“Our Lord is eternally the Son of God, but though he was the Son of God, in order to do his work as the Messiah in the likeness of man, in the form of a servant, he needed this ‘baptism’ with the Spirit. . . . In the power of the Spirit he was enabled. We are told that he spoke and lived in the power of the Spirit, he died through the power of the eternal Spirit, and rose from the dead through the power of the Spirit.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, p. 48.
The Incarnation — the assertion that the Eternal Son of God fully and completely entered into human life and experience — is a doctrine that Christians affirm as one of the decisive truths of our faith. But we can easily fail to appreciate some of the crucial implication that come with the doctrine. When Paul says that the Son of God “emptied” himself to become fully human, he means just that. Jesus was not just pretending to be human. He embraced and entered into genuine human existence with all the limitations and finiteness. As Long, Strickler, and Stokes point out in Growing the Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit (p. 48), in the story of Superman, even when he was disguised as Clark Kent, the Man of Steel still retained all his powers. So, Christians often assume that even in human form, the Son of God retained all his powers as God. We assume that the miraculous actions of Jesus are simply the exercise of those divine powers of the Son of God. But to assume that is to fail to take the Scriptures seriously and to refuse to appreciate the full implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation.
So, how did Jesus perform his acts of power? That’s the topic I explore in the sermon, “Our God of Power: Jesus, Man of Power.”
Read: Philippians 2:5-11 and Acts 10:34-43.
Then listen to “Our God of Power: Jesus, Man of Power.”
© 2013 Gary A. Chorpenning; all rights reserved.
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