How Christmas Looks from Heaven

John 1:1-14
The Gospel of John, from which today’s gospel lesson comes, is both the easiest and the hardest to understand of the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

John’s gospel is a bit like Jesus Himself, I suppose. A child can understand that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead so that all who turn from their sin and trust in Him have forgiveness and new, eternal life with God. But even a mature believer who has given steady attention to an intimate relationship with Jesus over many years, will never be able to fully understand everything about Jesus.

There will always be some mystery about Jesus and that’s as it should be because, after all, Jesus is God and you and I aren’t.

On Christmas Day, we encounter the mystery of God in full through the prologue to John’s Gospel.

It’s appointed as our Gospel reading, even though, unlike Matthew and Luke, John never tells the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.

The Christmas story is in the first fourteen verses of John’s gospel, though. Whereas Matthew tells the story from the perspective of Joseph, the carpenter chosen to be Jesus’ earthly father, and Luke tells it from the vantage point of Mary, the virgin chosen to be Jesus’ earthly mother, John through the first thirteen-and-a-half verses of our lesson, tells us what happened on the first Christmas from the perspective of eternity, from the vantage point of God Himself.

Then, starting in the middle of verse 14, John switches perspectives. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves.

Go to our lesson, starting at verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

John’s Gospel starts out like Genesis 1: “In the beginning…” But while Genesis only goes back to the beginning of the universe God made for us, John’s “in the beginning” goes back before God had created the first thing.

John starts when the only life that existed was God, ever one, ever three persons.

We will meet the Holy Spirit later in John’s Gospel, but for now, his focus--like our focus at Christmas--is on the second person of the Trinity, the Word.

God the Word, God the Son, was, John says, the very power by which God brought creation into being. According to Genesis, God spoke and creation happened. According to John, God the Word was that word that God spoke into chaos and nothingness and made life, order, peace.

God the Word was God’s, “Let there be life” and there was life, including life for you and me.

This eternal Word seared the darkness of nothingness with the blazing light of His powerful, life-giving love. Darkness, John says, “has not overcome it,” or more literally, “has not seized it, overcome it, arrested it, or comprehended it.”

Created light, you know, travels at 186,000 miles per second, but its power dissipates over distance. The Word, the Light of God though, cannot be chained, inhibited, hid, or brought under control. It never fades or gives out.

Whenever humanity has sought to stop or avoid this Light, the Word has kept on shining: showing us our sin, showing us the way to be free of our sin, lighting the way to free others of their sins, so that the Word can keep doing what He did at the creation, make life.

Verse 6: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.”

Some scholars believe that the John who wrote our gospel lesson was originally a disciple of the John he writes about here, John the Baptist. (Is that confusing enough?)

The gospel writer says that the Baptizer was, above all, “a witness,” pointing the world to the Word. “Don’t get confused,” our gospel writer is saying, “John the Baptist was a great and faithful man. But he wasn’t the Word and he wasn’t the Light of the world. His job was to point to the Word and the Light.”

By now, some of the gospel’s original hearers and listeners would have likely become impatient. “Spit it out, John,” they might have thought, “what’s this whole Word business about?” So far, you’ve told us Who He isn’t; but you haven’t told us Who He is. We’ve heard of God before. We’ve even heard of God’s Holy Spirit before. But what is this Word you keep talking about in circles?”

Had he been challenged in this way, John might have thought, “Glad you asked.” Verse 9-14a: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

The Word of God didn’t remain in the comfort of heaven.

He refused to be a mere philosophical proposition.

He wouldn’t be a distant deity.

He wouldn’t be, as some people picture God, a cosmic watchmaker who set the mechanics of the universe and then left His creatures to their own devices.

No!

The brilliant blazing second Person of the Trinity decided to brave the darkness of this sinful, fallen world to light our way to life with God.

He took our flesh upon Himself and “made His dwelling among us,” literally, “pitched His tent” with those He first made in His own image.

He became a baby subjected to death by exposure as he lay in a manger on a silent night, who cried from hunger and pain, who soiled His diapers and would need to learn to walk and run eventually, do the work of a fix-it man.

The Word came to live lives like ours, full of challenges, tragedies, joys, fulfillment, and temptations. He came to live one perfect life, so that, in the words of Hebrews 4:15, He could be: “...tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.”

