Jesus the Sender

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” (John 20.21)

In the harmony and eternal fellowship of God’s trinity, the Father sent the Son into the world to redeem men, women and children from every tribe and tongue. Jesus, the Son of God, light from light and true God from true God, became flesh and dwelled among us. He lived in the middle of a politically conquered people on the fringe of an empire. He lived in the midst of a spiritually dominated people where the Temple courts for the foreigners were filled like a wholesale barn stall and the synagogues were sated with Pharisaic hedge rules and hypocrisy. Jesus was sent into a world spun out in disorder and still He spoke “Peace.”

Now, Jesus the sent one is sending us. Just as the Father sent the Son, the Son sends us. He knows the temptations we will face for He faced them too. He knows the sorrow and abuse we will witness. He knows the pain and persecution we will experience as His disciples, because He Himself was mocked and abused, tortured and crucified. And still He speaks “Peace be with you.” He sends us as sheep among wolves to seek and save the lost. He breathes into us His Holy Spirit that we might live righteous lives before God and men, growing closer to His presence and draw others with us. Jesus the sender knows in our sent-ness He is calling us closer to Himself, closer to the cross, closer to the grave, closer to everlasting peace.

Jesus, thank you for sending me into the nations. Thank you that as I go out into the world you are bringing me closer to yourself.

Jesus the Tempted

And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him. (Mark 1.13)

Do we think of Jesus as being able to be tempted? Could the everlasting Holy One truly succumb to such base manipulated desires? Surely the glorious Creator could not be felled by such demonic arrogance. But we do not serve a God who is transcendent and aloof. Jesus emptied Himself and stepped down into His creation as a helpless baby. He grew up with the same casing of human flesh, the same heart and desires as all His creation. Jesus lived like His beloved creation, in the midst of our fallen and broken world.

There is a magnificent beauty in seeing our Lord like this. In the wilderness. In hunger. Solitude. Temptation. The One who is fully God and fully man pressed Himself beyond the flesh, fasting 40 days, and then engaged the enemy. In his physically weakened state, surrounded by the wild animals of the desolate lands, He came face to face with the great temptations. And in all of this, Jesus prevailed. Jesus the tempted refused to mar His holiness, the holiness of the Father and Spirit.

Jesus the tempted sets a model for us, for surely we will walk through the desolate plain of temptation again. We will climb by the dangerous crags where wild beasts are ready to prey on us as our souls search for significance. And in the moments of temptation He calls our eyes to look upon Him in the wilderness, to remember His enduring for His holiness and for ours. If we can just hold on through the struggle He will send angels to our side.

Jesus, thank you for setting yourself as my enduring example. I will fix my eyes on you in the dark nights of my soul and strive for holiness.

Jesus the Driven

The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. (Mark 1.12)

When we think of being driven we conjure up mental images of fierce determination. We imagine an inner propulsion that pushes us to success, and an urgency that compels us through difficult times. There is a sense like irresistibility to that drive. This does not mean that people cannot reject the drive. People can choose to embrace or reject the internal drive but the drive is still influencing their actions. A godly call to leadership can be twisted into cruel dictatorship. A moral responsibility to rescue others from a similar tragedy can be manipulated into a devaluation of human life. The energy that could drive the calling could push the person in the opposite direction.

Jesus had this option just as much as every man, woman and child. Jesus was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness. Jesus the driven was lead forcefully in His spirit (truly by His Spirit) into a desolate place to determine how He would walk among us. The temptations He endured in the desert were potential channels He could have driven His ministry, sinful self-centered channels, but channels all the same.

Jesus the driven stands before us and calls us to glorify Him through our God-given drive. As we pursue our Lord through our drive, our God-calling, we must recognize that the Holy Spirit will bring us through a season where we will be tempted to re-direct our drive, to fulfill our passion in ways that cease to honor God. As followers of Jesus are we open to the Holy Spirit driving us?

Jesus, place a drive within my heart. Please, give me Your Holy Spirit to keep me from manipulating my calling, attempting to divert your glory to myself.

Jesus the Baptized

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. (Mark 1.9)

Did Jesus need to be baptized? Jesus is the sinless one, the one who reconciles all humanity to Himself. Jesus does not need to repent from sin, from failure to keep the divine law. He is the author of the law and the perfecter of our faith. Did Jesus need to be baptized?

Considering this, Augustine wrote if it was needful for Jesus to be born? Was it needful for him to be crucified? Truly everything that Jesus did on Earth was a humiliation of His Divinity. He emptied himself, became the servant of the humanity made in His image, to share life with us and pass through death among us.

His baptism, then, becomes an amazing symbol of solidarity. His willingness to bend low in the waters of redemption, to submerge in the bathwater of humanity, opens our path to unity. He humiliated himself to embrace us, the sinful people of Israel and the sinful assembly of the nations. We step into the water to symbolize our need for redemption, our need to be made clean, made new. Jesus the Baptized steps out of the water bearing the waste of the world, the washed away dregs of our sin. They cling to Him and He carries them to His cross. This is how He began His ministry.

