time, but Mark wants it to be clear from the beginning that he’s not just telling the story of an ordinary man; he’s telling the story of the Messiah, the promised Savior: Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, he gives us more information about Jesus: he is the Son of God. So this Messiah, this Jesus, isn’t just a human warrior that God sent to save his people. He is a human being, yes, but not only—he is the Son of God.

Mark doesn’t go into details about Jesus’s birth or his lineage or any of that, so I won’t either—if you want to know more about that, go read the beginnings of Matthew’s gospel or Luke’s gospel, they both give a lot more information about it. That’s not Mark’s goal.

Mark’s goal here is to show us that although Jesus is human, he’s not only human; he is divine. Everything in this passage—in all the verses we’re going to see today—places emphasis on Jesus’s divinity.

Now that being said, in v. 2 Mark immediately makes a right turn and quotes the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Malachi (he mentions Isaiah because he was the more “important” of the two).

2 As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face,

who will prepare your way,

3  the voice of one crying in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight,’ ”

These prophecies we see quoted in v. 2-3 are prophecies of hope for a weary people, speaking of a messenger who would get the people ready for the coming of the Lord, for the day when these weary people would finally see the glory of God.

When John appears, the people of Israel are living under Roman occupation, and the prophets have been completely silent for hundreds of years. The people have been waiting and praying for the day when God would come and finally show his face again, but so far, it hasn’t happened. It would be easy for them to feel like the only answer to their prayers has been silence.

But then, we see in v. 4:

4 John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

This was a really big deal, because the law of Moses was still applied; the people of Israel, if they kept the law, were pure—they didn’t need anything else.

At least that’s what the Jewish religious leaders thought. But now, here comes this guy John—a pretty crazy-looking figure, dressed in camel’s hair and eating bugs—telling people that the rituals of the law, although not wrong, weren’t enough. God wasn’t just looking for ritual purity; what God wanted was a changed heart.

That’s what repentance is—it’s a commitment to obedience to God. It’s when we stand before God and say, “I want to be like you. I want to follow you. I want to obey your commands.” So they would come before God and confess their sins, telling God, “I don’t want to live like this anymore; I want to change”, and John would baptize them as a symbol that it is this heart-change that saves us, not ritual sacrifice.

Two really important things we need to see before we move on.

First, we need to see that John’s not reinventing the wheel here. The religious leaders, if they had been paying attention, would have seen that John is doing no more than applying what the prophets had already said. The prophet Micah, the prophet Ezekiel, and many others, had repeatedly told God’s people that all the sacrifices in the world are useless unless the people’s heart is changed. John is taking what the prophets said, and giving the people a visual aid, to help them understand it better.

Secondly, we need to see that John’s baptism is actually lacking something. John’s baptism can show the people their need for a new heart, their need for repentance for forgiveness of sins…but his baptism can’t give them a new heart; it can’t fully bring them to repentance. Only God can do that.

Someone in our home group mentioned that when he was a young Christian reading this book, it sort of seemed like John was almost misleading the people, because he knew his baptism couldn’t actually save anyone. That would be true if John hadn’t been up front about his own limitations—but he was.

Look at v. 7:

And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

So John is really up front about the fact that his baptism isn’t enough—someone else is coming, he said, someone greater than John. He will baptize you, not with water, but with the Holy Spirit.

Who can baptize with the Holy Spirit? Only God.

Do you see how John was effectively fulfilling his role of “preparing the way of the Lord”, getting the people ready for Christ’s coming? Through John’s ministry, he showed the people what they needed, and then he said, “Don’t worry—God is coming to do it.”

Jesus Christ is coming to do it.

Jesus Has God’s Approval (v. 9-11).

And that’s exactly what we see happen next.

V. 9:

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

Remember I said before that everything in this passage points to Christ’s divinity? This is an incredibly clear indicator of that.

When Jesus is baptized, the Spirit descends on him “like a dove”, and the Father’s voice rings out from heaven, saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” This was, presumably, a voice that everyone standing around could hear: it was a sign that this man who has just been baptized has the full approval of God himself—and even more: this man who has just been baptized is himself divine.

Mark has two goals in telling us this little story. The first is to show us that Jesus is both fully God and fully man.

Jesus is a man—he came from Nazareth, a little town in Galilee that everyone could go to if they wanted. Some of the people by the river probably knew Jesus, if they had followed John—Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus and John were cousins. Jesus is a man.

But at the same time, he is fully divine. God himself speaks from heaven, saying “You are my beloved Son.”

This is one of those subjects that are of primary importance. There are a lot of things we can disagree about and still be Christians, because there are some things the Bible teaches that are clearer than others, and some things go to the heart of the gospel more than others.

This is one of those subjects on which we cannot disagree: without the divinity and humanity of Christ, the entire Christian faith comes unraveled. If Christ were not man, he could not take man’s place. If Christ were not God, he would have no more power to save than you or I.

So Mark wants Jesus’s divinity to be crystal clear. Jesus is a man, but he is not a man like any other. He is fully man, but he is also fully divine.

That’s his first goal.

His second goal is to show that this fully human, fully divine Jesus was not asking anyone to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself. He didn’t need to be baptized, because he didn’t need to repent of sin. But he did it anyway, because one of his tasks was to represent human beings before God. So he would do everything God commanded man to do, and he would do everything man couldn’t do.

So Jesus is the Son of God, and Jesus has God’s approval.

Jesus Has God’s Strength (v. 12-13).

But there’s another piece that will carry on into the next section, and that is that Jesus has God’s strength. We saw the Spirit descend on him like a dove—now, we read in v. 12 that this same Spirit

immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.

Here we see a new character brought onto the scene, and that is Satan, the devil, the enemy of God. Some people want to paint Satan as a symbolic character only, taking any mention of him metaphorically. But the Bible just doesn’t give us that latitude. Satan is a real spiritual being who hates God and who wants to take down God’s people.

Nowwe need to keep something in mind, that Mark helps us see. Look at how little time Mark spends talking about Satan here. He mentions him almost as an afterthought. He wants our attention firmly centered on Jesus, not on Satan. His goal isn’t to downplay Satan’s power, but rather to elevate Jesus’s strength.

Mark tells us that Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. No human being has ever withstood such a thing. When was the last time you went forty days without sinning? We can’t even imagine such an ordeal. Again, Jesus was fully God, but he was also fully man. He was hungry, and thirsty, and tired. It was not easy to resist the temptation to eat, to drink, at Satan’s behest.

And why did he have to go through it? It’s not as if Satan thought Jesus would actually give in to temptation; he knew who he was dealing with.

We actually see the answer to that question in Hebrews 2.10, 18, which we saw this past Christmas:

10 For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering… 18 For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Jesus’s temptation by Satan was God’s plan, not Satan’s. It was the Holy Spirit who drove him into the wilderness, so that he would be tempted, so that Jesus would be perfectly qualified by what he endured, and so that he could come to our rescue when we are tempted.

Jesus was perfectly qualified because he went into that wilderness with the strength of God’s Spirit. Mark wants us to see that in this most hostile of environments, Jesus held firm. He wants us to see it so that we might remember that this man was no ordinary man: he is Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.

Jesus is God’s promised Savior; Jesus has God’s approval; Jesus has God’s strength.

Jesus Proclaims God’s Gospel (v. 14-15)

And lastly: Jesus proclaims God’s good news. V. 14:

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Shortly after Jesus’s baptism, John the Baptist is arrested, and after his arrest, Jesus comes back to Galilee. What does he do?

He proclaims “the gospel of God”, the “good news” that God had sent him to proclaim.

What is that gospel? What is the content of this good news?

First, we see a declaration of…well, good news! “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” Remember earlier, when we talked about how long the Jews had been waiting for the fulfillment of these prophecies, for some kind of sign that God was still listening, and that he still heard them?

That time has come: the kingdom of God is at hand. It’s coming. It’s almost here.

We just celebrated Christmas. Every Christmas morning, there’s a moment when parents go get their kids and say, “Okay, you can come out!” and the kids rush out of their rooms to go see the presents under the tree.

This is that moment, for an entire people. Except they haven’t been waiting a month; they’ve been waiting for centuries. And they’re not waiting on Christmas presents; they’re waiting on deliverance. It’s like they’re back in Egypt again, praying for God to deliver them from the Pharaoh.

