Hi, I'm Jonathan Pennington, and this is the Human Flourishing Podcast. This podcast is a repository of a wide variety of sermons, lectures, interviews, and other resources that I've recorded over the years. Today's episode is a sermon I preached at Sojourn East in Louisville, Kentucky. In our scripture reading this morning, it comes from Luke 2, 41 through 52, so if you're able, would you please join me in standing for the reading of God's Word? Every year Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. When he was 12 years old, they went up to the festival according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they weren't aware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days, they found him in the temple courts, teaching among the teachers, or sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for, searching for you. Why were you searching for me, he asked? Didn't you know I had to be in my father's house? But they didn't understand what he was saying to them. When he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them, but his mother treasured all these things in her heart. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Morning, friends. Can you think of a book from your childhood, something you read when you were a kid, or maybe even a lesson that really gripped you? I bet for a lot of people might be Harry Potter for me, which is great. For me, I remember as a grade school student reading the biography of George Washington Carver and all the uses of the peanut. He developed, I don't know why I remember that book. But I also remember from high school, probably 1985 or so, I read this biography of Alexander Hamilton. Now, this is before the musical was even in the mind of anyone, and I remember just being totally enthralled with this biography of Alexander Hamilton. I don't know if that was a prediction of my future nerdness or what, but it was, you know, long before the rap kind of musical that's great, it just wasn't enthralled by it. And you know, that's really both those are biographies, and that's because humans, we love stories and we love stories about other people. We love to learn about people. We want to know how did Steve Jobs think of the iPhone and run that company? How did Winston Churchill find the strength to sort of lead through the dark days of World War II? What is going on in Taylor Swift's lyrics, like what's going on in her story? We want to know that. And especially when somebody becomes famous and influential, we especially want to know about their childhood. We want to know what they were like, what sort of led to their greatness. And maybe it'd be, you know, legendary stories like George Washington, I don't know if they still tell this, but you know, when I was growing up, you know, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree that his father, you know, it's probably just a legendary story, his father gives him a hatchet, which is a bad idea. And he chops down everything, including his favorite cherry tree, but then he's honest about it. So those are the kind of stories that are very natural that we tell, especially about famous and influential people, and it turns out it was the same way in the ancient world. In Greek and Roman culture of the first century, the time of the New Testament, they wrote a lot of biographies. They wrote a lot of stories about famous influential people after the fact because that matters. Well, we've said it before, and we'll say it here again as we continue to preach to the gospel of Luke. Our gospels are biographies about the most important person in history. They're more than biographies. They are theological. Their gods were. They're revealed. They're authoritative for our lives. They change us. But they are biographies. They are telling us about this most important person in history. But what's interesting about them is how little they actually tell us about Jesus' childhood. In fact, with the gospel of Mark, which is probably the first gospel written, what's really striking about it is there are actually no stories about his childhood. It just starts right away with John the Baptist and Jesus. So I think Matthew and Luke, who were probably writing after Mark, both felt the need to tell us more, and thankfully they did. So in Matthew, chapters one and two, in Luke, chapters one and two that we've been in for last several weeks, you get several stories about Jesus' birth and how it came about, the miraculous elements to it. But except for our story today, no place else in the Bible, none of the other gospels tell us anything about the large gap between, say, Jesus' birth to around two years old and when he starts his public ministry, which is probably around age 30 or so, nothing. There are no stories in that which is really odd except for this story. This story from the end of Luke chapter two about Jesus at age 12 is an attempt to fill the gap a little bit. It doesn't fill it completely. But to tell us at least a little bit about what Jesus was like in childhood. In fact, the desire for these stories meant that even though this is the only one we know is true, it's canonical or in the Bible, in the second and third centuries there were actually a lot of other stories that circulated about this time of Jesus' life because people wanted