momento mori

this is a draft of my lesson for this wednesday. feedback encouraged.

ok, guys. so in two days, we celebrate what’s called Good Friday, the anniversary of the death of the Son of God. and sometimes i think we rush past the bad side of the good news. we rush past the dark and the evil to the beautiful and pleasant, so tonight i want to pause and reflect. that’s why we’ve come to the cemetery. i want you guys to take a look around, silently, and think. you might think about the ages of the people, young and old, who are buried here. you might think of their lives, theirs stories. what did the hope and long for? what were their goals, and did they ever achieve them? what did they want out of life, and did they get it? how did they die, and with whom? we’ll meet back at the front gate in twenty minutes.

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i hope that your time and your thoughts here tonight were helpful. there are two reasons i wanted us to come out here tonight. one is the fact that this is the result of our disobedience and rebellion against God. the curse of death rests upon this world because of our sin, our wrongdoing, our treasuring things more highly than our Creator and becoming slaves to those idols. as you look around the tombstones, you’ll see people who lived to old age, and those who died in infancy. the fact is, that because of their sin, every day between their birth date and their death date was the sheer grace of God, giving life onto ill-deserving sinners. the only thing that stops death from having the final say is Jesus’ own death, which He suffered so that all who trust in Him wouldn’t be ruled by death. we’ll talk more about that next week.

as i wondered around the graveyard a few days ago, looking at the tombstones and preparing for this lesson, i found a young man’s grave. his name was joseph g. doner, and he lived to be 23 years, 8 months, and 5 days old. i made sure to remember that, because i will be that old this june, on the day before my first anniversary. i wonder about who he was, what he wanted, what he dreamed of. did he have a job, and did he have people depending on him? did he have any plans: to have a family, to own a business, to move, to go on a trip, to see family? did he have a girl he wanted to marry and grow old with? was he much different from me?

the reason i wanted us to come out here is that death is a reality that, should Jesus tarry, we will all face someday. and most of us, because of the time and place we live in, don’t expect to face it anytime soon, at least not personally. most of us can reasonably expect to live for many years, getting gray hair and wrinkles and the whole nine yards. but in this cemetery there are dozens of infants who didn’t see their first birthday. there are several children who were younger than some of you when they breathed their last breath. joseph was but a few months older than me, and i doubt he expected to die at his age. but we are mortal. we are susceptible to all sorts of things, from bacteria and cancer to earthquake and hurricane. from murder to car accidents to war, our lives could end before we expect in any number of ways.

i don’t say this to frighten you. i don’t want you to go around being paranoid or living in a bubble-suit or a bunker, not that it would save you in the end. and though i’ve set it up rather well to speak of eternity in hell or the new earth, that’s not my purpose tonight either. heaven isn’t a place for those who are merely afraid of hell anyway. i don’t mean to cause you to despair or go around moping and downtrodden, and i hope not to suck the beauty out of this life, because though all that is here will eventually fade, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good and delightful and praiseworthy.

what i do hope you gain from tonight is perspective. what i hope you understand is that things in this life will eventually fade. all of our stuff – cars, tvs, games, furniture, makeup, trophies, etc. – all of it will be in a dump one day. in the end, no one will really care what the score of the soccer or volleyball game was. few will remember who was prom queen, or what club you were in, or who got what part in the play. what school you went to, or what job you had, or how much money was in your bank account, will ultimately be rather meaningless.

there was a custom in ancient rome, that whenever a general or an emperor would return victoriously from battle, and there was a parade with soldiers and a band and admirers and such, that in the general’s chariot would be a lowly slave. and that slave would every-so-often whisper into the general’s ear the phrase “memento mori,” which means, “remember, you are mortal, you will die.” this was done to remind him that the splendor of that day would at some point fade, and the glory of his victory would not shine forever, and though he had won the day, there would come another day which he would not survive.

what is the point of remembering this? what is the reason to keep these things in perspective? my hope is that by doing so, we would not waste our lives. i know the struggle all too well myself to let your days slip by in meaningless triviality, whether that be video games or television or books or sports or shallow friendships, whatever it may be. it’s especially easy at your age, or even mine, when we expect to have so much time ahead of us that wasting an hour here or a day there doesn’t seem that important. with that mindset, it’s all too easy to look back and wonder where all the time went, to wake up one day and realize that you’ve wasted it.

