Sermon
The Jesus Of History; The Christ Of Faith
December 15-16, 2001
Pastor Donald Sheley

I trust that you all have bulletins today and your notes. Would you pull out the sermon notes, because we've selected a number of different verses, and so if you have the text before you we'll read them from the notes. I'm not going to stay very close to the notes today, but we will start with the Scripture portion.

1 John 4:1-3 --Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit, or every person, that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world."

Back in the Old Testament in Isaiah, he says, For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

John, in the early portion of his gospel, and we've studied this verse, he says, The Word, that is Jesus Christ, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

And then back to the little letter, the little epistle by John in the latter portion of the New Testament. He begins that little letter with these words, That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. This life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

It's Christmastime and the great personage of this moment is Jesus Christ, and I want to talk about Him today. I begin our notes with a little poem:
What think ye of Christ? is the test
To try both your faith and your scheme;
You cannot be right in the rest,
Unless you think rightly of him.
In other words, if there's any distortion of our concept, biblical concept, of the Christ, to make Him anything less than who He is, then all the rest of our theology will be out of kilter. Jesus Christ is the very centerpiece.

In our notes I make mention, there is another version of the first Scripture which we started with in our lesson today, and that was the portion -- every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. Now there's a version written by a man by the name of Ronald Knox, and this is how he understands it, "every spirit which acknowledges Jesus Christ as having come to us in human flesh has God for its author; and no spirit which would disunite Jesus comes from God."

If you're reading from the Amplified: Every spirit which does not acknowledge and confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh [but would annul, destroy, sever, disunite Him] is not of God. [Nonconfession] is the [spirit] of antichrist. That's the way the Amplified Bible says it. So it brings in that word disunite.

Now in his rendering of these last words, as he is following the wording of the Latin Bible, speaking of Mr. Knox's version, which underlines the translation. But I ask the question, what does the Bible mean when it speaks of 'disuniting Jesus?' That's an interesting word.

Now, it refers, as Knox explains in a footnote in his Bible, to the teaching which "would deny the identity of the human Jesus with the divine Christ." There was a school of thought in the later part of the first century which regarded anything belonging to the material order (including the human body) as religiously worthless. It was the teaching of the Gnostics. The idea that God would reveal Himself in a Jesus of flesh and blood was unacceptable to them. Such a Jesus could be dispensed with; the true Christ was, to them, purely a spiritual being.

In other words, those Gnostics taught that Jesus did not have a real body, and when He walked He never even left footprints in the sand. Now it was to counter this line of argument that John, in his Gospel, insisted that in Jesus of Nazareth the eternal Word or the self-expression of God 'became flesh.'

Now we made the observation as we've studied together that the church has always been under the attack by those who would like to take and distort portions of the Scripture, and the one that they want to start with first is what the Bible says about Jesus. And John says that any distortion, anything that disunites the Christ of the Scripture from what one may believe, that is the preachment of the antichrist

Now John and Paul had to wrestle with those Gnostics, had to chase them from town to town as they would follow him in his preaching. In fact, one of the great little letters that Paul wrote was the book of Colossians, and it was primarily written to attack the argument of the Gnostics. But down through history we've always had to wrestle with the false teachers, and so John says the one who says that Jesus Christ truly is God in human form, that's Christ come in the flesh, that's truth; that comes from God. Anything else is from the antichrist.

Now even in our time. Let me go back just maybe 70 years, back in 1930. A man by the name of Mr. Wells. He thought himself to be brilliant so he decided he would espouse a teaching concerning Christ, and he said, I want it all to be known that the Jesus of the Bible never lived, that he was only the figment of the imaginations of men. Well such a proclamation of idiocrasy didn't go very far and he made a fool of himself and his words went silent. Because when you read the histories, the encyclopedias, you cannot deny the fact that 2000 years ago there was a man by the name of Jesus Christ who came to this earth. He lived. And any wise thinking intellectual person would have to reject what Mr. Wells said - that Jesus never was a man of history.

