The Purpose of the Incarnation (1 Timothy 1:12-17)

Our scripture reading this morning is from First Timothy

1 Timothy 1:12–17

chapter 1, verses 12 through 17. I thank Him who has given me

strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because He judged me faithful,

appointing me to His service, Though formally I was a

blasphemer, persecutor, an insolent opponent.

But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly, and

unbelief and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the

faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

And our focus this morning will be on the remainder of these

verses. The saying is trustworthy and

deserving of full acceptance that Jesus Christ came into the

world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

But I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the

foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as

an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.

To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be

honour and glory forever and ever.

Amen. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God, Father in heaven, we thank you for these

words, these simple words which now reflect on the month in

which we celebrated your incarnation.

And now today we look with this pastor of this small church with

words from his mentor that help us gain another facet of insight

into the incomprehensible mystery of God becoming man.

O Holy Spirit, by your gracious teaching ministry, will you

drive spiritual nourishment deep, deep within our hearts,

that we might not just check off the box of going to church the

Sunday after Christmas, but we might drink deeply from the well

of everlasting life. Lord, we thank You for these

words. We entrust them to the glory of

Your holy name, in which we pray.

Amen. Please be seated.

So imagine if you would the best documentary filmmaker makes a

documentary about you. But it's not about things that

you do or places that you go or accomplishments that you

achieve. It's about your thoughts and

your feelings and your attitudes.

It's it's about your inner life. And the narrator at one point

might say something like here we see them smiling while quietly

resenting last week's disappointments.

Or the voice over at some of their point in the film might

say, notice the sincere posture of prayer and the mental To Do

List running at full speed simultaneously, punctuated by

lingering displeasures of recent personal conflicts.

Then several frames of late night scrolling.

The narrator says this isn't rest, this is more futility in

the pursuit of emptiness. But you and I both know that God

has already seen every scene and heard every line of dialogue in

our life, and he still has not cancelled the documentary.

In fact, instead of rejection based on faulty content, the

Lord still loves us. And from the month that we've

just spent together learning about the incarnation, we see

that in fact, God's glory is revealed in the salvation of

those Christ came to save. And this saying is what Paul

says we are to fully accept and to trust.

Now, trust is a heart issue. Trust doesn't just first live in

the head, It settles in the heart.

When we trust someone or something, we do so because our

heart believes it to be truly real, truly reliable, and truly

worthy. And when Scripture speaks of

trustworthy, it names. It aims not just at our

thoughts, but on our loves. And our verse today is truth

aimed straight to our hearts. Twice in First Timothy, the

apostle Paul introduces a statement by saying this is a

trustworthy saying. And Timothy's little

congregation is being told to receive what follows without

reservation, not cautiously, not partially, but fully.

Mind and heart together. And we are being told the same,

not just acceptance, but full acceptance.

Every word, every facet, every implication, truth you can lean

the whole weight of your life upon.

And So what are we to believe? Three simple life defining

realities. Christ Jesus came into the

world. He came to save sinners, and the

person writing these words under the inspiration of the Holy

Spirit is the worst of them. The purpose of the Incarnation,

the uncreated Creator entering His creation, the eternal second

Person of the Godhead taking on flesh.

God with us, not just to keep U.S. company, but to rescue us.

Now you and I are in this world because someone else made that

choice. Our parents made that decision,

and their parents before them, and their parents before them

and so on and so forth and so on until we get back to our

original parents who were created in the image of God in

the splendor of the Garden Temple.

But Jesus is different. Jesus chose to come.

He chose to be born. You see His humiliation in this,

to leave the celestial chambers of the divine Trinity and

condescend to earth. Before Genesis 1, Christ Jesus

eternally existed without beginning in the eternal

generation of the Trinity. The beginningless beginner,

sometimes called the Angel of the Lord, sometimes called the

commander of the Lord's army uncreated, the second Person of

the Godhead, the agent through whom all things were created,

the eternal Son, who, who in the counsel of the Trinity, before

the foundation of the world, willed that he would come to

earth. And in the fullness of time he

came into the world in a way that he had never been before.