to know. Like there's a famous story of Jesus is with Joseph in the carpenter shop and Joseph cuts the board too short and Jesus' lengthens it for him, which would be super handy, right? Measure twice, cut once, right? That's the rule. But we don't, you know, maybe there was something to it, but we don't have any way to know. That's certainly not in the Bible. This is the only story we have. But even though we're glad to have this story, what's interesting about it is that what it's saying and what happens in it is not entirely clear. In other words, it's not like the George Washington, the cherry tree where it's like super easy. He did this wrong thing. He was honest. He confessed that he did it. This story we're going to see has some mystery in it. It's got some paradox in it. So what I want to do today is just sort of return to this story and then just ask, what is God saying to us? Why is this story here for us? So if you have a Bible, you can turn to the end of chapter two. We'll put the verses on the screen as well. There's a pew Bible in front of you as well, which I encourage you to, it's actually good to actually look in a physical Bible because you can kind of see things more, but we're going to look at this story in Luke, chapter two, starting in verse 41. And again, it jumps ahead about 12, 11 or 12 years from this story's Lucas told us before. And then after this next week, we're going to see in chapter three, it's going to jump ahead another 18 years or so. From what we can tell, even though this is the only story from Jesus' childhood, it seems like he had a pretty normal childhood. We see in Matthew and Mark that Jesus is referred to as the carpenter's son, so they knew Joseph. He's referred to as a carpenter himself in Mark chapter six. The other stories of the gospel show that people knew him, people knew his mother, and they knew his brothers and sisters, and so there doesn't seem to be anything overly abnormal about his childhood. He was a good, faithful Jewish boy growing up in a good, faithful Jewish family. And let's look at the story again, starting in verse 41. It says, every year, Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up to the festival according to the custom. Nothing abnormal here. The Passover, which is one of the big Jewish holidays, occurs in the spring. That's around the same time as our Easter, and that's because Christian Easter is celebrating kind of a new version of the Passover. And this was one of the three big festivals that if you were a faithful Jewish person and you had the means to do it, you would want to go to actually Jerusalem to celebrate this if you could. At least once in your life, and if you could go regularly, you would. This would be kind of like wanting to go to Washington, DC for the 4th of July, or not just having a Derby party at home, but actually going to the Downs, or whatever it is, going to Rome at Easter, going to Bethlehem at Christmas, whatever it is. This is something that a good faithful Jewish family would try to do if they could. And so in this way, it's very normal actually that they take the trip up to Jerusalem. And 12 years old, that's probably an important piece of data as well because from what we can tell from Jewish traditions, 12 is kind of like right on the cusp of adulthood. Maybe something like 17 for us or something, where at age 10, a Jewish boy can begin to seriously study Torah, God's scriptures, and the mission of the teachings about it. And then at age 13, you know, different traditions a little bit within the history of Judaism, but it's probably something more like adulthood, more responsibility at that point as a young man. So he's right on the cusp of adulthood. So all of those verses, those two verses, nothing's really abnormal here, but something unpredictable is about to happen. Look at verse 43. So after the festival is over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind the Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. And thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day, and then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends, and when they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him, and after three days, they found him in the temple court, sitting among the teachers, listening to them, and asking them questions. This is kind of a weird story, and you might wonder what this is about, is this a story about irresponsible parenting or something, but it does actually raise some real questions in our minds like, why did Jesus stay back, and why did he think that was okay? We'll come back to that, because that's actually really important. But I think the question that we can't help but ask ourselves is, how in the world could they lose their kid for a whole day? Well, I think we need to give them some sympathy here, because in terms of Mary and Joseph not knowing where they're young, I mean, he's almost an adult in some ways, for them not knowing where he was, it's important to recognize that this journey to Jerusalem would have been like a big caravan, like a big family reunion, a traveling family reunion, where aunts and uncles and cousins, and everybody from Nazareth and surrounding areas would all be making this long trip together and kind of looking out for each other, and I think it's