Jesus comes and sees us so that we will come and see him. “Come and see” are not so much two different actions as a whole-person, hands-on engagement with another person. Jesus models this come-and-see practice by drawing them out with questions (Andrew & John), renaming them (Peter), calling them (Philip), praising their honesty, revealing his supernatural watchfulness and intriguing them with promises of even greater seeing (Nathanel). The disciples, likewise, come-and-see Jesus by following the clues offered by John the Baptist (“The Lamb of God”) and each other (“The Messiah,” “The one whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote”), watching Jesus, and testing his promises. The more we recognize Jesus coming-and-seeing us, the more actively we come-and-see him, building a real and ever-transforming relationship with him.

Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness helps us fight temptation in our own lives. Behind each
of them is a question tempting him to doubt his relationship to God:
1. Turn Stones to bread: Will God take care of me?
2. Get authority & glory in exchange for worship: Does God know what he’s doing?
3. Throw himself down & be rescued: Does God care when I’m hurting?
The same kinds of questions lie behind our own temptations today. What’s at stake is not
primarily our moral purity but our ongoing, dynamic trust in the Lord. Until Jesus returns, we
will continue to face temptations and sometimes fail. Thankfully, Jesus perfectly passed the test
that Adam failed, Israel failed, and we fail today. He continued perfectly trusting God the Father
throughout his life, all the way through his death and resurrection. As a result, the same Spirit
who empowered Jesus now dwells in everyone who trusts in Jesus by faith. This Spirit is first of
all the Spirit of Sonship, who reminds us that God is well pleased with us because of Jesus. He is
also a spirit of power, love, and self-control (2 Tim 1:7). Because Jesus’ temptation was fully
human in every respect, his Spirit is able to help us when we are being tempted (Heb 4:15). And
because his Spirit indwells the whole church, we are not alone in our struggle.

Our church’s purpose is to embody and preview the Kingdom of God from Buckhead to Bankhead, which includes the work of racial reconciliation. Actually doing it depends on how well we believe and practice the metaphor of the body of Christ. The unity that we already have in the body motivates us to work hard to love each other and our neighbor. Diversity in the body puts us in uncomfortable positions, but it grows us to be able to love people different from us – which helps us better love our neighbors who are different from us. We do all of this through interdependent relationships, with a real feeling that we need each other to experience the fullness of Christ and to live missionally on the westside of Atlanta.

Mary is an extraordinary model of dynamic faith in God. While her distinct role as the physical mother of Jesus was utterly unique, the way she responded to God’s providence helps us understand how we can exercise faith today. The angel Gabriel declares her “favored” by God, and she responds by welcoming God’s undeserved grace. He informs her that she will bear the Son of God, and she responds by thoughtfully interrogating God’s promises. Without understanding everything that will happen to her, she embraces wonder with her famous response, “Let it be to me as you have said.” And while struggling to understand what it all means, she engages God’s people in the form of her older cousin Elizabeth, who may have been a spiritual mentor, and who helps confirm and extend her unique calling. And for the rest of her life, through many more hard and confusing situations, Mary continues to exercise humble, thinking faith.

Leah is known for the bitter competition with her sister Rachel for the affections of their husband Jacob. Though the New Testament does not highlight her place in the genealogy of Jesus, her story echoes many of his other “mothers.” Most distinctively, she illustrates a universal human experience: We all want to be loved, faithfully and securely – and yet human love inevitably disappoints us. In the midst of this reality, God keeps showing compassion toward Leah in order to reorient her primary attachment to himself. Ultimately, Jesus most fully reveals God’s grace-given, person-specific, perfectly secure delight in us. Apart from Jesus, we starve ourselves and smother others. But when we receive the love of Jesus by faith, we smother people less and love people more, even becoming strong channels of God’s love toward them.

NOTE: Since we had to use a borrowed sound system this week, the sermon audio was recorded with an iPhone on the front row. We'll have much better audio quality next week, Lord willing!

Tamar is one of the “mothers” of Jesus listed in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1. She was the twice-widowed daughter-in-law of Judah, the leader of the twelve sons of Jacob. When Judah refused to provide for her future by giving his third son to marry her, Tamar took matters into her own hands. She disguised herself as a prostitute, and Judah took the bait. When she was found to be pregnant, Judah initially ordered her killed, but when she produced evidence that he was the father, he declared her “more righteous than I.” And she was more righteous than him, but only in a relative sense. Both were attempting to rewrite the story of their lives apart from the Lord – Judah by trying to cover up his shame, and Tamar by trying to level up her injustices. But it didn’t work, only further isolating and dividing. Thankfully, God was writing their lives into a better story. Centuries later, their descendant Jesus would show a better way: We can be honest about our failures, trusting his blood to cover our shame, and we can petition him about our injustices, trusting him to vindicate and redeem in his timing.

Displaced and disheartened by suffering and loss, Naomi found life no longer sweet but bitter. Yet her condition did not have the final say. God was at work through many agents in Naomi’s life, even her own heart, and brought her back from death to life, from bitterness to joy, from emptiness to fullness. Naomi found sweet redemption from God through Ruth, Boaz and a son through whom would come utter joy.

The tenth commandment is the most explicitly heart-oriented of the ten commandments, and therefore almost impossible to keep. Powerful forces all around us institutionalize and reinforce coveting as the American Way of life. The alternative to coveting, however, is not to kill our desires, nor even simply to moderate them, but to direct them toward God himself. God never promises to fulfill all of our earthly desires, and there will always be inequality between people in this life, but he always delivers on his promise to give us more of himself. In order to want God more than anything else, we need Jesus to keep God’s Law perfectly for us, to bear the penalty of God’s law, and to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. All this Jesus has done for us, pouring his own Holy Spirit into our lives, so that we can increasingly experience the Good Life he has made us to live.

The ninth commandment applies most directly to giving formal testimony in a legal context. In the ancient near east, most legal disputes were settled by appeal to two or three human witnesses, rather than documents, recordings or forensic evidence. Bearing false witness was an easy way to harm your enemies or advance your own interests. Today, the commandment extends naturally to any verbal misrepresentation of reality at the expense of other people. Because some forms of lying can actually protect other people, a Christian is called above all to “treasure” the truth. This means treating reality as a sacred trust, flowing from the trustworthy heart of God, which must be stewarded carefully for his glory and for the good of others. Every Christian inevitably fails to meet this standard in big and small ways, so we must continually return to the fountain of God’s grace. Jesus, the perfectly wise truth-teller, endured slander, mockery and false witnesses all the way to the cross, so that we could be forgiven. His Holy Spirit of Truth now lives in us, calling us to repentance and empowering us to change.