Not as an Angel, not as a some kind of theophany, not as a

warrior, but as a baby. This one who when he sang stars

came into existence, now screams because of hunger.

The one who never needed food now survives on his mother's

milk. He has a human mind that learns

lungs that breathe, stomach that digest, liver and kidneys that

purify, human hands that builds things, fixes things, gets cut,

needs to be washed. Human nerves that receive an

unleash pain, and yet He is no less God.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and

the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Very God, a very God begotten, not made of 1 substance with the

Father. And our confession says it even

more plainly, that in the unity of the Godhead there are three

persons of 1 substance, power, and eternity, God the Father,

God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and the Son of God.

Being very and eternal, God did, when the fullness of time has

come, take upon Himself man's very nature, with all the

essential properties and common infirmities included, yet

without sin. You know, this is one of the

things that separates Christianity from all other

religions. Christianity is not a

philosophy, it's not a social performance, it's not a

privileged status, It's a person.

It's a perfect person. He is the perfect person, and

His grace overtakes us, and He comes to lodge at our house in

our hearts. And that person looks like you

and me, flesh and blood, yet God Incarnate.

You can have Buddhism without Buddha, you can have Hinduism

without any deity. But you cannot have Christianity

in its goodness and purest form without Jesus Christ, very God

and very man in one glorious person.

And this very God, this perfect person, is pursuing you in his

love yesterday, today, and he will again tomorrow.

And when life is upside down, he still loves you perfectly.

When the job is lost, the finances collapse.

Someone offends with a harsh word.

His love is still perfect for you when it doesn't make sense,

When disease and death visits our threshold, His perfect love

for you is never compromised. Ever.

Now the second saying in our passage today is just as

staggering as the first. He came to save sinners. 2 words

that trouble many people today save and sinners save from what?

And does sin even exist? But the word save in this

passage, sozo is the word, and in its form here it's pregnant

with meaning because it doesn't just mean to be rescued, it

means to be transported from a certain state or place to

another certain state or place. In other words, this one four

letter word encompasses the whole sweep of redemption, not

just saving from sin, but also from eternal no separation.

Sin is more than missing the mark.

It's any lack of conformity or transgression of God's law which

was given to any reasonable creature.

And Jesus sums it up beautifully when he says, love the Lord your

God with all of your heart, with all of your mind, with all of

your soul, with all of your strength, and love your neighbor

as yourself, which I'm sure you have done perfectly.

Any any nonconformity with this or any transgression of these

things, loving the Lord with everything within us, loving our

neighbor as ourselves is sin, and sin is separation from God.

When we sin, we are saying we don't want to be in the Lord's

presence. And we know from our own

personal experience and from science that separation in and

of itself is extremely unhealthy.

For instance, babies in that are neglected in orphanages have

been shown to develop an array of physical and mental health

issues as well. As if that's not enough, a

proclivity to self harm. Isaiah says, But by your sin you

have made a separation between you and your God.

Colossians says once you were alienated from God because of

your sins. But for those whose life is

hidden in God through Christ, nothing can separate us from the

love of God in Christ Jesus. You know, we have people in our

lives we know that have latched on to some besetting sin and,

and we sense the separation of from true fellowship.

We we separate ourselves from others because we judge them.

We would rather stay separated than reconciled.

We recoil from sinners, but Jesus draws near to us.

We want to punish sinners, but Jesus bore our full punishment.

The gospel is for every nation, every race, every tribe, every

age bracket. It's for successful people and

really, really bad people. Dane Ortland says that when we

send the very heart of Jesus reaches out to us.

So the word save fully explains that Jesus is saving his people

from eternal separation from an unending obscurity from the

devastation of FOMO. Now Pete was kind of to remind

me in between services that not everyone understands this

overused acronym FOMO. So for those of you that need

the Cliff notes, fear of missing out sin deceives us.

