Trinitas, in the winter of 1997 to 98, the snowfall was pretty solid, which meant that the passes were open into what we would call the spring here in the Pacific Northwest. That's into the month of March. And I remember that when track season was beginning, my best friend Stuart was not there the first day of practice. Now, he's a pretty serious runner, and I wondered why. So I asked his dad what the deal was, and his dad happened to be the distance coach at Lake Stevens High School, where I went to high school. And he told me, well, Stuart's up skiing right now. He goes, I know it sounds like a little bit of a contradiction because I'm the coach, but he said, you know, as a coach, I wouldn't have let Stuart go skiing. But as a father, I had to let him go skiing. We all have this experience. There are people in this very room who are both their kid's coach and their father. There's so many people in this room who are their kid's primary educator who are also in the role and task of a mother or a father. And we could go down the list. The truth is we've all experienced the burden of wearing contrasting hats, having contrasting roles. But see, Jesus had this in a preeminent way. Over the last three Sundays, we've expounded the reality that Jesus had an altogether natural human birth, but for the fact he was born of a virgin. Just the same, he was eternally generated from the Father. He's the eternal Son of God. We saw just this Sunday that he's one person with two natures. Well, today we're gonna consider something of where that deity and humanity meet in that one personal life of Jesus Christ. With that in mind, we're gonna go to Luke chapter two, read verse seven, and we're gonna read Hebrews chapter two, verses 17 to 18. When I'm finished, I'll say this is God's word, and you can respond, thanks be to God. We'll stand up and sing a short verse, the Gloria Patri together. With that said, let's bow our heads and ask the living God to give us aid and understanding. Holy God, we see your spirit active all throughout the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. And you told us, Lord Jesus, that when you went, your spirit, the comforter, the spirit of all truth, would remain with us. We pray for his empowerment and illumination from him here and now before we go to your word. It is futile for us to labor, to understand and to be fed in a spiritual way by our own natural might. We know we need aid from above and beyond ourselves. And we ask for just that in Jesus' name, by your spirit, amen. Luke chapter two, verse seven. And she gave birth to her firstborn son. And she wrapped him in cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. Hebrews chapter two, verse 17. Therefore, he had to be made like his brethren in all things, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For since he himself was tempted in that which he suffered, he is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted. This is God's Word. In the Creed of Chalcedon in 451 AD, we have one of the most majestic definitions in all of theology. We have this description of the dual nature of Jesus Christ as one person, God and man at the same time. As it reads, it says, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, acknowledged in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably, the difference of the natures being in no way removed because of the union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved and both concurring in one person. This effort to describe what Jesus is, this man who did such wonderful things that people were led to confess him, my Lord and my God. This Jesus, who at the same time, underwent death and a human birth. He shook his people from the very beginning as being a mystery in himself, something radically different than anyone we could conceivably encounter. We look at the works of Christ, we see that some express Jesus' humanity. Others express his deity. Some, some of his works require both at once. Today I'm gonna talk to you particularly about the works of Jesus that are expressive of his humanity. I wanna be clear, it's not as if throughout Jesus' life he oscillated between being God sometimes and man other times. No, he was always both at once. There were certain things that he did that could only be done if he were a genuine human. And others, only if he were genuinely God. Particularly when we think about the human works of Christ, they often are expressive of his weakness and his passion. Jesus' capacity to suffer. And we'll look at four particular burdens that Jesus had and could only have really had if he were a man. We'll consider the physical pains he experienced from without, the physical pains he experienced from within, the frustration of his human will, and even the ignorance of his human intellect. What we're going to see is that Jesus, being both God and man at once, and the communion between these two natures within him, do not diminish Jesus' suffering. but rather His simultaneously being God magnifies the burden He bore as a man. Let us consider first the physical pains of Christ from without, His subjection to exposure, you could say. In the passage we read in Luke, we see a Jesus tightly wrapped, swaddled, if you will, because He genuinely needed it with His outdoor birth. being exposed to the cold. It's noteworthy that Deity did not render Jesus incapable of experiencing the pains of heat and cold from without and all other external dangers. When his parents, for example, fled with him to Egypt, Every parent in this room knows that their little ones can experience with them the angst that they suffer from. And so could Jesus. Jesus could say, going to