In the last few articles, we have discussed the church’s credibility problem. Allow me to give a short review to summarize the essence of what we have discussed.
We have been left as Ambassadors of Christ and our mission is to communicate the message of reconciliation to the lost. God has placed His children into a permanent union inside of Christ and placed God-Holy Spirit inside of us. Our union with Christ gives us all the privileges of Divine Royalty and the Holy Spirit gives us all the power of Divine Omnipotence. We have the position, we have the power and we have the purpose of sharing the message. What we (editorial we) don’t have is the credibility to speak with any weight to the lost people in the world.
Old Man Review
The church lacks credibility because we have failed to live out the message of hope that we preach to others. We fail to live like we are the royal children of God. Instead we live the same way we always have, selfish, misdirected, afraid and angry. Let us summarize:
1. We are born without God who alone can meet the deepest needs of our hearts.
2. Separated from God, we turn to man to meet our needs.
3. We build our beliefs on the idea that people are able to meet our needs and will do so if we relate to them in a winning way.
4. We seek happiness through human relationships, which cannot last in this life, never satisfy, leave us empty, and cause us to be heartbroken.
5. The pain of imperfect and broken relationships motivates us to numb our pain and protect our hearts.
On the one hand we are empty and hungry and on the other we are hurt, angry and self-protective. We relate to others out of need rather than as those who have been filled and enabled to give freely. We relate to our circumstances from greed and fear rather than those content with the moderate means God provides. We have never had enough love and we are angry with those we believe should meet our needs. We never have enough material goods and we are afraid of being perceived as losers or possibly ending up alone and penniless. This is the life we live when dominated by the old man. It is no small wonder that the world sees us as hypocrites and weaklings. I believe that we can do better. The bible told me so.
New Man in Christ
The old man belief system is very difficult to see in our own life. We begin building our false view right after birth. The beliefs we developed, we have used all of our lives and they feel natural and necessary. The most effective means of revealing the old man is to compare it to its opposite, the new man in Christ. The new man (Eph 4:24) is the belief and behavior system of Jesus. It is the system that He built in His humanity and used to direct His perfect, sinless life. The new man in Christ is the belief system of God and aligns with the concepts taught in the New Testament. In this article we will examine the humanity of Jesus, His relationship with the Holy Spirit and the ideas that He chose to believe as He grew from a baby to manhood. Please forgive the following inadequate description of my Lord, the Perfect Man.
Humanity of Jesus
Luke 2:40 And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.
Conceived by the Spirit
The Holy Spirit caused the physical body of Jesus to be conceived in Mary’s womb. The Spirit provided 23 male chromosomes to fertilize Mary’s egg and this produced the body of Jesus. The miracle was not the virgin birth, it was the virgin conception. The purpose of the virgin conception was to bypass the inheritance of the sin nature, which is passed down through the male (Rom 5:12). After the miraculous conception, the process of development in the womb and the birth was totally normal. Jesus was human in every way, perfect humanity in the womb and from the moment of birth. He was born perfect, as Adam was created perfect. He was born with a perfect human body minus a sin nature, with a perfect soul and human spirit.
Stages of Growth
Like every other human, Jesus grew in stages. God designed the human body and mind to grow through stages of development. These stages have been observed and named by modern science but they were already well defined in the first century. The different Greek words for “child” indicate these different levels of growth. Beginning as a brephos (on the breast), Jesus grew to become a toddler or a nepios (lit. not speaking). From a toddler, he became a pais (small child) and then a teknon (under authority) which would indicate when He started to school. From the teknon stage He grew into a huios (adult son) or a son who was considered a man. These different stages are the normal phases that all of us, including Jesus, passed through on our journey to adulthood. It is as we pass through these stages that we develop our ideas about ourselves, others and how life works. All of us are born separated from God, condemned to eternal punishment, with a sin nature, in devil’s world and knowing nothing. In this lost and corrupted state, it is inevitable that all the ideas we build are wrong. Our ideas are focused on self and all of our relationship strategies are intended to persuade others to give us the love we need.
