The Word Made Flesh Series

The Word Made Flesh (John Pt. 3)

Text: John 1:14

When you think of the Glory of God, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it a majestic throne room filled with light? Is it fire, thunder, and earthquakes, and angels filling the sky singing and shouting? Or maybe some kind of shimmering cloud that you can just feel the power coming out of? I know there was a charismatic church, a few years back, that was buying hundreds of pounds of gold glitter and putting it up in containers on their ceiling… and when the preacher would get to an exciting point in his sermon, they would dump those containers and the glitter would fill the air inside the church, and the preacher would shout, “It’s the Glory of God!” And the people in the congregation would just go wild. Well, let me just say, man-made, emotional responses is NOT the power of God, the Spirit of God, or the glory of God. It’s actually deceitful – and you know where deception comes from right?

Well we’re in John’s Gospel, and just as a quick review, I want to remind you of what we’ve already talked about. FIRST of all, we learned that Jesus is the Word. He is the Word who was with God in the beginning, and the Word who was God in the beginning, and that He created all things. And when I say “all” I mean, “all”. Everything that was created, was created by Jesus. So Jesus is God, along with the Father, and the Holy Spirit…

Now what I’m talking about is something we call the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all eternally existent, uncreated beings. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God… not three different God’s, but one God. Each one is fully God. So it’s not like they are each 1/3 of what makes 1 God… each of them is fully God, and they are one. I even wrote up a little hand out and put it in your bulletins just to give you some of the Scripture references that teach the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s an essential doctrine of the Christian faith.

THE SECOND THING we learned was that even though Jesus is fully God, and even though He’s the Creator of all things… man still rejects Him… men love darkness rather than light.

So what happened was that for 4000 years God had been sending His Word to His people… He had given them the Law, and the Prophets… and they were all speaking of; and talking about that one point in time when God would send His Son… when God the Son would come… but what did man do? Well… Jesus actually tells us in Luke 13:34 when He says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” And in Matthew 23 He says to the Pharisees, “Your fathers murdered the prophets I sent.” So from the fall of Adam and Eve all the way up until Jesus day, God has been reaching out to His people, He’s been sending men to prophesy and prepare them for the fulfillment of His promise. But they wouldn’t hear it, they rejected God, and His Word, and His Law, His prophets, and His promise.

So what does God do?

Well… our text this morning tells us. It’s in John chapter 1, and we’re going to look at just one verse today. John 1:14 (READ).

We’ve already talked about how the Word (the Logos) was with God and how the Word was God, and how it existed with God in the beginning, but now John is making it as plain as he possibly can. THE WORD BECAME FLESH.

Now what does that mean? Well for starters it means that Jesus; God the Son, became a man. He was born of a woman, and became a human being. Now… understand, when we say God became a man, that didn’t mean that Jesus stopped being the Son of God… He was 100% God, and 100% man. And yet He was a single person.

And this is taught in Scripture. It was taught and believed by the Apostles… And it was taught and believed by the early Church Fathers… We see it in the Apostles Creed, we see it in the Creed of Chalcedon… This is what the Church has taught since its inception.

And anyone out there who teaches something other than this isn’t lining up with Scripture, and they’re not lining up with the Church… and we’ll call them what James and John, and Peter, and Paul, and Jesus Himself called them – false teachers! Or false prophets!