Sunday Recap- 12/11/11

QUINTESSENCE [the perfect embodiment]

It’s vital that we are appropriately leveled by the divinity of Jesus (transcendent, all-powerful, Creator, Ruler, Judge, King, supreme over everything) before we try to understand the significance and mystery of what happened in a stable in Bethlehem a couple thousand years ago.

Paul tell the Colossians that ‘in Christ we have the fullness of deity in bodily form.’
John preached in his Gospel that Jesus is eternal and that through Him everything was created.
The writer of Hebrews wrote: ‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the fact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.’

With that backdrop, these words from Philippians are the essence of Christmas…
Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.
Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being.

Jesus giving up His divine privileges… His status, His glory, to become a human in order to save humanity.  That is the essence of love.

All God.  All man.  Living the life we live with the same struggles and temptations and loneliness and exhaustion.  Yet without sin.  And in His sinlessness He not only ‘ate with sinners’ and ‘was a friend to sinners’, but was the only possible solution to free sinners… to free us from the chains of sin and death.

So we continue this essence of incarnation.  ’Christ in you, the hope of glory.’ Lived and poured our for a desperate humanity.

Scripture we read
John 1:1-14; Hebrews 1:1-3; Philippians 2:5-11; 1 John 4 

Worship Set
Here is Our King- David Crowder Band
A Baby Will Come- Bill Wolf
Come Thou Fount
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
Silent Night
The First Noel 

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