The Benefit of a Non-Made-Up Jesus

Today's message is entitled "The Benefit of a Non Made Up Jesus". The benefit of a non made up Jesus. Vegemite is a wonderful metaphor. It's wonderful because we can use it in so many different situations. Vegemite.

I don't know if you've realised that. At one time, vegemite can be a metaphor about splitting opinion. There are those of us who love Vegemite. And then there are those of us who hate it. You can't be neutral about Vegemite.

It splits opinion. At another time, you can say that vegemite is a useful metaphor for how strange patriotic feelings can be. People will import vegemite into their country when they live overseas to have it on their toast, so that in the morning, they can feel like they're home. But there's another great metaphor for vegemite, and it has to do with personal preference. Individuality.

Because when it comes to how much vegemite you spread on your toast, each person is different. I realised that this week when Desiree asked if she could make me a Vegemite and cheese sandwich. I said, of course. And then immediately took it away and took the jar from her to spread my own layer of Vegemite. Because she might do it wrong.

The amount of Vegemite that goes on your toast is a very personal choice. For some of us, we absolutely lather it on. The thicker the layer of that black ooze on our toast, the less bread we can see under it, the better. The layer should be so thick that the brown Vegemite looks almost black. Meanwhile, for others, we dip the tiniest tip of a butter knife into the jar, and then apply the thinnest coating over our toast.

A coating so thin that the bread has zero brown ooze, and it has just this very sickly pale yellow hue to it. Zero brown, all yellow. Vegemite can be a very personal thing. The same, however, can't be said about Jesus. When it comes to the Lord Jesus, I do not have the right to have a personal preference for who He is.

Over two thousand years, believers and non believers have wrestled over this issue. The identity and the mission of Jesus Christ. It's undeniable that in every generation, since the church was founded, there have been people who have tried to make Jesus fit into the mould that they would like Him to be. But it is perhaps in our postmodern individualistic world, perhaps more now than ever, that we find the phenomenon of making Jesus my own personal version of him. The truth is that today, there are many Jesuses.

There are many caricatures of the authentic Christ. Some people have made Jesus the friendly hippie Jesus, who cuddles lambs, who tells people not to hurt other people's feelings. Others have made Jesus out to be something similar to Monty Python's "Life of Brian" Jesus. A bumbling fool who just happened to turn up at the wrong place at the right time, finding himself to be hailed the Messiah. Others have made Jesus the Jesus Christ Superstar, the mysterious mystical attraction.

Today we have Jesus the capitalist, Jesus the socialist. In some places, Jesus the anti government libertarian. In others, Jesus the Marxist revolutionary. The danger is that all of these images are defective. Even as they try to seek to grab onto truths about Jesus, all these images are defective ultimately because when we try to make Jesus the version we want Him to be, then we aren't serving the Jesus of the Bible.

When we serve a made up Jesus, a caricature of Jesus, then He is ultimately made to serve us. He's being made to serve my political agenda. He is being made to serve my business aspirations. He is fulfilling my desire to fit in with high brow intelligentsia, the ones that I desperately want to belong to. This is not simply true of every non Christian out there.

The truth is, if you and I aren't careful, every single one of us can fashion the Lord Jesus into our own personal version of him. And so in a world where personal preference is king, Jesus does not allow Himself to become a Vegemite version. A personal preference of who I would like Him to be for me, for the world. Jesus is who He is. Jesus is who He's revealed Himself to be in the Holy Scriptures.

And so this morning, we delve into the realm of what theologians call Christology, the understanding of Christ. And this morning, we go to one of the most sublime passages of Christology that you can find perhaps anywhere in the Bible. And that is Colossians 1:15-29. And we're going to see there that Jesus is supreme over every aspect of our existence, that we belong to Him body and soul in life and in death as the Lord of all. So let's turn to Colossians chapter one, verse 15.

Paul writes to the church in Colossae: "This is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him, all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the church.

He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent. For in Him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him. If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.

And in my flesh, I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of His body, that is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the word of God fully known. The mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to His saints. To them, God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him, we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me.

This is God's word. Paul is writing a letter to the church in Colossae to combat a particular problem that they are facing. We get evidence in his letter of what some of those problems were tied to at least. Colossians 2:8, Paul says, "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit." The NIV translates it as hollow and deceptive philosophy.

