Word Become Flesh

John 1:14-18

Christmas 2021

John 1:14-18, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’” 16 And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. Christmas season is to help you to be fresh in your understanding of the glories of Christ. It’s not as if we don’t know the story of Christ. It’s not as if we don’t understand the depth of the incarnation, the theology of what was going on in Bethlehem.

We love these truths, we worship, and they are familiar. That’s part of what makes Christmas the celebration that it is. It is so loaded with history and memories from the past, and we sort of dive back into the pool of all that’s gone before and enjoy all the memories that have made up the Christmases of our past.

John’s account of the incarnation. John tells the Christmas story without Joseph, Mary, the baby, the stable, the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, the star, without the angels, without all the familiar components of the Christmas story.

John gives us the real story of what was happening. It’s a theological look at Christmas rather than the historical facts that we find in Matthew and Luke’s account.

John 1:14, “The Word became flesh.” With an economy of words, marvellous, profound simplicity captures our minds. That is the theology of Christmas.

The Word is the eternal God, God the Son. The Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, have existed always, eternally.

The Word became flesh explains that the second member of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God became a man. God is eternal, pure being, no beginning and no end, and no changing. God is pure eternal being. Everything else that has been created is becoming. Here the amazing miracle is the Word, eternal pure being, entered into the universe of the becoming ones and became a man.

John’s point is clear. God became something He had never been without ceasing to be what He had always been. The Word became flesh, the eternal God became a man. The Word, pure eternal being, became a man, a creature becoming starting out as an embryo planted by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, growing there for nine months, and then born as an infant, a child, a young adult, and a man, subject to all the change, change of being part of His creation.

This didn’t happen on December 25th by the way, and it didn’t happen on the Jewish equivalent of that in their calendar. But that really doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t matter. No celebration could be too great to overstate the incarnation.

No celebration could be too grand to overestimate the impact of the incarnation. The only thing better than that would be just to be reminded of it every single day. We cannot overstate the importance of this, the impact of the incarnation. As Christians we understand that.

We grasp this with all our spiritual might and make everything we can out of it, so that we can fully focus our attention for a month a year on the glory of the greatest event in the history of the world. The incarnation of God in human form.

It is, however, a very strange and bizarre paradox that another figure has intruded into the middle of our celebration, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to get rid of him. He is everywhere at this time of the year and is far more prevalent than any representation of Jesus Christ. Oddly enough, his name is a rearrangement of the letters that are the New Testament title for the demonic archenemy of Jesus Christ Himself.

Myth on Santa Claus

There is a hymn with his theology in it, and you know the hymn and your kids know the hymn.

“You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town. He’s making a list and checking it twice, going to find out who’s naughty and nice, Santa Claus is coming to town.

He sees you when you are sleeping, He knows when you’re awake, He’s knows when you’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness sake. You better not pout, you better not cry you better watch out, I am telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town.”

That was written by two guys – Coots, and Haven, in 1934. You all know it, you hear it all the time, and your children may know it. This teaches a false theology about a false non- existent person, sets up a set of false doctrines. The meaning of the song promotes a false theology that if you want to gain heaven you must be good.

What is interesting about this whole Santa Claus thing is that he has powers that are paralleled to God. I know that to sort of talk against Santa Claus is to like steal your Christmas.

Is Santa a divine being? Santa is not subject to the powers of this world. He can fly, and he can cover the entire planet, stop at every single house and do it in one night. He is a very powerful being. He lives at the North Pole but if you go to the North Pole, there’s a town in Alaska called North Pole, you are not going to find him there, because he is non-existent.

He’s a heavenly being and he is surrounded by other heavenly beings who aren’t subject to normal constraints in life of the rest of creation. He is also all-knowing. “He sees you when you are sleeping, He knows when you are awake, He knows if you’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness’s sake.”

Is Santa Claus being omniscient?

Does he know what’s going on? By the way, he also promises and threats. If you are good, you will get gifts; and if you are not good, the idea is if you are

naughty, you are not going to get any gifts. At that point, he doesn’t keep his word, because we are all naughty and we still get our gifts. And so, this guy doesn’t tell the truth, he is not consistent with his promises.

