Good morning, everyone. If you take your Bibles, open up
to the Gospel of Luke Chapter 9, Luke Chapter 9, that's page 919.
If you're using one of the Bibles in the seats around you
as you're opening up to Luke 9, I want you to think about a
question that has changed your life, a question that someone
has asked you at some point in time that you know, this was a
defining moment in my life. Maybe it was should I buy this
new house? Maybe it was should I say yes to
this person who wants to marry me?
I I think about sometimes in my own life that the reality of
questions that have shaped my life in different ways, hard
questions I've had to wrestle with.
Like. Do you really believe the Leafs
will win the Stanley Cup in your lifetime?
One of the probably most poignant questions I was asked
came in a season where I was even unusually busy in serving
God and doing some things in ministry.
And someone came up to me and said, hey, Kirk, what are you
trying to prove to God? Why are you doing more than what
you should be doing? And that was like straight to
the heart penetrating kind of question that makes you pause
and think and wrestle with something like that.
You see, there are some questions that don't just inform
our lives, they define our lives.
You've probably had a lot of those kinds of questions.
Am I happy? What is my purpose in life?
Should I take this job? Will I be OK?
Will the people I love be OK? And as we come to the passage
today in Luke Chapter 9, Jesus is going to shape his disciples
through a question. In fact, it is the single most
important question Jesus could ask you or me or any other
person. So let's read the passage
beginning in verse 18 of Luke Chapter 9.
While he was praying in private and his disciples were with him,
he asked them, who do the crowds say that I am?
And they answered John the Baptist, others, Elijah, still
others, that one of the ancient prophets has come back.
But you, he asked them, Who do you say that I am?
And Peter answered, your God's Messiah.
The single most important question in life is this Who do
you say Jesus is the The question of the identity of
Jesus, more than any other question you will ever wrestle
with in your life, matters. And the reason it matters is is
because it is the one question that has eternal consequences
and present day implications at the same time.
A couple of weeks ago, Pastor Derek talked about some of the
most common misconceptions that people have when it comes to who
Jesus is. And if you missed that sermon
from a couple of weeks ago, I really encourage you to go back,
review it, watch it. It's an incredibly helpful,
great teaching on some of the misconceptions people have about
Jesus. It's important that we
accurately understand the identity of who Jesus is.
Now, when I say identity, I don't just mean the fact that
Jesus existed. Historians are confident that
Jesus existed. Graham Stanton from Cambridge
University in England, he said this.
He said today nearly all historians, whether Christian or
not, except that Jesus existed and that the Gospels contain
plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and
assessed critically. So historians agreed Jesus
existed. So if he existed, then the next
logical question is, well, who was this guy?
Who is he? If you're not a history buff and
you don't really care about religion, you may not really
care because Jesus just another historical figure to study.
But what if that question of who is Jesus really, truly does have
eternal implications? What if it really does make a
difference in the way that you approach every single thing in
your life, not just part of your life, all of your life.
If you're here today or you're watching online and you're
exploring the Christian faith, who is Jesus is the primary
question to consider, and everything else flows from
there. The Christian faith is not a
faith primarily of rules and regulations.
It's not a faith of knowledge. It's a faith that is centered in
a person named Jesus. One of the mistakes that people
often make when they're exploring the Christian faith is
is they'll come to the Bible and they'll go, OK, I want to
understand all the things in the Bible before I make a decision
about Jesus. So I need to know, like, is it
really true? What happened in Genesis 1 and
2? Did all of that really happen?
Or the stuff in Revelation of a weird creature with horns coming
out of his head. Is that real?
Because it raises so many questions and doubts for me.
And so we go looking for all of our questions to be answered
first before we decide if we're going to put our faith and
belief in Jesus. But the Christian faith actually
works the opposite of that. The Christian faith starts with
the question of who is Jesus, and everything flows out of that
answer to that question. We have to figure out who Jesus
is and read everything else in the Bible through that lens.
Now, I know that for the majority of us in the room
today, we have settled this question in our hearts a long
time ago, who is Jesus? But for those of you who have
already made-up your mind who Jesus is, I want you to keep
your heart and mind open as we walk through this passage.
