The Glory of Incarnation

Hello Church Family!

Advent is a season of anticipation, as we await Christ's birth in our hearts, just as Israel awaited the promised Messiah.

This week, we'll explore the Gospel of John and his depiction of Christ's incarnation, a foundational yet mysterious truth of our faith—God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. This profound act highlights the value of human life and dignity, while also calling us to engage with one another in an incarnational way.

Grace and Peace,

Rev. Adam Thornton

Sermon Transcript:

Great are you, Lord, and greatly to be praised. All honor, all glory, all power belong to you, O Lord, and to you alone. You created the heavens and the earth by your Word. All things were created by your Word; all things are sustained.

You raise high and bring low the nations. You give grace to the humble. You resist the proud. And through your son Jesus, you have made a way for us.

And so we give you all praise and glory, power and majesty. We bless you, O Lord, and we bless the name of your son Jesus. By this name, all people might know you.

We give you thanks for your presence here among us, Lord Jesus. We give you thanks for the life that you offer to all of us.

And in this season of Advent, in the beginning of the Christian year, we look and remember that you are the birth of our Lord and Savior into this world.

We stand amazed. We stand amazed at this great mystery. We bless you, O Lord. May you hear our songs, may you listen to our hearts, and may you be honored and glorified today, we pray in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen and amen.

Merry Christmas!

We are firmly in Advent, the beginning of the Christian year, as we focus on Jesus Christ and His Advent into this world. So fitting that we begin the year remembering Christ, and then we remember in the spring His death and resurrection, kind of these huge moments within the life of the church where we experience the fullness and the grace of Jesus Christ.

Before we begin our time of reflecting on the Word of God, I wanted to make an announcement just to let you know. On Thursday of this week at 11 a.m. on the main campus, we will be having a funeral for Nancy Bovee, who is the mother of Hank Seal, who many of you know. So that will be at 11 a.m. I know they would appreciate it if you are able to come and be a part of that.

And then there will be a reception following that at Hog Heaven. But that will be 11 a.m. this Thursday in the main sanctuary. That will be a time where we celebrate her life and honor Christ.

So would you join me in prayer?

The wonder and power of your Advent into this world. How Advent is traditionally a time of waiting, of waiting on you, Lord, to act on our behalf, of waiting for your voice to speak into our life.

As Zechariah waited to speak until his wife had given birth to his son, John the Baptist, as Mary waited and treasured all these things in her heart until the birth of our Lord Jesus.

Lord, we wait on you for answers in our own life, decisions that we have to make, vocational decisions, family decisions, decisions about...

And Lord, we invite you into our lives anew in this Advent season in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

If you have your Bibles, if you will turn them on, or you can use an old school one like mine, we're going to be reading out of John 1, verse 14.

And I want to give us just a little bit of an introduction to what we're about to read. It seems like a different reading for Christmas. Normally, by this time, we're talking about shepherds. We're talking about Herod. We're talking about Mary and Joseph.

But I want to take us in a little bit different direction this season and help us to maybe think about something we're not used to thinking about.

We're going to be reading out of John 1, verse 14. But I want to read up to that, beginning in verse 1. Don't worry about seeing that on the screen or anything. I want you just to listen, because John takes a very different approach as he tells the story of Jesus.

John 1, beginning in verse 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made, and without Him, nothing was made that has been made.

In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through Him all men might believe. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through Him all men might believe.

He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him.

He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him. Yet to all who received Him, those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, children born not of natural descent nor of human decision or husband's will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

We have in the Gospels the accounts of Jesus' life. And in Matthew and Luke's Gospel, we have what are called the birth narratives. We have those things which tell us about from the time Jesus was born, just actually a little bit before He was born, the things, the circumstances that were going on.

Matthew takes this approach from the perspective of the king is born. Luke sees someone of low esteem and low means, someone who can identify with the poor. And in those two Gospels, we have these narratives that talk about shepherds and magi and kings and such.

But Mark has no birth narrative, and John's Gospel, we just read it, has no birth narrative. They go right to the ministry of Jesus or right before it.

But John's Gospel is even more unique in that John pulls way back. The camera goes very, very wide back into cosmic events, back to the very beginning, even with the words "in the beginning." John is born. This is helping us to remember Genesis one.

