John 1:14a (Christmas Bonus Episode)

The Shepherd's Church

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Well, I want to say welcome. This is our very first Christmas service as a church. We haven't been a church for very long.

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We started about six months ago in September, and then we met throughout the summer as a core team.

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But before we get started, I just want to pray. I want to first and foremost pray that the Lord would bless our time together and also want to pray that he would uphold my voice because I've been in a house full of sick people and my voice is not great right now.

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So if you will, let's pray and then we'll get started. Father, thank you for the fact that we can gather here to celebrate the greatest day in human history, the day when you were incarnate, when the word became flesh and literally dwelt among us.

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And Lord God, I pray that as we as we gather here that we would honor you, that Lord, I pray that you would turn our hearts and our affections upon you.

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And Lord, whatever things that we brought in with us that have weighed us down and burdened us and distracted us and hurt us or whatever it is, that Lord, that you would even be doing a work right now in all of those things.

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So Lord, we give this time to you. Lord, I pray for my voice that I would be able to to share the message tonight and that it would hold up and that Lord, I just thank you for the time that we have in Christ's name.

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Amen. So first off again, if you're new, if this is your first time or if you feel like that you're new like all of us do,

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I want to say welcome to you. The purpose here tonight is for us to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

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And we're gonna be doing that tonight from the Gospel of John. We've started the Gospel of John a few weeks ago and it worked out perfectly that tonight we're gonna be in the exact perfect verse for Christmas.

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I can't guarantee that next year. I can't guarantee that the year after that, but tonight is gonna be in the

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Gospel of John. And I want to begin by just sharing a little bit about why I love John so much.

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John is different than all of the other Gospels. You see, the other Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic

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Gospels, and that's to categorize them together because they have a similar type of way that they're telling the story of Jesus.

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John, on the other hand, is doing something different. For instance, Mark, he begins his

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Gospel on the very first day of Jesus's ministry. He doesn't talk about the birth of Christ. He doesn't talk about the baptism of Christ.

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He doesn't talk about anything that happened in his childhood. Mark is trying to communicate who

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Jesus is through his ministry. Mark's purpose is to show us that Jesus is the servant from Isaiah who has come to serve us in our sin by dying on the cross so that we can be made whole.

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Matthew begins earlier than that. Not only does Matthew have the birth narrative of Christ, but he starts back in a genealogy that begins in Abraham.

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So essentially, Matthew is pointing us back to 1 ,500 years before Jesus to show us several things.

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He's wanting to show us that Jesus is greater than Abraham, and he comes to bring all of the promises that were given to Abraham in the

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Old Testament to fruition. He's better than David. He's better than Moses. Matthew's purpose is to teach us that Jesus is greater than all of the

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Old Testament Scriptures because he's the fulfillment of all the Old Testament Scriptures. So he begins at a certain point in time in the

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Old Testament. Luke, on the other hand, takes us as far back as we can go in human history.

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He takes us back to Adam because Luke's purpose is to show us that Jesus is not only the savior of the

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Jews. He's the savior of the world. He's come for both Jews and Gentiles.

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So all three of the synoptic gospels are trying to show us something through a point in time.

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That's how they begin. John doesn't begin that way. John begins before time.

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John begins before human history. John begins by saying, in the beginning was the

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Word. Before there was space, before there was light, before there was galaxies exploding into being, in the beginning was

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Christ. And we find the reason that John does that is because he wants us to believe that this

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Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. All the other gospels are trying to teach us that Jesus is the

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Messiah and that he is God, but all of the other gospels talk about his divinity in somewhat muted terms.

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They talk about his divinity, but John puts it on the front page, on the very first.

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That's the spectacle of what John is trying to accomplish, is that this Jesus, who was born in human flesh, is

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God. He is worthy of believing in. His beginnings are from eternity.

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That's what John is trying to get it at. And because of that, he's the only hope for humanity.