very reasonable and on the way back they thought he was with somebody else, and he's a young man, he's got some independence. I grew up in the 70s and basically I got on my dirt bike at 7 a.m., and I didn't come home until 8 p.m., and that's kind of how it was in those days, and I think it was a safer time maybe, and there was a very communal kind of corporate family time, so I don't think it's really that surprising they couldn't find him, but as the evening of that first day on their trip back happened and maybe they were setting up camp or staying somewhere, they begin to look around for him and realize he's not with anybody, I thought he was with you, I thought he was with you, have you seen Yeshua? And the panic starts to set in, anybody who's been a parent of teenagers, you know that 12 a.m., or 12 midnight, or that 3 a.m. moment, where we begin to wonder where are they? And I can think of Pengton, six-kid family times where we did lose track of a kid at some point, at the beach or at the mall or something, and it doesn't take very long before the panic starts to kick in, in fact, I can remember a time where we lost mom, actually, I was just a couple years ago at the beach, and she decided, she told us, I'm sure, but we didn't listen to her, she was going to go down the beach up the beach and float back down on the tide on a flotation device, and that was all fine, but after like 20 minutes, we're like, wait, if you haven't seen mom, have you seen mom? So we actually lost her, we didn't find her eventually, but that was, you know, it's funny now, but in those moments when you actually can't find someone you love, and maybe especially a child that is, it is very heavy and very consuming. So imagine Mary and Joseph, they realize Jesus is not with any of their family in the Caribbean, and so now they've got to go back to Jerusalem. So they've got that whole journey back, I think of the panic of that and the anxiety and the prayers, and then they get to Jerusalem, this big city with its dark alleys and lots of strangers from different countries, speaking different language, you have harsh Roman soldiers who don't care at all, you've got political turmoil, and they spend a couple of frantic days looking for him. So think about that, the panic of that, there's no texting, no way to find them, no Snapchat map, they can look at them, no light 360 where you can legally spy on your kids, if you don't know what that is, look me up, I'll tell you, no, find my iPhone, no sympathetic police force that can send out an amber alert, no way to print up pictures of them and staple them on an every telephone pole of, you know, the long hippie Jesus knocking on the door of your heart, no way to do that. And finally, seriously in the midst of this anxiety, they go to the last place, they think they would find them, they go to the temple, and they spot him there, sitting with a group of Jewish rabbis, Jerusalem rabbis, the high powered intelligentsia, the pious religious leaders of the day, far above Mary and Joseph's humble pumpkin kind of status, and they see him sitting there talking. And all of that anxiety, that panic that they must have been feeling, I think probably explains the tone that's likely in Mary's voice, look at verse 48, she says, what his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, son, why have you treated us like this, your father and I have been anxiously searching for you. Now if we hadn't just read this story, or if you weren't familiar with it, I think an interesting question to ask would be, how is Jesus going to respond to this? This is a very tense situation. The parents burst in full of anxiety, pretty pointed words, how would you expect a 12-year-old to respond? Q, the eye rolls, maybe respond with some sass, maybe like mom showing up at the skate park, come over here right now, we're leaving, all right? Luke doesn't tell us what Jesus' tone of voice was or his facial expression, but from the whole story in front we know, and kind of what happens afterwards it seems, reasonable that Jesus actually responds with a calmness, a respectful attitude, but what he says is completely unexpected, look at verse 49, why were you searching for me, he asked, didn't you know I had to be in my father's house, or your translation might say it may be a little better, I had to be attending to my father's business, could be translated either way, the same ideas there that he needed to be concentrating on the things of God, and that's exactly what was happening, right? He was there with the experts in Holy Scripture talking with them, dialoging with them, this is what he was doing, and so for them to say, for him to say to them why are you searching for me, like what, I mean that seems like an obvious answer, but the second question he asked them, didn't you know that it was necessary? That question is very interesting because I think it really, if you keep reading the gospels you'll see that question kind of reverberates and echoes throughout the gospels and that the adult Jesus, when he's dialoguing with people, he's often going to say something similar, have you not read, do you not understand? And that is really this good question that erases for us, could Joseph and Mary have understood what Jesus is saying, I mean when they couldn't