if you don’t want to take my word for it, read through the book of Ecclesiastes. the whole thing is written is about how life can be spent in all sorts of ways, pursuing all sorts of things which seem good, but ultimately are vain, empty, meaningless. the book ends like this:

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 ESV)

a more modern poet puts it like this: “only one life, twill soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last.” and that is my hope for you. that you would see Jesus as the imperishable treasure, that you would set your heart and your hope and your identity in Him, and out of that you would work and play and sleep and eat and do all things so that your joy in Him may increase and His glory, the display of His perfections, would be seen in your life. that we would, as Jesus says, “not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life.” i wish i had time to unpack that more for you guys, and honestly i wish i knew how to do this better myself. but i want to strive with you guys in this, to have an eternal perspective, and not to waste this life. to that end, i have these little wooden tombstones for you. they have a cross engraved on one side, and that phrase “memento mori,” to help us to remember, and to live in light of our mortality.

Christology - the humanity of Jesus

i've been a little behind the ball recently, but here is last week's youth group lesson. i owe a large part of this to matt chandler's message at reform and resurge '06.

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behold, My Servant shall act wisely;
He shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted
as many were astonished at you –
His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance
and His form beyond that of the children of mankind –
so shall He sprinkle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of Him;
for that which has not been told them they see,
and that which they have not heard they understand.
who has believed what he has heard from us?
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
for He grew up before Him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him,
and no beauty that we should desire Him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows
yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
but He was wounded for our transgressions;
He was crushed for our iniquities;
upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with His stripes we are healed.
all we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned – every one – to his one way;
and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and He was afflicted,
yet He opened not His mouth.
by oppression and judgment He was taken away;
and as for His generation, who considered
that He was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
and they made His grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in His death,
although He had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in His mouth.
yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him;
He has put Him to grief;
when His soul makes an offering for guilt,
He shall see His offspring; He shall prolong His days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
out of the anguish of His soul He shall see and be satisfied;
by His knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and He shall bear their iniquities
therefore I will divide Him a portion with the many,
and He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
because He poured out His soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet He bore the sin of many
and makes intercession for the transgressors.
~Isaiah 52:13-53:12

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so i want to walk you through what we’ll be doing tonight. there are a few questions i want to discuss with you, then i’m going to lecture for a short bit to give you some background info (it won’t be long, so hang in there), and then we’ll tie the two together. so first, i want you to think about your own life. in particular, i want you to think about any really tough experiences you’ve had. some time when you’ve been really upset, where things have gone pretty bad for you. maybe a friend turned out not to be such a good friend. maybe a time where you had things all planned out, and nothing went the way it was supposed to. or maybe just a time where things were just really busy and hectic, and you felt like you just wanted it over with so you could finally get some rest. anyone willing to share?


ok, we’ll come back to that in a bit. this is where i’m going to go a little heady on you, and if some of this goes in one ear and out the other, it’s ok, but try to pay attention, especially those of whose favorite questions all start with “why?”. i know you might drive your parents or teachers crazy sometimes, but if that’s you, i’m glad your here; you’re in the right place.

so for the next two weeks, we’re going to be talking about Christology. those of you who really like science might remember that -ology means “the study of [something]”, so this means that today and next week, we’re going to looking at who this Jesus guy really is. this was a particularly debated topic back about A.D. 450, and so a group of wise and learned leaders in the church held an ecumenical (or church-wide) council, called the council of chalcedon, where they set down the Biblical and orthodox understanding of who Christ is. if you’re interested in going deeper than we will here, i’d recommend reading the chalcedonian creed and/or the athanasian creed, both of which lay out a short but thorough view of Christ’s nature.

when we talk of Christ, we generally say He is fully two things: fully God and fully man. think of marbled bread: you have dark and light bread, swirled together. it has all the characteristics of both the dark and light breads, but they are stuck together, inseparable, and one loaf is made out of the two types. in the same way Christ is both God and man, neither nature damaging or overriding the other, and also unmixed, indivisible.

so Christ is the God-man. next week, we’ll look more at what it means that Jesus is God, but for this week i want us to deal with Jesus’ humanity. because i think sometimes, when we think about Jesus, we think of Him as something like santa claus or some sky fairy. He’s up there, He’s watching us, expecting us to do and not to do certain things, and He’ll help us out when we get into a jam. or maybe we have God the Father and Jesus so connected in our brains that we have trouble thinking of Jesus as a human being. i have trouble with that sometimes.

but here’s the thing: Jesus became God incarnate. any of you like chili con carne? casey and i had some the other night, and it was delicious. do you know what the “con carne” part means? it means, “with meat” or “with flesh”. and so Jesus is God come in-carne, in the flesh. Deity become a man. it’s like there are two circles, God and creation, and they are completely different. God is infinite and without beginning. and He created the universe; so it is finite and time-bound. but then this crazy thing happened where these circles touched, and that’s Jesus.

now stay with me: when we think of the life of Jesus, what do you normally think about? perhaps His teaching, His miracles, His death and resurrection. but something we tend to overlook is Christ’s emotional life. if you look at John 4, where Jesus talks with the woman at the well, He’s there because He got tired and had to sit down. i sometimes have trouble of thinking about storm-calming, walk-on-water Jesus as being tired, but at least on this occasion, He got so worn out that He had to send His disciples into town for food, because He was too exhausted to get His own sandwich. have you been tired like that?

or in Mark 11, when He goes to the temple, and He sees all the swindling and greed and such that are going on there, He gets angry. really angry. so angry that He makes a whip, flips over their tables, and drives them out of there. this isn’t a guy letting his emotions run wild, either. this is controlled rage, focused and furious, which is all the scarier to me. we talked about this a little two weeks ago: Jesus is not the effeminate, skinny white guy we normally see in paintings. He was a ripped 1st century carpenter, and i imagine that when He got in these merchants faces, even a guy like schwarzenger would turn tail and run. have you ever felt angry at injustice in the world? has the evil and the brokenness of this world ever really made you fuming mad?

now remember with me the night of His arrest, how judas betrays Jesus. you’ve got to get this, judas was one of the twelve. he was one of Christ’s inner circle, who got to see things and hang out with Jesus in a way only a few got to out of the crowd that followed Him. think of your group of friends. think of the people who you let in on your secrets, and who you let into your life in a way that almost no one else is. judas was one of the guys closest to Jesus, and he’s the one who betrays Him. luke records that judas came up with this big crowd to where he knew Jesus would be, and it was dark. so he singled Him out from the other disciples by kissing Him on the cheek, which in that culture is a greeting of closeness and friendship. and Jesus turns to him and is like, “you’re gonna betray Me with a kiss, judas? with a kiss?! you’re one of my boys, judas! you’re one of the twelve!” Christ felt betrayal, and though He knew it was coming, even so He felt its sting, and he was grieved that one so close to Him would turn Him over for money. have you ever been betrayed? have you ever had one of your closest friends hurt you? and maybe not for a stack of bills, but because they’re part of this crowd now, and you’re not, and so that have to distance themselves from you. have you ever been betrayed?

or how about in Mark 3, when Jesus’ family comes and tries to get Him to stop teaching and bring Him home, because they think He’s lost His mind. even mary, the one who got pregnant by the Holy Spirit, who had to flee to egypt so herod couldn’t kill baby Jesus, who got the first Christmas presents ever; even she didn’t believe in Jesus at first. she and His brothers try to stop Him, because they think He’s crazy. have you had to deal with a family that thinks you’re nuts? with relatives who just don’t get it, and who are maybe even a little psychotic themselves?

one last example: Jesus praying the garden of gethsemane before He’s arrested. He said to His disciples, “my soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” Mark says that He was “greatly distressed and troubled.” Luke records that He started sweating blood, which is a real medical condition that happens only to those who are in the utmost stress and agony. He cried out for His Father to change His plan, even though He knew this had to happen, because that was how much He dreaded the cross: not just the physical pain, but the spiritual death of bearing the world’s sins. He knew it had to happen, but in that moment, He dreaded it, and while He had come into the world for this very purpose, as John says, even so He is in agony with the thought of it, and He lays His heart out before the Father. have you ever felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders? like you just couldn’t move on, because what you saw coming was so awful?

i could go on and on. the reason i bring all this is up is because of what the book of Hebrews says about Jesus. the first few chapters of that book are about how awesome Jesus is, and it says at the end of chapter 2:

“for surely it is not angels that He helps, but He helps the offspring of abraham. therefore He had to be made like His brothers in every respect, so that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. for because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.”

and listen to this at the end of chapter 4:

“for we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

so Jesus is not like zeus, some wrathful old guy in the sky who is ready to strike us down for the least wrongdoing. nor is He some spirit which floats about, who doesn’t understand what we go through. He’s not some taskmaster who rates us based on how well we do. no, He has gone through what we go through. He’s been there. He is, as isaiah calls Him, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

and get this: He didn’t have to. Jesus is the Son of God, part of the Trinity. He’s been around since before the beginning of time. He didn’t have to come into creation and write Himself into our story. He could have stayed in heaven, and enjoyed the fellowship of the Father and the Spirit, and have let us alone. but instead He came down to earth, born in a filthy barn to poor young parents and lived a life mostly in obscurity. He spent 3 years trying to teach a stubborn and hard-hearted people the nature and character of God and how we should live in light of that, and was homeless for most of that time, being followed by a bunch of people who just didn’t seem to get it, and being maligned and hated on by the religious rulers of that day. He didn’t have to do any of that, or face any of the trials and temptations and the emotional turmoil that we go through. but He chose to, out of His freely given love for us.

and not only did He live like us and face what we humans face, and more than what most of us will ever face, but He took the place we deserved on the cross, bringing us back to God. despite how often you and i mess up, no matter whether we do great things for Him or not, in spite of anything whatsoever we say or do, nothing is too big to get between us and Jesus. you don’t have to work for Him, as if to earn His love. you can’t! but because of the sacrifice of Christ, God is 100% for us, for all whom He has brought near to Himself. He is sympathetic, He feels for us, He intercedes for us with God the Father, He pleads our case for us, and He grants us mercy and grace and strength to get us through.

i say this so that when trial comes, when you mess up, when everything seems to be going wrong – and trust me, it is coming – when that happens, my prayer is that you’ll run to Jesus, and not away from Him. because He knows, He’s been there, He feels for you, and He does not let you go through hard things for no purpose. He will see you through, because He has saved you and made you His own. if you don’t get this, you’ll run away and find some idol to pursue, and it will kill you. this is about your life. so take the advice of peter, when he said “cast all your cares upon Him, for He cares for you.” run to Him, because He loves you, no matter what, unconditionally.

i want to give you a little time to process this now. just listen, think, pray, and then we’ll close. [play “i have been there”, then have someone close in prayer.]

now for the next week, i want you to take the Isaiah passage we read, Isaiah 52:13-53:12, and read 2 verses each day. then take 5 or 10 minutes, and just think about what those verses mean, pray about them, and maybe talk to someone about what they brought to your mind.

so i'm going to start posting my lessons from youth group every thursday, since i write most of them out anyway.


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“but now the righteousness of God has been manifest apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith. this was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. it was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” (Romans 3:21-26)


ok, so we’ve got a lot of work for tonight, a lot of ground to cover, so we’ll get right to it. which of you has had a time where your reputation was under attack? where you did something, and because of it, people questioned your character?


ok, so if you’ll remember the first time i was here, we talked about the prodigal son, and the grace that God shows to both the rebellious younger brother and the self-righteous older brother. and three weeks we talked about God as father, and His adopting grace to us. two weeks ago was the faithfulness of God’s love toward us. notice a pattern? now, last week things took a different turn. we talked about the holiness of God, how God is perfect, and that there is no darkness in Him at all, as 1 John says. does anyone remember where we left off?

we left off with the problem that this holy God has left sinners go free. now, think about your friends at school. if confronted with the wrath of God, or with hell, what would they say?


most, if they didn’t completely shrug off the whole idea, would probably say something like “why can’t He just forgive us? why can’t He just be loving and act like it never happened?” and that makes sense to them, because their mindset starts with them, and how their needs and wants get met. it’s a humanist mindset, and it’s what all of us are born with. most of us are still wrestling with that.

yet a Biblically-rooted mindset starts not with us, but with God, with who He is and what His purposes are. and this brings us to our text, Romans 3:21-26. paul has gone through the first nearly three chapters of this letter to show that no one in the world can stand before God. and he sums it up here with verse 23: “for all have sinned and fallen short the glory of God.” here, we run into another word that we use a lot in church, but might not know what it means. what does this word “sin” mean to you guys? don’t worry, i’m not looking for what you think i want to hear. i want you to tell me what it means to you.


here, we see sin tied into this idea of falling short of the glory of God. a very literal translation of that would say that we lack the glory of God. right now, we’re short on time, so i’ll come back to this later, but the Bible shows in a number of places that sin is the belittling of God’s glory. it’s trading God as our object of worship, and putting up something else in its place, or “de-goding God,” as d.a. carson would say. if you are treasuring anything above God, you are by definition sinning.

now, our sense of justice would tell us that the punishment you deserve depends on the person you have offended. if you squish a bug, no punishment. *** otherwise, fly-swatters would be illegal, right? i mean, we’d all be done for every time you swatted at a gnat, you’d be like “i hope no one saw that, or i’m in big trouble.” no jailtime for insecticide. but if you kill a dog, you get a big fine, and a few months or years in prison. if you murder a person, you get either lifetime imprisonment, or the death sentence. now, since God is infinitely worthy of our worship, and we haven’t given it to Him, we’ve committed an infinitely punishable crime. *** that’s the definition of hell: conscious, eternal torment, because for a finite being like us, it takes an infinitely long time to meet out infinite punishment. now, we all know we’ve done this, and paul has spent nearly three chapters of this letter proving that everyone has. so we all deserve hell.

now for a moment, let’s look at the opposite of this. the opposite of sin would be? righteousness, or justice (in greek, they’re the same word, just so you know). and so that word, by the Bible’s definition, is properly esteeming the glory of God above all things. and we know that God is righteous, so God values His glory above all things. i’m going to show you this is true a lot more thoroughly and with a great deal of Scripture in a couple weeks, but for now let’s run with this.

now God has let sinners, those who have dishonored Him by treasuring other things more than Him – He’s let them go. He’s forgiven us, right? but what would that say about God, if He lets God-belittling sinners go free? wouldn’t that be, in effect, agreeing with them, that His glory isn’t all that important? and wouldn’t that make God a sinner? it’s like, if there was a murderer on trial, and he’s convicted, and right before they cart him off he says he’s really sorry. wouldn’t the judge be unjust if he let the murderer go free? this is the problem that paul is faced with as he looks back over history, at God over and over showing mercy and kindness to those who have, in effect, flicked Him off and wanted nothing to do with Him. how can God do this and remain just, remain righteous?

this is why there has to be the cross. let’s look back at the text. verses 23 and 24 tell us that we have sinned and God has justified us, or counted us as righteous, through Jesus Christ. it says in verse 25 that God “put [Him] forward as a propitiation by His blood [that is, by His death], to be received by faith.” that word there, propitiation (or in the niv, an atoning sacrifice) means that Christ on the cross took for us the wrath of God against us, which we deserved because of our sins, the many times we’ve belittled the glory of God. then look what it says: “this was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins.” so God is righteous, He does uphold the value of His glory and His renown, and He shows this by placing the just punishment for our sins, the sins He has forgiven or “passed over” on His own Son. now ponder this question with me: according to this text, did Christ die for us, or for God?

now of course, Christ died for us, in the sense that He set us free from our sins so that we might be reconciled to God. but did Christ die primarily for us? let’s look back at the text. it says that God sent Christ to be this propitiation, “to show God’s righteousness [in] pass[ing] over former sins.” the cross is primarily about God being vindicated, and His glory being upheld, because in love He forgives our sins, “so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” as verse 26 says.

this might seem strange to you at first, that God is primarily about God, but give it some time, and this truth will become wonderful to you. i plan on spending the week after we get back from the mission trip on showing you more clearly that God’s greatest passion is for His own glory, and the week after that on why this is the best news in the world. but let me just point you a little bit to what we’ll talk about in three weeks, and it’s in 1 John 1:9. God here says, “if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” this idea that God is first and foremost about God, is the most solid bedrock and firm foundation of your faith and of your assurance of salvation that you could imagine. we’ll get there. let’s pray.