Jesus, the Bearer of Grace and Truth

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in John chapter 1 this morning. John chapter 1. We’ve spent the last several weeks going through the beginning of John’s gospel, sort of unpacking what they call the prologue here, part of chapter 1, where John talks about the birth of Jesus.

And as I’ve told you over and over, unlike Matthew and Luke, John doesn’t tell us how Jesus came to earth, but he goes into more of the reason why Jesus came to earth. And he starts out by talking about Jesus being co-eternal with God the Father, Him being there from the very beginning, before there was a beginning. Talks about Him being involved in creation.

Then he goes on to talk about Him redeeming that creation. After we fell through sin and that creation became marred, Jesus came back as the one that God the Father sent to shine the light into that dark world and to redeem us. And it talks about John the Baptist bearing witness, bringing a testimony that Jesus was the Messiah of God.

And having John the Baptist bring that testimony is the culmination, is the end of a long line of prophets. From the very earliest pages of the Old Testament up to John the Baptist, there’s a deep and rich tradition of God’s messengers pointing people to Jesus Christ. And then last week we talked about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us full of grace and truth. The only begotten of the Father.

And the very simple point that I brought you last week is that in times that we feel like God doesn’t notice us, God doesn’t care. Of course, we know in our minds God cares. We know what God’s promises are, but it doesn’t stop us at times from feeling like we’ve been abandoned by God or worrying about having been abandoned by God.

But the fact that God sent His own Son, the fact that Jesus came not just to die for us, but to dwell among us and to be tempted in every way we are but without sin and to experience what it’s like to be human, that He would come and share our experiences and then take responsibility for our sins when He had none of His own and didn’t deserve what he got for ours is the best evidence we could ever have, the best evidence that you could ever have, that God loves you and God cares about you and that God will never leave or forsake you. He promised it all throughout the Old Testament and then he gave his son to prove it. If God was going to leave us, if God was going to abandon us, it stands to reason he would have done it when sin started.

When we as a human race rebelled against God, he would have been entirely justified to look at us and say, forget about y’all. Or as my grandfather used to say about people that made him mad, rain on them. So look at the human race and say, rain on them.

If they want to sin, let them enjoy hell. But God didn’t abandon us then. The Bible says that while we were yet sinners, while we were caught in the act, Christ died for us.

And that’s how God demonstrated his love for us, and that Christ died for us. So throughout his word, God promised that he’d never leave us. He promised that he’d send a Savior, and then he sent his own son to fulfill that promise.

And today we look at the end of this sort of introduction to the book of John, and we’ll move on to something else next week. But we see what all of this leads to in a changing of mankind’s understanding of God. And it says, starting in verse 15, John, bear witness of him and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake.

He that cometh after me is preferred before me, for he was before me. And this goes right along with what John said about not being worthy to remove the Messiah’s sandals, to unbuckle his sandals. If you were here Wednesday night when we talked about the baptism of Jesus, this goes right along with it.

John says, I’m not John the Baptist. Don’t get confused with John the Baptist who’s saying this and John the Apostle who wrote it down. John the Baptist is saying, I am not even worthy to be the messenger of the one who’s to come. He that cometh after me is preferred before me.

He’s greater than me because he was before me. Now, John the Baptist was born six months before Jesus. He’s not talking about his earthly life.

Jesus was before John the Baptist. Jesus has been from before the beginning of time. There’s never been a time when Jesus was not. And of his fullness have all we received in grace for grace.

Jesus is full and abundant and overflowing with grace, and we’ve received it from him. Grace on top of grace on top of grace more abundantly than we could ever have even imagined. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Moses came to bring us the law.

Moses came to set up the rules, and then grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Those laws, the law of Moses, was really just a picture. I mean, there were some other things that were accomplished, such as keeping the Israelites in the realization that they were supposed to be separate. but really the main aim of the law was to point us to our need for God through Jesus Christ. So Moses came to bring that law, and Jesus came to fulfill that law.

Jesus came to change everything, to fulfill everything, to transform our relationship to God, to one where we don’t come to Him through sacrifices and through rituals, because Jesus has already fulfilled all the sacrifices and rituals. He himself was the ultimate once for all sacrifice. No man had seen God at any time.

The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. We don’t get to see the face of God. We don’t get to see the face of God.

