Why Call Him Saviour - Part 1

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Please make your donation today at vision.org.au. Of all the different names and titles ascribed to Jesus, one stands alone as the most meaningful and majestic. That word? Savior. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah examines that uniquely powerful name which was first announced to the world on that Christmas morning in Bethlehem. Continuing his series, Why the Nativity, here's David to introduce today's thought-provoking message, Why Call Him Savior. Ladies and gentlemen, there are more than 300 names and titles that describe the Lord Jesus. But the name Savior is the one that provides a poignant reminder to us that God is not leaving us in our sin, that he has provided a way for us to be saved. He is our Savior. And today we're going to talk about that as we continue our series, Why the Nativity. Today we begin the last message in that series as we approach the final hours before the birthday of Jesus Christ is celebrated around the world. You know, the question we have to ask ourselves is not only this, is he the Savior of the world? We know the answer to that one.

But here's the second one. Is he my Savior? Has there ever been a time when you have asked Jesus Christ to be your personal Savior, to forgive you of your sin and give you the gift of eternal life? If you will do that, if you will ask him to do that in prayer, he will do it. The Bible says he never turns anybody away because he is not willing that any should perish. So, why not pray that prayer today?

We'll remind you at the end of the program about that because that's the most important thing you could do to get ready for Christmas. Okay, let's get started now from Luke 2-11 as we call him Savior. The Bible uses more than 300 names and titles to describe Jesus. But Jesus can no more be contained in his names and titles than we could contain the ocean in a collection of beautiful bottles. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who was a great London preacher in another generation, often expressed his frustration in trying to wrap his arms around the names and nature of Jesus. On one occasion he wrote, I know my words cannot honor him according to his merit.

I wish they could. Indeed, I grow less and less satisfied with my thoughts and language concerning him. He is too glorious for my feeble language to describe him. If I could speak with tongues of men and angels, I could not speak worthily of him. If I could borrow all of the harmonies of heaven and enlist every harp and song of the glorified, were not that music sweet enough for his praises?

What he was saying in his old English way is what sometimes we feel. How do you describe the greatness of the Lord Jesus? How can you use words to express all that he is and all that he means to us? The names of Jesus, if we could understand them all, would still fall short of declaring his glory and describing his greatness. Jesus is the name of the Lord's personality. Emmanuel is the name of his proximity to us, but Savior, oh that name, that name is the name of the Lord's purpose and his mission upon this earth.

Jesus and Emmanuel are names that were given to the parents of our Lord by an angel, but Savior, that name was announced first to a group of shepherds on a hillside. We read about it here in Luke chapter 2 verses 10 and 11. And the angel said to them, Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.

For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. Now when that was announced to the shepherds and in that particular time when Jesus came, the people of Israel had had many saviors. As we learned in the book of Judges, they were constantly in need of a Savior, a deliverer to help them out of the messes that they created for themselves.

The book of Nehemiah summarizes it in Nehemiah chapter 9 verse 27 where we read, Therefore you delivered them into the hand of their enemies who oppressed them. And in the time of their trouble, when they cried to you, you heard from heaven. And according to your abundant mercies, you gave them deliverers who saved them from the hand of their enemies. Israel had had many human saviors. Oh, but the Savior that was about to be born, they'd never had any Savior like this one. Jesus took the title of Savior and he gave it new and eternal meaning. In the New Testament, the title Savior is found five times in the writings of Peter. And I find that interesting because you remember Peter is the one who, when he tried to walk on water on that occasion and he took his eyes off of the Lord, he began to sink like a rock and he cried out, Lord, save me. And Peter's whole life, like most of ours, was one long cry for a Savior.

When the angels gave Jesus the name Savior, they defined both his life and his death. For Luke 19-10 says, For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. Here in Luke chapter 2, we begin our understanding of the Savior by the promise of the Savior, which is given to us in this verse. For unto you is born this day a Savior who is Christ the Lord. This is the promise that had been made earlier by the prophets of the Old Testament. Isaiah in Isaiah 9-6 had given a glimpse of this when he had written, For unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. This is the promise that the angel had given to Joseph just a few months earlier in Matthew 1-21. And she will bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

Why? For he will save his people from their sins. If you read the Bible and you begin to get a perspective on the length and breadth of the Scripture, you will discover that there's a kind of rhythm in the Bible itself. Just when people need hope, God sends spokesmen to offer them a foretaste of a better future. Throughout the words and the works of the prophets, there were glimmers of a Savior, a King who would rescue his people and restore them to God. In fact, there were more than 300 specific promises in the Hebrew Scriptures about the promised Messiah or the coming Savior, as they called him.

