Belief: What We Believe Part 2

Week 2
Statement: “I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.”
Text: Luke 1:26-38; John 3:16-21
Big Idea of the Message: Jesus isn’t merely a wise teacher, but God in the flesh. Believing this requires radical sacrifice.

Talking Points:

1. “We throw around the word ‘believe’ pretty casually, from phrases like ‘I believe in Santa Claus’ to ‘We Believe!’ written on posters held up at sports events. Yet the Biblical sense of ‘believing’ like John 3:16 uses is much stronger. It implies a commitment to trust, understanding ‘that actions based on that trust may follow.” (James Strong, The Strongest Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, 1636).

2. Acknowledging that Jesus was real is not the basis of Christian faith.Even historians who deny Jesus’ deity acknowledge that He was a real person who existed. The real issue is what we believe about Him. “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 patronizing 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, 72-73.)

3. Confessing Jesus as “Lord” is a significant distinction of the Christian faith. Celebrities like Madonna have donned t-shirts and hats saying, “Jesus is my home boy,” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/05/10/jesus-chic-is- latest-fashion-trend.html), but Lordship is what sets the Christ-followers apart from the trend-followers.

4. “The doctrinal importance of the virgin birth is seen in at least three areas. 1. It shows that salvation ultimately must come from the Lord...The virgin birth of Christ is an unmistakable reminder that salvation can never come through human effort, but must be the work of God himself...2. The virgin birth made possible the uniting of full deity and full humanity in one person...God, in his wisdom, ordained a combination of human and divine influence in the birth of Christ, so that his full humanity would be evident to us from the fact of his ordinary human birth from a human mother, and his full deity would be evident from the fact of his conception in Mary’s womb by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit...3. The virgin birth also makes possible Christ’s true humanity without inherited sin...Luke 1:35 connects this conception of by the Holy Spirit with the holiness or moral purity of Christ, and reflection on that fact allows us to understand that through the absence of a human father, Jesus was not fully descended from Adam, and that this break in the line of descent was the method God used to bring it about that Jesus was fully human yet did not share inherited sin from Adam,” (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 529-530).

5. This current TV series called Jane the Virgin is a misplaced at tempt to capture the mystery of the virgin birth: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3566726/.