And finally, this man whom John spoke of as being “greater”, the one who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit, the one who had received divine approval at his baptism, this man comes saying, “You’ve been waiting a long time. The wait is almost over. The kingdom is coming.”

That’s good news.

And next, he tells them how to get in on that good news: “Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

We’ve already said that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. At this point in the story, the people hearing Jesus have only the tiniest inkling of what he has actually come to do. At this point, they didn’t know that Jesus had come to live the perfect life God calls us to live, in our place, and to take our sin on himself and be punished in our place, and to be raised to apply that work to us. These people knew none of that.

But they knew this much: the good news of the kingdom was coming through this man Jesus, and his message was consistent with the message of John the Baptist. It’s not enough to follow rituals and offer sacrifices: they must repent, and believe in what this man will tell them.

Conclusion

This is the beginning of Mark’s gospel, and in it we see him quickly and methodically laying out Jesus’s credentials—this man Jesus came with God’s approval; he came with God’s power; he came with God’s message. All of that could theoretically be true of an ordinary human being, like the Old Testament prophets. It was true of Moses; it was true of Elijah; it was true of Elisha.

What makes Jesus different is very simple—as simple as a voice speaking from heaven, saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

I said earlier that everything Mark tells us about Jesus here all adds up to one thing. This is that one thing: the story that Mark is going to tell us throughout his entire book is the story of the Son of God. Not a healer, not a prophet, not a good, moral teacher: the Son of God.

And that fact, if it is true, changes everything.

C. S. Lewis famously wrote:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Lewis is right. Either Jesus was a fool, a madman—or he was and is really and truly the Christ, the Son of God. There is no in between, and Mark means to leave us with no in between. He wants to force us to confront this man, this Son of God, so that we have no other choice open to us other than to accept or to reject him.

And that is the choice we’ll be constantly faced with in this gospel. If Mark’s first goal in writing his gospel is to show us who Jesus is, his second goal is to call all people to be his disciples. The lines in the sand are drawn very clearly here: you’re either for Jesus, or you’re against him; you’re either his followers, or his opponents.

It’s very black and white; when it comes to being a disciple of Christ, there is no room for gray.

So if that doesn’t sound like something you’re interested in, I suggest you find another church. Because week after week over the next several months, these are the choices that you will be faced with over and over again: the choice of accepting or rejecting who Jesus is; and the choice of accepting or rejecting his invitation to follow him.

That invitation is made to believers and unbelievers alike, and there is no bad time to respond to it. If you are an unbeliever, then right now, today, through the words of this gospel, Jesus is proclaiming the gospel of God to you. He is saying to you, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is here; repent and believe in the gospel.” There is no class you have to take, there is no minimum number of credits you have to earn. You don’t even have to get to the end of this gospel.

Today, right now, you have everything you need to respond to his invitation. Repent, and believe in the gospel.

And if you’re a believer, this invitation is for you too, because we all know how easy it is to slip back into unbelief. It’s notable, isn’t it, that Jesus called the apostle Peter to follow him…twice. Once when he first invited him to be his disciple, and then once again, after Peter had denied him. The invitation to follow Christ is always actual, always for right now, because it is the choice we have to make day after day.

So whoever you are, whatever you’re going through, the choice before you and me both is the same: Repent and believe in the gospel.

When God Says No (Acts 8.1-8)

Last week we started 2025 in exactly the right way. We spent the afternoon praying together for our church, our city, our country and our world. It was, as far as I can remember, the best-attended prayer meeting we’ve ever had, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been so encouraged by you. So I wanted to thank you for that.

Last Sunday morning we prepared for that meeting by spending our time in 2 Corinthians 1.11, talking about what happens when we pray together. We saw that when we pray together, God answers; when we pray together, we learn to pray; when we pray together, we see bigger; and finally, when we pray together, God is glorified. As Paul says, when God answers the prayers of many, it gives many the opportunity to thank God for his answer.

But there was one thing we didn’t address last week, that I want to address today. And that is this simple question: What happens when God says no?

I don’t want to be manipulative with this message, so I want to put all my cards out on the table. A couple of months ago, we knew we were going to have a prayer service on January 5th, and we knew we were going to be starting the gospel of Mark on the 19th. That left January 12th open for something else. So back in November, we were already talking about the possibility of addressing this subject today—and that is, what happens if our building project doesn’t go through?

The project isn’t over—we’ll tell you more this afternoon—but I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that the project isn’t going to happen exactly in the way that we thought it would. God has been really good to us. When I was in the U.S. I talked to the head fundraiser for a major Bible translation company, and he was astonished that we were able to raise so much money in such a short time, especially given that most of it came from within the church. It’s an incredible achievement.

But it still wasn’t enough to make the target we needed to hit in December. So it’s not over, but it’s not going to happen exactly like we thought or hoped.

Now there are two ways we could handle this. The first way would be to speak in very pragmatic terms. I know a lot of pastors who have tried to purchasing buildings in much easier places than Paris, and it’s almost never a straight line—most of the time, they try for one place, it doesn’t work, and they try for another, and it doesn’t work, and it’s a roller coaster until finally they have all their ducks in a row. And often that roller coaster takes many years to come to an end. So on the one hand, the fact that things didn’t go exactly how we were hoping is completely normal, and no reason to be discouraged.

But that’s not going to help those of you who have worked really hard, and are going to feel your minds spinning out of control now over all the unknowns about the future. I want to ask you to do your best not let yourself get distracted by those things this morning.

Because before we even get there, we can’t afford to look at this situation only from a pragmatic point of view. We need to look at it from a biblical point of view. We are children of a heavenly Father who loves us; to simply react to what seems like bad news, without taking our Father’s love and wisdom and sovereignty into account, is to do a disservice to God. So just as last week’s sermon was preparation for our prayer meeting, today’s sermon is preparation for our information meeting about the building project. We’re doing it this way because it’s in our nature to panic and worry when news like this comes, and we have no reason to worry, as long as we remember what’s actually going on.

Let me tell you a story that might help us put this in perspective.

Last year I went to an Acts 29 conference in Latvia, where we heard the testimony of a guy named Taras. Taras had planted a church in Minsk, in Belarus. Because of the war in Ukraine broke out, Taras and his family and their entire church were forced to flee for their lives in 2023. The church was scattered to the winds; still, they don’t know where everyone is. Taras and his family ended up as refugees in Warsaw, Poland. None of them spoke Polish; he had no job; they were put up in government housing; the kids had to go to school in a new language.

I tried to put myself in his shoes, and I had a very hard time imagining it. I kept seeing my own family, my own kids, thrown into that situation. It would be an incredible trial just to get through every day—much less do anything worth celebrating.

Taras and his church had prayed that the conflict in Ukraine would calm down. They prayed that their community would be preserved, that they could remain in Minsk and maintain the life of their church, their relationships with these brothers and sisters whom they loved.

But God said no. It’s a truth that’s hard for us to accept, but we have to accept it: sometimes, God says no.

So what happens when God says no? How do we process it? How do we react to it? How should we understand it?

That’s what I want us to consider today. There are many, many places in the Bible we could go. We could go to Joseph, sent to Egypt as a slave. We could go to the Hebrews, enslaved by the Pharaoh in Egypt. We could go to the exile of the Israelites in Babylon and Assyria. We could go to Paul, with his thorn in the flesh, praying that God would remove it, and Christ actually tells him no. And of course we could go to Jesus, who prayed that this cup might pass from him, just a few hours before his own crucifixion.

We really could simply pick our place. But today, we’re going to be spending our time in Acts 8.1-8.

The situation of the church in Acts 8 and the situation Taras found himself in are remarkably similar. The Christian faith exploded in Jerusalem not long after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. Thousands of Jewish men and women came to faith in Christ, the apostles were preaching the gospel with boldness, and the church was growing day by day.

Of course, this made the Jewish authorities very unhappy; we see several episodes of their conflicts with the apostles in the first few chapters of Acts.

Persecution (v. 1-3)

But in the second half of chapter 6, we see a new level of tension arise. A man named Stephen—not an apostle, just an ordinary Christian, but a Christian who was saying and doing remarkable things—caught the attention of the Jewish authorities and Jewish zealots. Stephen was seized by the crowd, brought before the Jewish council. After giving an impassioned speech before the council, Stephen was taken out of the city and stoned to death, making him the first Christian martyr.

