who Is Jesus?

Well, it's good to be with you again.

If you're newer to Keystone or you watch mostly the messages online, my name is Randy Wasnick, and my wife Chris and I were part of starting Keystone some 31 years ago.

And today we're wrapping up a series called Asking for a Friend.

And within this series, we've been wrestling with some of the deeper questions, the biggest questions people have about God and faith and Christianity.

And in week one, we asked the question: Is there really a God?

And we looked around us, and we looked at the humanity within us, and we looked at the resurrection behind us, and we discovered good reasons to believe that God exists.

And then last week we asked the question, is God really good?

And we discovered that there was an anchor to hold on to when life doesn't seem to make sense anymore, namely, that God did not create the world this way.

And he will not leave it this way.

But today we come to the question on which the entire Christian faith ultimately depends.

It's a question Jesus once asked his closest followers.

By this point in their journey, though, they heard him teach, they heard him say marvelous things about people, they watched him heal, they saw him calm storms, they saw him welcome outsiders, they heard him speak about God with an authority unlike anyone they ever encountered.

And then Jesus turned to his followers and asked, Who do people say the Son of Man is?

And apparently people had lots of opinions.

John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets.

Everybody seemed to have a different thought about who Jesus was.

But the question was really a setup for a more personal question.

This one.

Then Jesus said, but what about you?

He asked.

Who do you say I am?

And two thousand years later, that is the question that every one of us has to answer.

Who is Jesus?

And here's why the question is so important.

And this is our big idea for today.

Everything about Christianity rises or falls on the identity of Jesus.

And even people who don't believe in Jesus have opinions about Jesus.

He was a great teacher, he was a prophet, he was an inspiring example, maybe even a historical person whose reputation grew into a legend.

But here's the problem: Jesus didn't speak as though he were simply a good teacher offering some good suggestions.

He made astonishing claims about himself.

And he claimed the authority to forgive sin.

And at one point, he even said, I and the Father are one.

So when Jesus asked, Who do you say I am?

Peter, one of his followers, said, You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.

Now, Peter didn't understand everything that meant, and he certainly didn't anticipate seeing a cross in the future of Jesus' life.

But his conclusion about Jesus' identity was right.

Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

And if Peter was right, Jesus doesn't merely deserve some of our attention, he deserves all of our attention.

But a claim that is that significant deserves more than us giving it blind acceptance.

If someone claims that a first century Jewish carpenter was actually God in a human body, it's entirely reasonable to ask, why should I believe him?

So today I want to give you a few things, four lines of evidence to consider.

And I'm not going to try to give you one argument that makes doubt impossible.

I can't do that.

But I want to present a cumulative case to have you consider it.

And it begins with this.

The Jewish scriptures anticipated him.

For centuries, the Jewish scriptures have been telling a story about a God who would one day rescue and restore what humanity has broken.

And as that story unfolded, this promise began to become increasingly specific.

It would say things like, he would be a descendant of Abraham who would bless all the nations.

Then he would be a descendant of David who would establish an enduring kingdom.

He'd be a ruler from Bethlehem, a suffering servant, a king entering Jerusalem on a donkey.

Different writers over different centuries, but when taken together, they form a recognizable portrait.

And then Jesus steps into the story and essentially said, It's about me.

And Jesus then read a passage from the Old Testament prophet named Isaiah.

And then he said, Today, the scripture, the scripture that he had just read to them, is fulfilled in your hearing.

Well, what does that mean?

Perhaps the most striking example of that is what was found in Isaiah chapter 53.

Isaiah 53 · chapter mention

See, centuries before Jesus, Isaiah described Jesus as someone who would be rejected and suffer on the behalf of others.

One of the verses he wrote was, He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, and by his wounds we were healed.

Now, you can debate how individual prophecies should be interpreted, but the larger pattern is difficult to ignore.

And sure, some of the details of Isaiah's prophecy of Jesus could have been intentionally fulfilled by Jesus.

Like he could choose to ride a donkey into Jerusalem, but he couldn't choose where he was born.

He couldn't choose when he was hanging on the cross to be pierced in the side, what would happen to his clothing, or where his body would be buried.

None of this forces anyone to believe, but it gives us our first line of evidence that the Jewish scriptures anticipated him.

But anticipated promises are not enough.

Eventually, Jesus steps onto the stage, the public stage, and that begins our second line of evidence.

The life of Jesus revealed him.

From the moment Jesus began teaching, people recognize that there's something different about him.

He simply didn't quote respected teachers or offer unique interpretations of what someone else had already said.