We don’t get to necessarily walk and visit with the Father the way the Son does, the way that Adam did in the beginning. But everything that we need to know about God the Father, we see in God the Son. And as I was thinking about this principle throughout this week, of Jesus really being the one that gave us a more complete understanding of the Father, I started to realize, well, I’ve realized for a long time, but I don’t always want to realize that we can learn a lot about the parent by the child.

Those of you who’ve ever taught in Sunday school or been teachers, you understand this. when I taught you could kind of tell what child went with what parent and you knew something about the parenting how the child was in class I see this though as much as he tries to resist it my father acts like his father he acts like my grandfather now I probably act more like my grandfather than he does but he still acts like him and as much as I try to fight it I act like my father sometimes Charla, amen and as much as I don’t want to claim it there are a lot of times that Benjamin acts just like me. Now, before you say, oh, okay, that makes sense.

There’s a lot of times he does not act like me. Some of you have read the story on Facebook already. Some of you have not.

And so I’ll go ahead and tell it because I think it’s funny. But the other night I asked him why he was playing with one of his sister’s toys. He wasn’t in trouble or anything.

It’s, why are you playing with that one? And he looks at me straight faced. No irony, no sarcasm, no malice, just because I’m a free American.

Yeah, weird to hear that indeed. And I sat there for a second and thought, did I hear what I think I just heard? I looked at Charla.

I don’t know. You were playing a puzzle or something. She didn’t even hear it.

She just hears me laughing. I don’t allow my kids to talk back, but I couldn’t even get on to him for that one. I just started laughing and turned red, and he looked at me and says, what, Daddy?

You say that all the time. Okay, so maybe no more talk radio on the way to and from school. But I told Charla, I said, Oh, my goodness, he’s turning into me.

And I did have a talk with him later about appropriate times to say things like that. We talked about it. I don’t want him to go to school in Malibu.

Benjamin, you need to stop talking. But I’m a free American. And they send him to the principal’s office.

You need to call the parents. Have you met the dad? Call Charla.

Just call her. He’ll get somewhere. So my son tells you a little bit about what I’m like.

My daughter does the same thing. she’s taken to liking to tease her brother and y’all may not have seen it but that’s a big part of my personality I love teasing my sister and my sister’s kind of gullible too but Madeline a few weeks ago had Benjamin convinced that their Nana’s best friend was a lion and he’s asking me why he’s never met the lion I’m asking him what lion Nana’s best friend are you saying liar Finally, I see Madeline smirking in the back seat, and I thought, yep, she’s mine. Our kids tell us something about what the parents are like, usually.

You may be sitting there thinking, I’ve got one that’s nothing like me. Okay, in general, in general, the children bear some kind of resemblance to the parents. I know mine do, unless they’re bad, and then I’ll say it’s not me.

That’s generally true of us, but our children are also a little bit different from us. So there’s nowhere usually where it’s a perfect comparison. But with Jesus Christ, it was a perfect comparison.

When you looked at Jesus Christ during those years of his growing up, during those years of struggling through the growing years, during young adulthood, during the years of his public ministry, when the people who were around him looked at him and saw the way he acted, saw the way he loved people, heard the things he taught, and saw how it was consistent with his life. When they saw the wisdom and the truth and the grace and the honesty, and when they saw all of it, they were seeing the perfect spitting image of the Father. And so it’s true that while we don’t get to see the Father, and there’s a lot about the Father that is still a mystery, What we need to see of the Father and what we need to know of the Father is reflected perfectly in the Son.

He revealed the Father. No man has seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son has revealed Him, has declared Him. And so John takes us through this passage where he just points out that Jesus came to make the Father known to us in a way that He wasn’t before.

Jesus came to make God not only knowable, but also known to a world that was alienated from him. The world, believe it or not, is alienated from God. I hear the phrase all the time, well, we’re all God’s children.

And I’ve probably said that at some point or another. We’re not. I took a pen, there you go, burst your bubble if you were thinking that.

I’m sorry. We’re not. I thought that for a long time too, but that’s not what the Bible teaches.

The Bible teaches that we are strangers and aliens from God. We are in rebellion against God. We have made ourselves God’s enemies.

And that sounds harsh, but God didn’t say he was our enemy. We made ourselves his enemy through rebellion and disobedience. The world is in rebellion against God.

The world hates God. The world, in our natural inclination, is to take the light that we see and reject it because we like the darkness more. That’s why Romans chapter 1 talks about our foolish hearts being darkened.

