Among Us (Advent 2024) 2: The Word Became Flesh
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: John 1:14-18
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Again, good morning and welcome to Family Worship at Eastern Hills. Thank you, choir, for leading the church in worship this morning, as well as Michelle for your tremendous leadership, and Donna and Tony for playing along as well.
If you’re visiting with us this morning (either in person or online), we would love to be able to send you a card to thank you for your visit, and to see if there is anything that we can do to minister to you. If you’re online, you can fill out a communications form by visiting our website and scrolling to the bottom of our “I’m New” page. If you’re in the room you can do that as well, or you can fill out a physical card while you’re here. You’ll find it in the back of the pew in front of you. You can return that to us by bringing it down to me here at the front after service is over, because I would really like to meet you personally and give you a gift to thank you for your visit today. If you don’t have time for that today, I understand. You can get that welcome card back to us by dropping it in the boxes by the doors as you leave after service. Thanks in advance for filling that out!
Announcements
Announcements
LMCO: $8,764.60 of $32,500 given. Just finishing up our week of prayer. Thank you, Donna, for putting together the prayer activities this week.
Opening
Opening
This morning, we’ve already spent time with the choir reflecting on the “Wonder & Glory” of the Advent season—a season that we celebrate because of the arrival of Jesus, the incarnate Word who is with God and who is God. He is the reason that we celebrate.
But what exactly do we mean when we call Him the “incarnate Word?” When we say this, we mean that the One that John referred to in verse 1 is the same Word that he mentions in verse 14—the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. This is why our Christmas series this year is called “Among Us:” because we are considering the first chapter of the gospel of John.
And this morning, we will consider the fact that the Word became flesh as we take a little time on verses 14-18 from the first chapter of John. So please open your Bibles or Bible apps to John 1:14, and please stand as you are able in honor of the reading of God’s Word.
14 The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified concerning him and exclaimed, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me ranks ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”) 16 Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, 17 for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.
PRAYER (Bob & Beckie Boyer, loss of Cassie on Friday)
Christmas carols are so much fun, aren’t they? Most of us begin learning them at Christmas at an early age, sometimes without even realizing that we’re really singing hymns. Yes, hymns. In the red hymnal in the back of the pew in front of you, from hymn 175 to hymn 217, they’re all Christmas songs. The ones that we sang during the choir’s presentation: Joy to the World, Angels We Have Heard on High, O Come All Ye Faithful, and Silent Night… all of them are in the hymnal, and all of them about Jesus. I knew and could sing all of those songs when I was very small, before I ever believed in Jesus.
In 1 Timothy chapter 3, we find the text of a very early Christian hymn that actually talks about Christmas:
16 And most certainly, the mystery of godliness is great: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
From the very beginnings of Christianity, the fact of the incarnation has been a central tenet of orthodox (which means “right thinking”) faith.
2 This is how you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
And so the question that some might wonder is: “So what? Why does the incarnation matter?”
The truth is that if you get Jesus wrong, you get everything else wrong as well. Either Jesus is the Word is God who became flesh, or He is not. And if He has come in the flesh, then we have hope through His life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, along with the promise that He will return.
If He either wasn’t God or didn’t come in the flesh (meaning here that he was truly human), then we have no hope. We cannot be saved, because without His being God, He cannot be perfect; and without His being fully human, He cannot take our place as our representative.
The incarnation of the Word fundamentally changed the way that we can relate to God. Because of Jesus, everything is different. This is why we could sing of the “wonder and glory” of Christ’s birth this morning.
I suppose that verse 14 is truly our focal verse today, and the rest of the passage points to it.
14 The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Theologian Grant Osborne said of this verse:
In my opinion, this is the single greatest sentence ever written in the history of the human language, the deepest theological statement ever written.
— Grant R. Osborne, John: Verse by Verse
Verse 14 is the climax of John’s Prologue, the point to which he has been taking us since verse 1. In it, we see at least three things that are radically changed in how we approach the Lord because of the incarnation.
1: First, instead of distance, nearness.
1: First, instead of distance, nearness.