Then there was this man called Rudolph Boltman. He was a theologian out of Germany back in the '30s and this is what he taught. He said, what really the problems is that the Gospels are a later interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, and it was the desire of the writers of the Gospel to put his words in mythical form. So Mr. Boltman's theology was that the whole thing is a myth. And what he does in his book, he calls it demythasizing the Gospels. And here was his position, because the followers of Christ so exalted him and so loved him, they exalted him above who he was. If you really want to know the historical Jesus, you've got to do away with all the miracles and his claim to deity. If you can separate that has myth, then you can really know who the Jesus of history was.

An act of disuniting Christ from the teachings of Scripture. Mr. Boltman's theology was really the entrance of the liberalism that came into the church. And we wonder oft times why the Christian church has lost its great power in our society. It's because many have sought to tear away from our faith the very fundamentals that make it Christian. And again, John says, when you take anything away from the Christ you disunite Him from the truths of Scripture; you're preaching the sermon for the antichrist.

Now it's obvious when we think of the Jesus of history you have to come to one conclusion-He was here. And He was born, and we learn from history and we learn from the Scriptures where his hometown was, it was Nazareth. Matthew tells us in his Gospel, in Matthew 1:18, This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but just before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. And because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to his son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."

Now the Jesus of history was born of a supernatural birth. He was born of the virgin Mary. Tammy, when she sang her beautiful carol, reminded us of this truth:.
Christ, by highest heaven adored
Christ, the everlasting Lord;
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a virgin's womb.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail th' Incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with man to dwell;
Jesus, our Emmanuel.

Hark! The herald angels sing,
"Glory to the newborn King;

So we sing about it. We sing about His birth. And it's very, very interesting that in all of the writings of the Scriptures and in many of the writings of the early Christian fathers, they reference the birth of this Christ of history in supernatural dimensions. That's interesting.

A survey, if it means anything, and I think it does, was made a few years ago by a publication in our nation -- a large publication. And what they did, they hired a number of professional people to be the pollsters, and their desire was to find out what Christians believe. So they decided we'll go to the seminaries. We'll send them to the seminaries, all of the Protestant seminaries in America, and we'll ask questions that relate to their faith. And one of them will be, do you believe in the supernatural virgin birth of Christ? Do know what the answer was? Out of all of the seminaries across America, 56% of all the students studying for the ministry said we reject totally and outright the virgin birth of Christ. Isn't that sad?

So they found that fascinating. Why would people go to a Christian seminary to learn how to be a preacher and not even preach with the Christian faith teaches? It baffled them. So they had another survey. They said we'll do this in terms of different denominations. Surely there is a variation in the denominations, and we'll ask the question this time, how many of you believe in the supernatural birth, the virgin birth, of Christ?

And this I found to be fascinating. They went to, first of all, the Congregationalists, that's a large religious group that basically is in the East; 21% said they believed, 79% we don't. Then they went to the Methodists, and the Methodists 34% say we believe, 66% said no. Then they went to the Episcopalians; 39% said they believe, 61% said we reject it. Then they visited the Disciples of Christ in their surveying, that's a large religious group down in the Southland, and 62% said we believe in the virgin birth of Christ.

Then they went to the Presbyterians and 57% said we believe in the virgin birth of Christ. Then they thought we'll go to the Lutherans, the Missouri Senate of the Lutherans, and interesting enough 92% say they believed in the virgin birth of Christ. Then God bless the Baptists. They went to the Baptists folks, the Southern Baptists, and 99% said we believe in the virgin birth of Christ.

I think that's tremendous, but isn't it interesting to know that in our Christian faith there has been that great effort to disunite the truths of Christ, create your own Christ, whatever definition you want to give to Him, and forget the miraculous and forget His deity.

