Incarnate: Jesus - The Glory of Life - Dec 22, 2024 (Myles Holmes)

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

Awesome.

So good to be together.

So good to worship together.

And so good to continue to worship together as we open up God's Word.

If you have a copy of God's Word, you can open it to John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

We're going to be in verses 10 to 14 this morning.

And if you don't have a copy of God's word or own a copy of God's word, there's an usher coming to the front right now, and you can just flag them down.

They would love to give you a Bible and you can keep that as our gift to you today.

It would be a gift to us if you would take that home and read it.

As you're turning to John 1, I just want to put before you again, we talked about this last week, but at the end of the year, it's good for us to talk about this again.

Just our year-end giving.

And we just want to encourage you to continue again to worship the Lord through your faithful giving, especially at the end of the year, as we make a final push to really uh kill this deficit.

See a number come up here,$13,549.

We find ourselves in a deficit.

The Lord is providing, and that is getting smaller and smaller each week, and we give him praise for that.

And yet we just want to encourage you as a church to continue to unite together to see the Lord do a work here and to resource that through the things that he has given us, the gifts that he has given to us.

We're going to read from God's Word here in John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

Would you stand with us as we honor God and submit ourselves to his word?

Here's what the word of God says.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him.

Yet the world did not know him.

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of the blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

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.

Let's turn to the Lord in prayer.

Father, we bow before you.

And God, we do thank you for all that we just sang, Lord, that heaven, Lord, you came down from heaven.

God, we thank you that we have seen the glory of the Father full of grace and truth in Jesus Christ.

Thank you that he took on flesh.

God, these are words that if we have spent any length of a period of time in the church, we've heard time and time again.

And God, the great fear of my own life is that these miraculous words that God would become man would become so dull to us.

And God, if that is our spirit right now, I pray that your Holy Spirit would convict us, would show us, would shine light on that.

And that God, you would change and transform us as we this morning spend time together gazing at the glory of your Son and beholding him dwelling with mankind in the flesh, coming to the world, though the world did not receive him.

God, we pray this morning that as we open up your word, Lord, I pray for your help.

God, that as we draw out the meaning of your word, and we draw out the application of your word, that what would be happening this morning would be that we are hearing from you, from your very mouth.

And God, as we hear from you, I pray for our hearts, Lord, that we would bow before you, that we'd humble ourselves in submission before you, that we would receive all that you have to say to us, and receive it with faith.

Lord, that all that you have to say to us would transform and change our lives.

God, speak to us, help us.

We pray, and we pray this in the name of your son.

Amen.

Amen.

You can take a seat.

I'm not so sure that it's a good thing, but it's you'd probably agree with me that it's becoming easier and easier to become famous now, maybe today more than ever in history, thanks to social media, people can achieve fame in almost an instant, and often for reasons that will would leave you and I sort of shaking our heads.

Many of you know the girl who went viral on Dr.

Phil.

She became known as the Catch Me Outside girl.

And it was really, you know, disrespectful behavior on a pretty odd show that somehow turned her into a celebrity.

First a meme, but then into a celebrity with a musical career after that.

And all this at least makes me wonder, and I can tell by some of your faces right now, makes you wonder why our culture glorifies things so were unworthy of our attention.

Well, we can look at that from afar and laugh, but yet we find, I'm sure that you find ourselves in a day and age where often we can kind of be trapped into this sort of endless scrolling, this endless consuming, looking for something that's not only viral, but something that will captivate us, and yet often what we find is just ourselves asking, what did I just watch?

Why did I even watch that?

I think this highlights something about what it means to be human, and that is that a mark of our humanity is that you and I long for glory.

We want to see, we want to experience, we want to hear, we want to taste, we want to know glory.

Think about how how magnetic a sunrise or a sunset is that you have to just, you have to stop and stare.

You know, a few months ago, we were driving, Amber and I were driving home from a small group and I saw the most, I mean, I don't know if I've ever seen the northern lights before, but for sure on this night I saw the most glorious display of the northern lights I'd ever seen.

