Jesus, the Bearer of Grace and Truth

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John chapter 1. John chapter 1, starting in verse 1, says, Verse 1, And tonight, I told you this morning that what we’re going to talk about tonight would be expanding on what we talked about this morning. And honestly, in writing some of these messages on this series, I felt like I’m repeating myself a lot.

And I felt like if I come in with some of the same points week after week, I’m shortchanging you all. But then I thought of how many times God in various ways has had to say the same thing over and over to us. Sometimes it takes more than once for it to sink in for us.

I know it does for me. And I look at all the times in God’s dealing with Israel, just like any father with their children. I don’t tell Benjamin one time and he does things yet.

I hope to get there someday, but we’re not there yet. And with us as God’s children, it’s not the usual course of events that he tells us one time, and it really sinks in. And so for my need for it to sink in, for your need for it to sink in, I’m trying not to feel guilty about repeating myself because God does.

But what we’re going to talk about tonight is Jesus, the bearer of grace and truth. When he came, you know, as we talked about this morning and as we’ve talked about the last few weeks, he had no ordinary birth. But beyond that birth, it wasn’t just an ordinary life of any other man.

We talked about him being born into human flesh, but that doesn’t mean he was a regular person. He took on all the trappings and appearance of a regular person. We’re given no description of Jesus’ physical form in the Bible.

We have no idea what he looks like. Other than we’ve all seen the paintings that hang in churches in some of our homes, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t look anything like that. I’m pretty sure Jesus was not a tall, light-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed person.

If anything, he was probably average height and weight, dark-complected, dark curly hair like the people in his area. Some of you all have seen that program that they did on the History Channel about what Jesus might have looked like, and they went with the Shroud of Turin. and this is not saying much, one of the best Christianity-related documentaries the History Channel’s ever done.

And again, that’s not saying much when you’ve got people on there who are supposedly Bible experts who sound like they’ve never even opened one or seen one. But they talked about, this is maybe what Jesus looked like and he looked like your average Middle Eastern guy. The Bible tells us there was nothing about him, nothing physically lovely about him that would draw people to him.

We’re not told what he looked like because it just really didn’t matter. On the outside, he, I’m sure, looked like any other person, but on the inside, he was not just any other person. The life he lived, the miracles that he did, his very nature, he was not like anybody else.

And he was the fulfillment of all of God’s promises and everything that God had been revealing up to that time, everything that God had pointed out to his people about what he was going to do in some way, shape, or form pointed to Jesus Christ and he was the fulfillment of all of that. It says here as we’ve read tonight and read the last several weeks that John bear witness of him cried saying this was he of whom I spake. This is a few years on down the road from the Christmas story.

This is the culmination sort of the beginning of Christ’s life and the beginning of the end so to speak. From here John goes on to the three years or so of earthly ministry that are mainly talked about in the Gospels. But if we don’t make the connection between that and the manger, we miss something.

And so this passage that we’re going to look at tonight is so vitally important because it gives us, it goes from Him coming and the message of the prophets and John’s testimony into John’s testimony to those who followed Him about who this really was who’d come. And John the Baptist, some 30 years later, and I was talking to Wyma yesterday and telling her, I forget where it is, but there’s a passage in the Bible that talks about Him coming of age or being an adult or something of that nature. And because of the way that they would have used that phrase in the Jewish culture, we know from that he was at least 30 when he began his ministry.

But there’s the idea that he began his ministry at 30. He was crucified at 33 and a half and all that. We don’t know that for sure.

We just know he was over 30. Probably not an older man because they didn’t have such a long life expectancy back then, but he could have been closer to 40. We don’t know.

And quite frankly, it’s one of those, if I can say it this way, it’s one of those annoying little details that my wonders about, but shouldn’t because God didn’t think it was important enough to tell us exactly when it happened or how old he was. What is important is that it happened. And so some 30 plus years later, after Christ was born in Bethlehem, after the Word was made flesh, and 30 plus years of dwelling among us, then we get to the point where we beheld his glory.

The glory is of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And it says that John bore witness of this. He told the people.

30 plus years later, the people who followed John, as he’d prepared them, as he’d preached repentance, as he’d preached the imminent coming of Christ, that the Messiah was coming any day for the first time, and he baptized those who responded, those who repented, and he’d built up this following. Folks, when I say John the Baptist built up a following, it was not for himself. He built up a following to point them to Christ. That should be the goal of anyone in ministry, not to build up a following for myself or for yourself, but to build up a following to lead people to Christ. He said to them, this is him whom I spake.