Relationship with the Holy Spirit
Like John the Baptist, Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit from birth. In contrast to the rest of the human race, Jesus was born without a sin nature. The absence of a sin nature allowed Him to live without the constant temptation to put self above everyone else. Also in contrast to the rest of the human race who are born without God, Jesus was born with a perfect relationship with His heavenly Father through the agency of the Holy Spirit. While we were forced to turn to people for our needs, Jesus was able to turn to His Father to meet His needs. Having access to God as His Father, His human needs were provided totally and His soul was able to develop with perfect health. Instead of misunderstanding His own worth like we do, the Spirit enabled Him to have perfect knowledge about Himself. Having accurate understanding of His worth, He was able to be totally confident about Himself without having to prove His value through His appearance, personality or actions. Instead of reaching false conclusions about needing approval from others, He was able to develop unconditional love for others. He had His Father, He knew His Father loved Him unconditionally and that filled Him with strength to give to others without needing anything in return. He loved people, He was willing to sacrifice for people but He didn’t need people and He never manipulated people for His own benefit. Seeing the perfect human development that Jesus experienced because of His intimacy with God helps us to view our own experience in contrast to His. His perfect growth reveals the corruption of our own. The sense of worth He was given by His Father’s unconditional love is contrasted with the neediness of our empty hearts. His ability to give and love without conditions is so different than the way we love to be loved in return. He never believed He had to prove Himself to people unlike the rest of us who base our worth on what people think of us. His heart, full of goodness, overflowed with rivers of living water.
Driven by Need
We come to the world without any knowledge or ideas. Every conclusion we reach, every idea we form and every belief we adopt is a response to our needs interacting with our human experience. At birth, our divinely designed needs begin to reveal themselves. The need for warmth, touch, nurture, assurance and love are evident in newborns. In addition, to these needs, other needs like the need to belong, to be recognized and praised, to accomplish and to make a difference reveal themselves later in childhood. It is our needs, that we experience as desires, that are the core motivators of our lives. The bible makes it very clear that man’s desires motivate him to do what he does. Both Paul (Eph 4:24) and Peter explain that when our needs/desires are misdirected, they motivate us to build corrupt ideas. Born with a sin nature, we cannot escape its corrupting influence that causes us to prioritize our desires above our loyalty to God.
Relational Strategies
We are driven to find someone to love and return our love. We are desperately dependent on others to meet our needs. We are also driven to develop relationship strategies that motivate others to care for us. As babies we learn different methods of getting attention and causing others to give us affection. We smile, we cry and we perform to gain the approval of the adults in our environment. As we progress, our strategies and goals become more complex. The old man is empty, in need and relates to meet his needs. The old man belief system relates conditionally, giving to others to get in return. We love to be loved, we praise to be praised, and we initiate to be included. The new man in Christ has found his needs met by God. The new man in Christ relates unconditionally, giving to others to edify them regardless of return. We love because we care, we praise because it is due, we initiate to build teams to represent Christ.
Human Experience
We all experience some measure of success or what we feel is a lack of success in causing others to care for us. It is the way we are treated and the way we interpret how we are treated that shapes many of the ideas we form. The primary formational relationship in life is with parents. Our experience with our fathers and mothers has a huge impact on how we view ourselves and how we relate to others. If our parents love us, discipline us, train us and demonstrate their regard for us, we will form a positive image of ourselves. If our parents abandon us, mistreat us, abuse us, neglect us or remain silent about their regard for us, it is likely that we will form a negative image of ourselves. If our parents relate to us with unconditional strategies, we learn to relate to others based on our own character rather than theirs. If our parents relate to us conditionally, then we will conclude that we have to perform to be loved. If our parents are unfulfilled in their own hearts, they will relate to us to meet their own needs. Rather than building us up, they feed on us and leave us empty as well. If you have children, the best thing you can do for them is to grow up in Christ and allow God to fill your heart with His love. Then you can pass His love to them instead of using them to meet your own love needs.