In the beginning, the Word was with God, the Word was God, a cosmic reality. And the Word that was God is born into the world. Slowly the camera moves in. It gets tighter and tighter as it approaches this singular event in human history.

Somehow, some way, incarnation happens. God puts on flesh and dwells with you and I. C.S. Lewis calls it the grand miracle that takes place. The Word becomes flesh.

After all, that's what incarnation is all about. It's about a closeness. It's about a nearness. It is a picture of God drawing near to His creation.

And so John takes this cosmic view, this view and this verse, verse 14, that frames everything else in the entirety of the scriptures. From Genesis to Revelation, all points to this hinging event in John's Gospel.

The God who is close, the God who draws near, the God who's given examples over and over again of His desire not simply to create, but to be involved in the activities of His creation, to be close and imminent and near.

At its zenith appears to us. In Christ, the Word became flesh. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld His glory, John says.

We have reached out and grabbed His arm. He's here. Hebrews calls Him the God-man, fully God and fully human. He identifies with us in every way, save for our sin.

Think about that for a moment. Dwelling. You know, if you want to think about important ideas and grand philosophies and pictures and ideas, you need to go small to understand them.

For instance, have you thought what it must have been like for Jesus as He lived as a human being? We don't probably think about that too much.

I wonder if Jesus had insomnia on occasion. If when He woke up like us, His hips weren't working that morning. If His knees ached, if He stubbed His toe, if Jesus had an ingrown toenail from all the walking that He did.

I wonder if Jesus... Jesus had dandruff. I wonder if He had a peculiar laugh that set Him apart from the other disciples, and if so, what was that?

That's what John means when he says we've beheld His glory. We've beheld the humanness of the deity somehow in bodily form. We've observed what Paul says in Philippians 2, that Jesus leaves His power and glory and majesty and humbles Himself and becomes a servant, putting on flesh and dwelling with us.

Incarnation is, after all, about dwelling. From impersonal to present.

There's a couple of words in the Greek I'm not going to pronounce them, but I'm going to give you what they say to give us a clue about what's going on in verse 14 of chapter 1 of John's Gospel.

The first word is the word "dwell." The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Dwell. That word also can be rendered as the word "tabernacle."

Now that should immediately draw our attention or our memory should flash if it's working this way. This is a great example. We'll use that expression again in the message I want to speak about because it's quite clear, but it's a very interesting example and one of the very basic ones.

The word "dwell" is the word that's in the Bible. The word "dwell" in the Gospel is the word "dwelling," and the word "dwell" is the word "dwelling," which is the word "dwelling."

And we're going to look at that word "dwell" for a moment in a minute, but if you're in the Holy books, create a dwelling for Him in the very center of the Israelites.

The Torah tells us that as they were walking through the desert and as they set up camp every night, they would put the tabernacle, this dwelling, at the very center of the encampment, and all the tribes of Israel would camp around it so that God was right there in the middle of His people.

At night with a pillar of fire and by day a pillar of smoke.

I don't know if you all have seen on social media, there's this wondrous thing in the sea of garbage that we have to go through. Every now and then there's a gem, and this is called AI Bible.

Have you all seen this or maybe looked at it? It is incredible because what it does is it harnesses the power of AI and it takes familiar stories or images from the scriptures and it kind of counter juxtaposes them against what we see or understand and what really is going on in the Bible.

So it's amazing. For instance, it says what we think of that God dwells with the Israelites in the wilderness, and it has these tents and all these other tents and people are walking, and it's kind of real basic.

And then it says what really happens, and it shows the tabernacle, and there is this gem. It's a giant powerful pillar of fire that is shooting up into the heavens. It's incredible to imagine God right there visibly, tangibly in the midst of His people.

And as the Israelites go into the land that God has given them, as they receive that land, they construct a temple where His name would be put permanently in the temple.

And they travel to this place to worship and offer sacrifices and literally believe, as we might believe someone resides in a home in our neighborhood, that that is God's house. That's where He lives.

The prophet Ezekiel says that the ark of the covenant where God's presence dwells is the footstool of the king. He creates a temple. He creates this incredible image of God enthroned, and where His feet touch the earth is exactly where the ark of the covenant is. Where heaven meets earth. Dwelling.

The second word that we see that comes right before dwelling in the Greek is the word in Greek for "was made."

