God Has A Message For You Series

God has a Message for You

John 1:1-14

In the beginning was the Word.

What picture comes to mind when you hear this? A cloud floating in an empty universe with a big sign that says WORD on it? In the beginning was the word. Or maybe some certain word, Jesus, love, God. Those are words. In the beginning was the word.

You probably know that the Word is Jesus, so maybe you picture Jesus here, alone in an empty universe at the beginning of time.

Why use the word, word? What is the Word, other than Jesus?

Go back in time hundreds of years to when this was translated into English. Back them, word meant "a speech, a talk, an utterance, or a word." Today word has lost most of those meanings.

In this context, word actually means message. The Word is the Message. If we say in the beginning was the Message, we get a totally different picture. Since the beginning of time, God has had a message for everyone and a message for you. This is big. Of all the things that could be in the beginning, there was the message.

God has something to tell you.

But in the middle of verse 1 is where we usually ruin the whole passage, don’t we, because we insert who the Word is, but that is not told here. In fact, it is not told until verse 14. It is only there that we are told that the Word became flesh, became a man.

I propose to you that we can go through this passage and replace He with It, the Message, and get a clearer idea of what this passage is about. This passage is about the Message.

God has a Message for You. That is the title of my sermon. This message has four waypoints.

1. Four Waypoints of the Message (1-5)

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

John 1:2 He was with God in the beginning.

John 1:3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

John 1:4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

John 1:5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Remember I am proposing that even though it says he and him, it should be it. It, the message, was with God in the beginning. Through it all things were made. In it was life. This is about the message. There is a progression here. First, you have the message, it is with God, and it is God. Then it comes to this world because everything is made or happens through the message. Then the message moves on to life. It is something that can be lived. As it is lived and infiltrates a life, it becomes light.

From with God (1), to all things (2), to life (3), to light (4). That is what it shows here. Picture it as four waypoints on a map or four levels of distribution of the message. To go between them, there are steps, three steps. The rest of this passage gives the steps in reverse. So, we are starting with the last step, step three.

2. Step Three – People Must Be a Witness to the Light (6-8)

John 1:6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

John 1:7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe.

John 1:8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

Step three is going from life to light. The life becomes the light. The message moves from a life to light. How does that happen? By the life being a witness to the light.

John was a witness to the light. Through his witness, people saw the light and they trusted. They were saved.

Have you ever been a witness to something? I have. One night I was sitting in our front room with all the lights out. This was about one or two in the morning. A light flashed through our house. It was the beam of a flashlight. That got my attention. I looked out the front window, and a man was using a coat hanger to break into a truck parked in front of our house. He quickly got it open and started messing with the steering column. I was witnessing a crime. I called 911. The operator asked me questions. What race is he? I don't know. How tall is he? I don't know. What color is his car? I don't know. I didn't make a very good witness. But I was a witness.