"Manifest in the Flesh" 1 Timothy 3:16 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Verse sixteen of One Timothy chapter three, Paul says, Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness.

He was manifest in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, and taken up in glory.

Amen.

My family often goes to the Word of Life Bible camps in upstate New York, Shroon Lake, and they have a magician who is there who does magic tricks.

Although he makes a point every year of saying, because this is a Christian camp, I'm not a magician.

There's no such thing as magic.

These are illusions.

Yeah.

I don't really know what the difference is between magic and illusion because I'm not dumb, I guess.

So I watch these tricks though, my first time walking into it, and I was expecting, like, oh, where'd the card go?

Mwaha ha ha ha.

No.

This guy like has a hat and shows the hat and then brings kids up, kids that I know, like they're not in on it.

These are kids that have been with me all day up on the stage, and they're like putting a scarf in the hat, and then he puts the hat on his head, and then he takes the hat off, and doves fly everywhere.

I'm like, what?

That's magic.

And so I'm like, you've got to tell me how you do it.

You've got to tell me how you do it.

And he's like, no, you no magician ever tells us tricks.

I'm like, you're not a magician, that's the point.

Because I'm watching this and I'm thinking, there's no way where did the doves come from?

Like, you would have to get like little baby doves and raise them with little bottles their whole life to get them to hide in your shirt sleeve for an hour before you bring them out in a thing.

And so he finally caves in and does this little thing pool side, you know, at the end of our week there to show us how he does the tricks.

And guess what?

He got little baby doves and nursed them.

Like their entire life and trained them to stay inside of his sleeves for hours until he moves his arms and they all fly out.

Like he that's what he did.

And once I saw that, I was like, I can't believe I fell for that.

Doves up the sleeve?

You gotta be kidding me.

But it's so it makes so much sense once you hear.

I hope I didn't ruin that magic for you, the rest of you, but there's no such thing as magic.

What you're seeing here in 1 Timothy 3 is a little bit of that reveal.

So all through the Old Testament, all through the scripture, there has been this tension, there has been this mystery about God.

There's been this mystery of how can God be right with man.

There's so many prophecies in the Old Testament that describe what the Savior will be like, and they seem to contradict each other, and it doesn't make any sense.

You're working through it, and you think, how can all of this be true?

And then you get to the New Testament, and it's like the great reveal, and God explains to you how all of this gets brought together and how all of it is indeed true.

And so I want to walk you through the mystery of it's the mystery of godliness, he says in verse 16, but I'm gonna call it the mystery of sunlight today.

Where the sunlight comes from, the mystery of sunlight.

And as I'm sure most of you know, Michael Easley says this all the time that a mystery is something in the Old Testament that was hidden in the New Testament is revealed.

That's such a good, it's such a catchy definition of mystery that I've embraced it as my own.

A mystery is something hidden and then revealed, and that's absolutely true.

It's something that you're not able, it's not mystery like we mean in our own English language.

Mystery in our own English language is like a crime to be investigated with clues and you trace it down.

That's not what the Greek word mysterion means.

The Greek word mysterion is something that has been revealed.

It was a mystery before, it was obscured, it was hidden, and then the reveal has taken place, and so now you can look at it and you can say, oh, that was how it's solved.

That's what the word does in the New Testament.

And here in 1 Timothy 3.16, Paul says, Great is the mystery of godliness.

In other words, the word godliness there, it's not the normal word for godliness, it's the word for religion, it's the word for our faith.

You know, if our faith were codified as a religion, uh, this is what it would be.

It's even got the word we confess in there.

Uh great we confess.

That word confess is kind of a technical word, also.

It means, you know, a confession of faith.

And so what Paul is saying here is we have this confession of faith.

This confession of faith is a mystery, and this mystery is about our religion, and our religion is mysterious for the longest time.

From Adam all the way to Joseph and Mary, there was this great mystery about God about our religion, about godliness, about how a person can be right with God.

