Growing in Wisdom, Stature, and Favor with God and Man

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Good morning.

I'm Denise Yon.

I'm part of the San Francisco Community Group, as well as Women Reading Women.

Today's scripture reading is from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 39 to 52, as printed

Luke 2:39–52

in your liturgy.

A reading from the Gospel according to Luke.

When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee

to their own town of Nazareth.

And the child grew and became strong.

He was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him.

Every year, Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover.

When he was 12 years old, he went up to the festival according to the custom.

After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind

in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it.

Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day.

Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends.

When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him.

After three days, they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening

to them and asking them questions.

Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.

When his parents saw him, they were astonished.

His mother said to him, Son, why have you treated us like this?

Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.

Why were you searching for me?

He asked.

Didn't you know I had to be in my father's house?

But they did not understand what he was saying to them.

Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them.

But his mother treasured all these things in her heart.

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, O Christ.

Thank you, Denise.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer as we open up his word.

Father, we want to hear from you.

We want to remember your son.

We want to see him.

We want to behold him high and lifted up.

Even as the 12-year-old boy that you have revealed himself to be to us in this passage,

would we behold in him the son of God, slain for the sins of the world.

All glory be to Christ, we pray in his name.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

All right.

So I'm excited to open up this passage with you today because it's a super intriguing passage.

It's a super intriguing episode in Jesus' life.

It's literally the only account, right, about him in the whole Bible where he's not either

a helpless baby or a grown man.

What you just heard Denise read is all we get in the whole Bible, just 12 verses, about

Jesus between infancy and the beginning of his ministry at age 30.

12 verses about 12-year-old Jesus.

Think about that.

12-year-old Jesus.

He's not a baby anymore.

He's 12.

He's able to converse.

He's able to run around with his friends without parental supervision all the time.

He's clearly able to make some decisions on his own independently from his parents, but

he's also still not a grown man either, right?

In Jewish society, you were seen as an adult at the age 13.

So he had one more year to go.

He hasn't begun his ministry.

He's not a carpenter yet.

He's still got almost 20 more years to grow up into the 30-year-old Jesus that we're all

mostly familiar with.

So again, this is a super unique window into the life of Jesus compared to everything else

we read about him in the rest of the Scriptures.

And so the question we should be asking as we examine this super unique episode is, why

is this story included here in Luke's Gospel?

This little one-off story about 12-year-old Jesus.

And like, why aren't there other stories about Jesus from this, you know, this pretty long

formative chapter in Jesus' life?

Like, from infancy all the way to adulthood, that's a long time to not know what happened

in this guy's life.

And this is all we get.

Why don't we have stories about, you know, potty training Jesus as a toddler?

Or adventurous adolescent Jesus?

Or teenage boy Jesus going through puberty?

Or maybe Jesus as a 20-year-old young apprentice, carpenter's apprentice?

Why just this tiny little snippet, this really kind of unremarkable story about a boy staying

behind at the temple and worrying his parents?

You know, in ancient Greco-Roman literature, man, if you were going to tell the story,

the story of your greatest hero of all time, you'd most definitely tell the stories of

their childhood and of their youth.

Think of Hercules, right?

Who was supposed to be known for what?

His strength.

Greek mythology is full of stories about his strength, even from childhood.

This is a guy who killed a lion with his bare hands, right?

Even as a baby, when two snakes were sent into his cradle to strangle him, he strangled those

snakes, right?

And then as a youth, when he was reprimanded by his music teacher, he didn't know his own

strength and he whacked his music teacher with his lyre and killed him, all right?

All stories about his strength.

It was quite typical for ancient texts to tell such tales about their heroes in their

youth, to highlight these heroes' unique abilities and to show how special they were

even from a super young age.

But what we find here in Luke's gospel, it's quite different, right?

Quite different from all these mythical, fanciful tales.

Really, the only accounts you can find about Jesus that resemble such ancient Greco-Roman

hero myths are outside of the scriptures.

We call these the apocryphal texts, these texts that are not inspired by God, these texts

that have often very shaky historical reliability, and texts that often read way more like myth

and legend than like history.

For example, there's this text called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

I just read it this past week.

