What a man says seriously about his honest intentions is not to be taken lightly. His words deserve some credence, unless, of course, he is a proven consummate liar. Some of the most emphatically stated intentions of men and women have been scoffed at as preposterous until their actions later fulfilled their expressed proposals.

When Adolf Hitler published his “Mein Kampf” he plainly stated what he intended to do politically and militarily in Germany and the world. He set forth his timetable of conquest. The reading public laughed him to scorn. Why the very idea! That Austrian paperhanger, that strutting little corporal with the Charlie Chaplin mustache! But then one by one, that little man began to accomplish exactly what he said he intended to do.

No one ever verbalized more clearly and concretely His intended program, His proposed mission, than did Jesus of Nazareth. But because of the magnitude of His program’s scope, because of the incredible objectives He proposed, because of the unbelievable methods He said He would use, there were many people then, and many people now, who put little credence in His announced intentions.

Over and over in the Gospels Jesus speaks out His positive intentions. It is interesting to note the recurring stereotype phrase He uses to convey these intentions. “I am come,” says Jesus, “not to destroy, but to fulfill the law and the prophets.” “I am come not to be served, but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many.” “I am come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” “I am come to seek and to save the lost.” “I am come to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Over and over Jesus says, “I am come, I am come, I am come,” for this purpose or that, and so He clearly declares His intention.

If a man calls on you — someone you do not know — whose business with you you cannot even guess — do you not give the man who has come to you the courtesy of a ten minute interview, to hear him state his case and declare his intentions — before you arrive at an opinion regarding him and his proposition?

Will we do as much for Jesus Christ? He comes to us stating clearly these four specific intentions — Will we hear him out?

First, he comes saying He is the fulfiller of the best in the past. “Think not,” He says, “that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets; I have not come to destroy them, but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 3:17)

Standing one Sabbath day in the small congregation of the Nazareth synagogue where He had been brought up with the other young people of the village, Jesus read the passage from the prophet Isaiah. Closing the scroll, He reverently announced to His fellow citizens: “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” As He begins His ministry and announces His purpose, instead of issuing a new revolutionary manifesto, Jesus carefully turns to an old familiar scripture, reads it and says, “I intend to fulfill this.”

Though Jesus in His baptism by John in the wilderness had affiliated Himself with a new and vital religious movement, He here in the Nazareth synagogue plainly affirms His connection with Israel’s religious past. He claims He is a link in the Creator’s chain of historic purpose since the beginning of time. He is laying His claim to stand squarely in the old tradition of Israel.

“Jesus claims that in Him are fulfilled the highest hopes and dreams of the past. Before His coming, men glimpsed the truth; in Him they could gaze on the full vision of the truth. Before His coming, men heard faint echoes of the voice of God; in Him they heard clearly and unmistakably the voice of God. Jesus is the great interpreter and fulfiller of the dreams that haunt the minds and hearts of men.” (William Barclay — The Mind of Jesus — p. 134-135) This is a broad and sweeping claim — for anyone to make — hardly to be expected from so meek a man as the Nazareth Carpenter. Can we accept it?

In the second statement of intention Jesus says He comes as the Divine Servant of men. “I am come not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom for many.” So Jesus clearly affirms that though he fulfills the scriptures and hopes and expectations of Israel, he doesn’t pretend to fulfill all the expectations of every Tom, Dick and Harry, nor to incarnate literally every strand of scriptural hope.

William Barclay finds evidence in the gospels of Jesus early revulsion at the bloody animal sacrifices at the Temple. The sensitive lad of twelve, taken up to the Temple at Jerusalem witnessed the slaughter of the bleeding cattle and sheep. He saw the priests standing in puddles of blood, holding with crimsoned hands the great basins into which the blood of the sacrificed animals was poured. He watched as the priests carried the basins to the altar. He smelled the stench as the blood is poured on the flame of the altar. “Worship my Father in Heaven with such a revolting ritual?” The lad Jesus shuddered at the thought.

So was Jesus also revolted by the cold and calculating legalists in Temple and synagogue who handled the law of God as a wooden thing, as if men could give to the Eternal a fitting service by callous obedience with a view to trapping God in His own ordinances and so make God man’s debtor. So also He was revolted by the Prophetic visions of a mighty military conqueror.

