Jesus’ Primary Mission

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We had just been here a couple months. We were still fairly new in town.

and one day my family and I were at Whataburger having lunch and there was this older gentleman there who hollered out to me as I’m as I’m walking through the restaurant he just says hey what do you do he was really friendly I’m a pastor it kind of caught me off guard I’m not used to people just shouting at me at Whataburger unless you go there in the middle the night and then you know there’s all kinds of shouting going on I said I’m a pastor he said oh a newscaster I said no sir I’m a pastor he said you’re the new weatherman on KSWO aren’t you not to my knowledge yeah and and some of you may not realize this I am a huge introvert all right I I am, and there’s a certain amount of social awkwardness that goes along with that, to where I am in the habit of looking at my wife, or sometimes the ladies in the office, and going, is this a normal social interaction?

I mean, is this a thing that happens? And is he crazy, or am I crazy for thinking this is weird? And this is one of those situations my wife assured me, no, he was the crazy one, it wasn’t you.

But I’m just looking at her going, what is happening here? And he said, you’re the new weatherman on KSWO, aren’t you? I said, no, sir, I’m the pastor at Central Baptist downtown.

He said, so, you do the weather. I know we talked about calling down fire from heaven last Wednesday, but no. And he just looks at me with this look of, oh, you do the weather. And finally, I just thought about it and said, yes, sir, it’s going to be a high of 57 today, but it’ll be windy this afternoon.

And he said, oh, thank you. You have a blessed day. I said, you too.

And I just went back to my table and said, what just happened here? I don’t, he clearly had me confused with somebody else. And I’ve seen the weatherman who came to KSWO around the same time.

I don’t think we look alike, except if memory serves, he doesn’t have a lot of hair either. And, and I don’t know, Charles said I might’ve been wearing a bow tie that day. Maybe me for the weatherman.

And it’s a good thing that he didn’t mistake me for some other things like a cardiologist. That could go badly, right? And we’ve been in situations where I’ve been at the hospital like visiting Jojo, came up there after church and still in suit and tie and somebody thought I was one of the doctors, started asking me questions on the elevator. You do not want to mistake me for your cardiologist, right?

Again, you don’t want to mistake me for a nuclear engineer. Don’t want me running your power plant. There’s all sorts of things I can’t do.

We all get mistaken for somebody else sometimes, but we hope, you know, you’re not being mistaken for somebody that it’s going to turn out to be dangerous if they misunderstand your job or what you’re there to do. But it’s especially dangerous when we misunderstand Jesus’s job, when we misunderstand Jesus’s mission and what he came here to do. You know, we’re in this series about who is Jesus and looking at the Bible’s answers to the question, who is Jesus?

And one area we’ve got to nail down and understand in order to understand Jesus is to understand what his mission was and what the Bible says he came here for, what he came to do. And so we’re going to look at that this morning. One of the places where the Bible talks about this is in 1 Timothy chapter 1.

1 Timothy chapter 1, if you turn there with me in your Bibles. If you don’t have a Bible, It’ll be on the screen, or if you can’t find it, it’ll be on the screen. But once you find it, if you’ll stand with me, if you can do so without too much trouble, as we read together from God’s Word.

1 Timothy 1, starting in verse 12, and we’re going to go through verse 17 this morning. Here’s what Paul says to Timothy. He says, And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has enabled me, because he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry, although I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man.

but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief.

However, for this reason I obtained mercy that in me first Jesus Christ might show all longsuffering as a pattern to those who are going to believe on him for everlasting life. Now to the king eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

And you may be seated. Paul spells it out for us. This is not the only place in scripture where this is taught, but Paul spells it out here pretty clearly for us what Jesus’ job was, what his mission was.

When he came to earth, Jesus’ mission was to save sinners. Jesus himself said that when he talked to Zacchaeus in Luke 19. 10.

He told Zacchaeus, the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. There was this amazement that Jesus would come to the house of Zacchaeus, a sinner, a cheat who swindled people, and yet Jesus said, I’m coming to your house. There was this amazement over it, why Jesus would go to Zacchaeus’ house, and Jesus says, I have come to seek and to save that which was lost. I didn’t come to deal with those who were perfect, by the way, that includes none of us, But he didn’t come to deal with those who were perfect. He came to save sinners.

That was his job. And that’s why Paul says in verse 15 here, Christ came into the world to save sinners. He came to earth because we had rejected God, because we had disobeyed God, and because that disobedience separates us from him.

And it makes us unable to fix the relationship. If you’ve ever had a child or you’ve ever been a child, you know what this is like when the child does something wrong, like the child steals a cookie, the child breaks something and tries to hide it, and the parent knows. One of these days our children will learn we don’t ask questions we don’t know the answer to.

I’ve learned that from talking to lawyers. You know, if we ask, did you break this? We already know you broke this, so just admit it.

But when they try to hide it, or when I tried to do that as a child, tried to pretend, well, I didn’t do this, there’s a barrier in the relationship right there. It doesn’t mean I’m not their child anymore, but something is not right in the relationship. Now, you take that and apply it to where we stand with a holy God, and His standard is absolute sinless perfection.

Anytime we fall short of that, it’s going to introduce an obstacle, a barrier into the relationship. But because God’s standard is so high, any obstacle, any barrier between us becomes something that we can’t fix, becomes something we can’t move out of the way. because we have fallen short of the standard.

And no matter how good we are from here on out, we’ve already fallen short. He came because we, Jesus Christ came to earth because we had separated ourselves from God. And we were unable to fix the relationship.

There’s nothing that we can do to earn or deserve His forgiveness. Because again, once we’ve sinned, if we do everything perfectly from here on out, we’re just doing what we’re supposed to do. We’re doing the baseline of what’s expected.

We don’t get extra credit for that. and the example I love to give of this is if I killed somebody and stood before a judge and he said what do you have to say for yourself I don’t get to say but your honor look at all the other people I haven’t killed right I don’t get extra credit because I let some people live right okay so if I just did what God requires and followed the law from here on out I don’t get extra credit from that to apply to the times I’ve broken his law before there’s still sin in each of our lives that has to be paid for there’s a penalty that’s that’s owed and there’s punishment that’s deserved and so he came because we needed a savior. Jesus Christ came to earth because we needed a savior.

And I know for many of you, you may be thinking, I agree with that. I understand that. That seems really basic to be the main point of the message today.

We came here for, you know, we got all dressed up and came out today for something a little more insightful than that. Jesus came to save sinners. But it’s important to note that that’s the case because there are so many places where it is being taught even this morning that Jesus Christ came for some other reason besides that.

And I’m not in the habit of attacking people. At the same time, I want you to know I’m not just pulling things out of thin air. So I’m not going to name names this morning, but if you want to know any of who I’m talking about or any of the references, any of the quotes, come see me and I’ll give them to you later.

But there are churches that even this morning in our community are teaching that Jesus Christ came to show men how to work their way to Godhood. That if you just follow His example, You can become a God this morning. There are churches in our community that are teaching that.

There are churches in our community that teach that Jesus came to open our minds to the reality that things like the physical world and things like sin are just an illusion. If we can get past that, we can be united with God. There are churches that teach that Jesus came to clear away Adam’s sin so that we could earn a chance at salvation by being good enough.

There are religions that say at best Jesus was a misguided teacher of the law. There are world religions, well, I kind of have to name this one. Islam says that Jesus came as a prophet to lead people to Allah.

One of many, one of many, but just a prophet. There are religions that say that Jesus came to help people unlock their God consciousness. There are religions that say Jesus came to help people find enlightenment.

The New Age movement says that Jesus was a messenger of light to help us unlock the presence of God within ourselves. the prosperity teachers on TV will tell you that Jesus Christ came to show you the way to find health and wealth there are people today that Jesus that that will teach us that Jesus came to be the poster child for a political ideology or a social justice movement the armchair theologians on Facebook will even tell us that he came to make us nice happy people who feel good about ourselves and I’m sure there’s more I could go on but this is these are some of the other answers that that the world gives to why Jesus came, what his mission was. But he said he came to save us from our sins.

And as I said, it sounds so basic, but it’s important that we nail it down because there are other voices telling us something other than what Jesus said. And so we’ve got to be reminded, we’ve got to remind ourselves, this is what Jesus came to do. Otherwise, if we confuse what Jesus came to do, we very easily get into confusing territory about who he is and who we are, and we missed the point of the gospel entirely.

If we start thinking that he just came as an example to help us unlock the goodness within ourselves, we have completely missed the point of the gospel. Jesus came to save sinners. And this morning, if you think that message sounds harsh, I’m a sinner too.

He came to save me. And Paul, who wrote this under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said, Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I’m chief. So if you think, well, it’s mean to us, it’s harsh to us.

Paul said he came to save sinners and I’m the biggest one of all. And so as we study how the Bible answers the question, who is Jesus? We cannot fully understand who he is unless we understand why he came.

And if he came to save us from our sins, if he came to reconcile us to God, if he came to make us right with God, then anything else is a letdown. Just being an example that shows me how good I can be is really a letdown because it does nothing to fix my problem of the fact that sin separates me from a holy God. It just means that I’m going to be nice and good and loving and well behaved all the way to eternal separation from God in hell.

And so if Jesus came in our minds to do anything short of what he said he did, it’s a complete letdown. And we are very fortunate that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. He came to do the work.

He came to accomplish all that was necessary. And we can see all around us the results of Jesus carrying out his mission. They’re all around us.

We see transformed lives because of Jesus Christ. We see people who are no longer who they used to be. And that is directly attributable to Jesus Christ. That demonstrates clearly to us what Jesus Christ can do and that only he can, him doing things that only he can do. Because when it comes to matters of modifying our behavior, we’re not great at it.

We’re not great at it. I encounter that every time I tell my wife I’m going to buckle down and get serious about Weight Watchers again. And then I remember that tacos are a thing.

And I realize how weak I am at modifying my behavior. For somebody to have a real and a change in their lives, there has to be a huge cause. You know, sometimes we will change the direction of our lives if something traumatic happens.

But sometimes, and we can see it even among us in this body, sometimes the transformation that happens in people’s lives is not something that we can just explain by, well, he decided to be better. And there’s some of you in this room that tell stories that I didn’t know you before you came to Christ, and you tell who you were before Christ and I can scarcely believe it. That the complete and total transformation that has taken place in your life because of the work of Jesus Christ, because you trusted Him as your Savior, and He began to change you, is incredible.

And I don’t have that dramatic conversion story. I came to Christ at the age of five. I was raised in church.

I was raised by parents that I was scared enough of that I really didn’t do a rebellious thing. I mean, my parents were our college class Sunday school teachers, and we were sitting around one night trying to decide what was the most rebellious thing we’d ever done. I couldn’t think of anything.

Not saying I’m perfect, but I couldn’t think of anything rebellious I’d ever done. I asked my parents, can you think of anything? They said, we’re still waiting.

Still waiting for that rite of passage. Not that I’m perfect. I grew up a very sheltered life.

But even that, I look at who I am now versus who I was years ago, and I can see the transformation that Jesus has done in me. For one, I’m more loving and more patient and more compassionate than I used to be, which makes me really ashamed of how loving and compassionate I was back then, because I’ve still got a long way to go. But we should, over time, be able to look and see the transformation that Jesus has done in our lives, and that is evidence of His work.

And Paul uses his own life here as an example of this. That’s why he’s talking about himself here, because he points out in verse 12 where he is. He says at this point he’s an apostle, He’s serving Jesus faithfully.

He’s growing to be more like him. He says, I thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, who has enabled me because he counted me faithful, putting me into ministry. Paul talks about this incredible ministry he has that he’s been given by God.

The man that we think of as the Apostle Paul, this incredibly wise, mature, spiritual man. And he says, that’s where I am now. And by the way, Paul doesn’t claim to be perfect either.

But he says, I’m in this place of ministry. I’m in this place of service. I’m in this place of faithfulness.

But that’s not where Paul started out. Because in verse 13, he says, in contrast to where I am now, here’s where I was. He says, Christ counted me faithful, put me in ministry, although, verse 13, I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man, but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.

So even though we think of him as this wise spiritual man that he eventually grew to be, he started out as somebody who was violent, who was angry, who was sinful, who was self-righteous, and was separated from God. Paul, for all of his religiousness, for all of what he thought he was doing good works for God, he was as separated from God as anybody’s ever been. He was a brutal man.

You may not realize it if you’re new to the Christian faith, but the Apostle Paul, who wrote most of our New Testament, started out as somebody who went around capturing Christians and restraining Christians and taking them back to be executed. And he liked it. He was a brutal, brutal man.

Being a religious terrorist, I have compared him to the Osama bin Laden of his day. He didn’t fly planes into buildings, but if you didn’t believe the right things, he was more than happy to have you executed. That’s where he was in verse 13.

And you see this change, this transformation between where he was in verse 13 and who he has become in verse 12. And in verses 14 and 15, he explains what makes the difference. He says that Jesus alone was responsible for transforming him.

He says, and the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. What made the difference?

What took him from verse 13 up to where he was in verse 12 is what he says in verse 14 that the grace of Jesus Christ was abundant. Talks about this grace. Grace is a churchy word, but it means the kindness of God that we don’t deserve.

Jesus looked at him and out of his own kindness, not because of any goodness that Paul had, not because of anything he earned or deserved, but because God was kind and loving. Because Jesus Christ came to earth to save sinners. And He shed this grace on Paul.

He said, you don’t deserve forgiveness. You don’t deserve love. But I’m going to give it to you anyway.

He says it was Jesus who made the difference. And Paul explains that this is not an isolated incident. Paul explains that this shows how incredible and how far-reaching the power of Christ’s grace is when he goes into verse 15, talking about sinners of whom I am chief.

He says, I’m the biggest sinner I know. And then in verse 16, however, for this reason I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show all longsuffering as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life. Paul says, Jesus took me, the biggest sinner I know, and He saved me, and by doing that He showed a pattern here.

His saving of Paul demonstrated that He could save anybody. It was a pattern to those who were coming up later, to those who would believe later. That they’d say, you don’t know what I’ve done.

You don’t know how I’ve sinned. You don’t know how far I’ve strayed from God. And Paul could say, it doesn’t matter because I did worse than you and I strayed further than you.

And if Jesus can save me, He can save anybody. It’s about going for the hardest case first. I was watching a documentary recently about what they called Freedom Summer in 1964 when they did the bus rides to the South to try to integrate places in the south. And they targeted Mississippi first. And people thought that they were crazy for trying to racially integrate Mississippi because it was the hardest place.

It was the most segregated place in the country at that time. And one of the men who led this effort said, we’re going to Mississippi because it’s the hardest place in the country. And if we can break the back of segregation in Mississippi, we can break it anywhere.

It was to make a point to the rest of the country. And Paul says that’s what Jesus was doing in his case. If Jesus Christ could save and forgive and transform somebody as rotten as Paul, then he can save anybody.

And today you may be sitting there saying, you don’t know how badly I’ve messed up. You don’t know how great my sin has been or how far I’ve strayed from God. It doesn’t matter.

Because I look around this room, I can just about guarantee you that none of you are going around rounding up Christians and taking them to be executed and cursing Jesus Christ every chance you get and thinking that you’re doing God’s service in doing it because you’re so great and so wonderful. You throw the self-righteousness on. It’s just like the cherry on top of the wickedness Sunday.

And Paul says, I’m an example. If Jesus could save me, he could save you. And as a result, in verse 17, he tells us what Jesus deserves for what he’s done.

Because of what he’s done, he deserves to be worshiped and adored. It says now to the king, eternal, immortal, invisible to God, who alone is wise be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

He says, you look at my life, you look at the example, and there’s this tendency to want to praise the person who’s made such strides and say they’re doing so well. They started out here and now they’re here and they’ve done such a great job. It’s so incredible.

Look how far they’ve come. And to an extent, we do want to encourage that, but at the same time, it’s not due to any effort on Paul’s part. It’s the work of Jesus Christ. And he said, if anybody deserves the honor and the glory and the praise out of this whole deal, it’s Jesus Christ. It’s the King who transformed me.

And so all of this, it seems on first glance like Paul’s talking about himself, but really he’s pointing to the fact that Jesus Christ came to save us and transform us. And the evidence is all around us. As I said earlier, you should be able as a believer to look at your own life and see the change that has taken place over time.

And we see the testimonies of others around us who have just been completely turned inside out by Jesus Christ. And it’s good. It’s glorious that he can. It’s glorious that he does because nothing else but Jesus can save and transform sinners.

If we were to look back and spend some time going over verses 3 through 11 that lead up to where we started this morning in verse 12, what you’d see there is that Paul is talking about religion. He’s talking about goodness. He’s talking about the law.

He’s talking about all the things that people tended to put their faith in in that time period that were going to make them right with God. And he contrasts those. He contrasts the power of those things with the power of the gospel.

And he says that Jesus Christ and His grace, in His wonderful grace, He is capable of accomplishing what all the religious rituals that we could ever try to do would never accomplish. Religion cannot save or transform sinners. It can’t.

You know, sometimes we hear stories about the church is full of hypocrites. The church is full of mean people. I was hurt in church.

I think we’ve probably all been hurt in church. But do you know why there’s so many mean people scattered throughout churches all over America? It’s because religion cannot transform sinners.

And people can sit in a pew year after year after year, maybe listening, maybe not. and try to be religious and never have a relationship with Jesus Christ, and it just turns them into mean religious people. If they started out mean and angry, they’re just mean and angry with religious rituals on top.

Religion cannot save us. Religion cannot transform us. The fact that I was raised in church, that my parents took us to church every time the doors were open and then some.

The fact that my mother was the church secretary and my dad taught Sunday school, that was never. . .

The fact that I went on visitation, the fact that I was in every VBS, all these religious things, that was never going to make me right with God. That was never going to transform me. Instead, there had to come a day when I realized that I had sinned against God and needed forgiveness and understood that only Jesus Christ could give me that forgiveness because He paid for my sins in full on the cross.

He took responsibility for everything I deserved and He paid for it. And He rose again to prove it so I could be forgiven. Me going to church was never going to make me right with God.

And you, I’m glad you’re here today. Coming to church is a great thing. But listen to me, just coming to church will not make you right with God.

It will not transform you. It will not change you into who He wants you to be. Religious rituals.

You can attend all the Bible studies, all the Sunday school classes. You can get baptized. You can participate in the Lord’s Supper.

You can even come out and do the live nativity when we have it. You can be involved in everything we do, and it’s never going to make you right with God or change you from the inside out. Only Jesus Christ can do that.

The Bible teaches us then to look to Jesus for salvation and for transformation because that’s what He came to do. He came to save sinners. And that doesn’t just mean forgiving us.

That means forgiving us, giving us a relationship with the Father, changing us from the inside out to transform us into who He wants us to be. And when I say transforming us, that doesn’t mean that we become robots. It doesn’t mean that we lose our personalities.

It means we become the version of ourselves that God wants us to be. But that only comes about when we recognize that there is something that we have done that stands in between us and a holy God. There is a gulf there that we cannot bridge.

There is an obstacle there that we cannot move. There is nothing you or I could do to erase the sin that we’ve done. Jesus Christ had to come to save sinners.

And so He took responsibility for everything you and I have ever thought, done, or said that was wrong. Everything we have failed to do that was good. He took responsibility for all of it.

And He was nailed to the cross in our place. He shed His blood for us and He died to purchase our forgiveness. And three days later, He rose again to prove that what He said was true and that what He said He could do, He could do.

And now to us, He offers forgiveness and salvation. If we’ll simply stop trusting in what we can do and start trusting in what he’s already done and ask for the forgiveness because he’s already paid for it.