It was written much later than our scriptures.

All of our scriptures were written within the lifetime of the apostles, but the Infancy

Gospel of Thomas was written 200 years later.

And it's almost like it was written to fill in the blanks that scripture left behind, blanks

like, yeah, what was five-year-old Jesus like?

Well, according to the Infancy Gospel, Jesus was this little magical boy who couldn't submit

to anyone because he was way more powerful, way smarter, way wiser than everyone else, and

he both dazzled his community, and he struck the fear of God into his community because

of all his powers.

Like, according to the Infancy Gospel, it says that one little boy, you know, Jesus was playing

as a five-year-old with some water in a brook, and he was gathering some pools with the water,

and it says that another little boy came and he messed up the pool.

And Jesus said, you shall wither like a tree.

And that little boy died, all right?

Another story goes, like, there's another little boy, he's running and he actually bumps

into Jesus, and Jesus says, what does he say?

What does he say?

You shall not finish your course, is what Jesus says.

And that boy also dies, okay?

On some other occasions, Jesus is, you know, he's constantly outsmarting his teachers, all

these guys who are trying to disciple him.

He's constantly embarrassing his teachers, and one teacher gets so frustrated with Jesus,

he hits Jesus on the head because he feels disrespected by this little smarty pants, all

right?

And then Jesus curses his teacher, and his teacher falls flat on his face, and he faints,

all right?

And people are terrified at this little five-year-old Jesus in this narrative.

And then one day, this is probably my favorite story in this account, Jesus and another boy,

they're playing on a roof, all right?

They're playing on a roof, and then the boy that Jesus is playing with, he falls off the

roof and dies.

And people are quick to blame Jesus.

Of course, that Jesus, that troublemaker, throwing this kid off the roof, but Jesus is

like, no, I didn't throw him off the roof.

And you know what Jesus does in this story?

He leaps down from the roof, right?

To the boy who just died from falling from that same height, he leaps down there, and this

is how he brings the boy back to life.

He says, he yells out loud, Zeno, arise and tell me, did I throw you off the roof?

Does that sound like Jesus to you?

Does that sound like a story inspired by the Holy Spirit?

A few days later, there's a man who accidentally cuts his foot with an axe, and he starts to

bleed out.

He's about to die.

And Jesus is depicted like this Marvel superhero.

He goes and he sees this panicked crowd.

He rushes through.

He forcefully pushes himself through the crowds.

He puts his hand on the foot.

He heals it.

He saves this guy's life.

And then like a gangster, five-year-old Jesus says to this man, arise now, cut the wood,

and remember me.

This is the infancy gospel of Thomas.

Sounds more like it's written by Will Ferrell than the Holy Spirit.

It's hilarious, right?

Some pretty wild stuff in this infancy gospel.

And you can totally tell how artificial it is, right?

And that there's a super clear agenda behind all these childhood Jesus stories.

They're trying to establish his power, right?

His authority and his uniqueness.

And you know, it's not untrue that Jesus, even as a baby, he did have all the power and

all the authority.

And he was the most unique, the most special child in all of history.

But again, the gospel accounts, particularly our passage today, are nothing like these ancient

Greco-Roman stories of heroes in their youth.

Why?

Why?

What is Luke trying to communicate to us in this account of Jesus' youth, if not the power

and the authority that existed within this special boy from a young age?

Well, we've said this many times before, but you know, Matthew's gospel likes to emphasize

Jesus as the promised Messiah.

And Mark's gospel emphasizes Jesus as the servant king.

John's gospel emphasizes Jesus as the divine son of God.

But Luke's gospel, Luke, while agreeing with all the other accounts, Luke is keen to emphasize

Jesus as a human.

Jesus as someone who is like us in every way, yet without sin.

And that's what comes through here in our text, in this unique window into the life of 12-year-old

Jesus between infancy and adulthood.

Luke is showing us not primarily the divine power of Christ, but the humanity of Christ.

And this is important because if we only understand Christ as the divine son of God, then we'll

never be able to relate to him.

We'll never be able to believe that he gets us.

And we'll tend to see his way of life as unattainable, not really for us to humanly imitate or pursue.

