Our tech inevitably changes our behavior.   At first it mimics us, seeking to automate and streamline, manual time-consuming tasks.   But before long, the roles are reversed.  And our behavior mimics our tech.  As the internet moved from academic curiosity to commercial platform, retailers struggled to leverage this direct access to consumers.  There were actual obstacles to virtual shopping.   Shipping costs and the complexity of item returns created trepidation for buyers.   Enter Amazon Prime.   However you feel about Amazon, their introduction of free-shipping and no-hassle returns, more than any other innovation, opened the floodgates for ecommerce.

We all want gift exchanges to be easy.   No one wants to wait in line at Customer Service only to get store credit.  No one wants to search endlessly to find the return right address for a mail-order purchase and then have to pay shipping equal to the item’s original price.   Until Amazon, the cost of gift exchanges was high.   But now online retailers have made this process virtually painless.   Click, print, and take the return to the UPS Store.  Voila! You are done.   Ease of exchange has been revolutionary.  Anymore we are shocked at a seller that expects us to pay return shipping.   Forgotten are the days of difficult exchanges.

So perhaps it is extremely difficult grasp of the fullness of what it cost Jesus to make the greatest exchange.    When we think of the Incarnation, we consider the poverty and obscurity of his coming or of the constant rejection he experienced – “He came to His own, but His own received Him not.”   But our thinking about his humiliation never goes far enough.   We think of his humility in terms of what would humble us.  But the very act of the eternal God taking upon himself our nature is a humiliation of inconceivable magnitude.   While grace is free to us, it is not cheap.   All the brokenness and curse and wrath of God that our sin brings and deserves was placed upon him.   And all the righteousness that he attained is accounted to us, when we give ourselves to him.   The Apostle Paul pens this great mystery concisely when he wrote.

We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21

The incarnation was the costliest exchange in the history of gift giving.   God’s grace and mercy toward us came at an unfathomable cost.   Our forefathers expressed described this cost as Christ’s humiliation and described it this way in the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Q. 27. What did Christ’s humiliation consist of? A. Christ’s humiliation consisted of his being born in a low condition, living under the Law, undergoing the miseries of this life, undergoing the wrath of God and the cursed death of the Cross, and in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time.

Yet this costliest of exchanges brings about the most extraordinarily exchanged lives in the recipients of God’s gracious gift.   Paul describes this exchanged life in 2 Corinthians 5.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 2 Corinthians 5:14-17

Literature is filled with compelling stories of exchanged lives — The Prince and the Pauper, or A Tale of Two Cities.  But there is no more compelling story than the “Son of God becoming man, so that men could become sons of God.”   This week as we conclude our study of the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s teaching on the Incarnation by considering the costliest exchange in history — the humiliation of Christ.  

Join us as we examine 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 and consider what this exchange meant for Jesus and what it means for us. We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

We live in a world filled with mystery.  We believe we live in an age of hard facts and scientific data.  We pretend that with enough computing power and scientific inquiry, every question can be answered, every mystery resolved.   Indeed, we have accumulated much in the way of knowledge.   Ironically, knowledge and mystery increase in direct proportion.   The more we understand the world the less we understand how it works.   The more we know, the more we know what we do not know.

From our digital age, we look with smug superiority upon our forebears, quibbling about with pens and paper.   While we struggle to use our smart phones without consulting a small child.   Our technology is a mystery to us.    We think we have explored the earth — no new lands to discover and conquer, but we know less about the floor of the ocean, which covers two thirds of our planet, than we do about the surface of the moon.

We cannot explain even the simplest things we observe every day.  The sun, moon, and constellations are large on the horizon, yet seem to diminish in size as they rise overhead.    Yet if you hold out your thumb to the rising moon, then again when it is at its zenith, you will discover absolutely no difference.  What accounts for this remarkable trick of perspective?   Neither scientists nor psychologists can explain it.    And when you go to your favorite drive-in and order a milk shake, why does it give you a brain freeze?   Despite well-funded research, scientists have not determined the cause.   Our world is awash in mystery.

