As Luke begins recounting the events leading up to Christ’s birth, he starts with a prediction of another birth—that of John the Baptist. John’s birth serves as a powerful reminder that God remains faithful to His promises, even when it seems like He’s gone silent. John’s birth marks the end of the 400-year period of silence in the salvation narrative. It reminds us that even when our prayers seem to fall on deaf ears and our faithfulness goes unnoticed, God is always true and working. He continues to work even when all hope seems lost, when our dreams are dashed, and even when our prayers have become little more than a faint hope. This story calls us to persevere in steady faithfulness, believing that God’s promises are reliable and that He often responds when we least expect it
In the first few verses of his Gospel, Luke wants to make it clear that what he is about to tell us is not myth, fable, or fantasy, but history. The Christian faith is ultimately rooted in history. It’s important that we understand that Christianity isn’t merely a philosophy or a set of moral teachings. At its core, Christianity is about a real God working out a real plan to really save a people to Himself through the real birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who really was fully God and fully man. The reason this story is so good is because it’s also so true.
In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul describes the role of disciples of Jesus as that of an ambassador. For those of us who are disciples of Jesus our role is to represent King Jesus to the world around us through our actions and our words. We are to go to all those who do not yet know Jesus as King, who have not entered his kingdom and plead with them to “be reconciled to God.” On the cross Jesus did everything that was necessary to reconcile people to God, He took our sin on himself and offers to us His righteousness, deciding to receive that offer is the first step every disciple of Jesus must take, but it’s also the message every disciple of Jesus is called to take to the world.
When Jesus was asked what the greatest command is, He replied: ““Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the greatest and most important command.” If being a disciple of Jesus is learning to obey all that He commands, then it would seem being a disciple has to start with growing our love for God. The question then is how? How do we grow our love for God? In 1 John 4:10 the apostle John gives us the secret, by growing in our knowledge and understanding of just how much God has loved us! If we are going to grow as disciples who love God, we are going to have to grow in our knowledge of the God who loves us. Most particularly we are going to need to keep our eyes fixed on the cross as the ultimate testament to God’s overwhelming love for us. Application:
Are you participating in spiritual disciplines that are drawing you into the presence and love of God?
Are you daily spending time in God’s word and in prayer?
Invite people to understand God’s love for them more clearly and deeply by taking the NT from 30,000 ft class or if they are a young adult the practicing Sabbath class.
Generosity is both a means by which we grow and a marker of our growth. In Matthew 6:21 Jesus said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This means that when we give it not only demonstrates what we love but also that it grows our love for what we are giving to. Ultimately generosity, whether with our money, our time, or even our forgiveness, is rooted in two things: 1. Our faith in God’s willingness and ability to provide. 2. Our awareness of what we have already received from Him.
One of the markers of Christian maturity that Paul mentions repeatedly is kindness. kindness doesn’t mean that we are squishy on the truth or that we never speak with boldness. Kindness doesn’t mean that we will never do anything that offends others, or even that everyone will like us. What kindness does mean is that, at the end of day, we have compassion and show care to all people, even to those who are anything but kind to us. After all, that’s the heartbeat of our story, a God who showed us such kindness He suffered and died on the cross for us.
John Piper says: “Sin is ugly, it should be killed every day.” As we mature in Christ our sin should become uglier to us, our desire to be free from its presence and impact should great greater. To grow in Christ is to realize more and more that it was our sin that killed Jesus and so as our love for Him grows so too should our desire to put to death the sins for which He died.
The first marker of Christlike maturity that Paul identifies in Ephesians 4 is humility. To grow in Christ is to grow in your understanding of just how far short of the goal of Christlikeness you fall and how incapable you are of achieving that goal on your own you are. As you grow in humility it leads you to be gentler and more forgiving with others. As you grow in your awareness of how patient God is with you, it makes you more patient towards others more able to bear with others, which makes unity with other fallible and faltering followers of Jesus more attainable.