Sermon January 24 "Knowing Christ Through Scripture"

Knowing Christ through scripture was our theme this past Sunday. We looked at two passages: Luke 24:36-48 and Acts 8:26-35.

Both of these passages introduce us to ways in which the scriptures give us access to knowing Christ more fully. Without the scriptures we are destined to an incomplete and embarrassingly small picture of who Jesus actually is. We have a default Jesus, if you will.

The disciple turned apostle Phillip had a default Jesus too. We looked at his story briefly in John’s gospel.

John 1:45…
“Philip found Nathanael and told him, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’”

Phillip thought he knew who Jesus was and why he had come. He based this on his reading of the Law of Moses and the prophets.

John 6:5-7…
When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?" He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do. Philip answered him, "Eight months' wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!"

Jesus tested Phillip. Phillip thought he knew Jesus. But his knowledge of Jesus didn’t include Christ as creator of all things.

John 14:7-9…
“If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us." Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?”

Phillip’s understanding of Jesus didn’t include him as Emmanuel. In John 1 Phillip knew just who Jesus was. By John 14 Jesus is asking “Don’t you know me, Phillip?”

In Luke 24 after Jesus’ resurrection we see Jesus “opening up the minds” of the disciples to understands the scriptures- the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Jesus shows them that it is all about him.

Christ would have us know him for who he is and not who we make him out to be. We will come to know Christ more fully only through the scriptures that he himself, through the Spirit, will open our minds to understand.

In Acts 8 the Spirit tells Phillip to go over to the chariot in which the Ethiopian eunuch was reading a passage from Isaiah 53. “Of whom is the prophet speaking?” the eunuch asks.

Up until Christ opened his mind to understand the scriptures, Phillip would have never seen that passage of the suffering servant in Isaiah as one about the messiah, his Lord, Jesus Christ. But on that day Phillip could tell the eunuch about Jesus.

Only through a life spent in the scriptures will the small Jesus we carry around in our minds give way to who Christ really is in all of his fullness.

Pastor Scott

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Sermon January 17 "Knowing Christ Through Fellowship"

The first church was devoted to fellowship- koinonia. Acts 2:44 says, “All the believers were together and had everything in common [koinos].”

One image that the Apostle Paul uses for the church is that of “the body of Christ.” We looked at I Corinthians 12:21-27 where Paul says, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

As the church we represent how Christ is revealing himself to the world. To a person we represent the care and character of Christ. When we suffer along side of someone who is hurting we are Jesus’ compassion to them. When we rejoice with someone who celebrates we are the delight of Christ to them.

As the church, we are not only capable of revealing Christ to each other we are called to do just that. When we see ourselves as the body of Christ and live in connection to one another as a result, it is through that kind of fellowship that we come to know Christ more fully.

We looked at 3 ways in which this first body in Jerusalem came to know Christ through fellowship.

1
Acts 2:45, “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.”
Part of fellowship means a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the needs of others- to give of ones self.

In allowing ourselves to admit our needs, and being willing to do with less to meet the needs of others we will come to know Christ more fully through our fellowship.

2
Acts 2:46a, “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.”
We must remember, there were no church buildings. There was no place that was the church. The temple courts were simply the public. The temple courts were busy with hundreds of not thousands of people. They were the church not defined by a gathering place. They were the church not defined by a gathering time.

In seeing the whole of our lives as the living out of who we are as the church we will come to know Christ more fully through our fellowship.

3
Acts 2:46b, “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.”
Part of fellowship means having lives that are open to each other. These people ate together. They sat around dinner tables around Jerusalem and laughed and cried and prayed and shared the stuff of life with one another. We ought not diminish or downplay the place of sharing a meal with our church family.

A commitment to the table with one another is a commitment to knowing Christ more fully through fellowship.

Pastor Scott
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Sermon January 10 "Knowing Christ Through Worship"

In Acts 2 we discover that the first church devoted themselves to 4 things. They committed to worship, fellowship, the scriptures, and prayer. These four things are what we will study in this first section of this sermon series focused on how we know Christ.

