Pastor Chris Seay continued our recent series, drawing from Scripture and the unique insight of theologian C.S. Lewis as he taught about the ways in which the implications of Jesus' incarnation have often been historically misunderstood or understated. God became fully man; and that truth must radically transform our lives, our beliefs about our bodies and the created world, and point us toward our shared calling of living fully into the image of Christ.
Text
Philippians 2: 4-12
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
If you read the bible you’ll see that nobody who ever met Jesus Christ ever had a moderate reaction to him. There are only three reactions to Jesus: they either hated him and wanted to kill him, they were afraid of him and wanted to run away, or they were absolutely smitten with him and they tried to give their whole lives to him…
- John Stott
If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the Earth.
- C.S. Lewis
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.
-C.S. Lewis
“Never tell a child,” said George Macdonald, ‘you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.’ As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.”
- George Macdonald
‘Yes,’ said Queen Lucy. ‘In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.’
- C.S. Lewis
Reflection
Pastor Chris posed that the Church has historically fallen into three crucial mistakes with regard to engaging the broader culture; fortification (putting up walls to keep ourselves safe and to keep out the "harmful" influence of others), domination (asserting power due to our own defined view of "righteousness"), and assimilation (simply giving in and going along with the rhythms of the world). Which did you see modeled throughout your personal history in the Church? How have you perhaps acted in any of these ways?
Embracing the Incarnation as truth has profound implications. As you commit to follow Jesus in a fully embodied way, how with you more fully seek humility through service (getting your hands dirty), own up to your weakness, and pursue greater intimacy with the God who desires relationship with us?
Worship Set
My Beloved
Come Thou Fount
God's Highway
Open Up
Nothing But The Blood
Sweet Comfort