And drenched before humanity, soaked in the same water, God the Father and Spirit display their unity with the Son, God's triunity. Jesus is the the beloved baptized, the anointed baptizer, the bridge where the Triune God meets with the humanity made in His image.

Jesus, thank you for humiliating yourself to lift me up before the Father.

Jesus the Immanuel

But you are near, O LORD, and all your commandments are true. (Ps. 119.151)

How does the eternal God step into our everyday lives? Infinite. Immortal. Invisible. His divine attributes make him inaccessible to us in our frail humanity. We are not infinite. We have a beginning. And even in our birth we are born dead in sin. We are mortal. We are spirit, like our God who made us in His image, but we are bound to our material. Our bodies confine our souls like temporary housing. God is Spirit.

The Psalmist seeking the face of God in his epic poem declares that God is near, but even in this, God is still distant. He revealed Himself through His word spoken through prophets. He drew His people near by illuminating the hearts of men and women with His Spirit, speaking revelation into being. They printed each letter of His holy law and discovered in it their incapacity to ascend to his holiness. Only through a substitute could atonement be found.

And this is Jesus, the Son of God. He is Immanuel, literally God with us. He is the very fullness of the Lord God's nearness to us! He is the infinite placed in finite frame. He is the immortal One, whose death and resurrection, gives us rebirth and eternal life. He is the invisible made visible. The Word made flesh. The Light that pierces the darkness. His Spirit can indwell us because of Him. We can come before the Lord God in all Christ’s holiness. We are brought near to the Father by Jesus, our Immanuel.

Jesus, thank you for coming near to me even when I was far away.

Jesus the Eternal Light

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8.12)

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” James, the brother of Jesus, wrote these words. It seems that this is an area of our lives easily attacked. Whether conceit or pain, we have a tendency to remove the good and perfect gifts from the Giver. We act as if we’ve earned our own blessings, or we half-heartedly thank the Father of Lights for shining His sincere blessing on us.

“The Father of Lights.” Such a luminous and interesting description of God the Father. In Him there is no turning, no shadow. He shines on His creation and showers us with the radiance of His beauty. Reflecting on James’ words, was he remembering his mother’s son standing in the temple proclaiming Himself as the light of the world. Jesus, the light of the world, the brilliance of God’s love. He is the unquenchable blaze of the Father’s passion for His creation.

Jesus is like the light on a summer day. We know it did not originate in the earth or emerge from the shadows. The light and all its heat has emanated from the sun. It has come near to us, not the other way around. Truly, the closer we get to the sun, or even expose ourselves to its piercing rays, the more we burn away. And Jesus, the perfect gift from the Father, increases in us as we decrease.

Jesus, consume me in the fire of Your eternal light.

Jesus the Reconciler

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5.18)

Have you ever experienced reconciliation? True, healthy restoration of relationship with a loved one. Anyone who has felt the sting of a dissolved relationship knows the pain that takes its place. There we meet Pain and his companion, Longing, when someone we once called friend has now become a non-friend, or worse, an enemy. A loved one we once called brother or sister, father or mother now with an added prefixed word: estranged. The pain and loneliness is immense. That person occupied a space in our heart, the deepest places of our affection. Reconciliation seems impossible.

We carry the weight of failed relationships heavily, but when we recognize that in some situations we were the cause and the isolation can become unbearable. The guilt of our own self destructions makes reconciliation impossible. We long for restoration but believe nothing can be done.

And this is where Jesus steps in. Not only as our reconciler but as our model of genuine reconciliation. While we were still far from God, enemies of His holiness, Jesus died for us. He endured our death so that we might live. We are not only restored to a relationship impossible to us, we can rejoice that we have been reconciled to God, our Creator, our eternal Father who loves us. And in the reconciling love of Christ we find our calling as followers of Jesus, to be reconcilers too. We are ambassadors of Christ’s restoring good news. We are missionaries who proclaim the message of reconciliation.

Jesus, as I experience your reconciling love, give me strength and wisdom to carry that message of reconciliation to the hurting (especially loved ones I’ve hurt) in the world.

Jesus the New Beginning

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5.17)

Is there anywhere better than to start at the beginning? Like the first day of a new year brought in with fanfare and fireworks, everything is new. Everything is perfect, crisp, clean. But life doesn't often stay in pristine order. A new year is met with new year's resolutions hoping for better things. But things fall apart. Happy moments fall into waves of sadness. Life itself fades away and the beginning is lost over the horizon, left only to memory. Creation begins to creak and seams become torn.

And this is where we find an aspect of Jesus' beauty. Jesus, who was from the beginning and made all things, knew that his freewill creation would soil the image of God found in our souls. He knew as the days stretched into millennia we would lose sight of our Creator and the image He imprinted on us. We can look back over the sin and failure of our lives and recognize that Jesus is not surprised. He knew we would fail.

If we are in Christ we are not only created but recreated. We are made new again. We find in Jesus our Savior, our Creator and Re-Creator. The old and torn image of His love, distorted by our sin, has been made new. As we start this new year we can look on the face of our Lord Jesus who placed breath in our lungs and a new beginning before our feet.

So there is somewhere better to start at than the beginning: a new beginning. Thank you, Jesus, for making me new.