Because the truth is, this is the one question you're going to
have to keep coming back to over and over again throughout your
life. Now, when it comes to
understanding the identity of Jesus, one of the common things
that people will do is try and find out, well, what do other
people think about this question?
How would other people answer the question?
So we read books about the historical Jesus, we listen to
podcasts, we talk to friends, whatever that looks like.
And while it's OK and good to be aware of what other people
think, don't settle for what someone else says about Jesus in
verses 18 and 19. Peter is very well aware of what
other people think about who Jesus is.
Jesus says, who do people say I am?
And the disciples are answering the question.
This is who other people say that you are.
They're very familiar with what the talk of the town is about
who Jesus is. But as we read just in these 3
verses, Peter learns to figure out his own answer to the
question. He doesn't just depend on
everybody else's answer to the question.
There are some of you who maybe have experienced church life
before even being here at Forward, and many of you have
experienced deep hurt and wounds from other Christians and
churches. Some of you are looking at kind
of the world that we live in today and you see some things
that Christians do and you go, man, that does not line up with
what I think a Christian is supposed to do.
And there's a disconnect there for you.
And what happens is your experiences end up shaping your
definition of who Jesus is. You allow other people to shape
that definition in your mind and your heart of who Jesus is.
And so let me just say to you on this, if the the things that
other people have said and done that don't reflect Jesus well
are the reasons why you are doubting or struggling with
Jesus, that's not entirely fair to Jesus to allow other people
to define him for you. Let Jesus stand on his own
without being defined by what other people have or have not
done. There are also a lot of people
who've been in Christian environments for a very long
time who know all the right answers to the questions.
So, you know, OK, this is what I'm supposed to answer when I
say, when someone says who is Jesus?
And you've memorized the answers to the questions and you do it
because not necessarily that you believe it, but it's the right
thing to say and do when you're at church.
For example, there are a lot of people in our church who have
the incredible blessing of growing up in Christian homes.
And you grow up in a Christian home and, and, and, and you are
just surrounded by the teaching of who Jesus is and what the
Christian faith is all about. And, and, and what you end up
finding is that your entire idea of Jesus ends up being based off
of what mom or dad or a youth leader or a, a, a, a teacher in
kids ministry has told you Jesus is.
But at some point it's critical that you answer the question for
yourself that you don't believe simply because your parents
believe something about Jesus. One of the things I love that's
happening this weekend right now is we have about 80 students who
are off at a retreat discovering for themselves who Jesus is,
entering into a space where they're learning to take
ownership of their faith. And if you're a parent here
today and your kids have been asking you hard questions and
you're thinking, ma'am, maybe they've got some doubts, maybe
they're struggling with their faith.
I just want you to know, don't freak out.
It's OK. It's good.
In fact, it's healthy for your kids to be asking those kinds of
questions. It's good for them to wrestle
with that. Who is Jesus to me?
You have not necessarily failed your kids.
When they start to ask those kinds of questions, it's good to
createspace for them to explore for themselves.
Like I remember that moment for myself.
I, I had grown up in church. I've been taught all the rules
of the Bible, but then just reading the Bible for myself and
seeing things that just came to life that God wanted to speak
directly to me, not just through other people.
It's incredibly life giving when you discover that for me, the
defining moment in in that journey was I grown up in this
environment where Christianity was all about all the rules you
have to keep. And then one day I read the
words of Jesus where Jesus says the single greatest command is
to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength.
And that was like a light bulb went off in my head and where
God just said to me, seek Kirk, it's not about all the rules.
It's ultimately about my love for you and your love back to
me. That's the Christian faith.
So if you're exploring Jesus or you've been going to church for
a long time, don't just settle for other people's opinions.
The truth is, you're invited to get close enough to Jesus to
discover who He is for yourself. By the time we get to Peter
being asked this question here in these verses, Peter's been
traveling with Jesus for 2 to 2 1/2 years already.
He spent time observing Jesus in action.
He's seen Jesus working miracles.