We'll only see him as the truth to believe in our heads, the eternal life to live and enjoy

later, and the way to escape from the fires of hell.

But if we understand that Jesus is also fully human, then we will see him not just as a ticket

to heaven or as some unrelatable, unapproachable, far-off, detached God-hero that we cannot and

need not imitate.

If we see him for who he really is, not just fully God, but also fully human, then we will

see him as the way to always walk, the truth to trust today, and the life to live in every

second of our existence.

When we understand the humanity of Jesus Christ, we will see him not only as God, our maker

and redeemer, but also as, at the same time, Jesus has the best way to be human.

That is what Luke is trying to communicate to us in the story of 12-year-old Jesus, the

picture of the best way to be human.

So if I could put the whole point of this text into one sentence, it'd be this, and these

are our three points.

It's, even Jesus grew, and not by accident, with God and men.

Even Jesus grew, and not by accident, with God and men.

Okay, those are our three points.

So first, even Jesus grew.

So picking up where we left off last week, baby Jesus has just been to the temple to be

presented to the Lord by his parents.

And then verse 39 says, his parents then headed back home with him up north to their hometown

of Nazareth in Galilee.

And verse 40 says, verse 40 pretty much covers the next 12 years of his life, and it says,

and the child grew and became strong.

He was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him.

Now think about that for a second.

This eternal Son of God taking on flesh and humanity, and it says, the eternal Son of God

grew.

The I am became.

He subjected himself to a state of becoming.

Again, Jesus was fully human.

He was born in weakness, and he became strong.

He was born with the wisdom and the knowledge of an infant, and then he became filled with

wisdom as he grew.

This means there's a real point in his life in which he could not speak, he could not

understand, he could not feed himself.

He had to learn those things, how to speak, how to read, how to eat, how to bathe himself,

how to wipe himself, how to help out around the house, how to follow his parents' way

of life, how to observe the Torah, right?

How to follow the law of Moses, how to even get to Jerusalem once a year with his family.

He had to learn all this and so much more.

All the things that we take for granted about him, he had to grow up and learn and develop

just like the rest of us do as humans.

Like, you know that feeling that many of us who are parents, especially first-time parents

have had, I remember it well, just gazing at my firstborn, newborn, Cammie, right?

And thinking to myself, I can't imagine how this little girl is going to somehow start

crawling and then walking and then running and then she's going to be potty trained somehow.

She's going to get a job maybe one day, have children.

This is wild to me, right?

It's wild.

But this is probably what Mary and Joseph had.

These are probably the same feelings that Mary and Joseph had as well about their firstborn,

Jesus, who like the rest of us, had to grow up.

And probably not rapidly like some magical prodigy, but probably in a very human amount of time,

at a very human pace.

And this is not to say there wasn't anything special about Jesus.

He clearly had a knack for the Word of God, depth of insight, hunger for God and for the things of God.

But even as a religious student, even as a faithful Jewish follower of Yahweh,

He was still subject to the process of inquiry and growth and understanding and learning.

And that's why in verse 46 it says,

He was sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.

Twelve-year-old Jesus here is showing us that He, like all the rest of us,

was subject to diligent study and to discovery and to all the practices of spiritual formation

that would shape Him into the person He would only eventually become.

As a 12-year-old, yes, He was the Son of God.

Yes, He was without sin.

And yes, He did have wisdom and understanding about the Scriptures beyond His years.

But He also still hadn't arrived.

He was being formed.

He was being shaped.

He had to grow.

As a human, He wasn't born just, you know, having the Torah memorized,

understanding all the depths of the Word of God,

apart from decades of teaching and dialogue and reflection and meditation and prayer

in His community of faith,

the Son of God was subjected to the long process of growing as a human being

and as a worshiper of Yahweh.

As it says in verse 52,

He grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man

for the next 18 years of His life after this text.

See, just like all the rest of us, Jesus knew Psalm 1.

He knew that blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord

and on that law He meditates day and night.

Jesus, like all of us, He had to grow as a tree in order to bear fruit.

In season, He had to grow in His understanding of God and God's heart and God's mind

and in His understanding of the human heart and the human mind

in order to bear fruit and flourish.