I got home to my phone kind of exploding with all these texts of people sending pictures of the northern lights that they had seen, and I know that some of you saw it as well, and it really highlights this reality that when we see something glorious, we cannot help but to want to share it with other people, to experience it and to share it.

In fact, this longing is so deep in us that even if it's a negative thing, we just we want, as human beings, we're wired to witness significance.

So that, I don't know if you're like me, but if you hear the sound of screeching tires, you cannot help but to look.

That's why traffic slows down at an accident, because there's something in us that is wired to witness significance.

Now, John, man of in history who wrote this gospel, this morning he wants to speak to us about that.

And he wants to speak to us about a glory that each of us have missed or are missing even right now.

He makes an astounding claim.

Claim that we just read, that the ultimate glory, the Creator Himself, has come into this world.

That the Word, that is God's voice, that spoke this universe into existence, that the Word became flesh, and that He all not only became flesh, He lived among us, He spoke to us.

But important for you and I this morning is that this glory of the Word becoming flesh is not just something for us to behold, it is a glory that is to transform.

Glory that is to change us, a glory that is to captivate us more than anything else in the world.

Now, if you're not a Christian here, if if you don't subscribe to the Christian worldview, I think that it's probably a bit easier for you to understand just how glorious this claim that Jesus makes is.

I haven't met a single person.

In fact, when whenever I talk to someone who has a different worldview than the Christian worldview, this is often something I ask.

I ask if God were here in the room, maybe speaking to us right now, then neither myself nor you would want to speak.

We would want to listen to God.

We can all agree, like in that scenario, we would all be quiet.

We would want to hear God speak, and that is exactly the claim that John makes here, that the word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, that God indeed has done that.

In space and time, he has spoken.

So that as Jesus, Jesus' voice echoed through the air, it was the voice of God.

What's harder often is for Christians who have celebrated Christmas year after year to not approach this truth with apathy.

In fact, it begs us to ask this question, even now, if we become so familiar with the story of God coming to earth that it no longer stirs an awe in us, or if we've been distracted by even lesser glories, so that we've lost sight of the one glory that truly will matter for eternity.

Well, John this morning is challenging us then to see this glory, to believe this glory, and to respond to this glory that is introduced to the world at Christmas.

I want you to see three things.

I'm gonna tell you them all up front.

Let's just do that this morning, and then if you want, you can fall asleep, and you got all the points there.

Is that helpful?

Let's do that.

First, I want you to see that these words of John confront us with how we reject this glory.

Second, I want you to see that these words that call us to believe that we can receive this glory.

And third, I want you to see that these words compel us to reflect this glory with our lives.

It's a glory we reject, a glory we must receive, and glory we must then reflect.

Isn't that nice?

Well, let's explore that first, and I want you to see how we have rejected this glory.

Look at what John says with me.

Get your eyes on the word of God with me here.

Look at verse 10.

He was in the world.

The world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

This verse, really in a nutshell, tells us what Christmas is all about, that God came to the world.

In fact, it's really fleshed out in verse 14, isn't it?

The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Now we know from verse 1 that this word is Jesus, and that the word was not only with God, the word was God Himself.

And so what we come to understand here is that John is really making a quite extraordinary claim that for the first time in human history, in Jesus, God became man.

Now, we need to be theologically precise here.

This isn't that Jesus was half God, half man.

He wasn't sort of like a centaur.

You know, a centaur who's half a horse, they got the bottom of a horse, but then the top is a human.

And Jesus came to us, he was fully God, so that he retained all of the divine attributes.

You see that throughout Jesus' ministry.

He's able to stop the wind and the waves, he's able to heal people from a distance, he's able to cast out demons, he retains all of his divine attributes while also fully embracing the limitations and the qualities of being in the flesh.

Now, John here wants us to not only not only understand what Jesus did, but more importantly, did you notice that he wants us to understand where Jesus did it?