So the character of this philosophy is hollow and empty. He goes on and says, "This empty deceit, which is according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits or elementary principles of the world, and not according to Christ." In other words, the apostle Paul is writing this letter to combat what he calls hollow and deceptive philosophies, which were starting to circulate within the church. As part of this combat, we find this superb passage that we've read this morning. In essence, it forms the crux of Paul's entire letter.

It is the powerhouse that drives his warning to the church. Regarding our passage, New Testament scholars will point out that verses 15 to 20 is actually a poem or a hymn of some sort, and it employs a characteristic that Paul would have been very familiar with in Hebrew poetry, which is called parallelism. What this does is to make a single point by repeating the truth in two different ways. So you might say someone is beautiful by saying, "To me, she is radiant. To my eyes, she is luminous."

In other words, you're saying that she glows with beauty, but in two different ways. If you go to the Book of Psalms, Hebrew parallelism is everywhere. You see it in Psalm 27:1, for example, where it reads, "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life.

Of whom shall I be afraid?" Can you see the parallel that's being drawn? Light and salvation, the stronghold of my life. Whom shall I fear? Whom shall I be afraid?

It's the same point. Now if you look at Colossians 1:15-20 in your Bibles, you see that a single point is being made, and that is that Christ is preeminent. Christ is supreme. The word used explicitly is found in verse 18, that He is preeminent, meaning He surpasses all others. There is no one like Jesus Christ.

That is the point being made. But Paul is making that point, that single truth, by using parallelism to make his case. And he does it beautifully by holding up two different aspects of His preeminence alongside each other. The reason that Jesus is supreme is because He is supreme in the two things that really matter. The only two things that really matter.

And that is creation. He is preeminent in creation, and in salvation or in the redemption of that creation. So we'll put on our PowerPoint a graph that sort of hopefully explains this a little bit to see the two things being held there in parallel to each other. Firstly, from verses 15 through to 17, we see that the Son is superior. The Son of God is supreme in creation, firstly. Verse 15, Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, is the firstborn of every creature.

Verse 16, "For in Him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities, all things through Him and with a view to Him have been created." Verse 17, "And He is before all things therefore, and all things hold together in Him." All of creation held together by Him who created it. So the Son is superior in creation. Then Paul moves on quickly to verse 18 and he says, "And He is also the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead."

Do you see those two words being used there? Fifteen and eighteen: firstborn. Firstborn in creation, firstborn among every creature, and now the firstborn from the resurrection, from the dead. That in all things He might have preeminence. Verse 18 finishes.

Verse 19, "For in Him, He who is God was pleased to have all the fullness of Him dwell." Verse 20, "And through Him who is Christ, to reconcile all things to Himself." And there you have the parallel with verse 17. As the creator, all things hold together in Him. Now in verse 20, He is reconciling all the things that have been lost, all the things that have been broken back to Himself.

And so with this incredible, sweeping picture, the Bible is telling us that Jesus Christ is not some political or social pawn. He is the Son that is supreme over all things. And so this is the first point that we see: how the Son is superior as the King of creation. Jesus is not simply some idea or concept that we can use for our own personal agendas. He is the altogether unique, incomparable King of the universe.

He is slave, therefore, to none. He demands our allegiance. We don't make Him bend His knee to us. So in verses 15 to 17, Paul explicitly argues that this Jesus, this historical Jesus of Nazareth, was God in the flesh, that God was pleased to dwell in Him. He tells us in verse 17 that Jesus existed before all things.

Verse 16, that God the Father created all things in heaven and on earth, whether visible or invisible, thrones, powers, rulers, or authorities, all things were created by Christ and for Him. In other words, Jesus, the Son of God, demonstrates His divine kingship by the fact that all things are said to be held together by Him. Like muscles holding on to the skeleton of a body, so Jesus holds the universe together without all of it falling into a quivering mess. Not only is He therefore the creator and has, as some people try and argue, just created it and set it in motion, He is the provider, the sustainer of everything that happens now. Jesus Christ is superior because He is the ruling King of creation.

And so Christian, if you prioritise the Bible as the source of your understanding of who He is, your understanding should be that Jesus is the King of all creation. And so you or I don't tell Him who He is. He tells us who we are. He is the one that gave me my life. He has assigned a purpose to that life.

I don't determine the end or the goal of my life myself. My life has been designed by Him and for Him and is ultimately accountable to Him. So I cannot have a personal version of Jesus because I don't make Jesus fit with my purpose. Jesus makes me fit to His. Secondly, the Son is superior as the King of redemption.