And at this point in Luke chapter 2,

Luke 2 · chapter mention

you know, the season for the juiciest fruit in His life,

it hadn't even yet arrived.

So in the meantime, He waited.

And He committed Himself to growth.

And very importantly, He committed Himself to dependence upon God for that growth,

like a tree planted by streams of water.

Verse 40 says,

The grace of God was on Him, indicating that all of Jesus' growth,

He owed not to Himself or to some kind of automatic process

because, hey, I'm the Son of God.

No, again, like every other human being,

Jesus owed all of His growth in strength and in wisdom

to the gracious favor of God.

But as a human, He was and had to be absolutely dependent upon God for His growth and development.

And I point this out to us that even Jesus grew

because I want to encourage you wherever you are in your spiritual journey.

The fact that even Jesus grew teaches us that wherever you are,

no, you haven't arrived.

And yes, you do have room to grow.

But hey, so it is 12-year-old Jesus right here, the Son of God.

So don't beat yourself up about it.

We like to say it's more about direction than perfection here.

Here at Christ Church, we exist to lead you simply into a deeper relationship with Christ.

Wherever you are on the spectrum,

and trust me, we have people here all over the spectrum.

Some are negative 10s, super skeptical about Jesus.

Others are plus ones.

They've just taken their first steps as baby Christians.

There are others who are sevens.

There are others who are eights.

Then you have Jonathan, who's over 9,000.

So if you're feeling discouraged or like you're behind

or you're frustrated by your need to grow at all,

why can't we just arrive immediately?

What this little window into the life of 12-year-old Jesus shows us

is that even Jesus grew.

We're all growing.

And it's not so much about where am I on the scale compared to everyone else,

but what's my next step to grow as Jesus grew?

And that brings me to my next point.

Jesus' growth was not by accident.

It was deliberate.

There was a plan and a direction set out for him

that he and his community had committed to.

And I think for a lot of us,

it can be easy for us to think of Jesus' growth

as just automatic and accidental.

Like it just happened because that was the plan,

and how could it not happen for the messianic Son of God?

And we have a very mechanical, deterministic understanding

of Jesus' growth without recognizing

that there was a lot of intentionality.

There was a lot of structure and a process and a method

that were placed around Jesus to help him grow.

Read verse 39.

Did you hear that?

It didn't just say Jesus grew because that's what was supposed to happen.

It says Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the law of the Lord.

Excuse me.

Jesus' growth had a lot to do with his faithful, pious, Torah-observing parents

and the way of life that they committed themselves and their whole family to.

They were just at the temple, right,

dedicating him to the Lord according to what was required by the law,

and that was their intention for the rest of their lives

and for the rest of Jesus' life,

to build a purposeful environment of spiritual formation,

to set up a principled context in which Jesus would grow.

That's how Jesus grew.

The same way we do.

The same way our children will grow.

Jesus' family was practicing a way prescribed by God himself.

A way, a law, predictable patterns, a holy habit,

a rule of life with intentionality.

Verse 41 says,

Every year, every year,

Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover.

Verse 42.

When he was 12 years old,

they went up to the festival according to the custom.

Did you hear that?

Every year and according to the custom.

They never missed, rain or shine,

whether business was good or bad,

no matter how many children they had,

no matter how old their children were,

no matter how many extracurriculars their family had

or how many opportunities were presented to them.

Every year,

Jesus' parents made it a point to observe the Passover.

Every year.

For those first 12 years straight in Jesus' life

and probably for years to come,

they committed to celebrating with their people

God's greatest act of redemption,

delivering them out of slavery in Egypt,

sparing their firstborns by the blood of a lamb

and judging their Egyptian oppressors.

Jesus grew up hearing this redemptive story again and again and again.

His parents looked for every kind of opportunity to present to him this redemptive story,

the story of what God had done for their people.

He saw it at the table that they would eat at,

the roasted lamb,

the unleavened bread,

the bitter herbs,

the wine.

This was a predictable pattern,

a holy habit in the life of Jesus

and in the life of his family

that formed him into the Passover lamb

that he would one day become.

