Who do you say I am?
Two Sundays ago at Meeting Point, we started a new sermon series called "Who do you say I am?". We'll be talking for the next several weeks about the "I AM" statements of Jesus... and looking at the book of John for insight into how Jesus actually presented himself to the people around him.
As many of you heard at church, the I AM statements of Jesus (ie: "I am the way"....) are rooted in the I AM statements of God in the Old Testament. In other words, when the historic man called Jesus used that language, He was deliberately identifying himself (a young, unknown Jewish man from a small tribe and an unremarkable family) as the God of the universe. And as offensive or crazy as that claim was to many religious people, the words and actions of Jesus started a spiritual movement that has changed the world.
What we would love to see happen through Vineyard Amsterdam is for those claims that Christ made to become real, practical, and visible in our own lives. If Jesus said that He is our light... we want to learn how to trust in His ability to reveal things to us in His timing, to learn not to worry about the unknown, to learn faith in His ability to make life clear. If Jesus said that He is our way... we want to learn to walk with Him, and to follow His character and His example in the every-day business of life.
Who Jesus is should effect every part of our lives: how we deal with our finances, what we look at on the computer, how we speak to our children, how hard we work at our jobs, how much we allow ourselves to be consumed with worry or anxiety, what we post on our Facebook status lines and how we spend our time (just to name a couple of things!).
The claims of Christ should also effect every part of our heart identities: how we ask for and receive forgiveness, how we find emotional healing, how we access peace that is above our life's circumstances, how we become centered in Christ in our minds, hearts and souls. And fundamentally, how we find our rest in Christ, in His claims, and in the presence of God through the Holy Spirit.
It's not always easy to pull the huge, esoteric, eternal attributes of God into the practical corners of our lives... and that's why we are doing this together. But the more we come together in community to remind one another of who God is, of the things Jesus talked about as He was revealing God to the world, the more we're able to see that for all of the largeness of God, Jesus "moved into the neighborhood" to show us how this life is supposed to work, and how our souls are meant to find their center.
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