That it's sin is the antidote to FOMO, when in reality sins

consequences lead to an irreversible FOMO.

Sin is separation from all that ultimately satisfies the human

heart. When we refuse to reconcile a

broken relationship, we are saying that our sense of justice

is higher than God's, that we understand the human heart

better than he does, and we become intoxicated with our own

haughtiness and we're fine to be separated.

We will stay alienated. Scripture teaches us that this

problem runs deeper than our actions.

In Adam, humanity fell. Adam's desire to rule

independently of God corrupted our nature.

We are not sinners because we sin.

We sin because we are sinners. Augustine said it this way.

Our nature itself was soiled by sin and doomed to death.

This is why Jesus came. Not to save the strong, not to

rescue the impressive, but to heal the sick.

Hospitals are not for the healthy.

Hospice is not for marathon runners.

Churches are for sinners who gather to give thanks for being

saved by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Jesus came for the worst of the worst, the weakest, the

loneliest, the most broken. Now Paul gives his own testimony

to this. Look at verse 12.

Paul says in verse 12 he calls himself a blasphemer, which by

the way, I might remind you, in his legal system was a capital

offense. Then he goes on to say that he

was a persecutor and he went door to door with documents

seeking to arrest and deport Christians.

The text actually says more more vividly, that he was a violent

opponent. He was opposing people trying to

care for widows and orphans, for people trying to help the poor,

and seeking to be civil and kind and loving towards others.

But the Lord pursued Paul regardless.

God saved a murderous elite who hated Jesus, and he turned Paul

into one who would carry the name of Jesus to the world.

He's the poster child for all of us blaspheming persecutors and

insolent bullies. God chose to save Paul, also

under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, knew that He would

be an example for you and me. Look at verse 16.

Jump ahead to verse 16. But I received mercy for this

reason, that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might

display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to

believe in Him for eternal life. Even today we still understand

Paul as an example, that no one is too evil to be saved.

He came for Paul, He comes for you.

He chose you before the foundation of the world, that

you should be holy and blameless before him.

He was for known before the foundation of the world, but was

made manifest in the last times For your sake, the Lamb that was

slain before the foundation of the world, we see him who was

made lower than the angels. Jesus crowned with glory and

honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace

of God He might taste death for everyone.

And there it is. He was born to die.

The purpose of the incarnation. You can't have a death without a

birth. His death was a substitution for

you, born for you, to die for you.

A Christmas Eve confession of sin included these words that we

said together as a congregation. God Incarnate came to save us to

the uttermost as man, to die our death, to shed satisfying blood

on our behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for us.

If the man who died in our place wasn't the perfect God, then he

could not satisfy divine justice.

If the man who died in our place wasn't the perfect man, then he

couldn't represent the ones he came to save.

Humanity owed the debt for sin. A human must pay for it.

However, because the debt was infinite, only God could pay it.

The surpassing mercy of God and His irresistible grace

transformed Paul, the chief of sinners, into one of the

greatest witnesses of his covenant love.

So too those of us chief here today, transformed to be

witnesses of His grace and mercy.

Salvation is the Lord's faithful work to glorify Himself, not our

glorifying ourselves in order to be saved.

So now how does Paul respond to this trustworthy statement?

This, this sentence, deserving of full acceptance, the vilest

of the vile, saved by God's Amazing Grace.

What's his response? Well, about 7 times in Paul's

writing he will stop midway through whatever he is speaking

about and launch into a pure doxological expression of praise

to God. He is so overwhelmed by the

incomprehensible mystery of God, lovingly condescending in human

flesh to redeem His people so that we can be gathered in His

presence forever. And to consider these

unfathomable mysteries unleashes Paul into explosive worship, as

it should be for you and me. And Paul speaks without

restraint in verse 17. Look at verse 17.

To the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only

God be honor and glory forever and ever, Amen.

Paul has been ramping up to this geyser of praise.

