John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”

Many people are scrambling in these last few hours to find the perfect gift for that special someone. Maybe the perfect toy for a son or daughter, the perfect set of earrings for a wife, a fiancé or a mom or the perfect phone or electronics for the teenager in your home. I work in the car sales business, and people get new cars or newer cars for Christmas often. Every commercial is about the perfect gift in this or that, depending on the target audience. Well, no matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter how much money you have, the only Perfect Gift is Jesus. Unlike most gifts, He never gets old, He never breaks, and He is the gift that keeps on giving.

Let us explore a bit about how perfect Jesus is.

First, we must answer, who is Jesus? His Person directly identifies His perfection. In John 5:16-18 we are met by a stark statement from Jesus’ enemies. He is having one of His many discussions with the Jewish leaders; this particular one is sparked by Jesus healing someone on the Sabbath, and this is the chat they have:

“For this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill Him because He had done these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.’ Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill Him because He not only broke the Sabbath but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.”

Jesus, by calling Himself the Son of God, made himself equal to God. This is a significant statement by His enemies. Jesus is God; equal to God. Now we can explore His perfection in many categories.

Jesus is the Perfect Man, Luke 23:4, 14-15. Pilate came to the conclusion after examining Jesus and His accusers that he could ‘find no fault’ in this Man. Later in the same chapter, Jesus is examined by Herod, one of the 4 leaders of the area under Caesar; and again, He was found to have no faults. Jesus was the perfect Man. The scriptures tell us this in Hebrews 9:12-14:

“And not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

He offered Himself, without blemish – this is Perfection. Jesus, the Perfect Man.

Jesus is the Perfect Son. I have 4 brothers and a sister. I cannot imagine what it was like to live in Jesus’ household and have Him as an older brother. The Bible summarizes His life growing up from the age of 12-30 this way in Luke 2:51-52:

“Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them, but His mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.”

This was the account of Jesus and his family travelling to Jerusalem to observe the Passover; and once the feast was ended, Jesus stayed behind, being some 12 years old and was found debating with the Rabbis in the Temple. But then He went home with His parents, and these two verses give us a glimpse of 18 years of His life. Jesus submitted to His earthly parents, He grew in wisdom, He grew physically and He grew in character; in favor with God and man. He was the Perfect Son, both in the sense that He is the Son of God; but also, He perfectly fulfilled the 5th Commandment with regard to His earthly parents.

Jesus is the Perfect Friend. In John 13: 26-30 we see this account of the night Jesus was betrayed by Judas:

“Jesus answered, ‘It is he to whom I shall give a piece of bread when I have dipped it.’ And having dipped the bread, He gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. Now after the piece of bread, Satan entered him. Then Jesus said to him, ‘What you do, do quickly.’ But no one at the table knew for what reason He said this to him. For some thought, because Judas had the money box, that Jesus had said to him, ‘Buy those things we need for the feast,’ or that he should give something to the poor. Having received the piece of bread, he then went out immediately. And it was night.”

Judas did not sneak up on Jesus and catch Him off-guard. Jesus knew who Judas was when He chose him as an apostle. There are some lessons to be learned here for us, and I don’t want to belabor them, but being Judas who had the best teacher, he was an eyewitness to miracles that simply defy understanding; he may have even performed miracles himself on the 2 missionary journeys that he was sent on by Jesus.

But none of this is a substitute for being saved. One must trust Jesus as Savior personally and not as part of a group to be saved. No one gets grouped in. But on that very night when Judas would betray Him, Jesus washed His feet, Jesus fed him and did not out him to the group. He was the Perfect Friend right to the very end. Jesus was gracious to His enemy and faithful to His betrayer. He did good to the one who had plotted to hurt Him. Jesus, the Perfect Friend. What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.

Jesus, the Perfect Servant. In the last section, we briefly touched on Jesus washing Judas’ feet. I saw a post on Facebook from a brother in the Lord. He, speaking about this very event, lamented that when contemplating what he would do on his last night of life, washing someone’s feet would not be high on his list.

Yet, here in John 13:1-17, “Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. And supper being ended, the devil having already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.

“Then He came to Simon Peter. And Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, are You washing my feet?’ Jesus answered and said to him, ‘What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this.’ Peter said to Him, ‘You shall never wash my feet!’ Jesus answered him, ‘If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.’ Simon Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head!’ Jesus said to him, ‘He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet but is completely clean; and you are clean, but not all of you.’ For He knew who would betray Him; therefore He said, ‘You are not all clean.’

