Come To Know Christ and Love Him
This is my chosen son. Listen to him.
Last week we started the Lenten Sundays
with the beginning of Jesus' public ministry
when Jesus was in the desert and was tempted three times.
Today we are up a mountain and we are at the end of Jesus' ministry.
These do not look like they are related,
but they are actually very correlated
and very importantly related to each other.
Last week we heard the three ancient temptations of the devil
that have happened for eons.
You are what you do so turn this stone into bread.
You are what you have so
I will give you all the kingdoms if you worship me.
You are who other people say you are,
so if you throw yourself down from this parapet and save yourself,
look what they will say.
And today, we are at the end of Jesus public ministry
and here are the three temptations again.
Bear in mind that in the scripture just before this,
Jesus has fed the 5,000 with just two fish and five loaves of bread.
From that he is reminding the disciples
that he is not what he does.
This is the one of the great signs.
He is not what he has.
He has so little.
He had nothing.
They just gave him two fish and some loaves
but immediately after that, he turns around and asks the disciples,
“Who do people say that I am?”
They first say, you are Elijah or John the Baptist,
or one of the other prophets.
But then he ask them, he says, “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter, the one who confesses says,
“You are the son of the living God. You are the Messiah.”
So then Jesus must say, yes, finally he gets it.
He must be delighted after all these three years.
So he takes him up a mountain with his two closest apostles,
James and John and reveals himself to them.
He assures them that he is the son of God.
He knows he will die
but he wants to assure them that no matter what,
that the cross will not be the last word.
God’s last word will be the resurrection.
His final word will be that of love.
Jesus is trying to make sure that
they know this at a critical point in time in life,
because oftentimes in the struggles of our life,
we begin to doubt.
But what is important here is how this happens.
How do we come to know?
They have been with Jesus for three years
and they did not get, Jesus did not reveal it all at once who he was.
It was slowly revealed to them.
Then they came to not just know Jesus,
they came to love Jesus and to follow him.
See my friends, this is the journey of Lent.
What we are called to do is to come to know Jesus
in a deeper way and to come to love him in a deeper way.
But here is an important aspect,
we cannot love what we do not know.
If we do not know Christ, how can we love him?
Let’s take a more benign example to illustrate this.
Let’s take eggs.
Could you love eggs if you have never had eggs?
I guess in theory you could!
But what would it mean to to love something you have never had?
Like you say, “Oh, I love eggs, but what do they taste like?
I don’t know, I have never had them.”
That would mean nothing.
It would just be empty.
Just those words.
Now I happen to love eggs.
I love eggs fried.
I love eggs boiled.
I love eggs poached.
I like eggs boiled soft, boiled hard,
I do not care what way they are.
I just love eggs.
But I know them in every way.
And I have tasted them in every way.
And I have come to love them because of that.
The Lenten journey is to come to know God and Christ deeper,
but in much deeper way than just knowing eggs.
It is not a static thing.
It is a relationship.
And just like every relationship,
it requires commitment.
It requires a deepening,
it requires time to reveal ourselves to the other person
and allow them to reveal themselves
and to love them for who they are.
We all want to be known for who we really are
and be loved for who really are, not a set of conditions.
I will love you if, but love us just the way we are.
We all yearn for that and God does that for us
because God knows us completely,
He knows us better than we know ourselves.
Christ knows us and knows us better than we know ourselves.
He already knows us and loves us,
but he wants to be known by us,
and he wants to be loved by us.
So we are called to know Christ in a deeper way
and to love Christ in a deeper way.
And therefore we enter into this annual journey of Lent
to do that in a deeper way.
So what does that require of us?
Just like your own relationships
with your friends and with your spouse,
it requires time and commitment.
And that is what we commit to do on the Lenten journey.
Spend a little extra time in prayer,
a little extra time in which we come to know
and discover Christ and God’s love for us.
Not just in a head knowledge now,
but in a heart knowledge.
We move from just eggs to relationships.
We are called to really know Christ.
That is why my hope is that you come to this Lenten mission
that we have tonight and, and tomorrow night.
Maybe if you did not get to see it last night, to watch it.
We have it available on the Livestream.
And why?
Because this is how we come to know Christ in a deeper way.
We can not do it without showing up, my friends.
We have to find a way to carve out the time.
We will never have enough time
for everything we have to do.
So we have to choose what is it that we are going to do
that is going to deepen our lives,
to deepen our relationships,
to deepen the joy in our life.
In the end, we know that this cross is not the end.
Death is not the end for us.
It is the beginning of eternal life.
And that is the ultimate destination.
So everything gets set by that.
But we have got to come to know Christ
so that we can be comfortable with that journey into the very end.
My friends, I ask you to commit more time to prayer
in this Lenten journey.
To allow some more time each day,
and to listen to Christ, and allow Christ to reveal himself to you.
I will promise you,
you will love what you see and what you hear.
I promise you that He is the beloved son of God.
He is the chosen one.
He is the Lord.
This is my chosen one. Listen to him.