Some of these mysteries involve great contradictions — irreconcilable, yet indispensable truths.   In the early part of the Twentieth Century, as scientists observed sub-atomic matter, they realized that the physics of their day no longer explained the behavior of the nano-world.   A new physic, quantum physics, was born to account for what Sir Isaac Newton never even knew existed. 

At the center of this new understanding was a radical new idea – that light acted but as a wave and as a particle.   No one could explain it, but accepting this mystery was foundational in constructing a model of physics that explained the sub-atomic world.   Seemingly irreconcilable, yet indispensable truths, that make the world go round.

This type of tension is no surprise to the Christian.  The Christian faith is filled with paradox.   Indispensable truths in tension with one another.  “Truths,” as one theologian quipped, “to be believed, not discovered.”   Truths such as the absolute sovereignty of God and the undeniable reality of true human freedom.   And an even more incomprehensible mystery.   The truth of a Savior who is fully God and, at the same time, fully man – two natures, in one person, forever.   Yet, the scripture does not discourage “faith seeking understanding.”   God has given us minds that desire to know His truth, to seek and find what He has revealed.  

In Luke 1:26-38, we have one of the most remarkable stories in scripture.   The angel, Gabriel comes to Mary with a startling announcement — she will be the mother of her Savior.   Unlike the fearful skepticism of Zechariah, Mary asks “how will these things be?”   A question we all wrestle with as we consider the nature of our Savior as fully God and fully man.   But in the answer, scripture points us to one of the most precious truths of our faith.   Because Mary asked this question, we, along with our forefathers can turn to scripture to ask.   

Q22: How did Christ, being the Son of God, become man? 
A22: Christ, the Son of God, became man, by taking to himself a true body, and a reasonable soul, being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and born of her yet without sin. 

Join us as we examine Luke 1:26-38 and consider this question, why it is important and how we are to respond. We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

We live in a world awash with outrageous claims and inflammatory statements.   Faced with the daunting challenge of distilling fact from fiction, we may be tempted to believe everything or nothing.   But among all the outrageous claims, what if there is life giving truth?  What if there is truth we cannot live without?

No man made more outrageous claims that Jesus Christ.   He shocked the men of his hometown, by claiming to be the Messiah.  He challenged the religious leaders to point out a single one of his sins.  He pushed the limits with his disciples, commanding them to love enemies and offer unlimited forgiveness to offensive brothers.  

Jesus’ own disciples struggled to understand who he was and what he came to do.  From time to time, glimpses shone through their own preconceived notions of Him.  In a poignant moment, as they were crossing the Sea of Galilee, a furious squall sprang up and threatened to sink their small fishing boat.  Half of Jesus’ disciples grew up on these tempestuous waters, fishing with their families from their childhood, yet even they were convinced that they would not survive the trip.  They woke Jesus, who was asleep in the back of the boat. 

They did not ask him to save them – for what miracle working teacher was a match for a force-ten gale?  They only asked, “don’t you care that we are about to die?”   Jesus stood up in the boat and with a word, brought the waters from tempest to mirror.   These seasoned seamen were almost speechless.  The only thing they could say of Jesus was, “who is this?”   They perceived that there was much more to Jesus than even their imaginations could anticipate.

What about you?  When someone mentions Jesus, what comes to mind?  Religious revolutionary? Social justice warrior?  Ethical teacher?  Failed Zionist leader?  Founder of a yet another world religion? Who is this Jesus?  For many he is a caricature, influenced by pictures you have seen or by clichés which permeate our cultural ideas of “the historical Jesus.”  Or perhaps you remember him from a collection of anecdotes or parables you heard as a child in some Sunday School.   Just who is Jesus?

No claim of Jesus was more outrageous than his claim that “I and the Father are one.  He who has seen me has seen the Father.”   Jesus did not claim merely to be God’s servant, or God’s prophet.  He did not claim to be “a son of God,” but “The Son of God.”  Despite the best efforts of Arian heretics to erase Jesus’ claims to divinity, the Scriptures claim pervasively and decisively that Jesus is fully God and fully man.   Men who seek some value in Jesus as a mere man and moral example, but disbelieve his outrageous claim to deity must face C. S. Lewis’ scathing critique.

