I want to encourage you during the holiday season to include in your plans, to go see
the movie, The Nativity Story.
A few weeks ago I was able to preview a version of it and came away mightily impressed with
how the producers of this particular movie have captured the essence of the biblical
story.
I may add to it a little bit to make it a drama for the screen, but it gives you an
idea of how things might have happened 2,000 years ago.
And I would tell you in advance that it's also the Christmas card version of the story
in that, for example, the wise men come to the manger scene, which in the Bible that
does not seem to be the case.
But nonetheless, it is a marvelous story and it's one of which the gospel is presented.
So I would encourage you not only to go, but to take a friend along and expose them to
the truth of the coming of the Savior.
I believe it starts in theaters this coming week.
In their gospels, Matthew and Luke provide what we know about that Christmas story, about
the birth of Jesus the Christ.
They recount how he in fact got his name, Jesus.
John in his gospel, however, gives another name to him as he comes into the world.
And I invite you to turn to the gospel of John and the first chapter as we begin our
message this morning in John chapter 1.
The name that John gives to Jesus is that of Logos, the word.
As he begins to recount the life of Jesus, he wants us to know that this man tells us
what we must know to know God personally.
He is the word of God.
The word is God's communication to you personally.
Jesus explains God's attitude and his purposes for humanity.
We're going to look into the chapter to verse 14 where it says, the word became flesh.
That's the Christmas story, isn't it?
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.
John in the prologue to his gospel, the first 18 verses, makes several statements about
the word.
He makes it very clear in verse 1 that the word is God himself.
Make no mistake about that.
But when we come to verse 14, he gives us another insight.
He says that this eternal word, God himself, became flesh and lived among us.
He became flesh.
He always was God.
But there was a moment in time and history when this eternal word of God became something
more than what he had been before.
A change of state took place.
He who had always been deity became man.
John says that he lived for a short time among us.
While he was here, he displayed his glory as deity.
The divinity that was his as the one and only, the unique one of God who came from God displayed
his glory for all to see.
That glory can be summarized, says John, in this, that he was full of grace and truth.
Now it's that particular phrase that I want to try to unpack for us a little bit this
morning and also at a subsequent Sunday service.
The word became flesh and he was full of grace and truth.
Full of grace means that in Jesus we see the greatest possible expression of God's compassion
for his people.
He is full of grace and kindness.
The Bible says that Jesus is God's gift to the world.
And in him, in Jesus, you have God's grace in its fullness.
That is, in this gift God left nothing out of his grace.
His grace in all of its fullness is available to all who will believe.
Notice what he goes on to say, for example, in verse 16, from the fullness of his grace,
we have all received one blessing after another.
What he says, and out of his fullness we have received grace upon grace.
In other words, Jesus Christ is such fullness of God's grace that he's like the ocean itself,
which keeps bathing the shores of the world with its waves.
One after another laps at the sand, one after another.
And grace upon grace comes upon us who believe because of its fullness in the person of Jesus
Christ.
God's kindness knows no limit to you in Christ.
John uses the word grace four times right here in our text.
And then he doesn't use it again.
It really is Paul who unpacks the riches of God's grace for us, because the word grace
was one of Paul's favorite words.
Paul, in fact, takes the gift of the fullness of grace and he opens it for us so that we
can begin to see all that this gift of grace that comes in Christ, all that it includes.
We could turn to a number of passages in the New Testament where Paul talks about grace,
but I've chosen this morning one in 1 Corinthians chapter 1.
And I invite you to turn there as we read the text beginning in verse 3 of 1 Corinthians
chapter 1.
Please open your Bible and follow along, or if you don't have your own copy of the Bible
with you today, there's a copy near you in the pew, and I invite you to turn there.
1 Corinthians chapter 1 I begin reading in verse 3 where it says, grace and peace to
you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
What's the very first word in that verse?
Grace.
He says grace, along with peace, to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
He wants to go on and talk about this grace.
I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.
You see, Paul now wants to explain to us this grace in its fullness.
He wants to open the present and lay the pieces out for us to see.
For in him you have been enriched in every way, in all your speaking and in all your
knowledge, because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you.
Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ
to be revealed.
He will keep you strong to the end so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
Great God rather who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful.