He makes threats and doesn’t follow through on them. Santa, who favours people on the basis of them being good. That’s essentially what makes up every religion in the world but Christianity. Good works will earn you favour with transcendent god. Santa represents a transcendent being who doesn’t exist, who doesn’t tell the truth, who has empty threats, who has a works system rewards people on the basis of their doing good and who only shows up once a year.

On the other hand, this obliterates the true God, the true Christ,

• the living Son of God,
• who speaks only the truth,
• gives salvation not by works but by grace,
• keeps all His promises,
• will judge those who reject Him,
• always be gracious to those who receive Him, and
• always present, not just one night a year.

Why Christmas?

“The Word became flesh.” The incarnation is a reality in time/space history. This is Christianity. If we don’t have an incarnation, we don’t have Christianity. The world is consumed at this time of year with the frivolous joy tied to a fantasy, and reinforcing good works is the epitome of self-elevation.

In the celebration of Santa, the true Saviour, the only source of true joy, eternal joy, is obscured. But we get it! Shouldn’t we celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ? It was 1934 when those two men gave us the theology of Santa. It was two thousand years ago when John gave us the divine theology of Jesus Christ. John opens his majestic account of the life of Christ, called the gospel of John, by establishing Him as the incarnate God.

The whole point of the opening eighteen verses. John starts out referring to Him as the eternal Son who is pre-existent, coexistent, and self-existent and that identifies Him as God.

John 1:1, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word is identified here as the second member of the Trinity, the Son of God, who came into the world in human form, the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is called the Word because in the Greek world, in the secular world, they had taken the term “logos,” which is the Greek word for “word,” and they had used that as a title to identify the mind, the intelligence, the wisdom, and the power that created the universe.

They knew there was an intelligent mind, that there was a massive power. There had to be a cause for this effect called creation. They gave it a name, “logos.” It was impersonal. It was a power. It was a force. It was an entity without being a person.

John borrows that idea. That which you identify as the force that made everything that is, that embedded it with wisdom and intelligence is none other than the person of Jesus Christ. He is the Creator of the universe.

John 1:2-3, He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. Jesus is pre-existent. “In the beginning,” that’s the beginning of the creation.

Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning when God created the Word was. Jesus was already existing at creation, which makes Him pre- existent, which makes Him God. Anything that is pre-existent to creation is outside of creation, and that can only be God. Jesus is also co-existent.

John 1:1, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. “The Word was God.” He is not only with God, pre-existent. He is God, coexistent. John 1: 4, In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. “In Him was life.”

He is self-existent. Nobody gave Him life. He didn’t take life from someone else.

What about John 5:26?

John 5:26, For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, Simply means is that in the incarnation the Father did not withdraw from Him in His humiliation the power to give life. He is life.

John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The Father gave Him to have life in Himself, only in the sense that in His self-emptying and His incarnation He retained all that He was before His incarnation. This is the eternal One, the eternal Son called the Word. Word works also for the Jews, because the Word of the Lord was an expression, they were familiar with. Whenever God revealed Himself, disclosed Himself in the Old Testament, He was speaking.

Sure, there were appearances of God in fire, and a cloud, and the glory of God, and things like that, but when God communicated, He spoke.

So, the Word became the manifestation of God. For the Gentile, God is manifest in the person Jesus Christ. God the one who is the power behind creation. To the Jew, God has spoken in His Son.

Hebrews 1:1-3, God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, 2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; 3 who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

God is speaking more clearly than ever in Christ. So, Jesus is the communication of God, the manifestation of God, the proclamation of God, the declaration of God in human flesh, the eternal Son. Jesus is not only the eternal Son, but He is also the manifest Son.

John 1:6-8, There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. 8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of

that Light. 9 That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. He comes as light into the darkness, and He lights every man who sees Him and believes. The eternal Son becomes the manifest Son.

Jesus became the rejected Son.

John 1:9-11, That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. Jesus came to His own people, the Jews, and they refused Him.

They did not receive Him rather they rejected Him. The eternal Son becomes the manifest Son in His incarnation. Life, eternal life becomes light, and that’s simply to say He becomes visible. He is the rejected Son.

John 1:12-13, But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Jesus is still the sovereign Son. A divine miracle occurs to those who believe, and the Son Himself gives them the right to become eternal children of God. That’s salvation. John is pointing us in the direction of this child that is born in a manger in Bethlehem in saying He’s the eternal Son, He is the manifest Son, the rejected Son, and the sovereign Son.

