Text: John 1:1-18
We’ve got ourselves a problem, you and I, and I can tell you, it’s not just a little problem. We’ve got ourselves a whopper of a problem. It’s not a new problem, and we’re certainly not the first ones to ever have it. As a matter of fact the problem dates clear back to Adam & Eve, and every one who has lived from their time to ours has had the same problem.
And this problem, it’s really serious--deadly serious. In fact our problem is killing us, just like it has killed everyone who lived before us. And the worst part about it is that there is nothing we can do about it. We are completely helpless to solve our problem. There is no twelve step program to help us get up on our feet. As a matter of fact, the problem itself makes us unable to solve it, or even to recognize its seriousness. Like a frog in a slowly heated kettle our problem is slowly boiling us and we don’t even know the water is getting warm.
The problem I speak of is sin and each of us is guilty of it both by our nature and by our behavior. Our sin problem separates us from God-- it makes us unable to see or communicate with Him. It prevents us from being what we were created to be and condemns us to death.
Now God has been aware of the problem since the beginning, and He had a plan to solve it. We could not solve the problem in ourselves, but God provided the only possible solution. That solution is found in our text today in John 1:14: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."
What does it mean that "the Word became flesh"? It means that God Came Near. This morning we begin a series of sermons from John’s Gospel about drawing near to God. That’s kind of a theme that runs through John’s Gospel. John is known as the "disciple whom Jesus loved." Obviously Jesus loved all of His disciples as He loves all of us, but John seemed to draw especially near to Jesus during His ministry on earth, and in his record of Jesus’ time here this theme of closeness to Jesus figures prominently.
It’s no mistake then that John’s Gospel begins with the Story of Jesus drawing near to us--putting on human flesh to bridge the gulf that our sin had created between us and our Creator. Because that ultimate act of drawing near is the only thing that makes it possible for us to draw near to Him. We can draw near only because He drew near first.
The question I’d like to look at today it why was it necessary for Him to drw near first. There are three main reasons and they are found in our text today. The first reason that God the Son--described by John as "the Word"--had to become flesh was because of our...
Dullness
Our sin problem has driven a wedge between us and our Creator. We have become dull to things spiritual and have come to be ruled by our senses. The Apostle John points this out in verse five of our text. He writes, "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." The light is God shining His love for us into our dark world, but the blackness of our sin has made us incapable of comprehending His light. So the Creator came in a way we could understand.
Because we had come to be ruled by our senses, God, who is spirit, took on a physical form that could be seen and touched, a sensual form to reach out to a people ruled by our senses. This He did so that we could recognize Him and re-establish with Him the relationship which our sin had severed. This is made clear in John’s words in verses fourteen and eighteen, "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... No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known."
The Apostle John also wrote about the importance of the eternal Word becoming tangible, touchable flesh in one of his letters: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us" (1 John 1:1-2).
The Word, God incarnate, appeared at a particular moment in time. Although we cannot see and touch Him ourselves, we have the witness of those who did. The Spiritual Word is made more clear to us physical beings because He communicated on our own terms. What incredible grace! God knew that we could never reason our way to Him, so He condescended to take a form which would have meaning to us.
The story has often been told of a little boy who was having trouble sleeping. He asked his mother if she would stay with him to calm his fear of the dark. She refused to stay, but reassured him that God was with him. He replied that he knew that, but pleaded, "mommy, I need a God with skin on Him." Like the little boy, our sin had isolated us to the point that we needed a God with skin on Him; so, the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. He came to make clear what our dullness had obscured and He drew near because we were incapable of seeing our need to draw near to Him
Secondly it was necessary for Him to draw near to us to deal with our...
Delinquency
Our Sin problem had all but destroyed the image of God in man. We were created by God for greatness, for fellowship with Him. But our slavery to sin had made it impossible for any of us to live up to our potential. One might think that a righteous God might have become disgusted with the entire project and started over, but His love for us was so great that instead He came to recreate the image of God in man.
This is a task that would seem impossible, but He accomplished it in two ways, first of all by being our perfect example. In this way He showed us what we were intended to be. He demonstrated that we did not have to live as slaves to sin. By becoming a man and living among us, He showed us the way that we had been created to live--without sin. But the depth of our sin problem required an even greater work than that to restore us to where we were meant to be; so, He took it a step further by making us partakers of His divine nature.