find him for three days, I think we'd be surprised if they, if their response to that would be like, oh, he's probably a Jerusalem with the rabbis, he'll just operate home later or something, I'm sure that was not their response. It is completely understandable for them to be panicking, so should they have known, should they have been surprised at this story, and after all 12, 13 years, 12 years later, 13 years later, a bunch of miraculous stuff had happened, and that's what the earlier parts of Luke 1 and 2 show us, if you agree Matthew 1 and 2, you had Zechariah and Elizabeth had a miraculous experience in the conception of John the Baptist, he had an angelic appearance to Matthew, he had the same angel appears to Joseph in a dream, we see in Matthew, the angel appears to the shepherds, they show up, these mysterious magi from the east show up, Jesus is, how is when he's quite young, you have this angelic warning again in a dream that they should flee so that the baby Jesus is not killed along with other boys in Bethlehem, and then the text we saw last week, you have the prophecies at the dedication of Jesus in the temple, and of course all that on top of what Mary knew for virginal conception. So should they have understood this story? Well, kind of, but it was also 12 years earlier, and as I said from what we can tell, he had a pretty normal childhood, he's learning carpentry alongside his father, but I think the reason they couldn't understand is because this is really the beginning of something we're going to see all through Luke and really all the gospels, that Jesus' appearance in the world is really hard to understand. There's a mystery and there's a paradox in that the things Jesus does, the things he says, the response to that, the normal response that even by Jesus' own disciples is misunderstanding. It's a confusion, it's clueless, it's little glimpses of understanding, but not really. And that's what verse 50, if you look at it there, it says, they did not understand what he was saying to them. It's because Jesus breaks our molds, he breaks our categories, he breaks our expectations at every term, and this theme of people not really understanding Jesus is going to kind of go all the way through Luke we're going to see and come to its head really in the very last chapter of Luke, when Jesus is talking with another couple of people on the road to Emmaus when they don't understand still, even after the resurrection they still don't understand until he opens their eyes to see. So the one hand, I think it's a fair question to ask like should Mary and Joseph ununderstood, but in their hand I think it's really something deeper is going on. It's the beginning of this reality that we cannot understand God apart from revealing Himself to us in Jesus. And then our story takes one more unexpected turn in the very end. After these frantic and anxious moments, what do you think Jesus might do? Like he's almost an adult now, you might think he's say, thanks mom and dad, I got this now, I'm in Jerusalem, it was a good run, I'll take it from here, but that's not it ends, look at verses 51 and 52, it's maybe the most surprising thing. It says, then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them, but his mother treasureed or maybe pondered all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. Did you ever read those verses? It's kind of unexpected. Jesus after this amazing statement, did you notice the contrast? Mary says, your father and I have been looking for you and he responds, I had to be about my father's business. He obviously makes a contrast there between Mary and Joseph and God's father, but then immediately after that, he humbly obeys his parents and returns home with them, doesn't seem that he has a bad attitude or sass or kind of a sense of superiority to them, no threats. Mary ponders these things, probably again, not so much, treasures them like she made a scrapbook, kids will say the dornest things or something, but more like, as it says, she didn't understand really what was going on. She's pondering these things. All that had happened to her over the last 13 years, she's still trying to figure out. And then especially that last verse, Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. Have you ever thought about that? That is that he continues to develop mentally and socially and religiously in ways that are honorable and respectable and that he can be recognized as a good young man. So it's an interesting story, but we always have to ask,
