Jesus’ Mission: To Bring Salvation

Dan Chase

Midland SDA Church

May 24, 2014

Heavenly Father, as a muddy puddle reflects the clear sky, please help my words to reflect your truth.  Amen.

Word Made Flesh

Jesus had a mission when God sent him to earth. The mission, according to John, was:  “God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

One of the Lost Boys of Darfur, Abraham (Malou) Mach Thon told about how many missionaries had come to his country and tried to bring Christianity, but none were successful until a man came and stayed with them, learned their customs and language—just as Jesus did with humanity.

The Good News—Healing & Setting Free

In Luke 4: 16-30, Jesus’s first sermon outlined His mission when he stood up in the synagogue and read from Isaiah 61: 1-2— “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel [good news] to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable* year of the Lord.”

*Either a Sabbatical Year or a Jubilee Year when liberty from debt and slavery was proclaimed, and land was returned to former owners.

In Matthew 11:2-6, when John the Baptist was in prison and doubted if Jesus were really the Messiah, he sent emissaries to ask Jesus and Jesus told them, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see:  The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.”

This sums up Jesus’s ministry quite well, but, this summarizes the outward manifestations of His ministry; if we had to summarize the motive behind it, what would we say?

Great Commission

Jesus passed His mission along to his disciples at the Great Commission (Mt. 28:16-20, Mk. 16:15-18, Jn. 17:18; 20:21, Acts 1:8, 1 Cor. 15:6) “…Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…” [That would also seem to put to rest whether the Commandments were in effect or not after Jesus’s death on the cross.]

We Imitate Christ, the Perfect Example

Just as Jesus’s mission was in part to put off his divine nature and put on human nature, as Paul states in Romans 7, our mission as Christians is to put off our human nature and unite with Jesus. We have no ability under our own strength to attain righteousness (to be good). Nothing we do, no works we perform, can gain us eternal life. Only by discarding our sinful, carnal nature and dying to sin and coming up out of the watery grave of baptism can we attain righteousness by joining ourselves to Jesus. We die to ourselves, the worldly, and are resurrected, born again, to the spiritual. Through baptism, we too suffer in a very small way, the wages of sin and die (symbolically) in order to be reborn as spiritual beings, as brothers and sisters of Jesus who took the burden of our sin for us, just as he took the burden of death for us.  In Romans 6:14, Paul says, “For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.”

We Cannot Do It Ourselves

Yet, let’s not kid ourselves, after baptism, none of us, (at least I can’t), can walk through walls or do other things that a purely spiritual being can do, and so we still have the conflict that Paul speaks in Romans 7:14 where he describes the Adamic nature and the behavior of a believer who lives under the power of sin, a daily battle: “For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin,” and in verse 15, he personifies the battle of our old Adamic nature and the divine nature, “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” —to me that is similar to where Jesus speaks in Matthew 9:17 about pouring new wine into new wineskins—and I see the new wine as the Spirit and the wineskin as our selves. We will have a conflict if we try to pour the Holy Spirit into our old carnal self; or if we try to fit Jesus’s way, the spiritual way, into our carnal way of doing things. We need to replace our carnal nature, our carnal paradigm, with the Spiritual, and discard the old self and the old way. Being a believer isn’t about fitting Jesus into our worldview, nor is it about fitting our worldview into the kingdom of heaven; it is about wedding ourselves to Jesus and replacing the world with the kingdom of God.

Kingdom Come: Following Jesus

God’s kingdom is a spiritual kingdom—a non-worldly, non-carnal kingdom.  Jesus brought God’s Kingdom to earth. 

Jesus himself, when questioned by Pilot (John 18: 37), had said, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of truth hears My voice.”

In John 10:3 & 4, Jesus reiterates, “He [the Good Shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” So those who have faith in Jesus listen to him—they know his voice, first of all, and secondly, being on the side of truth, they listen to what he has to say; thirdly, they follow him, and lastly, as it says in Revelation 14:4, they follow him everywhere .

Forgiveness

There are many ways we follow Jesus. As I said, we follow him in truth—we listen to him. When the Apostles asked Him how to pray, he gave them the formula of “The Lord’s Prayer.” I work as a spiritual care volunteer for hospice and I have found that one of the major problems experienced by my care receivers results from lack of forgiveness. They have not forgiven someone, usually someone long dead, who wronged them in their past, and they are bound and determined to carry this grievance to their grave. Who is hurt more by this unforgiveness?—the one who trespassed, or the one who refuses to forgive the trespass?   Every time we say “The Lord’s Prayer” we pray, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…”

Some Bibles translate “trespasses” as debts and thus point back to Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 about the king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. The king forgave a debt impossible for his servant to pay back, and then the servant refused to forgive the debt of another who owed him a small amount. Just before Jesus spoke this parable, Peter had asked Jesus how many times should he forgive his brother when he sins against him, and Jesus had replied, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”  (Which is interesting because that is 490, which is the number of years that the angel tells Daniel must pass before the temple can be rebuilt and the Israelites will be restored to Jerusalem.)

Love God; Love One Another

The incident with the rich young ruler (Matthew 19: 16) teaches us that Jesus was concerned about more than following the letter of the law, and that the spirit of the law had to be in our hearts. This was driven home in Luke 10: starting with verse 25 with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Here a lawyer tests Jesus by asking what must he do to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers by turning the tables and asking him what is his interpretation of the law. The lawyer answers, quoting Deuteronomy 6: 5; “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’” Jesus tells the lawyer he answered rightly, that if he does this, he will live.

In the Sermon on the Mount, starting in Matthew 5, Jesus again emphasizes the concept of going beyond the letter of the law and in Matthew 7: 12 restates the Golden Rule: “Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22: 34 sounds suspiciously like Luke 10: 25, but here the Pharisees get together to question Jesus, and a lawyer asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment in the law. This time Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 6:5 to love God and then love your neighbor as yourself. He concludes by saying, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Judging Others

Starting at the beginning of Chapter 7 of Matthew, we learn that unjust criticism, or judging of others is forbidden and this strikes a chord in my heart because in the past couple of months I have heard of about four instances of this driving people from the church. Starting at Verse 1, Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother or sister’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother or sister, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s (or sister’s) eye.”

When we wonder about possible reasons our church isn’t growing, perhaps we should consider this. If we only allow those we consider to be “up to our standards” into this church, woe to us! Jesus didn’t come to minister to the righteous, but to the sinner. If you are without sin, maybe it is you who should stay home—but, not to be judgmental here, but I doubt that any of us here are sinless. I don’t recall Jesus appointing any human beings to be bouncers at the velvet ropes to his church, though I’m always open to Biblical citations.

The Law and the Sacrifice

Jesus was the perfect example for how to live, but, ultimately, he was the perfect sacrifice to substitute for sinful humanity. Hebrews 10 is an excellent summary of what His sacrifice was all about.

First, it says that the Law is only a shadow of the good things coming. As Paul said in Romans, the Law only points out our sin; it does not make us righteous. The sacrifices offered endlessly were only temporary remedies and pointed forward to Jesus’ perfect, once for all sacrifice. Hebrews 10 quotes from Psalm 40:6-8 saying, “Sacrifices and offerings you did not desire,…with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.” Hebrews goes on to say, “Day after day every priest …again and again offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest [Jesus] offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.”

If God did not desire sacrifice, just what was it that He wanted? In a word—obedience. He wanted us, from the very beginning in the Garden, God wanted Adam and Eves obedience. He wanted their obedience because they loved him and he wants our obedience today because we love Him. As Jesus says in Revelation, “Those who love me obey my commandments.”

Hebrews concludes starting in Verse 19, “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, His body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised it is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”