Believe

INTRODUCTION

Congratulations, you made it to Chapel in 2022. Right now you have perfect attendance! Everyone is two days into their New Year Resolutions. You have renewed your gym memberships or maybe gone to the gym for the first time in a long time. This time of year always cause us to pause and assess our lives.

What do you want to accomplish?

What are your goals?

We stop to assess our lives and the past year.

According to the New York Times, the top ten most read articles were

10. The Texas winter storm.

9. The J&J vaccine was paused for rare blot clots.

8. Facebook outage in October

7. -2 involved celebrities, football coaches, Capital riots, and Alec Baldwin.

1. Interesting the number one most clicked article for the year was titled, “There is a name for you are feeling, languishing.”

Languishing is defined by websters as, “Failing to make progress or be successful.” The middle ground between depression and flourishing. Languishing dulls the senses, motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.

Can anyone relate to languishing? It was the number most read article in 2021 for the New York Times, and it is believed to be the most common emotion of the year.

Now we all know that we cannot change how we feel. However, we can change our actions and what we do. Today’s sermon is entitled Believe, and we are going to look at three points.

Believe In God’s son

Believe in God’s grace and truth

Believe in God’s purpose and plan

After advent, and looking at the Christmas story. It is always easy to have a let down. Everyone puts on there Sunday best for Christmas, everyone decorates the house, we put out our presents. We cook a nice meal. Then a few days later we are tired of left overs, and we order pizza. We go from eating a beautiful meal to eating from a cardboard box. This might be a picture of languishing in a simple sense. It is not bad or good. It just is.

In the first three Gospel’s, the Christmas stories tell us the details of Jesus. The who, the what and the where. We see Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem. We see angels, and mangers, and magi, and sheperds keeping watch over their flocks at night. However, John takes a different approach in his Gospel account of Jesus.

He asks us to look at time. He says remember creation. In the beginning, the Word, the Logos, the idea of God, the wisdom of God, all of this was God.

John writes his gospel so that you will believe. The word used for the noun faith and the verb believe are the same root. John uses the action verb believe over and over in this gospel and avoids the noun. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, action. Your belief is not static, it is not languishing, it is flourishing toward Jesus Christ. You are following Jesus, you are believing.

So that brings us to our first point. Believe in God’s Son Jesus Christ.

The Christmas story here in John is different.

While the other three Gospel’s show the humanity of Jesus, and Philippians 2:7 reminds us that Jesus emptied himself of his divine powers while still being fully God and fully man. Jesus later in his adult ministry reveals some of his glory on the mount of transfiguration to his disciples, but this was not his normal day to day.

John focuses on the deity of Christ. God’s begotten. God’s one of a kind. From the beginning of time and all creation. Jesus and God were present. John asks us to believe in God’s son. Jesus tabernacled, put on a tent of flesh, so that we could see and understand the father better.

Have you ever meet someone famous? A few years back I got to meet David Crowder a Christian musician. We ordered some tickets for the chapel, and his agent wanted to donate 100 more tickets to the base. His agent said I could come down to the radio station and pick them up. I said Ok, and David crowder was there. We talked briefly. He was much talker than me, had a large beard, and had a cast on his hand. That is what I remember. NOTE: Before you accept any gift over $50 for the United States military it must be approved through your chain of command, so you do not break federal law. End of public service announcement over. I told my son that story a few months back, and now he thinks I have met most of the artists on the radio. He asks me if I have meet Toby Mac or Chris Tomlin. My point is that God intentionally sent his son to meet us in the flesh. We don’t have to guess. We don’t have to wonder. We have eye witness accounts of Jesus. Jesus shows us how to live, and he tells us that if we see him; we see the Father.

Believe in God’s son Jesus.

Believe in God’s grace and truth.

CONCLUSION