God in the Dirt

Welcome to PowerPoint with Jack Graham. Jesus is flesh. He is the form of God, as described in Philippians two. He is the physical presence of God. The infinite, eternal God is now touchable.

He is knowable. On today's PowerPoint, Dr. Graham brings a message about the measure God took to know us on a personal level.

Now, here's Dr. Graham with his message: God in the dirt. John chapter one, verse fourteen, and the Word became flesh. This is a part of the of the prologue of the Gospel of John, because it is in the four Gospels that we get the initial primary focus on Jesus. Of course, and John is focusing at the outset on Christ, who is the Word of God.

And that word is reflected and became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God, and all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. In this prologue of the Gospel of John, this beginning of this story of Jesus through John, we see we meet the living Word of God. The Word. What is a Word? The word is a reflection of an idea.

It's the communication of a message. The word is the articulation, and in the sense of Jesus, Jesus articulates God. He is God's vocabulary. He is God's version on earth, and therefore, we have in Jesus the Word made flesh, the Word made alive. We call this, in theological terms, the incarnation.

We celebrated at Christmas, but we celebrated all of our lives. We're in Christ because we know that God now is one of us. His name is Emmanuel, God with us.

So the Word was made flesh, carne. And so Jesus is flesh; he is the form of God, as described in Philippians two. He is the physical presence of God. The infinite, eternal God is now touchable. He is knowable.

He is understandable. He made his home among us, and therefore Jesus is the incarnate Son of God and Son of Man. One with us. Jesus often called himself the Son of Man, a favorite title that he took for his own. He is a full-fledged human being, and that is going to be our focus in this message.

God in the dirt, the humanity, the humanness. Of Jesus, to be a Christian is to believe in both the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ. He is God made man. He became man, not man who became God. Not half God and half man, but perfect God and perfect man—the man God.

Someone put it this way: He became what we are, that we might be made what He is.

So that's why in verse twelve of John one says, "As many as received Him, Jesus, to them gave He the right to be called the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, the family of God." Even those who believe on His name, because when we believe and receive Jesus, then we become a part of the family of God. His divinity intersects our humanity. To deny. The deity of Jesus is heresy. It is also heresy to deny the humanity of Jesus.

As a matter of fact, among the first heresies of the church in the early centuries of the Christian faith was Gnosticism, which was a heresy of denying the true humanity, flesh and blood. Of Jesus. Through the years, we've had ideas about who Jesus is and what he looked like, and what did he do when he was a baby and as a child. And what we have in our minds about how we see Jesus is is important because we all have certain imaginations. If you were to close your eyes right now and just, if I were to say to you, "Okay, imagine Jesus, what he looked like," probably some images that you've seen in tradition throughout history, or even in your own imagination, would show up.

What did Jesus look like? Frankly, we don't know because the gospels don't tell us; they never give us a physical description of Jesus.

So it's left up to our to our own minds and what others may have told us about Jesus. When you look at our Lord through the lens of Scripture, he was as an adult. In his early thirties, a Jewish man with a dark complexion—no doubt, if he's a common Jewish man—dark hair. We don't know that he had a beard, but most Jewish men in that era wore a short-cropped beard, not a long beard. He was most likely.

A man with short cropped hair is well. I know we've seen the long flowing hair of Jesus in our minds, but most Jewish males of that era kept their hair cut rather short, except those who had taken a Nazarite vow, like John the Baptist.

So we don't know, of course, whether he had a beard or didn't have a beard. He probably did. Dark complexioned, dark eyes. He was a Jewish Semitic man. He, if he was common, as we believe he was common to others in his same time period, as a Jewish male, he would have been about.

Now, are you ready for this? Five foot one inch and a hundred and ten pounds. Five foot one inch and a hundred and ten pounds. That was a common Jewish man in the first century. Women in the first century were four feet something and about seventy-five or eighty pounds.

This is why, when the women were going to the tomb, they were wondering, "How on earth are we going to roll away this stone? We weigh eighty pounds." But the angel rolled away the stone.