the cross, my soul is troubled, and it wasn't a show. It was a genuine burden he experienced in his soul. All of this pretends that Jesus will at one point be stripped. Although He is here, swaddled, there will be a day when He goes to the cross and He's stripped down. And the sheer capacity of His humanity to suffer will be put on display. Positively, this meant that Jesus could also enjoy the comfort of going from a state of cold or a state of pain to a state of pleasure. It's noteworthy. that God, Jesus as God, in his deity, could not suffer any pains from without. And herein lies the grand mystery. We're told all throughout the Bible that God is not threatened by any foe. It says of the very worst of foes in Psalm 2 that he laughs at them. God as well cannot die. He's called the only immortal and invisible Almighty God. In 1 Timothy 6, God is moreover eternally blessed. It's exactly what it says in Romans 1 25. He doesn't pass from conditions and states of suffering to blessing. Jesus was simultaneously God and man, and this means he experienced seemingly contradictory things all at once. But in fact, I'll have you know The communion of Jesus to nature's God and man did not diminish the ability of Jesus' human nature to suffer. In fact, his deity magnified his capacity to suffer in his humanity. To begin with, consider whether this is true of you. Can you not be hot and cold at the same time, comforted and distressed at the same time, but in different ways? Many of you, for example, have sat around a warm fire in a cold evening and felt warm on the front half of your body and cold in the back. And ask yourself if feeling that heat on the one side of you didn't make the cold on the other side feel a little more sharp. We've had this experience in lesser degrees. In fact, it is a trope of so many Christmas movies. Ask yourself if you've ever seen this, a main character inside of a home where everyone's celebrating, it's warm, and gifts are being exchanged, and he looks out the window and can see someone outside who's homeless, without anything to eat, and he feels compassion. The truth is, when that person steps out from the heat into the cold, the cold no doubt strikes them differently than the person who's been in the cold for some while. Indeed, to step out of that place with fellowship and good food into a place where those things were never expected, it is as if the person who has left the warmth, left those pleasures, is actually able to experience the pain and the hurt of the person who's never known them. even worse than they. In fact, the entire point of making movies like this is so that you as a viewer, when you sit nestled on your warm couch, perhaps in a well-heated home with people you love as viewing it and watching it, when you look out and you see that scenario, you feel perhaps even more melancholy than the person who's living in that condition here and now. This is a common human experience. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is, as it were, always both inside and outside of the grand celebration of communion with God. Jesus could perceive how cold the world really was. exactly because he had the most intimate communion with God the Father as his own eternal son. He knew the universe's opposition to him in a way that no other could. Because he was born into this world in a condition of original righteousness, he was born at once the God-man. Jesus not only experienced however pains from without, He also experienced, just as you and I, pains from within. And this is our second consideration. Jesus experienced hunger and thirst and exhaustion, the things that afflict us throughout our lives. And we see this, we see this in the reality that he was an infant who the Bible tells us, through nourishment, continued to grow and become strong. That impulse that you experience for food, That need that you have from within, which when it is not satiated is actually very painful, Jesus knew. He would experience this beyond the point of his infancy. When, for example, he went into a temptation in the wilderness and it says he ate nothing during those days and he became hungry. Now on the cross, Jesus could say, I'm thirsty. Now, for most of us, hunger is this minor affliction that we experience between 5 and 6 p.m. every single day, just this little pain in our gut. But Jesus experienced the depths of it. It's important for us to reflect that this can only be due to his humanity, because the Bible tells us again and again that God cannot hunger. Isaiah 40, 28 says, the everlasting God does not become weary or tired, as if he needed nourishment or fuel. And God tells us in the Psalms, if I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is mine and all it contains. He doesn't consume anything. He brings things into being out of nothing. Again, we might hear these two things and say, Those two states and conditions, total satisfaction in oneself and hunger are a contradiction. But again, I would challenge you to consider that Jesus' deity did not diminish the pains and hungers of his humanity. It magnified it. Ask yourself, can you be hungry and satisfied at the same time? Indeed you can. in different ways at the same time. Many of you, for example, are on a diet right now, maybe experiencing a degree of physical hunger, but at the same time, a greater degree of mental satisfaction and gladness that you have self-control. You ever had that experience where you could be hungry and yet satisfied? Same is true of any sort of appetite for discipline. You know, today, there's a sort of hunger that we have that the entire world of social media is playing on. It's your hunger for