The Incarnation: Jesus as the Heart of Christianity

Devotional

Sermon Summary

Bible Study Guide

Sermon Clips


Christianity is essentially the person of Christ himself. This is not just another teaching that's been given; it is a teaching, but it's much more than that. And before we even consider the teaching, we've got to consider this person. It came. Now, a teaching doesn't come; a teaching is given, but a person comes. [00:14:04]

Grace and truth have come, and unless you and I are clear about this person, it doesn't matter how Christian our ideas may be. The world has adopted many of the ideas and the teachings of Christianity. A man like the late Mr. Gandhi, who died a non-Christian and who said he wasn't a Christian and never pretended to be a Christian, he borrowed a lot of the New Testament teaching. [00:15:56]

Grace and truth came. It's this person that matters. It isn't his teaching primarily; it is he himself and what he's done. He's being born, he's living as a boy, his work as a carpenter, he's coming out at the age of 30, and his preaching and proclamation, his miracles, yes, his death upon the cross, his burial, the grave, the end. [00:17:38]

Grace and truth, as John reminds us, have come through Jesus Christ. But wait a minute, I want to open out this word "come," and perhaps the best way of opening out the word "come" is to take the other contrast that we have in the text. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ. [00:18:22]

Moses is but a man like other men, as I've already been reminding you. Moses, born of a human father and mother like everybody else, Moses, a man amongst men, a sinful man, a man like all other men in every other respect. Through Moses is John, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. [00:19:42]

In the beginning was the word. He was there existing before the beginning while the Holy Spirit brooded over that chaos, and before it, he was everlasting, eternal, without beginning of days. In the beginning, before anything was made that was made, before creation ever began, he existed. [00:22:40]

The meaning of words is to convey and to express and to reflect our minds. We express our minds through our words. The business of a word is to express a mind or an outlook. The business of words is to reveal what we think and what we are. As a man speaks, so he is expression and revelation. [00:23:35]

He expresses and reflects perfectly the mind of God. He is a perfect and complete revelation of God as he is and of the mind of the everlasting and eternal God. The word now then, this is just another way of saying that he is a perfect expression and revelation of God. [00:24:24]

In the beginning was the word, and the word was face to face with God. He's talking about this person, and he says that from eternity, this blessed person was face to face with God. What does that convey? Well, being face to face with always suggests friendship and fellowship and intimacy. [00:26:15]

All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. You know, when God acts, he reverses all our standards and all our ideas and all our thoughts. Is there anything more helpless than a babe? They wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and they put him there to lie in the manger. [00:29:34]

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. What does this mean? Well, John is, in a sense, just repeating his own phrases. In him was life, yes, the full life of God. All the divine essence, as it were, is in him. It's in the Father, it's in the Son, it's in the Holy Spirit. [00:31:32]

The Christmas message is just this: that this person whom I've been trying to describe in terms of John's prologue came into this world. If you like it in a phrase, it's all here in verse 14, and the word was made flesh. What does that mean? It means that he was born as a man, took human nature. [00:33:25]

Ask a question about this sermon