In the verses describing his execution, we see mention of a young man named Saul. We find out later on that Saul is a Pharisee, a young man who was well-educated in the law, and extremely zealous for maintaining that law.

As it turns out, Saul would soon himself become radically converted by Christ and become an apostle himself (the apostle Paul). But that hasn’t happened yet. For now, here is what we see. Acts 8, verse 1:

And Saul approved of [Stephen’s] execution.

And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. 2 Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. 3 But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.

So you see how similar this is to what Taras and our brothers and sisters who had to flee because of the war in Ukraine have gone through. The reasons are different, but the basic situation is the same.

Here’s what I want to draw our attention to. The pattern we see throughout all of Scripture, and particularly in the first chapters of the book of Acts, is that the Christians prayed about everything. So although it’s not mentioned in the text, it is inconceivable that the Christians facing Saul’s persecution would not be praying for God to deliver them.

It’s easy for us to look at this story from a distance and not feel much tension when we read this, because we know what happened later. But put yourself in their shoes. They didn’t know what was going to happen next. They knew that God had done incredible things in their midst up to this point, but suddenly here is this guy Saul—an extremely well-learned, passionate and convincing Pharisee, who comes on the scene and is, as v. 3 says, “ravaging the church”. He’s not just prohibiting services; he’s busting into people’s homes and carrying them off to prison.

So they prayed, as Taras and his church prayed…and God didn’t change things. In fact, they went from bad to worse.

Stephen is not only not released; he is carted outside the city and stoned to death.

It escalates to such an extent that the Christians living in Jerusalem are forced to flee. They just have to get out, run for their lives, scattering all over Judea and Samaria. The apostles stay, but everyone else has to run.

Can you imagine the mindset of those Christians? You know they’ve been praying, because that’s what they always do—and yet, God not only doesn’t stop the persecution. He allows it to keep on getting worse.

What question would be on your minds in that situation?

Why? WHY? Clearly the persecution of Christians is a bad thing. Why would God allow this to happen? Why wouldn’t he stop it? And in that moment, you don’t have a clear answer to those questions.

Now I know you know this isn’t the end of the story, but I don’t want to move on too quickly from this. I’d like us to sit in that state of uncertainty for just a minute, because in reality, that is how we will spend much of our time. The time spent between the prayer and the resolution, between the prayer and the answer to that question “Why?”, is often very long. And sometimes the answer never comes. Sometimes something happens, and we never really find out why it did, at least not on this side of heaven.

Scattering (v. 1, 4)

We will all be faced with a situation when either as individuals, as a family, or as a church, when we will earnestly pray that God will do something, and God will not do what we asked, and we won’t understand why. And we need to know ahead of time, right now, what kind of God we serve, because our understanding of God will determine how we respond to those situations.

We read at the end of v. 1:

And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.

Here’s the question—how did these Christians respond to this situation? What was their understanding of God, and how did it inform their response?

Look at v. 4:

4 Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.

What they did tells us what they believed.

What did they do when they were scattered? They went about preaching the word.

Think about that. These were people who had just been chased from their homes because they believed the gospel. And they didn’t go very far; they didn’t even flee to another country, but to the surrounding regions of Judea and Samaria. (Samaria wasn’t a place where Jews would have received a warm welcome; the Jews and the Samaritans weren’t fond of each other.) The point is, they were in places where it was still dangerous to be a Christian.

Even so, when they were persecuted, when they had to flee, they fled preaching the word.

This simple fact tells us a number of things.

It tells us, first of all, that their faith was not shaken by the disastrous situation in which they found themselves. It tells us that they didn’t believe that preaching the gospel was a lost cause, despite the hardships it brought them. It tells us they still had confidence in the God they served. It tells us they still believed they were on a mission. And it tells us that they knew that God was working, despite or—dare we say it?—even through their situation.

They couldn’t see what God was doing yet, but they knew the God they served. So they considered their situation, and they acted, not based on their situation, but based on their knowledge of who God is.

So far, the church had been almost entirely centered in Jerusalem. But now the Christians were scattered, and they would have remembered the prayers they prayed back in chapter 4, when they asked God to give them boldness to continue to preach the gospel.

Suddenly, through their desperate situation, they realize they have a new opportunity. It’s not what they were expecting, but it’s there: they can either try to hide themselves and stay safe, or they can go into these new places and preach the gospel wherever they end up.

That’s what they do.

And it’s what Taras did. When he and his family arrived in Warsaw, they were devastated. They had lost everything: their home, their possessions, their church. They had lost any and all familiarity with the culture and the language.

But Taras also knew that they weren’t the only ones in that situation. He knew that many, many Belarusians were fleeing to Warsaw. And he knew that God had not brought them there for no reason.

So he planted another church.

He planted a church for Belarusian refugees in Warsaw, and the church filled very, very quickly. God is now working in the lives of people Taras didn’t know before, in a city none of them knew. The message of the gospel has a particular resonance for people who have lost everything—what a relief to find out that even when you’ve lost everything, you can actually gain everything.

This was his testimony, of the beautiful things God is doing in his church and in Warsaw. And these things never would have happened if God had given them what they asked for in prayer; these things never would have happened if God hadn’t said “no”.

God’s Good Plan (v. 5-7)

God has a plan. It is not always our plan, but it is a good plan.

That is exactly what we see in the following verses in Acts 8. Let’s read again, starting at v. 5:

5 Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. 6 And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip, when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. 7 For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. 8 So there was much joy in that city.

Do you see it? The persecution of the church became a tool in God’s hands to win more people to Christ. When they prayed, as anyone would, for their persecution to stop, God said no—not because he didn’t love them, but because he had better plans.

Because the church was scattered from Jerusalem, the gospel went out to places that didn’t yet have it. An argument could be made that it was the scattering of the Christians from Jerusalem that began the trajectory of spreading the gospel all over the world. An argument could be made that we would not be here today if this hadn’t happened. There could have a been a scenario in which Christianity would have remained localized to Jerusalem. But that scenario wasn’t God’s plan.

Obviously letting the Christians stay in Jerusalem would have been far more pleasant and more comfortable. But there was more joy in enduring the persecution and being scattered than in having God stop the persecution. Because they knew who their God was, the Christians in Jerusalem were not devastated by their situation; rather, they realized their mission was being redirected, and they made the most of the opportunity before them, to bring the gospel to places they never would have gone otherwise.

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To close, let’s come back to our current situation. When we put this in perspective—when we think of our situation in comparison to the persecution of the church in Acts 8, or of Taras having to flee because of the conflict in Ukraine—it’s easy to see our building project is actually not a big deal.

But it feels like a big deal to us, as it always does to those who are going through it. So let’s ask the question: Why would God present us with this opportunity, only to not let us get the money we needed at the right time?

Most of the time, we have no idea how to answer that question when we ask it. This time, I have a ton of ideas. Some are speculative, and some are solid facts—we’ll talk about more of these this afternoon. But I want to mention just one specific thing this morning: one thing that stands out in my mind above everything else.

This opportunity has forced people in our church who may otherwise have sat still to use their gifts in ways they wouldn’t have needed to before, and thus to grow in him. I know it’s hard to see the forest for the trees if you’ve been in the thick of the building project this year; but as a pastor, this is what has made 2024 an incredibly encouraging year. I’ve seen people with gifts I had never suspected put together the legal, financial and communications structures that will make it possible for our church to purchase property in Paris. You have done incredible things.

And whether you realize it or not, all the work done over this past year has become the raw materials God will use to cause you to grow.

God almost always causes us to grow in faith and in maturity through trial. Many of us have been paying so much attention to the practical and logistical objectives of this project; I want you to take your eyes away from that for a minute, and consider what God has been doing in you through the effort you’ve put in. What has he been changing in you through this experience?

I’ll tell you what I’m seeing. I’m seeing people who are exhausted, yes, and perhaps discouraged. But I’m also seeing those same people who have realized, in a deeper and more urgent way, that they need God to do whatever it is they’re doing. It’s made us more thirsty for God, because we have a deeper realization of the fact that we can’t do this without him. I know it may not always feel that way—when we’re discouraged it’s hard to think about anything else. But when we cry out to God for help, we are acknowledging our need for him, and growing in our dependence on him.