Then He could give His sinless life as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. The Word was born into this world so that He could die in our places and so that all who turn from sin and believe in Him will have life with God, given “the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God,” as John puts it.

The Word Who once spoke the world into being, has come into our world. By His death and resurrection, He pronounces the good news that, by His grace, all who believe in Him are saved and made new. By grace through faith in Christ alone, we become God’s children.

At the end of verse 14, as I mentioned, John’s perspective changes. He moves from what God has done through this Word to explaining how he and his friends who followed this Word experienced Him on earth.

He talks about what He saw in the Word Who said of Himself, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.” [John 14:9]

And: “The Father and I are one.” [John 10:30]

And: “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” [John 8:58]

John writes in our lesson: “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, we’re told that after Moses met with God at Mount Sinai, his face shone with the reflected light and glory of God Himself. The Israelites were so afraid of God’s brilliant light--fearful that their sins would be exposed, fearful that they would clearly see the way God wanted them to live and be forced to trust in Him, rather than themselves and their own preferred and sinful ways--that they told Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” [Exodus 20:19] They were terrified to be exposed in their sinfulness in the fiery presence of God.

Their terror was not ill-founded.

If we dare to stand before God without repentance and without faith in the Word, the only one Who can make us clean, we don’t stand a chance. Hebrews 10:31 says: “ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

But remember: Jesus came not just in truth; He also came in grace. Grace means charity, God’s charity for people born in sin like you and me. (The word we translate from the Greek in which the New Testament was written as grace is charitas, from which we get our English word, charity.)

The Word Who came to pitch His tent among us also came to cover us in the favor, resurrection, new life, and grace He won for all who believe in Him.

Because of His grace, we can say with the preacher in Hebrews 4:16: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

An intimate and eternal relationship with the Almighty King and Lord of the universe! That’s what the Word made flesh came to make possible for you and for me.

We know this Word as Jesus, truly God and truly man.

Jesus, the Word, is more than a Hallmark card, words of love spoken from afar by God.

Jesus is God with His sleeves rolled up, doing the hard work, making the painful sacrifice of love for each of us.

Jesus, the Word, is Immanuel, God with us, God for us, God our redeemer.

Even a child can understand this about Jesus. And even an adult needs Jesus just as much.

Always receive Him and you will have what you can find nowhere else: Life--new, eternal life--from God and with God, now and always.

That’s what Christmas is about.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during worship this morning.]

Prayer (Part 2, Reaching Up, Reaching In, Reaching Out)

[This was shared earlier this evening during midweek Lenten worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

Hebrews 4:16
Matthew 7:7-8

During these midweek Lenten services, we’re considering what it means to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

You and I are called to be disciples of Christ in His Church, not members of a club that confers membership privileges, as though the Church were some religious version of Sam’s Club or the Rotary.

The term disciple is the English translation of a word used in the Greek of the New Testament to describe people who are followers of Jesus. That Greek word is mathetes, which translated at its most literal means student.

In first century Judea, when Jesus walked the earth, it was the custom for rabbis, teachers, to collect groups of students, or disciples, who would follow the rabbi as he taught and interacted with people from place to place.

This method is what Jesus used with His disciples to help them to grow into active participants in the Kingdom of God, which is ultimately what we’re called to be Christ’s disciples.

Remember how Jesus taught the disciples?

First, Jesus allowed them to observe Him as He preached, taught, brought healing, and cast out demons.

Second, Jesus would send the disciples out in groups of two, providing the disciples with mutual support and accountability, empowering them to duplicate His ministry in His name.

Third, Jesus brought His students--His disciples--back to reflect together on what they had learned from doing what they had previously observed Jesus doing.

At the end of His ministry on earth, after He had died and risen, as He was ascending to heaven, Jesus gave His disciples one last directive, a command we call the Great Commission, found in Matthew 28:19-20: “...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…”

The disciples were to replicate Jesus’ ministry repeatedly and empower others to do the same. The students were to become teachers. The disciples were to make more disciples.

And Christian disciples--right up to us today here at Living Water--have the same commission, to make disciples one life at a time time, person to person.