One mathematician has determined that if only 60 of those prophecies came true, it would be an odd something like 1 as opposed to 1 plus 157 zeros. In other words, the odds against this happening by itself are astronomical, impossible, these things that were prophesied concerning Jesus Christ, they actually happened as it was prophesied to the minutest detail. And yet, as we look at them today, we can look back in history and connect the dots between the prophecy and the fulfillment, the promise of the Savior. And then in this same verse, we have the purpose of the Savior.

Notice verse 11, "'For unto you is born this day a Savior who is Christ the Lord.'" In the Gospels, Jesus speaks very frequently about his mission in coming to this earth. Somebody might want to ask, why did Jesus come?

We need not wonder about that. The Lord Jesus always was communicating his purpose in coming to this earth. In fact, his very first recorded words were to tell his parents that they should expect him to be involved in his father's business. You remember when they went to the temple to find him after he had been left and they didn't know what he was doing and why he had not told them what was going on? And Jesus reminded them, wait a minute, I'm not here to serve you. I am here on my father's mission. Thirteen times in the Gospels, Jesus uses the phrase, I have come, and then he expresses something about why. For instance, Matthew 9, 13, he says, I have come to call sinners. John 5, 43, I have come in my father's name. John 6, 38, I have come to do the will of God. John 7, 29, I have come from him and he sent me to you. And John 12, 46, I have come to shine in this dark world.

If the written record is any clue, no sense of mission has ever been brighter. Perhaps his most moving statement about why he came to this earth came on a day when he encountered a strange little man by the name of Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was a man of wealth and distinction. Yet when Jesus passed through his town, this little man ran ahead of the crowd and climbed up into the branches of a tree so that he could get a good look. And when Jesus came by, he called him by name.

I've always thought, I wondered what you would do if something like that happened to you. You know he doesn't know who you are, but he calls you by your name. He called him by name and invited him to lunch. Now there's another thought, what would you do if Jesus invited you to lunch? The Bible says he came down and he went to lunch with Jesus. And when the townspeople heard about it, they were incensed because you see Zacchaeus was not one of the model citizens of the city.

He was a hated tax collector. And when they began to question Jesus about why he would eat with such a person, his response was, Luke 19, 10, for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which is lost. Now it is here that the ancient Jews and many modern religious people, like some of us perhaps and people that you know, have misunderstood the purpose of the coming of the Savior. You see, in the days of our Lord's birth, the people of Israel were looking for a different kind of a Savior. They wanted to be delivered from the Romans who ruled over them. They wanted their Savior to set them free physically. And Jesus had come to set them free spiritually.

And before we criticize them, we are not far behind them today, are we? We want a Savior too. We want to be saved from our bad marriages. We want to be saved from our indebtedness, from our boring jobs. We want to be saved from our meaningless lives. But he came to save us from our sins. We want him to save us from the sins of others. It is not our sins that are upsetting to us.

We are frustrated by the sins of others. Lord, please come and save me from the sins of my neighbors or from the sins of my husband or my wife or my boss. But in spite of the fact that many modern messages pander to that kind of Gospel, that is not the Gospel at all. Jesus did not come down here primarily to save us from our marriages or from our businesses or from our personal physical failures. He came to save us from our sins. And when we are saved from our sins, those other things begin to flow out of that. But you can go to churches sometimes now week after week and never hear anything about being saved from your sin.

What you hear is how to be saved from your problems. My friend, if you are not saved from your sin, you will never be saved from your problems. Jesus did not come to make our lives better. He came to save us from our sin.

And in spite of the fact that we know that, we are easily swayed by feel-good messages about how Jesus can make it all better. The Savior came to save us from our sin. And the Bible says in order to do that, according to Luke 19-10, he had to seek us first. He came to seek and to save that which was lost. I remember growing up, we used to sing a little chorus in our youth group that went like this, I found what I wanted when I found the Lord. And that's a beautiful little phrase and it was a great tune, but it's bad theology because we weren't seeking the Lord, he was seeking us. You say, well, I'm here, I'm seeking the Lord. Well, if you're seeking the Lord, it's only because he sought you first. He put you in a seeking mode so that you would hear the gospel.

And the Bible says that man will not come to God unaided. In Luke chapter 15, one of my favorite passages, we are told about the lost sheep and the lost coin and the lost son, all of them had to be sought by the Savior. Just as today, we must be sought as well.

Oh, my friends, there is music and majesty in Jesus' statement. One focus, the lost. Two actions, to seek and to save. Jesus came to this earth, listen to me, on a rescue mission. The Savior is needed to seek the lost and the Savior is needed to save the lost. He came to seek and to save. If he found us and didn't save us, we'd be in the same position we were before, but he came to save us. Now, I have to tell you, that word has fallen on hard times.