This was not a wasted opportunity. We don’t know where God is going to bring us in the future in terms of buildings, but we do know that every time God says “no” to a prayer, it is not to harm us, and it is not to set us back. It is to bring us closer to what he has planned for his people, closer to the glory of his name being seen.

Folks, I am not just saying this: I am happy with our situation today. I am so proud of my church. I am thankful for what I’ve seen God do in you, even if it’s been hard.

But most of all, I’m happy because our security isn’t in the success of a church project or a roof over our heads. Our security is in our knowledge of who our God is, that he is victorious, that he is good, that he loves his people, and that he is always working for our good and for his glory.

When God answers our prayers the way we asked, it’s good news, as we saw last week.

But when God says no, it’s also good news.

Ask Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt in order to save thousands of lives from famine.

Ask the Hebrews, who became slaves in Egypt in order to see God’s mighty hand at work to deliver them.

Ask Jesus, who drank the cup the Father held out to him, in order to save us.

Ask Paul, who (as far as we know) was never delivered from the thorn in his flesh, in order to understand that the grace of Christ was sufficient, that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness.

Ask the church in Jerusalem, which was persecuted and scattered in order to bring the gospel to the surrounding regions.

Ask Taras, who had to flee Minsk with his family in order to begin a wholly unexpected ministry in Warsaw, and see more people come to Christ.

And ask yourselves. Some time in the future, I believe we’ll be able to look back at this past year and see what God was doing, that never could have happened if things had gone exactly as we’d planned. Our God is a good God, and he never stops working for our good and for his glory.

All is well.

The Prayers of Many (2 Corinthians 1.11)

For our first Sunday of 2025, we felt it was important to start the year off right and have a Sunday of prayer. We’ll be staying after lunch today for a prayer meeting, and I want this message to be preparation for that prayer meeting.

But before we get started, I have a confession to make. I am so thankful to God that today, we have a great team: we are three elders leading the church together, we have an incredible team of staff and deacons and administrators.

But for the first few years of this church, it was just me. When we launched Eglise Connexion in 2014, I was the lead (and only) planter and pastor, and although people stepped up very quickly to take on responsibilities, I was mostly alone leading the church until Paul and Arnaud came on as elders a few years in.

Here’s why I’m saying that. A long time ago I heard someone say to a group of pastors, “Five years after you take over, what’s wrong with your church is what’s wrong with you.” I didn’t have quite enough experience at the time to see for myself what he meant, but I do now.

I love our church so much—but it is not a perfect church. And of all the areas of improvement we can see from our position in the leadership, the most important and significant area in our opinion is this one. One cannot say that our church is a church that prays well. The people who do pray give it their all, and they’re wonderful and I’m so grateful. But they are in the minority. Our regular prayer meetings are not well attended—maybe ten people, on a good Sunday.

I have to take responsibility for that. From the beginning of our church, I didn’t emphasize prayer as I should have, so a lack of corporate prayer got sort of folded into the DNA of our church. I need to ask your forgiveness for that. Those of you who know me best know that I’m far from a perfect pastor, and this is one of the areas in which I have failed you the most.

There’s a reason why I’ve done a bad job in this—it was never a conscious decision, but looking back at it now, it’s easy to see. Prayer has always been the single hardest aspect of the Christian life for me. I have a difficult time with prayer as a habit—it’s really easy for me to read my Bible, study, say a quick prayer and move on to other things. Extended prayer as a regular habit is difficult. And I also have a difficult time with prayer as a concept—why does God ordain that we pray? Does prayer really make a difference? And what does our praying together, rather than separately, change about it?

These may be immature questions, and I haven’t yet found all the answers I’m looking for. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever questions I have, as I read the Bible I cannot escape that prayer, both private and corporate, are meant to be integral parts of our lives as disciples of Christ. So I have to reckon with the fact that I have failed you all in this regard. And please don’t come to me after the service and say, “No you haven’t.” I know some of you will want to make me feel better, and that’s very kind. But I have failed in this regard.

And although that truth weighs heavily on me, I also know it’s not too late. Regardless of my own difficulties, it’s never too late to just take the bull by the horns and just get on with doing what the Bible tells me to do.

So hopefully I can start making a course correction today—and I say “start” because it’s not something that can only happen once. We’ll start this course correction by speaking about a particular kind of prayer. We won’t be speaking about merely private prayer today, but specifically about the prayers we pray when we are gathered together as a church. What is corporate prayer, and why should we do it?

We’re going to be looking mainly at a single verse today, but it’s a significant one. Turn in your Bibles to 2 Corinthians 1.

Paul Asks the Corinthians to Pray (2 Corinthians 1.11)

We’re going to start a couple of verses earlier to see the context.

This is the apostle Paul writing to the church in Corinth; he’s describing a situation in which himself, Timothy and his other co-laborers found themselves. Let’s read v. 8-10 first.

8 For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10 He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

We’re not exactly sure what affliction Paul refers to in v. 8, but we know it was bad: it was a deadly situation, such that they despaired of life itself. And apparently Paul and the others were expecting to be faced with this kind of situation again in the near future, because he states his hope that God will deliver them again. Even so, he asks for the Corinthians’ help, and it is a very specific type of help. V. 11:

11 You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.

He asks for their help. Not through financial or material gifts, but by prayer.

I’ve already told you this is an area of my life where I struggle, so I’m not going to claim to be an expert. I’m going to do my best to stick as closely to the text as possible in the next couple of minutes so you know that what I’m saying isn’t coming from me.

Let’s pick this verse apart a little.

Paul is expecting to be faced with another situation in the near future, in which he and his co-laborers are in danger. And although he has his hope set on the fact that God will deliver them, he asks for the Corinthians’ help in prayer: You must also help us by prayer.

Why must they help? What is the goal of their prayer? So that many will give thanks on our behalf.

To whom will they give thanks? It’s not stated here, but it’s clear from the context: they’ll give thanks to God.

So far so good. Now, why will they give thanks? For the blessing granted us. The blessing may be deliverance from a future trial, or it could be people coming to Christ through their ministry, or any number of things. The point is that when God is with Paul and his co-workers in their ministry, when he blesses them in their work, many will give thanks.

And lastly, he comes back to where he started. How will that blessing have come to them? Through the prayers of many.

So let’s take that verse in reverse, to get to the root at what he is saying. In this schema he’s asking the Corinthians to produce in their church, here’s what will happen: Many will pray. Through their prayers, Paul and his co-workers will be blessed in their ministry. And when others see that blessing, they will give thanks.

Do you see it? The prayers of many…result in the thanksgiving of many.

When God answers our prayers, the result is thankfulness. We get to see God’s hand at work, and God is glorified when we thank him for his hand at work.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: Paul’s goal in asking for prayer is not mainly that he will have an easy go of it. He’s not asking for prayer in order to be comfortable, and he’s not asking for prayer in order to stay alive. He’s asking for prayer in order that God may be glorified when people see him responding to their prayers.

It’s no mistake that when Christ gave us the Lord’s Prayer, he began that prayer with: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (Matthew 6.9). That is the most fundamental goal of all prayer: that God’s name would be glorified.

Challenges

Now obviously, that sounds good, but we know from experience that there are many challenges inherent in the idea of praying together.

Let’s face it: corporate prayer can be boring. When we speak of this kind of prayer, we’re not talking about a bunch of people in a room praying over one another; that’s just individuals praying in the same place. We’re talking about listening to one another pray and agreeing with what they are praying, joining our prayers to theirs. If you find yourself bored with corporate prayer, you’re probably forgetting the “agreeing” part; if you’re not engaged in the prayers of your brothers and sisters, of course it will be boring.

Corporate prayer is also humbling. By its very nature, it is not individualistic; it’s not the moment for me to voice my laundry list of complaints to God. Corporate prayer necessarily takes the focus off of ourselves and puts it on to God and others.

Likewise, corporate prayer can be intimidating. Most of us have been to prayer meetings in which Christians have prayed prayers that sound like poetry, or like they’re excerpts from a doctoral thesis, and we think, No way I’ll be able to follow that! Jesus warned us about thinking that by our many words, our prayers will be more likely to be heard; they won’t. Give me a simple prayer from a sincere heart over an elaborate prayer with a lot of words that mean little, any day of the week.

