Celebrating A Timeless Jesus At Christmas Series

Christmas kicks off at Cross Church officially today! I hope this is the best Christmas for your family and you have experienced.

Now perhaps the best news concerning Christmas came from our friends at Hallmark. Hallmark announced they are really close to developing a second movie plot.

Seriously, thank you for joining me for a Christmas sermon series entitled, A Timeless Christmas. It really is quite amazing that all over the world, billions of people will stop everything they are doing to celebrate this Son of a carpenter, born in a “no nothing” town, to a teenage girl and a young man who wasn't even His biological father. Today, Christmas is a worldwide phenomenon observed in a million ways every year by billions of people.1 Churches will celebrate Christmas with candlelight celebrations to pageants to even live nativities with many of the animals that witnessed the first Christmas.

I invite you to find the Gospel of John with me. This morning I want you to receive a gift that will never disappoint you – the gift of Jesus.

Today’s Scripture

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:1-5, 12-13).

In these five short verses of sixty-five words, John gives us enough truth and enough theology about the person of the Lord Jesus Christ to fill up five books and 65,000 words. Someone has well said about this passage: “Never has so much been said in so few words.”

What is Christmas with giving gifts? And it seems that every so often, there’s one gift that you just have to have, right? You’ve probably dedicated some brain cells to gifts and gift-giving. Who doesn’t like presents for everyone brimming from underneath a Christmas tree? Jesus is the best gift you can receive this Christmas for three timely reasons.

1. Jesus is the gift you will never return.

2. He’s the gift that will never go out of style.

3. And the gift that you always need.

This Christmas, I want to convince many of you to believe and receive Jesus Christ.

1. The Eternal Jesus

If wanted to gather all the information about Christmas from the four gospels, you’d be surprised by the gospel of John. There’s no genealogy of Jesus’ family in John’s gospel like Luke and Matthew have. There’s no story about the nativity, no Bethlehem story, and no manger in John’s gospel. We don’t find anything about the boyhood of Christ in the Gospel of John either. There’s a lot John doesn’t include. But John does one thing that no other gospel does: he takes us to Jesus’ very beginning.

Bethlehem was the beginning of Christmas, but it wasn’t the beginning of Jesus. You see, the true Christmas story commences before creation, continues with a cradle, before carrying on to a cross, and it concludes with a crown.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2).

Jesus has been portrayed as, among other things, a cynic philosopher, an apocalyptic prophet, a zealot, a rabbi, a Pharisee, a feminist, and a radical egalitarian.3 John says He’s so much more than that.

1.1 Jesus in the Beginning

When John discusses the origins of Jesus, he seems to want to remind us of the beginning of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

“In the beginning” is the very first three words of your Bible. In fact, the three English words “In the beginning” are but 1 Hebrew word which we translate, Genesis. When John wants to discuss the beginning of Jesus, he doesn’t start at His birth. When John tells the story of Jesus’ early days, he doesn’t start with the Wise Men, Mary, and Joseph in Bethlehem. Instead, John goes back to the beginning of all things, the beginning of the universe. John wants to take you all the way back. Because Jesus didn’t begin to exist at Bethlehem. Instead, He simply became a human there in the nativity.

Jesus is Genesis; He’s there at the very beginning. Jesus is the root of the very universe and He’s at the beginning of history. Before there was a cosmos there was a Christ. Before there was a sun to shine, a moon to glow, a star to twinkle, or a river to flow, there was Jesus.