The Word Of God Series

The Word of God

Text: John 1:1-14

July 8th 2007

Good morning. This week we are doing something very exciting. We are starting a new series. We recently finished a series on the teachings of Jesus through the book of Matthew and after a few weeks of topical sermons we are going to move into another series. This series will be on the character of Jesus from the Gospel of John. So for the rest of the year we will be looking at the characteristics of Jesus.

Now that may seem like a long series but truly there is no better topic to learn about than that of Jesus Christ. For Christ is the cornerstone of our faith. It is in Christ that we live, through Christ that we have life, and Christ that we follow after. In order to live a Christian life we must understand what that means. To do so we must understand what Jesus taught and how He lived. For this series we will take a look at how He lived.

DO AS I SAY….NOT AS I DO

Before we go too far we need to look at the biography of John.

One of my professors at school says that the measure of a genius is not one who can think up complex abstract thoughts. A genius is not someone that talks in big words and hard to understand concepts, that is an intelligent person. A genius is someone who can take the complex concepts of intelligent people and package them in a way that everyone can understand. This is the Gospel writer of John, a genius. He packages these complex ideas into beautiful images that a small child could understand: light-dark, salt, and things of the like. These are ideas that the slowest child can grasp, yet the brightest theologian can study for his or her entire life and not fully grasp their depth. John is a genius gospel writer. He writes in the simplest Greek of all the New Testament writers, yet his ideas and his use of imagery leaves even the greatest theologians always digging for more. So while Matthew, and Luke demonstrate a great intellectual understanding with complex ideas, it is John that can take those ideas and bring them down to the bottom shelf of understanding. John is the simplest to read but the most complex to understand. For John makes so many points subtlely that they can be easily missed.

Here are some of the things we know about John, John was one of the apostles. In fact he was the youngest apostle. His brother was the apostle James who is beheaded in Acts 12. He is the only apostle to not be martyred for his faith. And he walked in the inner circle of Jesus. We was with Jesus for three years while Jesus was doing his ministry. He has seen the miracles, he has heard the teaching, and he has had his life transformed. John and his brother James were given the nickname the ‘sons of thunder’ because of their zeal and passion. John during the course of his time with Jesus had seen and done many things, but some of the ones that stand out are these: He asked Jesus to call down fire from heaven to consume an inhospitable Samaritan village (Luke 9:54) he rebuked an exorcist for casting out demons because he was not an apostle (Luke 9:49), and he asked to sit at the right hand of Jesus in heaven (Matthew 20:21). John was not a timid, nor shy man by any means. Yet through the ministry with Jesus, after the resurrection something in John changed. He went from wanted to sit at the seat of honor in the kingdom of heaven, to recording a gospel where he does even mention himself by name. John’s life was turned completely around by Jesus. And when he writes this gospel, he writes as a changed man who desires only one thing, for everyone to come to a true and meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ the Lord.

That’s John in a nutshell. I would love to talk with you more about him but we simply do not have time today.

DO AS I SAY…NOT AS I DO

If you would open your Bibles to John 1:1. Today we are going to deal with one of thee most theologically complex concepts in the New Testament. The Word of God…the logos. Doctrinal Dissertations exceeding 100 pages have been written on this topic alone and we are going to try to cover it in less than an hour. From this text we get one of our few references to the trinity (which is never stated directly in scripture), a key look into the nature of God, creation, Jesus, and the existence of the world, and the power of God. To deal with this in any depth in the time we have is impossible. So this will be a readers digest version What we must do is look at a basic overview of the word of God. I want to be clear though: for everything we will say this week: it is only the tip of the ice berg. Before we get started, we are going to do something a little different after the service. Due to the nature of this text we cannot get through it all. After the sermon I am going to stay up here in the front- if you have questions or want to talk more about this extremely complex topic, I will be up here and we can go further in depth. Let’s begin: