Always Reforming

This post is an adaptation of my sermon notes from 12/23. One of life's most fundamental questions, one that we must all ask ourselves is, “Who is Jesus?”   This question has received many answers, and many of them are correct, if incomplete.   Jesus is God.   He is a man.   He is a teacher and a shepherd and our Savior.    The Reformed tradition has long thought it best to view Christ through the lens of His three offices: Prophet, Priest, and King.   Of these three, people like to emphasize His Kingship the least as it is the most repulsive to our human nature (see the Garden of Eden).   Liberal Christianity likes to speak of Christ as our Prophet, Evangelical Christianity likes to speak of Christ as our Priest, but it seems nobody wants to speak of Christ as our King!   The New Testament, however, strongly emphasizes the Kingship of Christ.   In fact, o f the three offices He occupies, His Kingship is perhaps emphasized the mo...

Christians spend entirely too much time trying to make the Gospel less offensive than it is. We try to synthesize our faith with our culture so that it will be more palatable, but our Savior came declaring a Kingdom that makes demands on your lives.  One of the fundamental Kingdom principles He proclaimed is that " the last will be first, and the first last ."  Christians are so familiar with Jesus's many aphorisms that we forget just how earth-shaking they are, and, subsequently, we fail to live them out as consistently as we should.  They're wise sayings, yes, but they are so much more than that.  They are operational principles for life.   When we read Jesus's teaching, especially the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), we see that this Kingdom He proclaims reverses roles.  It flips the carnal world on it's head.  The Kingdom of Heaven plays by different rules than this world.  The world says that it's a dog-eat-dog world.  Jesus says to...