Let’s pray. For I know whate’er befall me, Jesus doeth all things well. Help us, Father, to really believe that. Some of us need that later and some of us need that right now. Whatever comes our way, Jesus does all things well. We thank you for all that we have in Jesus. We thank you for all that we hold onto in in Jesus. And we thank you most of all for how he holds onto us. We pray now that you give us ears to hear, that your Word would breathe new life into our weary souls. You help us to listen, to pay attention, to learn, to grow, to be changed, to worship. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Have you ever met someone who becomes in your eyes more and more impressive the more you get to know them? That’s not normal. People can seem great on a first impression, most people are able to look halfway decent for a time and smile and talk friendly, then you walk away and you think wasn’t that wonderful? And then you get to know them a little bit more and you start to see someone warts and all. Or somebody can look very impressive from a distance. Maybe you’ve had the opportunity before, somebody who was your great hero or somebody famous, and you get to know them and you see that they’re a lot shorter than you thought, or they’re not as nice as you thought, or they have issues like we all do. For someone to look more impressive the more you see them, that’s rare.

My wife will tell you about the first time that I picked her up on a date. We had met before and we had gone out in some kind of context, but this was the first time that I was coming to pick her up on a date. And she had, I didn’t know this at the time, but she always sort of had a picture of, you know, the man who would sweep her off her feet would be driving a nice sort of manly pickup truck. Umm, that was a little know, you know, she did go to high school in Virginia so that was, you know, that was a little bit of good southern in her, to want her man to pick her up in a pickup truck. And so when I came by and picked her up promptly and rode in on my white steed, the white 1995 Dodge Neon, she was less than impressed. It was the first car that I ever owned and purchased and seemed like a good idea at the time. It was only later that my friends began to print out articles for me, “Top 5 Girl Cars,” and there it was, one of them on the top of the list, the Dodge Neon. No shame if you also drove one of those.

But I picked her up and at some point later in the conversation as we got to know each other, there was just that sort of question, just, “Kevin, the Neon, really? Why?” So now I just figure you just have kids and kids and kids and you’ll never be tempted to get a Neon again, you just have to get people movers to just sort of shuttle them all over. So I haven’t done the pickup truck, maybe sometime in my retirement days I’ll fulfill that lifelong dream for my wife. But I did figure, if nothing else with that early bit of disappointment, it was, the trajectory could only go up from there. And perhaps I could look more manly and more impressive as time went on by setting the bar very low.

But what if you have the bar set already extremely high, eternally high, and then you begin to see who this person really is and exceeds even all of those expectations. Well, that’s what we have when we meet the Lord Jesus Christ. They had these expectations of a messiah, but he was not the messiah that they thought they were going to get. And on first glance, he was probably not someone very impressive. If you were transported to first century Galilee, almost without a doubt you would not have been impressed with Jesus. Now if you saw the miracles, that would have got your attention, or saw the crowds. We don’t know what he looked like. But we know, because the prophets tell us, he had no form or majesty that we should be attracted to him.

Let’s pray. For I know whate’er befall me, Jesus doeth all things well. Help us, Father, to really believe that. Some of us need that later and some of us need that right now. Whatever comes our way, Jesus does all things well. We thank you for all that we have in Jesus. We thank […]

Oh, Lord, help us now to see, to savor, to listen, to learn. Show us more of Christ, the suffering servant. Show us more of Christ, our incarnate Lord. Stretch our brains, deepen our affections. What a gift you have given us in the Bible that we can know you, that we can read about you, that we can have access to truth. Thank you. Give us more of Jesus. We pray in His name. Amen.

Our text this morning comes from the Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 14. Just one verse this morning, but if you are familiar with this verse, you understand why we want to spend an entire sermon on just this one verse. As we were praying earlier with pastors and elders, I was reflecting that this text this morning and again the text from Exodus 19 tonight are some of those mountaintop passages. Tonight literally, but a mountaintop passage in scripture. And so as a preacher I always get a little extra enthusiasm to preach from texts like this, so grand, so glorious, and also a little bit of extra trepidation knowing that I’m sure I am not equal to the task. It’s always the case but you feel it especially. So my prayer is and has been that the Holy Spirit will preach to you in these next moments a better sermon than the one that I’m about to preach.

Follow along as I read from this one verse, verse 14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

My aim in this sermon is that after 40 minutes of meditating on this one verse we will be profoundly moved to marvel, to worship, and to give thanks. My prayer is that something of the gravity and mystery and the wonderful condescension in this verse will sink in very deep and will at the same time lift us up very high.

The Word became flesh. Now that is amazing. And in a world in which language is very often imprecise and constantly devalued and we learn to speak with great hyperbole, we can say that this truth is awesome. We tend to say that word with anything: That ice cream cone was awesome! The video game is awesome! That’s fine, I’m not going to be the language police. Mmm, maybe just a little bit. But this is awe-some. The Word became flesh. To say the eternal, pre-existent, divine Word became king, that would be unremarkable. That’s what you would expect from the divine, external, pre-existent Word. King. To say that a man and a woman came together and produced a baby born in the flesh is wonderful, but that would not be remarkable, you expect that. That’s what human beings are—flesh and blood. That’s what human beings produce—flesh. But to say the Word, Lógos, with all that we have seen already in John’s prologue, that Word became flesh, well, now, you are putting together two things that don’t seem to go together, like the Cubs won the World Series. That happened. Pigs can fly. Pastor Kevin ate his vegetables. They’re just pairs that don’t go together.

The Word became flesh. Those four words are familiar to most of us. We’ve read them in our Bibles, we hear them every year at Christmas, many of us have them memorized. But I want us to drill down into this verse and help you see some things that maybe you didn’t see before, because there are some theological truths, some doctrinal implications, in this one verse that will make your mind stretch and maybe hurt just a little, but it’s a good hurt. If we want to be a people that feel deeply, we have to a people that think deeply.

So here’s what I want to do. I read one verse, you may think well, that’s fairly small territory to cover, but I want to make it even smaller. I want us to focus in this one verse on just two words. Now you might think the words are “Word” and “flesh” and we will talk about it, but those aren’t the two words. You may think well,

Oh, Lord, help us now to see, to savor, to listen, to learn. Show us more of Christ, the suffering servant. Show us more of Christ, our incarnate Lord. Stretch our brains, deepen our affections. What a gift you have given us in the Bible that we can know you, that we can read about […]