The fortunate thing is that we don’t do this in our own power! Jesus promises us in Matthew 28:20: “...I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

And at Pentecost, Jesus would send the Holy Spirit to His Church. The Holy Spirit, the Third Person of God, is the One by Whom Jesus uses disciples like us to make disciples.

I bring all of this up by way of background for tonight’s topic: prayer.

Jesus taught the disciples to pray after they observed how regularly He Himself prayed. They knew that prayer was important to Jesus. So, they asked Jesus to teach them to pray.

Now, Jesus’ disciples were religious people. I’m sure they had prayed before. But maybe in observing Jesus, they saw that prayer is more than what they’d previously thought it was.

So, Jesus gave them a pattern for prayer, what we call the Lord’s Prayer.

He also taught them: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7-8). This wasn’t a blank for self-centered prayer; Jesus elsewhere speaks of prayer needing to be offered in His name, meaning praying in ways that are consistent with the will and the character of God.

But what Jesus was saying to His disciples, including us, is that whatever is of concern to us is a concern to our Father in heaven.

And we should humbly and honestly lay our whole lives before God when we pray.

Personally, I usually spend time in the mornings praying to God. But I also pray to God all day long, in what some people call the "chink" in my schedule: between appointments or events, while preparing to do something, or when thoughts cross my mind.

I often pray things like: “Lord, grant that I will do nothing to dishonor You, but only glorify You by what I say, who I am, and what I do.”

Or, “Lord, give me the right words and the right silences in this meeting, in this visit, in this counseling session.”

Or, “God, protect my family and me from all danger and harm. Protect our characters and our reputations.”

Or, “Lord, help the MSM students or the First Communion students to know and love You more each day.”

Or, “Lord, give me the words You want me to speak in this message.”

“Jesus,” I prayed Sunday before last, when I was reeling from sinusitis, strep throat, and meds, “get me through the morning so that I call attention to You and not to myself.”

Paul says that disciples are to “pray without ceasing.”

Hebrews 4:16 tells Christ’s disciples: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

Here at Living Water, we summarize the life of discipleship and the mission of our church in three components:

• Reaching up to God; 
• Reaching in to our sisters and brothers in Christ through mutual care, study, and accountability; and
• Reaching out to make new disciples of Christ through our witness and service in Christ’s name. 

But in truth, prayer is involved in all three of these elements of Christian discipleship.

In prayer, we reach up to God in surrender, worship, praise, and supplication.

In prayer, we reach in to pray for the needs of our congregation as a whole, for the entire Christian Church, and for our fellow disciples.

And no effort at reaching out to others to make disciples will have any impact unless we pray before, during, and after every encounter we have with those outside of Christ’s Church, who need the salvation and new life that only comes from Jesus. (My favorite place to witness for Christ these days is the deli counter at Kroger. Boar's Head meats are very popular, so there's lots of time for conversation.)

How we pray and what we say when we pray is not nearly important as that we pray and that when we pray, we come with both humility about ourselves and confidence in the grace and mercy of the One to Whom we pray.

And even when our confidence in God is battered or shaky, as happens to all of us, those who pray in Christ’s name will nonetheless find an utterly dependable God Who loves them passionately and totally.

We take comfort and power from God’s promises voiced through the apostle Paul in Romans 8:26-27, another great passage in what I think is the greatest chapter of the whole Bible: “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”

Jesus has taught we who are His disciples to pray. The prayer He has taught us shows us how to pray, with intimacy, confidence, concern for others, and repentant hearts.

But even when we find prayer difficult, whenever we lay ourselves before God’s throne of grace in Jesus’ name, our Teacher, our Lord, prays for us and with us. That’s a very comforting thought for me!

And at our most confused moments, the Holy Spirit takes our jumbled thoughts and emotions brought to God in the name of Jesus, and turns them into prayers that will eventually, inevitably, and eternally, work for the good of all who love Him.

Pray...about everything and for everyone!

That’s our privilege and our duty as disciples of Jesus Christ.

More on reaching up, reaching in, and reaching out next week.

The Centurion and What Amazes Jesus

[This was written to be shared with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio during Sunday worship today.]

