What Difference Does Jesus Make to You?

12/24/11

Scripture:

In our text Paul gives the big picture.  Tonight we come to take a snapshot of one day in the life of Jesus—the day of his birth.  But here we have the big picture of what Jesus’ life is all about.  As I get ready to read this text, Paul’s purpose in talking about the life of Jesus...this great parabola so to speak of Jesus being in a place of great honor and becoming a lowly servant and then returning again to a place of great honor Paul appeals to because he wants followers of Jesus to think like him, to serve like him, to be humble like him.  So listen to these words and ponder them for your own life tonight.  

Philippians 2:1-11 So if there is and any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, ² complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.  ³ Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  ⁴ Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.  ⁵ Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,  ⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,  ⁷ but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men.  ⁸ And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  ⁹ Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,  ¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,  ¹¹ and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  

May God bless the reading and our hearing and receiving of the word of truth.  Amen.

Well, tonight is the big crescendo of Christmas.  We have been approaching this season of celebration as well as believers around the world, tonight pausing to celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  This has been a special season.  There’s been decorations, there’s been details, shopping, and family get-togethers.  You can’t even escape in the stores where the primary goal and motivation is money and profits, not proclaiming the gospel.  Even there we hear songs like the ones we sing tonight celebrating and honoring Jesus of Nazareth.  But tomorrow Christmas will be here and then it will be gone.  Trees will be discarded or boxed away for next year.  Ornaments will be put away.  Christmas carols will no longer be heard in the stores.  Instead, it will go back to life as normal.  So the question I would like to ask for us to ponder tonight...we’re pausing and you’re in the right place.  You’re here to give some attention to Jesus tonight.  What I would like to ask you to consider is what difference does Jesus make to you?  Are you one of those folks that as the trees go away and the decorations are put aside, that Jesus becomes put aside in a sense in your life?   Oh, you believe in him, you acknowledge that he’s there, but you don’t give much thought to how his life intersects upon yours.  What difference does Jesus make to you?  

That question is almost assumed in the text that I read to you tonight from Philippians because Paul is writing to Christians, and he is assuming that Jesus is going to make a difference in the way these Christians relate to each other.  In fact, in verse 5 he says, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours is Christ Jesus.”  He’s wanting Jesus to make a difference in their life.  This was a church that wasn't in trouble.  They weren't in error.  This was a pastor simply calling the people of God to stretch, to love, to be like the one who they name as their Lord.  So let me ask you tonight how does the great story of Jesus influence your life?  How does it affect your behavior because Christianity—the celebration of Christ’s life and birth—it’s not simply a one-day-a-year thing, but it’s a life, a life change, because of who Jesus is and what he’s done.  So let me ask again, what difference does Jesus make to you?  Now really to fully answer that question you’ve got to have some things clear in your mind.  

Who is Jesus?

First of all, you have to have a sense of who exactly is this Jesus we’re talking about.  Who is Jesus?  Well, he’s a famous person because we’re celebrating his birth tonight, and we’re known to do that as people, to celebrate the birth of men and women with great achievement. Because of their contributions to society we celebrate social activists like Martin Luther King, Jr.  We celebrate leaders like Abraham Lincoln.  We celebrate people of renown and great resource, and so tonight we gather with billions of people to celebrate Jesus Christ’s birth.  But the question is who exactly is Jesus and what difference does he make in our life?

If we look at our text tonight, Paul is abundantly clear as he tells the reader to have the mind of Jesus and then he tells us who Jesus is.  “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”  Here in Paul’s letter he acknowledges what I call the preeminence of Jesus Christ that he is above all others because he is in fact God.  It’s mentioned here in the text when he says that Jesus was “in the form of God.”  The word form there is the Greek word morph that we use in words like metamorphosis.  It has to do with shape and character, and it speaks about how Christ Jesus himself possesses inwardly and displays outwardly the very nature of God himself.  Paul says here that Jesus was in the form of God and then he goes on to describe that he was equal with God.  He uses another Greek word, iso, there.  We use it in words like isotope when we talk about two elements like carbon 12 and carbon 14, that they’re the same because they share the same atomic number but they’re different in their weights.  And so Paul is saying here that Jesus is the same as God.  He’s equal to God.  And so everything that we would attribute to God we attribute to Jesus Christ.  He is eternal.  He is all powerful.  Jesus is all knowing.  Jesus is perfect in who he is and what he does.  In fact, the text that we’re reading here even speaks of Jesus in a sense of his pre-existence.  Think about this with me, if you will please.  All of us as we begin to move back to our own personal lives can approach that day when we began to exist.  It wasn't when we were born.  It wasn't when we were eight months in the womb.  It was back at the moment where we were conceived.  At that moment we began to exist and prior to that there was none of us.   But the scripture says that Jesus in fact did pre-exist as God.  He existed and acted before he was born.  Paul alludes to this in other letters of his like Colossians where he says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  He says that all things were created by him, all things were created through him, and all things were created for him.  