More essentially, corporate prayer requires sacrifice. This afternoon, you’re being asked to give up a chunk of your Sunday. We know that’s not nothing. Praying together isn’t something we do in a couple of minutes at the end of service. If we want our prayers to be truly together, it will take time, and it may not feel like there’s a huge “return on investment” right away.

Which brings us to what I believe is the most fundamental challenge of corporate prayer—or any prayer, really. Corporate prayer requires a big view of God: a big view of God that many of us don’t have. If your view of God is small, the sacrifice required, of your time and attention, won’t seem worth it. If your view of God is small, you’ll find a million other things you should be doing.

But if our view of God is big, if we truly believe he is capable of doing all that he can do, and that he listens to our prayers, then the sacrifice will definitely feel worthwhile. If we can glorify God by praying together and watching God’s response, then of course we will do it, because there’s nothing we want more than to glorify him.

Those are some challenges to corporate prayer. Now what are some positive reasons to do this?

“The Prayers of Many”

There is a lot we can glean from the simple fact that Paul is addressing a local church, asking them to help him by praying. He is asking, not that individuals would pray, but that the body of Christ in Corinth would pray.

John Piper put it this way: Corporate prayer is not a domestic intercom, but rather a wartime walkie-talkie. The goal of prayer is not to get God to give us things we want, as if he were our butler rather than our Commander-in-Chief. Corporate prayer exists to call in reinforcements and supplies when the battle is raging. Prayer for personal requests has its place—but prayer should never be only personal. Paul was praying for comfort, for himself and for others (cf. v. 3-7), so that the gospel might go forward unimpeded.

There are a number of reasons to approach prayer in this way—together—that we can deduce both from Scripture and from simple logic. I won’t mention all of them, but these are the few that have stuck in my mind over the last few weeks, as I’ve been working all this out in my own mind with the Bible in front of me.

First: When the church prays together, God answers. Of course this is true of individual prayer as well, but here’s the question I kept running up against: If, as he says in v. 10, Paul already believes God will deliver him and his co-workers, why would he ask the Corinthians to pray that God would do it? What would be the point?

This is a question I’ve run aground on many times, because I’m a Calvinist and believe that God is sovereign over all things. What is the point of praying if God will always and absolutely do his will?

Let me give you another example that I’ve already given before. A couple of years ago I installed a storage closet in our hallway. It’s a big closet, and our hallway is small, so it was a daunting project.

At the time, Zadie was four years old. And she wanted to help.

This was a dilemma. She was small, and I didn’t want her to get hurt; there wasn’t a lot of room to navigate in that hallway. On the other hand, I love her, and she wanted to be involved.

So I let her. It took twice as long as it would have if I had been alone, but she helped. Four-year-old Zadie hammered in forty-seven nails to the back of that closet. Some of them were crooked, some of them bounced off, and she did hit my fingers with the hammer more than once. But she did it.

Why would I go through the trouble of letting her be involved when I could have done it better and more quickly on my own?

Because that’s a memory she’s going to have of her dad for the rest of her life, and it’s a good memory. She still walks by that closet every day and sometimes mentions how we built it together. While we were building that closet, we were also working on our relationship.

C. S. Lewis put it this way (I’m paraphrasing): We freely accept the fact that God chooses to work through us, through the choices we make, through our practical obedience. People sometimes bump up against this idea of God working through prayer, but his working through prayer is no more illogical than God working through our actions. It’s a means he chooses to use to do his will.

So let’s come back to the original question:  If Paul already believes God will deliver him and his co-workers, why would he ask the Corinthians to pray that God would do it? The only answer that makes sense in the context of the rest of the Bible is this: Paul asks the Corinthians to pray because he believes their prayer will be part of God’s answer.

When people pray together, God answers. He might not answer in exactly the way we thought or hoped, but he will answer.

Secondly: When the church prays together, we learn to pray.

There is a reason why the Psalms were written down and are repeated and learned by the people of Israel and the Christian church today: we learn to pray by listening to others pray.

This is a benefit we cannot get if we only pray alone.

And I’m not talking about style—Jesus warned against imagining that by praying long, beautiful prayers God might take us more seriously. I’m talking about content. When we are immature believers, we often pray for immature things.

A new Christian (or any Christian, really) just learning to pray might have no idea of what it sounds like to talk to God. You might have a hard time finding things to say—after you’ve gone through your list of problems you want God to change, you’ve got nothing left. If that describes you, come to a prayer meeting and just listen. Pay attention to the way people pray, particularly if they pray with a Bible open in front of them. You could learn a lot—and, far more often than you might think, you’ll teach the brothers and sisters next to you just as much by your prayers, because your prayers haven’t become routine. They may be clumsy, but they’ll be genuine, and that genuineness has a kind of “new car smell” about it; it’s a kind of freshness that will encourage older Christians.

When people pray together, they learn to pray from one another.

This third point is related to the second: When the church prays together, we see bigger.

Paul and his friends felt they had received a death sentence. But, he says in v. 9, “that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” Their vision of God was so enormous that their hope wasn’t that God could maybe rescue them from their affliction, but that God can raise the dead. Even the worst-case scenario—their death—is no obstacle for God. If they die, and he so wishes, he can always bring them back from the dead.

The simple fact is that when people pray together, they stir one another up to a bigger vision of what God is capable of. As David Brian put it, “Corporate praying enlarges the vision of what we’re praying toward.” That’s what Paul is doing here, even though he’s not with them physically. He’s giving them an example of what fuels their prayers (not “God can get us out of a bind” but “God can raises the dead”).

And what Paul is doing happens almost every time I pray with other Christians. So often people pray for things I would never think to pray about. I have such a tendency to be insular that I often forget there’s a lot more going on beyond me. And then, we’ll be praying, and someone else will start praying for Togo, or for China, or for Iran, and suddenly my eyes are lifted higher than they were before. I’m remembering that our God is not a God of small things; he is the ruler of the entire world, who listens to the prayers of his people for the entire world.

Lastly: When the church prays together, we glorify God together.

I said earlier that when people pray together, God answers: Paul expects God to work through the prayers of the Corinthians for him. That is not to say that God is more likely to answer when several people pray as opposed to one. It’s not as if God is hard of hearing and needs a crowd yelling in unison for him to pick up that request. He is a good Father, who knows all things and loves his children, and he will listen to the prayers of one child just as he will listen to all of them.

There is a very simple logic to Paul’s request in v. 11. He’s not asking the Corinthians to pray together so that God will be more likely to respond. He’s asking them to pray together because when many people pray together for the same thing, and then God answers that prayer, those many people are aware that God answered the prayer, because they all prayed it.

It’s one thing to have the subjective experience of praying and seeing God answer. It’s quite another to be part of a group that prayed together and then say, “Did you see that? He answered our prayer!” And have your brothers or sisters say, “We saw it too!” At that point, it’s no longer subjective. It’s confirmed.

Few things give us a greater boost in our faith than seeing God’s hand at work. And few things stimulate us to gratitude more than thanking God together, for the same thing.

When people pray together, they glorify God together.

In a little while, the service is going to end and we’re going to eat. And after that, we’re going to stay here and we’re going to pray. We’re not going to pray specifically for the building project (it may come up, and that’s fine, but this prayer meeting isn’t for that purpose). We’re going to pray for the coming year: for our church, for our city, for our country, and for the world.

And our goal for this time of prayer is what we’ve been talking about today: that we might see God’s hand at work and glorify him together when we see him act.

This is my challenge, to myself first and foremost, and after to the rest of you: this year, I want to become a man of prayer, I want us all to become men and women of prayer, and I want us to become a church that prays together. let’s be a church that prays together. Let us help one another in prayer, so that many will give thanks for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.

If You Hear His Voice (Hebrews 3.7-4.16)

This Advent season, we’ve been looking at the beginning of the letter to the Hebrews to celebrate our Savior, and we’ll be ending that series today. We have a lot to see.

But what have we seen so far?

We saw, first, that Christ is the revelation of God: when God wanted us to know what he is like, he sent Jesus. We saw after this that Christ is supreme above all things, worthy of more honor than the angels, reigning over all creation. After that, we saw what kind of a King he is: a King who humbled himself, who came down to the people over whom he would reign, so that he might understand what it is like to be one of us, and that he might take our sin on himself and reconcile us to God.

