What is Jesus really like? | Chapel Hill Online | Gig Harbor
What was Jesus really like? Was he a blonde-haired, blue-eyed supermodel? Was he meek and mild? In this sermon from Pastor Larry Hackman, we explore how Jesus is our warrior king, and how He fights for us and already has the battle plan.
Discussion Questions:
How do you visualize Jesus? Read Joshua 5:13-15 and Revelation 2:12-17. How does this description match up with how you often think of Jesus?
Read Joshua 5:13-6:27. What details in the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho help you to remember that God is at the center of this battle?
What are the pressures on your life that tempt you to take Jesus out of the center of your battles? Make a commitment this week to re-center yourself on Christ this week by taking time to read through one of the gospels.
Transcript:
Recently, I have been fascinated by the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the company she started, Theranos. If you don’t know, currently Holmes is under trial for 10 counts of fraud. In 2015 Forbes ran an article proclaiming Holmes was the wealthiest and youngest self-made billionaire with a net worth of 9 billion dollars. Elizabeth had claimed to have developed a machine that could quickly and accurately perform lab tests using mere drops of blood. Instead of the usual needles and days of turn around time, her machine would almost instantly give results from a relatively painless finger prick. Except none of it was true. She had helped develop a prototype, but that prototype was hopelessly non-functional and couldn’t actually do the things she claimed it could.
What got me interested in this story was the question of how? How could very wealthy, very influential, and presumably very smart people have not seen the truth? It seemed outrageous. The answer, of course, is multi-faceted, but part of the reason has to do with what people were centered around. They were so centered around some particular thing that they ignored all the warning signs and red flags that Theranos was a house of cards. Some people were centered around being successful, so they were afraid that if they didn’t pour money into Theranos they would miss out on the next big thing. Some people were centered around money, they were afraid they would miss out on reaping the profits. Others were centered around Elizabeth Holmes and her magnetic personality. They were looking for the next Steve Jobs, the next brilliant inventor and leader who would disrupt the industry through the force of their intellect and magnetic personality. And Elizabeth Holmes fostered that. But in the end, it turns out they’d all centered on the wrong thing, and $9 Billion of worth was unveiled to be worth nothing at all, actually.
Hi, I’m Larry, one of the pastors here at Chapel Hill. I help serve by managing staff and on Sundays I’m usually helping out with our church planting Port Orchard with my wife Megan, who is the Lead Pastor at the plant. But this Sunday I have the privilege of sharing God’s Word with you. We’ve been exploring the book of Joshua and the story of the Israelites claiming the land God had promised them hundreds of years before. [PIC of map of conquest] They’d been rescued by God from Egypt, had journeyed through the wilderness, and at the point of the story we are at they are the doorstep of the land, having just crossed over the river Jordan, and they are about to embark on a series of battles. But there’s something very different about the way Israel fights their battles. Their battles aren’t really their battles, they’re God’s battles. So we’re starting a series we’re calling Not Your Battle to talk about the battles we fight, and how we fight them.
One thing I want to mention before we get into the text is that there are times in the next couple of chapters of Joshua there is a lot of violence. Most importantly it talks about the Israelites killing everyone in a city. Even here in Joshua, it talks about how they killed men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. It sounds an awful lot like genocide. Even to me, this is extremely troubling and it deserves time to talk about, but unfortunately that’s not time we will take this morning, for two reasons. One, it’s not the main thrust of the passage, so we would be following a sidebar to really address it. And two, this deserves more than a sidebar, it deserves way more. So we want to really give it the attention it deserves and not gloss over it. This week, Pastor Gunnar will tackle this problem in a vlog and really go in depth about how to understand what’s going on here. So I thought it would be good to mention something before we go on to let you know we would address it. The most troubling thing about this is that it causes us to question the heart of God. Is God some bloodthirsty, murdering God? However we understand this part of Joshua, I want you to hear the heart of God from…
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