Matthew 3:13-17
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. 14 But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”
15 Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.
16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
Listening guide
Relationships – hard?
“I’m trying to connect with you”
“I’m just trying to love people”
“Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings?”
Half of Americans view themselves as lonely.
Confidants = 0
Jesus connects with people
Peter’s mother
The first disciples
Sick family members, poor people, mourning individuals
Today’s question: why be with people?
“This is my son” (verse 17)
“With him I am well-pleased" (verse 17)
The Triune God shows the _____________ of ____________.
“it is proper to do this to fulfill all righteousness”. (verse 15)
The prince of England, the first astronauts, and the dean - “The answer is here, wherever it is that faith resides”.
Jesus fulfills every _________________.
Mark 12:30-31 “30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these.
People bring great pleasure
Discussion questions
Sermon
This week I had one of those hard relationship conversations. We were working through an issue. One of us said, “hey, I’m trying to connect with you here.” I.e. cut me a little slack, I'm working on this, we can do this. There was this awkward moment of silence that basically said, “yeah, and how is that going for us?” Sometimes building relationships can be hard.
I remember telling someone one time, “I’m just trying to love people.” Even as I said it, I knew the only reason was because we hadn’t really loved people well.
Pete Scazzero, who is something of an expert on relationships, because in his own words he was so bad at them for so long, he tells this story. He says one time a friend came to him and said, “Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings?” He said, “Why is it that so many are judgmental, defensive, and touchy?”
I’m not saying this is only our problem. Americans are bad at relationships. The results of a major study from Cigna were reported in 2018. “Half of Americans view themselves as lonely.” (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/606588504/americans-are-a-lonely-lot-and-young-people-bear-the-heaviest-burden). And the percentage is higher among younger people than older people. Think about that. Glance around this room. Of the people under 45, it is likely that 2 out of 3 feel lonely.
Do you know what the most common response to how many confidants do you have in your life is? 0. I have no one in my life that I can really be close to, that I can really be transparent and open with.
We struggle with relationships.
One thing I love to see in Jesus is how good he is with relationships. During Epiphany – these 6 weeks or so between Christmas and Lent – we see how is really good at everything. He can fix what is wrong with the world. He can teach God’s Word with authority. He knows how to impress, wow, and overwhelm people. And he is really good connecting with them.
He talks to Peter’s mother at her house and she loves him. He invites men to follow him and they get up and go. People come to him in all sorts of desperate situations – sick family members, poverty, and even death, and in every case he figures out how to show them what’s really wrong but still get them to appreciate him. It’s just remarkable. I think there is something for us here.
You can and should use Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Or if you haven’t considered Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, you’re missing out. They show us many reasons we stink with people.
But there is a power available to us. When you combine emotional health and good relational practices with God’s power and God's spirituality, it is truly life changing. You will be transformed.
That’s what the Triune God wants to do for us over the next few weeks. He starts with a simple thing: why be with people. What could people do for us. In coming weeks he has some other things: here is how to make your expectations clear in a God pleasing way, be sure to deal with the underlying issues that get in the way, and then are you really present for people. Today it’s an easy start: why be with people. It’s two things: who God is and what he does.
Part 1
We’ve got an event in Matthew 3 we call the baptism of Jesus. It shows us amazing and remarkable individuals.
We start with Jesus. He comes to John at the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. After he is baptized, a voice announces from heaven, “This is my Son.” (baptism of Jesus picture) So we know Jesus is a Son. No big surprise there. Every male human being is a son of someone. I guess the surprise would be if you expected Mary or Joseph there. Instead it’s a voice from heaven.
If the voice says, “This is my Son”, that means the speaker must be the Father. And in between the Spirit descends as a dove. This is what we call the Trinity.
Tri-une. Trinity. I suppose if you don’t like the word, you can talk around it. You can avoid it. It’s not used in anywhere in the Bible. It simply means “three - one”. It’s not really smart. Geniuses who came up with this name. Three – one. If you can say, supercalifra …. Trinity shouldn’t be a problem.
These three persons closely relate to each other. They don’t just do and say things that impact each other. There is more. The Holy Spirit comes down in the form of a dove and lands on Jesus. He connects to the Son. The Father says something personal and individual to the Son. He connects with the Son. They all connect with each other. And there is something remarkable about it all. Verse 17 “with him I am well-pleased".
How much do you like other people? If you are in the early stages of a dating relationship or first year of marriage or you just had a baby, you’re like “Me, me, me, me” (make kissy action). The rest of us are kind of like, uh yeah, people. We’ve said the line from Charles Schulz “I love humanity – it's people I can’t stand.” Relationships are so hard. Sometimes personal connection feels pointless. But that’s not the Triune God.
I’m going to come down to you (the Holy Spirit) and with you I am well pleased. The persons of the Trinity actually want to connect to each other. They’re family, but not really. This is not grandpa and grandma gushing over the grandkids.
The Triune God is totally content. The three of them. They have a great relationship. The relationship is so awesome that we’ve got a way to describe God’s existence: aseity. It means God’s self-existence or self-sufficiency. He is not in any way dependent on other beings. Let me just draw your attention two awesome aspects of God’s self-existence.
On the one side, the relationship that the Son and the Father have is so intimate, so close that Jesus can say, “I and the Father are one.” You begin to taste this when you’re married and you have a kid. You find yourself saying, “Oh my gosh that kid is me, that kid is my wife. That kid is us, all in one.” But you can be married for 10 years, 50 years and you will still find out something new about your spouse. You will never fully see through the other person. You can’t know them fully. Jesus can say, “I and the Father are one.” That is the one side of their relationship. So intimate.
