WEEKEND RECHARGE!

FOLLOWING THE REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS, BE SURE TO CHECK OUT AN EXCERPT FROM R. C. SPROUL–“WHO IS JESUS?”

Below are reflective questions for you to prayerfully consider; choose one or two to focus on this week. 

1. PRAY: Ask God to open your heart so you can hear him speak to you about the issue.
2. RESPOND: Confession. Repentance. Surrender. Thanksgiving.
3. ACT: Take the steps to do what God is calling you to do.

Questions for Reflection 

1. Are you relying more on your own resources and abilities, or on the power and authority that Christ provides for his mission?
2. How do you respond when your witness for Christ is rejected—do you become discouraged, or do you trust God and continue the mission he has given you?
3. Are you depending on yesterday's spiritual victories, or are you seeking fresh faith and daily dependence on Christ today?
4. What area of your life is Jesus calling you to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him more faithfully?
5. Are your priorities shaped more by "the things of God" or "the things of man"? What is one practical step you can take this week to align your heart with Christ's mission?
6. Where in your life are you tempted to focus on what Jesus has not done, rather than standing in awe of who he is and what he has already accomplished through the cross?
7. This week, what is one practical way you can move from simply knowing about Jesus' power to worshiping him with greater awe, obedience, and confidence?

WHO IS JESUS? 
(Taken from:  R. C. Sproul,  A Walk with God: An Exposition of Luke (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 1999), 204–209.)

Even today there are many opinions as to who Jesus is. It seems everybody has a favourite aspect of Jesus’ personality and ministry that they would like to claim as an ally for their particular movement. The theologians and historians of the church have said that the question of Christology (that is, our understanding of the person and work of Christ), has been a major issue in four centuries in church history, and those centuries are the fourth century, which brought to us the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed; the fifth century which culminated in the great historic Council of Chalcedon, and again in the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. So that the issue of the identity of Jesus is a paramount question for the church today in a way that has been paralleled perhaps only at three other periods in the history of the church. We are in a crisis of our understanding of who Jesus really was, and are still living out the results of the attack against the New Testament and against a supernatural understanding of Jesus that was so forcibly wrought upon the church in the nineteenth century.

Liberal theology tried to reshape and recast the image of Jesus, not so much as a supernatural being, but as a man of profound wisdom and insight. The Jesus of nineteenth-century liberalism was a Jesus who was recast as the supreme ethical teacher.

Then came the philosophy called Existentialism. Existentialists had the same problem; they didn’t believe in a supernatural Jesus, so what did they do with Jesus? They put forth Jesus as the supreme model of existential man, the greatest existential hero that has ever lived. It seems that as philosophical schools change, Jesus becomes a chameleon, whose identity is shaped and reshaped to suit. Now that should warn us that there can be a difference between the Jesus of fact, and the Jesus of human opinion. We must be careful not to allow our own prejudice to determine who Jesus really was. Most people, although they don’t believe in the deity of Christ, are willing to say something kind about Jesus—he was a great teacher, or prophet or whatever. Such are eager to be considered Christian. Some dictionaries define a Christian as anyone who is civilized, as opposed to one who is savage or uncivilized. So people still want to be associated with the good reputation of Jesus, without wanting all of the liabilities of being called a member of the church or of the classical Christian tradition.