And we could look at the other gospel accounts where it talks about what it was that John said, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight the path. All of these things told them, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Everything that John had preached about the coming of God’s anointed one, he says, that’s the man I was talking about, points at Jesus Christ. This was he of whom I spake.

He that cometh after me is preferred before me, for he was before me. He said, the one who comes after me, and Jesus did show up on the scene publicly a little later than John the Baptist we know. He said, he’s preferred before me, which means he got preference, not just special treatment.

But we have it in the United States too, what they call the order of preference or precedence or something like that, where when you’re at an official state function based on your job title, your position, You know, certain people are categorized, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever, by how important they are. And you’ve got, you know, say if we were, say if the president were in town, and we’re in Fayetteville and we’re speaking, and there was some kind of special event, they were here, according to the U. S.

Order of Precedents, which we wouldn’t probably stand on that ceremony here, we’d be glad they were here, but we wouldn’t bow down and give them the best seats in the House, and all that, that goes against what we teach. But the Order of Precedents, we’d have the president, we’d have the governor of Arkansas, and we’d have the mayor of Fayetteville. And then after that, you’ve got the vice president and so on and so forth.

Well, we’ve got a kind of order of precedence here in God’s kingdom, and he says, the one who comes after me is before me. He’s preferred before me. He’s more important than I am.

And that’s something I would hope that we would all want to say. The one that John pointed to is preferred before us. I know I’m not perfect at that, but I very much want to say, you know, he’s more important than whatever I want or whatever I’m doing.

And that’s what John was saying. The one who comes after me is preferred, is better than me, for he’s preferred before me. He’s more important than me.

He deserves more honor than I do. Listen to him instead of me, for he was before me. And that, when he says he was before me, he’s not talking order of precedence and the honor he deserves.

Again, he’s already dealt with that in saying he is preferred before me. He’s saying he was before me. He was here.

He identifies him as the everlasting God. When Jesus, like when Jesus said, when Abraham, before Abraham was, I am. He was before there was.

And so John points people to him and says, this man who comes after me, this Jesus, he’s the one I’ve been talking about. The Messiah I’ve been preaching about and the other prophets have been preaching about, it’s him. And he deserves more honor than me or all of us put together because he was here before any of us and he’s one with God the Father.

It’s a lot of meaning packed into a few words. It’s a skill I wish I could learn. For He was before me, and of His fullness have we all received, and grace for grace.

They had received of His fullness. When it talks about Him being full of grace and truth in the Scriptures, He didn’t just have grace and truth. He was full of it.

He was filled to the brim and overflowing with grace and truth. It’s a unique quality. We all have some capacity for grace and truth within us, especially as Christians.

We all have some capacity to show compassion on people that they don’t deserve. We all have some capacity to tell the truth. But as we discussed in Sunday school this morning, talking about the depravity of the human heart, that’s not our overwhelming character.

That’s not our overwhelming nature to be full of grace and truth. And yet in Christ, there was nothing wicked. There was nothing evil.

There was nothing petty, nothing sinful. He was full and overflowing with grace and truth. It exuded from him.

He says, we’ve all received of his fullness and grace for grace. But the law was given by Moses, or for the law, verse 17, was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. And when I started thinking about this, this verse, this made, this verse right here, became the key to the other verses that we’re going to look at tonight, made it clear what he’s talking about here. And for those of you who are in Disciple Way, I employed one of the questions that they ask us about, oh my goodness, comparisons and contrasts.

If you’re not in disciple way, one of the questions they train us to ask as we’re studying the Bible is to look for comparisons and contrasts, things that are alike and things that are different, to see if God’s making a point by saying this is different than this. And I asked myself that and said, okay, he says the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. And he’s contrasting here saying there are two different things here, and they stand in, I want to say they stand in opposition to one another. They stand in contrast to one another.

They’re not in opposition. Christ came to fulfill the law, not to obliterate the law. But they stand in contrast to one another.

And it’s a way of identifying not just, hey, Moses came and brought this, and Jesus came and brought this, but to put Jesus, to hold Jesus up to those who were listening as the one who brought a new covenant. I mean, it was a pretty bold move in that day to compare anybody to Moses. For all the talk of monotheism and there’s only one God and how dare Jesus say he’s the Son of God and all of these things.