“So when He had washed their feet, taken His garments, and sat down again, He said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.'”

Jesus instructs us to do as He did in the above verses. The principle we learn is the Leader must be the chief servant. Whether as a husband at home, a pastor at church, a small-group worker, a Sunday School teacher, and on I can do. The Leader is the head servant, and if you are not, then you are not following Jesus’ example. Jesus is still washing feet today; we find that, in 1 John 1:8-9, we are saved but as we travel through the world and life, we get stained with sin; and when we confess our sin, He faithfully washes our feet and keeps us clean. The Lord’s churches, the Lord’s families and the Lord’s Kingdom, in general, need more faithful servants.

Jesus is the Perfect Healer. As a child growing up in church, I often heard about the Lord’s miracles. Feeding the 5,000, 4,000, walking on water, making the blind to see and the lepers clean. But when you read the scriptures for yourself, you will find that Jesus healed thousands, entire cities and their surrounding areas brought the sick and lame to Him, and he healed them all.

Look at Matthew 4:23-25: “And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people. Then His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed them. Great multitudes followed Him—from Galilee, and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.”

John the apostle writes in John 21:25 that the world did not have enough books to contain all the things that Jesus did. Jesus never got tired of healing people. He took their pains away. One of my favorite accounts is that of Him touching a leper. In Matthew 8:3, Jesus heals a leper and, in the process, touched him. How long had it been since that man had felt the human touch? How long had it been since he had felt loved? Jesus did not just heal His body; He healed His soul. He, Jesus, is the Perfect Healer. So many today need the healing touch of Jesus. You and I are to be His hands and feet to the hurting world around us.

Jesus is the Perfect Intercessor. In John 17 we have an account of the Lord praying on the night He would be betrayed. John gives us a detailed chapter of His prayer. In John 17: 20-21, Jesus prays for you and me.

“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”

Look at verse 20. He prayed for all those who will believe. That is us. Today, Jesus is still interceding for us each and every day. Are we interceding for each other? I know I can do more praying and a lot less criticizing.

Jesus is our Perfect Sacrifice. In 1 Peter 1:18-19 we see these lovely words that describe our Lord Jesus:

“Knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”

Jesus is our Perfect Sacrifice, one without spot. He never sinned though He was tempted and tested by Satan. Hebrews 4:14-18 tells us this:

“Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us, therefore, come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

 Jesus was ‘without sin.’ He never, not once sinned. As such, He did not deserve death, but He took our death so we could have His life. He is our Perfect Sacrifice.

Jesus is our Perfect King. One day soon He will return to set up the Millennial Kingdom. And in the book of Isaiah we are told this about His reign as King, Isaiah 2: 1-4:

“The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; And all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, ‘Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and rebuke many people; They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Wow! No one will learn war for 1,000 years. Jesus will settle all disputes between nations, and He will teach them the ways of Holiness; His ways. Jesus, our Perfect King; He will do for the world what the UN thinks they can do without Jesus. Only Jesus is the Perfect Prince of Peace.

Jesus is the Perfect Gift. He was given to us by God the Father as an offering for our sins. A gift to bring us eternal life and to give us real and tangible hope.

Give someone the gift of Jesus today by telling them the true story of how a Baby in a little town in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago came to pay for our freedom. Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. Believe that He, the Perfect, sinless Son of God paid for your sin debt to God, and in His resurrection provides us with the chance to be saved forever.

Have you humbled yourself before the Perfect Saviour? He loves you and has offered Himself for you, a ransom, redeeming you from your sin and death to holiness and life.

Merry Christmas.

Sean Gooding, Pastor

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

 

Exodus 5:1-2

“Afterward, Moses and Aaron went in and told Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel: ‘Let My people go, that they may hold a feast to Me in the wilderness.’” And Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the Lord, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go.’”

As we approach the Christmas celebration, we come face to face with the veracity and validity of the Bible:

Did Jesus really come?

Is the Bible just a cunning book of crafted stories and can we trust that God is real and that He loves us?

It is my intent to equip and prepare the Lord’s people for the mess that is coming our way over the next few weeks, months and years.

