In case you didn’t know…..I am not just a mild mannered college student. I am also a pastor. Relax, I am not a televangelist. I am a real pastor. I love Jesus and it is one of the greatest privileges in my life to talk about the gospel (good news). This story changed my life. This is an important sermon that I preached recently on Roman’s chapter 8:32. It is important because it deals with the implications of the life and death of Jesus.
The Choosing of the 12 Apostles
Lessons from Jesus’ Choices
What is obvious about the 12 apostles of Jesus, is that the reason why they were chosen is not obvious. At least it is not obvious at first glance. If you were writing a book to advise people on how to start a religious movement that would turn the world upside down, you would certainly not make recommendations that your top leaders be of these kinds of men. The group lacks education, experience, wealth and influence. They are working class men, from different backgrounds, who possessed huge differences in their political and social affiliations. Why then did Jesus choose these men? We don’t know all everything behind the selecting of the 12, but I would suggest 4 reasons:
First, so that the glory would belong to God. When a self-sufficient person works hard and succeeds, the next step is usually taking responsibility for the accomplishments. If success was going to come from this group, no one would say, “Naturally, what did you expect from such a well qualified group.” This is exactly what happened in Acts 4:13 “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus.” Many times God goes out of his way to work through apparently fragile means, and weak people so that no one will steal the glory. In the Old Testament, God whittled down the army of Gideon to an astounding 300 soldiers in order to defeat the enemies of Israel. Why? “ And the LORD said to Gideon, ‘The people who are with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel claim glory for itself against Me, saying, My own hand has saved me. (Judges 7:2)’”
Second, I would suggest another reason these men were chosen: To show that grace unifies different people. Politically there could not have been two more polar opposites than a tax collector (a.k.a. Collaborator!) and a Jewish zealot. It is amazing that the tolerance and diversity that the world so desperately wants, is nowhere so typified as in the Church of Christ. Sure there is racism and division in the church. But find people that have really been transformed by the gospel and you will find a group who love people different than them. Grace shines bright when it overcomes the natural prejudices that we have towards others. The full realization of this will be in heaven, which will be more diverse than the United Nations, with people from every language and family on earth! When we unite around a common worthy focus, we show that the cause is more important than our differences.
Third, I believe that these men were chosen to show that usefulness is within reach of anyone. The Bible is an amazing book, it is painfully honest. Almost all of the accounts of the “heroes” of scripture are generously sprinkled with candid accounts of their failures. This is true of the apostles. Thomas who doubted; Peter who boasted, fought and then denied; James and John who sought glory for themselves. But the message of Jesus changed them. With these men and countless sinners since, God has shown that he can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. Jesus was able to see past failures and sins and see what His grace would accomplish in them.
Lastly, scripture teaches that God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble. I would suggest that Jesus choose these men to shame the proud. I Corinthians 1:26-27 makes it very clear, “Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” Christianity has not been the religion of the rich and the elite. It has been the faith of the weak and hopeless. By arranging things this way, God has brought down the gavel on those who trust in themselves that they are wise, or strong, or noble. By choosing servants like the apostles, and like us, he shows that his power is made perfect in weakness. We must rely on Him. I believe that this is one of the most important leadership lessons from the choosing of the 12 apostles.
How Does God Deliver Us?
“Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver you and you shall glorify me.”
Psalm 50:15
In meditating upon this verse I asked myself, “how does God deliver us?” This led me to think about the nature of our troubles and I came up with this attempt to help me understand the kinds of trouble I face and how Jesus helps me.
Concerning trouble (and deliverance from it) I would suggest that there are three things to consider. There are probably other ways of looking at this, but this was helpful to me. To help illustrate this, let me give an example from the story of David and Goliath:
- The cause(s) of trouble: Goliath and the Philistine army.
- The trouble itself: we will suffer painful injuries.
- The results of the trouble: we will die and our people will be enslaved.
I think that God delivers us from the days of trouble in many different ways. I have come up with these 9 that have been a rebuke to my anxious unbelief. In some of these I use the concept of the cause of trouble and the trouble itself loosely and interchangeably because they are so often connected.
