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December 21, 2008
John 1:14
Exordium: Last Sunday we closed on the note of likening the Virgin birth of Christ to our entrance into the new life we have in Him. How kind of the Lord to pattern His birth in such a way that we can understand our new life by grasping how the Virgin birth. It was entirely God’s idea and His work- and the only human element was Mary’s simple agreement, “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)
What a remarkable way to teach us. The Christmas story which seems so simple and beautiful is actually a profound lesson in many aspects of our faith, but especially our regeneration, our rebirth. For example, it points to the enormity of problem of our sin: How much it took to overcome the guilt, the problem, the penalty of sin; How much the story illustrates for us the depth and persistence of the love of God for His people, that He would do all this – preparing for centuries and governing human history so all things would be ready for the Advent of the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Do you see all that was required to accomplish our spiritual rebirth?
Explication: That is what verse 14, our text today, is about. Right after saying that “He came to His own and they did not receive Him – But all that did receive Him are born of God.” Then we read, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Each one of these phrases describes one of the ways God met the requirements of the new birth for us.
I. THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH
The “Word” is described in the first 13 verses and we have learned about Him in the last three weeks. The Word is the Son of God, who has always been with God – in the bosom f the Father, and is Himself God. He is the second Person of the Trinity; it is He who comes forth willing to be the Saviour from sin and to do all that is necessary to be redeemed.
How much it involved! He must exchange infinity for the finite, Spirit for flesh (the very word is tainted with sin and speaks of weakness, frailty, infirmity, mortality). Yet He was willing to so limit Himself to prepare to undergo great suffering, so great was the divine love for us.
He did not change into flesh. (He is no Superman disguised as Clark Kent.) This is the eternal God, in His second Person, assuming the very flesh which He Himself created and taking it permanently. He carries that human nature with Him now. Even in Heaven at the right hand of God, He is the God/man. Our human nature is in the highest heaven – going ahead of us to greet the dead in Christ and welcome them home.
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December 14, 2008
John 1:10-12
Exordium: Let’s look at the beginnings of Christmas through John’s eyes and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. He starts from eternity and shows us God from everlasting, cherishing His Son in His bosom, and in Him He sees and loves all those on whom He has set His love, and purposed to make them part of His Kingdom.
Gradually John introduces the coming of the light into a dark world, slowly so that our eyes will not be blinded. He shows us the preparation for the entrance of the Light of the world. “There was a man sent from God” – a man to point to the light, a man named John the Baptist.
Explication: Verses 10-13 of this first chapter summarize all that we have seen in the first two weeks of this group of messages. They bring us to the entrance of the Incarnate God/man into the world. Even here it is very gradual, gathering up these amazing statements the way the sea gathers up its strength to advance the tide along the shore. Here the most important event in history is unfolded. Everything depends for us on understanding it.
First, John describes:
I. THE WORD IN THE WORLD
“He was in the world.” That is the Pre-Christmas Christ. He was active in the world from the beginning. Ever since creation all the way to his incarnation and birth He was in the world. He gave the gift of reason and conscience and the testimony of His handiwork in nature to all who entered the world through birth.
After the fall into sin and death, He immediately began the plan of salvation. He separated the human family into two: those who would be His people and those who would be left without His special revelation and allowed to go live without His Word.
His own people were to be made ready to recognize and receive Him when He comes to deliver them from their sin and make of them a royal kingdom. Those who were without His special revelation, (that outside the witness of nature) He would use to show the utter bankruptcy of the human family without the Word of God being given to them.
All this time He was in the world preparing His people by the word of the prophets, by acts of worship and sacrifice, by the ministry of the priesthood, so they would be a people prepared – to know the Messiah when they would see Him.
The world where He walked was His world. He made the ground He walked on. The elements of the world acknowledged Him as their architect.
The sky provided a star to lead the magi.
The seas were ready to support Him when He would walk to His troubled disciples during the storm.
The lilies were ready to display His creative genius and His love of beauty.
The earth was ready to quake when He suffered on the cross.
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December 7, 2008
John 1:6-8
EXORDIUM: Last week we opened this wonderful book of John with the first five verses they set the stage for the birth of our Lord into His world. You will remember has He is given to us as the everlasting One. If we can imagine back into history as far as we can go, we will discover that He is already there. He has always been there. You will recall how He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
We spoke together about His part in the creation of all that is – and that He is the source of life – all life – in the world and that light itself, meaning knowledge and insight, has its origin in Him.
But at verse 5 is there a problem. The matter of light causes John to speak also of the darkness. “Yes the Light shines, but it shines in darkness.”
It is this fact that gives rise to advent of John the Baptist.