In the same breath, Paul moves to verse 18 and he says that Jesus Christ is the King of salvation. And he says this by referring to Him as the head of the church. As the people of God who have been rescued by God's forgiving grace, caused by the sacrificial death of Jesus. Jesus is now the captain of the church. Verse 18 calls Him the firstborn from among the dead.

This is talking about His resurrection, when Jesus came back to life after His death on the cross. And in doing so, He shows us that His death was effective in accomplishing its propitiating task, its satisfying task of absorbing God's wrath on our behalf. But secondly, by showing us that life does exist after death. Death can be conquered. That is what Jesus' resurrection also proves.

And so Jesus is the firstborn Son. He is the heir to the throne. From among all of us who will one day be resurrected, He is our older brother. And as the firstborn Son, He is the oldest, the oldest child. He becomes the pathmaker.

He becomes the pioneer that His youngest siblings will one day follow as well. He goes before us as being the first to have a physical, bodily resurrection. And so the Bible is saying that Jesus, in His salvific effort, has become the King of redemption. And so in far reaching poetic insight, Paul declares that Jesus Christ has existed with the Father before the creation of the universe. But that the Father has deemed Him to be the creating agent for the universe.

And then in His incarnation, Jesus has made the invisible God, the God of all glory, visible. But also, as the first one to rise from the dead, Jesus has proven that He is able to conquer sin, that He's able to redeem the consequences of that sin, and that He is reconciling the entire lost and broken universe in some way back to Himself and His purposes. These are profound verses. But we are left with a question: so what? What happens if we understand this?

What does that mean for us? Well, this is the ultimate purpose of understanding that Christ is the King of creation and redemption. And that is our third and our final point. You must grow up. The King demands our maturity.

Paul concludes chapter one in verse 28, where he says, "Him we proclaim. This Christ that I've just explained to you, him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ." Stylistically, the word "we" when Paul says "him we proclaim" is put in the emphatic position in the Greek sentence. So Paul says, "We proclaim Him." And he does this in order to emphasise or to stress the difference between himself and what he is preaching along with the apostles, and what the false teachers were doing in promoting empty and hollow philosophies mentioned earlier.

And what does Paul and his fellow workers preach? He simply writes "Him". "Him, we proclaim. Jesus Christ, we share with you. Jesus," he says, "is the mystery of God."

Verse 26. And this mystery has now been revealed, he says, to His saints, to His holy ones, His special ones. Verse 27 declares that in God's astounding grace, He has revealed this mystery to even the Colossians who are Gentiles. The Jewish Messiah has come not just for the Jews, but to them, to us. But the true glory of this mystery, Paul adds at the end of verse 27, is that this Christ is in you.

And he says this makes Him the hope of glory. What all of this means is that the majesty, the power, the awe of a glorious God, ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ, has the very concrete, subjective effect of causing me to have an unshakable hope that I have a life that cannot be taken away from me. Why? Because this life is locked away in the powerful, awesome, majestic God who has made it possible. My life is so secure because my God is so great.

God's glory has a feeling, Paul says, and that feeling is hope. All of this hope is centred upon a person, Jesus Christ. And Paul can make all these wonderfully hope filled statements because he's already defined who Jesus is in verses 15 to 20. We can have hope because Jesus is the supreme King. He is the Son of God who rules over the creation and over the church.

And so this hope of glory changes my life forever. It is not a vague sense of optimism about, you know, things will work out for me somehow. Proclaiming Him, Paul says, warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom about Him. The purpose is, he says, verse 28, so that we may present everyone who receives this mature. The goal of knowing the true Jesus, the non made up Jesus, the Jesus not designed by my own agenda. Jesus does not allow Himself to be shaped by me.

Jesus is who He is. And knowing who He is matures me out of my own agendas, out of my empty and hollow philosophies. He doesn't come to me to be what I need Him or want Him to be. I go to Him to be transformed into what He needs me to be, what He wants me to be. And this is the Christian's lifelong purpose, friends.

Don't get lost in the hype of what certain preachers will tell you Christianity is about. It is not about being comfortable. It is not about being healthy or rich or to be some sort of world conqueror. You are to become mature. What does this maturity refer to?

What does it look like? Well, it's talking about those very things we so often gloss over in our Bibles. It is the working of our inner character to be conformed to the image of this Son. By knowing this supreme Christ, we are now called by Him to actually love, to actually love our brothers and our sisters. We are to actually be patient with one another, not just hope that it'll happen somehow.