He spoke with his own authority.

He said things like, You have heard it said, but I tell you.

And after he delivered the Sermon on the Mount, we read this.

The crowds were amazed at his teaching because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law.

Jesus spoke about the human heart as though he completely understood it.

He spoke about God as though he knew him intimately.

And he spoke about the kingdom of God as if it actually belonged to him.

But it only wasn't only what Jesus said, it's also what he did.

The accounts of his life describe Jesus opening blind eyes, healing diseased bodies, enabling people who couldn't walk to stand.

He touched the untouchable, he fed the hungry, he calmed the storm.

And as we saw last week, he stood outside of the tomb of Lazarus and called a dead man back into the light.

And people kept watching.

And they asked some version of this question: Who is this?

Interestingly, even Jesus' opponents didn't deny that extraordinary things were happening.

They argued about where his power actually was coming from and what they should do about him.

And after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, that they gathered together and, well, they said, Well, this is what John wrote about it.

They gathered together and said, What are we even accomplishing?

Here is this man performing many signs.

His opponents didn't say, Oh, well, no, no, nothing happened.

Nothing's really happening.

They essentially said, if this keeps happening, everyone's going to believe him.

And Jesus wasn't doing these things somewhere off in the distance in secret.

His ministry unfolded publicly in villages, in synagogues, in homes, in the fields, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and eventually in the courtyards of Jerusalem.

His miracles weren't simply displays of power.

They were signs.

They were glimpses of what happens when God's kingdom comes near.

When the blind see, when the broken are restored, when the guilty are forgiven, when the excluded are welcomed, and when the dead are called back to life.

But the most important sign came after Jesus died.

Because extraordinary teaching and remarkable miracles, they might convince you that Jesus was a prophet, but they don't necessarily prove that he was the Son of God.

And when Jesus was crucified, even his closest followers assumed it was over.

Peter had declared Jesus to be the promised king, but when Jesus was arrested, Peter denied even knowing him.

And the other disciples, they ran for their lives.

And by Friday evening, Jesus was dead and buried.

And as far as his followers were concerned, it was over.

Then came Sunday.

Several women went to Jesus' tomb expecting to find a body.

And nobody was out there standing outside the tomb doing a countdown.

Three, two, one.

Resurrection.

Nobody.

Nobody expected a resurrection.

Instead, they found a stone moved and a tomb empty, and that Jesus was alive.

And in the days that followed, his followers claimed repeatedly that they encountered him.

They spoke with him.

They touched him.

They ate with him.

And something extraordinary happened to him, to them.

The same people who ran away in fear became suddenly convinced that he was alive.

Peter, the one who denied even knowing him, eventually stood up publicly in Jerusalem in front of a huge crowd of people and declared, God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it.

And that became the centerpiece of the Christian message.

Not that Jesus taught some wonderful things, not that Jesus performed some amazing miracles, but Jesus was dead.

And now he's alive.

And the first Christians, they understood what was at stake.

Because if Jesus stayed dead, he may have been inspiring, he may have been courageous, he may have been a remarkable teacher, but then he wouldn't be who he claimed to be.

The Apostle Paul put it as plainly as possible.

He said, if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith.

In other words, if the resurrection didn't happen, Christianity collapses.

Christianity doesn't ask you to believe Jesus is God simply because he delivered wonderful sermons or any of that.

Christianity believes that Jesus is at the center of a historical claim that Jesus walked out of the grave.

And if that didn't happen, Christianity isn't true.

Because dead teachers can leave behind ideas, only a risen king can offer life.

Which raises exactly the question a thoughtful person should ask.

How do we know any of this actually happened?

How do we know that the miracles and the especially the resurrection weren't simply stories invented decades later by people who never even met Jesus?

Well, that brings us to the third line of evidence.

Eyewitnesses reported him.

The accounts of Jesus don't read like once upon a time, like a legend set up in an imaginary world.

They name real rulers, real cities, real villages, real controversies, and real people who claim to have been there.

John explained why he recorded all the things that he witnessed.

He said, These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

And by that believing, by believing, you may have life in his name.

Luke approached it a little bit differently.

Luke wasn't one of Jesus' original disciples.

He was a doctor, he was an educated investigator who gathered the testimony of people who were there and witnesses to it at the time.

Luke wrote this.

He said, I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

In other words, I've investigated the claims, I talked to the people who were involved.

Here's what I discovered.

Now you decide.

And the resurrection message, it wasn't something that Christians invented generations later.