Did you catch that?

He, Jesus, was in the world.

Now, this word, world, in the Gospel of John is extremely significant.

We'll come to it time and time again.

And I'm sure that you're even aware right now of John 3.16, which is the most famous verse in the Bible, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

Well, it's important for us to understand exactly what John means here.

In fact, throughout all the gospel, when he says the word world, he doesn't speak of the world in a positive sense.

In fact, almost always when John speaks of the world, he's speaking of it in a negative sense.

He doesn't just refer to the physical earth or humanity in general.

Instead, what John is talking about, when he says world, he is talking about a whole system of humanity that is designed at its very heart to oppose God.

Let me show you that.

Look at John 7.7.

I'm gonna read it for you, but you can turn there as well if you'd like.

Says the world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil.

Again, in 15 verse 9, you'll see this.

How Jesus thinks about the world as not 15-9, 15-19.

Says, if you were of the world, the world would love you as its own, but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

What we find here is that the world is a system of humanity that it stands in opposition and enmity to Jesus, so that there is a great significance in what John is saying here, that by stepping into the world, Jesus was stepping into enemy territory.

This is why John the Baptist, when he saw Jesus, he said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

And you and I look at that and we say, Oh, that's so cute, you know, lambs are so fluffy and so precious, and yet the Israelite knew exactly what that meant.

That was a bloody affair.

Jesus coming into the world was like you and I flying into the heart of war-torn, a war-torn country.

But yet it's not even really like that because if you and I right now were to fly to a, you know, the middle of a war-torn country, we would fly there as neutral observers.

But what Jesus does is flies to the heart of enemy territory where all that has happened for thousands and thousands of years is the people, his own people, but all of humanity opposing him.

Jesus knew this.

Jesus knew the words of Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 65, when Isaiah prophesied immediately before the people of Israel were put into the Babylonian exile.

Isaiah 65 · chapter mention

He said, I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me.

I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me.

The prophet says, I said, Here I am, here I am, to a nation that was not called by my name.

I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices, a people who provoke me to my face continually.

These are the people that Jesus came to.

Now listen, as we understand that Jesus in coming to the world, came to enemy territory, there is so much application to draw from this.

First thing I want you to recognize is this is that Jesus took great pains for you to know him.

If you know, if if you knew that someone, let's just say, you know, they were tortured or something, for you to receive a message.

How much more does it make you willing to listen to that message?

I mean, if a if a person is is willing to endure great pain in order for you to know something or to experience something, then immediately that person has our ear.

It's so important for us to understand.

You see, we make Christmas so sort of, you know, light and fluffy, and we put on the radio, and you know, I love all this stuff part about Christmas.

I mean, I love it in December.

November's a little early for me, but I'm getting off track here on the sermon.

We make Christmas so light and fluffy, but when you really get to the heart of it, it's it's this bloody endeavor.

Jesus is born into a world that hates him.

He's born into a world that will crucify him.

Secondly, I want you to see that your sinfulness and your inadequacy and your enmity does not make Jesus' heart cold to you.

In fact, what Christmas reminds us of is this reality that Jesus loves to do this.

For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross.

You see, Jesus is not flying into the lands that are favorable to him.

What Jesus is doing is coming to the world that has done nothing but stand in strict opposition to him.

So that when you feel lost, when you feel sinful, when you feel like you're not enough, when you feel like you could never deserve God's love, when the Bible comes to you and the law crushes you and convicts you, and you realize that there's no way you could ever live up to the commands of God, that you are not holy.

It is at that very moment that Jesus is, Jesus looks at you and he looks at your heart and he says, That is territory I want to go to.

You see, Jesus did not come to this world to seek and save those who could help themselves, who could, you know, sort of muster up a sense of righteousness for themselves.

What Jesus came to do is to seek and save the lost.

Now, here is the heart of the problem.

That even though Jesus is willing to enter into this enemy territory, even though Jesus comes into the world, what John says is this the world did not know him.