And it really does go back to Adam in the garden.

When Adam and Eve sinned, God begins the mystery with the first presentation of the gospel where he tells Adam and Eve that one of Eve's descendants will crush the head of the serpent, but the serpent will bite his foot.

This descendant will bring peace to the world, will triumph over the devil, will bring mankind back into the garden.

In the meantime, Adam and Eve got to go, but one of Eve's descendants will bring mankind back, and yet he'll be bit by the devil in the process.

And then you get more indications of this mystery as you keep going through the Bible.

You get the prophecy that he will crush Satan and that he'll be bit by him, but that just gets elaborated in the New Testament.

I mean, in the Old Testament.

You get Isaiah saying that God will crush him.

Isaiah says it pleased the Lord to crush the Savior.

And then you get Zechariah, God speaking to the prophet Zechariah, saying that the Savior is Yahweh himself, that the nations will look upon Yahweh, whom they pierced.

You get Psalm 89 saying that the Savior will be invincible, and yet he will die and go to Sheol.

You get even in Psalm 89, the Savior saying that he'll deliver himself from Sheol.

You've got Psalm 80, uh you've got Isaiah in the suffering servant songs that say he'll see no end of days.

In other words, he'll live forever, and yet his grave will be in a rich man's grave.

Well, how can he have no end of life and yet be buried in death?

How can he go to Sheol and yet be delivered from Sheol?

How can he be a man descended from Eve who will defeat the devil and yet be Yahweh himself?

How can Isaiah say, Yahweh speaking to the prophet Isaiah, I will not share my glory with another, and yet turn around and say the Savior will have the glory of Yahweh in him?

How can both of those things be true?

Or the most obvious example is how can David say the Savior will be his son, and yet turn around and call him his Lord.

Now we understand where this comes together because we're Christians and we have the New Testament and you realize that it all makes sense.

It all does, it does fit together.

He is God and man, one person, two natures.

He is descended from David.

That's how Matthew's gospel begins, tracing his genealogy back from David, and yet he is the one who made David.

Both are true in the person of Jesus Christ.

But you understand, working through the Old Testament, it is hugely mysterious.

So we can be too harsh sometimes on Old Testament writers or on Jews saying, how can they not get this?

But the truth is, if you don't have Jesus Christ, it's very hard to get.

That's the mystery that Paul is talking about.

Great indeed is the mystery of godliness.

That's what's revealed in this hymn here.

The rest of verse 16 is the same.

We'll look at it over the next several weeks.

We begin with he was manifest in the flesh.

And this is the mysteries revealed through the sunrise.

Through the sunrise.

The sun dawns on the earth.

He was manifest in the flesh.

The Son, the eternal Son of God, is the one who takes on human flesh, becomes a human being.

We have in this little confession here, I drew your attention to the word confession earlier in verse 16.

It is what I'm going to call the first Christmas carol.

I'm calling it a Christmas carol because it is a song.

It's written in a rhythmic form.

It's in parallel structure.

It's obviously written poetically, designed to be sung, as Jewish writing like this would be.

It's the first Christmas song because it's about the birth of Christ.

And you could count the angels' song at the actual birth of Christ, the first Christmas carol, I guess.

Sure.

This is the first Christmas carol written by people, though, okay?

And it is a song sung in the church, apparently, because it comes out of nowhere in 1 Timothy 3.

Obviously, the people in Ephesus that Paul's writing to would be familiar with this.

He says, Great is the mystery of godliness, and then he's communicating to them a stanza or a frame that they would have known.

He's not dropping this in here as if it's new information because he's not unpacking it.

The idea that we have even today is that some of our Christmas carols have better theology in it than we are even able to articulate ourselves, and so we sing them and learn their words, and that's why those Christmas carols have such good theology and they're so well known because they they endure and they teach you about God.

That's how this carol is.

Paul doesn't go through it and exegete it, he just drops it in your lap, and it begins with this expression that he was manifest in the flesh.