And it was a holy habit that he practiced

not just individually,

but communally.

With his family,

with the whole company of people,

with the whole nation that was gathering in Jerusalem

and all the people they traveled with,

every year,

this was a tight-knit community

that looked out for each other,

that did life together,

a community where relatives and friends

watched each other's kids

and traveled together

and shared the same values

and worshipped the same God.

Verse 44 says,

Mary and Joseph just assumed

he was in their company

and they traveled a whole day

assuming he was with their relatives and friends.

And through these predictable patterns,

through these holy habits,

and in this whole community

that was practicing this way of life

that God had commended to them in his law,

this way of worshiping

and walking with Yahweh together,

this is the context in which Jesus grew.

See, it takes more than a desire in our hearts to grow.

Jesus didn't just grow because he wanted to grow.

It takes a plan.

It takes a community.

It takes a rule of life.

And it takes accountability.

Sure, it starts with desire in our hearts.

And we definitely need to be checking our hearts

as we engage in these practices

so we aren't just performing religious rituals

or practicing religious techniques

that will help us level up spiritually

or make us feel more holy and self-righteous.

But desire by itself,

it's not going to get us there.

Jesus himself was committed

to a concrete list of practices.

Practices that God had ordained for him

and for his community in the Scriptures.

And that's what we need as well.

That's why we've been focusing on this

all fall and winter.

And we do this not to force growth into our lives,

but there's a posture that our lives can take

that makes us more conducive to growth.

Think of it like a boat with a sail.

We can either be tossed by the waves

here and there, there and here,

with no rhyme or reason,

ending up wherever the waves may take us,

or we can put up our sails.

And the sails won't get us anywhere by themselves,

but if we put up our sails,

that's how we'll be ready to catch the wind

of the Holy Spirit,

to be moved in the way God wants us to go.

And maybe this is a word for some of us

going into 2025 as we're thinking about

our resolutions, our goals,

the themes of the new year.

And I want to point you to this holy habits list.

You've seen this before.

It's in your liturgies.

Turn to this page.

Practices daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally.

I want to point you to these holy habits.

Let's challenge ourselves.

Let's be that garden of trees, right,

that are planted by the stream of water.

I want to challenge you to take up

something on this list

that you aren't already currently practicing.

You can circle it right now.

Or maybe something that you do practice,

but you want to practice

with more intentionality and consistency.

Maybe for you, it's just showing up

consistently on Sundays

rather than once a month.

Maybe it's just making sure

you hear the good news preached to you

once a week

and that you taste and see

that Jesus is good at this table

once a week.

Or for others,

maybe it's joining a community group,

joining a men's covenant group,

sharing life and prayer

and accountability with others

to help each other

keep your commitments to Christ.

Maybe it's praying for people

in your life

who you'd love for them to meet Jesus.

Or maybe it's inviting someone to Alpha

to have spiritual conversations

with us here in this church.

Maybe it's just showing up to Alpha yourself

to grow in your ability

to have such conversations yourself.

The bottom line is,

what's your next step?

Even Jesus grew.

Even Jesus grew.

And not accidentally.

Not without steps.

Not without a concrete list of practices.

And now finally,

what was the fruit and result

of Jesus' growth?

Well, it says in verse 52

that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature

and in favor with God and man.

See, the point of growth

isn't growth for growth's sake,

for more spiritual badges,

to satisfy our self-righteous inclinations.

No, the point of growth

is communion with God

and our neighbors.

So let's go back into the story.

Verse 43 says,

the festival ends

and Mary and Joseph head back home,

but Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem

without them knowing.

And verse 44 says,

they don't go looking for Him

until a day into their trip,

which some scholars say

could have been a 20-mile walk

that they just walked a day through.

So when verse 45 says

they don't find Him,

they now have to leave

their traveling companions,

go back maybe 20 miles to Jerusalem

to look for this guy.

And at this point, of course,

they're anxious.

Jesus is close to, you know,

Walter and Jack and Luke's age,

and He's a whole journey,

a whole day's journey away.

It's not just that He's

a 12-year-old boy either,

but maybe Mary and Joseph

were also thinking,

oh shoot,

have we lost the Messiah?

