All of us know what it’s like to be humbled, and almost all of those times of humiliation have been forced upon us - after all, no sane person would willingly choose to be humiliated in front of other people. But Jesus’ humiliation is active: “he humbled himself” Paul says in Philippians 2. But why would he do this?

Paul insists that the path of salvation - in other words, the path of exaltation - is and was necessarily the path of humiliation. Jesus humbled himself, becoming the servants of those very people whom he created, sustained, and who rebelled against him, in order to rescue us who could not rescue ourselves. This also provides a model of what it means to love self-sacrificially, to give up our glory and exaltation to serve others who do not deserve it.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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A person’s appetite for and willingness to change can frequently be a matter of personality - some people are by nature more conservative in their personality and tend to resist change by nature, while others have personalities that are more progressive and tend to embrace and even pursue change.

The former group have the advantage of not being easily swayed into making bad changes in their life but the disadvantage of being unwilling at times to make necessary good changes. On the other hand, the latter group have the advantage of being willing to embrace much-needed changes but the disadvantage of sometimes rushing into unnecessary and even harmful changes. Both groups, of course, need each other to temper each other’s weaknesses. But how do we know what is bad change and what is good change?

The answer the Bible gives is that their is an unchangeable touchstone, Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He never changes because he is perfect and thus needs no change. But we are not perfect, so we must be ready to change when needed, and we know we need to change when our thoughts or behavior does not match up with the perfect, unchangeable Jesus. So, with Jesus as our North Star, we can know when changing is necessary and when changing would be wrong.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith - the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin - the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fundamentally an agreement with God, that he is right and we are wrong.

These confessions carry with them a lot of benefit for the individual human: first, by turning us away from the fake “reality” that God is wrong and we are right and orienting us to true reality, we can know that we are right with God; and second, this right orientation to God’s reality produces psychological comfort as the individual human begins to experience much less dissonance in his life as he moves throughout God’s world.

Chuck and Aaron also discuss the benefits of private confession to God, corporate confession, individual confession with a pastor, and confessing our sins to those we have sinned against.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

Subscribe to the show at https://cacg.saintjamesglencarbon.org.

To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep103.