God Almighty is decidedly other than us. He is the Creator, we are the creatures. He is in heaven, we are on earth. He is holy, we are most certainly not, left to ourselves. He is perfect, we are sinful. How could we even begin to get to God on our own?
But John writes in the first part of verse 14:
John 1:14a (CSB)
14a The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Instead of us having to find a way to reach God, He came for us in the Person of Jesus. He became flesh, taking on our humanity and its frailties. No longer distant, Jesus is God who is so near that those with whom He walked could actually touch Him, and be touched by Him. But the word that I want to focus on here in 14 this morning is the word “dwelt.”
This word literally means “sheltered,” or “tabernacled.” As in “living in a tent.” “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” To the Hebrew mind, this would have instantly brought images of the wandering in the wilderness in the Exodus, and of the tabernacle of the Lord—the temple-like tent that the Hebrews were instructed to create in Exodus 25:
8 “They are to make a sanctuary for me so that I may dwell among them. 9 You must make it according to all that I show you—the pattern of the tabernacle as well as the pattern of all its furnishings.
This special tent was the center of the Hebrew camp as they wandered. The tabernacle housed the Ark of the Covenant, the physical symbol of the Lord’s presence with the people of Israel. But even then, the Ark was kept behind a curtain, and could only be approached once per year.
There was another tent that Moses had during the Exodus, called the tent of meeting, where he would go regularly to meet with God. But that tent was outside the camp, and only Moses and his assistant Joshua would go into it.
7 Now Moses took a tent and pitched it outside the camp, at a distance from the camp; he called it the tent of meeting. Anyone who wanted to consult the Lord would go to the tent of meeting that was outside the camp.
So God was almost unapproachable, and even when He could be approached, it was only in a particular place, by a particular person. But in Jesus, God had come near. He had come to be with us.
23 See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Immanuel, which is translated “God is with us.”
When we sing carols of “Immanuel,” that’s what we’re declaring: that at the Advent, the Word that is God came to be near us, to be with us.
In fact, for those who believe in Jesus, He is even nearer than that, because of what Christ has done and promised. When we surrender to Jesus as our Savior and Lord, God comes to dwell in us by His Holy Spirit.
16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever. 17 He is the Spirit of truth. The world is unable to receive him because it doesn’t see him or know him. But you do know him, because he remains with you and will be in you.
So in Jesus, the completely other God has come near, as one of us, and through faith in Christ, He will even come to dwell not just among us, but within us by His Spirit.
2: Second, instead of unseen, visible.
2: Second, instead of unseen, visible.
When Jesus came, He didn’t only change the nearness of God. He changed our ability to see God Himself. Since the Word who became flesh is God, then when we look upon the Word, we look upon God.
John 1:14b (CSB)
14b We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father...
Again, the imagery here of “observing His glory” would have recalled to the Hebrew mind the concept of the representation of God’s visible and present glory in the Exodus, called the shekinah. When God would manifest Himself in a way that was visible, it was the shekinah that people could see. His glory appeared in the cloud to show He was there and at work, it appeared on the mountaintop as fire to show that He was present with Moses as He gave the Ten Commandments, it would fill the tabernacle and descend upon the Tent of Meeting.
But even then, Moses couldn’t see the Lord Himself—just the representation of His wonder and glory.
18 Then Moses said, “Please, let me see your glory.” 19 He said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim the name ‘the Lord’ before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” 20 But he added, “You cannot see my face, for humans cannot see me and live.” 21 The Lord said, “Here is a place near me. You are to stand on the rock, 22 and when my glory passes by, I will put you in the crevice of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take my hand away, and you will see my back, but my face will not be seen.”
But now, according to John, we not only see the glory of the Lord—the glory of the unique Son of God—but in Jesus, God Himself has been revealed to us in a new and spectacular way. John continued in verse 18:
18 No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.
The word “revealed” here is powerful. The Greek is where we get our word “exegete,” which means to explain or interpret so that others can understand. In this way, Jesus has come and has shown us in a visible, tangible way what God is like. This is why John could write as he did at the beginning of his first epistle:
1 What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—
John could testify to seeing Jesus with his eyes, touching Him with his hands, observing Him. The invisible God was been made visible through Jesus. Paul would write of Jesus in Colossians 1:
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
Daniel Akin, in his book A Theology for the Church, explained this passage well:
...Christ is essentially and absolutely the perfect expression and representation of God the Father. The “image of the invisible” gives the sense that Christ is the visible representation and manifestation of the invisible God to created beings. Christ is the image of God in the sense that the nature and being of God is perfectly revealed in him. Adam may have been created in God’s image, but Christ is God’s image.