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Now, if we think about who John is writing to, John is writing, some scholars believe in the 90s, I think it was a little earlier than that, but he's writing to people just like us.

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He's writing to broken people who live in a broken world. He's writing to real men and women who have real problems.

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He's writing to men and women who are stuck in their sins and their addictions, who are crippled in their brokenness.

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He's talking to people who have unmet expectations for God. He's talking to people who've been waiting hundreds and hundreds of years to hear from God.

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If you remember in the Old Testament, Malachi was the final book. That is the last word from God for 400 years.

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400 years of silence, and then we have Christ.

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He's writing to people who thought God had abandoned them. He's writing to people who thought

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God was not gonna come through for them. He's also writing to Greeks, to people who had scoured the earth looking for purpose and meaning in a pantheon of gods.

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He's writing to people who had lived life long enough to know that really, all those things don't matter.

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None of those things bring you hope. He's writing to people who've lived long enough to see that hope will not come if it doesn't come from God, and I haven't seen

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God looking for me lately. That's the kind of people John's writing to. But John, I love it, he doesn't begin with their pain, he begins with a person.

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John is trying to elevate their gaze above their circumstances. He's trying to elevate their perspective above the darkness, above the pain, above the misery, above everything that they're facing, because he wants us to have our view focused on a person, and that person is

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Jesus Christ. John does not depict a God who has forgotten us.

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John does not depict a God who refuses to save his sinful creatures. John doesn't depict a

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God who's too busy, who's up in heaven, who's aloof from his creation. John depicts the one and only

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God who came in human flesh, personally visiting the people who had rejected him in order to save them.

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So if you will, turn with me as we're going to look at John 1 .14 tonight, and we're going to look at the hope that we can have in what

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God has done through Jesus Christ 2 ,000 years ago. John 1 .14,

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we're only going to be in the first half of the verse. If you come back on Saturday, you'll realize why that happens so much, because I can't preach an entire verse usually.

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I have to just take it a little bit at a time. John 1 .14a. And the

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Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Three little statements there.

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The Word became flesh and he dwelt among us. And those three statements are going to deal with three of the biggest questions that we have in human life.

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Questions like, where is our hope going to come from when tragedy strikes? How is that hope going to come?

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And why is this message something that we should put our faith and hope and believe in?

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So question one, let's just take this little bit by little bit. Where does our hope come from? John says it comes from the

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Word. The Word made flesh that dwelt among us. This Word is not a grammatical construct.

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This Word is not spelling that is organized together to communicate a meaning. This Word is a person.

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John uses the Word four times in his gospel. Three of them are in verse one. Verse one tells us, in the beginning was the

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Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

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So essentially, John is beginning his gospel by telling us that an eternal relational divine person has always existed.

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That's how he begins his gospel. In verse 17, we find out who this person is. Verse 17, it says, for the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.

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So already John is pitting Old Testament history with New Testament reality.

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The law came from Moses, which tells us that God cares about our behavior.

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John is not overthrowing the law here. He begins with it. All of the words that were given to the people of Israel were for them so that they could obey

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God. All of the commands, all of the statues, all of the words were there so that they could be in relationship with God.

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We don't overthrow the Old Testament as Christians. We see that it's fulfilled by Jesus Christ.

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John doesn't overthrow the Old Testament either. Because to be in relationship with a perfect God who has made us in his image means that we also must be morally perfect.

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That's what it means to be made in his image and his likeness, is that we would be like him. Now think about it this way.

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You might be wondering, why would God care about my behavior? What does God care about what I do on Saturday night? What does

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God care about the thoughts that are in my mind when he's up in heaven being God? But we don't understand who

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God is if we think that way. Because we think God is just a little bit better than us. He's just a little bit more holy than us.

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He's just a little bit more righteous and loving and giving and caring. But that's not who God is. God is incomprehensibly holy.

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God is like the sun. At the right distance away from him, you receive blessing from the heat and the warmth.