Because what we did know about God, we chose not to acknowledge. And so over time, God has grown distant from where we were with Him in the garden. Think about the closeness where the Bible says that Adam and Eve were in the habit of walking with God in the garden in the cool of the day.

You know why that sounds foreign to us? Because it is. Because that’s not the relationship between God and man anymore.

We have pushed God away and kept him at arm’s length, and man knows very little of God. And unless God were to stoop and condescend to tell us something about himself, we would never know him. Our small minds cannot handle his greatness.

And yet Jesus Christ came to make him noble. Jesus Christ came to show us what he was like. Jesus came to show us his love and his compassion and his mercy and his wisdom.

And yes, his judgment. All of those things. All of the characteristics of God.

Jesus came to reveal those. But he didn’t come to just make God knowable. He also came to make God known.

There’s a difference between knowable and known. Einstein’s writings are knowable to me. I could go look them up.

I can go get a book. I can go look on the internet and I can read all about Einstein’s theories. They are knowable to me, but they are not known.

I do not understand what Einstein. . .

I know from cartoons that it had something to do with E equals MC square. I don’t know what that means. I may know a lot of stuff.

There’s also a lot of stuff I don’t know. I may know a lot of stuff, but even though that’s knowable to me, that’s not one of the things I know. There are people here in town that are knowable to me.

It is possible for me to run into them at the store or go to their house and get to know them, but they’re not known to me. We see the difference. There are lots of things that we have the potential to know that we don’t.

Jesus came not only to make God knowable, but also to make him known. To say God is not just here and available, but God has actually shown up. God has stepped into your world.

The word became flesh, as it says in verse 14, and dwelt among us. Jesus’ whole mission on earth, as John tells us, was to make God known. And make his will known.

And make the salvation that he offers known. So he did that, first of all, by bringing mankind a new covenant from God. For thousands of years, they’d been operating under the old covenant.

You’re required to do these sacrifices. And there were many of them. I’ve been trying to read and understand the sacrifices and the temple rituals and the things that went on in the tabernacle, and it’s just a lot of stuff.

And I think I’ve mentioned that before and said, I read that and it just makes me thank God that we’re born now and not then. Because that’s another thing that’s knowable but not known. I’m not sure my brain can handle keeping track of all those details.

All the sacrifices they had to do. All the rituals they had to do. And still the whole point of the law was that they couldn’t keep the law.

That there was no way possible for them to keep the law to the letter. And so for thousands of years, you just make your sacrifices, you go through the rituals, you try to follow these laws about behavior, you try to wear the correct garments, you try to cut your hair the right way, you try to eat the right things, and there’s no assurance in there other than the faith that goes behind all of it. If it’s just about I can keep the rules, it didn’t work.

But if it was the realization that I can’t keep the rules, but these sacrifices remind me that God is eventually going to deal with the problem of sin. God took that old covenant where they were looking ahead in faith and fulfilled it. Put skin to their faith.

Sent Jesus Christ so that they wouldn’t have to offer bulls and sheep and birds anymore on the altar. Jesus Christ was offered once for all, as the book of Hebrews says. not every year as they were used to doing in the temple not every week as some churches do today think that they’re sacrificing the literal body and blood of Christ but once for all he was offered and now that picture is no longer necessary all those rules and regulations that schoolmaster that leads us to Christ is no longer necessary because we can look back in faith where they had to look forward in faith to something that they hoped God would do eventually we get to look back in faith to what we know God has already accomplished.

Jesus changed the entire dynamic of our relationship with the Father. To one of I hope He does, or from one of I hope He does someday to one of I know He already has. And now God offers forgiveness to us because of what Christ did.

Not because we can be good enough, not because we can earn it, not because I can go to church enough to get God to say, I like Him. he’s okay he can come on up or give money to the poor or be nice to people or any of these things that people think are going to get them to heaven if I just do enough good things to outweigh the bad it’ll work out it’s none of that it’s looking back and realizing that Jesus Christ did everything that was necessary and he’s already accomplished it and all we have to do is believe that he died for our sins and ask God’s forgiveness the law was given by Moses it says in verse 17 but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Moses brought the law, and Jesus brought the fulfillment of that law. Jesus brought mankind the undeserved forgiveness of sins.

And that goes along with the same verse. Moses brought this law that condemns us. If I tried to get to heaven just by my adherence to the law, I would never make it.

I like to think of myself as a law-abiding person. I try to follow the speed limit. I try to make sure I understand everything correctly on my taxes.

Kathy, we need to talk. But I was shocked by this statistic. About a year ago, I heard Rand Paul being interviewed and said that there’s something like 80,000 federal regulations just on the use of your land.

And talked about people that were brought up on federal charges just for building a pond on their land or something like that. And I thought, how are we supposed to keep up? That’s just earthly law.

How are we supposed to keep up with all these regulations? I probably, this is not an admission of guilt, if anybody is here from the NSA, I probably break 10 or 15 federal laws a day without even knowing it. There’s no way I can be a good person by my adherence to the law.

I’m just not capable of it. Well, the same thing goes with our spiritual life. I break God’s law sometimes without even trying.

I do not deserve his forgiveness. And I think that’s the thing we most need to understand about his grace. Grace, if we deserve it, is not grace.

It’s what we’re owed. I didn’t deserve his grace. And God doesn’t owe me a thing but death and separation from human health.

Because if I went by the law that Moses brought, I’m worthy of death and I’m worthy of separation and I’m worthy of hell. But Jesus brought grace. Jesus brought something that I could never deserve in a million years.

Jesus looked at me when even my best things that I had to offer were as filthy rags. Even the best of me is garbage by God’s standard of perfect holiness. And Jesus looked on somebody like that and was willing to love me anyway.

Our forgiveness is not owed to us. It’s something that he brought in spite of what we deserved. The law condemns us, but thank God Jesus brought grace to fulfill the law.

And so no longer do we have to live in constant fear of if I mess up, if I say the wrong word, if I have the wrong thought in my heart that God’s not going to love me, He’s not going to let me into heaven, there’s no longer that fear, there’s grace. And when you really understand grace, it’s like stepping out of a small, dark, closed-up, musty room and taking a big lung full of fresh air. It’s the most liberating thing to realize that God’s grace is there and it’s abundant and he offers forgiveness not because we deserve it but because we don’t.

And then Jesus brought revelation of the mysteries of God. It says no man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father he hath declared him.

There’s so much we don’t know about God. There’s so much we will never know about God. Those who were here on Wednesday night, I mentioned that for Stump the Preacher, I was going to try to answer a question that came from my daughter.

Those who aren’t here on Wednesday nights, I let people submit questions, and they write them down, and I study on them, and then I try to bring a presentation and answer their questions. My four-year-old daughter asked me one night last week, who is God? And I thought, okay, seminary definition is not going to cut it.

This is a four-year-old. And I start trying to understand, or I start trying to explain, and thought, I need to research this some more. I mean, I know who God is, but you know how you can tell you’ve really grasped a concept when you can explain it to a four-year-old?

So I thought, I need to do some more studying on who God is, and get it to where a four-year-old could understand it. Because I don’t think I have a four-year-old’s understanding of God. And yet the Bible tells us to come to him as a little child.

There is so much that I don’t understand about God. I understand enough, but there’s so much more that I want to understand. And in their day, they understood God even less than we do.

They didn’t have the New Testament. They had less of an understanding of God than we do. And Jesus Christ came and showed them exactly what they needed to know.

Is the Father a wrathful judge? Is He just love and grace and mercy all the time? Is He fun?

Is He austere? You know what? Jesus showed us what he was like.

And the truth is he’s probably the perfect balance of all of those things and more. But Jesus came and showed us exactly what he was like. Folks, we know God and his will because Jesus revealed them.

If God through his son had not come and done what he did, we would not understand God the way we do. We would have no hope of understanding God the way we do. We’d have no hope of understanding God’s will for our lives the way we do.

we would have no hope of the relationship with God that we have I can’t I don’t want to just say the same thing over and over but I feel like this is worth repeating God adopts us as his sons he calls us his friends I didn’t do that I didn’t build that I’m not responsible for that relationship Jesus gave me that Jesus gave all of us that we wouldn’t have it apart from him so why did Jesus come it was to totally transform our knowledge and understanding of the Father to give us a relationship with Him and an understanding of His will and help us to know Him and see Him for who He is. No man has seen God at any time but the only begotten Son of God which is in the bosom of the Father, He’s declared Him. He’s made Him known to us.