The God Who Comes To Us Series

SERMON BRIEF

Date Written: August 9, 2010

Date Preached: August 15, 2010

Church: OPBC (AM)

FOUNDATIONAL ELEMENTS

Series: Recognizing and Responding to the Living Word

Title: The God Who Came to Us

Text: John 1:1-14 [Read passage here… put on screen when I start!]

ETS: John wanted his readers to fully understand that Jesus was God in the flesh.

ESS: John message to us today is the same, we can come to know God through coming to know this person Jesus Christ…God with us!

INTRODUCTION:

There was once a young boy who was very excited. His mother was going to have a baby and his parents had carefully told him how God was sending them a little brother or sister for them to love and care for.

Finally, the great day arrived. His parents brought home his new little sister to live with them. They took her to her room and put her in her bed. The little brother stayed behind when the parents left the room and whispered to his newborn little sister, “Quick, little sister, tell me, before you forget, what does God look like?”

Who among us can answer that question? “What does God look like?” So many of us have a picture in our minds about what God is like, but the NT, specifically the Gospel of John reveals to the reader what God is really like… That is one of the main reasons for Jesus coming to earth… He revealed truly what the Father looked like!

In fact Jesus said “He who has seen Me has seen the Father…” (John 14:9) So I want us to see look into Scripture and catch a glimpse of God thru the person of Jesus Christ!

There was once a pastor, who after a lifetime of preaching and teaching the Bible said that the 5 most important words in the Bible are “…and the Word became flesh…”

Without Jesus being willing to take on the cloak of flesh and human form, there would be no Sermon on the Mount, no atoning death on the Cross, no victory in the resurrection…no without God being willing to wrap Himself in flesh we would have no way to intimately know God…we would be forever doomed to be separated from Him.

This morning, we are going to take a look at the incarnation… God wrapping Himself in flesh and coming to earth in human form… we are going to look at what it means, what was its purpose and what is its relationship to the church today!

First let’s look at the meaning of the incarnation – v.14:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The word incarnation is the word that we use to communicate the truth about how God chose to become human! He wrapped flesh around His heavenly being and came to dwell among His creation! He did this thru the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

In the dictionary the word incarnation means the ‘infleshment’ of something or someone. God took on human flesh and revealed Himself to this world in the person of Jesus Christ. We can find Paul writing about this very subject in Phil 2:6-11. [put verses on screen now…read verses from screen]

In viewing this one passage we can see that it is pointing us to the greatest mystery of the Christian faith and that was that Jesus Christ who was fully God, yet He was fully human as well. A principal that is hard to understand but one we must come to grips with…

John Calvin, a preacher in the early 1600’s in Geneva, Switzerland said that if Jesus was not fully God…He could not have saved us. And Calvin went on to say that if Jesus was not fully human…He could NOT have reached us.

The incarnate God has come to us in the flesh, not just in spirit…as many have claimed! If Jesus was but a Spirit or an apparition, how could John write in 1 John 1:1

“…the One we have seen and heard, we saw Him with our own eyes and we touched Him with our own hands…”

And John goes on in v. 3 of that same chapter, “…we are telling you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard [and touched]…”

Matthew and Luke tell us that God became flesh thru the willing obedience of the Virgin Mary. They tell us of Mary’s faith, of Joseph’s fears, of the angel’s songs, and of the shepherds’ worship.

Throughout the Christmas story, there is a great & powerful truth that rings out and that in John’s Gospel it is trumpeted loudly that “…in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us!”