And in verse 11, it gets even more intense.

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

The claim John is making is not just that some reject Jesus.

The claim that John is making is that we all reject Jesus.

Well, of course, as we read through the Gospels, it becomes clear how the world at the historical time of Jesus rejected him.

He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

But what John is speaking to is even more relevant to us than that.

What he's speaking to is this heart of rejection and rebellion that is still alive in us today.

How might we reject Jesus?

And one way is just simply by rejecting the claims that Jesus makes about himself.

Many of us were quick to, you know, accept the claims of culture about what culture says, maybe about marriage, about what culture says about how we should live, what about what culture even says about what might make us happy, but we are hesitant to accept the claims of Jesus, and so we resist then submitting to him in our lives.

But a second and maybe more pertinent way that we often reject Jesus is perhaps more.

Subtle.

Maybe it's in the day-to-day process of letting our hearts be pulled towards other sinful desires.

Maybe it's simply in the things that we allow to distract us by the entertainment that we consume, by our work, by even good things like family.

It is centering our lives around things that are not Jesus, that consume our time, that consume our attention, that consume our energy, leaving little room for Jesus really to be the Lord of our lives.

This perhaps is the most pertinent way that we reject Jesus.

And what we need to see this morning is not just that they've rejected Jesus, but that you and I, spiritually, on a day-to-day basis, Christian or not Christian, like right now, we reject the glory that has come into the world that is Jesus Christ.

Now, this is the bad news.

And I need you to understand that before you can understand the good news, you need to understand the bad news.

And so John really fleshes this out that he came into the world, but he was rejected by the world.

But in verses 12 to 13, he gets to the good news.

I want you to see secondly here that if we're gonna see and respond to the glory of Jesus Christ, that we need to believe that we can receive Jesus.

Now John wants us to understand this that whether you're rejecting him out right now, or that was a phase in your life's history, or maybe even the present or the future, that the reason Jesus came was to be received by man.

Though for the most part, apart from a handful of women, in Jesus' lifetime, he was rejected by all, his mission was that he might come in order to be received by his own.

Sorry, John says in verses 12 and 13, he says this, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of the blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

But of God.

Jesus to be received.

What does it mean to receive Jesus?

Well, look at the text here.

John is trying to help us understand this.

Look at verse 12 with me.

But all who did receive him, then John clarifies, who believed in his name.

Let me ask you something.

What does it mean to believe in a name?

You know, when I met almost all of you, I told you my name is Miles, and none of you, at least in front of my face, said, you know, I don't believe you that your name's Miles.

I mean, there might be like an underground conspiracy going that I have some sort of different name or something, but I've never heard of it.

That's just not something that we do in this day and age.

Well, that's because in our day and age, names don't really carry meaning to them.

Names don't make any sort of claim about who the person is.

But if I were to tell you this, that that my name means mighty warrior, which it does, well, all of a sudden I can tell some of you are looking at me a little more puzzled.

You know, you don't look very much like a mighty warrior to me, and I can tell you I didn't have any sort of Spartan upbringing.

You know, I lay I ate a lot of just junk food.

You know, I I really was not prepared, trained as a child to be a warrior at all.

And so even now I'm telling you all this, and maybe it's stacking up a lot of evidence against the fact that I am some sort of mighty warrior.

You see, if my name has a meaning, it makes a claim about who I am, and then as we think about that claim, you and I can wrestle with whether or not we believe that to be true.

And if you wanna do that, catch me outside after the service.

We'll see who the mighty warrior is.

Well, in biblical times, it was a person's name that reflected their character and their person.

And what you need to understand is that no matter how much you know or don't know about Jesus Christ, his very name makes a claim on your life.

His name, Jesus, means deliverer.

And by that, the claim of his name is that he is the only way to salvation.

Now, Jesus would say all sort of things that would uh corroborate that that he believes this to be true about himself.

