Facet 4: Life - Transcript

Welcome to Facet Four: Life. We’re talking about the plan of God to rescue and recover creation, and we’re approaching the crescendo of the story.
 
Last time, we talked about the nation of Israel, which all started with a man named Abraham, and we discussed how this nation was given something called “the Law of Moses,” which was meant to expose a very deep problem inside the human heart.
 
Over and over and over again, the people failed at keeping this Law, and this proved that there needed to be a different “Way” to recovery and healing than just law-keeping… Right and Wrong.
 
Well, God showed us that Way. And that Way to Life was different than anyone expected, but it’s what makes the most sense. Because it came in the form of a human being.
 
Jesus is the one who came and through His life we saw what true life really is. And He was the one prophesied about in the Law for thousands of years.
 
So the Scriptures tell us that Jesus came “at the fullness of time.” In other words, He came at the exact moment in history when humanity was ready to wake up.  
 
See, Jesus came at the best time in human history for a message of truth to fill the world. He came right when the Roman Empire was at its height, and that empire had created the world’s first road system, which connected nations and people groups like never before.  
 
It was a breakthrough in technology and culture that was preparing the world for massive change. Jesus came at that moment. He also came at the moment when law-keeping was at its height, and the people of Israel were exhausted by the Law.
 
He came when people were ready for a solution. And through His life, as well as His death and resurrection, that solution emerged. And that’s where we’re headed here.
 
Now, as we get into this, I want to make something extremely clear:
 
Contrary to popular opinion, Jesus Christ did not come to start a new religion. He didn’t come to start a club called Christianity that could one day compete with the Jewish club or the Buddhist club or the Hindu club or whatever. We need to get out of that tribal thinking…
 
Jesus came to restore life in the human heart, in every race and every culture. He came to bring all of us back to that original blessing—to our true identity of peace and wholeness. He came to give us abundant life, in the here and now, and in what’s to come.
 
And He came really to do the deep surgery on that self-life we’ve been talking about; that false life of deception and independence that produces everything wrong in this world.
 
So let’s make a few things very clear about who Jesus is… Everything hinges on the question of “who is Jesus?” And there’s a lot of different answers to that question.
 
Many people call Him the Messiah. In fact, that’s what the word “Christ” means. It’s not His last name. Jesus Christ means Jesus the Messiah. Now, in the world during His time, and still today, people thought of the Messiah as someone like a prophet or a king who would come and basically kill all the bad guys and rescue the good guys. That was their interpretation of the Messiah as they understood it.
 
Well, Jesus is in a whole other category. He is the Messiah, but He is nothing like what the world expected.  
 
Jesus is, first and foremost, part of the Divine Family we’ve been talking about. He is the eternal Son of God who existed before time itself. He appeared and manifested in the person of Jesus from a town called Nazareth, but He is of the Divine Family.
 
Now remember we said each Person of the Divine Family is equally and fully God. They’re one. So Jesus is fully God. He’s completely divine. He is God incarnated in human flesh.
 
The word “incarnate” is very important. It literally means “the act of being made flesh.” Carne is the word for meat or flesh. So, God was en-fleshed in the person of Jesus. We see this really clearly in the first chapter of the Gospel of John where it says:
 
In the beginning was the Word (that’s talking about Jesus), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…
 
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
 
To this day, people will argue over that point. Many religious systems out there deny the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus. But it is so vital we understand this part.
 
And here’s why. I don’t want to tell you what to believe. If you’re watching this and you disagree, I’m not going to try to shout louder and say, I’m right, you’re wrong… Let me just give you the reason why this is important, and you can decide in your heart where to go with this.
 
The reason that this whole idea of incarnation, God-becoming-flesh-in-Jesus, is so critical, is because it gets at that root problem in humanity. Remember, we fell into a false identity. We lost sight of our true selves, and of God’s true self—His true nature.
 
So, because Jesus is fully human and fully God, the incarnation answers the ancient question of who am I and who is God?
 
Those are the two essential things that have been lost. We have forgotten who we are and we have forgotten who our Heavenly Parent is. Jesus came as the ultimate reminder. As both fully God and fully Man, Jesus reveals who we truly are, and who God is.
 
