> Sermon Series: “Five Truths a Telling: The Doctrines of Christmas”
> Sermon 1: “Jesus Is a Man”
> Segment 1: “Heresies About the Christmas Baby”

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I love Christmas. It is one of my favorite times to be part of a church family. I believe celebrating Christmas is one of the more important things that a church does together as a worshipping congregation.

I can only imagine what Christmas is like for people who don’t go to church. For them, I suppose, Christmas is just another holiday — another chance to eat a lot of food, and watch some sports, and exchange some gifts. By themselves, those things sound pretty empty to me. At church, we celebrate the true meaning of the season with our songs and hymns, our candle-lit services, our Christmas programs and our Christmas sermons.

I suppose we preachers and teachers would like to believe that people learn their Christian doctrine primarily from the sermons we preach and the lessons we teach. But I think the truth is that quite a bit of the doctrine that most Christians know, they learned from the songs and hymns we sing, and from the visual things we do: things like baptism, and the Lord’s supper — and celebrating Christmas. The Christmas story communicates, in an exceptionally visual and clear way, many of the essential doctrines of Christianity.

This is the first in a series of Christmas messages titled: “Five Truths a Telling: The Doctrines of Christmas.” Christmas beautifully communicates five fundamental truths about Jesus.
• Jesus is a Man.
• Jesus is God.
• Jesus is the Son of God.
• Jesus is our Savior.
• Jesus is our King.
Man, God, Son of God, Savior and King. Five truths that Christmas so effectively proclaims, every year, loud and clear. “Five Truths a Telling: The Doctrines of Christmas.”

The Gnostic Heresy
The first of those five Christmas truths is a potent one: Jesus is a Man. A real man, a real human being.
• Jesus: the first-born son of Joseph and Mary, a humble, blue-collar family who lived in Galilee, in Israel.
• Jesus: who was born in a stable, round back, in Bethlehem.
• The oldest of several brothers and sisters.
• Jesus: Who played with his playmates, attended school, and as a teenager, became a carpenter by trade.
• Jesus of Nazareth.
You don’t get any more real or more human than Jesus.

And yet, one of the most persistent heresies with which Christianity has had to contend, since the earliest days, is the claim by some false teachers that Jesus was not really a man.

Toward the end of the 1st century, when Christianity was still only a few decades old, Christian Gnostics began to teach that Christ was not really a man. Their false teaching was based on the equally mistaken belief that the flesh is inherently evil. And so, they reasoned, Christ — who was holy, who was divine — could not have actually occupied wicked human flesh.

Some Gnostics (Docetics) said that Jesus didn’t really have a fleshly body. That it was just an illusion. Other Gnostics acknowledged that Jesus was a real person with a real body, but they taught that Jesus was not the real Christ. They claimed that the Christ was a spirit who came down from heaven and occupied Jesus’ body for three years, from the time of his baptism to just before his crucifixion. That Christ temporarily borrowed the body of Jesus of Nazareth, without being tainted by its physicality. Variations on these Gnostic themes have continued to resurface, century after century, for the last 2,000 years. There are those who teach such things today.

I have observed that many modern Christians — who would never describe themselves as Gnostics or would even know what that term means — seem to believe that the flesh is inherently evil, and that Jesus must not have really been a man. Not like other men. Not really like you and me. Because to understand Jesus as a true human being would somehow diminish Him.

Jesus at the Movies
You can see it in the way many of the modern movies have depicted Christ. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, Max Von Sydow’s Jesus speaks with an excruciatingly slow, hypnotic, other-worldly voice. In Ben-Hur, when the lead character collapses to the ground and Jesus offers him a dipper of water, the slave looks up at this kind stranger, and as they lock eyes, Ben-Hur looks as if he has seen a ghost.

Jesus was not other-worldly. He was not a ghost. He was a real human, born to this world, the Son of Man. Violins did not swell in the background when Jesus entered a room. People did not freeze in place and time when they looked into Jesus’s eyes. I don’t commend every aspect of Jesus Christ Superstar, but I think one reason that movie received such a negative response from the religious community is because it depicted Jesus as a real man — with personality and emotions and a temper. It can be startling, it can feel a bit scandalous, to fully embrace the truth that Jesus really is a man.

We picture Jesus with shoulder-length hair, wearing a flowing robe and sandals, and that image enhances our mystical perception of Him. But Jesus simply dressed like other men of his day. If Jesus were living in the contemporary Western world, He might have short-cropped hair and wear a business suit, or perhaps slacks and a sports shirt. Imagine Jesus, with his hair in a short clipper cut, dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt. If you find such a Jesus hard to accept, is it because you have difficulty embracing the idea that Jesus is a real man?

Line in the Sand in 1 John
This subject is not open for debate. As a matter of fact, the New Testament categorically condemns the teaching that Jesus was not a man as heresy.

The epistle of I John was one of the last books of the Bible to be written, around 90 AD. By then, Christian Gnosticism was on the rise and gaining a toehold in the early churches. It is obvious that the Apostle John wrote 1 John specifically for the purpose of refuting and denouncing Gnosticism.

Listen how John opens his letter. 1 John 1:1:

What was from the beginning — what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life…

As John wrote that, he was an elderly man, probably 75 to 85 years old. He was remembering the time, more than half a century earlier, when he was a young man, perhaps a teenager, and he was a disciple and then an apostle of Jesus Christ. He tells his readers: “Don’t listen to what these Gnostic false teachers are telling you. I was there! I was there from the beginning. I saw Jesus in the flesh. I stood at the foot of the cross, as Jesus shed his real red blood. I touched Jesus with my own hands. So don’t listen to this nonsense that Jesus is not a real human being.”

In 1 John 4, John spells it out even more clearly. 1 John 4:1-3:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus, is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist.

You can’t state it any more clearly than that. This doctrine that Jesus is a Man is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith, and to deny it is to deny the faith.

This sermon series is titled, “Five Truths a Telling.” One of the truths that Christmas tells, loud and clear, is that Jesus is a man. Celebrating Christmas and remembering the Christmas story is one of the best ways we have to proclaim this essential doctrine. When we sing about the Christmas baby and re-create the details of His birth, we declare all over again, year after year, that Jesus was, and is, a real human.

Not some ghost, or spirit, or alien, or superman. He did not descend fully grown from the heavens. He did not ride in on a chariot. He did not materialize out of nowhere. He is not the figment of somebody’s imagination.

He was born. He was born! He is the Christmas baby. And thus, Jesus really did come in the flesh. That is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith.

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Segment 2: “Jesus Became the Ultimate Human Sacrifice“