The passage we looked at in our discussion of knowing Christ through worship was Colossians 1:15-20. This passage addresses why we worship in the first place. I made this point, “So often we miss the point of worship when show up on Sunday morning hoping to get something out of it. As though the point of worship is what we glean from it. Worship is not about us or what we get from it. The most basic and fundamental concept that we must understand is that we do all of these things because they glorify and honor God. Our operative thought concerning worship ought not to be the hope that we can get something out of it, but rather that we can bring something of worth to it.”

It is to this end that our passage speaks. Christ is why we worship.

This Colossians passage says four things about Christ that are the foundation of why we gather to worship.

1. All things were created by him.
We come to know Christ in our worship because as we celebrate the handiwork of God’s creation we are celebrating the work of Christ. He may have been born on Christmas, but he was born into a world that he created.

2. All things were created for him.
Not only is Christ worthy of our worship because he created all things. But he created all things, especially us, so that we might give him worship. We are not the focal point of creation- Christ is. As his creation we have been infused with the purpose of glorifying him. In our worship we fulfill our reason for being and in so doing come to know Christ more fully.

3. All things are held together in him.
He is worthy of our worship because he still holds the stars in their place. By his word the planets stay in their motion. By his will summer gives way to fall, and fall to winter, and he brings the planet back to life with spring. The very seasons exhibit the redemptive fingerprint of Christ. We come to know Christ in our worship as we celebrate the fact that he’s got the whole world in is hands- and they are loving hands.

4. We are reconciled to God through him.
We come to know Christ more fully in our worship because our worship is a celebration of the good news of the gospel- namely, that the Word that created all things and sustains them for his glory left that glory, abandoned the heavenly place, in order to be born as a peasant and die as a criminal. And why? Because we sinned.

By him. For him. In him. Through him.
When Christ is in the center of our worship then in our worship we will come to know him.

Pastor Scott

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Sermon January 3 “To Know Christ and to Make Christ Known”

On this communion Sunday we began a sermon series on our church mission statement: “To Know Christ and to Make Christ Known.” This will be a 9 week series. This week I reintroduced the mission statement (which is on the front of our bulletins each week) to the church. Over the next 8 weeks we will spend the first four discovering how it is that we come to know Christ more fully and we will spend the next four discovering what it means for us to make him known. Oh, how the kingdom would grow if particular churches were internally strong and externally focused!

The focus passage this week was John 6:25-40. In this passage we find a hungry crowd seeking Jesus for the wrong reasons. They want to “see” who he is. They want to have their bellies filled with more of the loaves and fish he miraculously distributed the day before.

Jesus’ frustration with this crowd is born in the fact that this multitude is interested in the product of his power but not so much in what his power says about who he is. Jesus says that God has but one thing that will please him: Believe in the one whom he has sent. The crowd begs for more proof that he is worthy of such belief appealing to the manna in the wilderness.

Jesus proclaims that he is the true bread that has come from heaven.

Two things hang in the balance of knowing Christ as the true bread.
1. Satisfaction in this life. “Whoever comes to me will never hunger and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

2. Salvation in the next life. “And this is the will of him who sent me that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.”

The whole of this life and the next hang in the balance of knowing Christ- through faith believing that he is who the scriptures testify him to be.

After coming to the table to celebrate the sacrament- Christ the bread broken for us- we closed our worship together by joining in a statement of purpose:

Leader: Church, what is our mission?

Congregation: Our mission is to know Christ and to make Christ known.

Leader: How is it that we come to know Christ more fully?

Congregation: We come to know him through worship, fellowship, in the Scriptures, and in prayer.

Leader: How is it that we make Christ known?

Congregation: We make him known through our actions, our words, our testimony, and our life together.

Each component of the congregational response will be the focus of our next 8 weeks together.

-Pastor Scott

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