what is this saying? Why is this here? What is God trying to say to us through Luke putting this here? What's good to remember that again, this is the last installment in a series of episodes that Luke's been giving us in the first two chapters of his gospel that are really setting up the whole rest of the gospel next week. We'll be in chapter three and we'll see Jesus appears on the scene as an adult. But this is the last of these stories. And all three of these stories are, I'm sorry, all these stories in chapters one and two are meant to show us something is up that something fundamentally and radically different has happened in the world through the birth of Jesus. And in this final story, before this, Jesus has been really just a passive baby. In this story, he's now taking action and he's stepping towards ministry. In fact, these are the very first words Jesus has in Luke in this dialogue with Mary. And if you keep reading through Luke, which if you stick around, we'll be in Luke for a little while. But if you keep reading through Luke on your own, you'll see that he is intentionally crafted the book in such a way that we're meant to see patterns. And I think this story particularly is like the first book end of something really important that's going to happen at the end of Jesus' ministry. This is in some ways the beginning of it, but the very end of Jesus' ministry, he's going to be back in the exact same place in Jerusalem, in the temple courts, also dialoguing with the religious leaders and experts in the law. They're also going to see his wisdom and his power, but this time they're not going to like it. It's going to be very, very different. This time instead of saying, what a wise little boy we love you. Instead, because he's challenging their ideas, he's challenging their status, he's challenging so many things that they thought they had understood about God that they're going to kill him as a result. And so this story is waiting because it's really setting up this whole sort of picture of Jesus as a as a teacher in the temple. But we can ask here, what is God saying to us in this particular story? You might be tempted to think this is a story about, you know, lost kid, found kid. That's awesome. But there's something far deeper going on and you have to really pay attention to the tension. And pay attention to the dialogue. Like what? It's not just about a kid that was lost and found. There's something that happens in that dialogue between Jesus and Mary. And here's what I think it is. I think Luke is inviting us to ponder something. He's inviting us to ponder the paradox that Jesus is both God and man. That simultaneously Jesus is fully God and fully human at the same time. Let me show you what I mean. Jesus is fully God. If you think back to earlier in chapter one, we learned again that Jesus's birth came about by the Holy Spirit. Now here in the end of chapter two, we see that he as a 12 year old boy is as a wisdom that is not normal. He's not just human. I skipped verse 47 before but it says that while he's sitting in dialogue with the teachers of the law, it says everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. That's not a normal thing, especially the teachers of the law. He's not trained. Jesus is a carpenter son. I don't know if any of you have ever had a chance to read. I'd highly recommend any of the novels by the mid-20th century Rabbi Haim Potok, P-O-T-O-K. I've read a bunch of his novels. And the chosen the problem is, my name is Escherlave, the gift of Escherlave. They're amazing. And what you see and even though they're 20 centuries later, these traditions are not totally different among Jewish people, you see this intensity of study that was involved for the rabbinic tradition. You've got not only Torah, the all of the Jewish scriptures memorized usually, be of all the traditions about them and the Talmud and the mission and all these and all the different debates about how this verse relates to that verse and how this tradition relates to this tradition. This rabbi said this. This rabbi said this. You see a little bit of that in Jesus' own adult ministry later, but it was much more complicated. And I don't, I'll never forget reading this in one of the Potok novels once he has this picture of this kind of debate happening between various rabbis, etc. Well, this is the kind of thing that was probably going on that there's this intense conversation about who is the Messiah and any number of thousands of other issues that come up when you study the scriptures deeply. And there this 12-year-old boy is sitting among them, not a train, not the son of a rabbi, sitting among them, giving him answers in a way that is like he's the teacher. So there's something more going on. And then what he says, again when Mary says, we were looking, your father and I were looking for you and he audaciously says, why are you surprised? I had to be about my father's business. We're used to that language maybe, but you have to recognize how shocking that is for Jesus, this 12-year-old boy, to be claiming this unique relationship with God as his son. Imagine if your favorite musician were coming to town or some CEO of some business you admire or something and then tickets are all sold out and you say to your friend, man, I wish I could really go and the person says to you, well, I've got his number, I can just text him. You're like, what? This is this and beyond that. This is Mary and Joseph's response, like you're claiming God as your father, this is totally unexpected. And friends, this is getting at this absolutely central reality of Christianity of the incarnation. That central to Christianity is the truth and the claim that that whatever else you think about Christianity, it is claiming that God has actually become a person. He's become an incarnate in the flesh person. There's a mystery there, there's a paradox to it. As John 1 says, no one has ever seen God or fully explained God, but now Jesus is that. John 1 also says that the logost, the very breath, the word of God has now taken on flesh, this