"Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord" (Philippians 2:5-11)

The Apostles’ Creed is the oldest, and most widely accepted statement of faith in Christianity. It wasn’t written by the Apostles (Jesus’s companions) but it became accepted in the early centuries as a faithful summary of what the Apostles taught. In this week's sermon, we move from God the Father to looking at the person and work of Jesus, God the Son.  We will see that the early church saw Jesus's servant posture as a model for how we are to relate to a hurting world. Our calling to follow the way of Jesus is a invitation to become servants of a saving, servant king. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: How do you feel about people in positions of power? Are you trusting or skeptical of them? What characteristics make a powerful person a trustworthy person? What should the title “Christ” (Messiah) have meant to a waiting Jewish nation? What should it mean to us? Read Luke 4;17-21. How do these words show what kind of king and kingdom Jesus brings? What do they saw about how God is choosing to use his kingly power? Read Colossians 1:15-17. What does it mean that Jesus is the “firstborn”? Does this mean he is a created being, unlike God the Father (this is what some religious traditions teach)? How would you answer this, using v.16-17? (see also Hebrews 1:1-3 and John 1:14,18). Read Phil 2:9-11 and the quotes below. What are some competing”lords”, like Caesar, that people are coerced into serving today? How does Jesus’s lordship conflict with these other claims to lordship? Where are the places where you are impatient or annoyed with others? How can you move closer to those people to repair and renew these relationships? QUOTES: “The church faced a crisis when it was required to recite the formula “Kyros Kaisar” (“Caesar is Lord” ) in giving a loyalty oath to the emperor. The imperial title was filled with theological and religious connotations…. ’According to the ancient view, lordship over the world empire indicates lordship over the cosmos.’ Hence  many Christians chose to die rather than utter the loyalty oath. This refusal to call Caesar “lord” did not come out of  revolutionary civil disobedience, but from reluctance to render to Caesar that which did not properly belong to him. Absolute authority, dominion, and power belonged to Christ, who alone reigns as cosmic Lord.”— J.I. Packer “From the earliest days of Christianity we find an astonishing shift, for which again nothing in Jewish traditions of the time had prepared Jesus’s followers … they said that he was the unique embodiment of the one God of Israel… that he was the one through whom all things were made, and through whom now all things were being remade….  And they said all this, not three or four centuries later …. at a point when it might conceivably have been socially or politically desirable to say it. They said it within a single generation. And they said it even though it was shocking to the religious sensibilities of both Jews and pagans. Moreover, they said it even though it meant a direct political  confrontation with the claims of Rome.  Caesar, after all, was “son of God”; he was “lord of the world”; his kingdom was all-powerful, and it was at his name that every knee already had to bow. The earliest Christian evaluation of Jesus as the place where heaven and earth met, the replacement for the Temple, the embodiment of the living God, was about as socially provocative, as well as theologically innovative, as it could possibly have been.  And yet they said it.”— N.T. Wright