Sermon Central
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Our Busy Busy Ascended Savior
Contributed by Stephen Belokur on May 15, 2021 (message contributor)
Summary: We love to read the brief descriptions of Jesus returning to His Father. But, what has He been doing since He returned to His Father's side? It is wonderful!
Our Busy, Busy Ascended Savior
Please stand with me as we go over our current memory Scripture:
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
And our memory Scripture “refresher” verse is:
“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder. And His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
Today we will be reading from Luke 24:50-53 & Acts 1:1-11
This past Thursday was Ascension Day which is either 39 days after the day Jesus arose from the dead or 40 days after the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead if you count Resurrection Day.
The ascension of Jesus is just one part of the beautiful plan of redemption that only our incomprehensibly great God could accomplish.
Many times I am amazed as to the way the Lord works things out in His timing. I mean, just think about this … We now have about 40 memory Scriptures in our spiritual arsenal that we can draw upon at various times. And, we rotate through the previous memory Scriptures as “memory refresher verses” as we cycle through them each Sunday.
How excellent is the Lord’s timing that on Ascension Sunday our memory refresher Scripture is a prophecy about Jesus coming to earth as the Son of God and Son of Man; fully God and fully man.
And He did that for our salvation!
I mean, He would have to come to earth before He could ascend back to Heaven, right?
Is our God Amazing or what???? Praise His Holy Name Forever!!!
So, let’s go ahead and read about the ascension of Jesus back to the Father in Luke 24:50-53 & Acts 1:1-11
(prayer for help)
Back right after we were married, Pastor Karenlee worked at IBM in an office that processed changes that the engineers had made to different devices that were being produced in the manufacturing plants.
There were two men and she was one of the two women who worked in that office. The men regularly worked two hours of overtime every day and Karenlee and her co-worker did not.
One day the two ladies decided to keep a log of the work done by each person and what they found was that she and her co-worker were processing ninety percent of the engineering changes with no overtime and the two men were processing only ten percent of the changes with two hours of overtime each day.
Why am I telling you this? Hopefully it will become clear later.
Do you ever think about how confusing Jesus must have been to the Jews of His time? Even their very Scriptures must have caused them to scratch their heads as they studied them.
We have talked about the Shema before, right?
The beginning of the Shema or the daily prayers of the Jews is found in Deuteronomy 6:4 NIV where it says,
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
Deuteronomy 6:4 YLT where it says,
“Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our God [is] one Yahweh.”
The people of Israel firmly believed, and rightly so, that Yahweh was and is One God!
But, they also knew the creation account in Genesis 1:26, 27 where Yahweh says,
“‘Let us (plural) make man in our (plural) image, in our (plural) likeness’ … So God created man in His (singular) own image, in the image of God He (singular) created them; male and female He (singular) created them.”
And we see the same sort of language in Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah 6.
That’s enough to make your head spin, isn’t it?
But, THEN what did they do with the memory refresher verse we have today?
“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder. And His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
Let’s just edit that a little bit to show the headache this must have caused … A Child will be born … A Son will be given … His Name shall be called … THE MIGHTY GOD … THE EVERLASTING FATHER …
WHAT????????????
If I had been an anti-Jewish-religion nut back then I would have definitely pointed these things out as contradictions. Of course, that did not happen because only a few had access to the Torah and the writings of the Prophets. And no one, until Jesus, would have dared to challenge the Jewish spiritual leaders.
When you try to get your mind in that sort of frame it can be very confusing. But now we have it easy. We’re looking back into the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament. But the people at the time of Jesus grew up only knowing the Old Testament and they were living in the advent, the very beginning of the New Testament, the New Covenant.