logost that was with God in the beginning and was God has now become a person. This is absolutely at the heart of the Christian message. So Hebrews 1 tells us that Jesus is the exact representation of God on the earth. You can't say that about any other person or any other idea. So Jesus is more than a prophet, he's more than a teacher, he's more than a rescuer, a leader, a shepherd, he's all the king, he's all those things, but he's more. And this is why the gospels are so important. It always have been for the church because they particularly show us that Christianity is not just a new set of ideas or just an updated explanation of Torah. It is actually about the incarnation, it's actually about God becoming a person. I think that this is not the only place Luke's going to talk about this, but he wants to understand that this spirit be gotten son of God is of the same essence of God himself, he is divine. Now, for some of you here today, you might say that sounds like old news, some of you may say that sounds crazy, it's irrelevant. That's why our faith is called Christianity because again, it's centered on a person who is Jesus Christ. And I think what Luke wants us to understand, I think what God wants us to understand today, that that reality is so weighty, that it's like an explosion of light that makes everything else pale in comparison. All of our pride, all of our little plans and pettiness, all of our high thoughts of ourselves or our sense of shame, whatever else consumes your thoughts and my thoughts and our affections and our energy, it's just a stale drop of water compared to the ocean of the Son of God entering the world. Imagine right now if those doors open and installed a 655 pound stripe Siberian tiger, all 10 feet of muscle and teeth and fur.
Whatever else you were thinking about, maybe you were distracted right before I gave you that image that you can't think of now, but whatever else you were thinking about, what's for lunch? I fight you had with your spouse on the way here, which is the best song on the new album. Whatever the issue is, good things are bad things. In that moment, if that tiger strolled in here, all the other issues which may still be real issues, and we may have to come back to them later, a cancer report, whatever it is. But in that moment, the relative value and the relative weight of them would be seen. And that's what Luke is wanting to see here. That this matter of God becoming flesh in a person is so heavy that the one who made all the tigers and plays with them as pets, he has actually entered the world. But it turns out that's not the only thing Luke wants us to understand. And in some ways, the other part of this is just as mysterious and shocking. And that is that not only is Jesus actually God incarnate, wrought by the Holy Spirit, he is actually simultaneously fully human. We've got to sit with this for a minute because you and I are afraid don't think about this enough. Notice again, the tension in the story. He says he has a father that is not Joseph, and yet he in verse 51 humbly submits himself to his parents. And notice again, the emphasis that gives us, which you didn't have to in verse 52, that Jesus actually develops and grows in wisdom. Have you ever thought about that? His body is growing in height and hair and fingernails and tiredness and laughter and hunger and need for sleep. His brain develops, his emotions mature, his knowledge increases, his discernment deepens, his virtue and character and obedience become deeper. Now, we understand from other biblical texts that Jesus was sinless, so in that sense he's not like us, but that doesn't mean he was static or unreal or robot. He actually grew and developed the text says, Hebrews 58 says that Jesus actually learned obedience and wholeness through what he suffered. Doesn't mean he was disobedient, but even as the son of God incarnate as a real human he grew and learned. You see, Jesus is not just God acting through flesh and bones and vocal cords like a puppet, mysteriously and paradoxically, while Jesus is holy spirit conceived and fully God. He doesn't just appear to be human, he actually truly is a human. That's amazing. And wrestling with this and other New Testament biblical teachings, the church came up with over a lot of wrestling, the best way to describe this mystery as that Jesus is one person with two natures, divine and human that are not mixed and confused with each other, but both fully true of him and he's not two people, he's one person with these both natures simultaneously. And just like it matters that Jesus is divine, it also matters for us that he is fully human. Let me give you a couple reasons why that is first, because Jesus is fully human, it means that he can and does care and understand what it means to be human in all of our struggles and weaknesses and limits, disappointments, failures. If they're making that up, look at one of my favorite passages, Hebrews chapter 4 says this, for we do not have a high priest that is Jesus who's unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we actually have one who's been tempted in every way and tested, we could even say just as we are, yet he did not sin. Look at the implication of this, let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Do you