To Receive Jesus
Minister: | Rev. Ronald Van Overloop |
Date: | 8/9/2015 AM |
Text: | John 1:12 |
Psalters: | 238, 233, 35, 72 |
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper |
- The fact.
- The Belgic Conf. speaks of receiving Jesus in Art. 29 and 35.
- To receive Him is to embrace Him by a living faith in His name (Self-revelation in the sphere of redemption).
- It is to have Jesus.
- The heavenly Father, through the work of the Spirit, gives you to Jesus and gives Jesus to you.
- This is true for the newest and weakest as well as the most mature Christian: we are fully, finally, irreversibly justified.
- Those who receive Him experience the wonder of God’s gift that they have the right actually to be children of God.
- This word emphasizes the spiritual, ethical side of our sonship, implying our being born of God.
- It speaks of a relationship of likeness: the son is like his father, bears the image of his father, to be like Him (cf. I John 3:1,2).
- This great honor is ours over against whatever man (including ourselves) think of us.
- When we are given the ability to receive Him and believe in Him, instead of rejecting Him, we experience this great “power.”
- To receive Christ, therefore, is to receive the right to sonship.
- That this is our right (“power”) is found in God’s gracious works.
- This word emphasizes the spiritual, ethical side of our sonship, implying our being born of God.
- The experience.
- We constantly need to receive this right because we sin. We need to be assured of forgiveness.
- From the Old Dispensation perspective, their right to be children of God had not yet been established.
- We grow in the consciousness of sonship.
- In this sense we long to be fully His children, to be completely like Him.