Jesus is the glorious Son. “The Word became flesh.” This is the most important reality in human history. It is the most important essential truth in Christianity. No incarnation, no Christianity. It is essential for Christianity.

It is essential for salvation. Unless God becomes a man, unless there is a perfect sacrifice, a man to die in the place of men and God at the same time to conquer death, there is no salvation. So, the eternal Word became flesh. Pure eternal being becomes something He had never been before without ceasing to be what He always was.

This is the mystery of Jesus Christ.

• Fully God and
• Fully man.

It’s a staggering concept. It’s a stunning declaration by the apostle John. There have been people very early on in the Christian world who felt that this was just too irreverent. There was this idea that flesh, mortal flesh was bad and evil.

Sinful people recognize they couldn’t comprehend humanity without sinfulness. For Christ to take on humanity seemed to be too demeaning. And out of misguided reverence they came up with this notion that He only appeared to be human.

It was only a spectre. Kind of ghost humanity. They were called docetists because they were drawn from the Greek verb dokein which means “to seem to be.” Docetism is a famous heresy that was debunked very early on. John even writes against it, that’s how early it was.

1 John 4:2-3, By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. Fully God, fully man. John is speaking against that docetic heresy already developed.

The apostle Paul addresses it.

1 Timothy 3:16, And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, Justified in the Spirit, Seen by angels, Preached among the Gentiles, Believed on in the world, Received up in glory.

The marvel remains that this is true, and so beautifully and simply stated: “The Word became flesh.” The Word, fully God. Flesh meaning, fully human. “and dwelt among us.”

The Greek verb eskēnōsen means “to tent,” or literally “tented,” tented, pitched his tent.

Had Christ ever appeared before? Had the second member of the Trinity ever appeared before the incarnation? We had done series of message on Christ in the Old Testament. Jesus Christ did appear in the Old Testament in what are called Christophanies, appearances of Christ before the incarnation.

There are occasions when an angelic being called the angel of the Lord appears in a human form. They are marvellous to behold. But wherever you see them, and they are scattered throughout the Old Testament period they are brief. They are here and gone immediately, momentarily, fleeting appearances.

But this time He dwelt among us 33 years. The Christophanies of the Old Testament they were very brief and only previews, only preliminary. Now we see the Word, and He stays 33 years. “We saw His glory.”

If you went to the Old Testament, the glory of God came down in Exodus chapter 40 into the tabernacle as light. That led the children of Israel as a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. When the temple was finished in 1 Kings 8, the glory of the Lord came down, and it filled the temple to such a degree that people couldn’t even function in there. So, the glory of God had shown up.

There was one occasion in the ministry in the life of Jesus Christ recorded by Matthew and by Luke where Jesus took Peter, James, and John up into a mountain, and He revealed His glory. It’s called the transfiguration. He pulled back the veil of His flesh, and they saw the glory in light, they saw manifest glory reduced to light.

That was to let them know that He is the same glory that appeared in the garden, the shekinah that walked with Adam in the garden, the same glory that came into the tabernacle in the fortieth chapter of Exodus and filled it, the same glory that came into the temple in 1 Kings 8 and filled it, the presence of God.

So, when Jesus showed His glory, they were seeing His glory. Of course, they were immediately literally knocked to the ground and went into a semi-coma under the fiery fury of that blazing light. Peter, James, and John were there.

Is that what John’s talking about? Peter made reference to that.

2 Peter 1:18, And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. “We saw His glory.”

Is that what John is referring to here? I don’t think so. “Glory as of the only begotten from the Father.”

Glory has an only begotten from the Father? Yes, glory that is connected to God, glory that is possessed by one who must have the same life as God. “Only begotten” is a word that needs an explanation. Because from our viewpoint, when we would look at that word we would say, “that seems to sound like there was a time when He didn’t exist? And He’s the only begotten.”

That’s not what the word means. The Greek word is monogenēs. The emphasis is two-fold. 1. Shared life. What John is saying is that He possessed the life of the Father. This word cannot mean simply that God brought Him to life.

He is the only one that God ever brought into life.