They sure did put Moses on a pedestal if you read the Gospels. And Moses was a good guy, but he was just a man. And God used him in incredible ways, but he was just a man.

But God used Moses to be the one to bring the law to the people, to make that covenant known to the people. And what he’s doing here, what John is doing here, by sharing the fact that the law was given by Moses, but Jesus Christ came with grace and truth, is to say that not only did Jesus come full of grace and truth, and He was a nice guy and wonderful and all these things, but to say that God has come and brought a new covenant for mankind. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new covenant in Jesus Christ, do we not?

Read the book of Hebrews. It talks about the old system of the sacrifices and the law, and that was not able to satisfy God, and yet Jesus came with this new covenant. That’s what He talked about before He was crucified and said this is the New Testament in my blood.

We have a new covenant with Jesus Christ, under Jesus Christ. Through his blood, we can have forgiveness from God and reconciliation with God, forgiveness for our sins. So I say this became the key to the whole passage because it becomes clear again that he’s not just setting Jesus up as another nice guy. He’s making it clear that Jesus came on God’s behalf to make another covenant with mankind.

And aren’t you glad that he did? I’ve talked to you enough about, I can’t even remember all of the laws and things. They couldn’t either unless they were some of these Pharisees and scribes devoted their whole lives to memorizing the law.

Folks, I could memorize Scripture and still not remember everything I’m supposed to do. All these laws that they had, can you imagine? If you wake up this morning and you do such and such, you step out of line this little bit, you’ve got to go through this ritual and you’ve got to sacrifice a pigeon over open water with another pigeon in there and sprinkle the blood and you’ve got to do it all in the right order in just the right way and have your heart in the right condition while you’re doing it.

And all these things and still just to even approach the idea of making atonement and still that doesn’t completely satisfy God’s justice. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

I can’t imagine if we had to do that today. I’m so thankful that God brought us a new covenant in Jesus Christ. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. So tonight, first of all, he says, the first point we can learn from this is that Jesus came to bring mankind a new covenant. When Jesus came, it wasn’t, if I can say it this way, it wasn’t just God coming into human flesh.

I know. The idea of putting the word just with the phrase God coming into human flesh as though that happens every day is a little silly, but there’s even more to it. God didn’t just show up.

He changed the game. He changed everything. Better said, he fulfilled everything.

And from then on, things were different. We have access to God that’s unprecedented, that we would never have had under the old system. We have a relationship and a closeness to God that we could not have otherwise had.

So when he says that the law was given by Moses, but he’s talking about Jesus coming as the mediator of a new covenant. Thank God that he did. When he says that grace came by Jesus Christ, he says that grace came by Jesus Christ, what he’s telling us is he’s referring to the undeserved forgiveness of sins.

Even in the Old Testament sacrifices, there was this idea taught in the Old Testament law that they had to come in and they had to make this sacrifice. Again, they had to. .

. Folks, I’ve taught on it. I can’t remember the details.

Leviticus chapter 1 and sacrificing the bull. Folks, that’s not the only sacrifice there is in there. But if you’ll remember, I taught several..

. You may not remember. I don’t blame you.

I taught several months ago on Leviticus chapter 1 on a Wednesday night and went through the steps of the sacrifice and pointed out some 12 or 13 things that pointed to Jesus Christ in there. But there was still, even if it’s referring to Jesus Christ, there was still a very real ritual that they had to perform and they had to sacrifice this animal on this date. And that was one of many sacrifices.

They had the sin offering. They had the, never mind, I shouldn’t start naming things. I can’t remember.

I would have been a bad, bad Jew. Can we just say that? They had all these sacrifices to do and they were told to do it.

And yet, when you think about it, even that did not cause them to deserve God’s forgiveness. Yes, they were doing what he said to do. But think about it in these terms. I’ve heard evangelists use this before when they’re talking about the idea of being good enough for heaven.

If you were to kill somebody and you were to be taken in and held up on murder charges and the judge were to ask you what you have to say for yourself, and you were to say, well, judge, I only. . .

Miss Wyman, this is not a he-needed-killing story. I only killed one guy, and I promise if you’ll let me off, I’ll never do it again. And I’ll even pick up litter on the highway, and I’ll give money to the poor, and I’ll do all these good things.

