In 1925, Bruce Barton wrote a book on Jesus Christ entitled, The Man Nobody Knows. He said he was tired of hearing Jesus portrayed as a wimpy, “milk toast” character, and he wanted to show America a Jesus for the “Roaring 20s.” I’m not sure how successful he was; he described Jesus as an advertising executive who appealed to everyone! Is that who Jesus really is?
I think what often happens is that we try to make “a god in our own image.” We try to make Jesus into the kind of Jesus WE want Him to be, instead of Who He really IS. Where can we find the BEST picture of Jesus? In His WORD. I read or hear of people all the time who say things like, “The Jesus I know wouldn’t say that; the Jesus I know wouldn’t do that.” But where are they getting those ideas about Jesus? Just what they “feel” about Him? What you “feel” like Jesus would do, doesn’t matter. We need to get a true understanding of Jesus from His WORD. And that is what we are going to look at this morning in Revelation 1:5, “Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood”
Last week we saw that John tells us in :4 that this book of Revelation is from the Triune God: God the Father (“He who is and who was and who is to come”), God the Holy Spirit (“the seven Spirits who are before the throne”) and God the Son, “Jesus Christ.” And we noted that usually when the Trinity is mentioned, it is: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, in that order. But in this case, he mentions Jesus Christ last; NOT because He was not being emphasized, but because we IS: because he is about to elaborate on Jesus for a while, which we see in the rest of Revelation 1. So this morning we are going to follow up last week’s message by looking at :5, which tells us more about Jesus, in a very simple but clear way: “Who He Is, and What He Did.”
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shawnethomas 