No, Jesus could not fit into every pious expectation and fulfill every scriptural hope in a pedantic, wooden way. He was God’s great pioneer whose fulfillment of all the best that came before was in courageous imaginative dimensions beyond the brightest of men’s hopes in the past.

So Jesus insisted that He came not only to fulfill all the best in the past, but to bring a new pioneering dimension to God’s service of men. It was commonly accepted that men should serve God. Jesus said that He came as the divine servant of man; He came not to receive things from men, but to give things to men; not to dominate like a conqueror but to serve like a servant. It was a commonplace of ancient religions that men should sacrifice to God; but it was something completely new that God should sacrifice Himself for men. The supreme signatures which Jesus said He had come to fulfill, therefore, were the suffering servant passages of Isaiah.

But more, Jesus says it is His intention as the Divine Suffering Servant to seek and to save the lost. “The Son of man,” says Jesus, “came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10) For the Divine Suffering Servant to serve the faithful and obedient and elect people of God was strange enough, but to announce His intention to serve the lost and the sinner and the outcast was stranger still.

Last night we noted that Jesus does not use the term “lost” in a theological sense, as of the “damned,” “the condemned to destruction by God forever and forever.” He uses the word “lost” to refer to His intended mission in its fundamental, simple, human meaning — as of the confused, those in the wrong place, those going in the wrong direction, all astray.

“Jesus came to find men and women who were heading straight away from God, and therefore lost, and to turn them back to God.” (Barclay — ibid. 136)

Someone has said that the playwright, Tennessee Williams, “has a special compassion for the lost, the odd, the strange, the difficult people — fragile spirits, who lack talons for the jungle, and Williams wins his audience’s sympathy for these people because he speaks to a common condition — loneliness. All his characters yearn to break out of the cell of the lonely self, to touch and reach another person. ‘Hell is yourself,’ says Tennessee Williams. ‘When you ignore other people completely, that is hell.’ The revelation towards which all Williams’ plays aspire is the moment of self-transcendence when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.” (Time magazine — March 9, 1962)

But there is another worse and deeper hell into which men sometimes sink, when they are lost from God’s presence. And the burning passion of Jesus is to seek the poor, lost soul in that dismal hell of godlessness and bring Him to the moment of soul transcendence when realizing His lost condition, he vows: “I will arise and go to my Father, and say: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in Thy sight and am no more worthy to be called Thy Son.’”

Finally, Jesus comes to us declaring His intention to be the divine physician of sin-sick souls. “Those who are well have no need of a physician,” says Jesus, “but those who are sick. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Matthew 9:9-13)

Jesus saw clearly that it was man’s sin which caused all man’s lostness; his lostness from the good life, his lostness from the joy and love of human companions, the lostness from the blessedness of life at the Father’s side. The way to restore the lost was to deal realistically, helpfully, curatively with man’s sin.

“So Jesus regarded Himself as the divine physician who had come to enable men to be healed from the universal human disease of sin. Jesus did not regard the sinner with loathing and revulsion. A layperson might find himself disgusted and revolted and sickened by some horrible physical condition — cholera, small pox, leprosy; a doctor would find in the same conditions only a call to his compassion and a summons to his skill.” (Barclay — ibid. 135)

“So the divine physician came to seek and to save lost sinners. Jesus is convinced that this service requires not only His loving visit, and His skillful spiritual surgery, but also a life saving transfusion of His own blood. So He does not shrink from a cross. He accepted it as the culminating work of God’s suffering servant. And about that atoning death and its meaning for us and our sinful world, we will probe more deeply tomorrow night.

“There is a green hill far away

Without a city wall,

Where the dear Lord was crucified,

Who died to save us all.

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin;

He only could unlock the gate

Of heaven and let us in.”

Jesus Christ clearly states the basic intentions of His life and death. He comes to us and says: “For this cause I am come into the world; to fulfill the best of the past, to be the divine suffering servant of man, to search out the lost wherever they are, and to serve as the divine physician for man’s sin-sick soul.”

What think you of Christ? What does the clear, expressed intention of Jesus for you really mean in your life? How are you acting on your judgment of Him and His ministry for you?