So who is Jesus?  If we’re going to answer the question what difference does he make, we need to understand that he is in fact our creator.  He is God.  This is something Paul wrote in Philippians about 30 years after Jesus was killed in Jerusalem.  He’s quoting from an ancient hymn and so this concept is not new to Paul.  It was a concept believed to be true all throughout the church that Jesus was in fact God.  

Why Did He Come?

Now what difference does Jesus make to you?  Again I think we need to not only ask the question who Jesus is, we need to understand what this night is about.  We come to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, but what does that mean that Jesus, God's son, God the Son, was born?  Well this night is about one thing...an invasion.  It’s God choosing to enter the world and to be like you and me.  Paul says in Philippians 2, “Jesus made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”  Here is the great mystery of Christmas...that God became a man. 

Now I want to just ask you to just use your imagination here and to think about this with me for a moment.  We can...if we pause and let our mind wander a little...we can think about what it must have been like in heaven in the weeks prior to Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.  Now the God we worship is an all-knowing God, but the angels in heaven who serve him are not, and so it tells us in the Bible that these angels don’t always understand what God's salvation is about and they long to look into with interest what God is doing in rescuing his people.  So we can imagine something of what the conversations must have been like for the angels in heaven prior to Christ’s descent to earth.  I'm sure they were beginning to discuss exactly how God would enter into human history.  Would he appear as a mighty general marching into pagan Rome the way Caesar did when he crossed the Rubicon?  Perhaps he would come as the wisest of philosophers putting the wisdom of Plato and Socrates to foolishness by a supernatural display of intellect.  But what do we actually find?  What are the markings of the descent into human history by God?  

There’s no display of glory, no pomp, no marching of the feet of the heavenly legions.  Instead, Christ lays his robes aside, the glory that was his from eternity.  He steps down from the heavenly throne and becomes a baby in the arms of a mother in the far eastern colony of the Roman Empire.  At this display of condescension the angels are truly amazed and they burst into such a crescendo of song that the shepherds hear them on the hills of Bethlehem.  Why?  Why would God who has all of the glory of his own being lay it aside and become a servant, become a human, become as the scripture says obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross?

Well, the answer I believe is found in the text that Paul writes when we ask the question to whom was Jesus Christ obedient, to whom does he serve.  The interesting thing here is that Jesus is equal to the Heavenly Father in glory and power and radiance and yet he is willing to humble himself and to serve the will of the Heavenly Father.  In fact, we see this when we read the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus when on the night when he is about ready to be arrested he’s in the garden and he’s praying to the Father and he says, “Father, take this cup from me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will.”   Jesus was there humbling himself before his Father in heaven and seeking to be obedient to him in all things, even to death on a cross.  Why is that?  Because there at the cross is where peace and forgiveness and eternal life is provided for you and me.  Paul says in Colossians that in Jesus All the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him (Jesus) God reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his (Jesus’) cross (Colossians 1:19-20).  In fact, what Christmas is about is this:  Jesus became like us so we could become like Him.  That’s why the angels proclaimed peace on earth, goodwill to men.  That’s the message of this night...this night where God lays aside the glory that is rightly his and becomes a servant to serve the Father and to serve you and me.  

What is Our Destiny with Him?

What difference does Jesus make to you?  Well, we need to stop and think more than just who he is—God—or why he came which is that invasion.  We need to understand what is our destiny with him, and this is what I call an intrusion.   Jesus is on a path to intrude into your life. You and he will have a meeting, an appointment that he has scheduled for you and there’s no way you can get out of it.  You will stand before him one day, as we all will, and acknowledge him as Lord.  Listen how Paul continues to describe Jesus.  He began with his initial glory in heaven, his radiance, and then began that descent down where he chose to lay aside his glory and become that servant on the cross dying to please the Father.  And then in the story Jesus is not the actor, now he’s the one being acted upon by God the Father.  And listen to what Paul says about Jesus now.  “Therefore God has highly exalted him (Jesus) and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,  and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Paul has the audacity here to claim that this man Jesus is now the centerpiece of human history to whom all of us will give an account as Lord.  Now I want you to think through the audacity of such a claim because Paul wrote this down a mere generation after Jesus died in Jerusalem, and yet here he has the audacity to say that no one in the Roman Empire is more significant to everyone’s destiny than Jesus.  

