What's in a Name?
- Series: Immanuel
- by: Adam Sheffield 12/16/09
This Christmas Season we’re stepping out of the book of Acts for three weeks to look at the name of Jesus and what we can learn from one simple name: Immanuel. As Isaiah 7:14 prophesied, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.”
We’ll be studying three specific aspects for the weeks of December 13th, 20th, and 27th starting with the Divinity of Christ, then the fact that, as the name Immanuel means, God is with us, and finally we’ll look at the only appropriate response we should have to God coming down to be with us.
Through this three week mini-series we hope to teach something which even the disciples never fully comprehended when Jesus was with them in the flesh. We, as a church, need to fully grasp the fact that Jesus is God. He was not just a man who had special favor in God’s eyes. Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, was God—the originator of life, the source of light and darkness, the giver of grace and mercy—in human form. He was and is with us, and came to us on a specific mission: to glorify God the Father.
He came to us and died on the cross not because he was a narcissistic megalomaniac nor a self-loathing martyr but because, as Jesus explains in John 14:6, he is “the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [him].”
Jesus came to guide us and lead us in our destiny. He came to us, church, because we were lost like sheep gone astray in the dark and stormy night. Having nowhere to go for shelter and being paralyzed with fear for what traps, dangers, and enemies awaited us in the dark night, we were helpless and hopeless, trembling in despair. That is why Jesus came! Immanuel. God with us. Not “God saw us from afar and thought about helping us out but then changed his mind.”
In the culture and periods of history in which the Bible was written, names meant a lot and so did what the names meant. However Immanuel wasn’t the name Jesus signed on his homework assignments he turned in. Immanuel was given as a sign of hope and to remind God’s people that he is never far away. The name Immanuel was given to show that God, in human form could be know in this character, as God incarnate (in the flesh). It was almost like a prophesy within a prophesy even as God has sent his Holy Spirit to indwell those who call upon the name of Jesus Christ out of saving faith starting on the day of Pentecost we read about in Acts Chapter 2. God is with us now and forever more, forming a bond between the most holy and most intimate fellowship between God and men until the end of this age upon which we will forever be praising and worshiping God by being in his very presence. His glorious and wonderful presence.
Until that day comes though, we invite you and your family and your friends to join us as we begin learning how the undeniable truth that God really is with us can change not only us as individuals, but how it will shake the foundations this earth rests upon.