We use every word that we can come up with from the dictionary except the word saved. I remember growing up as a boy, it was a common thing to ask somebody if they'd been saved. I remember one little foray into the witnessing arena when I was a student at Dallas Seminary. I was taking some courses at North Texas State University, some graduate courses, and I was going through a period of time, and you've probably never been through a time like this, when I was feeling very guilty that I was so busy about doing the Christian thing that I wasn't witnessing. I had probably heard a message on witnessing that had put me under a guilt trip, and so I determined this week I was gonna witness and I went to my class and sat next to a friend, and I'll never forget this. I asked him, are you saved? And he said, I'm not interested in being saved from anything except from nuts like you. That's what he said. It sort of set my witnessing program back a few weeks. It was very discouraging. Now, somebody would say to me, well, you shouldn't have asked him that question.

There's a better way to ask it, and perhaps there is. But the Bible's term for it is to be saved, to be saved. When we think of being saved, we think of pictures of sailors clinging to the wreckage of a ship, helicopters hovering in the night sky, shining their beacons on the sea in search of the living who must be saved. A few months ago, Don and I were in a condo, and it was a very quiet day, uneventful, and all of a sudden, we heard helicopters, five of them right out in front of where we were staying, going up and down in front of this thing, and it went on for hours.

I knew something was going on, and so I walked down to the pier and asked some of the people who had gathered there what was happening. A surfer had disappeared, and they feared he had drowned, and ultimately, he had. But they couldn't find his body, and so they were searching for him, and they never stopped until they found him. We think of a collapsed mine where workers are trapped far beneath the earth. Their oxygen runs low, and men crouch in darkness, wondering if they dare hope for salvation. We think of a little girl at the bottom of a well, or even the favorite word picture of a single stray sheep trapped on a perilous slope.

The Coast Guard will find those lost sailors, and no taxpayer will ever complain about the expense. The miners will not be abandoned. The little girl must see the sunshine once more, and the sheep must be rescued from danger. These situations are urgent, and when we see them on television, we stop and we pray and we wait. We may not even know any of the people, but instantly, we find ourselves identifying with them and praying that somehow they will be rescued. They are lost, and they need to be saved. But, ladies and gentlemen, these temporal situations are transcended by the true tragedy of men and women who are lost in their own rubble of sin and darkness and pain.

And often, even without knowing what they are longing for, our world's inhabitants are crying out to be rescued. We don't need to be saved from the sins of others. We need salvation from our own sin. Until we are willing to acknowledge that, no matter what the Savior may have done for us, it will not connect with us at all. Until we are willing to say, it's not their sins that is the problem, it is my sin.

It is not my situation that's the problem, it's my sin that's the problem. Until we are willing to stand up before God and own up to the fact that we have failed him and we are falling short of his glory and the only hope we have is a Savior, until then, whatever the Savior may have done for us, it will not make any difference because he does not force himself upon us. He paid the penalty for our sin.

He paid all that needs to be paid, but he waits for us to accept it by faith. The promise of the Savior and the purpose of the Savior. Notice the provision of the Savior in the same verse. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord. Please notice the fact of this Savior coming to this earth.

This is a fact of history. It's very interesting that this verse, while it is so very short, contains everything we need to know. It says, for unto you is born this day a Savior. Jesus did not just gradually come upon this earth. There was a day when the Lord God was born into humanity, when he came through Mary and on a certain day, in a certain place, at a certain time, he was born into humanity. The Bible makes it very clear this is an historic event. On this day, Jesus was born.

The birth of Jesus is not the beginning of a spiritual force, but the historic record of a person who had an actual birthday. You're listening to Turnic Point, I'm David Jeremiah, and we are coming to the end of our series, Why the Nativity, several days, at least three weeks of teaching on Christmas. Tomorrow we'll finish up this lesson on Why Call Him Savior.

I know tomorrow will be a busy day for everyone, and you may miss the program, but you can catch it on our website or on our app and finish up the series on your own time. Here's the question that we've been asking. Is he your Savior? He is the Savior of the world that we know, but he only becomes your Savior by invitation. So, I've been encouraging you to ask him to come into your life and to forgive your sin and give you the gift of eternal life. All you have to do is ask.

The Bible says he's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to him. So, do it today. Do it before Christmas.

Give yourself the greatest gift you could ever have, the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. See you next time. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's current series, Why the Nativity, please visit our website, where you'll also find two free ways to help you stay connected, our monthly magazine Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Now, when you do, ask for your copy of David's 365-day devotional for 2021. It's called Strength for Today, and it's filled with biblical truth for the year ahead, and it's yours for a gift of any amount. And to keep your spirits bright through the holiday season, visit the Home for Christmas channel at turningpoint.tv, your free source for Christmas music, videos, messages, and more. The Home for Christmas channel at turningpoint.tv. I'm Gary Hoogfleet. Join us tomorrow as we conclude the series, Why the Nativity, here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au.