We can all grow in our understanding of the salvation King Jesus brings and respond by asking God to shape us to be more like Jesus and to shape our world in this way.
This Advent season, we are celebrating the arrival of Jesus Christ our King. We are learning more about and responding to five characteristics of King Jesus: Humble, Suffering, Victorious, Savior, Perfect. We will pray together, asking God to show more of each characteristic in our world today.
I. Why did Jesus come?
John 3:16-21 16 “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him may not be lost, but have eternal life. 17 God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world guilty, but to save the world through him. 18 People who believe in God’s Son are not judged guilty. Those who do not believe have already been judged guilty, because they have not believed in God’s one and only Son. 19 They are judged by this fact: The Light has come into the world, but they did not want light. They wanted darkness, because they were doing evil things. 20 All who do evil hate the light and will not come to the light, because it will show all the evil things they do. 21 But those who follow the true way come to the light, and it shows that the things they do were done through God.” – John 3:16-21 NCV
II. When the Savior King arrived everything changed for us.
He died in our place to take away our sins, and not only our sins but the sins of all people.” – 1 John 2:1-2 NCV
“God’s power is very great for us who believe.” – Ephesians 1:19 NCV
III. The Savior King has saved for eternity.
Titus 2:13 “We should live like that while we wait for our great hope and the coming of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” – Titus 2:13 NCV
Additional Notes:
We can all grow in our understanding of the salvation King Jesus brings and respond by asking God to shape us to be more like Jesus and to shape our world in this way.
What do we learn about King Jesus?
1. King Jesus is our Savior sent from Father God for our forgiveness and salvation.
Jesus Christ showed a consciousness of his divine identity. All through the Gospels Jesus is constantly forgiving sin, which only God can do. He also claims in, in various places, “I am going to come back and judge the earth,” and only God can do that. He claims to have mutual equal knowledge with God the Father, Matthew 11:27-28. At many times and in many ways Jesus Christ, said, “I am God,” and thousands believed him and came to worship him, Acts 2:41.
“This is an intellectual watershed, a personal crisis, and/or a great hope. The claim that Jesus is God also gives us the greatest possible hope. This means that our world is not all there is, that there is life and love after death, and that evil and suffering will one day end.
God is infinitely holy, so our sin could not be shrugged off. It had to be dealt with. He is also infinitely loving. He knows we could never climb up to him, so he has come down to us. God had to come himself and do what we couldn’t do. ” – Timothy Keller Hidden Christmas
He didn’t send an employee or committee to tell us how to save ourselves. The Good News isn’t moralistic nor relativistic. Sin can’t be shrugged off. God found it necessary to do this.
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” – Mark 10:45 CSB
“Ransom was a familiar image in the Jewish, Roman, and Greek cultures. It was the price paid to liberate a slave, a prisoner of war, or a condemned person.” – Donald English
Mary’s song, in Luke 1:50, includes this truth. “God will show his mercy forever and ever to those who worship and serve him.” – Luke 1:50 NCV
Romans 5:8-11 “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. 9 And since we have been made right in God’s sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly save us from God’s condemnation. 10 For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son. 11 So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.” – Romans 5:8-11 NLT
Romans 10:9-13 “If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation. 11 For the Scripture says, Everyone who believes on him will not be put to shame,, 12 since there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord of all richly blesses all who call on him. 13 For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” – Romans 10:9-13 CSB
“Jesus is truly God. Jesus is truly human. This is unique among all the philosophies and religions in the world. Go through the history of philosophy. They are always arguing: What is more ultimate, the absolute or the particular? The One or the Many? The ideal and eternal or the real and the concrete? Is Plato right or Aristotle? But the doctrine of the incarnation breaks through those binaries and categories. “Immanuel” means the ideal has become real, the absolute has become a particular, and the invisible has become visible! The incarnation is the universe-sundering, history-altering, life-transforming, paradigm-shattering event of history.” – Timothy Keller Hidden Christmas
King Jesus brings salvation!
By confessing faith in King Jesus as Savior, confessing, and turning away from our selfish lifestyle, believing in our hearts that King Jesus is our Lord we can receive this new spiritual life, forgiveness of our sins, and the removal of our guilt and the need to be punished, and the compulsion to repeat mistakes and we can now live in the confident hope of Heaven in our future.
Confess and turn by praying, “I am a moral failure. I don’t love God with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind. I don’t love my neighbor as myself. And, therefore, I am guilty, and I need forgiveness and pardon before I need anything else.” And, so, “Dear Lord Jesus, I believe that you died for me. I confess my sins. Jesus, forgive me, come into my life, be my Lord and Savior. I turn away from the past and I turn to you. Thank you.”