It's like the angels that appeared at the Manger where

they were behind the clouds and they couldn't stand it any

longer because of the magnificent mystery of the

second person of the Godhead becoming a human being, and they

explode with praise. Suddenly there was with the

Angel a host of other angels saying glory to God in the

highest. It's this is like Paul's version

of that. It's like a breathtaking stunt

in Mission Impossible when Tom Cruise accelerates at full speed

up that ramp of the Cliff in Norway.

Remember that. It's like this trustworthy

saying is the fuel that's accelerating that motocross

engine up that mountain incline, the powerful plan of Jesus

bearing upon himself the full wrath of justice that belongs to

the worst of the worst. Paul, realizing the divine grace

triumphs human depravity, that God will accomplish his faithful

purposes and promises even when we are powerless to fulfil our

own. And as he's scratching his nib

across the papyrus under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,

Paul's heart bursts open, realizing the magnitude of what

Jesus Christ has done for us. He can't hold it back any

longer. And it's like when Tom Cruise

flies off the Cliff and he drops the cycle.

And in that glorious freefall, Paul suddenly soars into

celebration of praise and worship.

And in this freefall the Lord pulls the ripcord, and his

saving chute deploys, and emblazoned on the Kevlar

strength nylon salvation of Paul are the words to the King of the

ages, immortal and visible, the only God be glory and honor

forever and ever. Amen.

The one most guilty under the law becomes the greatest witness

of Christ's covenant faithfulness.

Paul's life reminds us that God's purposes are accomplished

not through our performance record, but through His eternal

mercy and grace. We worship God because He is

sovereign over time and history, as promises are sure and

unshakable, He displays his glory by saving the most

undeserving. And so our fitting response,

lifelong worship, repentance, confession, reconciliation for

salvation is entirely God's work.

And for His glory alone. Well, maybe you're here the

Sunday after Christmas because you're in town and it wasn't

part of your itinerary, but here you are.

And these things that we've said of Jesus actually may be true of

you. You're saved from what does sin

really exist? And this may be the day that

you're here to consider these things, that there is a perfect

Savior pursuing you. If that's you, Pete and I, or

anyone in this room who loves Jesus, would love to talk with

you. Paul himself calls himself the

foremost of sinners, yet God's sovereign mercy transforms him

into a faithful disciple and calls him into service and

worship. The same could be true for you.

And this paradox, the chief of sinners displaying the riches of

divine grace, as we see in the apostle Paul, vividly

demonstrates that God will fulfill his promises not through

human merit, but by his grace and mercy.

In Christ the guilty are saved, the undeserving are called, and

the glory of God alone is magnified by grace.

You have been saved through faith and not of yourselves.

It is a gift from God so that you don't get to boast about it.

Whoever believes in him will not die, but will live forever.

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you

believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you

will be saved, says the word of God.

So regardless of how thick your file is, or how bad the content

of the documentary has been will be, God's glory is revealed in

the salvation of those Christ came to save.

And this is the purpose of the incarnation.

Perhaps the theologian Gerhardus Voss summarize it best with

these words. He gained down from heaven to

seek mankind. So he still comes down silently

from heaven in the case of each Sinner, and pursues his search

for that individual soul, following it through all the

mazes of its waywardness, all the devious paths of its folly,

sometimes on the very brink of destruction, till at last His

grace overtakes it. And Jesus says, I must lodge at

your house. Father in Heaven, these few

simple words from this dear mentor to this young pastor in

this small congregation many centuries ago now ring so

vividly in our hearts, calling us to bow before Your sovereign

will in all of life and to worship You, regardless of our

understanding of how life is going, that Your glory is

revealed in the salvation of those You came to save.

And today, as we begin the long March toward that tree, having

celebrated so gloriously this season of the Incarnation, now

we turn our faces toward Jerusalem, knowing that you, O

Christ, were born to die for your people, that you might

satisfy righteousness and bring glory to yourself through your

work of redemption. We bow before you and worship

and Thanksgiving, humbly praying in your holy name, Amen.

Would you stand please?