He's listened to Jesus teaching. He saw how Jesus has interacted
with people and cared for people and love people.
And so the answer Peter is about to give to this question is not
based on having memorized the right answer to the question.
The answer Peter is about to give to this question is based
on his experience with Jesus. Sometimes you can come to a
church environment like this and somebody's going to ask you a
direct question like this one. Who do you say Jesus is?
And it feels like a pop quiz like I got to get the answer
right or else. And you feel this incredible
pressure. And so I, I want, if that's you
today, I just want to take the pressure off.
Nobody likes a pop quiz not giving you a pop quiz to the
question. Here's what I want you to hear.
We want you to take the time to discover for yourself who Jesus
is. We don't need to give you a
sales pitch. We, we don't need you to buy a
product. We want to invite you to take
the time for yourself to discover who Jesus is.
And after all this time of walking with Jesus, here's the
conclusion that Peter comes to. He says in verse 20, you are
God's Messiah. That's who Jesus is.
That's his identity. Some Bible translations will say
you are the Christ the OR the Son of God, and they're saying
the same thing. Christ is not the last name of
Jesus. You know, some of us might think
that his name was Jesus Christ. That's not his last name.
It's a title. The words Messiah and Christ
both carry the same meaning. It's a it's a title that means
the anointed one. To be the anointed one meant
that you were set apart by God for a special purpose and
reason. That in the Old Testament, being
the anointed one was often symbolized by pouring on of oil
on a person. And while Peter is saying he's
come to believe that Jesus is the one who is sent by God to
accomplish God's purposes in redeeming the world, that's what
he's saying. And to us as Christians, this is
the statement that brings us together that Jesus is God's
Messiah. In Matthew's version of this
story, after Peter makes this confession, Jesus says on this
rock, I will build my church. Jesus saying based on this
confession of who I am, that I am the Messiah, I'm going to
build my church. This is what unites us.
The church does not primarily exist to be a social community,
although there are social elements to what we do.
The church does not exist to run a bunch of good programs,
although that's part of what we do.
The church does not primarily exist to sing some nice songs or
to show up in an auditorium on Sunday morning and listen to a
guy talk for half an hour, although that is part of what we
do. The church is united around 1
answer to one question. Jesus is the Messiah.
That's who we are as Christians. And one of the things that is so
heartbreaking is to see the kinds of things that Christians
are debating and dividing over in our world today, like things
that we are arguing about that do not matter in the grand
scheme of eternity. The single thing that matters is
who do you say Jesus is on the day you and I stand before God.
He is not going to say, so take me through your entire
theological statement so we can decide if you can get into
heaven or not. He's not going to sit there and
say, take me through all the theologians and postures that
you listen to so I can decide if I agreed with those guys or not,
so you can get into heaven. He's not going to sit there and
say, were you a Calvinist or an Armenian?
He's not going to ask that question.
The only question that matters is what did you do with Jesus?
Who do you say Jesus is? That's all that matters when it
comes to our eternity. All those other things are good
questions, interesting conversations, but have no
bearing on our eternal salvation.
And most of us in this room, we will all agree that we believe
Jesus is the Messiah. But that leads to another
question. What do we actually mean when we
say that Jesus is the Messiah? Do you even know what that
means? Or is it just a title and it's
the right answer to the question?
Well, to say that you believe Jesus is the Messiah is best
understood with three words Prophet, priest, and king.
In in the Bible, those are the people who were anointed by God
for a special purpose, prophets, priests, and kings.
Up to that point, the world had seen all kinds of people carry
one of those titles of prophet, priest, or king.
But now Peter is recognizing Jesus as the anointed by God to
carry all three titles, that Jesus is the ultimate prophet,
priest, and king. So let me unpack that for us so
we understand what that means. First of all, Jesus is the
prophet who shows what God is like.
Imagine for a moment that God actually wanted to speak to you.
What? What does God sound like to you
in your head? What what does God sound like to
you? Is he?
Is he like the warm and cozy and fun grandpa that just wants to
hang out with you and feed you lots of sugar?
