Getting Close To Christ - December '08 - Day 3

December 3, 2008 …

Passage of the Day: Philippians 2: 6a [see highlight passage in bold/red] … 5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the Name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

My Journal for Today: Yes, here we are with the same short sub-verse, … Phil. 2: 6a. However, I hope that you’re disciplining yourself to read and meditate on the entire passage of Phil. 2: 5 – 11 each day with me while we’re in this passage of Scripture. Who knows? If we use that passage a lot this month [and we will], we might all get to know Jesus more closely than ever before. Is that not reason enough to be meditating daily on this passage for this month?

So, as we focus on Phil. 2: 6a again, we’re looking into the centerpiece of our beliefs as a Christian in this statement about the deity of Christ. You see, one cannot claim to be a disciple of Christ without holding faithfully to the core belief that Jesus was Whom He claimed to be … the ever existent God Himself. If one also goes to a verse like John 8: 58, we read Jesus clearly referring to Himself as the eternal “I AM,” which was the equivalent of the term God used to name Himself to Moses in Exodus 3: 14. And so, the unbelieving Jews, hearing Jesus proclaiming Himself to be God (in John 8: 58), immediately picked up stones to kill Jesus, whom they felt had committed unpardonable blasphemy. But as we know, Jesus somehow hid himself from them because it wasn’t His time to die.

Actually, everyone is confronted with the ultimate question: “Is Jesus Who He claimed to be?” And if we declare ourselves to be “Christian,” we must believe that Jesus is One Who existed before Abraham existed (again as He claimed John 5: 58 – 59). Historically it’s easy to see that there was an historical Jesus of Nazareth, the adopted son of a carpenter, Who was born in Bethlehem and Who was crucified on that hill called Golgotha. But to be a born-again Christian, we have to buy into His claims of being One with His Father … and that He truly was - and is - God.

When the Apostle Paul was charging one of his young protégés, Titus (see Titus 1: 9), reviewing the characteristics of Christian leadership, Paul said that a leader in the church (and really he’s speaking to all Christians as well) must hold fast and stand faithful to the teachings we are describing herein – that Jesus Christ was – and is – the ever existent God, … the great “I AM.” We must be willing and able to stand for Christ’s deity, even in the face of the historical fact of this Man who died so ignominiously in humiliation on the cross. So, as we read in Col. 1: 15 – 17 of Christ’s deity (also in Hebrews 1: 3), will we be defenders of the truth of Christ’s deity?

Now we have to ask ourselves, “Do we live up to the declaration of Romans 1: 16, which says, ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ!’ ? “ I leave it to you to decide where you stand.

But, stay tuned … there’s more!

My Prayer Today: My dear Jesus, I stand with You as the Lord God! Amen