Riverside Community Church
Connect with us on facebook. 
Riverside Sermon August 17th 2025 – The Beauty of Jesus
Speaker: Kevin Price
Introduction
Good morning, my name is Kevin and I’ve had the opportunity to preach at Riverside throughout the years. I’m married to Kayla who is part of the Tucker clan and have two (almost three) children, Alden and Ellie. It is neat to have preached here every year or so for the past while, because it makes reflect on when I preached last summer I was in a time of uncertainty and job transition – I’m a teacher – leaving a Christian private school that I worked at for seven years and then joined the one true faith with the Catholic school system teaching high school French.
I think it’s interesting because I ended up teaching a couple religion classes this past school year (in French) even though I am a Protestant and not a Catholic, but I have an almost completed Masters in Theology from Tyndale Seminary, and speak French, so that qualified me to teach those courses according to my administration. I loved teaching those courses, especially grade 9 religion –I tended to channel all of my preaching energy into that course – trying to teach fairly high level theological ideas from my masters degree to fourteen year olds…in French. Lets just say that I’m excited to put some of that preaching energy towards teaching adults today mais si je parle en francais soudenment, pardon moi - please forgive me.
Teaching a course about the Christian religion to teenagers made me reflect on how to best communicate to them the value of Christianity. Often these kids, even though many of them have attended Catholic schools all their lives, do not consider themselves Christian/Catholic or have much to do religion at all, alongside their families. I would say about 30% of my students were upfront about any Christian faith and only a handful of them seemed seriously committed. My students are growing up in an ever-increasing pluralistic society – meaning that they have countless perspectives, beliefs and ideas being presented (or bombarded) at them every day. This tends to be a more evident reality for younger generations because they spend more of their time online where you can encounter a dozen different ways of thinking in 30 seconds scrolling through tiktok or Instagram. Add that to a number of other factors such as their friends, family, school experiences, extra curriculars, sports – one little religion teacher like me won’t have much of a chance to convince them that Christianity is the best perspective out there when there’s so many options.
I love it because it presents a challenge to me: How can I leave my students with a good, true and beautiful experience of the Christian faith?
This led me to reflect on my reasons for being a Christian, which brings us to our main question for today: What is your reason for being a Christian? I would like you to actually think about your answer to that question for a minute. {WAIT}
True, Good, Beautiful
If you recall, my challenge was – how can I leave my students with a good, true, and beautiful experience of the Christian faith? Those words are inspired by the Greek way of knowing the worth of something – is it true? Is it good? Is it beautiful? If you reflect on you reasons for being a Christian, perhaps your answer aligns with one or more of these qualifiers. Maybe you are a Christian because you believe it is true. Maybe you are a Christian because you believe God is good. Maybe you are a Christian because you know Jesus, and Jesus is beautiful. All of those are great reasons. It is that last answer that I want to focus on today – the beauty of Jesus and the beauty of following Him.
I feel like we are really good in our Baptist churches to show how Christianity is true and the Bible is trustworthy. I think we are really good at helping others be good people through having upright morals and loving our neighbours. I think we can just spend sometime focusing on beauty of Jesus today, because I’ve come to the conclusion that experiencing and knowing Jesus’s beauty is an essential part of showing my students that Christianity is valuable to their lives.
Beauty
Now what comes to mind when you think of “Beauty”? It is kind of a strange concept in our culture. My guess is that most of our minds go to the idea of physical beauty and attraction. There are conventionally attractive people plastered all around us on advertisements – trying to convince us that we will be beautiful like them if we just buy clothes, or perfume, or toothpaste. Beauty often tends to weaponized in a way to sell us things in our society, and that can make our idea of beauty pretty shallow.
But if you can manage to keep yourself away from all that weaponized beauty, then perhaps when you think of it, you think about experiencing a deeper beauty - that perfect spring morning outside in the garden. Or maybe you think of that one concert you went to or movie that you saw that was just so well done – you witnessed true art that resonated with parts of your soul. Or maybe you think of the time you got dressed up for some event or get together and you felt like you were truly beautiful. Or saw someone you loved take your breath away with their beauty.
To behold beauty is more than just shallow appeal to sell us toothpaste – beauty is something that speaks to our innermost being, that resonates with our hearts and souls, that you feel in your gut. It is earthy, messy, human. It is something that we can miss out on so much if we follow our culture’s drive to keep our faces to the grindstone and scrolling on screens – keep everything in the realm of the mind and the superficial – and not slow down long enough to realize the beauty around us and within us. Beauty is something we experience deeply.