1. He gives us a different view of the trouble. He teaches us what the real trouble is. Sometimes after the fact we find that we were mistaken. Jesus teaches us this when He says that the fear and anxiety associated with lack of food or clothing can help us to learn that our lives are more than food and the body more than clothing. Sometimes the problem is “us.” Sometimes we are the cause of our problems with our sin and carelessness. We would like to escape the consequences without escaping our waywardness. But God delivers us by chastening us for our good.
We could further illustrate this by thinking of a scared child who is learning to swim. The child is crying and afraid, reluctant to get into the water, even in his mother’s arms. The child has a fear of drowning. We might say that this is the trouble for them. Although drowning is possible, in his mother’s arms there is little danger of this. The real problem is the fear of the water and not knowing how to swim. Through the tears the mother grabs the child (against his will!) and teaches him to swim and overcome his fear of the water.
2. He destroys the cause of the trouble Himself. At the Red Sea the children of Israel were faced with death and slaughter at the hands of pharaoh’s army. The Lord parted the Red Sea and destroyed the king of Egypt. At Jericho God interceded and miraculously brought down the walls of the city. The Lord sent and angel to deliver Peter from prison, and many times provided bread and water in the desert. When Hezekiah was threatened with siege and defeat at the hands of the king of Assyria, God sent an angel to kill 185,000 men and sent Sennacherib away (2 Kings 19:35).
3. He uses us and He uses our own efforts to overcome and destroy the trouble. We must trust first and call upon the Lord. Our own efforts won’t be enough to deliver us without God’s help. Yet often the Lord uses our efforts to overcome the trouble. It was the stone from David’s sling that brought down the giant, and the boy’s hand gripped the sword that severed Goliath’s head. Noah and his family were saved from the flood by they boat that he and his sons had built.
4. He causes our enemies (or trouble) to destroy themselves. Several times we read this kind of language in the book of proverbs: Proverbs 26:27, “Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, And he who rolls a stone will have it roll back on him.” God brings victory through Gideon by driving the Midianites to destroy themselves (Judges 7). Several times when the Pharisees came questioning Jesus because of their jealousy, He returned a question that they could not answer. Their own jealousy put them to shame.
5. He helps us to understand and endure the trouble, and sometimes prevents the effects. We experience this when we “endure” temptation without giving in (James 1:12). In Jesus’ parable of the houses built on the rock and the sand, the storm comes upon both (Matt 7). Yet there is a very different outcome. Joseph is not saved from the experience of slavery or imprisonment, but allowed to endure and at the end even to understand God’s gracious purpose (Genesis 50:20).
6. He sends someone or something to help us through the trouble. In the midst of drought and famine, God provides for Elijah by sending Ravens with food, and later the widow of Zarephath (I Kings 17:4 and 9). Daniel is not spared from the Lion’s den, but an angel is sent to spare him from their teeth (Dan 6:22). When Paul is in prison, Onesiphorus comes to refresh him (2 Tim 1:16). And how many of us have received an unexpected check when we have prayed for the Lord to provide for us?
7. He does not remove the trouble but prevents the consequences from coming upon us. A deadly viper bites Paul, but he is unaffected by the venom (Acts 28:3). God does not spare Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego from the anger of the king, the trial and questioning, neither the shame of condemnation nor the furnace. But He spares them from the fire and honors them and Himself in the end.
8. He allows the consequences to come upon us to show us that He is our greatest treasure. God is going to judge the wickedness of the Jews, and He is going to use the military muscle of the Chaldeans to do it. Habakkuk is faced with the coming invasion that will be a judgment on the nation of Israel and lay waste her economy. Yet God gives grace and He is able to pray, “Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; Though the flock may be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls—Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation (Hab. 3:17-18). In like manner when David is deprived of his royal palace, running from Absalom, and living in a desert wasteland, he prays, “O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water (psalm 63:1).” In this case something else was keeping us from really seeing that God is our greatest possession.