I was saved at the age of 14 in Barbados, a little spot on the global map. I had heard the Gospel many times before but, that Monday night 36 years ago, I asked Jesus to forgive my sins and to save me. According to the Bible, I am saved. I believe that Jesus is God, that He died for my sins, that he is the only way of salvation, and in my need for a Savior, I called on His name to save me. My salvation is not based on a feeling or a ‘hope so.’ It is based on the written Word of God, and the confidence, faith and trust that I put in the person of Jesus Christ. In Romans 10:8-13 we find these words, from the Bible, but what does it say?

“The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For ‘whoever calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.'”

If you too have obeyed the Word of God as written here, you are saved as well. I am not perfect; I am a sinful man and I fail my family and the Lord more often than I can count. God, however, is Gracious and Kind, His Mercy is new to me each day, and His love for me is inexhaustible. He made me a promise that I can confess my sins when I sin and that He will forgive me and cleanse me of all unrighteousness every time. There are a lot of burdens put on saved people about perfection: That is not in the Bible. Passages are taken out of context and not read in a balanced view with the whole Bible.

Over the past few years, the Lord has helped my wife and me, as well as our whole church, to embark on reading the Bible cover to cover. Just start, get to the end and start again, over and over. I am on my fifth reading, and what I find is that the men whom God called were sinful men like me. Men with flaws, men who were adulterous, some murderers, like Moses and some who were idol worshipers like Aaron, some who were simply not nice people at all. This does not condone sin in any way. God cannot do that. But sinners we all are, and we all will be until Jesus gives us our glorified bodies and raptures us up to heaven. We can get a glimpse into how Jesus deals with us by how He told the disciples, and we as His followers, to deal with our brothers and sisters in the Lord. Here are two examples:

Luke 17:4, “And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and comes back to you seven times, saying, I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

Matthew 18:21-22, “Then Peter came to Him and said, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.'”

In the book of Proverbs, The Lord tells us, in Chapter 10:12, that “Love covers a multitude of sins.” Now some will say that I am advocating sinning and that I am taking advantage of the Grace of God. I will admit that I, as well as every other Christian on this planet, takes advantage of God’s Grace. We simply do. Our children take advantage of the love and grace that we have for them, and we are no different than they, with respect to the Lord. What the Lord requires is humility and repentance. Yes, we are to turn from our sins and work at bringing our body into submission, but we will sin, sometimes quite badly and often with dire consequences. But God is Gracious and Kind, slow to anger and patient with us His children. He remembers that we are just dust and frail at best.

Jacob, one of the Old Testament patriarchs, was a trickster who stole his brother’s birthright. He tricked his father and defrauded his brother. He married two women, had children with four, and yet God called him a Prince. God honored him and protected him, loved him and made a great nation out of him. Did he have some hard times? Yes, he did! He suffered a lot. He had strife in his house between his many wives, he had in-fighting with his children; so much so that they stole and sold off Joseph to slave traders and then told their dad he was dead. Jacob described his life on earth this way in a conversation with Pharaoh recorded in Genesis 47:9:

“And Jacob said to Pharaoh, ‘The days of the years of my pilgrimage are one hundred and thirty years; few and evil have been the days of the years of my life.'”

Jacob described the days of his life as evil. They were hard, but he knew who his God was, and he knew where he was going. There is never any doubt in his mind, no doubt in his conversation that he was going to meet his Father in Heaven. This man, like all of our ancestors in the faith, understood that salvation has never been and will never be about how good I am. If that were the case, we are all dead in our sins and going to hell. Jacob understood as did Abraham, Moses, Aaron and David that their security was based on the faithfulness of God to hold them securely in spite of their sinfulness, weaknesses, and at times “fleshliness.”

The same David who defied Goliath, numbered Israel without God’s permission. The same Samson who broke every rule of his Nazarite vow is called a servant in Hebrews 11:32. The same Elijah that called fire down from Heaven was found scared and asking God to kill him a chapter later. The same Peter who walked on water, denied Jesus in fear of a little girl. On and on I can go, but there is no need.

When we began this writing, I posed a question from Pharaoh found in Exodus 5:1-2, “Who is this Lord that I should obey Him?” Pharaoh was filled with pride. He was accustomed to being revered as a god by the people of Egypt, and to submit to the God of Israel would have meant that there was a God greater than him, and he could not have that. So, he defied God. He refused to submit; thus, over the course of the next 6 chapters, God destroys Egypt. He leaves them broken, without food, without gold and silver, and without an heir to the throne of Egypt. God completely establishes himself as the Supreme God, able to control the weather, the insects, the waters, and life itself.