I enjoy books, as you know, and early this morning as I was thinking about this I just grabbed a couple books to show you what is meant by disuniting Jesus. One of my favorite authors, a great brilliant mind, Mr. Barclay, and his book is entitled 'The Mind Of Jesus', and on the last page he says, and he's speaking of the virgin birth, there seems to the only one possible conclusion in its explanation. The New Testament writers were not primarily concerned with the virgin birth as a literal and historical fact. They were concerned with it as a symbolic way of saying that from His very first entry into the world Jesus was in a special and unique relationship with God.

I do not think, he says, that we were intended to take the virgin birth of Christ literally. That's disuniting Christ from the truth of Scriptures. I think if we were intended so do, the writers of the scripture and the compilers of the New Testament would have reconciled the inconsistencies and would have harmonize the divergencies. I think that we are clearly intended to take the story of the virgin birth as a parabolic, symbolic, pictorial, metaphorical, method of carrying the unique relationship with God back to the very birth of Jesus quite irrespective of whether that birth was a virgin birth or a normal birth like the birth which all other men enter into the world.

A brilliant mind, but he hasn't written his last paragraph. This is what he says it his last paragraph: but we have not yet come to the end of the purpose. We have seen how the special relationship of Jesus to God is connected with the resurrection, with His baptism, with His experience in the temple as a boy, with His birth; then comes the fourth gospel and the fourth gospel pushes the unique relationship of Jesus with God back to a time before time began. It takes it completely out of time and it lodges it in the forevers of eternity.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In the fourth gospel we have the culmination of the whole process: the great leap of human thought, the great vision in response to revelation in which the relationship of Jesus Christ, the Son, to God, the Father, is something which was before time began which is now while time shall run, and what shall be when time has come to an end. In Jesus Christ we see the very essence and the being of God in human flesh, and that is why we call Him Lord.

Isn't it interesting that in this mind that wrestles with this miraculous, seeking almost to take the miracles and the deity from Christ, he is saying we don't have to accept that. But then he says, in writing his last paragraph, I've got to deal with John's record of Christ. And John says He has always been. He is eternal. And that's why we call Him Lord. And that's the great tension that has gone on down through time, disuniting the great truths of Christ and making him just a personage, and then you understand that personage as you have been taught to think about Jesus.

I picked up another one. This one has an interesting title it's called 'The Christian Agnostic'. It was written by a man by the name of Dr. Leslie Weatherhead. He pastored the great church, The Temple, downtown Temple, in London for 25 years. They thronged into that temple by the thousands. But here's a man who, again, disunited the Christ.

He says, Christ tells me as much about the nature of God as I need to know or am capable of knowing, but because he remains only a man, he cannot tell me anything about the activities of God. Then he writes -- and I really got this one. If you read my books, many of them have HERESY on the top -- because he writes these words: men glibly turn to an infallible Bible, or an infallible church, or an infallible Christ and say that that authority is sufficient for them and enables them to accept truth.

I believe all of that kind of talk is false. There is an infallible Bible, and a wonderful Christ described in that Bible, a virgin birth, miraculous, sinless; and another interesting thing about this historical Jesus is that He came as the fulfillment of the prophecies of old. As you trace through the prophets, you'll find that there's that reference of the time when God would visit this world in the person of Himself in human being. And thus, He was called the Messiah.

And in fact, when you read your Amplified Bible, every time almost the word Christ is used, you'll find in brackets the word Messiah. So not only did the Christ, the Jesus of history, have a very special birth, had a very special life, but He fulfilled all the promises of the Messiah of the Old Testament. Now here's John's position. If you're going to deny that Christ is not the incarnate Son of God, then you've got to reject everything else, and you got to reject -- that rejection will ultimately lead to destruction, because those in the New Testament who rejected the deity of Christ died in their sins.

Now you say, Pastor, why is this an issue with you today? I'll tell you why. I walk down the malls just like you do, and I listen to the great carols that are being sung. To me it's a fabulous time of year because every atheist and every skeptic has to sit in silence. They can't do a thing. I mean, music is everywhere. I sat the other evening in a little restaurant and the waitress had gotten her little radio and she had turned it up with Christmas carols and they were just... I mean. And I said to Vernita, I said, honey, how many people are really not comfortable in this kind of a setting? Because the Jesus of history was being proclaimed, but most people only Him as a personage of history; and then, their concept of Him is affected by what they've been taught.

Some have been taught that Jesus was only a great teacher. That He was a great moral man. So their concept of the Christ is not the biblical Christ that we believe in. Some years ago a pastor was preaching and in his sermon he said Jesus Christ was a Jew, or Jesus was a Jew. And a little lady in the back of the church, I mean, she's irritated. When she comes up to him she says, Pastor, I want you to know that my Jesus was not a Jew. And the pastor said little lady, the Bible is very clear that Jesus was born from the womb of a little Jewish girl called Mary. So the Jesus you believe in is not the Jesus of the Bible.

So if we divorce, we disunited, the great truths concerning the person of Christ we move Him off over here, and then we can define Him anyway we want to; and that's our Jesus. And so the folks today will walk the malls, hear the music, pass their gifts, and they only know Him as a person of history. But I want to talk to you about Him as the Christ of faith. Now there's a world of difference.

He moves from a personage of history. We lift Him out of the historical setting and He becomes the indwelling presence within our hearts through faith. There comes that moment when Jesus becomes very real to us, where by faith we open our hearts and we say, Lord Jesus, I believe that You're the Son of God. I believe that You lived a sinless life, and I believe that You died on that cross to pay the penalty for my sin. And I invite You by Your spirit to come and live within my heart. And at that moment a marvelous happening takes place within our lives. The Christ of history, the Jesus of history, becomes the Christ of faith, and now the perspective is totally changed.

When I know Him as the Christ of faith, I know Him as my Savior. You see, the world listens to all of these great carols and they talk about Jesus the savior, but they haven't got the slightest idea how desperately they really need Jesus. They are sinners. They need forgiveness and there's only one name under heaven given among men whereby we can be saved, and that's through Jesus. And when Christ becomes the Christ of faith, it's the result of a moment when we realize how desperately we needed a savior and we wanted our sins forgiven, and we wanted to be right with God. It was then that the Jesus of history became the Christ of faith, and He became our personal Savior.

And so the Jesus they sing about to me is very precious because I realize that 2000 years ago He died on a cross to pay the penalty for my sins so I could live forever. He's my Savior. They sing about Him; we know Him. He not only is our Savior when He becomes the Christ of our faith, but He becomes our Lord. He's not just a personage of history He's someone who's very dear to me, and dear to the Christian who by faith has trusted in Him. We have someone we love, someone we want to serve, someone we want to obey, someone we want to be loyal to. He's our Lord, as well as our Savior.

Jesus in His sermon on the Mount says that not everybody that says, Lord, Lord, will make it into heaven. It's only those who do the will of My Father. And in Luke 6:46, He says, Why do you call Me, 'Lord', and do not the things that I say? When the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of faith there's a relationship that's so deep and so marvelous, and in those moments of worship I can call Him, Lord.

He's not only Savior, He's not only our Lord, but He's our Sanctifier. You say, what's that Pastor? Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:30 says, Christ has become our sanctification. It means that that relationship with Christ is so daily and so constant that He's ever seeking to make us more like Him, to change us from glory to glory into His image. And even though I've been a Christian for nearly 60 years, He, my Sanctifier, has been busy with me this week. Because there have been times when I thought things or said things that I know displeased Him, and He, my Sanctifier, just jarred my spirit and I knew I had done wrong. And I'd say, Jesus, I'm sorry. I really do want to be like You, but to act that way that's not like You, and I'm sorry and I want to be more like You. That's the prayer of every one of us.

