Sunday, “Best of” messages

February 21^st, ‘10

WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?

“He’s just a carpenter – Mary’s boy. We’ve known him since he was a kid…Who does he think he is?” (Mark 6:3 The Message)

He thinks He is who He knows He is, as should we all. Listen to the badmouthing, “just” a carpenter. Not the architect, just a brick carrier, a “fix it” man, “Mary’s boy”. Joseph evidently had been long dead by this point. He’s just a boy, Mama’s boy at that. Imagine, calling a thirty year-old man a boy (Luke 3:23). Elsewhere they accused Him of being illegitimate (John 8:41). “We’ve known him since he was a kid”. The locals will always see you as you were, never as you are or could be. They see a kid, never a man. And they demand you stay in your place, “the brother of Joses, and Juda, and Simon”. Your life must match the rest of the family’s. Any lack of conformity and they seek to whip you back into line. Your dream is to be an astronaut or president, at least own a Pizza Hut or something; they demand you stay on the farm. Who does he think he is?

Flip the question around; who do they think they are? Limit one made in the likeness and image of God? If a “prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin” (Mark 6:4) then he ought to leave Dodge. For one thing He “could there do no mighty work…because of their unbelief” (vs 5,6). Life is too short to settle for mediocre. Just because nothing good ever came out of Nazareth (John 1:46), which it appears was true, doesn’t mean you or I have to allow them to pin that label on our shirts. Jesus didn’t confine Himself to their boundary lines; He “went round about the villages, teaching”. Notice, He didn’t defend Himself or butt heads with the town elders. He went on His way “teaching”, instructing other small town, small mind, would-be prophets on how to shatter the Nazareth mold. Some molds are too moldy for me. Every hometown needs some hometown boys to stay and man the gas pumps but the worst thing you can do is stay put out of some mistaken sense of obligation.

Just who do you think you are? My typical reply is, “How long do you have?” because a Spirit-filled believer can testify all afternoon of who he or she is…in Christ. They may have known you since you were a kid but if “old things are passed away, and all things are become new” then you aren’t the same kid that left there for college. Once freed, don’t submit to that old condemnation. The Book says you are an overcomer, “more than a conqueror”, an “heir of God, and joint-heir with Jesus Christ”. Better to be a joint-heir than a billionaire, because the Father says, “All that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). “My Daddy paves His sidewalks with gold. What did your daddy ever do back in Nazareth?” Had Nazareth honored Jesus He would have wrought the same miracles there that He did in Cana or Capernaum, “…them that honor me I will honor, and they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed” (1 Sam 2:30). Notice, “them” and “they” in that text, the same them and they that belittled Jesus down on Main Street, Nazareth. Remember, one has to be little to belittle. Instead, see the best in every man. Give one another the honor of a prophet and you’ll not fail to receive a prophet’s reward.