He would say, say, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

He would say that no one can come to the Father except through me.

Jesus came uh believing this about himself, but the name itself makes this claim on your own life that he is your own only deliverer.

And so the question for you then is do you believe it?

It's not only the name Jesus that makes a claim on your life, it's the name Christ, which means Messiah, the anointed one, the king who is promised in scripture to redeem humanity.

He is the solution to the darkness that we face in the world.

You see, the name it makes a claim on your life.

It is a claim that you must wrestle with, even if all you know is his name.

Now, C.S.

Lewis famously put it like this.

The claim that Jesus makes on our life leaves us with only really three options.

That as Jesus claims to be our deliverer, either he is a liar or a lunatic or he is the Lord.

You know, maybe he's a liar, maybe Jesus came, you know, in in history and time and space, and maybe he was just lying about who he was, and he really deceived the masses, and he really started this revolution of people who then followed him.

Well, that's one thing to believe.

Another option is that maybe he was a lunatic, maybe he really believed this about himself.

Maybe he really believed that he was the only deliverer, and so he preached these things, believing it, and and other people didn't sort of see through the lunacy, and so they believed it as well.

Either Jesus is a liar, he's a lunatic, or he was right, that he is the Lord and the only savior of the world.

And John comes to make to say this: what do you believe about the claim that Jesus makes simply through his name?

And then he shows us this profound truth that if you believe him, if if you believe in the claims that he makes, if you believe in his person, if you believe in his mission, if you receive him, look at these words.

He gave the right to those people to become children of God.

Now, this is a verse that if you have been in the church for any length of time, you have probably read time and time again.

And often with those verses, we need to take that, you know, men in black memory eraser thing and erase our memory and come back to this again because the claims that this verse is making are, I think, I think are radical, jaw-dropping.

Let me read it again to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right.

The right.

You see, the gospel is so encapsulated in this verse simply that God's will is to save a rebellious humanity, so much so that if all you need to do is believe, and so long as you do that, you are handed this spiritual right.

It is a right to become a child of God.

Now we love rights, don't we?

You know, the perk of being born in a free country is the rights you have as a human.

The rights to free speech, the right to privacy, the right to the freedom of religion.

These are foundational rights for us, and on a daily basis, we live believing that we not only have them, but that we deserve them.

Why?

Because we are a human.

I mean, Canada was built on that belief that each human is given these rights.

And the gospel, John is saying, is built on this belief that if you have faith, you have a spiritual right that cannot be taken away from you.

Listen, is that too strong of language to say?

If it is, you've got to wrestle with what God's word is saying here.

That if you believe, listen, if you're a human, you have human rights.

If you are a believer, you have spiritual rights to become a child of God.

God grants you that right.

It's not based on your birth, it's not based on your will, your desire, John says.

It is a gift granted by God alone.

It's God's word.

Now, John wants us to understand the weight of this language, the significance of this language.

And I gotta tell you how many times I have come to a verse like this to remind myself of the strength of God's promises.

You see, you fight this feeling of being inadequate for salvation by clinging to verses like this.

When doubts about your salvation overwhelm you, there's one question you ask.

Do you believe?

Do you believe?

And if you believe, when you come to a verse like this, you will find nothing else in him, in here.

To all who did receive him, to all who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

If you believe, that's all if if there's belief in your heart, if you believe that Jesus is the only deliverer, then you then have the spiritual right to become a child of God.

There is only one step.

Now, this is what I experience time and time again as as I have had the privilege of having a front row seat of seeing people embrace the gospel over and over and over again.

What is always asked is this, and then what?

And then what?

You know, I believe, and then what do I do?

And I try like there's only one step.

There's only one thing to do.

Because if you believe, there is then this promise from God Himself.

It is a right that is granted to you that you are born into the family of God.

Think about rights for a moment.

What did you do to have the rights of a citizen of Canada?

For most of you, the only thing that you did was you were born.

Congratulations to you.

You did it.

It was one thing.

One thing.

