When we put our faith in Christ, we are saying that we want to follow Christ, allowing Him to become the guide and authority of our lives. But we often fail to recognize why it matters. We easily fall into the trap of following Jesus for what we can gain from it. We gain everlasting life, relationships in the church, in some cases, even our livelihood, and these things are good. But they miss the greatest benefit of following Christ which is Christ Himself. You see when we follow Christ, we gain Christ, and when we gain Christ, we need nothing more. All of those other things are fringe benefits that we turn into the benefit. May God help us to glory in our relationship with Christ as ultimate, rather than exalt Jesus’s good gifts above Him. If not, we may come to find that we weren’t real followers of Christ at all, just members of the crowd looking for a freebie. Read More

It’s difficult and frustrating to be a human much of the time. We fight and fight against sin and often with very little to show for it. This is the way it has been since the fall. Ever since Adam and Eve disbelieved God, doubted His Word, and pursued making themselves to be gods, all of humanity has struggled in the battle against sin. But one human was able to defeat it. When Jesus was tempted with temptations in many ways similar to what Adam and Eve faced, He was victorious. Jesus’s victory over temptation from Satan proved that He was the very best human and the only One as righteous as God. He proved His worthiness as a spotless sacrifice to appease God’s wrath and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Praise be to Jesus for His endurance through temptation and His righteous life that won our salvation. Read More

The significance of Christ’s dual nature, divine and human, is essential to our faith, but if we aren’t careful, we can minimize one of Christ’s natures over the other. In our tradition, we are more likely to over-emphasize Jesus’s deity, because we know that Scripture emphasizes that Christ is divine. But if we underestimate Christ’s humanity, we lose an important part of Who He is. In His baptism, Jesus identified with us as humans as He prepared to take the sins of the world on Himself. But also, in Christ’s baptism, God identified Jesus as His beloved Son in Whom He was greatly pleased. This is the significance of Jesus’s baptism, not that God was baptized or that a man was baptized, but that the God-man was explicitly revealed to be the God-man. He is the only One worthy and able to save the human race. May Jesus Christ, the God-man, be praised, because He is true God and true man, our Savior. Read More