Hebrews 11:17, By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son,

We remember the story in Genesis 22. Was Isaac Abraham’s only begotten son in the sense that he had no other sons? No. He had another son named Ishmael. Ishmael was born before Isaac was born and was a son of Abraham. Here is evidence that this term monogenēs means,

“The son of privilege,” “The son of inheritance,” “The son of right.” Not only the possessor of the nature of the father, but the one who possesses all the inheritance of the father. Jesus Christ then is called monogenēs, one, because He bears the nature of the father.

2. Eternal heir of all things of the Father. Eternally the Son and eternally the heir.

Matthew 28:18, And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.

John 5:27, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man. Jesus bears the Father’s nature, and He is the only heir to the Father. John is saying, “We saw His glory and it was the same glory that would belong to one who possessed everything that was true of God.”

Was John talking about the light that he saw on the mount of transfiguration? No! Because he goes on to say this, “full of grace and truth.” He moves away from sort of manifest glory to moral glory.

What is the glory of God?

Is it just light? Isn’t light just a representation, kind of a symbol? If you go back to the thirty-fourth chapter of

Exodus 33:18-19, And he said, “Please, show me Your glory.” 19 Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

Exodus 34:5-7, Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. 6 And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, 7 keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers

upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”

What are these? These are all attributes of God. The glory of God is His love, His grace, His mercy, His wisdom, His knowledge, His power, His justice, His holiness, His immutability, His compassion, His omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, anger, wrath, kindness, patience – all of His attributes.

When John says, “We saw His glory,” that’s what John saw. Those three years that John was with Christ, “We saw His glory,” the very glory that belongs only to God and therefore proves Him to be the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Why out of all the panoply of attributes does he pick grace and truth? Because they are related to salvation. They’re related to salvation. John says, “We saw it.” John never really got over that.

John introduces that to us in the beginning of his gospel, and he does the same thing in the beginning of his epistles. He wrote three epistles.

1 John 1:1-3, That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life— 2 the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. John repeatedly says that we saw His glory. We heard, we saw, we stared at, we touched. Manifested. We saw full grace on display, full truth on display.” Those things which were known to them to be attributes of the eternal God were manifest in Christ. Grace and truth relate to salvation.

They saw grace in Him. His message was grace which encompassed compassion, mercy, kindness, patience, tenderness but more importantly,

forgiveness of sins, transgressions, and iniquities – as Exodus 33 describes God. They saw grace in Him. The grace that they were familiar with as belonging to God and they heard truth from Him.

John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

They saw truth in Him.

John 8:32, And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

John 8:36, Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. Very simply when you find Christ, you find the truth, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free from the search for the truth. The search is over.

They saw not just grace and truth in Him as sort of over- arching attributes, but He was full of grace and truth. No half measures, no fractions. Perfection! When John has an opportunity to pull two attributes for the sake of illustration, he pulls two most wonderful attributes.

• Always truthful,
• Always gracious.
• Full truth,
• Full grace.

Colossians 1:15-19, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. 18 And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. 19 For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, Of all that have ever been raised, He is the premier one, He Himself comes to have first place in everything. Everything that God is dwells in Him. When the incarnation happened and Christ came, God was not diminished in Him at all. He was fully God, as He had eternally been, and fully man, no less God.

Colossians 2:3, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

If all fullness dwells in Him, then all wisdom and all knowledge is part of that all fullness.

Colossians 2:9-10, For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; 10 and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. All the fullness of God dwells in Him, He dwells in you. All the fullness of God dwells in you, and you are complete. That’s just a stunning reality. Even John the Baptist that everybody recognized to be a prophet. V 15, John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’”

What did he mean by that?

When it came to birth? John the Baptist was born Jesus. Elizabeth was pregnant long before Mary, months. John the Baptist, regarding birth, born before Jesus. Regard to ministry, John begins his ministry before Jesus.

• In terms of birth, John comes first.
• In terms of ministry, John comes first.

But John says, “In terms of existence, He existed before me. He ranks higher than me because He existed before me.” If He existed before he was born, then He’s the eternal One. Here’s the testimony of the prophet that everybody recognized to be a prophet of the eternality of Christ, the full deity of Jesus Christ.

So, you have not only the testimony of John the apostle writing. John the apostle borrows from his namesake, John the Baptist, to make the same testimony. V 16, And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.