You were born in this country.

And so here John is saying, what is it that gives you a right to a heavenly inheritance?

It is this that you were born of God.

How do you know that you're born of God?

You believe.

And it's like this circular argument, isn't it?

When you start to think about it, like, how do I know that I'm born of God?

I believe.

How do I believe?

I believe that I can be born again.

It's a circular argument, but I love it because what God wants to do for us is take us entirely out of the equation.

God doesn't want salvation to be any part of your work because your work is questionable, God's is not.

Can we be honest?

I mean, when we do a work, don't we question it?

Listen, I write a sermon every week, they say this about sermons, even the great sermon writers say this that you never finish a sermon.

There just comes a time that you have to preach it.

I could look at every sermon I say and I've preached and say, listen, I there are ways that I could tweak it, there are ways I could make it better.

It's not a finished work.

It never is a finished work.

We look at the work that we do around our house, we see all the flaws, we see how we could have done it better, we say, next time I'm gonna do this different.

But what about God?

God always finishes his work, it's always on time.

You and I just come to understand that.

Even if you're not a believer, you understand that the work that God has done is always a good work, so that we can go on Google right now and we can look up that tomorrow the sun is gonna rise.

Well, you know, it's December 23rd, so probably at like 11:30 in the morning.

But it is gonna rise at that very minute, and we can even look to December 23rd, 2025, and see what time the sun will rise.

And we come to understand that God's work is always consistent, he always accomplishes what he says he will do, and so it is with your salvation.

It is a work of God, John says.

You were born not of the blood, nor of the will of flesh, that is even your own will, nor of the will of man, but you were born of God through belief.

It's his it's his work.

It's his work.

It's right.

The security, it's it's unshakable because it's yours in Christ.

Now, if we come to understand this, that all of us have rejected the glory, and that we can receive it.

If we have received it, then I want you to understand that the third thing that happens is that we live to reflect it.

And here, look at what John says in verse 14.

It says, 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.

It's an incredibly clear statement about the reality of what has happened.

The eternal word of God, who was with God and is God, took on human flesh, he became embodied.

In fact, the very word dwelt.

The literal meaning is to tabernacle.

Or maybe to put it, you know, in some contemporary English, to tent.

And this word, it draws us to this powerful image in the Old Testament, one that would have immediately resonated with the people that John was writing to.

You see, the tabernacle in the Old Testament was the portable dwelling place of God.

And God had instructed his people, particularly Moses and the Israelites, to build the tabernacle.

And so while the Israelites were in the desert on the way to the promised land, the tabernacle would travel with them, and it was a mobile structure where God's presence would be found.

It is a portable dwelling place of God, and so that as you read through the history of Israel under the leadership of Moses, what you find is so long as the tabernacle is in their presence, they're fine because God is dwelling with them, God is in their midst.

There's a powerful presence.

So powerful and magnificent that in Exodus 33, and you can read this later, in verses 18 to 23, Moses would ask God to show him his glory.

God would respond that he would allow his goodness to pass before Moses, but more Moses could not fully see God's face because it would be too much for him to handle.

The glory of the inside of this tabernacle was so great.

In Exodus 34, Moses would enter into the tabernacle and he would meet with God, and so glorious would that meeting with God be that when he left, his face would shine brightly, a physical brightness shining off of his face, so that the Israelites who saw Moses were filled with a sense of fear because of the glory of the God that Moses had just encountered.

Now, when John tells us then that Jesus tabernacled among us, he's telling us that Jesus is the fulfillment then of the Old Testament tabernacle, the presence of God.

In Jesus, the glory which once dwelt in a tabernacle that could not be accessed by uh all but only by a few, it was now fully revealed and it was embodied in human form.

So that as you and I come back 2,000 years later to study the life and the words of Jesus, we are seeing that same glory that Moses saw.

It's the same glory.

John tells us here that it is a glory that is full of grace.

It's full of grace.