In one of his earlier letters, Paul preserved the summary of what Christians had already believed after the resurrection.

He said, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, and he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living.

And that last phrase is fascinating.

Most of whom are still living.

It's almost as if Paul was saying, don't take my word for it.

Go ask them.

Go ask him.

He was there.

Go ask this whole group of people.

They were all there.

They saw this.

Christianity didn't believe centuries, didn't begin centuries later in some distant country.

It began in the same generation, in the same region, among people who could investigate the claims and challenge them directly.

Christianity didn't begin with some private spiritual experience that nobody else could examine, or it wasn't a compelling social media post or an AI-generated video.

It began with a public claim about an empty tomb.

And it spread person to person in a culture whose person's public reputation, their honor, his or her credibility, their family standing, their faithfulness to one's personal word carried enormous social weight.

Here's another interesting thing about those accounts.

If the disciples made the story up, they made themselves look terrible.

I mean, they recorded all this, how they misunderstood Jesus, how they argued about which one of them is the greatest, how they fell asleep when Jesus begs them, begs them to pray for him and stand with him.

They abandoned him when he was arrested.

Peter denies even knowing him.

And then in every gospel account, the women are the first to discover the empty tomb.

In a society, a culture where women's testimony was often given less public credibility than a man's.

So if these guys were trying to write propaganda that propped them up to make themselves look like heroes, they did a horrible job.

But perhaps the most important part of their testimony, the most compelling piece, is what happened next.

Before the resurrection, the disciples were frightened and they were defeated.

After the resurrection, they walked in back into the city where Jesus had been executed and then announced, He is alive.

And they kept saying it.

They said it when they were threatened, they said it again when he was arrested.

And even when they started, when they noticed that following Jesus began to cost them their security, their reputations, and in many cases, their lives, they didn't waver.

They kept saying, He is alive, and I will stake my life on it.

Now, their willingness to suffer doesn't mean, doesn't prove that they were right.

People can sincerely believe things that aren't true.

People have died for things they sincerely but mistakenly believed in.

But that is very different from suffering for something you know you made up.

And what did the disciples get out of all of this?

Wealth?

Political power?

Fame?

Comfortable lives?

They got full on opposition.

And yet they kept saying, he is alive.

Eyewitness testimony.

It doesn't make doubt impossible, but something, something transformed a group of frightened disciples into the people willing to carry the message of Jesus into the whole Roman world.

And they were willing to die for it.

Which brings us to our final line of evidence.

History was changed by him.

Think about how unlikely the story of Jesus actually is.

Jesus was born into an ordinary family in an insignificant village.

He never held political office.

He never commanded an army.

He never wrote a book.

His public ministry Ministry only lasted a few years, and then Rome executed him as a criminal.

So, by every ordinary measure, that should have been the end.

But it wasn't.

His followers carried his message beyond Jerusalem throughout the whole Roman Empire, and within a few centuries, people throughout the very empire that crucified Jesus were worshiping him and calling him Lord.

And today, people from virtually every nation, language, culture, social class identify themselves as followers of Jesus.

Now, Christians haven't always represented Jesus well.

People have used his name to pursue power, to justify violence, to defend things that Jesus never taught.

But our failures as people, as humans, as imperfect people, our failures don't erase his influence.

Jesus reshaped the way that people thought about forgiveness, generosity, human dignity, care for the poor, and even how we should view and do view our enemy.

And his followers, they established hospitals, they cared for abandoned children, they served victims of diseases, they challenged injustice, and they carry his message of love around the world.

Not because Christians have always gotten it right, we have not.

But because Jesus has continually called his followers, you and me, to be beyond ourselves, to give ourselves away, to walk into the world of love and to make a difference in his name.

And at our best, at their best, Jesus' followers made things better.

I look at over a hundred children, hundreds of children, starting school last week in a poverty-stricken school outside Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

This new education center that we'll be dedicating in November in Nebi, Uganda, for young moms, with many of them with forced pregnancies and their children.

And a whole bunch of you showing up over the last week and in the next few weeks over at Sibley School, helping in the classrooms, encouraging the teachers, pulling kids aside and having conversations with them, and working with family promise, and serving and helping bring resources to the other way ministry, and getting involved in hand to hand, and so, so, so much more.

So, was Peter right?

Was Jesus really the Messiah?

Was he really the Son of God?

Not a single piece of evidence can force you to believe.

But step back and look at the larger picture that we've looked at today.

The Jewish scriptures anticipated him well before he was born.

The life of Jesus itself revealed him.

Eyewitnesses reported him, and history was changed by him.