I was curious at the time what significance had Jesus’ name established in this Roman Empire.  To what extent were Christians declaring their love and allegiance to him?  Because Paul here has the courage to say everyone is going to acknowledge his authority, but if you look at the history at the time that this letter was written historians tell us that the Roman Empire estimated between 54 and 60 million people.  It got me wondering, out of those 54 million citizens, residents of the Roman Empire, how many were Christians?  Well, there’s no real answer.  No history book that you can crack open and get an account, but I did some math and I tried to look at starting with the small church of 5000 in Jerusalem and calculating different percentage growths how many Christians there would be when Paul wrote this letter.  At a 10 percent growth rate there would have been about 90,000 when Paul wrote Philippians.  At 20 percent growth there would be significantly more, just over 900,000.  But even at its best scenario, Christians would have been less than 2 percent of the entire Roman Empire, probably more like 0.2 percent.  And yet here Paul is saying that that one that this small percentage of people are worshiping and praising and serving, he is the one to whom every knee will bow.  He is the one that every tongue will confess that he is Lord—those in heaven, those on the earth, those under the earth.  He’s saying it’s the dead and the living that are accountable to him. You cannot escape the jurisdiction of Jesus.  

Let me share something with you that you probably know.  The great atheist, Christopher Hitchens, died last week.  He’s quite famous.  He’s made this new atheist movement popular in his books.  He’s debated a lot of religious people, a lot of Christian people about why we’re fools to believe in a personal God or to believe specifically that that personal God has visited the earth in the man Jesus Christ and he died.  My heart aches for him now because now he knows the truth of Philippians.  Every knee will bow, every tongue confess.  Now he is to stand before the one he rejected and reap the consequences of his unbelief.  See Christopher Hitchens will bow the knee to Christ and dear friends so will you.   Every knee will bow, every tongue confess.  That’s the intersection of your life with this one for whom we celebrate his birth tonight.  And so I want to ask you a few questions as we ponder what difference Jesus makes to you.  

Will you bend the knee because of love and adoration for the one who died to rescue you?  Or will you bend the knee by compulsion as a conquered foe, as a soon-to-be-vanquished enemy of the very one who created you, who visited you, who died for you?  What difference does Jesus make to you?  It should make all the difference in the world.  And so I want to ask you, I want to beg you tonight to become his follower, to take upon yourself the mantle of Jesus Christ, the person of who he is, to walk in his steps, to not simply come to worship and to go home but to let who he is change your life.  As Paul says, let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.  It’ll change your life and it may in fact change others.  

I want to tell you a story that comes from Watchman Nee, a Chinese evangelist.  He talks about there was a man, a poor rice farmer, who had a rice patty on the side of a high mountain.  If you know anything about rice patties, you fill them with water and the rice grows submerged under water.  So this farmer would fill his rice patties with water daily and then after he’d leave to return home his neighbor would come out.  He had a field a little bit lower and so he would go up and open the gates there where the flood water was and all of that man’s water would trickle down into his neighbor’s field.  So the next day he would return and he would notice his rice was uncovered.  He would begin to refill his field and he would depart and his neighbor would take the water, drain it downhill into his field every day.  This man, this rice farmer, was a Christian and one day he decided he was going to do things a little different.  He decided he was going to take to heart the words of Paul to look out not only for your own interest but the interest of others.  So he got out to his rice field that early morning and he decided to fill the neighbor’s water first.  So he got his rice patties full and then he filled his water second.  It was a smart move because it ended the problem of his neighbor stealing his water.  He didn’t need it anymore.  So this began the new habit.  Every morning he would fill his neighbor’s field and then fill his own.  He put the other’s needs above his own. And the interesting thing was because of that his neighbor became a Christian.  His unbelief was overcome by a genuine demonstration of a Christian’s humility and Christ-like character.  This is the heart of Jesus Christ—one who is willing to lay aside all that he has to become nothing, to be a servant to die with nothing for us.  This is Jesus Christ, the one we come to celebrate.  May your knee bow in reverence before him.  May your heart be filled with worship to him not only here at Christmas Eve but always.  Let us pray. 

Lord God, I thank you for this incredible description in Philippians of who Jesus is and what he did.  I thank you that you call us not only to receive the blessings of Jesus but to be like him in humility and lowliness and service.  Lord God, take our hearts and mold them to be like the Son of God for whom we celebrate tonight.  May we truly be different.  May Jesus make a difference in our lives that we can make a difference in others’ lives for his sake.  Lord, help us to share the love of Christ.  Help us to be mindful that this story is more than history.  It’s inspiration for holy living.  May we please you and honor you, oh Lord, by being like you.  We ask this prayer in your Holy Name.  Amen.