Is he the harsh and direct like a controlling parent or employer
stern kind of conversation? One of the things that God
consistently does in the Bible is send prophets to reveal God
to the people. And so these prophets would show
up and they would tell the people what God wanted them to
say, what God wanted communicated to the people.
And so when we see Jesus, he does the exact same thing.
In John 14 Jesus says the word that you hear is not mine, but
is from the Father who sent me. So every word that comes from
Jesus is not just Jesus words, it is what God wanted to say
through Jesus to people. So Jesus is a prophet just like
every other prophet. But then Jesus is a prophet in
an even better way than all the other prophets.
One of the many reasons we keep encouraging you to open your
Bible and to meditate on the Bible is because God wants to
reveal Himself to you through the Word.
And one of the things we see in the Word in John 14 verse 9,
Jesus says this. If you've seen me, you've seen
the Father. Jesus wasn't just the prophet
who spoke the words of God. Jesus was the greater prophet
who actually embodied what God is like.
When you want to understand what God is like, you look to Jesus.
So when we as God's people confess Jesus as the Messiah,
what we're saying is Jesus doesn't just give us information
about God. Jesus reveals who God is.
He doesn't just talk about God. He puts God on display for us.
So if you want to know like what does God think about suffering
and grief? You look at Jesus, you watch him
at the tomb of Lazarus if you want to know how God treats
outsiders. You look at Jesus and how he
interacts with a guy like Zacchaeus.
If you want to understand how God responds to self-righteous
people or injustices in the world, or political powers, or
people who are broken, or people who are humble about their sin,
watch Jesus. He embodies what God is like.
He is the greater prophet who is revealing God to us.
Any issue that you want to understand what God thinks and
what God has to say, you look to Jesus.
And as Jesus reveals God to us, he's also going to reveal how
far you and I have fallen from God's standards.
And that's why it's also important we understand that
Jesus is the priest who mediates between God and people.
If a prophet brought God to the people, the priestess is
designed to bring the people to God.
Many of you have grown up in traditions where you are called
to confess your sins to a priest because some believe that God
Forgives sin through a minister of the Church.
But every single priest in all of human history is imperfect in
some way. Jesus is the only priest who's
perfect in every way. The in the Old Testament, every
priest had to keep offering sacrifices over and over and
over again because the sin was never fully dealt with.
Jesus came and offered a sacrifice that was sufficient
once for all time. And while priests in the Old
Testament sacrificed an animal for the atonement of sins, Jesus
offers himself as the ultimate sacrifice.
And here's what all that means for you and me when we believe
that Jesus is the Messiah. If you confess Jesus as the
Christ, if you believe in your heart he is who the Bible says
he is, your sins are fully forgiven in the eyes of God.
Like imagine someone showed up at the bank today, went up to a
bank teller and said, hey, Kirk has this debt.
Here's all the cash to pay off his debt.
And oh, by the way, here's my card.
And whenever he incurs more debt, just put it on my account.
I've got that taken care of too. That's what Jesus has done with
your sin and my sin completely paid for past, present, future.
And not only that, because Jesus is your priest, it also means
your salvation is secure. Like some of us, we get worried
about be Am I being good enough as a Christian to keep my
salvation? We sang it earlier.
Jesus paid it all. All.
You cannot and do not need to worry about paying more to be
able to keep your salvation. Your salvation is secure because
Jesus is the priest. Jesus as priest also means that
you and I, we've got direct access to God, that you don't
need to confess your sins to a priest in order to be forgiven.
Jesus is the high Priest who gives you direct access to God
for the forgiveness of your sins.
Now, just because Jesus has forgiven you of your sins, that
does not mean you've got permission to do whatever you
want to do. Because to believe Jesus is your
Messiah also means that you believe Jesus is the King who
has ultimate authority. The Jews understood that kings
were anointed by God, and the Jews kept looking for the next
political king who was going to rescue them from the Romans.
But The thing is, there have been plenty of political kings
in human history. Jesus is better than that.
They all come and go. Anyone who just wants Jesus to
be a political king is thinking way too small.
