Church Requel
Today we begin our new sermon series from the Gospel of John. We "camp out" today on one verse only - John 1:14.
The God Who Goes Camping
Mary Kay and I learned very early in our marriage that we loved to go camping together. We tent camped and canoed all over Ontario, Canada in our first couple of years. In 1986, when our youngest two children were still toddlers, we purchased a motorhome and over the next 15 years, our family camped in 44 different states. We loved to travel and explore. We loved the fact that no matter where we went and who we saw, we were “at home” in each place. We LOVED to camp!
Today I want to tell you about the God Who goes camping! We learn about this and many other unique things about God from the Gospel of John. Over the next several months I would like to “camp out” with you in this 4th gospel book. The Gospel of John is unique in 4 ways:
Unique GOSPEL: The Book of John is a gospel - it tells us the GOOD NEWS about Christ. But it is different than the other 3. Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels - they all appear to be in sync with one another, telling many of the same stories. The Gospel of John is unique, telling us things that happened with Jesus that we would never know about if it wasn’t for John’s Gospel.
Unique DESCRIPTION: We learn so much more about who Jesus is from John. The Word. The Son. The teacher come from God. The prophet that should come into the world. The Messiah. The Holy One of God. The Lamb of God. The Coming One. The Bread of Life. The Good Shepherd. The Resurrection. The Way, the Truth, the Life. The true Vine. A Paraclete. Rabbouni.
Unique HISTORY: We are creatures of our own culture and history. Most of us have grown up with the order of the New Testament with John as the 4th gospel and the 4th book of the NT. But scholars tells us that John was written much later than the other gospels and much later than most of the other books of the NT! What if it were the last? What if the Gospel of John was not just filling in the blanks for the other Gospels but for all of Christianity?
Unique PERSPECTIVE:We often think of any of the books of the NT as an author sitting down and writing out the words on a scroll. But what if the Gospel of John were really a series of sermons from the youngest disciple given over his lifetime? Near the end, John and his own disciples decide this should be written down? These are the teachings of Jesus as taught and preached by a first hand eyewitness and lived out through a lifetime of preaching experience!
Today - to get started - let’s consider just one very special verse:
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14
From this one verse we learn 7 amazing lessons!
#1 - The Word…We start where the Gospel writer begins in verse one: “In the beginning was the Word…” The Word is John’s unique description of Jesus. Jesus is not just any man… and for that matter Jesus is not just any god! Jesus is the Word. Next week we’ll talk more about this, but John’s teaching is that Jesus was always God - from the beginning, before our beginning, the very Creator God, the “all things were made through Jesus” God, the all things were created by God’s spoken WORD, that nothing that is here today were it not for this Jesus… this Word. God spoke creation into existence. This is the Word that John is talking about - The Word!
#2 - The Word became flesh…We have become so accustomed to this truth about Jesus - that He was fully God AND fully human - 100% each - that we tend to take this for granted. But think just how important and precious this is for your relationship with God. You don’t pray to a God Who is far away and Who cannot understand what you are going through. No! You pray to a God WHO TOOK ON FLESH. Who became flesh and bones. Who took on mortality. Who could become sick. Who could be disappointed. Who could cry. Who could die! God created you so He knows you better than you know yourself. But He also knows what it’s like to be you - to be fully human. Because He took on flesh!
#3 - … and made His dwelling among us… When we read this verse we think of Jesus, the Son of God (the Word) living among men and women. God coming to Earth as a baby and growing into a man. This is the idea of the incarnation (God with us), which we read about in Matthew and Luke.
John, however, has a different sense of this. The original Greek word he uses here could be most accurately translated, “he tented among us.” This, however, is not entirely how his readers would have understood it. They would have seen it this way: “he tabernacledamong us!” This understanding would have taken them (and us) back to the Old Testament book of Exodus when God traveled in the wilderness for 40 years with the Israelites. They literally built for God (at His direction given through Moses) a tent sanctuary/temple, where God would be worshiped. God tabernacled among them. And according to John, God the Son - Jesus, also tabernacled among them too!
#4 - … and we have seen his glory…There are two big principles to grasp ahold of here. The first, to go along with the idea of God tenting-tabernacling-camping among us - they say they have seen His glory! What does this mean? The Jewish rabbis had a description for the glory of God - they called it His “Shekinah” glory - and they used this word whenever they wanted to talk about the divine Presence or Dwelling of the Lord God here on Earth. This first Shekinah glory was seen when the Israelites were trapped by the Egyptians. The Shekinah glory of God was seen as the Pillar of Cloud during the day and the Pillar of Fire at night.
You might also remember that at one point Moses asked if he might see God face to face. God replied that no one could see his glorious face and live. And so Moses was hidden in a rocky crevasse and God covered the place where Moses was with His hand until He had passed by - so Moses only saw God as He was walking away.
Hold onto to that thought that no one could see God’s glory, no one could witness God’s Shekinah glorious Presence and live to talk about it. With that in mind, consider this astounding verse of John 1:14. John is saying that they (disciples and others) saw his glory. They were eye witnesses! This is critically important for everything that follows, because when we are talking about the miraculous events in John, we are talking about eye witnesses, who are sharing this with us. While this may not seem as miraculous as the other things in John, seeing God’s glory in the Presence of Jesus was an incredible, never before witnessed miracle all by itself!
#5 - … the glory of the One and Only Son… There is no other Son like the Son of God. He is unique! He is special! He is a one of a kind! He shares the Shekinah glory of the Father God, and John and the disciples were eyewitnesses.
Again, here John the preacher reaches back into his familiarity with the Old Testament - this time to Genesis 22. Do you remember the story of Abraham and Isaac? Genesis 22:2 - Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love…” Now the gospel writer/preacher is putting it all together. God never had in mind for Abraham to sacrifice his one and only son. But God was foreshadowing what He had already made the decision to do - to sacrifice His One and Only Son!
#6 - … Who came from the Father… This is a theme that John would return to over and over again. We will talk more about it next week, but this is how John begins His gospel:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son…”
John 4:34 Jesus: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me…”
John 5:19 “the Son can do nothing by himself; He can do only what He see His Father doing.”
John 6:27 Jesus: “On [the Son] God the Father has placed His seal of approval.” / And 6:37“All those the Father gives me will come to me.”
John 7:28“I am not here on my own authority, but He Who sent me is true.”
John 8:18 “You do not know me or my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”
Over and over again, practically every chapter - every sermon from John, gives us this picture of the unity between God the Father and God the Son. There is no place in Scripture where it is more obvious, culminating finally to John 14:9 “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father!”
#7 … Full of grace and truth. Jesus came from the Father “full of grace.” What is grace? Receiving what is not deserved. Jesus brings lots of gifts with Him. The grace of forgiveness. The grace of light. The grace of revelation. The grace of acceptance. The grace of becoming fellow children of God. The grace of eternal life. Over the course of this study in John we will see just how magnificent is this undeserved grace of God through His Son, Jesus.
But John was careful not to just stop at “full of grace.” That is certainly our tendency. To stop at grace. To stop at the gift and not look any further. You’ve heard the expression to never look a gift horse in the mouth? What does that mean? If you received the gift of a horse, you could examine the horse’s teeth to determine its health and its age. The common proverb to “not look a gift horse in the mouth” is an admonition to be grateful, to be thankful, to accept the gift with gratitude.
But John here is saying, it’s ok to be more than grateful. It’s ok to want to know more. It’s ok to look beyond grace. It’s ok to examine the God behind the grace. Why? Because Jesus came from the Father, full of grace and truth! John (and Jesus before him) did his best to explain the depths of grace from God. To also understand the truth of God in giving us His grace.
This truth from God was not just something received in grace through Jesus from God, but also something to be lived out in our lives because of God’s grace. God’s grace to us changes our truth! Changes how we live! Changes how we think! Changes how we relate to other people. Changes how we see ourselves in relationship both to God and to man.
And Jesus (according to John) was FULL OF BOTH! Jesus did not just give us the gift of grace and go light on the gift of truth. No! He was full of both! Some people - like the religious leaders of his day - were not all that interested in Jesus gift of truth. They thought they had things pretty well figured out. They didn’t want to change their minds. They didn’t want to change their way of living.
Conclusion: What about you this Sunday morning? As we prepare to go into this remarkable story and history and meanings from John about what he was taught and in turn taught others about this Word, this Son of God, this Jesus - do you come to these sermons with an open mind? Do you come with eager ears and a hungry heart? Do you want to accept the Son’s truth as much as you want to accept the Son’s grace?
This gospel is what has changed the course of history. But it’s not historical. This gospel has changed the course of politics, but it’s not political. This gospel has changed the course of religion, but it’s not religious. This gospel has changed the course of nations, but it’s not about large people groups.
It’s about the One and Only. And it’s about you. It’s about how you… and you… and you… each one individual and one at a time will respond to the One and Only Son. Are you ready?