Luke 7:1-10
Jesus did things that amazed a lot of people during His time on earth: turning water into wine, raising dead people to life, casting out demons, dying a death on the cross He didn’t deserve to pay the price for our sins, rising from the dead to give eternal life to all who repent for sin and surrender to Him. To this day, Jesus amazes: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch--undeserving, imperfect, sinful old bag of wind--like me.” That’s amazing!

But have you ever thought about what it would take to amaze Jesus?

Jesus is God in the flesh. He’s the author of amazing. The Bible says that in Jesus, “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible...all things have been created through Him and for Him...[and] in Him all things hold together.” So, what would it take to amaze Jesus?

Interestingly, the Gospels, the Bible’s authoritative accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, tell us that Jesus was amazed two times during His earthly ministry.

The first time is recorded by two of the gospel writers, Matthew and Mark. Let’s take a look at Mark’s version of things, found in Mark 6:5-6. After beginning His public ministry--teaching and preaching, calling people to repent and believe the good news that He has come to bring God’s kingdom into our fallen world, and performing miracles, Jesus goes home to Nazareth. But Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes refused to trust in Him. “Hey,” they told each other, “we know this kid. He’s Mary’s boy. We know His brothers and sisters.”

Familiarity, you know, breeds contempt. The people of Nazareth thought they knew Jesus. But they clearly hadn’t gotten to know Jesus.

If they’d known Jesus, they would have known about His uniqueness. He had never been in trouble. He had never hurt anyone. He had never misused God’s Name, never gotten involved in sexual shenanigans, never had any shady business dealings. Jesus was sinless and had they reflected on that, they would have understood why their fellow Nazarene was out in the world  pronouncing and demonstrating the arrival of the Kingdom of God.

When Jesus returned to Nazareth though, He didn’t find faith, but contempt. Look, please at what verses 5 and 6 tell us: “Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He marveled [Jesus was amazed!] because of their unbelief...”

I wonder if today, Jesus were to walk into this sanctuary, whether He would have cause to be amazed by our unbelief? Over our lifetimes, we’ve gotten to know Jesus. But is our knowledge of Jesus something that fires and inspires our faith in Him, our trust in Him, our dependence on Him, our love for Him, our acts of sacrifice and service in His Name? Or has it bred something like contempt?

I know that speaking for myself, I sometimes pray, giving my concerns to God, and then, as I rise from my knees, take them right back onto my own shoulders. Don’t I trust Jesus? Don’t I believe it when I pray, “Thy will be done”? Would Jesus marvel at my unbelief? This is why I turn to Christ again and again each day: Moved by His loving grace, anxious to let Him crucify the old Mark and give life to the Mark who will live with Him in eternity, I repent and grasp hold of Christ’s grace any time I can!

There is also unbelief, a functional atheism, among some Christians today who comfortably sit in their pews on Sunday mornings and go through the motions of faith, but never repent for sin, never trust Christ with their lives, never ask that His will be done except in rote prayer, never appreciate what Christ has done to bring them forgiveness and everlasting life, and who, when they run into the inevitable pain and difficulties that are part of life in this fallen, sinful, imperfect world, complain that God isn’t dancing to their tunes, making things easy for them, or approving their favorite sins of choice. That, I’m sure, amazes Jesus.

Our Gospel lesson for this morning records the other time in His earthly ministry that Jesus was amazed. Please turn to it, Luke 7:1-10.

Jesus has just concluded what scholars call His Sermon on the Plain. He goes to Capernaum, a city that sets at the northeast tip of the Sea of Galilee.

Verse 2 says: “And a certain centurion’s servant, who was dear to him, was sick and ready to die.” A centurion, of course, was an officer of the Roman army, who commanded a maximum of 100 soldiers--a century of soldiers. The Romans occupied Judea and Galilee and were resented. But already in this verse, we’re alerted to there being something different about this centurion. He is a what was called a God-fearer, a Gentile who believes in the God of the Jews.

His servant, the verse tells us, was “dear” to him. The word translated as dear is a compound word: entimos. It means honored, respected, distinguished and related to a word for precious, valuable, worthy of honor. This centurion esteems the servant and cares about what happens to him.