Won’t that make up for it? Brother Mike, would he get off? You should.

Well, there goes the analogy. He’s not supposed to. You’re quick.

He’s not supposed to get off. So what if he doesn’t litter from now on? So what if he doesn’t kill anybody else from now on?

If he doesn’t kill from now on, if he goes through and does all the good that he’s supposed to do, he’s only doing what the law demands. He’s not doing anything extra. He’s just doing what the law expects him to do.

Hey, don’t kill anybody. If I don’t kill you all right now, that’s not me being nice. That’s just what the law.

. . I wouldn’t do that.

But that’s what the law demands. That doesn’t earn me any points before the law. Well, the same thing is true of God’s law.

To break one of God’s laws, we can’t just say, hey God, now I’ll do all the other things that you’ve told me to do, and that makes up for it, right? Because we’re not doing anything extra to work off that bad. We’re just doing what God expects of us in the first place.

And the Bible tells us that God took no pleasure in the blood of bulls and goats and all these things, that what God wanted was obedience from men’s hearts. And in our natural state, that’s very hard to give, and it’s impossible to give all the time. And so there’s this idea that we don’t deserve forgiveness.

We need forgiveness. It’s a catch-22. If you need it, you don’t deserve it.

And if you deserve it, you don’t need it. And so we’re stuck in the precarious position of needing God’s forgiveness and not deserving it at all. And trying to be good and keep the law and going through all the rituals that they had to do.

Ladies and gentlemen, God forgave the people of the Old Testament as they looked forward to the coming of Jesus Christ. He rewarded their faith. But it had nothing to do with the act of sacrificing. That sacrificing, following the law to the letter, is not what earned them heaven.

It was their faith, the Bible teaches. But that was only made possible. And our forgiveness was only made possible because of the grace that Jesus Christ brought.

We had the problem of needing God’s forgiveness and not deserving it. And saying, God, what if I sacrifice this bull? Will that make me all right with you?

You’re just doing what the law expects you to do anyway. It doesn’t make up for it. And Jesus came and brought grace instead.

And God being able to say, I can forgive you, not because you deserve it and not on the basis of what you’ve done. Again, if it was because we deserved it or on the basis of what we did, we wouldn’t need forgiveness. We wouldn’t need grace.

And yet we needed it. And he came and said, I can forgive you, not because you deserve it, not because of what you’ve done, but because Christ deserves it and because of what Christ has done. And he came and brought us grace.

He came and brought us grace. So when Jesus was born, he brought mankind a new covenant from God. He brought mankind the undeserved forgiveness of God.

And Jesus brought the revelation of the mysteries of God. Now, when I say the mysteries of God, please understand I’m not talking anything new age or esoteric or woo-woo or anything like that. The mysteries of God, the Bible talks about several things being mysteries.

And it doesn’t mean that it’s just for the initiated and just special secret knowledge you have to earn. It’s the mysteries of God are things that God didn’t choose to reveal until a certain time. But we’ve got the mystery of the gospel that God would forgive sins through Jesus Christ, that all the sacrifices, everything in the Old Testament was just foreshadowing the coming of Christ. That’s what they really were to look forward to, that He would forgive sins, that He would bring grace.

We’ve got other what God calls mysteries in the Bible. The fact that in the Old Testament and even in the Gospels, the Jews and the Gentiles, there was this gulf between them. They were separated.

They didn’t like each other. And yet God, what mankind didn’t understand was that we all have the same spiritual need. We all need the same grace.

We all need grace from the same God. It was all provided the same way. And the Bible talks, I believe in Ephesians, about it being a mystery in the church.

That was the Jews and Gentiles being brought together as one in Christ. Folks, there’s so much about God we still don’t understand because we’re human and finite and incapable of fully understanding God. There’s so much we don’t understand because God hasn’t chosen to reveal everything to us. There are questions that go unanswered like the question of, again, talking about this with, We had a good conversation yesterday, didn’t we, Wyma?

Discussing yesterday, when did he realize he was God? When did Jesus realize he was God? And I said, I don’t know.

There are still so many things about God that I don’t understand, that we don’t understand. But what they knew of God up to the point when Jesus Christ came was only part of the picture, was only a shadow of what was to come. I gave you the example this morning of them beholding the glory of God for the first time.

What they had been doing was, when I was a kid, we had an eclipse at school. And we didn’t get to go out and look at it. The older kids did, but they were afraid we’d go ahead and stare at it and blind ourselves.