dopamine. I wonder if any of you have ever had to employ the strategy I employ about three times a year. I'll post something really controversial, really try to make my point, and resolve to go the distance to answer every single objection that someone writes on my wall on Facebook. But I exercise this discipline. It's a rule I have. Some of you might have noticed it, but I, for 72 hours, will not touch my post. I just want everyone who's mad about it to get all of their energy out on the page. And after they forgot about it, then I'll maybe start answering some of the points. In the midst of that, there's an impulse, and it's that dopamine hit, whether for good or for bad, to look and to see what's going on online. But you can have a greater satisfaction in denying it. This is the way that we're made. It's all true. Same with physical exercise, where your body is screaming no, but your mind says more, and there's a satisfaction, even when your body aches and cries out for relief. Jesus is quite clear he was able to have a sort of divine satisfaction even when he was hungry. As he says in John 7 34, my food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Jesus could say when tempted in the wilderness, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. See, Jesus' satisfaction as God, with God, rendered for him the burden of experiencing these unsatiated appetites of man even worse. Because Jesus could know in the midst of it. It's these appetites of our flesh that often gets the greater of us than the appetites of the soul. Jesus could be burdened, burdened even by the suffering of his own hunger in a way you could not because he knew it as a potential enemy to the kingdom of God. This is one of the reasons why Jesus was so inclined to describe himself as food, to leave for us the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. He did this to convey that his whole kingdom was designed to satiate the depths of our needs in a way that no mere food could. But Jesus, third, also experienced frustration of his will and he could only experience this as a man. As a man, Jesus more than once finds himself wishing one thing but getting the opposite. Very often he would ask people after he healed them to not publish what he had done. And how many of you know what really occurred? They went about telling everybody. In fact, in Mark 7, 24, we read that Jesus, evidently looking for a little bit of rest, left his main area of ministry in Galilee, goes outside the boundaries of Israel to a place called Tyre. It says he went up and went away from there to the region of Tyre, and when they had entered a house, he wanted no one to know of it. Yet he could not escape notice. In fact, even on the cross, on his way to the cross, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus says, Father, if it is possible, let this cup of your wrath pass from me, yet not as I will, but as you will. Jesus submits his will to the Father, and he has it frustrated. This could strike you as a contradiction because the Bible is so clear that God's will does not get frustrated. We read in Psalm 115 verse three, our God is in the heavens, he does whatever he pleases. The Bible could not be more clear. In Ephesians 111, that God works out all things after the counsel of his will. And you might say, how then can there be communion of deity and humanity in one man? Well, you might begin by observing that you can have two competing wills at the same time, one of which is satisfied, another of which is frustrated. How many of you, in the course of all things this season, found yourself saying, I'd like to get a more extravagant gift for this loved one. I'd also like to save money. One of those two wills won out. One of them won the day and was satiated, the other was not. You will say in the course of the days ahead, I would like to stay up and extend a good time. And another part of you will say, I would like to go to sleep so I can have a good day tomorrow. One of those two wills is going to be satiated. The other not. Worst of all, we experience a conflict of wills. Every time as a believer when we sin, Paul could say, I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I'm doing the very thing that I hate. Wills can be complex. So it is. Jesus enjoyed one and the same divine will with his father. In fact, it is because his will is one with the father that Jesus hated sin and its consequences in a way that you and I cannot comprehend. This means that taken in itself, the thought of being the object of the wholeness of God's wrath as a penalty for sin was a horrifying and undesirable thing for Jesus as a man to contemplate. At the very same time, exactly because Jesus disdains sin and any deviation from the will of the Father, He could at the very same time submit that human horror to His common will with the Father to dispose of your and my sin forever. Jesus' total commitment to the ends of His Father actually magnified the burden of knowing what He was going into experience and to bear. and with painful determination, Jesus embraced the frustration of his human will in submission to the divine. Positively, Jesus could experience joy like you and I do when we pass from a state of frustration to vindication and fulfillment. The last consideration we will have is Jesus' capacity as a man for ignorance And what a mystery this is. Luke 2.52 says, the child not only grew strong, but he grew in wisdom. Well, growing in wisdom means passing from a state of relative ignorance to understanding. Jesus could say on one occasion, when a woman reached out to get healing from him, he could say, who touched me? And ask it as a genuine question. But