If you know who Jesus is, you have no choice but to follow him. Jesus is God we can see. Jesus is the one through whom all things were made. He is before all things, both in sequence and in preeminence. He is the one in whom all things hold together. Every power, every attribute, every characteristic of God is found in Jesus. Jesus fulfills the most lofty, majestic things that have been said about him, yet he also is the one who allowed himself to fall into the hands of sinful human beings and die a cruel death for the purpose of saving the world.
Knowing who Jesus is matters to our individual lives. Jesus is the reason behind the universe, the organizing principle, the foundation of reality itself. Just about every problem we have stems from a failure to accept reality. We blame others for the problems we cause ourselves. We look for happiness in places that can never make us happy. Every solution to our problems is going to have something to do with Jesus, the foundation of reality.
Knowing who Jesus is matters to our world. The distinctive challenge of our time is our disconnection from one another and our hostility towards one another. We enjoy tremendous freedoms and benefit from amazing technology, but those freedoms and technologies serve to isolate us from each other. We live in a fragmented, polarized world. Again, the solution is Jesus. Jesus is the one who can overcome our broken world, not by getting us to spilt the difference with each other but by leading us to rise above our differences in our devotion to him.
In our sermon this Sunday we will talk about knowing who Jesus is, and once knowing, following him.