9. He uses the trouble at hand to end all of our troubles and take us to heaven. To some this may not sound like deliverance at all. But it is. Sometimes in our day of trouble we may die. But God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. In Romans chapter eight Paul says, “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” What are “all these things?” “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. (Romans 8:35-27)” We become conquerors because we continue to trust and serve Him through the trials, and our enemies cannot touch our real security.
One amazing thought is that the death of Jesus as our ultimate deliverance involves many of these methods to bring us ultimate deliverance from our sin.
When I think of the different ways that God has delivered His people from trouble, and that He has promised to deliver me when I call upon Him, I am ashamed that I struggle with so much anxiety. May God help us to trust His promises.
Perhaps you can think of some other ways that God delivers us. I would love to hear about them.
The Famous British Preacher C.H. Spurgeon preached a sermon from this passage called “Robinson Crusoe’s Text” Download it
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis is the author of many famous books, including The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
“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 the 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 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – Mere Christianity, pages 40-41.
Purpose in the Savior’s Name
What’s In a Name?
In studying science, it has surprised me again and again how many strange names there are for scientific things. The vocabulary is often ugly: borrowed from many languages, then chopped and pressed into our usage. Look at a junk food label if you don’t believe me. One of my instructors often takes pains to explain the origin of these names. Sometimes they are named after the scientist who discovered it, sometimes based on appearance, and sometimes based on function. He always says he prefers a name that is explanatory rather than a technical catalog sort of name. The reason: it helps us to remember what that thing is, or what it does.
To the man on the street, the name of Jesus doesn’t hold any special meaning. It is just a reference symbol. For many His name is filler in a sentence. For some, a source of jesting and mockery; For others still, a distant historic name that has little personal significance; and for a number who call themselves by that name, “Christian”, it is a good luck charm. But the name of Jesus wasn’t chosen because it had a pleasant ring to it. When my wife and I chose our children’s names that was an important factor. How does the name sound when you say it? Can you picture yourself calling the baby this name? And what about when he grows up? And of course we practiced saying them, and comparing the sound of competing names from baby books. Not so with Jesus. God had picked his name and delivered it to Joseph by an angel. That name was not picked because of how it sounded. It was picked because of what it meant. It was picked because of Jesus’ job description. In our country we used to have names based on job description: smith, wainwright, etc. I used to work with a man with the last name “Goldsmith.” Jesus name fits his calling.
In Matthew 1:21 we read, “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.” The name of Jesus means, “The LORD is salvation.” He is a savior, and it is important to note that he will save His people “FROM THEIR SINS.” The whole purpose for the baby in the manger was to rescue sinners from their sins. And that is what He does. He takes people who are full of themselves, miserable because of their shameful behavior, sick in sin, and he rescues them…from their sins. What that means is that people who are saved by this Jesus are saved from their old way of life. Not saved to remain in sin, but to leave it behind. When Jesus saves a sinner he picks them up and puts them on a new path, a wonderful path of serving him.
That is my experience. I heard the story of the Bible many times, but when I really began to listen to the story of Jesus in my high school years, my sins began to look worse and following Jesus looked better and better. Most people that I speak to don’t see that they need to be saved from anything. Except maybe election commercials! And they’re probably partly right. But every time you say the name of Jesus you are handling a loaded gun. Jesus’ name has distinct purpose. It tells us about His skills, His purpose. His name is His resume. He saves us from our sins and reconciles us to God. That is why we pray in Jesus’ name, and that is why we baptize in Jesus’ name.
Most Americans say they believe in Jesus. Do you know anything about the purpose of this name? Have you been saved from your sins?
Did Jesus Have B.O.?
Did Jesus have body odor? A comic, perhaps, irreverent question for some. If it is a hard question to ask, it may be even harder to answer. The Bible doesn’t give any real ink to the subject of Jesus’ B.O. Yet this kind of question may be useful because it forces us to question our assumptions and beliefs about Jesus. What kind of man was He? If Jesus ever had a smelly day, that means He must have been very human, very ordinary. That means He must have worked hard and worked up a sweat. But coming to a realization like this may be a little shocking, like the first time you saw a school teacher at the grocery store and realized that they were “normal too.”