I appeal to you brothers in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree with
one another so that there be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united
in mind and in thought.
While this letter of 1 Corinthians is largely a letter of correction by Paul to the church
at Corinth because it was a very troubled church, Paul astutely begins the letter on
a more congenial note.
He reminds them as he reminds all of us of God's provision by his grace.
First he tells us that you and I have unlimited resources to do God's will.
Verses 3 through the first part of verse 7.
We have unlimited resources says Paul.
What God purposes for your life is supported by all of the resources that you will ever
need.
God has already given you all that you will ever need to fulfill his purpose for your
life in this world.
Paul is writing here to the church as a whole and he says you are enriched in Christ, but
it's also true of us personally.
God has enriched us.
The word there means to make wealthy or to be richly furnished.
Have you ever been to one of the model homes that you see advertised in areas that are
being built out?
You go into the home and you admire not only the color scheme, but you begin to see the
furniture that has been placed there and the drapes and all the little pieces that make
a home beautiful.
You say to yourself, oh if I could just buy the model home, right, as if you could afford
it.
Because you see that home has been enriched.
That home has been filled out with things that are exactly what the home needs to make
the model sell other homes.
God tells us here that he has enriched us in Jesus Christ.
He has given to us in Christ all of the riches that we will ever need.
In 2 Corinthians chapter 8 and verse 9, Paul says to them in that letter, you know the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor.
That you through his poverty might become rich.
Rich with what?
Rich with the grace of God.
Paul is thinking here in this context especially of spiritual gifts.
He says to that church, you have all the gifts you need in speaking and in knowledge.
You have all that you need to fulfill God's will for you there in Corinth.
But I want you to know that's true of you personally as well.
God has enriched you as part of the body of Christ with spiritual gifts.
Yes, he's given you also natural gifts, which are part of the shape of who you are.
You have inclinations, you have attributes, you have abilities that come to you simply
because you're a human being.
You have certain interests and certain strengths and for that matter certain weaknesses.
They're part of who you are.
But Paul is talking about something different than that here.
He's talking about spiritual gifts.
Those unique and special abilities that the Holy Spirit brings to every child of God.
We have natural abilities by our first birth.
We have spiritual gifts and abilities by our second birth, our new birth in Christ.
God has enriched you with spiritual abilities to serve him.
He has blessed you.
And you are blessed to bless others.
God has richly given spiritual capacities to you to be a helper in serving them, serving
others and in doing that serving God.
So God has enriched us.
He has enriched you.
And you are blessed that you might bless others.
One of the things that we talked about in Beautiful Day was what do we say to people
when they ask the question, why are you doing this?
The answer to that is we are doing this because we are followers of Jesus who has called us
to be a blessing because that's what he is to the world.
We did what we did on Beautiful Day because we're followers of the one who blessed us
that we might be a blessing.
The reason that you and I serve and bless others is because we ourselves have been blessed.
You are personally given all of the resources that you could possibly use to carry out your
divine design.
God wants you to fulfill his purposes and he provides all of the tools for you to get
your job done.
In 2 Peter chapter 1 it says, his divine power has given us everything we need for life and
godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
His divine power has given us everything that we need for life and to live a Godward life.
So you say, if I'm rich, then how do I release these unlimited resources?
The answer to that is profoundly simple and at the same time most challenging.
How is it that you and I release the resources that God has already packed within us by his
grace?
It is through prayer.
You say, oh come on, couldn't you find something a little more sexy than that?
I'm sorry.
That's where it's at folks.
In fact, there's a little acronym that maybe you've heard for prayer.
Prayer releases all your eternal resources.
As you and I are people of prayer, we will experience in our lives the resources that
God has already given us by grace.
And those resources then will be unleashed to go out and to bless others as well.
There is a direct proportion.
There is a ratio between how much I pray and how much of the eternal resources that God
has already given to me I experience in my life.
If my life is a life, a Christian life that is impoverished, it's not because God has
failed.
It's because I have not spent time with God.
For as I pray, you see I become more intimate with God.
I become more open to God.
The aperture of my heart enlarges so that I'm able to experience and then release to
others the resources that God has put in me.
How much time are you spending in prayer?
There is no question that gets a person under conviction more quickly than that one.
Because if there is any place the devil fights you and me, it's at the point of prayer.
The devil doesn't mind if we're busy serving the Lord, if we're doing good things, as long
as we don't take time to pray.
You know the devil doesn't even mind if you're reading your Bible or reading good Christian
books or watching Christian television, as long as you don't pray.
Because it's when you pray, it's when you pray that those resources that God has already
put within you begin to come forth to bless your life and through that to bless others
around you.
I want to challenge you this morning to devote yourself to prayer more than you do now.
I know some of you are prayer warriors, but others of us, well, we only play at it.
God has already given you in Jesus Christ all of the resources you'll ever need.
You are rich in Him.
You are wealthy.
You are a prince, a princess of God.
And all of the grace, all of the power, all of the ability that you will ever need to
fulfill His purpose in this world is yours already.
And you will experience it when you begin to be serious about prayer.
And some of you know exactly what I mean, because that is the heartbeat of your life.
Oh, that it were the heartbeat of all of us.
It would change our church.
And we have our one night a month devoted to prayer as a church family.
And I see how many come.
It helps me understand the life of our church a whole lot.
If we are serious about experiencing God and serving God as a congregation, dear people,
it must begin with prayer.
And certainly a lot more than one night a month.
It means being in prayer on a regular, consistent basis, being with God.
But can we not at least one night a month come together to pray?
If we as a church fail, it will not be because God has not given us what we need.
It will be because we have not yet opened the resources of grace that God has already
given to us.
Prayer releases all your eternal resources.
Well Paul tells us secondly that out of this gift of grace that God has given us in Christ,
we have something more.
He says you have unlimited confidence to face the future.
He says to them, you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.
He will keep you strong to the end so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
Like the Corinthians, you and I live in a scary world.
We live in a world that is threatened by terrorism.
We live in a world that is under the threat of nuclear bombs and missiles from rogue nations.
We live in a time when the Western European civilization is crumbling and there is an
ascension of the Islamic civilization in the world.
We live in a period when there is the overthrow of moral values, when there is in many places
in the world the violent persecution of the followers of Jesus and there is looming persecution
in our own land.
We live in a very different world than the world that I grew up in as a child 50 years
ago.
It is a scary world.
The world back in those days of the 50s and the 60s was called the age of anxiety.
I want to say to you today that we have graduated to the time of terror.
People today long for personal safety and security, but the fact is that fear dominates
our culture.
But I have good news for you if you're a child of God.
If you're one of those who has believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and who has now received
this gift of grace out of his fullness, God's grace secures the future for you.
You need not live in fear.
The age in which we live is coming to its culmination.
I believe that with all of my heart.
How soon?
I do not know.
But I see the signs on the horizon that our Lord's coming is soon.
It was 50 years ago we began singing one of John W. Peterson's great hymns.
It said, Marvelous message we bring, glorious carol we sing, wonderful words of the King,
Jesus is what?
Coming again.
The chorus said, coming again, coming again, maybe morning, maybe noon, maybe evening,
and maybe soon.
Oh, what a wonderful day it will be.
Jesus is coming again.
My friend, there is absolutely no doubt about that.
There's a lot of uncertainty in our world, but there's one thing you can count on.
Jesus is coming again.
Paul says to the Corinthians 2,000 years ago, you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ
to be revealed.
You see now he is veiled.
He is a historical figure, only to some.
To others he is a myth.
And then there are those who count him an important teacher or moral instructor, an
example.
They do not perceive the truth that he is in fact God incarnate, the Word become flesh.
He is the Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.
They don't understand that.
But one day he is going to be unveiled.
Even now the Spirit of God unveils one heart at a time as people come to faith.
But there is a day coming when he will be unveiled to the world.
Last Monday some of us gathered over in the playground at Beacon School and Almoden Prep
where we had done the work on Beautiful Day.
It was so exciting.
The children had come to class on Monday when they had left the weekend before, the week
before.
They saw the playground equipment being taken away because it was old, but they had no idea
what was happening.
They got to school on Monday morning and now the building is painted.
The grounds have been groomed beautifully by you Beautiful Day volunteers.
And there in the playground was a brand new playground, one playground for the kindergarten,
one playground for the elementary school, and it was all covered in tarps.
It was veiled.
They didn't know what was underneath it.
They were eager to see.
And so we had a little bit of a dedication service and then the tarps were pulled off
and it was unveiled.
And oh the excitement as they began to climb on the playground.
I wish all of you could have been there to see it.
I knew at that point that we had done a good job putting that playground together because
it had a ton of kids on it, let me tell you.
They were all over that thing with excitement.
They could hardly wait to get their hands on it.
Dear friends, do we feel that way about the coming of Jesus?
Do we eagerly wait for Him?
That's one of the reasons that we in the West are beginning to see persecution on the horizon
is so that we will be more eager in our waiting for Christ.
Could it be that our hearts have grown complacent and careless with the ease of this age?
That we have become very comfortable in this culture as it has been?
That we have adopted it?
And that really we know Jesus is coming again because the Bible says about it but it'll
come in time.
Or do we eagerly wait for it?
That is to wait with intensity because that's what the word means here.
It's the eager intensity that you see in the hospital ward and the coming of a new baby
and that mother and father who are yearning for that little one to come, especially the
mom.
And there's an eager intensity waiting for that little one to come.
And dad can hardly wait to hold that little one.
Paul says in Philippians chapter 3, our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await a Savior
from there.
I wonder just how much of the church of Christ, at least in the Western world, understands
that our citizenship is in heaven.
It's not here.
Because if we understood that our citizenship, our real place of belonging, was over there,
we would be waiting with intensity for the Savior to come and as worldly and as divided
and as fleshly as this Corinthian church was.
And it was all of that and more.
It was a church that was eagerly waiting for Jesus to come.
The writer of Hebrews says Christ was sacrificed once to take away sins of many people.
And he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are
eagerly waiting for him.
Oh, may that be the spirit of our hearts.
We don't know what 2007 holds, but the followers of Jesus can confidently face it because of
the gift of grace.
We can look to the future with confidence.
Paul says he will keep you strong to the end.
The word end there means to the goal.
To the goal line, he will keep you strong.
You will be blameless on that day.
No charge against you.
Then he says God who has called you is faithful.
Maybe you aren't anxious about the world that we live in today, but you're anxious about
your own circumstances.
It could be that you're anxious about your job.
And whether that job is going to be there, or if you can really fulfill the responsibilities
that have been put before you.
Maybe you're fearful about whether what you've saved for retirement is going to be enough.
If you're going to make it to the end.
Perhaps you're fearful about your child and what's going on in your child's life, or your
grandchild.
Perhaps you have a child who's in the military.
Or someone you love is in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Or maybe today you're fearful about college and whether you're going to be able to make
it there.
You're going to have enough for your tuition.
You don't want the future holes.
Maybe it's a matter of illness.
And you don't want the future holes because of that.
I had an email from my sister this week in which she recounted the fact that her son
has now been engaged and his fiance, who was a professing Christian, but comes out of a
more religious background than Christian.
That his fiance had accepted Christ in the premarital counseling.
And she was rejoicing in the fact that now they were going to be certain to be married
and is one in Christ in 2008 and suffering from colon cancer.
She then put a dash and she said, I hope I'll be there.
What's the uncertainty of your future?
Would you write it on your heart this morning that whatever the question marks or the concerns
that you have may be, God is faithful?
God who has called you is faithful and he will keep you for that day when Jesus will
come.
And there is nothing that can separate that from you.
You are a part of that destiny and that calling.
And God is faithful.
He will keep his word.
Yes, there will be ups and downs and there will be question marks and there will be corners
and you don't know what's around them between now and then.
But understand this, that God in his grace is faithful to you and he will keep you all
the way of your journey until the very end.
Never doubt that.
That's a gift of grace, my friend.
Day when our world is longing for security.
You have it in Christ.
The final thing I want us to note about this gift of grace that Paul points out is that
you and I have unlimited motivation to embrace one another.
Paul begins now to shift his tone from the positive commendation to an appeal, an earnest
appeal out of his heart.
He appeals to them to embrace one another despite the conflict and the differences that
exist among them.
Somebody has said that Christians are like porcupines.
They have a lot of good points but you can't get too near them.
Well, that may be true.