All of these mysteries come together in the person of Christ.

He is the answer to how can the Savior be David's Son and David's God.

He is the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, and yet he takes on a human nature and is born.

He, because he has a human nature, he will die a death and he will be buried, and he will descend to Sheol, and yet because he is divine, because he has the life of God in him, he triumphs over the grave, he resurrects himself and ascends back to heaven.

He's the answer to how Isaiah can say, God will not share his glory with anyone else, and yet the Savior will receive the glory of the one who redeems the world.

Both of those are true because they are true in one person.

The person of the eternal Son of God.

And then you understand this with, I'm calling the sunrise because you understand this with the idea of light shining into the world.

This is a common way, not just uh Paul, but it's a common way that John and a common way that Matthew describe the Savior, that He is the light of the world.

God is light, John says, and that's true.

God is light, but Jesus is the light of God.

The light that shines into the darkness, the light that comes to earth is the light of the Son of God.

God is light, but Jesus is the light of the world.

It's 1 John 1, verse 5 that says God is light.

1 John 1:5

But then John 3.19, speaking of Christ, says light has come into the world with the advent of Christ.

And Jesus himself understands that.

In John 8, verse 12, Jesus says, I am the light of the world.

John 8:12

So God is light, the Son of God brings the light of God into that into the world.

And the normal way this is understood is that God is the illuminator and Jesus is the light.

You know, you can't see light, ironically enough.

You can't see light.

I mean, can you describe what light is?

You see everything by light, but light doesn't light up itself.

Light can have color to it.

You can see color in light.

Light, of course, exists across the color spectrum, but your eyes can't really describe or discern what light is by looking at it.

But that's true of nothing else.

Everything else you describe by looking at what is that person like?

And you describe what he or she looks like.

What is the movie like?

And you watched it.

You describe things based upon how they look.

Light is different.

You know, you describe everything else by it.

So the idea here is that God is light, but you perceive God through the light, which is the Son.

The Son is the one that makes God known.

And God is the illuminator, Jesus is the light.

This is all over the New Testament.

Colossians 1, verse 15, probably the most famous verse about this, that says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

Colossians 1:15

No one has seen the Father.

This is a point that the Scripture makes repeatedly.

Nobody can see God and live, but just ontologically, no one has the capacity to see God.

God is spirit.

You can't lay your eyes on the Father.

He's spirit.

He doesn't have a corporal body.

You can't look at him.

Just it's not possible.

But Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is the image of God.

So all the substance of God, all the essence of God is communicated, is given to the Son.

That is the Son's existence, is the life of God, and he reveals God to us.

John 1, verse 18.

John 1:18

Nobody has ever seen God except for the one who is at the Father's side, or at the Father's bosom, and he has made him known.

So no one can see the Father, but the Son is the image of the Father and can bring the Father into the world.

The Father is not in the flesh, the Spirit is not in the flesh, only the Son is.

That's the significance of verse 16.

He was manifest in the flesh.

Who's the He?

Who are we talking about?

Who is manifest in the flesh?

Was the Father manifest in the flesh?

No.

Was the Spirit manifest in the flesh?

No.

The Son is manifest in the flesh.

The second person of the Trinity, He is the one that takes on flesh.

So did God become man?

Yes.

Because the Son of God, the eternal second person of the Trinity, He is God.

He is truly God.

And He takes on flesh.

So did God become man?

Yes.

Did the Father become man?

No.

Did the Spirit become man?

No.

But God did become man in the second person of the Trinity, the person of Jesus Christ.

You see wrapped up in here the pre-existence of Christ?

That's what it means.

He was manifest.

It means he existed before Bethlehem.

Before he was in Mary's womb, he existed because he was manifest.

For something to be manifest, it has to exist before it's manifest.

That's what the word manifest means.

It's describing to you reality that is now revealed.

The second person of God was hidden, and now he is revealed to us.

He is the light that shines.