What separates the Jews and the few Egyptians that obeyed God, is humility. Those that had God’s protection humbled themselves under the Mighty Hand of God and acknowledged his Sovereign Power. For those of us that are preserved in Jesus, we have come to the same crossroads, and we have chosen to humble ourselves under the Power of the Almighty God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

There is a growing number of people asking the same question, ‘Who is God that I should obey Him?’

There are only two categories of people on this planet: those who humble themselves under the Mighty Hand of God, and those who defy God and ask, ‘Who is God that I should obey Him?’

The Bible describes the people who question God’s place and authority as ‘fools.’ We are surrounded on this little planet by billions of fools. They defy God; they refuse to obey Him, not for the lack of knowledge, but because they deliberately refuse to humble themselves and obey God.

No book in the world has been investigated more than the Bible. It has never been proven to be false, and it is still the basis for the majority of our moral codes in law, in business and in society at large. You have to decide what to do with it. It either is the Word of God or it is nothing to us, but it is not just a good book.

We stand at the beginning of the end here on earth. The Lord Jesus will return to judge this earth very soon, and He will take His New Testament saints out just before all ‘Hell’ breaks loose. There will be hail, famine, earthquakes, fire from heaven, waters turning to blood, and billions will die. Yet many will defy God and ask, ‘Who is the Lord that I should obey Him?’ Many will choose the mark of the Anti-Christ over allegiance to God Almighty. If you read the book of Revelation, you will see that God is about to unleash His wrath on this earth; and the major failure will be that people, for the most part, will be un-repentant and filled with pride. And, their pride will be a willful pride; they will see the power and majesty of God much like Pharaoh did. And rather than humble themselves, they will shake their fist at the God of the Universe and defy Him. The pot will call into question the power of the Potter. We find this account from Revelation 16:17-21:

“Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ‘It is done!’ And there were noises and thunderings and lightning; and there was a great earthquake, such a mighty and great earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth. Now the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. And great Babylon was remembered before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of His wrath. Then every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And great hail from heaven fell upon men, each hailstone about the weight of a talent. Men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail since that plague was exceedingly great.”

Notice that the people still ‘blasphemed God’ instead of humbling themselves and submitting. They know for sure that this is God doing this; there is no question, but they defy Him. In Revelation 9 after four angels are released to kill millions of people, the summary of how the people of the earth reacted is shown in verses 20-21:

“But the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk. And they did not repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.”

There simply was and is no humility and no repentance: ‘Who is the Lord that we should obey Him?’ What a sad time we live in; what a difficult time to serve the Lord and to try to obey Him. We live in a time when good has been classed as evil, and vice-versa. God has been demonized and Satan elevated. Right is now wrong and evil normalized. We have excused sin for mistakes and defiance as individuality. The Bible tells us that God cannot be mocked; whatever a man sows he will also reap (Galatians 6:7). We are reaping a whirlwind of evil as we speak.

I have chosen to humble myself under the powerful and Almighty hand of God. When asked ‘Who is the Lord that you obey Him?’ I answer,

He is the ‘I AM’ who spoke to Moses from the burning bush, the Almighty God who destroyed the ‘god’ of Egypt and did not even break a sweat doing so. He is the God who delivered the Jews from bondage, fed and watered them for 40 years in the wilderness and gave them the land we call Israel today. He is the God who parted the Red Sea, the God who one day about 2,000 years ago, stepped out of Heaven and became the man Jesus Christ. He paid for my sins and then rose from the dead and established that neither death nor the grave could have any power over the saved: Ever. He is the God of the Living: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samson, David, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all alive and well. They are alive and well because they humbled themselves under the Mighty Hand of God; they submitted to the Living God and believed with all their hearts that Jesus is God.

Have you submitted to God?

Have you humbled yourself under the Almighty Hand of God?

Or are you a modern-day Pharaoh asking, ‘Who is God that I should obey Him?’

Just remember what God did to Pharaoh. It was not pretty, and Egypt has never recovered the prominence they had up until this day. For those of us that are saved, we need to discipline ourselves through the Power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to say no to sin. BUT we will sin, we will fail, and we will need to ask God for forgiveness. He will forgive, He will restore, and He will always respond to genuine humility.

Look Up! Jesus is coming soon!

Missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca