Please find below the notes from the Elder's Prayer this past Sunday.

I love my three boys.  Each evening I’m home we eat together, we wrestle and play, we work together, we bathe, we read, I pray with them, we go to bed….  We live life together.  We have life experiences together.  I am more than a list of statistics to them.  I am their father.  I love them.  I want to know them.  I want for them to know and love me.  

 I see the love that many of you parents have for your own children.  The love that you fathers have for your children.  So I know that you’ve done the same for your own - you’ve committed time to them, you’ve sacrificed for them, you have life experiences with them...  You're their father.  You know them.  You love them.  And you want them to know and love you.

 Have you ever wondered at the incarnation of Jesus?  Have you ever considered its significance relative to your salvation?  Jesus, God the Son, the Son of God is the fullness of deity, yet completely human.  And if God has a Son, then God Himself must be a Father.  And the fact that the Son indeed has a loving Father is best of news for humanity!  

 The Father loves His Son.  Loves Him so immensely, so extravagantly that He expressed that love by creating our reality, the universe - by creating us.  The Father created all things by and for His Son. He will one day reconcile all things in heaven and earth in His Son.  And even now, the Father is recreating the world - recreating us - through His Son, Jesus.

 The Father knows His Son.  And the Son knows His Father.  Only God can know God.  So only God can make Himself known.  And He did make Himself known to us through His Son, the God-man, Jesus.  

 But Jesus did more than just preach the gospel of His Father’s love to us.  More amazingly and more importantly, He came to make the gospel of His Father’s love known in us - experientially.  Jesus said of Himself in John 10:30 “I and my Father are one”.  He emphatically reiterated it again in John 14:10, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”.  John 14:23, Jesus said, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”  

 That relationship believers have with God is more completely described in John 17:22,23, “The glory that you have given me [Jesus said] I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”  Verses 25 and 26, “O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these [those given to the Son by the Father] know that you have sent me.  I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

The good news then is this:  Jesus, God the Son, came embodied in our flesh, to join Himself to us forever that we who evidence repentance from our sin and believe in Him might be brought into the perfect, extravagant, and eternal love that He and the Father share.  The love of God for His Son has actually entered the frailness of our humanity, through Jesus, allowing us entrance into that love.  

Do you know God?  Do you know God’s love?  To know the Father through the Son is to be joined to the Father through the incarnate Son.  Knowing God is much more than being familiar with a list of facts or statistics about God...  Are you joined to Jesus and His experiential knowledge of His own Father’s love?  Are you experiencing life in Jesus by knowing Him through the study and application of His living Word, through prayer, by humbly and joyfully submitting your own will that His might be displayed and lived out in you.  Jesus knows you, Jesus joined Himself to you - He became humanity for you….  As such, Jesus did not just provide a way to the Father, He is the incarnate way to the Father.  And in Christ alone, God through the Holy Spirit gives us participation in the life and love that the Son and the Father have always had and have always been!

 2 Corinthians 5:17 - “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”