This is how John begins his gospel.

Notice John chooses his words very, very carefully.

The word was with God.

The word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

So this language, the second person of the Trinity, is God, but he is not the Father.

He was with the Father.

He is not the Father, but he is God, and it's that word that became flesh.

So did all three persons of God become man?

No.

Only the Son became man.

But all of God is in the Son.

The entirety of deity is in the Son, and he becomes man.

This is what Paul means, Hebrews 1, verse 3.

Hebrews 1:3

He is the radiance of divine beauty.

Notice the way Paul describes it there.

He uses the concept of beauty.

He's the radiance of the divine essence.

Radiance is this, think of what the word radiance means.

It's you can see heat radiating off of something.

You know how hot something is when you see the heat radiating off of it.

You know how beautiful God is when you look at Jesus Christ.

He's the radiance of divine beauty.

And there's no other way to see God.

No other way to see God unless God reveals himself to us.

And God reveals himself to us through the Son.

You know, there's a sense in which God reveals himself to us through nature.

Isn't there the Bible that speaks about this?

You can look at nature, Romans 1, and you can deduce that God is holy.

You can look at nature and deduce that that sin is wrong.

You can look at nature and deduce that there's a creator, of course.

I mean he came from somewhere.

But you can't really learn about God beyond that, beyond that He's holy and creator.

To get more in-depth, you need more explicit revelation.

Why is that?

Like, why can't you study the sunset and deduce the Trinity?

And I'm only being a little bit condescending here.

Because even in the sunset, you see the illuminator, you see the sun shining light, you see the light, you feel the heat of the light.

There's a Trinitarian implication right there.

The rock and the light and the heat, all three are eternal, all three exist, you know, eternal days, you know, they all exist simultaneously.

You experience them all at the same time, but they're all different, kind of thing.

So can't you deduce eternity from the sun?

Not really.

And why not?

Why can't you study the universe and the physicality of the world and figure out what God is like?

And the answer is because of sin.

Sin mars creation.

Sin messes things up.

Animals eat each other now.

It wasn't supposed to be like that.

People die all the time.

The world is, there's black holes and supernovas, and things explode and set on fire, and there's famine, and there's so much suffering and sorrow.

So, yeah, you see a beautiful sunset, but even that is marred by sin.

Creation groans, and we don't have the capacity to discern what in creation is groaning and what is shining, you know?

It's all a hot mess.

So for God to truly reveal himself, he has to come into his creation in some way that's not nature, you know?

Something more specific.

He's got to come himself.

But when he comes, you truly see him.

You can tell a lot about somebody by going in their house, can't you?

I mean, I remember house shopping.

I haven't house shopped in 10 years, but I remember house shopping ten years ago.

And we go into houses, and you could you could write the family's whole story just on like a five-minute tour of the house.

You know, this house is immaculate, obviously they want to sell it.

This house is a disaster, and the kid is throwing popcorn at us, I don't think they want to move.

You can look at family pictures, see how many kids they have.

See if they like each other.

You can tell how they're doing financially.

You can tell what kind of food they like, you can tell their ethnicity, you can tell their style or lack thereof.

You can tell a lot about it.

But you can tell even more if the owner shows up and shakes your hand and talks to you a little bit.

You can tell a lot about a person by going to their house.

What about if you visit their house after an earthquake and everything's jacked up?

You know, all the dishes are broken, there's trash everywhere.

Now you're getting a different understanding of how they are.

That's a little bit what living in this world is like.

You're walking to the house of the Father Made, and it's been destroyed by an earthquake.

I mean, not totally demolished, you're here anyway.

But it's been devastated.

It's really hard to figure out what God is like by looking at his house.

But then you meet Jesus, who represents God in his entirety, in his fullness, who comes to earth, manifest in the flesh.

He's the radiance of divine beauty, and you look at him and you see the beauty of God, don't you?

He radiates the beauty of God.

For God's beauty to break through into fallen creation, you have to have some physical manifestation of it.

And God's majesty, which is so far removed from us, would be like a secret and hidden place unless he himself came to us.

And when he comes to us, it's like he opens up his heart.

He opens up his house.

And you meet the owner, and you see him in all of his glory in the person of Christ.

And so God didn't want to remain hidden in heaven.

He didn't want to remain hidden and distant in that secret garden, so to speak.

He gave us the key, he didn't just give us the key and open the door, he gave us the key, opened the door, and then he walked over to us.

And he shows us his beauty.

He shows us himself.

This is why the incarnation is not just a picture of God.

It's not one more picture on the wall or one more picture on the wall that got knocked off by the earthquake.

It's not one more picture of God.

The incarnation is not like a picture, it's more like the window.

When you look at Jesus, you're seeing the glory of God.

You're not Seeing pictures of the glory of God in different parts of his life, but when you look at Jesus, you're seeing the beauty of God.

He is the beauty of God.

And so you look at him and you see he was beautiful in heaven, he's beautiful on earth.

He's beautiful in creation, he's beautiful in redemption.

He's beautiful making the angels, he's beautiful being ministered to by the angels.

He was beautiful in miracles, and now he's beautiful on the cross.

You're seeing the full array of the beauty of Christ.

You see his beauty and his courage before the crowds.

You see his beauty and his courage on trial.

You see his beauty in going face to face with Pilate.

You see his beauty in telling Peter to put away his sword.

And obviously, you see his beauty in the grave, and then in the empty grave, and then ascended into heaven where it's on display forever and ever and ever.

So the mystery of godliness is seen in the sunrise.

The light of Christ is the light of the world.

This is Matthew 4.

He's a light shining into the darkness for the Gentiles to see the beauty of God.

So the mystery of sunlight is seen first in the sunrise.

And if you're going to have a pun, you may as well lean into it.

It's also seen in the sun sense.

What I mean by this is that this poem has six declarations about Christ.

If you look at it and meditate on it for long, the first thing that will pop out to you is that all six of these are passive verbs.

So, I mean, if you're thinking critically about these, that's probably the first thing you'll notice.

What do all six of these have in common?

Well, Christ is the subject, of course.

But they're all passive.

They're all things happening to him.

You know what a passive verb is, right?

He's being acted upon.

I hit the ball as active.

The ball hit me.

You know, I'm receiving.

That's passive.

I got struck.

All of these things are happening to Christ.

And we'll look at that over the next several weeks.

But for this week, he was manifest.

Somebody did this to him.

So who did this to him?

The Father, of course.

That's not hard.

With the New Testament, that's not hard.

With the New Testament, you see Jesus repeatedly saying, the Father sent me.

And there's, you know, probably 30 verses that say something like that.

But we'll just choose one.

John 5, verse 37, because this is a great example of it.

John 5:37

Where Jesus says, the Father sent me, and he has borne a witness about me.

And if you're looking at John 5, the bearing witness about him is the scriptures.

It's very clear in John 5.

Jesus says, the scriptures pointed to me.

You don't believe me, he says there, because you don't believe the scriptures.

But the Father who sent me also points to me.

That's his point.

That the Bible speaks of Jesus.

The Scripture is the Word of God spoken by the Father, delivered through the Son, inspired by the Spirit, and it's about Jesus.

So Jesus is sent by the Father, he says.

And that makes sense.

Because the Father is the source, the Son is the light.

The light doesn't send the source.

Or if you think of the Sun analogy again, the light of the sun doesn't push the rock, the rock pushes the light.

The sun comes from the Father.

And so it makes sense then that because the Son comes from the Father, that the Son wouldn't send the Father to earth, but that the Father sends the Son to the earth because the Son comes from the Father.

That's what it means to be a Father is to send forth or to beget a son.

And what it means to be a son is to be begotten.

Jesus was born of a virgin.

