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Humanity of Jesus, human
Humanity of Jesus, human Entries in human (2)
Monday's Meditation: His Humanity, Our Example
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 09:14AM 
The great theologian Abraham Lincoln once observed that God must love the common man because he made so many of them. He was on to something. From the beginning God the Father has loved people! He made people, he talks to people, and he accomplishes his work through people. The humanity of Jesus is not so much an exceptional act of God as it is the crowning act of God.
It should be no surprise then, that when God Himself wanted to accomplish the redemption of the whole earth, He did so through a man. Jesus, 100% God, was also 100% man. The religious authorities in his day could not accept the idea that a man could forgive sin, that a man could open the eyes of the blind, or that a man could cleanse lepers with a touch. Sin, blindness and leprosy were contagious, men should flee from them all! But the Man Jesus Christ came with a heavenly contagion that set the oppressed free.
God’s method, revealed in scripture, is to use people. Before Jesus, God partnered with people: Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Ruth. In Jesus, God sent a man. After Jesus, he commissioned men, “Go therefore into all the world . . .” (Matthew 28:18) Why is this significant? We need to see that God has always chosen to work through humanity to accomplish his purposes in the earth. Jesus, our model, demonstrated the potential of a human life lived in total submission to the Father. Jesus healed and taught and discipled not by virtue of his divine nature but by the grace of being a Man fully submitted to God. He didn’t raise the dead because he was the Boss’ Son, he did so to display the full potential of a human life in partnership with God.
To grasp the humanity of Jesus is to grasp the hope that Christlikeness is possible for each of us. His intention is to reproduce Himself in the lives of his followers, to launch a community of God’s sons and daughters capable of the kind of character and power demonstrated by the only begotten Son of God. God only "fathered” one child, but He has chosen to adopt untold more, and each adopted child is called to the family business.
The Difference between Jesus the man and Jesus as God
Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 11:34AM 
If you want to know what the full potential of your life can be, look at Jesus. All that he did during his earthly ministry was done through reliance upon the Holy Spirit. That means we can imitate his example. “Impossible!” you say?
As Evangelical believers in the previous century placed the emphasis more and more on the divinity of Christ our understanding of his humanity began to fade. That’s a problem: if we lose sight of Jesus the Man we also lose sight of his plans for us right here and right now. If we lose sight of everything he did and said before his death and resurrection we have fallen into the role of salvation consumer instead of disciple of Christ.
Let me share you with a “secret” seldom considered by most believers today: Jesus is fully God and fully man. We need to make distinctions between the two aspects of his identity because each one drives different aspects of our Christian walk: we worship Jesus because he is God; we can pattern our lives after him because in his humanity he lived the perfect human life as our example. We should recognize the difference between his unique sacrificial death on the cross and the pattern of living he set for us during his earthly ministry.
His death on the cross is unique because of who he is—the sinless perfect Son of God, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. History is filled with examples of sacrificial deaths; soldiers have died on behalf of their comrades and parents have died on behalf of their children, but no one else could accomplish what Jesus accomplished on the cross because his sacrifice came by virtue of his identity as God-come-to-earth. His sacrifice was for the sin of all peoples, in all times, in all places. Only God’s own blood could satisfy the guilt of our sin. His death was unique: one time, once, for all. God himself provided the lamb. No one else could do it and no one else will ever have to do it again. We emphasize the death and resurrection of Jesus as God’s only Son precisely because only God could do it.
But there is the danger of over-emphasis: when we concentrate on the substitutionary death of Jesus to the exclusion of his life and teaching we limit his ministry to a divine rescue mission—a rescue mission that only becomes effective for us when we die. When we see his ministry exclusively as the action that purchased heaven for us it is difficult to make the connection between his sacrifice and our everyday lives. Many Christians are moved emotionally by his suffering on Calvary. Many are grateful that he paid a debt he did no owe. Many Christians understand that they have no hope of heaven apart from the price Jesus paid on their behalf. But apart from gratitude for his kindness we see little connection between what Jesus did then and how we can live today.
Here is the challenge: our appreciation for what he did does not empower us to fulfill his example. Our gratitude for his suffering does release the wisdom, insight, or strength for each one of us to live as a new kind of person. Jesus urged his followers to “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” The rest he speaks of here is not our eternal rest, but rest and peace for everyday living. His gentleness and humility may have led him to the cross but they are also character traits available to his disciples today. He offers the opportunity for us to learn from him—not about how to go to heaven when we die but about how heaven can come to earth now. This is the very first request we are taught to pray in the Lord’s Prayer: “Let Your Kingdom come, let Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6: 10, emphasis added). During his earthly ministry his wisdom, his actions, the radical nature of the gospel of the Kingdom of God, and his powerful works were examples of how we could live on earth as well.
His mission included purchasing our pardon from sin by going to the cross, but it was much larger. The life-stories of Jesus seldom mention the word gospel apart from the phrase Kingdom of God (or Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew). His mission on earth included pardon for sin, but it also gave new life and a new family identity to everyone who believes in him. That new identity, available right now to anyone who will follow him, is “Child of God.” When we discover the breadth of the gospel message we discover our adoption into a new family, and the possibility of taking on the family likeness.