Two men once met at a social gathering in Jackson MS. One’s father had been the president of the biggest bank in the state. The other’s father had been the custodian in that building. The president had actually hired the custodian because he had previously been his yard man. When their two sons met, the custodians son said this. “On the day my dad died, your father was the first person my mom called. He came over to the house at 10 o’clock and just sat with us. For two hours he sat, gave just a little advice, and mostly just said ‘everything will be all right.’ I’ll never forget your father for that.”
The bank president’s son simply replied, “Yep, that was daddy. That’s the kind of man he was.”
If you were going to pick one story from the Bible to say, that is the kind of God Yahweh is, which would you pick? What kind of God was Jesus? What kind of God is the Lord?
Today we turn to possibly the most talked about and written about passage of scripture in the whole bible, and for good reason. It was a hymn, most Bible’s will have it set off into verses, a hymn that was sung by Christian churches far and wide by the time of Paul’s writing. It is a hymn that summarizes all the truth and beauty of Christianity.
- Who Christ was – the Truth of Christianity
He was in the form of God – he lived in a form that revealed his divine nature. He looked like God, he had the privileges of God. He left that form and all that privilege to be a servant. He served us, the people he loved, by taking the form of a man and suffering death on our behalf.
Now if you are new to Christianity, or if you have been confused by false religions such as the Jehovah’s Witness they will try to make a lot out of this verse. They will say, you see he wasn’t God, he only was the form of God.
Paul was not a pagan, he was not a greek, he did not believe in many gods, or demi gods. He believed in the One God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, he alone was God. Nothing and No one lived in the form of God but God.
This fact is the most dramatic truth of Christianity. Less than twenty years after his death, the Church initially made up of thousands of monotheistic Jews were singing this hymn – worshipping the man Jesus as the one who formerly had dwelt in the very form of God.
If you doubt Christianity you will be tempted to have your head turned by politics, sexual stereotypes, racist stereotypes, hypocrisy in the Church and a hundred other things. Those things are all just bluff and bluster. The Church like all other worldwide organizations with billions of members has different opinions. The fact you must deal with is the historical fact of monotheistic culture worshipping a man as God. That is the central fact of Christianity, it resulted from the resurrection, and it only has one rational explanation. You need to decide what you think about Him.
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