So Jesus. Was not giant Jesus. He was probably smallish, and because he was a carpenter, in effect, a contractor or a construction worker, who lived outdoors and worked outdoors, he would have had a weathered face and a winsome face, because we know that he was kind and gentle and humble. But there was nothing about his physical appearance that would have taken you in. Isaiah, in speaking of the coming of the Messiah, said of him, he said he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.

So, if Jesus was in a crowd, there was nothing about the physical appearance of Jesus that would have been standing out, attractive. It wasn't his physical beauty, even. That was desirous. You would, you certainly would not have known that you seen Jesus in a group that there was anything supernatural about him. He didn't walk around with a halo.

I'm pointing out to you that if you saw him physically, there was there was not anything special about him physically. Certainly not supernatural. If you just looked at him. But here's what we do know, through the lens of Scripture. If we're capturing Jesus in the lens of Scripture, he was born of a woman.

He had a human body. He grew up as a baby, then a toddler, and then a teen, a teenager. Imagine that. He had a family. And lived with his family.

He grew up in a small town, a very small town, Nazareth. About four or five hundred people lived in Nazareth when Jesus grew up there. He obeyed his parents, that we know from Scripture. He worshipped God in the synagogue, at the temple, and he prayed. He was a common laborer.

He got hungry, therefore he ate. He grew tired and weary, even exhausted at times, and therefore he slept. He was thirsty, and so he drank. He even asked people questions. I mean, he knew the answer.

Because he knew what was in the heart of all, but in his humanity and his humility, he asked for information. He asked for help when he said to the woman at Samaria, "Would you give me a drink?" He was at times stressed, troubled. In the Garden of Gethsemane, before Golgotha, there was Gethsemane, and he was sweating blood, so stressed that the small capillaries of his skin burst, and oozing out of his skin was blood. He was stressed to the nth degree, and yet while stressed, and sometimes he was angry, yet he never sinned. He was the kind of man that overthrew the money changers in the temple when he saw injustice, when he saw people in pain and misused and abused.

He said something. He did something. Yes, he was gentle, Jesus, meek and mild, but he was also when needed angry at sin and forceful with his message and taking things into his own hands. He was loving and compassionate, and yet. He was willing to confront evil and wrong when he saw it.

You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, God in the Dirt. Did you know that you can join Dr. Graham for his daily devotion? It's a study of God's Word that will help you grow in your faith, encourage you in your walk with Christ, and show you how to navigate through the challenges of life. To sign up, text DEVO to five nine seven eight nine and begin receiving Doctor Graham's devotional every day.

Again, text DEVO, D E V O to five nine seven eight nine. When you are walking through a difficult season or ministering to someone who is, you know that easy answers rarely help. What we need is the unchanging truth of God's word. That's why Doctor Jack Graham wrote Diamonds in the Dark. In this encouraging book, he opens Scripture to show how God meets us in grief, fear, waiting, illness, and uncertainty.

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Now let's get back to today's message. God in the dirt. He made friends and hung out with his friends, both female and male friends. He traveled with them. He was never married.

You say, "Well, how do you know that?" Well, first of all, we're never told that he was married in Scripture, and there's your authority. You say, "I read something in a magazine. I read something online several years ago that there's an old manuscript somewhere that shows up that said Jesus had a wife." So is it true that Jesus had a wife?

Some even suggest that he was married to Mary Magdalene. This is all fabrication. This is all fiction.

So if you read something or heard something or something in your head that that Jesus had a wife, forget about it. But here's here's what the world wants to do with Jesus. Jesus, they want Jesus because they don't believe in God. They don't believe Jesus was anything special.

So he, you know. He had a house, a mortgage. He had a wife. He had kids. He was just like us in this way.

No, the scripture never says that Jesus had a wife. Though he had wonderful friends, Jesus loved children. He loved children. Little children would crawl up in his lap, and he would speak to them tenderly. I always, as a little boy, related.

To those little kids who loved Jesus, he celebrated holidays, religious feasts and festivals of the Jewish faith and tradition, and and Jesus entered that. Oh yes, and he entered and and he went to parties and weddings. A lot of people see Jesus as you know because they've seen pictures of Jesus that they think that's Jesus is boring, or maybe they went to church and church was boring, so Jesus must be boring. But Jesus was not humorless in his humanity. He was joyful.

