Master Mentor #28

Chapter 27 (Book 4, Chapter 5)
Every once in a while, I find myself face to face with the reality of who I am and who Jesus is and what He has done for me. While reading this chapter tonight, that’s where I am. It’s easy, I think, to sit and speculate about Jesus’ teaching style or how he lead his disciples, to read about his actions and words and determine the meanings of both. But if he hadn’t done anything else… no healings… no teachings… no miracles… none of that… but just came and died on the cross for our sins, I think that I would still be in amazement of that.

Its hard not to read this chapter about Jesus coming to this planet… in the context of a conversation about a child’s toy soldiers coming to life… and not think about Philippians 2… “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being found in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:5-11, NIV). Those are powerful, powerful verses… “emptied”… “humbled”… “obedient”… Hard to imagine what he gave up to come down here and be one of us, one of his creation.
Especially knowing what he was going to have to endure. That’s where I come back around to amazement and wonder. That Jesus would be willing to do that… willing. It would have one thing to have been commanded. There are things that I do in my life not because I want to, but because I have to (most of them end with the word “meeting”). I don’t want to do them but I don’t have any other choice. But in this situation, Jesus had a choice. And he choose to come. I wonder what other ideas Jesus and God entertained before his coming… if any.

But yet, he was willing to come. As CS says… “The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man – a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone” (page 156). Wow!


Jim