Back in Facet Two, we looked at how all of our problems come down to this issue of forgetting our true face, and the face of our Father. Jesus restores us back to the truth, and we’ll move forward now by talking first about how He reveals the true face of God.

So, in humanity’s guilt and shame, when we took on that orphan mindset, we began to twist and distort God’s nature in our minds.
 
We ended up turning God into our own image; our own violent, controlling, authoritative image. Even though we were the ones moving away from Him, we made ourselves believe that He was the one who abandoned us; and who for the most part was very angry with us.
 
But these were lies that became engrained like stone in our hearts, which we held to and would not let go of.
 
So think about this. Jesus comes to the earth, and one of the main things He talks about is His oneness with the Father. He says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
 
Jesus re-revealed the face of God. And this was the first major part of the surgery—the healing that we needed. Jesus comes claiming to perfectly reveal God, and so what does His life look like?
 
That’s a question we need to ask. What kind of God did Jesus reveal?
 
Did He reveal a distant, angry, and violent God?
 
Not at all… In fact, Jesus revealed the exact opposite of what the whole world believed God was.
 
Jesus exhibited this life of compassion and healing and approachability. He let children sit on his lap and his disciples rest their heads on his chest. He touched lepers, the outcasts of society. He was gentle and humble.
 
And so, there are leaders and influencers throughout history, from Mohammed to Ghandi who have all talked about the power of Jesus’s life. They didn’t all believe He was God directly, but they recognized the beauty of His life.
 
So I want to talk a little bit more about Jesus’s life…
 
Did you know that Jesus never turned someone down who needed healing? You can open up a New Testament and fact-check that yourself.
 
Jesus never said to someone who came to him, “No. God wants you to be sick. He wants you to learn a lesson from this sickness. He gave it to you.”
 
No. Jesus healed every physical ailment and disease that was brought before Him. And by doing that, He showed us that sickness comes from the curse of darkness in this world. It does not come from heaven. There’s no sickness in heaven, so it can’t come from there anyway.
 
Now Jesus also had a tendency to ruin funerals. In fact, He didn’t just ruin them, He turned them into parties. On several occasions, He raised people from the dead; gave children back to their parents, brothers back to their siblings.
 
And guess what? By doing that, Jesus showed us that death is not from God either. Death is not something God created. We brought death into this world because of that false way of life. But Jesus came to reverse that.
 
Also, one time, when Jesus came up against a storm that threatened to hurt His disciples, He stopped it. He commanded the storm to cease. He also had these times where there was no food around, people were hungry, and He provided food for them.
 
All of this comes together to show us that everything we know in our hearts is evil in this world—like poverty and hunger, sickness and disease, destructive storms, and ultimately death itself—none of it comes from God. They are not on the same team. And He doesn’t send these things to teach us lessons.
 
He will teach you through them, but He did not create them.
 
Jesus came to show us the heart of our Dad. And the heart of our Heavenly Father is to see His children with bellies full, bodies whole, the environment healthy, and so forth.
 
Jesus said this very clearly: “The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, I have come that they may have life, and life abundantly.”
 
Now I know this brings up a lot of questions, most of which are beyond the scope of this video, though we do have a lot of resources that dive more into this.
 
But I know this is where people begin to say that, you know, the God of the Old Testament seems very different from the God revealed in Jesus.
 
Ok, what I’m about to say to that is very important to understand:
 
In the Old Testament, in that Law of Moses and in the writings of the prophets, God’s face was hidden. This is why we talked about those two layers of reading the Old Testament.
 
God, in those Old Testament times, was entering into our dreamworld. He entered into our Matrix in order to blow it up from the inside out. But first He had to enter into that world; into that violent, broken, and primitive world of sacrifice.
 
And sometimes it seems like He’s behind that stuff, but really, He was bearing patiently with our violence, in order to slowly unveil His great plan when the world was ready. And so again, when the fullness of time came, He revealed—He re-revealed—His true face by sending His Son. By sending Himself.
 
So I know some people will say here, “What about God’s wrath?” That’s another big subject, but I’m going to answer this very simply.
 
The true wrath of God is His passion for His children to be free. Wrath is an extension of His love. So for instance, when a doctor goes to save a patient from a disease, he doesn’t stick the patient with a scalpel because he hates the patient.
 