Jesus, Jesus with a smile. I can imagine it, can't you? Even in his preaching and teaching, when he told some of those parables and anecdotes, it was humorous to a first-century audience. You may not get the joke, but there were jokes in there. But Jesus said, "My joy I give to you." What joy you talk about?

Jesus' joy, the joy that He knew.

So Jesus was joyous. Jesus, oh yes, He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. We're going to talk about that in just a second. But in his sorrow, there was great joy, and for the joy set before him, he endured the cross and even despised the shame. Yes, Jesus celebrated life.

He went to parties, and you know you don't you don't invite a buzzkill to your parties. People enjoyed being around Jesus, tax collectors and sinners, just people, common people. Couldn't wait to hear him. Stayed all day to listen to him preach and teach. And one last thing, I could say much more, but one last thing about Jesus: He loved his mom.

That's good, isn't it? Say Amen. He loved his mom. Took care of her to the last breath on the cross. Yes, Jesus was real.

Real blood; his blood ran red. Human DNA, authentic. God in every way, and man in every way. He diminished his dignity by coming to earth, but he never gave up his deity. He emptied himself, took on the form of a man.

This is Philippians chapter two. And became in the form of man, the physicality of a man, and because he became a servant in in this humility, in this humanity, he is now exalted, and he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That at the name of Jesus, every knee would bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord.

So Jesus was a man; he suffered as a man. There was pain in his life. There was struggle, human struggle. He lived in a world of death. The Roman world, everything around him, people were dying.

The average life expectancy of the first century Roman world was 21 years of age. Can you imagine? Jesus saw the death and the brokenness and the tears and the hurt, and He Himself suffered. He was tested and tried. The Scripture says that all points such as we are tested and tried.

God got down in the dirt, didn't He? He washed dirty feet when a woman was accused. Accosted because of her adultery, he got down and wrote in the dirt. What a picture of God down in the dirt for the sins of a woman and a man. And this is such an incredible encouragement to us because we do live in a broken world, in a sinful, wicked, depraved, defiled.

Sin sick world and culture. We live here. We live here now. And God and Christ stepped into this world for us to show us His humanity, to show us that He understands us, that He knows us.

Now He didn't have to come to Earth to understand us. But he came to earth to show us, so we would know that he cared about us, that God cared about us, that God understood us.

So we don't have a high priest that is not acquainted, does not know our hurts, our pains, our heartaches, our our heartbreaks, our tears, our fears. I don't understand. I could not possibly understand the death and the pain and the hurt of someone going through the loss of of a child or name any other kind of loss in in life. I don't get it. I don't understand it, but I know one who does.

And I can point people to the one who does understand, who does know, who does care, who does comfort, who is always there just when we need him the most. That's when we just tell people the story of Jesus. Try to write on their hearts His words. He picks us up. He stoops to pick us up.

When I was three years of age, my brother was thirteen years my senior, my big brother. He was a great big brother, so he would have been sixteen. I was three years old when it happened. We were picking him up for lunch at school, and going to lunch, and then and then taking him back. I'm not sure that those details, but I was in the back seat of the cart, and my car, and my mother had made me a sandwich of some kind.

And so I was willing to eat the sandwich. What I was not willing to do was to eat the crust around the bread, because I disliked the crust around the bread. But my mother told me I must eat the crust around the bread, and you know why? Because that's where all the vitamins were living.

Now, I always believed my mother, but I'm not sure about that one. Said you got to eat the crust. Because that's where the vitamins are, but I didn't want to eat the crust.

Now remember, I'm three years old. I'm already a sinner in my little wicked heart, and I'm about to lie to my mother because what I did in the back seat—I just peeled the crust off, as I often did—and I would get reprimanded when I did it, and then forced to eat the crust by itself. That was not pleasant, but I. I took off the crust around the thing, and then I wadded it, balled it up in my hand, just like that. And I'm sitting there in the back seat with my sandwich and the crust in this hand.

And I'm going, "Now what am I going to do with this?" She's going to catch me. She's going to know what I did.

Now I'm a liar and a deceiver at this point.