In any sense, in only sense that he has a father, it is our eternal Father.

God Himself begets the Son.

He's the eternal, eternally begotten Son, the only begotten Son of God.

And so the Father sends Jesus.

The Holy Spirit doesn't take on flesh.

He will be sent by God as well.

The Spirit comes from both the Father and the Son.

We'll look at that next week.

That's next week's declaration, is the Holy Spirit.

But this week's declaration is the Son.

And the Father sends the Son.

Now, not only does the Son not send the Father, but there are other creatures that the Father doesn't send.

The Father doesn't send any creature.

He doesn't send the angel.

The angels don't come to be deity manifest, because angels aren't God.

The law is not who the Father sent to fully reveal himself.

And that's what the Jews would have said.

That God is revealed.

You want to know what God is like?

Look at the law.

But you understand that the law wasn't so much given to you to reveal God.

It reveals his holiness, I guess.

But more than that, the law reveals your own sinfulness.

It shows your need for a savior.

It doesn't reveal the Savior Himself.

The incarnation does that.

So God doesn't send an angel.

He doesn't send the Torah.

He doesn't send prophets.

He does send all those things, but they're not his own self, perfect self-revelation.

His perfect self-revelation is not the Torah.

It's not the angels.

It's not the prophets.

Although he does give all those things.

His perfect self-revelation is his son.

It's his son.

The Messiah manifests and God fulfills.

The Messiah manifests God and fulfills the Torah.

The Messiah manifests God and commands angels.

The Messiah manifests God and gives the words to the prophets.

The Messiah is God.

It's God who sends God.

The Father who sends the Son is foundational to why he's Father, because he gives life.

The Son is eternal, but comes to earth representing the Father, so much so that Jesus can say, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

Because he manifests him in the flesh.

That's the point.

The Father didn't become manifest in the flesh, but the Father sent the Son who is manifest in the flesh.

And when the Son comes, I mean, I think so often we tend to limit the deity of Jesus Christ.

We even say things like he set aside his deity, which isn't true, by the way.

He didn't set aside his deity.

If he set aside his deity, he wouldn't manifest the deity.

You know what I mean?

If he left it in heaven, he's not showing it to you.

He's only manifesting what he has.

He has the fullness of God.

Now he limits himself in some way.

He goes from being, you know, having the free run of heaven to being localized in a body.

Just think about the great contrast between divine nature and human nature for a second.

Divine nature created the universe by saying it.

By speaking it.

You can't even create lunch by speaking it.

But God makes the universe.

The universe that we can't even comprehend.

You know, we get one picture from a telescope, and we're like, whoa.

God made it all by saying it.

We can't even count the stars.

God made them all in a moment with a word.

And God's sovereign over all of it.

This is divine nature to be sovereign.

He's sovereign over the stars and he's sovereign over the molecules in your own life.

He causes the grass to grow.

He numbers the hairs on your head.

And yet, he knows how many stars there are.

He's the author of history from start to finish.

He numbers your days.

This is his divine nature.

He numbers your days.

And also the blades of grass in your yard.

I'm not talking the big picture stuff he's sovereign over.

And as micro as you want to get, he's sovereign over it.

And in his mind, there's no difference.

That's the nature of God.

There's no real difference between numbering the stars and the hair on your head.

I mean, at some basic level, it's just math, you know?

He's sovereign over it all.

He writes history, numbers your days, knows the result of sporting games before they happen.

You have to believe in the sovereignty of God to be a soccer fan, you know?

That ball hits the post and goes this way or that way.

It's a totally different world history, and yet God is sovereign over all of it.

And that's Paul's point here.

That divine, sovereign human nature comes to us.

Think about how different human nature is.

We train for our whole life to get one kick to go in the right direction.

We go to the gym.

We read and study and learn.

And still, we can only see what's in front of us.

You don't know what's happening outside these walls right now.

Unless you can get a screen in front of you that's got, like, you know, your ring camera, and then you see what's happening somewhere else because it's brought before your face.