He sticks the patient with a scalpel because he hates the disease inside, and he wants to see them whole.  
 
I remember the first time my oldest daughter had an asthma attack and how much I wished I could take away that asthma. That frightening contraction in the chest. At 2 years old, she was and still is infinitely precious to me. I love her more than I ever explain. But I hated that asthma inside her.
 
Jesus is called the Great Physician. He loves the world. He loves every person. His wrath is against that which steals, kills, and destroys.
 
That is the God Jesus revealed. That is the true face of our Divine Family. They are filled with compassion and hope and unimaginable patience. And they are not distant from us. They are willing to get right into the mud, right into the pain of our existence, in order to lead us out…
 
Now let’s talk about the other side of the mission of Jesus. Jesus not only came to reveal God…He also came to reveal us. He was called “the Son of God” and the “the Son of Man”
 
Jesus is described in the Bible as the perfect image of God, and in that same book we are described as being made in the image of God.
 
So this brings us back to something we discovered in the first Facet of Awake. We talked about how God created this entire universe and fine-tuned it for life to exist, so that eventually it would be filled with younger brothers and sisters of the eternal Son of God.
 
We are those brothers and sisters of Christ, which by the way makes us brothers and sisters of one another. But we’ve lost our way and we’ve stopped treating one another accordingly.
 
So Jesus comes to answer the question, “Who am I?”
 
And when you look at Jesus, you see what humanity was meant to look like. You see the possibilities of what can flow from these hands, and eyes, and feet. You see what this brain and heart were made for.
 
In Him, we discover a beautiful humility and yet an intense confidence and strength. In Jesus’s life, we see a lot of peace, and a lot of healing and comfort. And these are all things that are meant flow through the human frame, effortlessly, as part of our DNA.
 
When you see Jesus as compassionate and yet unafraid, not willing to bend in the face of evil, courageous and yet gentle—you are seeing an image of your true self.
 
God was made flesh in Jesus to show us that our flesh is actually good. The flesh gets a bad rap, but really the flesh, as in our physical bodies, was custom-designed for this divine life. And Jesus proved this. He proved that the human flesh is made for Godlikeness.
 
We fell into that false identity. We fell to the lie that our flesh is bad, and that we are evil to the core… But that is not the truth. Before there was original sin, there was original blessing, and that is the greater truth of who we are, even though we’ve fallen in the mud.
 
Christ shows us that humanity, at its core, is good. And not just good; very good. In fact, divine. We are made in the image of the Triune God. So we’re made for goodness, and we’re made for community.
 
Now of course the false identity is bad. Really bad. The self-life is not good. In fact, it’s very not good… And that’s what some Bible translations call the “flesh” in a bad way. But again, it’s just really just a life living out a lie.
 
Your actual flesh, as in your brain, your blood, your body is designed for life and freedom. It’s made to be a vessel of joy. That is your truest self.
 
So man and woman are made for Christlikeness. That’s our identity and it’s our destiny. Of course, all of us have unique personalities with different traits and expressions; but at our core is Christ, the image of God. That’s what’s inside of us, and that’s what truly defines us.
 
That truth was stolen. Adam and Eve in that story in Genesis were told they needed to do something to become like God. They needed to embrace something exterior—some kind of food, some kind of law, some kind of religion or self-works—in order to become sons and daughters.
 
But we were deceived, and we began to live according to that deception, treating one another like dust. Like evil beings. Like composites of chemicals, and not something more… We stopped seeing ourselves as the brothers and sisters of Jesus, the sons and daughters of the Father.  
 
So to sum this part up. Jesus Christ came in the flesh to break the power of the lie that was ruling over our flesh, and distorting it. Which goes all goes back to identity.
 
Now here’s the thing. We couldn’t do this in our own strength. We couldn’t break the lie ourselves, because we were blind to it in the first place. So Jesus the Messiah came as Light to the world, to enlighten our hearts to the truth of who we really are—and who God is.
 
This is why the incarnation, God being made flesh, is the most important subject you could ever dive into. And yet, it’s also only the beginning of God’s secret mission to rescue all of us.
 
So let’s keep moving forward.