really believe that? That mess you've gotten yourself into maybe relationally or financially. The weariness you feel is the desire to give up. The limits you feel may be regrets. I should have done this with my life. The shame, the disappointment, the anger that you have trouble beating. The defense mechanisms that we've all developed to cover up our shame and guilt, your anxieties that you came in here this morning with, your fears, just all the limits and losses and difficulties of being a real human on the earth, no matter what darkness, addictions, failures, shame, pain that you find when you're actually honest with yourself. What this text is saying and what the Bible teaches is that Jesus actually understands. He cares and he's been victorious over those things and he invites us then to approach his throne of grace with confidence and to receive mercy and help. We don't have to approach God unsure of how he's going to respond. We don't have to approach God thinking, well, he doesn't really understand my plight, but whatever situation you find yourself in, he actually says, come to my throne of grace and find help and mercy. That is good news. That is a beautiful implication of Jesus being truly human. I think a second one I'll give you is that by Jesus being fully human, he has created for us and he models for us the way of being truly human. He has created for us and he models for us the way of being truly human. One of the themes we're going to see throughout Luke and you'll find it in Paul's writing a little bit too is the idea that Jesus is a second Adam. This is something that church fathers talk a lot about that even as Adam models for us and leads us into brokenness and sin and separation for God. The second Adam as a real human actually creates and models for us the way of being truly human again and even better filled with the spirit, the same spirit that breath into the first Adam and made him alive now is residing fully in Jesus who then gives us his spirit and you see this workout in the rest of the New Testament and Luke's follow-up volume acts and others so that we might live in the world differently, that we might actually become what we are supposed to be in relationship to God. You see the message of Christianity and the message of the Bible is more than the reality and the possibility that our sins could be forgiven. It is that. That's foundational but the message of the gospel and the message of the Bible is much bigger than that that by the power of God's spirit now in us that is bestowed, the triumphant God is bestowed upon all those who follow Christ by that power of the spirit we can actually live differently in the world in ways that are marked by thriving and peace and contentment and joy and fruitfulness even in the midst of brokenness, even in the midst of our sin, even in the midst of tears and failures and frustrations. Because Jesus didn't just die for us, He lived for us, He modeled and created a new way being human fully. I'm very fortunate to have relationship with a lot of like real theologians so whenever I'm wrestling with text often call up a theologian friend of mine and speak into one of them this week named Mike and you know I just thought what he said was so helpful, he talks about how we often think of holiness just in a negative sense of like not sinning is passive, not doing bad and that's true. He points out that this story that we have highlights that Jesus, Jesus holiness and wholeness, He actively obeys, He trusts the Father, He does God's will, He grows as a human. Did Jesus doesn't just stay free from sin which He does but He is actually perfected through sorrow and suffering and limits and losses, He doesn't just die for us, He lives for us and that now enables us to by the power of His same spirit to live differently, to have the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit increasingly in our lives of love, enjoy and peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.
And He's taken together this paradoxical truth and there's a mystery here, we can't figure it all out of Jesus's full divinity and his full humanity, friends it's exactly what you and I need. Because if Jesus were God but not human, our relationship with God would still have kind of a layer of separation between it, we could use some cultic system or some ideas and rules to follow and we may do that sincerely but if Jesus were God but not human, He wouldn't really in the same sense be able to be a model and create a new way of humanity for us. But if Jesus were human but not God then He couldn't bring us new life, He couldn't conquer our sin, He couldn't shape us into being a perfect unified relationship with the triune God. So friends as we have finished up this introduction to Luke and next week we're going to see it's going to be out of the shoot really fast with Jesus' ministry, what I think God wants us to know is that we're going to get to see an experience and we can, you and I can as well just like the people two thousand years ago, the true God man incarnate creating and modeling for us the way to relate to God and to each other and find fullness of life and himself. Thank you for listening to the Human Flourishing podcast to learn more or get in touch with me visit my website JonathanPennington.com