A Perfect Childhood
Jesus, being fully human was born with the same needs as every other human being. As a baby, He craved affection and the warmth of nursing on His mother’s breast. When He was wet He needed to be changed and when He was hungry He needed to be fed. As He grew older, He felt the need to belong and the desire to be praised and any other normal human need. He was like us in almost every way.
Two Significant Differences
There are two great differences in His life in comparison to every other member of the human race. The first was the absence of a sin nature. Lacking a sin nature, He was not driven to view His needs/desires as more important than His loyalty to His Father. He was willing and able to delay or even forgo gratification. Like us all, He had cravings and wanted to gratify His desires. He chose to subordinate His desires to the Father’s will and only gratify those desires that fit into the Father’s plan. He never built beliefs that viewed His desires as more important that the plan of God.
The second difference was His intimate relationship with His Father and the Spirit. Jesus was the only man born of woman who was able to relate to God as His parent and to Joseph/Mary as His parents. His intimacy with God-Father allowed Him to perfectly meet every need intended to be met by God. His relationship with wonderful, Godly, human parents allowed Him to imperfectly meet every human need He experienced.
His perfect relationship with His Father and the Spirit provided Him with truth to interpret His human experience at every stage of development. As He went through all the normal events that come with growing up, He had the Spirit to tell Him the truth about it. When He was ridiculed by His peers, the Spirit comforted Him and explained that they were empty and needed love. When His earthly parents lost their temper, the Spirit explained that they were sinners and that they needed a savior. When His brothers and sisters resented Him, the Spirit explained that they didn’t have the same resources that He had and that they needed compassion. At every moment, in every situation, at every stage of life, the Spirit protected Him from error and false conclusions. Every conclusion he reached about His human experience was guided by absolute truth and every belief He built into His heart was based on absolute truth. Every time He felt disappointed or hurt by the failure of a consequential person in His life, He went to His Father for comfort and understanding. His mind was perfect, His relationship with the Spirit was unbroken, His relationship with His Father was unhindered and every belief He put into His heart was perfectly aligned with the will of God.
His earthly parents were Godly, growing believers but they were not perfect. They were sinners saved by grace who were striving to live as mature believers. Their character surely made them wonderful parents for Jesus and His siblings. It is inevitable that there were moments of failure in their lives just like the rest of us. When parents fail, it always has an impact on children. Great failure has great impact and small failures have minimal impact, but impact nonetheless. When Joseph and Mary failed in their parenting of Jesus, His relationship with the Spirit and His Father insulated Him from being negatively impacted. He was able to avoid processing false conclusions in spite of their failures.
The Perfect Man
In contrast to us, Jesus was born without a sin nature and into a perfect relationship with the Holy Spirit and His heavenly Father. Like us, He went through all the normal stages of human development and was confronted by all the sin and evil in the devil’s world. Like many of us, His earthly parents surely loved Him but just as surely failed Him. As He entered His earthly ministry, we find that His earthly father had died at some point. His loss must have brought normal grief to His heart. His elevation to the “man of the house” had to have brought pressures not intended for a son to endure. His brother’s unbelief also had to have been difficult to take.
He never broke. He never failed. He never misunderstood and never conjured a false conclusion that corrupted His view of life. His life in the Spirit and with His Father was an unbroken source of truth and strength from birth to the moment the sins of the world were poured on Him. He built the perfect belief and behavior system. He related to others in His life perfectly and unconditionally. He is worthy of our absolute admiration and worship as the perfect God-Man.
Conclusion and Application
As you consider our Lord’s perfect human development, compare it to your own. As you consider that He related with grace to every individual, every time, compare His relating to your own. As you consider how He subordinated His desires to the Father’s plan and His perfect obedience to His Father’s will, compare his choices to your own. As you see how very different you think/feel and how very different you behave, those differences are evidence of the existence of your old man belief and behavior system. This system is what must be intentionally laid aside and replaced by the beliefs and behaviors of Jesus. This exchange is not optional, it is the will of God and is in fact the Christian life. There is no Christian life in reality without taaking off the old and putting on the new by the power of the Spirit. It is time for the Christian church to stop pretending, faking it and choose to change our hearts.
Hebrews 12:1-2 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. 2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