And finally, last week, the author compared and contrasted Jesus and another faithful servant of God, Moses, showing that as faithful as Moses was, Jesus is worthy of even more glory and honor. So after comparing and contrasting Moses and Jesus, he now starts to compare and contrast the different ways of responding to them both. (Keep your Bibles open in front of you—we’ll be skipping around a bit in these chapters.)

Hardness and Unbelief: Israel in the Wilderness

He quotes Psalm 95, which spoke about how the people of Israel acted when they were in the wilderness, after God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. V. 7:

7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,

“Today, if you hear his voice,

8  do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,

on the day of testing in the wilderness,

9  where your fathers put me to the test

and saw my works for forty years.

10  Therefore I was provoked with that generation,

and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;

they have not known my ways.’

11  As I swore in my wrath,

‘They shall not enter my rest.’ ”

The people were promised rest if they followed God. Rest from their labors under slavery in Egypt, yes, but more deeply, rest from the uncertainty of living outside of God. The foundation of God’s covenant with his people was this promise: “If you obey my commandments, you will be my people, and I will be your God.” The culmination of this rest was to come when God’s people entered the Promised Land of Canaan—a land where they could live and prosper.

But we were in Exodus all year—what happened? What did we see over and over again? God leads them out of Egypt with miraculous signs…and they’re afraid of not having water. He delivers them from the Pharaoh…and they’re afraid of not having food. He frees them from slavery…and they make a false god to worship. Their hearts were hardened against God. As a consequence, the generation that left Egypt didn’t go into the rest of the Promised Land. They died in the desert, and it was their children who finally went in and took the land.

The question is, what was at the root of this “rebellion”? What hardened the people’s hearts against God?

The author tells us in v. 19:

19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.

Now if you know the story, this might seem really confusing. The people of Israel who wandered in the desert for forty years obviously believed in God; they had seen him act with their own eyes. They saw everything he did in Egypt; they walked across the Red Sea, on dry land, as God separated it. They saw his glory descend on the mountain, and then on the tabernacle.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that God existed.

And we could say the same thing about ourselves. Look again at v. 7, where we started. He starts the verse with “Therefore”—that is, based on everything I’ve just said, “do not harden your hearts.” Well, what did he say just before that? In v. 6, we read: And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.

In other words, he’s talking to Christians here, or at least people who claim to be. He’s talking to people who more than likely believe in God.

But he knows that in any church there are people who claim to be Christians but who aren’t really living for God. And he knows that even those who have faith in Christ need stern warnings to wake us up on a regular basis. Like the people of Israel, who had seen God at work, who had come close to him, who had no doubt that God existed and was powerful.

So where did they go wrong? They clearly believed in God. So how was it that they didn’t enter the rest of the Promised Land “because of unbelief”?

The answer is deceptively simple. In the Bible, “belief” is more than what we usually mean by that word. It’s not just a matter of being “sure” of something. It’s not a matter of intellectual assent. It’s not only—it’s not even mainly—a matter of conviction.

It’s a matter of trust.

The people of Israel believed in God, but they didn’t trust him. They didn’t trust him to be the God he said he was. He had given them promises and warnings: promises for obedience, warnings for disobedience. They believed he existed, but they didn’t believe his promises or his warnings. When he spoke to them, they didn’t take him at his word.

This is a sobering thought: it is possible to believe in God without believing in God. Belief is more than conviction, more than certainty. Belief is trust in God and allegiance to God. Belief says, “I’m putting all my chips in on you, even if I still have questions.” There may be parts of our minds that have a hard time grasping or accepting certain things; but despite that uncertainty, we still make the choice to trust in the eighty percent we are certain of.

And the people of Israel wandering in the desert didn’t do that. They believed in God, but they didn’t trust him. They believed without believing.

That is the counterexample the author gives us, to show us what not to do. And he takes these two chapters to not only give us a negative example, but to positively show us what we are to do. If unbelief looks like this, what does actual belief look like?

This text seems to give us a lot of information, and it can be a little confusing to get through, because the author seems to go in circles a bit. But that’s actually telling us something. The author repeats himself over and over again, because there are a certain number of things he wants us to really focus on.

The first thing he wants us to focus on is the goal.

1. The Goal Is Rest.

The goal is rest—we see it repeated nine times in these two chapters.

For the people of Israel in the wilderness, the “rest” they were looking for was the Promised Land of Canaan. But that is obviously short term, and those who rebelled against God lost even that.

But, he says in 4.10,

there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

The Sabbath was the one day every week when the people of God were commanded to put down their tools and do no regular work. When Christ fulfilled the law of Moses, that law was no longer binding for us, but the author reminds us of the Sabbath because there is another rest that is waiting for all of God’s people. It is the rest that is waiting for us at the end of our lives, the rest that we will enjoy forever with Christ after his return.

This is the goal.

And we are called to work hard to enter it. 4.11:

11 Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

So the goal is rest, and secondly:

2. The Time Is Now.

Look at how often the author tells us that there is a specific time for us to act, and that time is now. In 3.7, the author quotes Psalm 95:

TODAY, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.

3.13:

But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “TODAY…”

3.15, again quoting Psalm 95:

TODAY, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.

And again, in 4.7:

…again he appoints a certain day, “TODAY,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “TODAY, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”

He says it more clearly than I ever could.

The author wants us to understand the urgency of the call he’s making here. He is exhorting his readers to perseverance; his goal is that those who read his words will enter the rest he’s talking about.

It’s not too late, he says. As long as it is today, it’s not too late.

So many people wait so long to truly do the work God has given them to do, because they think there is always time. But that’s just not the case. Today is the only day we ever know we have—and we don’t even know how much longer “today” will last for us.

Right now, it’s not too late. Don’t wait any longer.

So the goal is rest, and the time is now. We have to move, and we have to move toward a specific destination. The question is, how do we do it?

3. Listen to His Voice.

Chapter 3, verse 7 once again:

“Today, IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, 8  do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”

We see the same thing in v. 15, and again in chapter 4, verse 7.

God is speaking to us, brothers and sisters. How do we hear his voice?

Well, we saw part of the answer to this question at the beginning of our series, at the beginning of this letter. Chapter 1, verse 1:

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…

We hear God’s voice by listening to his Son.

But by saying that, the author isn’t comparing good and bad. He’s not saying, “Now that we have Jesus, whatever God spoke through the prophets can be ignored.” He’s talking about a progression in God’s revelation to humanity, but that past revelation is still vital.

Look at 4.11 again:

11 Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

That is the command—those are our marching orders: strive to enter your rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience that felled the people of Israel in the desert.

And right on the heels of that, we see the means God has given us to strive (I put the verse on the screen because I want everyone to see that these two go together.). V. 12:

12 FOR the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

We try to hear God in so many places, in so many ways. And some of us are so desperate to hear his voice that we’ll start imagining we hear him speaking to us in every ray of sunshine, in every singing bird…all the while forgetting that God already has spoken to us, he already has made his voice heard, through the Scriptures.

Now of course God does speak to us through the world he created, in our thoughts and in our hearts, but necessarily those things are subjective, and subject to error. Sometimes I might think God has spoken to me, when in fact it was just what I happened to be thinking at the time. (Two people can say they heard God speak to them, but he’s telling them both two contradictory things. At least one of them is wrong.)

How can I have real, objective certainty that God has really spoken to me? I go to his Word. As John Piper said once, “If you want to hear God’s voice, read the Bible aloud.”

Exposing ourselves to the living and active Word of God is a long and arduous process, because it’s not enough to just land on a verse and pluck it up for ourselves. We need to take the time to prayerfully learn this book inside and out, to know what the whole Bible says about different subjects. It takes time, and it’s less immediately gratifying.

But when we do—when we strive with the tools God has given us, when we allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate the words he inspired in Scripture—we will set down roots that go deep into the bedrock of our salvation. Because when we set ourselves in front of this Word, we expose ourselves to a surgeon’s scalpel. God’s Word cuts deep: it pierces to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart. It exposes all of us.

We are called to let the Word of God cut us deep, to let it excise what needs excising, repair what needs repairing. We are called to listen to his voice.

And when we do, we are called to a specific response.