So I said, "I know what I'll do." She's driving the car. My brothers in the front seat—they're talking. I know what I'll do. I said, "I'll roll down the window quietly, and I'll throw the crust out the window." Now I'm not only a liar and a deceiver; I'm a litterer.

So I reach over to roll down the window, looking at her, and unfortunately, instead of the window, I took hold of the car door, and I opened the car door. And guess what happened? I went flying out. It wasn't that funny. I went flying out, landed on my head, 40 miles an hour.

I'm laying in the street, bleeding. I'm still conscious, I think. But what I remember is my brother getting out of the car and running to me, my big brother, running to me. It takes me back to the car. I'm trying not to cry, and my big brother holding me.

My mother. We go to the hospital, but I've always thought of that story and of someone else who is our elder brother, the Lord Jesus. When we fell and were broken and wounded, left for dead. Our big brother, the Lord Jesus Christ, He came down of heaven and got down with us and picked us up and carried us to healing and hope. That's why God dwelt among us.

And don't think for one skinny minute. That when Jesus ascended after His resurrection, when He ascended into heaven, that He left His humanity behind here on earth. Not at all. He is still our man in heaven. He's our elder brother.

There is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, and God. In Christ, in His humanity, is standing with us still to this very day, and interceding for us, and picking us up. We have a man in heaven. We have a Savior in heaven. The Lord Jesus Christ, our God and our King.

Yes, yes, He is. You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, "God in the Dirt." Every day, someone turns on the radio, opens a podcast, or watches a message online, looking for hope. Many are carrying burdens no one else can see. Through your support of PowerPoint Ministries, they're hearing the life-changing truth of God's Word exactly when they need it most. And as our thank you for your gift of ten dollars or more, we'd love to send you Dr.

Jack Graham's book, Diamonds in the Dark. It's a reminder that God is present, faithful, and working even through life's hardest seasons. To give a gift and request your copy, text N O V to five nine seven eight nine. That's N O V, as in November, to five nine seven eight nine. Did you know that you can join Dr.

Graham for his daily devotion? It's a study of God's word that will help you grow in your faith, encourage you in your walk with Christ, and show you how to navigate through the challenges of life. To sign up, text DEVO to 59789 and begin receiving Dr. Graham's devotional every day. Again, text DEVO D E V O to 59789.

Pastor, what is your PowerPoint for today? John seven seventeen says, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority." Now these are the words of Jesus, and this is what Jesus is saying. If you really want to know if I'm telling the truth about who I am and who God is, speaking the truth of God, if you want to know if I'm just making this up or if this is reality, you can know because God will reveal Himself to you. Ultimately, knowing Jesus isn't a problem of the mind or the intellect. It is an issue of the heart, and if you wait till you get everything all figured out, you'll never come to Christ.

At some point, you must make a decision regarding the evidence. The trilemma has been often repeated: Is Jesus a liar, or is he a lunatic, or is he Lord? If you say, "Well, I really just don't know," then pray this way, Lord, if you are real. If you are who you claim to be, if you are who you say you are, then show yourself to me. Make it clear to me.

Speak to my heart through your word, O God, and then be willing to examine the evidence and ask God to show you if Jesus is Lord or if He is not Lord. I believe if you ask Him, He will make this positively clear to you. Thousands, even millions, through the ages will testify to the reality of Jesus. Their lives, and I know that I can personally testify to the reality of Christ in my own life. In fact, I'm banking my life and my future on the fact that Jesus is who He claims to be—that He is Lord of life and Lord of all.

He is my Savior, my Lord, and my God. The good news of Jesus Christ is the best news the world has ever heard. That He came, lived a perfect, sinless life, died on the cross for our sins, and rose again. That we could be saved, forgiven, and have eternal life—that is the greatest news you could possibly hear. No, Jesus is not a liar.

He's certainly not a lunatic. He is Lord, and that's good news for every day. And that is today's PowerPoint. Remember, when you give a gift of ten dollars or more, we'll send you Dr. Graham's book, Diamonds in the Dark, as our thanks.

Just text NOV to five nine seven eight nine. And join us again next time as Dr. Graham brings a message about why God became flesh and walked among us. That's next time on PowerPoint with Jack Graham. PowerPoint with Jack Graham is sponsored by PowerPoint Ministries.