most famously, Jesus could say of his second coming, his parousia, his return, of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels nor the Son, but the Father alone. This is a hard saying because the Bible tells us of God, that God knows all things, 1 John 3.20. Not only that, but that God is perfect in knowledge in Job 37.16. that he declares the end from the beginning. Can it really be that Jesus as a man could experience ignorance while at the very same time being God and omniscient? Once again, I would challenge you to consider that you can both know things and not know things at the same time. Many of you know I've taught logic for 10 years at Northwest University. It's one of the most wonderful experiences teaching logic, because it's not as though any student in the room doesn't know how to reason already. If they literally had no power of reasoning, I would be teaching rocks, and that doesn't work. I always point out to the students the wonder of what's going on. I'm actually giving names for things you've been using since you were two in reasoning with your parents. I'm actually challenging you to acknowledge something that you've been using your whole life. You can genuinely learn things that you already know by way of active experience. You can be taught to acknowledge and to name what you've just taken for granted. Even more, you can forget things momentarily that you actually know. How many of you, when watching a movie, you see an actor and you've had this experience, you go, ah, I know their name. I just can't get it. In that moment, do you know or not know that actor's name? Plato described us, our brains, like a birdcage, with all this knowledge flying around inside of there. Sometimes it's hard to catch the bird. I think it's where we get that phrase, bird brain, pretty sure. You can have knowledge in your mind which is not at the forefront of your mind. And in fact, aside from these examples, perhaps the most important will be this one that I will challenge you with today. When you forgive someone, which is one of the greatest disciplines of the soul, you are determining to forget something. It's not to say that you cease to know whatever the wrong was so that it's nowhere in your mind. but it is a determination to not be knowing it when you see them and encounter them and have relationship with them, a determination. I'm gonna put this back here and I'm gonna see you in a light as if that stain were not present. It is a discipline of the soul to be able to forget. Many of you had been forgiven in words and felt, however, that when you encountered the person who so forgave you, in fact, just their countenance conveyed that they still remembered that short, that slight, that wrongdoing against them, you can just see it on their face. Real forgiveness involves this capacity to look past faults as if they were not there and to not be knowing them. Someone who's really good at forgiving, they almost have this effortless power to look past your wrong. When we understand this about knowledge, you can understand what Jesus means when he says, I don't know the day or the hour. Jesus, the omniscient one as God who cannot not know anything. Nevertheless, as man can determine to not know, to not be knowing, to look past what would be his greatest consolation. What he's saying is my focus is myopic on serving my father, my determination to submit myself wholly to Him. That's my focus. He could say, I'm not knowing what lies beyond the cross. I am looking at the cross for what it is. I'm knowing the burden of my judgment to come. In fact, Jesus' omniscience rendered His willingness to look past what He knew an even greater burden than it would have otherwise been. I'm gonna lay a challenge at your feet, therefore. If Jesus could embrace the wholeness of humanity, had this determination of character to experience our suffering and frustration of will, even our burden of not knowing, Are we not obligated to limit our gaze in the days ahead, giving genuine forgiveness perhaps to the people nearest to us in our own extended families? I hope you can treat your loved ones with the sort of kindness that you would treat a stranger only because you don't know that stranger's list of wrongs. Only because you're ignorant of them and would give them the basic graces due to all men. If Jesus, if God in becoming man, could embrace such a task, don't we have a burden to do so in some limited fashion? For everyone present, I do hope that you will acknowledge the gift of Jesus Christ today and tomorrow and all days to come. If you're an unbeliever, I would just simply challenge you to receive him in saving faith for the first time. I hope you can see his incomprehensible value. All other would-be saviors may profess to impart spiritual disciplines to help you find peace with God after the manner they supposedly did. Only Jesus is the union of deity and humanity in one person. Only Jesus is the accomplishment of communion between God and man. Only Jesus is God and man reconciled in himself. That's why he is the way, the truth, and the life. We leave you with him. We implore you to receive him. Bow your heads with me. Living God, we praise you and we thank you for the gift and the mystery of the incarnation. Lord, we thank you. that the union of deity and humanity in you sheds light the more on what we are as men. Lord Jesus Christ, you alone can show us who we ought to be as men. And you alone can reconcile us, those sinners, to God our Father through your atoning word. We praise you and we thank you. We pray that we would be smitten with you. for all the days ahead. In Jesus' name we pray by your spirit, amen.