Revealed
The Gospel of John • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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I asked the worship team to sing Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone.
You may be familiar with John Newton’s song “Amazing Grace,” but are you familiar with why he wrote it? Newton wrote a lot of songs for his church, and a member of his church named William Cowper often helped him. Cowper was a fantastic poet who wrote such songs as “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” and “God Moves in Mysterious Ways.” Yet Cowper battled his entire life with darkness, depression, and self-condemnation. The song “Amazing Grace” was written by Newton for a New Year’s Day service in 1773. Newton always wrote his hymns with the needs of his congregation in mind.
On January 1, 1773 there was one individual who was desperately in need of understanding the message that God’s grace can save the worst of wretches. This was William Cowper whose depression was spiraling downward in a vortex of madness that led to his attempted suicide a few hours later. Central to Cowper’s madness was a deep-rooted fear that God had rejected him despite his faith. Newton … had tried hard to persuade Cowper that God’s grace is universal and never withheld from a believer.… Could Newton have hoped that the words of Amazing Grace … might relieve Cowper’s fear and spiritual blindness, leading him out of the dangers and snares … toward the security of God’s grace? (Aitken, John Newton, 229)
It was Cowper’s struggle with doubt, anxiety, and guilt that motivated these particular words from Newton:
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
we have already come.
‘Twas Grace that brought us safe thus far,
and Grace will lead us home.
If you are new watching this online or new in the sanctuary, we have been looking at the Gospel of John. The beginning of the Gospel of John gives us a extremely good picture of who Jesus is and why He came.
Today, we will see that He came to reveal God’s glory, grace and truth.
If you have your bible, turn to the Gospel of John. We will be in Chapter 1 verses 14-18. While you are turning there, please allow me to pray for this message today.
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. (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.’ ”) Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 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.
I am going to give you a little insight on how I study the bible. I take what verses I feel the Holy Spirit wants me to preach on and I read through it at least 15 times. The reasoning behind that is I do not want to miss something. It is similar to re-watching a show or movie and catching something you had missed the first time.
So read and re-read, and I look for things that stick out, like words that are repeated. In today’s verses, I noticed that glory and truth is mentioned twice and grace is mentioned 4 times. Then I look to see how those words fit into the context of the verses. In today’s verses, glory, grace, and truth hold such beautiful meaning and how Christ is the revelation of those characteristics of God.
In fact, verse 14 gives us nearly all the context we need for this message today.
Let’s read it again.
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.
The bible as we see it today is divided into two parts: promises made and promises kept. All these promises- the ones made in the Old Testament are kept in the New Testament. Why bring this up?
This is really good news for us because this is God’s way of providing a way for the sinners to be reconciled to Himself. John is writing to reminded us of tone of these promises. God’s promised seed of woman would be born to bring victory over sin. Over death, hell and the grave.
I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.
This brings what John wrote into a better light. The Word became flesh.
We learned in John 1:1, that the Word, Jesus Christ, is pre-existent. So the statement became flesh, expresses that Jesus did not come down in spirit form and took over someone to be the Messiah. The Spirit did not take a grown man and make him Jesus.
He became flesh. The Son of God became man being born from the seed of woman. This means that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. If anyone ever dismisses Christ’s divinity and/or his humanity, they are teaching a false doctrine. His divinity and his humanity do not diminish each other.
For the entire fullness of God’s nature dwells bodily in Christ,
There are two truths that can not be overlooked from this.
If Christ did not come down as a man, he could not have experienced temptation.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.
Why is this so important? For Christ to be our advocate before God’s throne, we needed someone who knows exactly what we are going through and how it feels. He knows our weaknesses, because as a man, he went through them also, but walked away without sin and overcame temptation. He became the example to follow. Jesus became man, so we can know how to respond to sin and temptation.
The other important truth is if Christ did not become man, we would not have the sequence between Bethlehem and Calvary We should never see the manger that Christ was born in without seeing the cross on which he died. He came as a man to do that for us. He left glory, to become a man, so that we can be in glory with him. His poverty made us rich.
The other part of the context that we need to look at before we continue on is how John wrote “dwelt among us”
The complete, more literal meaning is “pitched his tent among us”. John is connecting the coming of Christ as a human to God coming and being with Israel in the tent of the tabernacle. God would come down in a cloud and dwell among the Israelites in the tent.
The cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
The tent and Jesus has many parallels:
The tent was in the center of the camp, Christ is the center of our lives.
The tent was where the law was preserved, Jesus is the fulfillment of the law.
The tent was where God dwelled, we are the temple which Christ dwells.
The tent was a place for revelation, Christ gives us revelation through the word.
The tent was a place for sacrifices, Christ is the one and only sacrifice needed.
The tent was a place of worship, Christ is the focus of our worship.
Now that we have the context of what John was giving us, let’s look how Jesus fully reveals glory, grace and truth.
Let’s start with
Glory-doxa
-a quality of God’s character that emphasizes His greatness and authority
John is connecting the dots for the reader between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Jewish reader could not read this and not think back to God’s glory on the tabernacle. It was the visible manifestation of God’s greatness and authority. It was God’s promise to his people that He was the Lord who guides and directs their path.
So John is telling us here that the promise of God’s glory to His people is found in Jesus Christ. John is telling the Jewish people that their ancestors saw the glory of God, but to fully see it and understand it you must look towards Jesus. Jesus is the personification of God’s greatness and authority.
Glory and now grace...
Grace-charis
-favor or kindness shown without regard to the worth or merit of the one who receives it and in spite of what the person deserves
The glory that Christ brought down was not just a show or a flash in the pan, it was full of grace and truth. Notice John says it is grace upon grace. This means it is an inexhaustible supply.
The law came along to multiply the trespass. But where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness, resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The focus here is more than that we received grace from Christ, it’s that this grace is fuller and more complete that the law had provided.
The law was given as a protection for God’s people, but it was never intended to save the people. The law was not an instrument of grace. The law was always meant to point people to Jesus Christ. The law was a shadow of the coming fullness of grace.
Jesus came so grace could be revealed to us fully. No more need to seek forgiveness through the law that was given to Moses, but seek out grace that is freely given to us through faith in Jesus Christ. We no longer have to live in the shadow of the law, but in the light of the fully revealed grace.
Glory, grace, and now truth
Truth-aletheia
-conformity to fact or actuality; faithfulness to an original or to a standard
Christ is the fulfillment of truth and the law. Jesus is the embodiment of truth revealing God’s character in a way the law alone could not.
We are from God. Anyone who knows God listens to us; anyone who is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception.
Christ came down to bring understanding of truth by completing the law brought down by God. It was God’s plan to unite the law through Jesus. We as Christians can not be saved under the law, only under the fulfillment of the truth.
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.
This word revealed happens only six times in Scripture.
Christ reveals all of this to us through his life, death and resurrection. John is telling us that the whole story of Jesus is so we can know the whole story of God Himself. Jesus is the revealed story of glory, grace and truth.
Christ, the one and only Son, is more that a man, He is God made man. Jesus Christ is God’s glory, grace, and truth made in human form. Jesus came to fill the gap between the sinful undeserving people and the throne room of a completely holy God.
If your faith is in Jesus Christ, then through Him we have abundant, overflowing glory, grace, and truth poured out onto us. It is sufficient. Never lose sight of that. If you take away your pride and ego, His glory, His grace and his truth will guide you home.