When I think of beauty, of course I think of my family. My wife, my kids, do you ever have those moments when you are with your loved ones where you just think – wow, I am so incredibly blessed to be with these beautiful humans, so incredibly blessed to love them and be loved by them. That feeling is encountering beauty. And beauty doesn’t have to be these super meaningful moments every time. I also get a taste of beauty when I see a really cool Lego set, which sounds really lame – like I got a Lego Millennium Falcon and had it set up for a while before my kids slowly destroyed it, and so many times I would see it and just think it was so cool. I’m trying to inspire you to think of when you encountered beauty – the profound and simple examples in your life that make you experience beauty. I believe we need to encounter deep beauty often in our lives, be surrounded by it, because beauty leads us into encounters with God in our innermost being.
Psalms
The psalmist says in Psalm 42 – “when my soul is downcast within me, I remember God (where?) in beautiful nature – in the land of Jordan, from the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mitzar, in the roar of your waterfalls – DEEP calls to DEEP. By day the Lord commands His love, and at night His song is with me – a prayer to the God of my life.” (Psalm 42:7-9). We can miss out on a big part of living our lives with God when we miss beauty. We miss the deep of God’s beauty calling the deep of our own souls. The Psalmist teaches that regular encounters with God’s beauty gives us an anchor for our souls when tough times come. You can say with hope that even when your soul is downcast, even when your mind and your body fail, you can say that “God is the strength, the rock, of my hearts and my portion, my reward, forever” (Psalm 73:26).
Scripture is full of authors writing about the Beauty of God as they experienced the divine in nature, in their life experiences, and ultimately, the clearest in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what we are turning to today – passages in the Gospels that point us to the beauty of Jesus because Jesus is the clearest picture of who God is, as Colossians says “He is the image of the invisible God”, or in John he is “the Word made flesh and dwelling among us”. I believe that the more we know the beauty of Jesus both in our minds and hearts, the more we want to be around Him and follow His way of life – the more we actually live this life He offers - real, abundant, eternal life here and now. And that gives us really strong reasons to be Christians. Let us look to Jesus…
_________________________________________________________________________________
Intro to Matthew 4
If you have a Bible and want to follow along, please turn to Matthew chapter 4. We’re told in Matthew 4 that Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Something that I learned recently that adds a whole new perspective on this passage is considering that Jesus is likely considering how He is going to go about doing His ministry. This happens right after His baptism and before He starts His public ministry, so He is likely in the wilderness planning out how he is going to communicate His good message that God’s kingdom is here and He is offering real, true, eternal life to everyone who follows Him. He spends 40 days fasting and actively working with God the Father to discern how to go about his ministry. But to fully do this work – He needs to test it. That’s where the tempter, the devil, shows up to tempt Him with three alternative ways to do His ministry.
Temptation One
The first is in verse 3 – the tempter says, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Jesus is super hungry after fasting, so what’s the problem with using His power to feed Himself? Jesus responds quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, “people shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”. For Jesus, the tempter was trying to get Him to use His power to satisfy His hunger in the moment, but one could argue it is much more than that. This first temptation offers Jesus the idea to use His power in his ministry to win people over by giving them bread. By giving them all the food they need, He can gain a huge following to make Him king and then usher in God’s kingdom through force.
This is what Rome would do – the empire of Jesus’ day – if the people got a bit too fed up with the many bad decisions of the government, then the emperor would sponsor “Bread and Circuses” to pacify the masses through providing for their basic food needs and putting on entertainment to distract them. This means putting on gladiatorial spectacles at the Colosseum and literally throwing bread into the audience. I’m sure we can think of modern examples of this tactic – perhaps “Netflix and Tax rebates?”.
Feeding the Thousands
Jesus refuses this temptation and never uses his power to give bread to his followers, right? Wait…Does Jesus ever use His power to feed people during His ministry? Yes, the story of “The feeding of the Five thousand” in Matthew 14 and also doing it again in the less famous story of the feeding of the four thousand in Matthew 15. In both those passages, Jesus confronts this temptation again. (Temptations don’t just go away once and done). He has huge crowds following Him for healing and teaching and haven’t had anything to eat for a long time. We’re told that Jesus has compassion on the crowds both times and He multiplies the little food that was present to feed everyone with more than enough.
So is Jesus giving into temptation because He used His power to make bread to feed people? No because He does not provide for their needs in order to profit off of them – using them to boost up His own attempt for power like so many other leaders throughout human history. Instead, He puts Himself at risk of this temptation because He has compassion on the crowds – He loves them. He has to send the crowds immediately away after feeding them because they inevitably try to push in the direction of the first temptation – it says that the crowds were going to seize Him by force and make Him king because they thought He could save them from Rome through His magic bread powers.
