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"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me."
(Luke 4:18)
This week's devotions will focus on discovering the reasons why Jesus came to earth.
There are verses in the Bible like Luke 19:10 that clearly define the mission of Jesus: "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." Mark 10:45 states, "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many." We could never reach God because of our sins, so God reached down to us because of His love. Jesus is amazing! There is no one like Him. He came from heaven to earth to truly show us the way to the Father. In Him, we find our greatest joy, completeness, and fulfillment.
Billy Graham memorably wrote this about Jesus, "Napoleon was right when he said, 'I know men, and I tell you, Jesus is more than a man. Comparison is impossible between Him and any other human being who ever lived, because He was the Son of God.' Emerson was right when he replied to those who asked him why he did not include Jesus among his representative men, 'Jesus was not just a man.' Arnold Toynbee was right when he said, 'As we stand and gaze with our eyes fixed upon the farther shore, a simple figure rises from the flood and straightway fills the whole horizon of history. There is the Savior.'"
We read in Luke 4:16 where Jesus enters the synagogue in Nazareth and begins His public teaching ministry. He quotes almost verbatim Isaiah 61:1-3. Nazareth was the very city in which Jesus grew up. The people in church that Sabbath day knew precisely who Jesus was, or at least they thought they did! When He revealed who He was and why He came to earth, the people in His hometown turned against Him and even sought to kill Him (Luke 4:28-30).
C.S. Lewis wrote the following in his classic work Mere Christianity, "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
I love Mercy Me's song, "Then Christ Came." You can listen to it here:
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