And any one of those things might be explained away, but taken together, they create a cumulative case that deserves to, at the very least, be taken seriously.

Something happened in that first century Judea that is difficult to explain by simply saying that Jesus was a good man.

There have been lots of good men and women, lots of great teachers, lots of people who left behind big ideas, important ideas.

But two thousand years after Rome tried to silence Jesus, people all over the world still call him king, Lord.

But here's the thing Christianity isn't simply a case to be examined.

Because if Jesus is really alive, then he isn't simply someone people encountered 2,000 years ago.

He is someone that people are still encountering today.

Rather than me trying to explain what that might look like, I asked Leonard, a Keystone friend and whose time our guy I recently spent time with on one of our Keystone High Adventures, to answer the same question that Jesus asked Peter.

And that question is, Leonard, who is Jesus to you?

Well, there was a time in my life when I didn't have an answer for that question.

I was born in the South.

I was born to a mother that had just turned 17 years old, and we were living with my grandmother, and five months after I was born, she died, and so the family got dispersed, and I ended up uh moving in with some relatives, and they did the best that they could, but I was on the fast track of living fast and dying young.

And I had so much rejection in the core of my being that I wanted to prove my worth and my value in this world.

So I thought the best way to do that is to become good at everything that I did.

And so I was a star athlete.

I played baseball, basketball, football, the whole shebang.

And I and and then I tried to build a reputation, and then I got involved in selling drugs to try to make a lot of money, and and eventually I started using drugs, experimenting with drugs, and I overdosed on drugs and died.

Let me say something about death.

It was nothing like I expected it to be.

You know, we all have an imagination about what the afterlife might be about.

It was none of that.

As a matter of fact, you know, when I went into the afterlife, I went through a tunnel like I've heard people say before.

Yeah, I went through that.

But the light came and it went.

And then after the tunnel, I ended up in what I call the land of imagination.

It's all the things that you could imagine.

But then, about a million miles past that, I ended up in a place called this is just the way that it is.

And in that place, there was a God whom I was not in a relationship with.

And it was awful.

This is a place that you would not wish for your worst enemy to end up in.

It was horrible.

And I had a ton of experiences in this place being separated from God and and and knowing that it's just, it's right.

This is the way that it should be.

Because this is just the way that it is.

And in that place, you know, I was going through experience after experience, and one of the last experiences I had, I'm playing tug of war.

I'm in a fight with an entity by the name of death.

Don't ask me to explain it.

But this entity is about 30 feet away from me, and right here from my belly button, because in the spirit world, you still have a body, and from my belly button, a string went out, and this death entity started pulling on the string and playing tug-of-war with me.

And in the middle of where I was at, and the entity was the bottomless pit.

How do I know these things?

And I've never read a Bible and I know nothing about God.

And I heard a voice, I was pulling, and I thought, well, I'm pretty good at stuff.

I should be able to beat this.

I'm pulling and it's pulling, I'm pulling and it's pulling.

And I noticed that I'm losing an eighth of an inch, and then another eighth of an inch, and another eighth of an inch, and it doesn't take too long to figure out you're gonna lose this fight.

And I said, God, help me.

And I heard a voice that said, Only Jesus can save you.

And I said, Jesus, if you will allow me to go back to the earth, I'll live for you.

And I decided I was gonna let go, and whatever happens, happen.

And I fell into the bottomless pit.

I just let go and fell.

And I fell and I fell.

And I don't know if you've ever had a dream before where you were falling.

I fell and I fell and I fell, and you think you can't fall anymore, and I kept falling and I kept falling and I kept falling, and you think this has got to be the end of it, and I fell for what seemed to me to be forever.

And I fell back in my body.

And when I fell back in my body two weeks after that, Orlando Diaz, the guy that actually took me to church, led me to Christ, came and talked to me about Jesus Christ.

I tried to understand it.

I knew that it had something to do with what happened to me, but I couldn't make heads or tails.

Listen, you cannot understand Jesus until you surrender.

You can know about him, but you gotta surrender.

And so he took me to church with him.

I got to the church, and the pastor is preaching like just to me.

And I'm thinking, did this guy tell the pastor about me?

Are they in cahoots?

And he gave an altar call at the end, and he says, you know, you should anybody want to come up and give their life to the Lord.

And I heard two clear voices in that church that that day.

One of them said, Now that you know that this is the way to go, you can just wait until you're about to die and do this.

Just keep living the way you're living.

And then I heard another voice that said, No, this is why I allowed you to live.