The beauty of Jesus in this example is that He offers provision out of compassion, at risk to Himself, because he actually cares about the people following Him. He did not care about the crowds to get something that He wanted out of them – He cared about them because He loved them, even though He probably knew they were going to let Him down right afterwards by trying to make Him king and missing the whole point.
Application One
I don’t want us to miss what this means about our own walk with Jesus in the Christian life. We can take from this beautiful example that Jesus cares about us as His followers, not because we are going to do something for Him or that He expects us to live up to His expectations for us. Jesus cares for us and cares for our needs simply because He loves us, even when we let Him down, even when we don’t think we’re doing “enough” for Him. He’s not sitting there thinking – “oh you didn’t pray and read your Bible for enough time this week so I’m not going to care about what you need”. Jesus just gives of Himself freely to us because He loves us. And that is beautiful.
Temptation Two
Moving on to the second temptation we see in Matthew 4:5. The devil takes Jesus to the highest point of the Temple in Jerusalem (in a vision or literally). The devil tells Jesus to jump off of the highest point because, as the scriptures say, “He shall command His angels concerning you” and “upon their hands they shall lift you up, so that you may not strike your foot against a stone.” Jesus responds with his own scripture verse: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test”. To understand Jesus’s temptation here, imagine you are on the ground, minding your business walking on the streets by the temple, and you see this guy on the tallest point, which mind you is the tallest building you’ve probably seen in your life (Like the CN tower) jump off and then a bunch of angels come in and let this guy float gently to the ground – how would you react? That person would be instantly famous. They would blow up online. And that is what would happen to Jesus too – he would become super famous and get everyone’s attention to spread his message. He would prove that he was a special guy through the miraculous. His huge following would eagerly expect their new leader to save them from their enemies with His magic powers. And Jesus again says no to that way of spreading his message.
The way of the celebrity is superficial and temporary – catching people’s attention one day and losing it the next. Has anyone scrolled on a tiktok or Instagram feed? Sometimes I get sucked into YouTube shorts, often right before bed – very annoying. It is amazing how good these short videos are at catching your attention for a few seconds – it knows what you’re interested in and capitalizes on that. For me it’s video game highlights and those sped up recipe videos – you know? But Jesus didn’t come to catch your attention for a few seconds – He came for your whole life to give you a much better life in Him.
Healing Others
So….Jesus refused this second temptation and he never did anything else miraculous for the rest of his ministry – right? Of course not, a major part of His ministry was healing people and doing miracles. There were times when he healed and then told the person to not to tell other people, but the person told people anyway and Jesus couldn’t “enter a town openly” anymore because of the crowds. He was a celebrity because He continued to do the miraculous. But He had to continue to resist this temptation to capitalize on the attention he was generating. And why did he continually put himself at risk to this temptation? He did this again because of compassion. We’re told in Matthew 9 that Jesus went around to the towns teaching, proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and sickness because he “felt compassion” for the crowds. He didn’t heal people to again get things from them - he did it because he loved these people who didn’t understand him and probably most of them were just using him to get better. He still loved them, and I think that is beautiful.
Application Two
For us today, I don’t want us to miss what this shows us about our walk with Jesus. You might not realize it, but we are just bombarded with messages constantly trying to get our attention every single day. Many of us probably feel burned out with the amount of things that we feel we need to pay attention to. Add parenting young kids into the mix and yeah it’s hard to focus on anything for more than five minutes. But I think we would be amiss to lump Jesus into the mix – just another thing trying to yell for our attention among the countless other things vying for it.
I often feel guilty about not giving Jesus “enough” attention in my day to day life because I’m focused on so many other things. In my reflection, it could come from difficult relationship with my biological Dad – I picked up on this message that I just need to constantly give and give enough attention to him to make him happy. It is too easy to think the same about God and reinforce my guilt. But God is not like that. The more I get to know God, the more I realize that God is just there. Jesus does not push His way through, demanding my attention and shaming me for my distractions. He is just there, waiting for me to notice Him. And when I do notice Him, I am reminded of His good and beautiful presence right nearby always.
I hope you know this feeling in some of your relationships with really good friends. People you can call up anytime, who don’t expect or demand anything from you, who just love you. A friend that you want to be around, that gives you life and energy whenever you encounter them instead of taking and draining. God is like that but even more. That is what I take away from Jesus resisting the second temptation – he is not here to be another drain on our attention, but to give us real, abundant life. Isn’t that beautiful?