The other side, Jesus and the Father are firmly independent of one another, and the kind of emotional entanglement and relational entanglement that characterizes our relationships isn’t a problem for them. Let me give us a quick example. You know you have an unhealthy relationship with your father when you can’t do anything without his approval. Or when you are anxious if he isn’t around. Or if you feel unnecessarily guilty or ashamed about things. That’s a sign of a codependent relationship. That’s not Jesus.
After Jesus rises from the dead, he tells Mary, don’t cling to me. “I’ve got to go to my God”. Jesus is going to return to his Father so there is a closeness still. But there is a separation. He calls him “my God”. It’s like calling your dad “my manager”. One of the clearest examples is on the cross. He calls out and says, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” You notice he doesn’t say, “My father my father why have you forsaken me.” He says, “My God my God.” That’s the other side of their relationship. Firmly independent. They’ve got a genuinely interdependent relationship. It’s no wonder the Father says, “with you I’m well pleased.”
They actually like each other. They’ve got a great relationship.
The Triune God shows the pleasure of people
Take this to heart. I think a lot of us hear, “family relationships bring pleasure”. This is more. Connection, real relationship brings pleasure. If you go back to Genesis 2, and we’ll do that sometime, you see you and I were built in the image of the Triune God where there is an usness, a community
We need to take a look at this reality and process it. This is the end of isolation, putting up walls, blocking other people out. This is the end of loneliness. Other people can bring pleasure. The persons of the Trinity brought each other pleasure.
Part 2
Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that marvelous? When I see that, I just marvel at it. There is incredible power at work here.
Why? What does God do to make this relationship?
Jesus has this great line to explain why he is getting baptized. He shows up to John. John is his rough and tumble cousin. Immediately recognizes him. John is repulsed by the idea that he should baptize Jesus. Jesus says “it is proper to do this to fulfill all righteousness”.
This is straight up, straight forward gospel. Jesus has this amazing relationship with his father. Everything is good. Still he will satisfy all the expectations and requirements.
Every other religion says to us “You live a righteous life and give it to God. You offer yourself and if you are good enough, maybe you can please God and he will accept you. Christianity says, “Jesus has lived a righteous life and he gives it to you.”
Jesus wants to be your substitute. He wants to live in your place. He will do all the expectations and requirements.
Let me give us an example. I don’t even know if they meant to but they did such a good job. Some of you might have seen this story from “The Crown”. This is the story of Prince Philip and the first astronauts to reach the moon.
What happens is that you’ve got the prince of England, Prince Philip. He goes through some a crisis. It starts one day at church. He can’t stand the dean and his preaching. He leaves.
They get a new dean. About the same time, the first astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin – don't you all want to say Buzz Lightyear every time you have to say his name?- and Michael Collins go to the moon. The way the story goes, not sure if its accurate, is that Philip was absolutely enamored by this. For weeks, even months it was all he talked about.
The dean invites him to join something of a spiritual retreat. There are about 8 men discussing religion and their place in the world. They’ve lost their way they feel. They have no sense of significance, value, and meaning. The prince listens patiently. Then finally he explodes. He mocks the men for doing nothing. These astronauts, they are real men. They have actually done something meaningful with their lives.
The prince gets to meet the astronauts. He asks them how it felt. What did the sense as they looked down on the earth or as they stepped onto the moon? The way the story goes, they’ve got nothing. They were so busy with the tasks that the never reflected. They were so shallow that it never dawned on them to consider the smallness of their lives, the majesty of God’s creation, their own meaning and significance. They want to ask him about the palace, the driver, and his wife as queen – all these shallow and insignificant things, in his mind.
He returns to the circle of men to discuss greater spiritual matters. “[I’ve experienced] an almost jealous fascination with the achievements of these astronauts. An inability to find calm, satisfaction, or fulfillment. … My mother died recently. She saw that something was missing in her only child. Faith. How is your faith, she asked me. I admit I’ve lost it. The loneliness and the emptiness and the anticlimax to go all the way to the moon and to find nothing but haunting desolation, ghostly silence, gloom.... I’m trying to say that the solution to our problems is not the science or technology or bravery. The answer is here, wherever it is that faith resides.” The vicar sits in silence.
There is nothing he can say. Only one person can handle all the weight of our hopes, our dreams, our expectations, and our requirements.
Only Jesus said, “I am doi He made the meaning of his life to fulfill what was required of you and me.”
If you put your demands and your expectations on someone else in this life, do you know what we call that? That’s a savior. That’s an idol.
Only one person has fulfilled all our dreams, our hopes, our longings, and ex A lot of us need to take this to heart in our families, our friendships, our workplaces, and our communities. We all have relational expectations. The more we make someone else carry those expectations, the more we are likely to get crushed and crush someone else.
The devil is busy saying to us and through us, You need this in order to be pleasing.” Jesus says, “That will not make you pleasing. It’s only the Word of God that will make you pleasing. Bread will not satisfy you. It’s God saying, ‘You are my beloved child.’ ”
What makes God’s relationship so wonderful, so full of pleasure?
Jesus fulfills every expectation.
Action
The heart of healthy relationships is Jesus’ summary of the law. Mark 12:30-31 “30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these.
Realize that you can’t love God without loving others and you can’t love others without loving God. The two are inextricably linked.
It’s only as we begin to see the awesome relationship that God has in himself that we are going to experience true love in our relationships.
People bring great pleasure when you let Jesus fulfill all the expectations, all the righteousness.