But the older kids, I’m told, made these things with pinholes in them that they could look through. And I guess they trusted them to look through paper and not blind themselves. They didn’t get to see the fullness of the eclipse.

They looked through the hole and saw portions of the eclipse, saw what they were able to handle. But they weren’t able to look directly at the sun. Before Christ came, that’s what mankind was doing to God.

There’s so much fullness and so much glory that we couldn’t even comprehend it, and we’re staring at God through a tiny little hole and saying, oh, yeah, I see everything. We know what God’s about. Imagine going, those of you who are married, going through your whole life and only looking at your spouse like this.

Imagine never talking to them. Don’t try that, Christian. That’ll drive me crazy.

Imagine never talking to them. Imagine any time you wanted to discuss something with your spouse, you had to do it in writing. It would take a long time to try text messaging.

It would take a long time to convey any information between the two of you. As a matter of fact, when Christian and I fight, we fight by text messaging. So we don’t feed off each other’s emotions.

And you think, is it really worth it to say this after all the trouble? But imagine only looking at your spouse through a little sliver between your fingers and only text messaging what you had to say to them. Not much of a relationship, not much of a knowledge of one another, is there?

They had for thousands of years looked through their fingers and seen part of God. They’d only understood part of what God had to say. But when Jesus came, it’s like the blinders came off, and they heard God speak with a human throat, and they saw God in human form, and they saw the culmination, the fulfillment of everything God had said He was going to do for thousands of years, all fulfilled in one person.

The truth that they had only seen in part, the truth that they had only seen a little bit of, they got to see everything that God wanted to reveal in that one person. So when it says that he came and truth came by Jesus Christ, that’s what it’s talking about. The truth of God came in its fullness and was understood in the person of Jesus Christ. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. And it tells us here that no man hath seen God at any time.

I keep trying to say at any time and it keeps coming out in any time. No man hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

He says he’s in the bosom of the Father. That indicates a very close relationship. If you don’t believe me, walk up to a stranger sitting on a park bench and try to lay your head on their chest. It’s not going to work out well.

We don’t do that because we’re not close to them, right? Don’t try that. That was hypothetical. Don’t really try that.

We don’t walk up to strangers and lay our head on their shoulder or their chest because that’s a close thing. And yet Benjamin, you all saw him this morning. He threw the fit, threw himself down to the floor.

I said, okay, I’m going to let you. bumped his head on the floor, hurt himself, and then he wanted to climb up and put his head on daddy’s shoulder, on daddy’s chest. He’s my son. I let him do that because we’re close.

When it says that the son is in the bosom of the father, that indicates a close, intimate relationship, that he’s not just any other created being. He really is the son of God. And it says no man had seen God at any time.

People had seen glimpses of God the father. Folks, this could be talking physically. It could be talking spiritually.

We know that Moses saw part of God as he walked by. We know that Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden, but the Bible’s clear. Nobody was able to look full on and experience the whole glory of God the Father.

But Jesus Christ, the closest person to God the Father, the spitting image of His Father, if you’ll let me say it that way, came and declared Him. Came and revealed everything that God chooses to reveal about Himself. That’s not to say there’s not more to God than what we know because there is.

But what God has chosen to reveal, the grace and truth that God has chosen to reveal to mankind, folks, it was all revealed in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the revelation of God. He brought grace and truth to mankind. Gave us a glimpse of the full glory of the Father.

I shouldn’t say glimpse. He gave us full view of the glory of God the Father for the first time. He gave us the opportunity for a relationship with God the Father that we’d not had before.

I was listening to somebody yesterday. It was talking about when the Bible calls him Abba, Father. The word Abba means Daddy.

And when they wrote down the words of Jesus, they translated them into Greek for the New Testament that we have today. This morning, as a matter of fact, I heard this. But they were so startled by the word Abba in Aramaic because it was so unusual to call God by that intimate name Daddy that they didn’t even translate it into the Greek.

They left it in Aramaic. So everybody knew exactly the word that was used for God. Nobody in the Old Testament called God Daddy.

And yet the Bible’s clear. Now that Christ has come, we have the opportunity to call him Abba or Daddy. Abba, Father.

Folks, Jesus Christ came and brought us the opportunity for a relationship with God the Father of such closeness that we’ve never had before.