Scripture Passage
Message Text
The holiday season has come and gone, and you’ve already been back at school for a week. I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful and restful holiday. Holidays during middle and high school is wonderful, isn’t it? You get to sleep in, stay up late and not have to anything much. It’s truly something to be thankful for.
But all of that’s probably a distant memory by now, right? As you continue on back into the busy schedule, and as you have exams coming up later this month, I wanted to share God’s message with us today. And I wanted to kick off our new year in 2017 with this message.
Today’s passage is the first time in the gospel of Matthew that Jesus appears as an adult. Until now, it has been about Mary and Joseph and Jesus as a baby. Remember those passages about the scandalous situation in which Mary’s pregnancy arose? About how God made a way when there seemed to be no way?
In this passage, we meet Jesus as an adult for the first time.
And the very first thing that the adult Jesus does is he went from Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. Galilee is in the northern area of Palestine; John the Baptist’s ministry by the Jordan River was in the southern area of Palestine. That’s a long walk! What was this all about and why did he do this?
The first question is, who was John the Baptist and why were people getting baptized? We need to understand a little bit of the historical context to have a better idea of what was going on.
The area where most of the Jews lived was ruled by Rome. The last few hundred years for the Jewish people had been tumultuous. There had been foreign takeovers, revolts and temporary independence, and now domination by Rome, the greatest power this part of the world had ever known to date.
The pride and dignity of the Jewish people had been dealt a massive blow. Many people believed that a leader anointed by God would come and deliver the Jewish people from these foreign rulers. This anointed leader was referred to as the Messiah. And the emotion that accompanied such a belief is referred to as “messianic fervour”.
For some people, they believed that in order for God to send this leader and thus restore the Jewish people to their former glory, they had to return to God and turn away from their sinful natures. This is where John the Baptist came in.
He was a very weird-looking man. A very wild man who would not blend in well in bustling areas like Jerusalem. Yet he had a fiery conviction that people needed to repent – turn away from their past sinful life – and come back to God. Baptism at the Jordan River was a symbol of such repentance. And he developed a huge following!
Droves of people would come out to the desert where he was in order to be baptized and turn their lives around.
And this is where we first meet the adult Jesus. Jesus traveled a far distance from his home town and region in Galilee. This was before he began to do any of his public ministry, before anyone even knew who he was.
He insists on getting baptized, which symbolizes repenting from old ways and finding new life in God. He gets baptized, and as he comes out of the water, he sees the heavens open up and the Spirit of God descending like a dove. Note the words here: “the heavens were opened to him”. The wording implies that this was not something visible to everyone there – just Jesus. In other words, this was a personal experience.
When he sees the heavens open and the Spirit of God descending, God declares: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
God declares Jesus’ identity. This identity would become the foundation for his public ministry, his death and his resurrection. The rest, as we know, is history. He went on to heal the sick, cure the lame, speak truth to power, ultimately die for his actions and be seen as our Saviour. But all of his future ministry rested on this moment when Jesus was affirmed about his identity.
Here is a simple diagram that outlines the flow of Jesus’ life:
IDENTITY → MINISTRY (Work) → RESULTS
That is the order that Jesus lived his adult life in. The work and results of his life stemmed from his identity.
The nature and type of work flowed from his identity. He had a deep sense of who he was, what he was passionate about, what he felt his calling to be. So that identity shaped his work as an adult. That work would then lead to results that God determined.
This identity also helped him resist temptations that would follow him for the rest of his life. What are some of these temptations he faced?
- To be popular and liked
- To preserve himself rather than do God’s will
- For comfort and riches
These temptations would lead Jesus to very different type of work. And it all goes down to Jesus’ identity. In the temptations, the main question posed to Jesus was: “If you are the Son of God…” That great word “if”. In other words, Satan was saying to Jesus: if you are the Son of God, prove it! If you can’t prove it, then your identity is not worth much.
But Jesus resisted that temptation, and simply believed what God had told him, that he really was the Son of God.
What about us? What is our normal pattern? I would say it’s something like this:
Do the WORK → Get the RESULTS → That shapes our IDENTITY
WORK → RESULTS → IDENTITY
The order has changed. With Jesus, it was IDENTITY first, then the work, then the results. But with us, we try right from the start to do the work, in order to get the results. Our identity is then formed after that, whether we get those results or not. If we succeed, our identity is good. If we fail, then our identity is bad.
We’ve all heard of child celebrities. As children, they become famous for being on a tv show, or for their musical talent. For a lot of these children, what shapes their identity is the fame and recognition, and the work that leads to that fame or recognition. But as they grow up, they realize that just getting fame and recognition is not a fulfilling way of life. More than that, when the fame and recognition is no longer just given to them, they get into a great crisis. That’s when they start acting out and getting into problems with drinking, partying or things like that. It’s all because at their core there is an emptiness. They don’t have their own solid identity beneath the things that come and go.
In our day and age, we often think about a career or job that sounds cool and decide to pursue that. But this is often done before we reflect deeply on who we are, what our personalities are like, what really makes us feel alive, and what is unique about us. So we take that result or work, and then try to shape ourselves to fit that.
And when we don’t get those results that we’ve set up as the standard, we feel bad about ourselves.
What a stressful way of living! And what a shaky foundation for our identity! One bad test and that identity is on shaky ground. One bad assignment and it’s questionable. One experience of social isolation from those you thought were your friends, and you question your worth.
My friends, there is good news for us today. The good news is that God, our creator, is telling us that our identity is secure in God’s love! There is nothing that we need to do or achieve to rest on this secure foundation. God declares this for us!
God is telling us today that He has created each of us uniquely and beautifully. There’s a verse from Psalms: “I was fearfully and wonderfully made”. Yes, my friends, we were indeed fearfully and wonderfully made by God.
God is telling us to rest on this foundation. No matter what the world thinks we need to do, all we need to do is respond to God’s love and accept that as the basis for our identity.
As we move forward in this new year, let’s let our identity as God’s beloved children be our solid foundation so that we can live life confidently!
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