Paul’s point is simple. Christ is not simply a picture of what God is like; he is God himself.
—Daniel Akin, A Theology for the Church
The reality of Jesus being the eternal Word who is God, but who had been made flesh and dwelt among us, making the invisible visible, revealing the glory of the Lord in a new way is why John wrote in our focal passage about what John the Baptist declared about Jesus and His glory:
15 (John testified concerning him and exclaimed, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me ranks ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”)
And He came for a reason. He came to reveal the love of God through His sacrificial death on the cross, to show us how far God is willing to go to rescue us from our sin, from death. He came to save us from the wrath that we deserve, by giving us what we don’t deserve: grace.
3: Instead of wrath, grace.
3: Instead of wrath, grace.
We’ve seen in verse 14 that the arrival of Jesus brought God near, and that He made the invisible God visible. And while these are incredible truths that we can cling to and rejoice in at Christmas, the true reason that we can rejoice in the coming of the baby Jesus is because He also brought grace.
John 1:14c (CSB)
14c ... full of grace and truth.
It’s in verses 16 and 17 that John expands on what he means by this in 14:
16 Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, 17 for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Again back in the Exodus, the law was given through Moses, and its purpose was to reveal to God’s people that they needed God to save them—that they could never save themselves. The cost of our sin is simply too steep. The law wasn’t meant to save. It was meant to drive us to cry out for God’s mercy in faith, because it shows us how terrible we really are on our own.
Paul explained this connection between the law and grace through faith in Romans chapter 4 and Galatians chapter 3:
13 For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would inherit the world was not through the law, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. 14 If those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made empty and the promise nullified, 15 because the law produces wrath. And where there is no law, there is no transgression. 16 This is why the promise is by faith, so that it may be according to grace, to guarantee it to all the descendants—not only to the one who is of the law but also to the one who is of Abraham’s faith. He is the father of us all.
24 The law, then, was our guardian until Christ, so that we could be justified by faith. 25 But since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.
In Christ, John writes, we have received “grace upon grace” from His fullness—from the fact that He is “full of grace,” to the point of overflowing. The Christian’s foundation being not upon a law that we must keep, but upon the grace of God which is freely received by faith, means that it is God that does all the work of our salvation. Jesus is the one who justifies us by His sacrificial death in our place:
9 How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath.
And we have received “grace upon grace” because if our foundation is His grace, then all the blessings that we have in Christ are all gifts of grace as well. He gives more and more grace!
This grace is found only in Jesus—the baby who was born in a stable and placed in a manger—who grew up and lived a sinless life on our behalf, and who then died in our place on the cross to pay the penalty that we owe because of our sin. He took the wrath of God against sin on Himself, so that we wouldn’t have to. This is the message of Christmas. We can’t look at the manger without looking to the cross. And we are saved—we receive this gift of grace—by faith, trusting in what Jesus has done to save us, surrendering our lives to His Lordship.
Closing
Closing
While we’re studying just the first chapter of John for our Advent series this year, John says that this is why he wrote his entire gospel in chapter 20:
31 But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
He wrote chapter 1 for the same reason: so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. Will you believe in what Jesus has done for you this morning, surrendering your life to Him in faith? This is how you receive this “grace upon grace,” how you come to see the invisible God, how you come to be near to your Creator. Come to Jesus in faith.
Baptism
Church membership
Prayer
Giving
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Bible reading (Isa 9-10, Pro 5 today)
Canceling Pastor’s Study tonight
Prayer Meeting
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
1 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors by the prophets at different times and in different ways. 2 In these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. God has appointed him heir of all things and made the universe through him. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
