Sunday Leftovers (12/3/06)

“Christianity is everywhere in our culture, and yet Christ is so hard to find. We have an institutional Christ, a social Christ, a popular Christ, and a cultural Christ. Where is the Lord Jesus Christ?” asks writer and musician John Fischer.

It’s a perceptive question for a church culture where the supremacy of Christ is too often diminished and for the Christmas season.

The Lord Jesus Christ is in the manger — a baby, yes, but deity too. He is the eternal God-Man — both fully God and fully man at the same time. The exalted One and a humble One. Amazing.

Jesus Christ, whom we worship, did what He did as one person. Yet within that one person dwelt two different and complete natures — deity and humanity. So, “though Christ in his human nature knew hunger (Luke 4:2), weariness (John 4:6), and need for sleep, (Luke 8:23), just as Christ in His divine nature was omniscient (John 2:24), omnipresent (John 1:48), and omnipotent (John 11), all of this was experienced by the one person Jesus Christ” [Ron Rhodes].

So where is the Lord Jesus Christ? He is in the Christmas story — a story that is much more than the story of an interesting birth. It is the unique (meaning, unduplicated, one-of-a-kind) story of the advent of the God-man.

How shall we respond to Him? Not as a “nominal Christian.” As Robert Short wrote,

The nominal Christian, then, will see Jesus as a name, a representative, a symbol, a personification, a prototype, a figure, a model, an exemplar for something else. The nominal Christian pays homage to something about Jesus, rather than worshipping the man himself. For this reason, nominal Christians will extol the moral teachings of Jesus, the faith of Jesus, the personality of Jesus, the compassion of Jesus, the world view of Jesus, the self-understanding of Jesus, etc. None of these worships Jesus as the Christ, but only something about him, something peripheral to the actual flesh-and-blood man. This is why when the almighty God came into the world in Jesus, he came as the lowest of the low, as weakness itself, as a complete and utter nothing, in order that men would be forced into the crucial decision about him alone and would not be able to worship anything about him.

The humility Christ demonstrated does not diminish His greatness as the exalted Christ. But it does necessitate a response of faith by us. Will we trust and follow and submit to the humble and exalted King of kings?