4. Come to Jesus Together.

Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion…

Do you remember why the Israelites in the desert didn’t get to enter the Promised Land? Chapter 3, verse 19 again:

So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.

We saw before what belief entails. It’s not about intellectual assent. It’s not mainly about conviction or certainty. It’s about trust.

And here is why I love this text. It may be tempting for us to take these things the author is saying for us personally. And we should do so; every step I take toward Christ is a decision I have to make.

But I’m not alone on this road, and this text makes that abundantly clear. Chapter 3, verse 12 again:

12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

We see it again in chapter 4, verse 11:

11 Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

His language is subtly suggestive: reading this naturally, we would have expected him to say, Let us strive to enter that rest, so that we may not fall by the same sort of disobedience.

But that’s not what he says. He says: so that NO ONE may fall.

It’s a subtle reminder that he’s not speaking to his readers as individuals here, but as a body—he’s talking to us, not me. We exhort one another every day, so that NONE OF US may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. We strive to enter that rest, so that NO ONE may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

The image here is not of a single person climbing up a mountain, but rather of a group of people carrying one another up. Someone will start to fall, and those in front and behind will grab an elbow and keep him on his feet.

We strive together, in order to persevere together.

This is very difficult for some people to accept, either because they’re too proud to accept that they need help, or because they’ve been burned one too many times and have a hard time trusting others. And even if we don’t have a problem with the idea of needing one another now, there will come a time when it will feel so much easier to just drop the hands of the people next to me and go the rest of the way on my own. It’s often harder to go together than it is to go alone.

So we need a really solid reason to believe this, to believe that not only must we work to enter God’s rest, but that we must do it in such a way that, Lord willing, no one falls by the same sort of disobedience the Israelites showed.

What is that reason? V. 11 again:

11 Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. 12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword…

Simply put, the Word of God tells us that belief is a community project. We strive together, we exhort one another, to enter the rest that God has promised us, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

So what does that look like?

It actually looks a lot like what I’m doing right now. I know that many of you are exhausted at the end of this year (and there are several people I’m thinking of who aren’t here today). I know that some of you are doing fine, but you’ll soon need a reminder to get you back on track. I know that others among you are wounded, grieving, suffering.

And I know that some of you are pretending. You know exactly what to say, you know exactly what to do, to give the impression that you believe in God. But you believe without believing. You’ve hardened your hearts, and slowly but surely, you’re falling into the same trap as the Israelites in the desert.

Whatever the reason, you need help—the same help I myself need just as often as anyone.

The stakes are simply too great for us to drop anchor here.

So where do we turn, in order to head towards the rest that is promised to us? We turn toward our great High Priest. Chapter 4, verse 14:

14 Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus knows what it’s like to be us. That’s why he came. He was tempted in every way as we are. He understands, and he has sympathy for us. Jesus has not abandoned us; he has not abandoned you. He is a good High-Priest, a perfect High-Priest, and even if your situation seems desperate, you can still today hold fast your confession and come to him. Believe in him. Trust him.

…Now of course, if you take the opportunity to speak like this to someone else, the way they respond is up to them. The person in front of you, who will need to hear these things, may wake up and strive to enter that rest, or he may harden himself even further. The important thing is that we seize the opportunity, today, and that we be there to help our brother or sister stay on their feet.

Belief is a community project.

And for all of the many things going on in our church—for everything we’ve had on our plates this past year, and everything that’s coming this next year—this is the only project that really matters.

Consider Christ (Hebrews 3.1-6)

Every time Christmas comes around, we tell the story. Mary and Joseph making the long trek to Bethlehem, Mary giving birth in less-than-ideal conditions, and then the wonder of this thing: God himself, born as a human boy. And every time we tell this story, I can’t help but think of when my own kids were born.

Their births were both incredible in their own ways, but it is a peculiar experience to have your first child. When Jack was born, it was after a very long and very difficult delivery. They almost had to rush Loanne into an emergency C-section because it was so bad. So when Jack finally came out, I was completely overwhelmed with emotion. I cried so much I made the nurses cry.

Now, that in itself doesn’t mean much: I cry a lot. Remember that Apple commercial a few years ago, the one where the soldier in Afghanistan was watching the birth of his kid over FaceTime? Complete meltdown for me. The fact that I was overcome with emotion isn’t that surprising.

Even so—and this is the experience of just about every parent ever, even those who manage to contain their emotions better than I did—when I held that little guy for the first time, I knew two things: first, that starting from this moment my life had fundamentally changed in ways I couldn’t control or predict; and second, that I would do anything for this kid. Anything. Meeting this child necessarily brought with it a number of acts that I would definitely perform.

If this is true about us when we become a parent, or when we find a husband or a wife, or when we’re adopted into a loving family after being without one, then it is infinitely more true about us when we find our Savior and our Lord, the Creator of all things.

If you remember the story, in Luke chapter 2, when the shepherds finally found the baby lying in the manger, they went out from there celebrating, glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard. When Jesus later approached the disciples in the gospels, they were so shaken by their encounter with him that they left everything to follow him.

Jesus is the one human being who changes everything for those who meet him.

The first two chapters of Hebrews have been a long description of why Jesus Christ should provoke such a profound and intense reaction in all of us—why Jesus Christ should leave none of us indifferent.

We see that Jesus is the perfect revelation of God himself: through Jesus, we see who God is and what he is like. We see Jesus compared to angels, these powerful beings known and respected by early Christians: Jesus is infinitely greater than the angels, in his majesty, and in his relationship to God the Father. And last week, we saw the kind of ruler and King he is: a King who lowers himself to be with his people, to take on our humanity and to take our punishment in our place.

We have one more brief comparison to see today, but most of all, today and next week, we’re going to see how we respond to him. Once we have found our Lord and King and Creator, what is the only appropriate response?

We see it in chapter 3.

Jesus and Moses

We see Jesus compared to Moses at the beginning of chapter 3. If you know your Bible at all, you know that Moses was revered by the Israelites and the early Jews: he was a standard for what it looked like to be a faithful servant of God.

Why is Jesus compared to Moses here, and not someone like Abraham or David? Those two men will come in later, but I think the author talks about Moses because of the rest of what he says in this passage. Abraham was at the beginning: he was the forefather of the people of Israel, but there wasn’t really a people when he was around. David came later—he was the greatest king of a kingdom that already existed.

Moses got in on the ground floor. Moses was integral in building the people of Israel, so to speak, in making it what it became. What we’ll see later on is that Jesus is building something too.

Let’s read v. 1-4:

Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, 2 who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house. 3 For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. 4 (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.)

What we see here is fairly obvious, so we won’t need to spend a lot of time on it. After comparing Jesus to angels, saying he is more glorious and powerful and majestic than they are, he now compares Jesus to Moses.

He gives us one similarity between the two men, and that is that they were both faithful to the task God had given to them. Moses wasn’t perfect—we know he didn’t enter the promised land with the people of Israel because he lost his temper and disobeyed God—but he was, by and large, a faithful servant of God.

But as faithful as Moses was, the author says that Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses.

Why? Because Moses was a servant, and Jesus is the King he served.

The example the author uses is a good one. He says in v. 3, For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself.

The architect Frank Lloyd Wright is well known for his gorgeous and unusual buildings. In the town in Florida where Loanne and I met, there is a college called Florida Southern College (it’s where Loanne did her studies), and the buildings of that college were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a strange place—not everyone is a fan of the style of the buildings on campus—but the architecture of Florida Southern is still renowned in the town. Not because the buildings themselves are magnificent, but because they were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The builder of a house has more honor than the house itself.

Every house is built by someone, the author says in v. 4, but the builder of all things is God.

The ministry of Moses, as revered as it was, wasn’t really Moses’s ministry at all. It was God’s ministry, God’s work—he was building the house.

That’s the first thing: when people look back at the ministry of Moses, they shouldn’t be impressed by Moses, but by God who was working through Moses. And the implication, which we saw in chapter 1, is that Jesus is this “God”, the builder of all things.

The second comparison, we see in v. 5-6:

5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, 6 but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son.

It’s similar to what we saw in chapter 1, when Jesus was compared to the angels. Moses was faithful, absolutely; but he was faithful as a servant. Jesus was faithful too, but his faithfulness was of a different sort; he was faithful as a son.

