Keion Henderson - Undercover Boss

God told me to tell you not to forget He’s the Undercover Boss. Come on, that’s what I want to talk about today: He’s the Undercover Boss. You may be seated in the presence of the Lord. I don’t want to insult your intelligence. How many of you have seen the show? Well, raise your hand if you’ve never seen it; I must introduce it then. There’s a television show—in fact, one of our local billionaires, Mr. Fertitta, who owns the Rockets, was actually on this show, and he had another show about being a billionaire. This is a show where corporate CEOs go undercover, putting on bad wigs and mustaches. You can tell they really don’t fit, because even though they are acting poor, they are rich. So, you’ve got your legs crossed like you have $12 million in your pocket, acting like you’re a janitor. It doesn’t always work. But it’s easy to judge from the television, because when you’re in the moment, it seems to work every time, where the owner of the company will dress up like an employee, insert himself into the everyday life of the company to see what his employees are actually experiencing while working for him or her. They stay in hotel rooms, drive themselves, and walk to work because they have to do everything they can to keep the disguise. I’ve seen it a million times, and at the end of the show, you’re going to cry. Yeah, right! Because once they get in there and find out how hard it was to be them, they end the show by doing things like paying off loans, giving college tuitions, and granting scholarships. Some of them get promoted and go from being ordinary individuals working as cashiers to sometimes having shares in the company. Could you imagine what would happen if you went to work tomorrow and realized that the entire thing was an exercise only to set you up to be in a position tomorrow that you were not in yesterday? What would you do if you walked into work tomorrow and they said, «Sir, ma’am, thank you for the last six years of service. We recognize it and want to give you a million-dollar endowment?» Uh-oh, it could happen! It could happen! Jesus is the ultimate Undercover Boss because one day He looked over the banister of heaven and saw that His children were in trouble. So, He took His godness and hid it in a disguise called human flesh. Come on, sir! He put Himself in the womb of a woman He created and stayed there for nine months so that we would not know it was Him. He was born and laid in a manger, a feeding trough, an animals' food bin, so that we would see that He was actually poor. He was circumcised on the eighth day, had a mother and father who were not even married, and was born of a virgin, wrapped in swaddling clothes. He did this so that we would not know it was Him. Yet He had already written, «In the beginning was the Word.» Yes, sir! And the Word—you all like the Bible—was God. Verse 12 says He tabernacled among us. That means He came to His own, and His own received Him not. He was a king coming to Earth, but had He come to Earth as a king, He would have messed up the experiment. So, He had to become man to understand what pain feels like, to understand what betrayal feels like, my God, to understand what it means to cry, to lose loved ones, to face ridicule. So, He was the Undercover Boss. He became man so that He could redeem man, because Genesis states that seed must beget after its own kind, which means that when it came time to redeem us, He could not redeem us in spirit form, because spirit cannot redeem flesh. Therefore, to redeem us, He had to become the seed of the same kind; He had to become flesh because only flesh could die for flesh. Are you all still with me? Yes, sir! So here is the God of the universe hiding in a human outfit, walking around dying, yet He is the life. Come on, sir! He walks around hungry while He’s the bread; He walks around thirsty while He’s the water. Yes, sir! He cries because He’s depressed while being the mighty counselor filled with hope. Simultaneously, He’s the Prince of Peace. Look at God hiding in human flesh! Yes, God walking in plain sight, crying with the power to wipe tears away. Are you listening to me? This is the God of Scripture who has hidden Himself in human clothes to find out what our experience is like. But He really never liked attention; I can prove it. He was born, yes! We hear about Him on the eighth day, and then He disappears. We hear that Herod wants to kill Him at two, but we don’t hear anything else. By the time we see Him, it’s a decade later; He’s 12 years old. His mother and father walk into the customs of the feast; they get a few days' journey and find out that they’ve left Him. They say, «Oh, where’s Jesus?» They go back, walk back, and find this boy in the room teaching the doctors and the lawyers. His mama said to him, «Boy, when we move, you move.» He said, «Woman, didn’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?» The only God, the only boy who can talk back to His mother!