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You try to fly to the sun with a rocket and you'll be destroyed. The sun is so good and so pure and so lovely that it would consume you if you get too close.

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That is what God's holiness looks like. God is so holy and so pure that it is dangerous to us who are sinful, dangerous to us who are stained by sin.

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And without God doing something on our behalf, none of us would be able to have a relationship with God.

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I think that's why John brings up the law here to show that there is a standard and that we have not met it.

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You see, the Bible describes in vivid detail this problem within the human race we call sin.

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Every standard that God has ever given us, we have fallen short of. Worship the one true God, fail.

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Keep the Sabbath holy, fail. Honor thy father and thy mother, fail. Tell the truth, fail.

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And I'm sure that we are starting to see the implications of this because if we've not met any of the standards and if it takes perfect obedience to be in relationship with a perfect God, then who can be in relationship with God?

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Certainly not me. You've probably heard the phrase that the punishment must fit the crime.

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I heard this recently in a television show. The lawyer was complaining to the defense attorney, the punishment has to fit the crime.

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You're over punishing my client. And I was thinking about that. If you've committed a crime against an infinite person, then if the punishment fit the crime, wouldn't your punishment be infinite?

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If you have sinned against an infinite person, the consequence would be infinite. So God would be just if all of us who have sinned against him had an infinite punishment fall upon us.

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God would be just if every single person in this room who have sinned against him went to hell.

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God would be just. We have all sinned unwittingly in our apathy.

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We've sinned willingly in the things that we have done. We've all at times thought that we were good, better than most.

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But when you compare us to this standard, we do not measure up. Now, this is not where John ends the story.

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But I take us here and I show us this because we have to have this as our framework to understand why this is good news.

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It's not good news if you're just good enough to make it on your own. We're not. It's good news because God provided a rescuer.

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Let's continue. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.

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John is not denying that we're guilty and he's not abolishing the law to let us off the hook. He's saying that something better than the law has come.

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He's saying that something that is better than Moses has come. All the words that Moses gave to his people so that they would obey a better word has come.

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The word has come. The word of God has come. All of those words should have hung like a noose around our necks, but yet the word has come and he has dwelt with us in flesh.

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And because of that, we can have hope. We can find forgiveness for all of our sins. We can find love and peace and mercy and grace and we can find meaning and fulfillment in our life because the word has come.

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Which brings us to our second question. How does this hope come?

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Because it's not enough to say that the word came. John doesn't end there. He says that the word became flesh.

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Without the word becoming flesh, our flesh would have still stood condemning us.

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And this is what we celebrate at Christmas. We do not celebrate a God who stood far away. We celebrate a God who came near.

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We don't celebrate a God who only loves the rich and the powerful and only came to the palaces. We celebrate a

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God who came to an unwed teenage mother in a stable in Bethlehem. We celebrate a God who goes to the lowly and who loves us and cares for us in our brokenness.

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We celebrate a God who took on human flesh. We celebrate an eternal being who became finite.

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The invisible that became visible, the transcendent that became imminent. These verses give us the right to celebrate because redemption has come.

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And it was outside of us because you and I cannot save ourselves.

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If we glory and if we hope in the things of this world, we have no hope. Everything that we own will be the future stuff of junkyards, garage sales.

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And we will be at some point in an urn or a graveyard.

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Everything that we see around us will decay. Political parties will not bring you hope.

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We've got elections coming up in the next year. They will not do what they say they're going to do. They will not bring you ultimate hope.

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Our beauty will eventually fade. Our health will eventually be gone. Everything that we come up with in this generation will be laughed at at the next.

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If you don't believe me, look at bell bottoms. It's true. Skinny jeans will be next.

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John is casting his spotlight on something that has come to this world that can never perish.

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Something that has come to this world that can never fail. Something, if you can grab hold of it, will never be taken away from you.