So in these verses, it’s not the quality of the work that is compared, but the role of the person doing the work. Moses was a servant; Jesus is a son. Moses “testified to the things that were to be spoken later”; he was getting things ready for what was to come. Jesus is “what was to come.” Everything Moses did was getting the people ready for Jesus.

I said before that I think the author used Moses as a point of comparison here because of what he was doing: the author says he was serving to “build the house” that God wanted to build. This “house”, of course, isn’t a literal building, but God’s people, the family we talked about last week. We know this because we see in the second half of v. 6:

And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.

It shouldn’t escape our attention that there is a condition attached to this privileged place we hold: IF INDEED we hold fast… That is, there is a certain way to respond to Christ that shows that we are his house.

To come back to Frank Lloyd Wright: he has a very distinct style. If you know his work, you can take one look at a building and know it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, because of the characteristics of that building.

In the same way, there is a certain way of living that shows we are “God’s house”; there are certain ways of responding to Christ that show we are his people.

Our Response to Jesus

There are lots of examples we could give, but in today’s text, the author gives us three.

We see the first appropriate response in v. 1:

Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus…

It seems obvious to say it, but it’s not as obvious as we might think. Commands are given because not all of us will instinctively follow them. Some of us would never consider Jesus if we weren’t told to do so.

Here’s what I mean. How often do we spend time just thinking about who Jesus is? We consider what he can do for us, absolutely. But how often do we just consider him? Who he is, and what he does? How much of our mental energy is spent on just contemplating our Savior?

I hope quite a lot, but I suspect the answer to that question is, not too much.

Now why should we consider Jesus? The author tells us in v. 1: we consider Jesus because he is “the apostle and high priest of our confession.”

He is an “apostle”—not in the same way the other apostles are; the word “apostle” simply means one who is sent. Jesus was sent by God, to show us who God is. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, we saw in chapter 1, verse 3. Jesus was sent by God to show us who God is.

Second, he is “the high priest of our confession.” Remember what we saw last week? The high priest’s job was to stand as intermediary between God and man. That’s what Jesus did. By taking on our human nature, he is able to represent human beings. He took our place, lived our life and died our death, so that he might stand in the presence of God the Father and say, “These people’s sins have been covered. Your wrath against them has been satisfied.”

When we consider Jesus, we consider everything we saw in the first two chapters: his majesty and glory which is so high above that of the angels; his humility and lowliness that makes him a King worth following. And now, his faithfulness to the task God gave him. Faithfulness through every temptation, faithfulness through every struggle, faithfulness even to death.

Third, he is the builder, and we are his house. Of course that’s a metaphor, so let’s put it more plainly: if we want to know who we are, we need to consider our Creator and Savior. We are the house he is building, but how are we to have any idea what we’re supposed to look like if we don’t know the Builder? A disciple is someone who follows and learns from and imitates a master. How can we know how to live like our Master if we don’t consider our Master?

Consider Jesus. That is the first way we respond to Jesus.

Here is the second way; we see it in v. 6:

And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence…

Isn’t it interesting that he speaks about confidence? We might expect him to talk about purity or obedience—because those things absolutely play a part, as we’ll see next week. But for now, he shows us that the proper response to Christ is confidence: not in ourselves, but in him.

So many Christians today live their Christian lives like they’re walking on eggshells, always questioning whether or not they’re doing the right thing. Of course there is a place for such questioning—we should be making sure we’re following Christ as we ought to.

But there is a kind of self-examination that often does more harm than good. Ask yourself this: When I examine myself, when I question my behavior or my motives, am I afraid? Do I examine myself with fear in the pit of my stomach, wondering what will happen if I don’t measure up? What will happen if I learn that I’ve made a mistake?

I say this with all the love in my heart: you don’t measure up. I don’t measure up. None of us do. We will make mistakes; we do every day. Our ability to do the right thing is not the basis of our confidence.

Followers of Christ are meant to be a men and women full of confidence—not in ourselves, but in our Savior. That means that when we examine ourselves, we should feel confidence, not worry. When we examine ourselves, maybe we will see things that don’t measure up. Maybe we will see things that need to change.

But when we see things that need to change, even as we grieve over our sin, we are confident, because Christ is our Savior, and because of who he is and what he has done, we can change. The fact that we’re imperfect doesn’t mean that our salvation is in jeopardy; it means that Jesus still has the opportunity to make us more like him. And he promises to do just that. We have been predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son, Paul tells us in Romans 8.

We can wonder; we can question; but we don’t have to worry. We hold fast our confidence.

The final way we respond to Jesus in this text is similar. V. 6 again:

And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.

This is a good step beyond simple confidence.

First of all, we boast in something: we boast in our hope.

I’ve said this before, but hope in the Bible isn’t hope the way we usually think of it. It’s not like when we say, “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” with no real certainty that it will happen, since it’s Paris and it’s winter.

I told you last Sunday that my brother got married a couple weeks ago. Hope in the Bible is closer to what my brother felt standing at the front of that church, waiting for the doors to open in the back and reveal his bride. The doors aren’t open yet, but he knows she’s right there, on the other side, waiting to come to him. It is the anticipation of what we can’t see yet.

This thing we can’t see yet, but that we know is coming, is the fulfillment of the work Christ has done. We have this hope: that one day, Christ will return, and on that day he will rid the world of sin and all its effects; he will raise us from the dead as he was raised from the dead, ridding our bodies of death and decay and sin; and we will live forever with him in the new heavens and the new earth, perfectly fulfilled in him as his people.

And this hope doesn’t leave us indifferent. It leaves us confident, as we saw before, but even more than that: it leaves us proud. We boast in our hope.

This may sound strange because of the high price the Bible places on humility—but again, it’s not pride in ourselves. We’re not proud of our own accomplishments. We’re proud of our brother, Jesus Christ, who lived died and was raised to give us this hope.

We’re proud of this incredible message we have been given to proclaim to the world—what an opportunity we have, to tell people how they can be free to live as they were created to live: forever, and perfect in that forever.

We’re proud of the God who knows all things and sees all things, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and who knows better than we do how we can be happy.

So many Christians lived ashamed of their faith. When they have the opportunity to speak about Christ, they hesitate, because they’re embarrassed. I’m as guilty of this as anyone; it’s hard to be proud of something that everyone else sees as ridiculous.

But is it ridiculous? Do we have a reason to be ashamed? Absolutely not. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1.18: For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

We have no reason to be ashamed. We are proud of our Savior. We boast in our hope.

Conclusion

I said earlier that when I held my kids for the first time, I was overcome with emotion. But I wasn’t just emotional; I was also determined. I looked them in the eyes, and I made them promises to live a certain way, not because it was his duty, but because I grasped the incredible gift I’d been given when they were born.

In the same way, when we know who Jesus is, and what he has done, we are driven to respond.

We consider our Savior. We think about him, we learn about him, we meditate on him. This Christmas, when we gather for meals or to exchange gifts, we remember that every light, every gift wrapping, every flavor in every food is about him. We wonder at the miracle of his coming: God made man, to save men and women from all nations, throughout all history. We remember the complexities of his character and the greatness of his glory, and that when we see him, we see God himself.

We hold fast our confidence. We don’t live our lives in fear. Christians who understand their Savior are necessarily confident, because they know that their place with God and their salvation does not depend on themselves. If we’re confident in ourselves, we will absolutely crash and burn, because we can’t live up to that confidence. But if we are confident in him, we are on rock-solid ground. We can wonder and examine ourselves, but we don’t have to worry. If we have repented of our sin and placed our faith in Christ, we are safe; he will not let us go.

And finally, we hold fast our boasting in our hope. We have received an incredible gift. This is what we try to tell our kids at Christmas, because the gifts under the tree can quickly become a consumerist feast. But we give gifts to remember the ultimate gift we have received—and it’s not a gift that “belongs” to us. It’s not a gift that came to us because we did something right, or belonged to the right tribe, or understood the right thing. Jesus Christ is a gift that was freely given to us by God, and it is a gift that is meant to be shared.

So we are not ashamed. For the rest of the world, it may seem like folly, but for those who are being saved, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God. We contemplate the majesty of the Son of God, and then we rush away from the manger, celebrating him to anyone who will take the time to listen to us.

This is how we respond to the Son of God.