I. BECAUSE OF DARKNESS, A WITNESS TO THE LIGHT IS NEEDED
Darkness has crept in through the prince of darkness, who entered and caused our first parents to sin. He is the father of lies which resist the truth. Darkness in the Bible means doubt, unbelief, rebellion, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, selfishness – all of the attributes of the one who is the prince of darkness.
The darkness has made its way into the human heart-into our hearts. It exists not only in the world, but also within our very selves.
Darkness is life without God; the life of the world when it is organized apart from the Lord who made it. Darkness is not simply the absence of light, but a positive opposition to the light, a concerted effort to stifle the light. Darkness has its own character. It does not comprehend the light, that is, understand it, and yet it cannot overpower it. It is an opponent but it cannot overcome light.
Ask any minister of the Gospel who is doing battle day by day in the trenches of building a church, any prison chaplain who looks through bars or plate glass to deal with a hardened criminal, any missionary who fights religions of superstition and fear all day, if darkness has a force of its own.
Such a force requires God’s response – God’s “counterforce” – something that will point out the light in the midst of the darkness that surrounds it. For 400 years, no prophet’s voice had been heard, though there was always a remnant of faithful souls waiting for the promised Messiah to come.
Then God broke the silence – He sent a man. The works of God are always prepared and introduced gradually, slowly, and “hiddenly” until the right moment, and then they appear suddenly. Suddenly John the Baptist appeared as a “Godsent” one.
John had spent his life in the desert, in sacred loneliness, waiting for the call; studying and going deeply into the holy laws of God, and waiting for the call to express the image that was burning in his soul. Until he could wait no longer.
Then it was given to him to recognize the long-promised Saviour. He was at hand. The kingdom was near. The Master was ready to announce His new realm to a world starved for spiritual truth and life. His name, “John” means grace – since he is a gift to the world and to the church.
The Word of God is coming very near. It just needs to be pointed to and preached and believed. John is the man to do it. He is sent for that. It is a great thing when God gets hold of a person so thoroughly that He can thrust him into the world wherever He chooses.
II. JOHN CAME AS A WITNESS Read the rest of this entry »
November 23, 2008
Thanksgiving Sunday
Philippians 4:6
Exordium: How good it is that we have a week devoted to giving thanks! Of course, thanks are always to be given, but if we have a time for lifting it up especially, we grow in the grace of gratitude. May this be a week for you and your household of great thanks and of great feasting.
How appropriate that just now we should reflect on the teaching of the Word of God about this subject. What stands out there is that we have taken gratitude for granted as being optional and not really a necessary part of Christian living. Yet it was for the lack of this that God gave His early people up to uncleanness and the lusts of the flesh, even to perversion, showing that there is a connection between the lack of gratefulness and moral impurity. (Romans 1:21-24)
We have not yet seen how central and essential this grace is, but let us do so now.
Take Philippians 4: 6 for example. Here God is saying through Paul that the antidote for anxiety is prayer, and it must be prayer surrounded and permeated by the giving of thanks. “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”
This centrality was certainly sensed by the early pioneers of our land. Christopher Columbus knelt down on the shore of the newly discovered land and gave thanks to God. Likewise the pilgrims even before they left the deck of the Mayflower had prayers of thanks for the goodness of God in bringing them across the water, and preserving the lives of many of them for the work before them. During their first year 51 of the 102 people who arrived had been buried. Their life had been hard and there was little food, but they set apart a day of thanksgiving. Ninety Indian men joined them including Chief Massosoit. They were together feasting and getting acquainted for three days. That visit was also a providence of God because the Indians went into the woods and brought back five deer from their store of food. In 1623 after a drought had limited their crop they spent a day in fasting and prayer for God’s blessing in rain, and the heavens answered with welcome showers. They prayed for wisdom to plant well and to know how to fish in those waters. And God sent an Indian, Squanto, to teach them and to translate for them with the rest of the Indians. God had prepared Squanto as a slave in Europe and England for this particular work.
But not until 1777 was the “Infant Land” called to prayer officially (by the Continental Congress.) In 1789 President George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving. During the Civil War, President Lincoln, in 1863, asked all the people of the land to acknowledge God’s gifts with one heart and one voice. In his proclamation, he touched on the important aspect of Thanksgiving in a corporate sense.
God wants us to do this together. It honors the Lord when God’s people corporately lift up their songs and prayers of gratitude with one heart and one mind. That is what we do in the Lord’s Supper. One of the most ancient names for this is Eucharist, a word which comes from the original Greek, meaning the “giving of thanks.” That is the heart-beat of the communion service, giving thanks as a body to the members of the Trinity, the One God, for the saving sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf.
What is it about gratitude that makes it front and center in the mind of God and the practice of His people?