And that word expresses a person or thing that is in a state of change. And that word expresses a person or thing that is in a state of change. That changes its property and enters into a new condition, becoming something it was not before.

You might think of the caterpillar that goes into the chrysalis, and when it emerges, it is something different. But in a sense, it is still what it was before. It keeps some of its identity. It was destined to become that.

But now it's got a new condition, something not before. That is the incarnation. Not that Jesus has somehow crawled into a chrysalis and has sprouted wings to fly off back to heaven, but rather that Jesus, the eternal Word of God, has become flesh.

And what's even more interesting, and I know this will really make some of you English majors happy, but in Greek there are multiple tenses. Not just past, present, future, but they have another like half dozen that really serves to confuse anyone who studies Greek.

But there's this tense called the aorist tense. A-O-R-I-S-T. And that aorist tense, whenever you see a word in that tense, it means the world. It means that it is definite and it is completed.

It is a completed action. And so that word for "was made" is in the aorist tense. And what that means is this, that God has so wanted to identify with us that Jesus was made flesh and dwelt among us, and it is permanent.

It is not like the tabernacle, which no longer exists. It is not like the temple that was torn down. No, in Christ, with flesh, Jesus has become the final word of God on dwelling with you and I.

And that is ongoing, this idea of dwelling in the spirit of the living God that lives in every single person who loves God and is called according to His name. Amen.

That means when we enter into glory, when all things are made new, Jesus will be human. You may not have thought about that a lot. He won't be this ethereal ghost that is floating over everything, and He will be a human being.

God so wants to dwell with His people. He so wants to be right in the midst of creation that He says, "I'm going to put on flesh for all time."

There is no greater verse that demonstrates the intimate connection we have with God than John 1:14, demonstrating that God is all in. There is no going back.

Truly, the prophet Isaiah was right. His name will be called Emmanuel, God with us. But we even might go further and say, you can change that middle word "with," not only God with us, but God for us. Close.

In the first service in children's time, I told you, I'm going to put on flesh for all time. I talked about, I asked the kids, isn't it great when you have like a soccer game or a swim meet or you have a recital or something like that, and your grandparents show up?

Or maybe an aunt and uncle appear and they're there. And not only that, but maybe when you go home after dinner, they stay the night. And you get to have them the whole evening and early in the morning, and they're up and having breakfast together.

Isn't that great? Isn't that awesome to have that? Absolutely. It's great to have family around us, to connect, to be close. It's great to share our victories and know that there are people there in our defeats when we're sad and broken, who will gather around us to rally for us.

Those who celebrate when we have success and those who stay close when we experience the hardships of life. It's great to have people in your camp. Part of it. Part of your tribe, people who care about you. Connection is important.

I've told this before, but I remember when I was in Bible college where Melanie was fortunate enough to meet me and date me. We had to have a student ministry, and my roommate and I chose street ministry.

Now, we were 18 or 19. We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a choice of which neighborhoods to go in and the rules by which we did that. We couldn't enter into any bars or clubs or anything, but we were to talk to people and get to know them.

And it seemed very ridiculous to me to start talking to people that I've only just met about Jesus and telling them things when I had no relationship, no connection to them whatsoever.

And so I decided to take a different tact. I thought, you know what? I'm just going to talk to people and hear their stories. And so that's what I did.

I talked to people and asked about their life. I didn't express shock because they were dressed differently or looked differently or anything like that. I really tried to hear their story and not to interrupt.

And I'll never forget, there was a young lady there who was decked out all in black. She had the very look of goth. That was real big back in the late 80s, early 90s. That was kind of the fad at the time.

And so she was decked out in black. She was decked out in that. But what caught my attention was not the color of her dress or the dark makeup that she wore. It was that she had a rather large safety pin through the side of her cheek.

It went in her mouth and came out of her cheek. And it was not small. It was rather large. And so I asked her, innocently, I went to her and I said, I said, listen, I mean no disrespect. I'm legitimately curious why you would do that. Why would you put a safety pin in your face?

And she said, very clearly, because I don't want to be like everybody else. I don't want to conform.

And I remember thinking, you succeeded. But then what happened next was very interesting. Because she said that to me with great confidence and assurance that she wanted to strike out and be different and not conform to the culture.

And then she walked to a group of people that looked exactly like her. And I remember that day thinking, everybody needs someone.

We all long for connection. We all long to be a part of something. Because the human soul was made to connect. We're designed that way.

And if you don't believe it, the pandemic demonstrated it. When there is no social interaction, it wreaks havoc in the lives of human beings. It affects somehow the soul of a person.

Larry Crabb in 1997 published a book called Connecting. Larry Crabb, a famous Christian counselor, very renowned, wrote this book. And in the introduction, he writes this about how soul wounds are healed.

Maybe a prophetic book considering the pandemic. He writes this: we must do something other than train professional experts to fix damaged psyches. Damaged psyches aren't the problem.

The problem beneath our struggles is a disconnected soul. And we must do something more than exhort people to do what's right and then hold them accountable.

Groups tend to emphasize accountability when they don't know how to relate. Better behavior through exhortation isn't the solution, though it sometimes is part of it.

Rather than fixing psyches or scolding sinners, we must provide nourishment for the disconnected soul that only a community of connected people can offer.

Do you hear that last word, last phrase, that only a community of connected people can offer? He goes on to say that the greatest need is not for more Christian therapists and moralists, but for authentic Christian communities where the heart of God is home, where the humble and wise learn to shepherd those on the path behind them, where trusting strugglers lock arms with others as together they journey on.

That's what Emmanuel means. God with us and in turn, we with each other.

There's no coincidence that in this idea of connecting that Jesus, when asked what the greatest commandment is, says to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, to connect with God and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Connection. The Lord who made us, made us to connect with one another, to dwell with each other, to be present.

This is a God who is near, not far off and uninterested and disconnected, but a God who so wanted to be with us that He put on flesh.

You and I are called to do the same for one another. Our invitation to follow Jesus this week is in the midst of the busyness of this season.

Some of us have already been to three Christmas parties, and we've got about another four more before the season's done. If we start to think about it, if we see another one of those barbecued little weenies again, we will likely explode.

I get it, there's a lot that's taking place. But I want to leave you with three things, three ways for you to follow Jesus in this season.

So the first one is this. When you're shopping, when you're out to eat with friends, family, work colleagues, as you prepare for this season, see people.

I don't mean look at them, but see them. See your servers or those that are behind the counter to check you out as you prepare to leave the store. See the people who help you to find what you're looking for.

See them. See behind the service they're providing and into their life. And interact with them. Tell them thank you. Not as you're leaving, but look them in the eye and thank them.

Or better yet, ask them how they're doing. If there's an opening. If there are 85 people in Starbucks, don't ask them how they're doing, okay? Because you will create more stress.

But if there's a window, an opportunity, ask how they are. And don't ask it in passing. Don't say, you know what? Hey, how are you? And then leave, like we often do.

But pause and listen to what they say. Ask them about their life beyond the business that you are interacting with them concerning. Be relational, not transactional.

Second, you will never have enough time. You will have to make time. So make time to have coffee, lunch, or dinner with a friend or dessert.

Maybe a family member or a work colleague. And listen to their story. And I mean really listen. Be curious.

When you sit down with them to eat or you buy their lunch or you buy their coffee, ask them about their life. And then listen. Really listen.

Don't just listen until they will stop talking so you can say what you want to say. But make the whole time about them and their life and their story.

Don't patronize them, but listen to their story and their life. And when they ask you out of politeness about your family and your job and your life, politely redirect the conversation back to them and their life.

And listen to them. When you do that, you give them perhaps the greatest gift of all: your attention.

And last, make time again. Because remember, you will not have time. You must make time to read and sit with the stories of your life. The stories of the birth of Jesus.

Grab one of your kids. Bring your spouse along. Bring your whole family together. Or maybe sit by yourself and read Matthew and Luke's account of the birth of Jesus.

Sit with it. Don't just read it. Okay, I got to do what the pastor says. He wanted me to read it. I don't really want to read it. If you're going to do that, just don't even read it.

But sit with it. Think about it. Put yourself into the story. Who would you be? Why? How would you interact with what was going on?

Ask the Lord to speak to you about the different elements in the passage and to remind you of really what's at stake in the story of Jesus for our life.

Interact with people around you. Make time for a friend, a colleague, or someone else to listen to their story. And sit with the story of Jesus' birth this Advent season.

Follow Jesus. Connect with Him. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Emmanuel, God with us, dwelling with us. This Christmas, make the time to listen, to watch, to interact, and be Christ for others.

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.