The centurion hears that Jesus is in town and he asks the local Jewish elders, the officials of the synagogue, to go ask Jesus to heal his servant.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the centurion does this instead of approaching Jesus himself. Gentiles were considered “outsiders” by the Jews, damned with no chance of knowing God. That may be one reason for the centurion not going to Jesus with His request.

But I think there’s a deeper reason for it: He is aware of his own faults, deficiencies, unworthiness, and sin. The believer in Jesus Christ should feel no hesitation at all about approaching the God we know in Christ in prayer. That’s why Hebrews 4:16, in light of the fact that Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross makes those who believe in Him worthy of coming to God in prayer, says: “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

But if we ever approach God in prayer with the notion that what we ask for are things we deserve, we approach God with the wrong heart and the wrong attitude.

The great 20th-century Lutheran theologian and author Ole Hallesby, in his book Why I Am a Christian writes: “...there is no other way of becoming personally assured of Christ and of the Christian faith than...the way of the sinner, the way which leads through complete despair of self.”

Until we know how desperately we need Christ and His blessings and how desperately unworthy we are of them, we will never ask Him for anything rightly!

The centurion sees two things clearly: his own unworthiness and Christ’s mercy and grace. And so, aware of his own deficiencies, he asks friends to bring his request--not for himself, but for his servant--before the Lord Jesus, Who has no deficiencies. He believes that, in Christ, God can give grace, undeserved favor.

His Jewish friends don’t have that kind of faith. They think that a human being can be worthy of God’s favor. They think that to get God’s blessings and favor, you make deals with God. That’s why in verse 5, they try to build a case for the centurion. They talk about the centurion’s works. “He loves our nation,” they tell Jesus, “He built our synagogue.”

They don’t get it. Neither do we if we think that we can earn God’s favor.

We know that the ratio of births to deaths in this world remains 1 to 1. Not everyone who is ill for whom we pray will be healed. But we do know that everyone--Jew, Gentile, sick, healthy--who calls on the Name of Jesus Christ, repenting for sin and trusting in Him for forgiveness and new life, will be saved from sin, death, and the devil.

And that won’t happen because of their virtues. It will only happen because of the love, mercy, and grace of the Savior on Whom they call, we call. We are saved by God’s grace in Christ and our faith in the grace-giver, not by our non-existent goodness or good deeds.

As Jesus approaches the centurion’s house, the centurion sends a few more friends to Jesus with a new message. Verse 6: “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof. Therefore I did not even think myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant will be healed.” He explains that as a soldier, he understands authority. He understands that if the Lord of all creation commands the disease that afflicts his servant to be gone, it will be gone.

Verse 9 tells us: “When Jesus heard these things, He marveled at him [Jesus was amazed by the centurion!], and turned and said to the crowd that followed Him, ‘I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!” When the centurion’s friends returned to his house, they found that the servant had been made well.

Folks: If you turn from sin and trust in Christ, you can know you belong to Him no matter!

If you seek it, Jesus Christ will prevent Satan from reminding you of the sin for which you long ago repented and you can know that Satan will be constrained.

If you need help to resist temptation, Christ can give you that power.

If you need the strength to bear hard circumstances, Christ can give you the strength you need.

Jesus Christ, Who died and rose and sent His Holy Spirit to those who believe in Him, can give you a trust that no matter what happens to you in this world, you belong to Christ for eternity. Nothing can snatch you from Christ’s hands!

The centurion knew the extent, the height, the eternal depths, and the power of Jesus‘ authority.

If there is one thing we need in Christ’s Church today, one thing that we who call ourselves Christians need more than anything, it’s a renewed understanding of Jesus‘ authority, a renewed commitment to living under Jesus‘ authority and grace alone! 

We need to learn again what the witnesses of His resurrection told us: Jesus Christ is Lord of everything!

Faith informed by an understanding that only Christ has authority over life, death, and sin gives us peace and hope and joy even in the midst of life’s difficulties.

And that’s the faith that amazed Jesus when He saw it in the centurion!

May our prayer be, “Lord, build faith that rejoices in Christ’s grace AND respects Christ’s authority within me. Help me to trust in Jesus Christ and His Word alone!”

May Christ give us a faith in Him and Him alone that amazes Him, a faith that no longer seeks to assert our authority or power or selfish ends, but seeks only to honor and glorify the One Who died and rose to give us life with God! Amen