If we could rewind history and do a blindfolded smell test with Jesus and five other Palestinian men, several things would be immediately obvious. First, you wouldn’t choose this as a career. As Americans, we are pretty intolerant of funk. And second, you probably would not have been able to tell Jesus apart from any of the others by smell, or even by normal appearance. In fact, when Judas was carrying out the great betrayal, he led a small army of soldiers into a garden outside the city where Jesus and His disciples used to spend the evening. If the real Jesus were anything like the Jesus of medieval art, Judas would have said: “arrest the guy with the halo and the glow.” But Jesus could not be easily recognized from others, especially in the low light of the evening. So Judas gave a signal, “I will go up to Jesus and greet Him with a kiss. That is the one, arrest Him.” (Mark 14:44)
The Bible portrays Jesus as an extraordinary man, but also as a very ordinary man. Both of these concepts are important. More on this in a moment. In what ways was Jesus a normal guy? He grew up in a big family and He had a normal, working-class job in the family business as a carpenter (Mark 6:3). If He had pants, He would have put them on one leg at a time. He was so tired after a day’s work that He fell asleep in a storm-tossed boat. He walked almost everywhere He went. This produced the normal human experience: He was tired and thirsty and hungry (Mark 11:12). He attended weddings and feasts, and sometimes was criticized for it (Luke 15:1-2). He was betrayed by friends, criticized by the elite ruling class of His day. Often misunderstood, misquoted, and slandered. People used Him, and seldom thanked Him for His kindness. He was often tempted (normal!), but never gave in (definitely abnormal! Hebrews 4:15). The night before His betrayal and death He was lonely, and His closest friends stood Him up. He cried and prayed in His loneliness. He died a very human death full of pain, tears, bleeding, and loud cries. Then He was buried. After all this His friends cried and mourned. Scripture tells us how ordinary He was: “Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren…” (Hebrews 2:17)
However, this is only one side of the life of Jesus. If we only see His humanity, we will be just like the people who misunderstood Him. The facts of history record for us amazing things about Jesus. Those who heard Him said, “no one ever spoke like this man.” (John 7:46) He also performed miracles impossible in nature, because He had power above nature. He turned lots of water into lots of good wine (John 2:1ff). He loved His friends and His enemies. He said that He had the divine prerogative to forgive sins (Luke 5:17-24).
From his prison cell, John the Baptist sent someone to Jesus with a doubt-filled question: “are you the promised savior of the Old Testament?” Jesus replied, “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”(Luke 7:22) His own disciples were dumbfounded when Jesus calmed a storm on the sea of Galilea. Their response: “So the men marveled, saying, “Who can this be, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?” (Matt 8:27) So, from this perspective Jesus was definitely not ordinary.
So What? What’s the big deal with Jesus as ordinary yet extraordinary? Read the rest of Hebrews 2:17, which was quoted above: “Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” (Hebrews 2:17) Jesus had to be a real human being in order to suffer as a substitute.
This is the unpopular truth about Jesus. He wasn’t just a great rabbi who believed in humanity. He came to be the savior of humanity. All of us humans (yep- me and you) have universally made a mess of things. By selfishness and lawlessness we have worked hard to destroy our own lives and the lives of others. Jesus came to repair this. But even the good teaching of Jesus was not enough to fix things. Good examples are not enough. Committed leaders are not enough. The whole thrust of scripture is that we have incurred a debt to God by our bad conduct. “The wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) Jesus died to pay this debt. Here is a useful illustration: In terms of international finance, a debt must be paid in the same currency as the loan. Borrow dollars, pay dollars. Borrow yen, pay yen. Jesus had to be human to pay for the sins of humanity. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God” (I Peter 3:18). His death could pay that debt and bring us to God because He was very ordinary and very extraordinary. Hebrews 2:14 says the same, “Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death.”
Here’s the rub: Jesus took on flesh and blood that he might change flesh and blood forever. If Jesus had B.O. it was because you and I needed a Savior.
MattTroupe.net 