Love one, you look at Christ and you'll find one who is filled with grace.

We love grace.

I mean, at Christmas time, undeserved kindness.

That is what the Christmas season is all about, about giving gifts and showing the ones that you love your love for them.

And we celebrate grace in all kinds of ways in the Christmas season, but especially in gift giving.

And you know, this past week we sat down with our kids and in preparation for the week ahead, you know, we started talking about how you receive gifts.

And the heart of that is that it's not so much the gift that you receive, right?

It's the message that it says about the person who has given you that gift, that they love you and that they want you to experience the joy that this gift brings, that that's the greatest part of the gift.

That's the thing that we're to be thankful for.

That's grace in a nutshell.

Kindness and love that is expressed in the act of giving.

John says that it is a glory, it's full of grace, and it is full of truth in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the truth.

You know, the ultimate reason at the heart of it, why we embrace the Christian worldview, at the heart of it is because it's true.

Because as we look at the world through the lens of the Christian worldview, we come to understand what is truly true.

We cannot comprehend the experiences that we have, we cannot make sense of this life that we live apart from the reality that Jesus came to preach and teach about.

Now, as we understand the grace and truth that is found in Jesus, I want to draw out an application for us.

The reality of something that is glorious is that it must be shared.

That's what glorying in something is.

To glory in something is to declare that it is awesome.

For something to be glorious is for it to radiate its majesty, its goodness, its awesomeness.

So that the glory of God, the glory of his grace and truth, just like it radiated off of Moses' face, is something that is meant to reflect off of our lives.

We're called to reflect the same glory.

As we come to communion this morning, this is exactly what we do.

We take communion and it is a physical, it's a physical symbol that preaches to the world and to us each time that we take it that Jesus came in the flesh.

We take the flesh and it is not Jesus, but it does show us something.

It can be held and it can be seen, and it can be tasted, and it is something that is real.

Material.

And it reminds us of this reality that Jesus, he was the eternal word who took on flesh and came into this world for this very reason to die.

In communion, we take the cup, we take the bread as a way to symbolize that we have received this.

That we are those in verse 12 who did receive Jesus, who have believed that there is one deliverer.

It is in the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

It is in the pierced flesh of Jesus Christ.

It is our only hope of salvation.

And because we have believed that Jesus in his death and resurrection is our Savior, we have been given the right to become children of God.

Now, if you didn't receive the cup, the ushers are at the front and you can flag them down and they will get a cup into your hands.

There's two reasons why you might not take this this morning.

One is if you're not a Christian and you have not received Jesus.

We would invite you to do that today.

The other is if you are a Christian and you're living in unrepentant sin, not that you have sinned, but that there is sin that's been revealed to you, that you are saying to God, I am unwilling to deal with this sin.

If that's the case, then we would ask for your own good that you would pass on communion and turn in repentance today.

Before we take communion, let's turn to the Lord in prayer.

Father, we bow before you.

And God, we thank you for this cup that we hold in our hands, for the bread that we hold in our hands.

Lord, that you were pierced for our salvation.

And God, we're especially grateful for this opportunity to take communion so close to Christmas because we're reminded that Christmas in all reality was a it was a bloody affair.

That your son was the Lamb of God who came to die for his people.

And God, as we take this cup and we eat this bread, we are declaring, Lord, that we believe in the name of Jesus Christ, that we receive him, that he is our only Savior.

But Lord, also declaring this that we want to reflect this to the world.

Lord, there is one hope for salvation, and it is Jesus Christ alone.

And so, God, we thank you and we praise your name.

And we pray this in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Top layer there, you'll find uh the bread.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, for I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

Though the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Let's take the bread.

In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

Let's take the cup together.

Father, thank you.

Thank you for your glory.

And we turn to you now, Lord, in worship.

Again to declare, Lord, that you are glorious.

Because you are the one who sent your son to us to dwell with us and to redeem us, Lord.

Thank you.

And we sing praise to you now in the name of your Son.

Amen.