When Christ becomes our Savior and our Lord, our desire to be like Jesus -- to be like Jesus, all I ask is to be like Him. He's the object of our affection. He's more than just a person of history. When He becomes the Christ of our faith He becomes our King. One of these days the King of glory will break through the clouds of heaven and welcome us all who have trusted in Him into His eternal heaven. He's the King that's coming for me someday. He saved me, became my Lord, the object of my affection, became the one who's constantly in the process of making me more like Jesus. But one day, He's going to invite me into His heaven.

The folks know I love books, I have a set of books, five of them. They are out of print today. They were written by a man by the name of Rolls, C. J. Rolls. C. J. was raised in a home in England with his brother. His brother loved mechanical things and so he and his friend by the name of Mr. Royce formed the company known as the Rolls-Royce Company of Great Britain. That was years and years ago. But his brother C. J. decided he wanted to be a preacher. He didn't want a mess around with cars, so he went off to Cambridge and he was well-trained, and for 75 years he preached the gospel. In his closing book it has a picture of him at 96 years of age preaching. So I've got 26 more years ago. (Congregation laughs/applauds)

But C. J. Rolls in Cambridge he decided that his master subject would be Christology, getting to know the person of Jesus. And it is said that every time he preached for 75 years he had only one subject, and that was Jesus. And he started writing and I pull those books out constantly because here's a man for 75 years who the spirit of God bathed with a love for Jesus that is absolutely immense. He just flows, and I sit there and it isn't five or six minutes until I'm crying inside and rejoicing outside because here's a man who the Christ of faith became the total object of his life.

So at 96 he wraps up the last volume of his book and here is the poem that he ends up his book with:
King of all that's kingly, King of life and light,
Lord of all that's lovely, robed in raiment white;
Highest of the lofty, grandest of the great,
Gentlest of the gracious, perfect is Thy state.
Prince of all that's princely, strongest in Thy might,
Boundless in Thy bounty, brightest of the bright!
Kindest of the kindly, wisest of the wise;
Morning Star most brilliant, Monarch of the skies:
Richest of the wealthy, of mankind the Head,
Fairest of the friendly, First-born from the dead.
Famous in Thy victory, foremost in renown,
Righteous in Thy justice, matchless is Thy crown!
God of all that's godly, truly good and just,
Noblest of the worthy, worthy of our trust.
Choicest of the comely, mighty, Thou, and strong,
Gorgeous in Thy glory, valiant all along.
Wondrous in Thy wisdom, changeless in Thy love,
Ageless in Thy goodness, so like God above!
Power, riches, and wisdom unto Thee belong,
Hosts proclaim Thee worthy, in an endless song;
Every lip is praiseful, every voice upraised,
Christ is Lord triumphant, and forever praised!
Here's a man (congregation applauds) that no longer was He a personage of history, but He was a Christ that dwelt within as Savior and as Lord, and as Sanctifier and as King. And my Christmas message this year is my prayer is that He's more than just a person of history to you.

To know Him is to love Him. To know Him is to want to serve Him. To know Him is one to whom you want to be loyal. To know Him brings a great hope that one day this King, the Jesus of history who ascended to the heavens, will come for us so that we can ever be with Him. Now that makes Christianity complete. Amen?

Father in heaven, we do not join with those who seek to disunite Jesus from the truths of Scripture and create a personage of our own imagination. We don't go along with that at all. And to think that if those statistics are correct, half of the people who sit in churches today don't really know You.

Lord Jesus thank you for revealing Yourself to us as the Son of God, divinely born, who lived a sinless life and died a vicarious death, and who rose triumphant as our Christ of faith. Lord Jesus, we believe all that the Scriptures teach about You and who You are. We don't in any way seek to disunite You from the Scriptures. On this beautiful weekend approaching Christmas we bow our hearts in Your presence, and Jesus, we worship You. We love You. And we're so glad that at this Christmastime You're more than a person of history. You're the very center of our life, of our faith, and of our hope. We worship You, dear Christ. Amen. God bless you. God bless you