2. King Jesus brings a change to how we live.
Consider the journey of Mary:
“In the end, faith always moves beyond mental assent and duty, and will involve the whole self: mind, will, and emotions.” “God has to open our hearts and help us break through our prejudices and denials.” “Mary’s thinking was convinced, feelings captivated, and her will gladly surrendered.” – Timothy Keller Hidden Christmas
“Jesus moved heaven and earth to get near us – what should we doing now to truly be with him? What are the elements of a genuine, personal relationship with Jesus? It requires, as does any close personal relationship, that you communicate with him regularly, candidly, lovingly. That means not simply “saying your prayers” but having a prayer life that leads to real communion with God, a sense of his presence in your heart and life. Consider Psalms 27, 63, 84, 131 to see this kind of prayer. On the other hand, being in a close personal relationship means that he communicates with you. That comes from a deep acquaintance with the Bible, the ability to read it, understand it, and meditate on it. Consider Psalm 1 and 119 to see how to have the Bible become a vital force in your life.” – Timothy Keller Hidden Christmas
“God’s power is very great for us who believe.” – Ephesians 1:19 NCV
“God planned long ago to choose you by making you his holy people, which is the Spirit’s work. God wanted you to obey him and to be made clean by the blood of the death of Jesus Christ. Grace and peace be yours more and more.” – 1 Peter 1:2 NCV
“Our only goal is to please God whether we live here or there, 10 because we must all stand before Christ to be judged. Each of us will receive what we should get—good or bad—for the things we did in the earthly body.” – 2 Corinthians 5:9-10 NCV
“Brothers and sisters, we taught you how to live in a way that will please God, and you are living that way. Now we ask and encourage you in the Lord Jesus to live that way even more. 2 You know what we told you to do by the authority of the Lord Jesus. 3 God wants you to be holy and to stay away from sexual sins. 4 He wants each of you to learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable. 5 Don’t use your body for sexual sin like the people who do not know God. 6 Also, do not wrong or cheat another Christian in this way. The Lord will punish people who do those things as we have already told you and warned you. 7 God called us to be holy and does not want us to live in sin. 8 So the person who refuses to obey this teaching is disobeying God, not simply a human teaching. And God is the One who gives us his Holy Spirit.” – 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8 NLT
“So brothers and sisters, since God has shown us great mercy, I beg you to offer your lives as a living sacrifice to him. Your offering must be only for God and pleasing to him, which is the spiritual way for you to worship. 2 Do not be shaped by this world; instead be changed within by a new way of thinking. Then you will be able to decide what God wants for you; you will know what is good and pleasing to him and what is perfect.” – Romans 12:1-2 NCV
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” – Romans 12:1-2 The Message
Also helpful: 1 Peter 1:3-9, 13-21 NCV
“When you come to Christ, you must drop your conditions. What does this mean? It means you have to give up the right to say, “I will obey you if…I will do this if…” As soo as you say, “I will obey you if,” that is not obedience at all. You are saying: “You are my adviser, not my Lord. I will be happy to take your recommendations. And I might even do some of them.” No. If you want Jesus with you, you have to give up the right to self-determiniation. Self-denial is an act of rebellion against our late-modern culture of self-assertion. But that was what we are called to do. Nothing less.
To become a Christian you are going to have to have the courage to do something our culture thinks absolutely crazy. You are going to have to commit to denying yourself. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves…” Luke 9:23. We are told repeatedly in our society that the one sacred law is “To thine own self be true,” that we must always work to fulfill our deepest dreams and satisfy our deepest desires. There are enormous problems with this philosophy of life. It starts with the fact that our feelings change over time, and at any given time they are usually in conflict with one another.
Nevertheless, this is the dominant view, and so the Christian calling is shocking. Modern people need bravery to give up their right to self-determination, yet that is what is required. If you want Jesus in the middle of your life, you have to obey him unconditionally.
We need him to name us. He made us. He knows who we are, what we were made for, what will fit us. That means that we will know who we are when he comes into our lives and then, through obedience to him, we learn our true identity.” – Timothy Keller Hidden Christmas
“My dear children, I write this letter to you so you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have a helper in the presence of the Father—Jesus Christ, the One who does what is right. 2 He died in our place to take away our sins, and not only our sins but the sins of all people.” – 1 John 2:1-2 NCV
Following Jesus’ words and example will help us live in a way that pleases God.
3. King Jesus will return, ending all suffering and starting a new spiritual era of peaceful joy.
Revelation 21:1-6 “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The first heaven and the first earth had disappeared, and there was no sea anymore. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It was prepared like a bride dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Now God’s presence is with people, and he will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them and will be their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, sadness, crying, or pain, because all the old ways are gone.” 5 The One who was sitting on the throne said, “Look! I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this, because these words are true and can be trusted.” 6 The One on the throne said to me, “It is finished. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give free water from the spring of the water of life to anyone who is thirsty.” – Revelation 21:1-6 NCV
What should we do now?
1. Read some of today’s Scriptures looking for a clearer picture of King Jesus.
2. Write your definition of salvation and description of our Savior King Jesus.
3. Pray asking God to help you become more like King Jesus.
4. Write a prayer topic list of how our world can become more like the Kingdom of Jesus.
What do we pray for?
1. God, please help us better understand the salvation brought by King Jesus.
2. God, please help us receive and respond with wholehearted devotion to the salvation brought by King Jesus.
3. God, please help us see how we can participate in the Movement of Jesus to share this salvation message with the people you have placed us near to.
4. God, please show us how we can bring more people into this kind of relationship with you.