And I went up, and the first step's the hardest step.

And I took a step and went up to that altar.

I got to the altar, and the pastor says, You want to give your life to Jesus?

And I says, I think I do, but I'm not sure what it means.

He said, Well, it means that you would be under new management.

And I understood that.

And I said, Okay, I'm willing to do it.

Listen, I thought that I was just about to get into a straight jacket.

There would be no more joy, no more laughter, no more fun, definitely no more partying for the rest of my life.

But I was willing to do it if that's what it meant to surrender to Jesus.

And so he said, just kneel down at that altar and just tell God that you're sorry for your sins.

And I knelt down at that altar and I did the very best I could to tell God I was sorry for the life that I had lived.

I was sorry for the person that I had become.

I was sorry for all the drugs I sold to people.

I was sorry for the people that died from the drugs that I sold to them.

That I was sorry.

And as I was kneeling there at that altar, he touched me.

And I said, Lord, I'm not much, but what I am, I give to you.

I surrender it to you.

And I stood up from the altar.

And when I stood up from the altar, I felt chains come off of me.

And I knew that I had been set free.

I came out of that church on fire for God.

Listen, September the 23rd coming up will be 53 years I've been walking and living with Jesus.

And what have I learned in those 53 years?

I've learned that He knows me.

He knows me inside and out.

He knows my weaknesses.

He knows my strengths.

He knows my failures.

He knows the things that I've never told anybody.

He knows those things.

And he still loves me.

And he loves me with an unfailing love.

And he has been with me throughout the years.

And walking and living for Jesus has also changed my perspective on my entire life.

I know now I wasn't just born born in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the woods, just like the baby Moses was put into the river to be caught by Pharaoh's daughter.

God put me in those woods.

I was born to the right mother.

I was born to the right people.

I was born at the right time.

Had it not been for all of those people and my mother, I love her to death.

If it had not been for her, I wouldn't be the man of God that I am today.

Because living and following Jesus changes your life.

And now he's the God who saved me from myself.

He's the God who saved me from eternity.

And he's the God who redeemed me.

So who is Jesus to me today?

He's my Redeemer.

He's my Lord.

He's my Savior.

He is the name above every name.

And I love Him because He loved me first.

Thank you, Leonard.

And that brings us right back to where we started.

Because ultimately the question isn't, who did Peter say Jesus was?

Or who does Leonard say Jesus is?

Or who does Randy say Jesus is?

Jesus asks, what about you?

Who do you say I am?

Eventually every one of us has to answer that question for ourselves.

But if Jesus is who he claimed to be, he can forgive you, he can lead you, he can restore you.

He can restore what's broken in you.

He can bring you back to your heavenly father.

He can empower you to live a life of love for yourself and for others.

And ultimately, he can raise you from the dead and give you a life that never ends.

So for some of you, the most quite honest answer you can give to that question is, I'm not sure yet.

And that's okay.

Hang around here for a while.

For some of us today, it may be the day you're ready to make Peter's confession, your own confession.

Jesus, I believe you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

I trust you with my life.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus asked his closest followers, Who do you say I am?

And today he asks you, What's your next step?

If you prayed this or you this prayer, or you want to talk to somebody about your next step, there will be people under the screen after the service who would love to do that with you.

Or reach out to one of us over the coming week.

Let's pray.

Father God, give us the courage to wrestle with who Jesus is, not just to the world, but to us.

Open space in our lives to read one of the gospels and investigate it ourselves.

Talk with someone we trust or follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Some of us have followed you for years, Jesus, and we've seen you do amazing things, but we have put expectations on you to fix things or to do things that, well, for unknown reasons to us, you haven't done so yet.

And so we struggle.

We struggle with trusting you, especially for this thing, whatever that is going on in our lives right now.

But God help us to see that this room is full of people who have gone through their personal struggles and hells, and they've endured because you have promised to walk with them, even when you haven't fixed it or changed it.

There are still parts of many of our lives that we hold back, whether it's our finances or our relationships or forgiving somebody or or a child that we haven't trusted back with you.

Or there's a decision right in front of us that we keep holding on to and haven't turned to you.

If we find ourselves in that spot, God, the question is less, do I believe in Jesus?

Maybe it's where do I need to believe in Jesus again?

Where do I need to trust Him again?

Give us the courage to pursue that over this holiday, over this next week.

God, thank you for this morning.

Thank you for this group of people.

Thank you for just loving us right where we're at.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks for coming this morning.

I hope you guys have a wonderful Labor Day weekend.

We'll see you back next week.