Jesus’ mission was to reveal the Father to us. More specifically, Jesus’s mission was to accomplish the plan of salvation. This devotion looks at how revealing God’s love helped reveal our need to accept the salvation God was offering.
Nuggets
God’s love and mercy is intrinsically connected.
Providing mankind access to the plan of salvation was the focus of Jesus’ mission.
Devotions in the What I Believe series
What I Believe Series
Devotions in the Evangelism and Missions category
What Is Evangelism?
What Is Missions?
What Was Jesus’ Mission? (Part 1)
What Was Jesus’ Mission? (Part 2)
How Is the Mission to be Inclusive?
As you can see, my computer issues have not been resolved yet. Thank you for your patience.
We started discussing Jesus’ mission in the last devotion. We’re going to finish that discussion today.
Let’s recap. We’ve said so far that Jesus’ mission was
To reveal the Father
To glorify the Father
To bring God’s kingdom to earth
Moving on. Really, Jesus’ mission centered on fulfilling God’s plan of salvation.
To Make God’s Love and Mercy Known
“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!” (Eph. 2: 4-5 CSB)
God’s love and mercy is intrinsically connected. God’s mercy is the unexpected way God responds in love to our needs.
Bayne wrote that God’s mercy “… teaches us our duty to God and man. He has loved us first, therefore must we love Him again, His love must constrain us; and our love is a reflection of His to us (1 John 4:19; 2 Corinthians 5:14; 1 John 4:11).” Disciples’ mercy is a characteristic of compassion for the needs of others, especially those who are in distress.
Resource
Bayne’s The Mercy of God
https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/bayne/the_mercy_of_god.htm
Rossi wrote what I have long thought. He wrote that God shows us mercy to promote His glory. But then, He is God. He deserves the glory.
Resource
Rossi’s God’s Mercy Towards the Sinner
https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/rossi/god’s_mercy_towards_the_sinner.htm
God’s mercy is also shown by the substitution of one man’s death to redeem many. Jesus became the propitiation so that we could be restored to the Father.
Glossary
Propitiation
We’ve talked before that God does not love as the world loves. His love is a constant, unchanging love, the opposite of how the world loves.
To read a related devotion, read How Is the World’s Love Different from Jesus’ Love?
Villiers caught a difference in “… rich in mercy …” and “… his great love …” (Eph. 2: 4 CSB). He wrote, “… mercy, in fact, refers to man in his fallen state, and that the love refers to the manner in which that mercy is manifested.”
Resource
Villiers’ The Mercy and Love of God
https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/villiers/the_mercy_and_love_of_god.htm
Jesus, when He was here on earth, showed how that mercy is manifested through love.
God bestows this love and mercy on us even when we are spiritually dead. “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5: 8 CSB).
Don’t take that to mean God is okay with us being spiritually dead. No. He wants us to admit our sins, believe in Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, and confess Him as Sovereign Lord.
To Seek and Save the Lost
“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost” (Lk. 19: 10 CSB)
We have all sinned so that we are all lost. Sin is when we disobey God and break one of His laws and commandments.
We need to repent of our sins. Repentance is expressing sorrow for breaking God’s laws and commandments by making the commitment to changing ourselves through obedience so that we no longer do the wrong things.
When we repent, we exhibit the faith that God can save us. Faith is the belief that the doctrines stated in God’s Word are true, even if we do not understand all aspects of them. Salvation is deliverance from evil and the consequences of sins to replace them with eternal life and good.
When we step out in faith and accept Jesus as our Savior, we accept God’s gift of grace. Grace is a free and unmerited gift from Heavenly Father given through His Son, Jesus Christ that enables salvation and spiritual healing to believers. This includes forgiveness of our sins.
Forgiveness is when God pardons us because we have broken His laws and commandments. We accept the pardon by letting go of the guilt and remorse that we feel because we have done something wrong. It is a conscious decision to accept His forgiveness.
This forgiveness starts us on the sanctification road. Sanctification is the transformation of mind, body, and soul beginning with regeneration and ending with perfected state of spiritual wholeness or completeness. Regeneration is the change in us that God brings about when we go from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive. It is where God breaks Satan’s hold on us.
The perfected state indicates spiritual wholeness or completeness. It means we have become holy, sanctified, and righteous. Holy means to be set apart, perfect, and pure. Righteousness is the result of a solid relationship with God built by a sincere life of conscientious obedience to God’s laws and commandments.
We are able to approach God and ask for salvation because Jesus redeemed us. Redemption is where something is used in exchange for something else to gain or regain something. Jesus substituted — became the propitiation — for us because He knew God’s wrath had to be appeased. He shed His blood to pay the price for our sins.
Jesus is our Redeemer because He was born of a virgin, making Him 100% God and 100% man; gave His life on the cross for us so that His blood could pay the price for our sins; and because of God’s great might and power, rose from the grave, conquering death and paying the price for our sins.
Jesus’ blood became the atonement for our sins. Atonement is about repayment for a wrong. The repayment was the shedding of His blood.
When we accept Jesus as our Savior, we must change. We have a circumcision of the heart, where God changes our hearts.
We gain eternal life because we are no longer spiritually dead. Eternal life is the promise of living eternally – even if we have died in this life – because we have admitted our sins, believed Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, and confessed God as Sovereign Lord. Spiritual death is the separation from God that occurred as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s original sin.
We have to choose to accept God’s plan of salvation because He has given us free will. Free will is the ability within us to make decisions, which determine actions that produce character.
Making the Connections
Jesus’ mission did not end when He ascended. We are still charged to complete His mission. “… Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation’ (Mk. 16: 16 NIV). We are to imitate His mission.
Making the Connections to Self-Discipline
Ooo, baby. We are to witness, worship, show love, have mercy, and imitate. Oh, yeah. Those things don’t always come naturally to some of us. We’ll need self-discipline.
We’ve been looking at defending our beliefs when we are witnessing. That means we have to be secure enough to convince someone to accept our beliefs.
Our questions should still serve us to determine on what we need to focus.
What does the Scriptures say?
What do I believe?
Why do I believe the same/differently than the Scriptures?
What are the talking points when witnessing to a non-believer?
Related Links
I have created a worksheet of the questions above. You can access it through the library.
How Do We Apply This?
Hooker wrote, “As regards God, our soundest knowledge is to know that we know Him, and our safest eloquence concerning Him is silence, when we confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness above our capacity or reach.” The only way we know Him is to seek for Him and spend time with Him.
Resource
Farrar and Hooker’s The Incompressibility
https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/farrar/the_incomprehensibility.htm
We have to diligently work to imitate Jesus. No, we won’t be perfect. We just have to ask to be forgiven, and then do better at following Him.
We are called to spread the gospel unto the ends of the earth. Providing mankind access to the plan of salvation was the focus of Jesus’ mission. We need to make it the focus of ours.
Father God. Thank You that Jesus came to be the Sacrifice to pay the penalty for our sins. Thank You that we see His dedication and obedience to You. Lord, it is our prayer that we imitate Him in doing whatever You call us to do. Amen.