Have we lost the Son of God?

This isn't just any child.

What have we done?

Have we failed in parenting

the miracle child

who all the people

and all the angels

have spoken great prophetic things about?

How's He going to save the world now

if we can't even find Him?

Verse 46 says,

they eventually find Him

after three days.

And He was in the temple court

sitting among the teachers,

listening to them

and asking them questions.

Everyone who heard Him

was amazed at His understanding

and His answers,

and even His parents.

Verse 48,

when His parents saw Him,

they were astonished.

But that's not the only thing

they felt.

Mary's got something to say

to her preteen, right?

Verse 48,

His mother said to Him,

Son,

why have you treated us like this?

Your father and I

have been anxiously searching for you.

And this all sounds

like a pretty typical relationship

between a 12-year-old

and his mother

until Jesus replies

with a very interesting response

in verse 49,

why are you searching for me?

Didn't you know

I had to be

in my father's house?

See, up to this point,

while Yahweh worshipers

did speak of Yahweh

as a father,

they never, like,

personally addressed Him

as my father.

So as verse 50 says,

they did not understand

what He was saying to them.

In Mary's mind,

this was her 12-year-old son.

In just one year,

he'd be 13,

he'd be considered as an adult,

he'd be responsible

to God for himself.

He'd probably also

take up the family trade

and increase

his family responsibilities.

So in this 12th year,

more than ever,

in Mary's mind,

Jesus was supposed

to shadow and stick

to Joseph as closely

as possible

to prepare for becoming

a man,

to prepare for becoming

a Yahweh worshiper

and a carpenter.

This past Passover festival,

Joseph probably more meticulously

than any other year

was probably explaining

to Jesus

all the elements

of the Passover,

what the lamb represented,

what the bitter herbs represented,

the bread and the wine.

And in her mind,

she's probably thinking,

and here you are,

Jesus,

just one year away

from being responsible

for your own faith,

and we've been trying hard

to teach you

how to be a faithful Jewish man,

and here you are,

disobeying the fifth commandment

and not honoring

your father

and your mother,

and you've made us

so anxious.

But see,

little does Mary understand

that Jesus has been

paying attention

to everything

she and Joseph

have been teaching him.

And Jesus does know

the importance

of this year,

and he is gearing up

for when he turns 13

and when he turns 30.

And he actually

has been sticking closely

to his father.

For while Joseph

may indeed

have been anxious,

Jesus' true father,

his ultimate father,

his father in heaven,

was not one bit anxious.

Actually,

God his father

was delighting

that his son

lingered to stay

in his house,

even if it led

to Mary and Joseph's anxiety.

This is what Jesus

is trying to communicate

to his mother.

Mom,

I have been with my father.

At this early age

in Jesus' life,

it's become clear to him

that there is a relationship

in his life

that is more important

than even the most important

relationships in his life.

And it's a relationship

with God,

his personal father.

And nothing will take precedence

over this relationship,

even if this means

disappointing and confusing

and scaring

and breaking the hearts

of the people he most loves

and of the people

who most love him.

This is how Jesus

was growing

in wisdom and stature

and in favor with God.

He was learning

to put God first

above all else,

even above his most

precious family members.

And maybe that's another word

for us in 2025.

How will you put

your relationship

with God,

your father first

over everything,

over everyone else

in this coming year?

Has your relationship

with God as your father

informed your plans

moving forward

into 2025?

How will you commit

to growing with him

in the new year?

Now maybe for some of us

it sounds so spiritual

and unhelpful

and irrelevant

for day-to-day living.

Like, come on!

Of course the pastor

is going to tell me

I need to work

on my relationship

with God.

But what good

is that going to do

for me

or for the rest

of the world?

Look here in verse 52.

Notice it doesn't just say

Jesus grew in wisdom

and stature

and in favor with God,

but also with men.

Just as soon as Jesus

tells his parents

that his relationship

with his father in heaven

is his highest priority,

verse 51 also says,

Then he went down

to Nazareth with them

and was obedient to them.

But his mother

treasured all these things

in her heart

and Jesus grew

in wisdom and stature

and in favor with God

and man.