Jesus is the greater king because Jesus is the one who
would conquer the one thing that no other king could ever
conquer. He's the one who conquers sin
and death, and so to to declare Jesus as King is to believe that
he is the one that everything else should fall under, that he
is the authority above all other authorities.
He's the one who's going to establish true justice in the
world. The crazy thing is that while
other kings and political leaders try to impose their
power over your life through laws and decrees and press
conferences and social media posts, King Jesus works the
opposite way. His kingship is marked by
humility and sacrifice and love and suffering.
For you to acknowledge Jesus as King is not the same thing as
saying King Charles is King because none of us, I shouldn't
say none of us. There might be some royal people
in the room. Most of us do not go about our
whole life going. I wonder what King Charles wants
me to do today. To acknowledge Jesus as King is
to say I am putting my life under the authority of Jesus as
King of everything. It's not a theoretical He's
king, but he is my king. It's not a theoretical He's all
powerful. And then we move on.
To believe Jesus is the Messiah is to say He's my king.
And that has profound impact on our lives because most of us
hate the idea of submitting ourselves to the control of
someone else. Most of us like to live with
something we've been taught our whole life.
Be your own boss, make your own decisions, do what you want to
do, how you want to do it, when you want to do it, and just do
life your own way. And we live with the idea of
nobody can tell me what to do. And this is where believing in
Jesus moves past a nice set of statements that you say you
agree with, to being a life that changes your life.
If you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, what you are doing is
you are surrendering yourself to him, all of yourself to him.
You are surrendering your time to the kingship of Jesus.
You are surrendering your wallet to the kingship of Jesus.
You are surrendering your relationships and how you
approach relationships to the kingship of Jesus.
You are surrendering how you relate to the people you like
and the people you don't like to the kingship of Jesus.
You're surrendering your purpose in life to the kingship of
Jesus. Every single one of us lives in
a Kingdom with a king. There's always someone or
something that is ruling over our life, even if that's someone
or something is ourselves. Paul Tripp said this.
He said little Kingdom living is an endless search for earthly
treasure and an unending focus on personal need.
Grace calls you to a bigger Kingdom.
When you're a citizen of God's Kingdom, you're a part of a
Kingdom that cannot be shaken. You are.
You are serving a king who promises to protect you, provide
for you, and care for you. And that is what Peter's answer
to the question is. Who do you say I am, Peter?
You're the Messiah. You are the ultimate prophet,
priest, and king. So what about you?
How would you answer the question?
Who do you say Jesus is? If Jesus really is the ultimate
prophet, priest and king, then what we do with him makes a
profound difference with our lives.
It's the most important decision you'll ever make.
And as I said earlier, I know there are many people in the
room who are exploring the Christian faith.
And I want to encourage you, take your time and keep
exploring. And the reason why I say that is
because I believe with all my heart, as you discover Jesus and
explore who Jesus is, you are going to find out, you're going
to taste and see that he is good and he is worth trusting your
entire life too. But some of you, you've been
exploring for a long time and you've got a lot of answers to
questions already, but for some reason, there's a there's a
block for you that's stopping you from being ready to confess
Jesus as Messiah. And so I just want to encourage
you. What are you waiting for?
What's holding you back? Why not today be the day where
you finally say, I believe Jesus is the Messiah?
You can do that just right in your own heart, right where you
are just like Jesus. I believe that you are the
Christ. And all of that means for me,
You're the one who shows me what God is like.
You're the one who paid for my sins, and I need you to save me
from my sins. You're the King who conquered
sin, and I surrender my life to you.
The Bible says part of the reason why God wants us to see
who Jesus really is is because of the life that God wants to
give us in Jesus. Listen to these words.
These things are written so you might believe that Jesus is the
Messiah and that by believing you might have life in his name.
That's why God wants us to come to this understanding of Jesus
as Messiah. Many of you are here today.
You're walking with someone and your greatest desire is you just
want them to become a disciple of Jesus.
And I just want to say to you, just be patient and keep
modeling Jesus to them, keep inviting them to come.
And most of us, we're believers in Jesus, but there's some
things we've forgotten about what the implications are of
believing in Jesus. We're, we're really glad that
Jesus is our priest who paid for our salvation, but we really
don't pay much attention to Jesus being king or being the
one who reveals God to us. There's one thing I know about
most of us is we're, we're, we would all say we're busy.
We run around to all kinds of activities and we're anxious and
we're filled with all kinds of worry over any number of things
in the world. But how would your approach to
life be different if you just simply remembered again that
Jesus is the one who reveals God to us?
I know when I lose sight of it, I will read the Bible more like
a task as opposed to reading the Bible to hear God's word.
To me. When I lose sight of Jesus as
King, I'll make hundreds of decisions in the course of a
week without really thinking about what is it that Jesus
wants. So just think about even this
coming week, today and going into this week, you're going to
make hundreds of decisions. You're going to make decisions
with your calendar. What does it look like for Jesus
to be king? You're going to make decisions
about what food to eat, how to care for your body.
What does it look like for Jesus to be king over everything?
One of the realities for us is that following Jesus is going to
be a lifelong journey of discovering who he truly is.
It's one thing to be able to say I believe Jesus is the Messiah,
but what you're going to discover is over the course of
your life, you're going to continue to discover what it
really means practically that Jesus is the Messiah.
If you're, if you're here today and you're almost ready to
believe and you go, but I feel like I have to understand it all
first. I want you to know you're not
likely going to understand it all first because Jesus, over
the course of your life, he's going to keep showing you more
and more of who he is. And if you're already a
believer, over the course of your life, it's going to be a
journey of discovering what it really means to trust Jesus as
prophet, priest, and king. Peter, in these verses, he makes
this confession where he says this is the answer, you are the
Messiah. But that was not the end of the
story for Peter. That's like the beginning of the
story for Peter. In the months and the years that
are ahead of him, those words, that belief statement is going
to take on a whole new set of meaning to Peter.
He had no clue what he was fully saying, and he consistently
failed to live like a man who believed like it was true.
Like he confesses Jesus as Messiah here, but just a while
later he's going to rebuke Jesus when Jesus says I have to go to
Jerusalem to die. And he's like, no, you can't do
that. There's so many things that
Peter's going to discover more about the implications of what
it means to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
So much more room to understand what it means to really believe
this. And over and over again in your
life, you're going to face, you're going to come face to
face with situations that are going to test and stretch your
faith in different ways. And if you're in a spot like
that, I want to encourage you with something.
Just keep bringing yourself back to who Jesus is because it's
going to help you make sense of all that's going on.
When you're in the spot of the greatest uncertainties in your
life and you don't know what tomorrow holds, step back and
remind yourself, I believe that Jesus is King and all things are
under His authority. I'm going to be OK.
When you're questioning your salvation because you just got
doubts and fear, step back. Remind yourself that Jesus is
the priest who paid it all. I, I, I I can't work my way back
to God. He's the priest who paid it all.
It's OK. I just need to trust Him when
you're looking at the state of the world around us and you're
going I, I can't make sense of all the stuff and the chaos
that's going on in the world. And I don't know whose voice to
listen to in the in in the mess of noise of voices that all have
an opinion on what's right and what's wrong.
Step back, go. Jesus is the prophet who reveals
God to us. Everything becomes much more
clear when I hear His voice above all the other voices.
The reality that Jesus is the Messiah will come to life for
you over and over again as you follow Him.
It is not something that we just believe one time and then move
on. It's what we keep coming back to
again and again that shapes how we approach everything in our
life. Remember that.
Who do you say Jesus is? Believe it, come back to it,
live like it's true. Father, thank you so much for
your word. Thank you for this penetrating
question. Who do you believe Jesus is?
Thank you for your word that reveals who Jesus is to us.
God, I pray for every person in this room.
This will not be simply a statement to check off a list,
but it will be a belief that takes root in our hearts and
lives and shapes and informs how we approach everything in our
lives. Jesus, you are the Messiah.
You are the Christ and we worship You.
Amen. Stand together and worship Him.