We are to drop our arrogant gripes. We are to drop our self righteous pride and to be deeply humble towards one another. Christians, we are to actively pursue holiness, to live differently. To be mature is to become radically transformed by the hope of this glory, the mystery of Christ revealed. In other words, we have so much hope in us because of who Christ is that we cannot help but lay aside our petty quarrels.

We lose all of our bitterness because Jesus is King. All my immaturity has now been matured out of me. He has chosen me. Can we believe it? He has chosen me to be in His kingdom.

And not only do I have that promise, I have the promise that He somehow has come to live in me. Christ in you, Paul writes. And we understand that to mean the Holy Spirit who is taking us and making us believe this truth. The Holy Spirit who is making us uncomfortable enough as we hear this right now to allow the transforming power of knowing Christ to actually transform us. This maturing power comes because the majesty and the magnificence of God has been fully displayed in the face of Christ.

As the firstborn of creation and redemption, as the agent, the goal, the forerunner, the pioneer, the sustainer of the church and all of creation, because He is all these things. Jesus Christ is the one I must listen to. There is no one else. Friend, will you listen to Him? Will you accept Him to be that King?

Because Jesus is supreme, His words demand our obedience. Because He owns our lives completely. There's a story of a young boy who purchased a model boat. And he spent his entire summer building, gluing carefully this intricate boat together. This model boat. Months went by until he finally put the last bigger bit of rigging onto his prised possession, gave it the last lick of paint.

He now had the joy of taking that model onto the lake and seeing it sail on real water. But his heart was broken that day. After only a few minutes in the water, a big wind came up, caught the boat, took it very far over this very vast lake, out of reach of his remote control. And he stood in agony watching the water until he couldn't see his ship anymore. Years later, the boy had grown up into a man and one day, he was walking home from work and he spotted something interesting in a shop window.

It was a model boat that looked surprisingly similar to the boat that he had once built. He went inside, investigating the object. To his great astonishment discovered it was the very same boat. What were the chances that he would find his long lost, very prised possession? The man gave the shopkeeper whatever he asked for. He had to have his boat back.

The young boy, now in the body of an older man, walked out of that place with a heart full of satisfaction because he knew that this boat was his. He had come to own it doubly. First, because he painstakingly put it together. And secondly, because he lost it and bought it back. This is the truth of the gospel.

When Jesus sees someone who has placed their trust in Him, He says of that person, "Mine." Because I have made you and because I have paid for you. It's the truth that calibrates my thinking and it permeates every true Christian's reaction to life. It's that truth that matures every facet in my life. The late preacher and theologian, John Stott writes, "When we see Him thus," referring to Christ, "he says, our place is on our faces, prostrate before Him.

Away then with our petty, puny, pygmy Jesuses. Away with our Jesus clowns and Jesus pop stars, our political messiahs, our revolutionary Jesuses. If this is how we think of Christ, no wonder our immaturities persist. If only the veil could be taken from our eyes and we could see Jesus as He is in the fullness of His person and saving work, then we would give Him the honour that is due His name and we would grow into a mature relationship with Him. The benefit of a non made up Jesus.

A Jesus who has determined who He is by Himself. The benefit is that we grow up and we get rid of our immaturities. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for this calibrating vision that we have of you, our supreme King. Lord, we are small and finite minds, minds that cannot even begin to grasp the size of this universe You have created.

We struggle to know exactly how we are to respond to these things. It makes us feel very small. But we thank you that that is okay. That is actually life giving because we have a very, very large God. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you are our saviour.

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you are our creator. Help us, Lord, to understand these truths so that we may get rid of our empty and hollow philosophies. Help us to guard our hearts towards things that sound true about you, things that people will try to cause us to believe about what your purpose is in our life. Help us to walk very carefully. Help us to listen very carefully.

And then Father, help us to simply do what your Son Jesus has told us to do. As He has heard from you and told to us that we will love one another, that we will get rid of all bitterness and envy and strife, that we will work in unity for the sake of the gospel that it may transform us and the world around us, causing, Lord, your kingdom to grow. We thank you, Lord, for these great truths. Please, Holy Spirit, remind us of it and thank you that you are in us, that you are working in us, Spirit of Christ, conforming us to the Son, convincing our hearts that this is true. We praise you, and we bring all glory and honour to you today. In Jesus' name. Amen.