See, growth in favor

with God

does not automatically

preclude our growth

in favor with human beings.

But actually,

the two go together

more than many of us

might think.

Like, sometimes I think

some of us think

that growing in favor

with God means,

you know,

growing in animosity

with our neighbors

or growing in awkwardness

toward others.

We're just like

these spiritual weirdos,

these outcasts

who are always misunderstood

all the time

and that that's proof

that we are close to God.

And we can get so preoccupied

with God and spirituality

that we just don't really care

to understand the world around us.

We don't care to understand

the culture around us.

We can't relate to others.

We have a hard time

having empathy

or compassion

or being sensitive to others.

Friends,

this is not the way

of Jesus.

If we are growing

in the way of Jesus,

we will draw nearer

to the heart of God

and also nearer

to the hearts

of our neighbors.

We will become

more human

and not less.

We will grow

in empathy

and understanding

and compassion

and sensitivity

and humility

and service

toward others

when we grow

in our relationships

with God.

And sure,

people do have sinful hearts

and sure,

we may be misunderstood

by those who are far from God,

but know this,

when we are right with God,

whether our enemies

can see it or not,

we have everything we need

to be right with

and to bless

all kinds of people,

any kind of person.

In a real sense,

we never need to choose

between pleasing God

and pleasing our neighbors

because to please God

is the best possible thing

for our neighbors.

So to bring it all back,

whether baby Jesus

or 12-year-old Jesus

or 30-year-old Jesus,

Jesus shows us

the best way to be human

and the way

to intentionally grow

in favor with God

and with man.

And this is good news

for the world,

that our growth in Christ,

that our growth like Christ

is for the glory of God

and for the good

of our neighbors.

The good news

of the gospel

is that even though

God had every reason

not to pursue

the good of sinful humanity,

God didn't make us choose

between Him

and humanity.

No, God doesn't call us

to honor Him

at our own expense

or at the expense

of our neighbors.

the good news

of the gospel

is that God

has made a way

for us to honor Him

and humanity.

And it's through

the selfless,

sacrificial way

of Jesus.

The beauty of the gospel

is that the very way

that Jesus won favor

with God

is by winning favor

with man.

And the very way

that Jesus wins favor

with man

is by winning favor

with God

all at His own expense,

not by flaunting

or asserting

His power and dominance

like Hercules

or a five-year-old Jesus

from the infancy gospel.

Jesus doesn't come

as a petulant kindergartner

wielding His power

to terrorize those

who cross Him,

but as a 12-year-old boy

simply eager

to learn and grow

in His Father's house

and happy

to simply obey

His godly parents.

It's as simple as that

in humility.

And from this point on,

from this story on,

He prepares

for 20 more years

being formed

in this pattern,

in this holy habit,

in this community.

He's formed

and He's on His way

to becoming

the real Passover Lamb

who will one day

pour out His own blood

on a cross

to finally satisfy

God's demand for justice,

God's desire for mercy,

and to save us

from ourselves.

This is what 12-year-old Jesus

is here to show us today.

Even Jesus grew,

not by accident,

and He grew in favor

with God and man.

So let's grow in Him this year.

Let's grow like Him,

not by accident,

and let's grow in favor

with God and man.

Amen?

Let's pray.

Lord, would You astound us

with the reality

that Your Son,

the eternal Word,

took on flesh

and humbled Himself

and subjected Himself

to the long and often

grueling process of growth?

Oh God, we are

an impatient people.

We hate to wait.

But that's how You've made us.

You've made us to grow

and to develop

as human beings.

You alone are the I Am.

And You, in Your humility,

have graciously come down to us

and You've entered

into our state of becoming.

And You learned

and You grew

and You developed

and You subjected Yourself

to practices

in the person of Christ.

Would we do the same?

And would we do the same

not just to merit

more spiritual badges,

but would we do the same

because we believe

that Jesus is the best way

to be human?

Would we do the same

because we want to grow

in favor with God

and with man

for Your glory, O Lord,

and for the good

of those around us?

We thank You

that this is possible.

Jesus has shown us

the way.

Help us to love Him,

trust Him,

obey Him,

and enjoy Him.

In His name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.