Verse twelve of our text tells us that, "to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right [or the power] to become children of God." Our sin Problem is so severe that even a perfect example could not motivate us to become all that we should. So God’s grace extends even further to give us the identity of the perfect human if only we will turn to Him in faith.
In the same way that we have the identity of Adam in our physical being and in our sinful nature, we can have the identity of Jesus in our spiritual being. The Apostle Paul wrote that
"if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ?" (Romans 5:17).
"And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:49)."
So then the Word became flesh, God came near, to deal with our delinquency by both showing us a better way and allowing us to receive His perfection in ourselves when we reach out to receive Him in faith. Finally, He came to deal with our...
Debt
At the very heart of our sin problem is the issue of Debt. Because we have turned our backs on God we have run up a terrible debt--a penalty that must be paid. Sin’s penalty is death, both physical and spiritual. God’s justice demands that the debt be paid. God cannot merely pretend the sin does not exist, because that would soil His character, it would make Him "soft on sin." Imagine a parent who allowed a child to continue to misbehave without correcting and punishing the child. This type of failure to correct bad behavior reflects poorly not only on the child, but also on the parent. Imagine further a parent who repeatedly threatens to punish misbehavior but never follows through. Once again it is poor parenting.
God, as the perfect parent, refuses to look the other way--to allow this terrible problem of ours to go unpunished; nor will He make Himself a liar by not following through on His warnings to us. In the book of Exodus He declares He will "by no means let the guilty go unpunished." In a sense sin cannot be merely "forgiven;" it must be paid for. But as we noted earlier, the penalty for sin is death, so man cannot pay the price of sin and survive.
Each person’s death can only pay for their own sin. Because death also marks the end of our opportunity for reconciliation with God, on our own each would die separate from God, so the debt must be paid by one who is sinless. One who owes no debt of His own would be worthy to pay the price for others. Yet only God is sinless. He is the only one worthy to pay the debt for others, but God, the author of all life, is Spirit and as such He is incapable of death. Furthermore, because the debt was incurred by man it must be paid by man. And so it is clear that we do indeed have ourselves one great big problem--a problem that seems to have no solution. But God loved us so greatly that He found a way.
The only possible solution was that God become a man and die in our place to pay the debt we could not pay. The solution was that the Word became flesh. John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son to pay the price that we could not pay. One of Jesus’ disciples, Peter wrote "Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God" (1 Peter 3:18).
In order to pay the price for our sins He was nailed to the cross and died. Though He was without sin Himself, God placed the sins of each of us upon Him and poured out all of His wrath for the sins we committed on His own Son, Jesus Christ. The innocent blood that He shed was enough to pay the price for the sins of the entire world. In one of John’s letters He declared that "He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world." (1 John 2:2). Because we could not pay the price ourselves, God Came Near and paid the debt for us. All that we must do is reach out to Him in faith--it’s our way of drwing near to him-- trusting in what He has done to pay the debt for us.
CONCLUSION:
We do indeed have a problem, each one of us. We are all burdened by a load of sin too heavy to bear. On our own we were wallowing in it with no hope to be freed, and there was only one solution to the problem. The solution was that the Word Became flesh and made His dwelling among us. God came near.
It was the only way, because of our Dullness -- We could never have found our way to God and so He found His way to us and demonstrated His love in a way we could understand
It was the only way, because of our Delinquency -- Our sinful nature had left us with only a trace of the image of God. So God the Son came to show us what we were meant to be and to give us the benefits of His perfection if we only believe in Him and put our trust in the work that He did on our behalf.
It was the only way, because of our Debt -- a debt that none of us could ever pay. So the only One righteous came and took on human nature so that He could pay it for us.
I said at the beginning of this sermon that there was no twelve step program for our problem. That is true, there is no self help program -- we are totally helpless in the face of our sin problem. But there is a two step program established by the one who drew near to us. And just like the twelve step programs, step one is to admit that you have a problem and decide that you want to change. The Bible calls this step repentance and it is simply this--an admission of guilt accompanied by a sincere desire to change. Of course we can’t change by ourselves-- I’ve shown you today that we are much too deep in our problem to work our own way out. Change can only come when we take the second step.
Believe in Jesus. Believe that He came to pay the debt you couldn’t pay. Trust in what He has done on your behalf. And then, as we read in the Bible today, when you receive Him, He will give you the power to be a child of God.