That's how our knowledge works.

Like you've got to actually see it.

That's not how God doesn't have eyes.

It's not how he is.

There's such a huge difference.

His word makes the universe.

Our words don't make anything.

Can the two ever be brought together?

Well, that's what happens on that Christmas morning when he's manifests in the flesh, is he takes on a human nature.

That divine, incomprehensible, beautiful Godness takes on a human nature.

So the Son of God in the person of Jesus is localized.

He's born.

He learns because he's a human, he's learning.

And so you really need both natures to understand that Jesus has two natures.

He has all the knowledge of the universe, and he also learns.

He has to learn how to walk.

He coos.

You know, babies are cute because they coo and they make adorable sounds and they don't speak.

And Jesus was beautiful because he was like that.

At the same time, his words create universes.

Both things are true in one person at the same time.

He's limited and local in his humanity, and he's eternal and unlimited in his deity.

And you think, how can the two ever be how what hope is there for me to ever set eyes on God?

How can I ever be right with God?

How can I, Jesse, ever be in the presence of God?

It seems impossible.

Because there's such a great gulf fixed.

And then that Christmas morning, Jesus shows that love comes down and comes to us.

It's possible if God comes to us and he comes to us as one of us.

That's the mystery.

He's manifest in the flesh.

We don't even have a grid for that.

But Jesus gives us a grid by coming to us.

Now, this is a non-negotiable part of Christianity.

There are Christian sects and groups out there that say Jesus was a man, a good teacher, a son of God, like you're a son of God, but not the son of God.

That is outside of Christianity.

And Paul makes that clear here.

Look at how he says it.

There's a common confession, verse 16.

Great indeed, we confess.

That's the phrase for a confession.

And this phrase we confess, it's universal.

It means you might render it in English like this, unanimously it's said.

In other words, every true believer says the six things on this list.

If you get one of these six things wrong, my friend, you're not a Christian.

Great indeed, we confess universally by unanimous proclamation this mystery.

People in the Old Testament didn't get this.

But it's revealed to us now that God, the Son of God, took on a human nature, revealed himself by taking on that word flesh.

It's the human nature.

Came to us.

Now one more word, I want to draw your attention to this.

Great indeed.

Back in verse 16, how this begins.

Great indeed.

This is written to the church in Ephesus.

Acts 19 lets you know that the church in Ephesus, or not the church, but the city of Ephesus had a mantra, a slogan that they chanted.

Do you remember the slogan in Acts 19?

Great is Artemis of Ephesus.

Great is Artemis of Ephesus.

They chanted it.

Mega Eston Artemis Ephesus.

Paul just tweaks the ending of those words.

Great, indeed.

Not Ephesus, but Eusebius is the word for religion or godliness.

Not Artemis, not Artemis, but Mysterion.

Great is the mystery of godliness.

Our religion, greater than Artemis, greater than all those so-called gods out there.

Our religion is the true God, the Son of God, coming to us.

And Peter says it this way, too, Peter 1.19, you do well to pay attention to this as a light shining in a dark place.

God, we're grateful that you have come to us, bringing the truth of heaven to earth.

There's no way we could have worked our way to you so you came to us.

This is what love always does.

Love comes down.

Love descends and serves those below it.

The Father sent the Son.

So the Son shows us the love of the Father by loving us, washing the disciples' feet, dying on the cross, rising from the dead.

So we in turn love each other.

We love the children in our midst.

Jesus says, if you love him, you love the children.

Great judgment on those who keep children from you.

This is the way love goes, from top to bottom, heaven to earth.

You didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give your life as a ransom for many.

You came to reveal your Father to us.

And you do perfectly.

So Lord, we just gaze at the person of Christ, the beauty of heaven on earth, the beauty of the immortal God, robing himself in mortality, dying on the cross, and rising from the grave.

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness.

You are our Messiah.

We give you thanks for this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.