Temptation Three
The final temptation brings Jesus to a very high mountain to see all the kingdoms of the world and all of their glory. The devil says, “I will give you all of these things, if you fall down and worship me”. Jesus responds with a pointed “Be gone satan! It is written: You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve”. I wonder in this scene if satan is literally expecting Jesus, the son of God, to bow down to him to achieve His ministry goals. Jesus’s goal was to bring about the kingdom of God as THE kingdom above all these other kingdoms in the world – Babylon, Rome, and many others we can think of in our current day. He could achieve this through supposedly worshiping the devil or do it through worshiping God.
I wonder if what is meant by doing it the devil’s way is to do it the way that all these other kingdoms have achieved their power and glory – through violence. That is what everyone was expecting the Jewish Messiah to be like – a conquering king that would unite the Jews against the Romans and kick them out through violence. Then Jesus would set up another earthly empire to rival Rome, in fact, He could set up the greatest empire to ever have existed. If he used violence. This is the ugliest example of the way of the devil – using violence to have power over people. Jesus does not.
Non-Violence
In fact, Jesus teaches and practices the complete opposite. He teaches His followers to overcome evil with good. He tells them to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. He tells oppressed Jewish peasants if a Roman soldier (their enemy) forced them to carry their equipment, which they could legally do for one mile, to go the extra mile. I love how the TV series “The Chosen” used this idea for a scene with Jesus and his disciples, imagining them in this situation, which could have very likely happened. [Roman soldiers force Jesus and his followers to carry their equipment for a mile, making fun of them along the way. They stop at the mile mark and go to take their equipment back, but Jesus insists on bringing their equipment further along until they get to the Roman camp.] The soldiers are stunned and treat the disciples kinder than before as they continue on. I showed this scene to my students and it really resonated with them.
People don’t do things like that to their enemies. When confronted with people that they hate, maybe people they disagree with politically or people who have done them wrong, then it is natural to not give them the time of day, let alone give them more than they were demanding from you. But Jesus’s ministry is full of this – The Good Samaritan, The Woman at the Well, Eating with the Tax Collectors like Zacheus, and then giving himself over to the religious leaders and Romans to be crucified. Jesus faces the ultimate test in his arrest and trial. His disciples try to fight to defend Jesus when he is getting arrested, but he tells them how could take the violent way – saying that he could call 12 legions of angels to his side to protect him from being arrested (Matt 26). But he stands firm in his commitment to non-violence and resists this third temptation. He gives up His life, forgiving those who persecuted him, to bring about the kingdom of God based on God’s unshakeable love for us.
Application Three
Jesus’s sacrificial death is one of the most important aspects of our Christian life with so many implications. For our focus today, two things. One, it shows us that following Jesus means that we are committed to forgiving and loving our enemies. This is one of the hardest calls for a Christian and one that I think is not expected to happen instantaneously with God. But it is something that God wants us to do with Him – to always be open to the way He works on us to forgive and love those who are hardest to in our lives.
I think the only reason we are able to do this is the second implication of his death – Jesus knows suffering. I believe this is the most beautiful fact about Jesus – Our God knows what it means to suffer. Every single person’s life knows suffering. We will experience hardships and we have tragedies in our life, they cannot be avoided no matter how much our society tries to. This has been an especially hard year for me with losing my Gram, with extra challenging implications to forgiving enemies. The thing that I hold onto is that I know God suffers with me. Jesus grieves, Jesus cries, Jesus suffers right next to me and right next to you. He knows how hard it is, the cost, of forgiving and loving enemies, and going through the tragedies of just trying to live your life in a world of suffering because He knows suffering. How deep is His love for us and how beautiful.
Conclusion + Review
So to review…
I believe that knowing the beauty of Jesus is such a strong reason to be a Christian. The life and death of Jesus is overflowing with examples of how He was and is the most beautiful human to have lived, the kind of beauty that resonates with our souls like we said – His self-giving compassion and love is so attractive to us. It makes us want to be around him, to trust him and be like him and find our real, true, life with Him. Jesus sums up all of this in John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly”. The thief attempts to tempt Jesus with things that only lead to stealing, killing, and destroying – through violence, greed, and spectacle. Jesus doesn’t build his kingdom on these crumbling foundations that the rest of human empires have used – He is here to give us abundant life in Him through His beautiful way.
So let me encourage you to reflect on how much you know in your heart the beauty of Jesus, and how you are living with Him, experiencing how He loves without expecting things in return, of how He is with us without imposing draining demands, and how He suffers alongside us when we are suffering. Then I think you will have even more reasons to be a Christian – because following Christ is beautiful. Thank you.