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 a 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.  – C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

Jesus did not come to point out the way, the truth, or the life, but to be the way, the truth and the life.  This demands that he be fully human and fully divine. 

Who is Jesus?  Our seasonal displays of a baby Jesus in a lowly cattle stall show only his humanity.   But in the opening chapter of his gospel, John pulls back the curtain to reveal “the rest of the story.”  You think you know who Jesus is?  Come and find out as we examine John 1:1-5, 9-14 and grapple with what our forefathers expressed in the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Q21: Who is the Redeemer of God’s elect? 
A21: The only Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the eternal Son of God, became man, and so was, and continueth to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, forever. 

We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Pipe tobacco and yellow legal pads.   My father was never without either.  He did nothing without an outline.   In large, block script he detailed his plans to do anything he intended.   Even after leaving home, I would receive outlines of his travel itineraries in the mail.  He was not an impulsive man.  He carefully analyzed his intentions and all expected consequences.  And only after putting the plan on paper would he act.   And without a doubt, I am my father’s son.   I, too, outline my approach to everything.  I attempt very little without a plan and an analysis of all its contingencies.

In this, my earthly father resembled my Heavenly Father.   God is no trouble shooter.  He is not unaware of anything that comes to pass.  In fact, He “foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, according the counsel of His own will, for His own glory.”   He is the ultimate planner.   Man’s fall was not an unexpected turn.   God is never held captive or contingent to any of the free actions of his creatures.   He not only knew all that would happen. But he purposed it.

Everything that happens contrary to his prescribed will is by no means contrary to his decreed will.   He always intended to deal with the world according to grace.  And the means by which he bestows that grace is not through an unfallen mankind in Adam, but to a redeemed mankind in Christ.   Isaac Watt’s metrical paraphrase of Psalm 72 says it well.

Where He displays His healing power,
Death and the curse are known no more:
In Him the tribes of Adam boast
More blessings than their father lost.

In Christ redeemed mankind can boast more blessings than Adam ever had.   That is a remarkable statement.   This is what God planned for us always.   Time and time again we are told in Scripture that God has purposed grace in Christ, “from before the foundation of the world.”   Even in its fallenness, and sin, and sorrow, this world with its promise of redemption, regeneration, and renewal in Christ is the “best of all possible worlds.”   Nothing has gone amiss with God’s plan and purpose.  There is no waste, no “gratuitous evil” in God’s economy.  The world is not “off the rails.”   God’s perfect and gracious plan is unfolding, just as He intended it.  And in this we have hope.   He is the God who does all He pleases, and all He promises.

The first chapter of Ephesians is a literary masterpiece.   In one long breath, Paul extols the amazing beauty and richness of God’s grace to those who are ‘in Christ.’   The Ephesian church faced severe crises internally and externally.   False teaching and persecution were leading many to ‘abandon their first love.’  So, God pulls back the curtain to show them the truth of their situation ‘in Christ.’    In a city that boasted one of the wonders of the ancient world in the Temple of Diana, it was actually the church that housed the great treasure of God’s grace – a grace that was rooted in God’s sovereign and eternal plan to save.  

And this is good news.   Our sin and rebellion is nothing so novel, so unexpected that it is outside God’s plan and power to save.   There are no surprises or unexpected circumstances that thwart God’s efficacious love for us in Christ.   You are not beyond hope.    Even if your situation seems hopeless.   Our forefathers expressed this hope in a series of questions and answers called the Westminster Shorter Catechism.   There we find this great promise.

Q. 19. What is the misery of that state into which mankind fell?

A. All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so are made liable to all the miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever.

Q. 20. Did God leave all mankind to perish in the state of sin and misery?

A. Out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, God chose some for everlasting life, and he entered into a covenant of grace to deliver them out of their state of sin and misery and to bring them into a state of salvation by a redeemer

Join us this Lord’s Day as we examine Ephesians 1:3-10 and consider God’s eternal, unbreakable, and effective plan to save us from the power of our sin.   We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube.