Give Me Some Word

Rev. Wayne A. Lawson

Pastor, First Baptist Church

Ardmore, Oklahoma

Pastor@firstbaptist.org

TITLE: GIVE ME SOME WORD

SCRIPTURE: ST. JOHN 1:1-5

St. John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with

God, and the Word was God. 2. The same was in the beginning with

God. 3. All things were made by him; and without him was not

anything made that was made. 4. In him was life; and the life was

the light of men. 5. And the light shineth in darkness; and the

darkness comprehended it not.

Many times I am presented a question not only from children but every

now and then entertained by adults that I have the opportunity to

witness - they too present the same question. They ask during the

course of evangelizing - "HOW DID GOD GET TO BE?" We have a

mechanism that has been placed in us by society that causes us to

wonder about the beginning of things. GENESIS 1 and ST. JOHN 1 tell

us about the beginning of things.

· In the Genesis account we are exposed to the HYMN OF CREATION or

the POEM OF THE DAWN - deals with COSMOLOGY

· INORGANIC ERA = Cosmic Light - The Firmament - Dry Land

· ORGANIC ERA = The Luminaries - the Lower Animals - Land Animals

· CULMINATED with the Creation of Man

In this we must understand God is not a THING, and He did not BEGIN.

He simply IS. He was already there when TIME began, and He will be

there when Time CEASES to be. John tells us in our text this morning

that the WORD, who took on human nature and lived among men as Jesus

of Nazareth was a part of the divine being ALWAYS. When all things

began, the Word (Jesus) already was. What I want to wake up in your

spirit this morning is the fact that the WORD is the expression of

God’s mind, and the way He communicates to the mind of men.

Verse 1 (Read) may literally be translated "THE WORD WAS FACE TO FACE

WITH GOD, AND GOD WAS THE WORD." To avoid any misunderstanding, Vs.

2 Repeats the declaration - "THE SAME WAS IN THE BEGINNING WITH GOD."

The New English Bible TRANSLATES -- "THE WORD DWELT WITH GOD, AND

WHAT GOD WAS, THE WORD WAS." Some of you are with me this morning,

but others are shaking their head, trying to digest and make sense

out of this text. We are going to take our time during this

preaching hour - somebody look at your Neighbor and say neighbor -

Give Me Some Word!

The GREEK term for WORD is "LOGOS." Logos means REASON or

REVELATION. In the Gospel of John it indicates Christ as "THE WORD"

the complete Revelation of God to man, yet eternally existent. Now

stay with me this morning, I will bring this together and make it

plain for us. We were taught in SEMINARY that when you introduce

your sermon the first two to three minutes is critical. It is during

that time that you will either capture the attention of the

congregation or they will tune you out, if the later happens it is

very difficult to bring you back into the message.

The principle is somewhat like reading a book or a novel. Have you

ever sat down and begun reading a new book and after three or four

chapters it just bored you and you closed the book and made another

selection that is to say you closed it, put it away and read

something else? You know how good writers try to select fascinating

items from their times as an opening. They do this to grab a

reader’s interest from the very first line. Well, JOHN did

precisely that. In his day there was a PHILOSOPHICAL TERM which was

popular with religious thinkers.

· They said the True God - the Absolute God was UNKNOWABLE

· There were evidences of His workings and interventions within

space and

time

· Agreed that God personally revealed Himself through certain

Writings

(Moses)

· Personally revealed Himself through certain Manifestations or

THEOPHANIES

(Angel of the Lord/Burning Bush)

It was about A.D. 50, some forty years before John wrote his Gospel,

PHILO, a Jew of Alexandria, COINED a word that lumped all the

knowable things of God into a single package. That word was LOGOS.

In this word "LOGOS" was compressed all that the JEWS and GREEKS knew

of the reasoning and manifestations of God. It was a useful term and

people soon began to refer to the "Logos" rather than go into detail

about the way God worked in human affairs. So the term "Logos" was

the common way of referring to God’s revelation of Himself. When