All the fullness of deity dwells in Him. He dwells in us. Therefore, of all that fullness, we receive. Just think of it. Grace upon grace! That verse has almost infinite possibilities of discussion.

What do you mean grace upon grace?

He means grace, literally grace in the place of grace. Grace in the place of grace. Grace just keeps replacing itself. It’s overlapping. It’s like waves. If you go down to the beach and you watch the waves, you don’t know where one end ends and one begins, they just roll- on top of each other. That’s the notion expressed in the way this is framed. Waves of grace rolling on us.

Romans 5:2, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

We literally are engulfed in waves of grace. You don’t live on past grace. You don’t live on stale grace. You live on grace, replacing grace, grace on top of grace. His mercies are new every morning. There are no gaps in His grace. This is an amazing statement.

You as a believer in Jesus Christ not only have received the authority to become the children of God, but you have been given eternal life.

You will be the recipient of endless grace without any break, without any gaps. There’s just grace and more grace. Grace is like a stream flowing constantly every moment of every hour. No moment, no split second is ever apart from the satisfying, overwhelming goodness of God in giving grace to sinners such as we are.

V 17, For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. There’s no grace in the law. The law will kill you, the law will hold you guilty, the law will hold you accountable. The law will render a judgment and a verdict on you, and the verdict of the law is death. Kill the sinne.

Ezekiel 18:20, “The soul that sins it shall die.”

Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.”

Hebrews 10:28, Anyone who has rejected Moses’ law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. There’s no mercy in the law. There’s no grace in the law. Paul calls the law “the ministration of death.”

So, if you are going to try to live under the law, are you going to live Santa Clause’s way?

You going to be good? You are going to end up eternally dead because the law will only kill. Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. This is the good news of the gospel!

Why we celebrate Christmas? V 18, No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. The Old Testament says, “No one can see Me and live.” No one has seen God at any time.

By the way, that’s one of the reasons why many Bible scholars believe that the appearances of God in visible form in the Old Testament were appearances of Christ rather than the Father, preincarnate appearances of Christ.

No one has seen God at any time. There’s another way to say that: “The only begotten God.” Well, God isn’t born, there wasn’t a time when God wasn’t.

So, if you compare the only begotten from the Father with this designation, “the only begotten God,” both of which refer to Christ, then you know that monogenēs isn’t talking about something that brought Him into existence.

It’s talking about the fact that He bears the same nature, and possesses all the inheritance, all the goodness, all the greatness, all the gifts, and all the possessions that belong to His Father. The one who is called the monogenēs God, the one who is in the bosom of the Father, the one who is wrapped up in the Father. Again, this emphasis of Trinitarian unity. He has explained it.

You want an explanation of God? Read the four Gospels. That’s the best explanation of God you will ever have.

You want to know what God is like? John says, we saw Him, we heard Him, we looked at Him, we touched Him, we walked with Him. We were there every day 24/7 for three years. We saw His glory. It wasn’t human glory, it was the glory of one who bore the same life as God, and it was full of the things that characterize God. Grace and Truth.

Moses saw the back parts. We see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Corinthians 4:4, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.

We see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. God showed Moses His back parts, God showed us His face, and His face is the face of Jesus Christ. When you read the gospel of John and he never gets over the wonder of the fact that He is seeing God every day.

The whole gospel of John focuses on the things that reveal that Jesus is God. John ends his gospel so profoundly.

John 20:31, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

The eternal, incarnate, omnipotent, glorious Christ. Wonder of wonders of His fullness we have all received.

Grace, upon grace. It would be one thing for Christ to come into the world and reveal Himself. It’s quite another for Him to take up residence in u. But that’s the truth. When we come together like this to worship Christ, we do not worship a Christ who is above us, or apart from us, or outside of us but we worship a Christ who is inside of us.

We are the recipients of grace, upon grace! As Christians, we never get to the place where God can stop giving us grace because we can make it on our own, right? We need grace until that day when we enter the heavens and are made perfect.

Until then we need what He grace, upon grace. Grace, upon grace – grace for all our sins, as He keeps us by the power of the Holy Spirit to eternal glory. Therefore, we celebrate. Therefore, we honour the Lord on this occasion to remember His incarnation!