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The word become flesh. It's none other than Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, born in Bethlehem, born 2000 years ago in a stable, born to set his people free, born to heal the broken, born to raise the spiritually dead, born to give sight to the blind eyes, born to bring hope and heal the hurting and born to bring light to a dark world.

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That leads us to our final question for tonight. So we talked about where does the hope come from? It comes from the word.

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We talked about how does that hope come? The word became flesh. Final question is, why is that hope for me?

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Why does that message actually matter in my life? John's answer is that he dwelt among us.

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You see, we'll talk about this more on Saturday. But the overarching theme of the entire

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Bible is God dwelling with human beings. In Genesis, God made humans to dwell with him.

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In Revelation, when everything is made new again, God dwells with human beings. And in the midst of our brokenness,

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Christ came to the world to dwell with us. The whole Bible, beginning, end and middle is all about a

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God who graciously wants to dwell with us. God doesn't need us. But God wants to dwell with us because it's the very best thing for us.

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And like we said, the fundamental problem of human nature is sin, which causes

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God to be separate from us. In sin, Adam and Eve lost relationship with God.

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In our sin, we lost relationship with God. So what does God do? He comes down and he dwells with us.

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What does God do? He comes down and shares his presence. And more than that, the reason why this is good news for us is that he did not just come as a baby.

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He was born in order to die. This Jesus did not just come to visit his people and say what's up and then peace out after 33 years.

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This Jesus came born to die. This Jesus came in order to trade places with us.

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He came because as John says, Moses and his law was leaning over us and that shadow was so heavy for us that we could never bear it.

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So what does Jesus do? He lives a perfect life. He lives a morally perfect life and he satisfied the demands of the law.

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Jesus did what we could never do. And in his death, he took upon himself the only innocent man that has ever existed.

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He took upon himself our guilt. He took upon himself our shame. He took upon himself our sin, our rebellion, every wayward thought that we've ever thought.

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He took it all upon himself. He paid the penalty that we all deserve.

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The only reason that this message has any hope, the only reason why

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Christmas matters is because of the cross. 2000 years ago at the end of his life,

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Jesus took our place. He took our sin and he gave us his life.

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He took our shame and he gave us his freedom. And as we end tonight, I want us to end understanding the gospel that Jesus did what we could not do, die to death we could not die so that we could have the life that we never deserved.

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That is what the meaning and the hope of Christmas is. God dwelling among us and then through the

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Holy Spirit never leaving us. So let's pray. Jesus, thank you for the hope of Christmas.

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Thank you for the meaning of it. Lord, we live in a world that tonight is going to celebrate in various different ways.

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Celebrate around trees, around gifts and celebrate with credit card debt that will have to be paid off and celebrate with various other ways.

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And yet Lord, 2000 years ago in a stable, hidden away from the world, the most significant thing that has ever happened occurred.

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2000 years ago in a womb, you brought the author of life. Lord, 30 years later in a tomb, shared that life with us.

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Lord, for all in this room who are in Christ, I pray that you would allow us to worship and praise.

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And Lord, I pray that you would allow our spirit within us to just be overflowing with gratitude for what you've done.

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You didn't have to leave heaven. You didn't have to come down and rescue us. You didn't have to do any of that.

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You certainly didn't have to die. But you say in your word that for the joy set before you, you endured the cross.

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So that we might be even given the right to be called the children of God. Lord, for anyone here who does not know

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Christ or is not sure if they're a Christian, Lord, would you graciously and tenderly speak the message of the gospel upon their hearts?

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Would you let them know that there is no hope in themselves. There's no hope in their stuff. There's no hope in their relationships.

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There's no hope in all of the decaying things that this world has to offer.

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And Lord, would you give them the unshakeable hope that can only be found in Jesus Christ?

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Lord, if they have questions, would you give them the courage to ask? Lord, would you allow them to see your beauty and your glory tonight?

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And Lord, would you allow all of us to leave here worshiping you in Christ's name, amen.