Christmas at One Church

Okay, this is the last message I'm gonna do in a grouping or a series of messages we've been calling There's More to the Story.

And so what we've been doing for the last couple of months is just looking at different verses that when you first read them, you may not know what to make of them.

It's like what does that mean?

What does that say?

And just like any uh context, um you the more you know about it, the more you know about maybe history, the more you know about uh the personalities and the characters and the people, the more that the story makes sense and you get a lot more depth to it.

And so the Bible is one of those things that um you know we look at as God's word, and we want to make sure that we're not just like reading something, jumping to a conclusion, and maybe missing the point.

And so that's what we've been doing the last few months.

We're gonna keep doing that uh even into next year.

We'll call it something different, but that's the way we approach uh God's word.

And today's gonna be no different.

Um, you know, you come to a Christmas service, and obviously we know the story of the birth of Jesus, right?

We know who Mary and Joseph are.

We know that they uh Jesus was born in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes.

We know that the angels appeared to the shepherds.

I bring you good news of great joy for all people, and then the shepherds came and worshiped them, and you know the story of the wise men and just all of this.

And it's a great story, it's wonderful.

You may have traditions in your home about reading it together and that type of thing.

What I'm not gonna do today is necessarily like preach to you about the shepherds or the wise men.

I really want to uh talk about the reason that we make such a big deal about Jesus, the reason uh that Jesus is so important.

And what I want to do is kind of do the more to the story thing in looking at Jesus through the eyes of his best friend.

Um, one of the Gospels is the Gospel of John, and John is arguably Jesus' best friend.

Um, he's known as John the Beloved, John the Beloved Disciple, uh, which we kind of joke about a little bit because the only place he's called the beloved disciple is in John.

Right?

So it's like uh he gave himself that moniker, okay?

Um but you know, it might you might see it as like he's full of himself or whatever.

I don't see it that way.

I kind of think like this is a guy that knew he was loved, and he had a revelation of Jesus that I hope we all have, which is to uh understand his love for us.

And so John felt that way, certainly, about Jesus.

But we know that Jesus felt that way about John because in John 19, in probably like one of the crescendo moments of the Bible, you have Jesus is being crucified.

And as he's he, you know, is about to die, he's trying to get his family in order, and he realizes you know, his father, Joe, uh earthly father Joseph has passed away, and his mother's gonna be alone.

And so he looks over at John.

John is that friend that you trust with your mother, he's that friend that you trust to take care of your family.

He looks at John in John 19 and he says, uh, John, take care of my mom.

And he looks at his mom and says, Mom, John's gonna take care of you.

And so, I mean, you want to talk about an affectionate, deep trust in relationship.

I mean, you know you got some friends you like to hang out with, but you wouldn't trust them with your family, right?

And then you got some friend that you really trust with your family.

That's the kind of friend John was to Jesus.

In fact, church history tells us that Mary ended up living in Ephesus with John until she died, is what church history says.

So we're going to look at this and then we're gonna look, uh, I'll give you a little bit more to the story of John.

So after Jesus, you know, dies and ascends to heaven, now he, you know, gives the Great Commission.

So his disciples are taking not just a message of good news, but they're taking the body of Christ or the community, building relationships, communities, churches around this ethos of the kingdom of God through the lens of Jesus and all the stuff Jesus taught.

And I know that's a loaded statement, and we talk about it all the time, and I don't have time to explain all of that now, but they went to build those types of communities.

So John he leaves and he goes to an area he wasn't from.

It's an area called Asia Minor.

Okay, now I want to show you little maps because when when you're reading the Bible, like if you read the book of Acts, it'll say, like, hey, Paul was trying to go to Asia.

And we hear Asia, it's a little confusing because we when we hear Asia, we hear the continent of Asia and all the countries in that continent.

And so it seems like that's where he's going.

It's definitely not where he's going.

So let me go ahead and bring up that map real quick.

And uh, okay, so Asia is basically modern day Turkey.

So if you see on this map, uh, got this map from a guy named Marty Solomon, uh, awesome map.

Uh, that basically that yellow area is modern day Turkey, and then the west coast, the west uh western part, the coastal region is called what they call Asia in the first century.

Asia Minor is inland a little bit, and it's uh uh again a bunch of different cities like Ephesus, uh, and then we even last Sunday looked at um two different areas Colossae, um, Laodicea.

Some of those cities are in Asia Minor.

So whenever you see Asia, Asia Minor, basically think modern day Turkey.

So this is where John settled.

Okay, now let me give you a little more about Asia Minor.

So Asia Minor, you can take it down.

Asia Minor was in the um, you know, obviously in the Greco-Roman world.

But when you think Greco-Roman, right, that's two words.

Greco meaning Greek, and Roman meaning Roman.

And so you had, just like in America, where we have different cultures in different parts of our country.

One country, but the West Coast, okay, the south, the east coast, okay, uh, Midwest, has a little different culture in general, pro the kind of a prototypical culture of that area.

When you think of Asia Minor, they were more Greco or Greek than Roman.

And there's a lot to that, but the main area I want to highlight today is that when they thought about, especially theology, um, Greek people really saw the gods, the pantheon or the collective group of um polytheistic, like all the gods, like many, many gods, they believed in those gods.

They believed that those were real gods, and those gods are out there, and the world, you know, basically the world revolves around these gods.

And we're just people living in their world.

Romans, uh, many Romans, again, this is a generalization, but really the Roman mindset took the gods out of the center of the universe and put people in the center of the universe, and then the gods, the concepts of the gods were really more, they would cling to that more than they did, like, hey, we really believe this god is out there.

So your Greek uh people really believed in the Greek gods and the pantheon of gods, and that shaped not only their theology, but it shaped their community, it shaped their culture and their how they behaved around each other.

So John decides to write a gospel, and what we really believe, what many of us believe, including me, is that John came to the conclusion, I need to write a fourth gospel because he realized that the other three gospels really weren't focused and aimed in a way that a Greek person would receive it.

Right?

Matthew's motive, we've talked about this before, Matthew was aimed exclusively at a Jewish audience.

If you read Matthew's gospel, he doesn't explain any of the customs, any of the insider language of Jewish tradition.

He just assumes you know.

Mark and Luke were focused at Jews and Romans.

So they they had a Roman emphasis, which sorry, I don't go down that rabbit trail.

Stop, Greg.

Okay, and then the fourth is John realized when he read, probably read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he realized, hey, these are great for Jewish people and Roman people, but this is not going to work.

Like these Greek folks are not gonna grab it like this.

And so he loves these people, so he constructs and writes his own good news gospel account of Jesus that's going to ultimately serve and have Jesus be revealed to his Greek audience.

That makes sense?

So let's look, let's just get into it.

So John 1, 1, okay, so the very beginning of John, look how he opens.

It says, In the beginning was the word.

Okay, the word for word there, okay, this is written in Greek.

The word for word is the word logos or logos, however you want to pronounce it.

And of course, to a Jewish person, they hear in the beginning, what do they think?

They think Genesis 1.1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

So he's he's signaling to them, he's he's he's essentially pulling them in to the conversation.

But then it's the word logos, okay?

So the word logos to a Greek person, when they hear logos, they would have thought about a frequent term used, a popular term used in Greek philosophy.

So 600 years before this, the term logos started to be used by Greek philosophers to talk about the mysterious intelligent force in the universe that in the midst of change maintained integrity and held everything together.

So Greek philosophers talked about this 600 BC.

They're like, you know, there's something out there.

We don't exactly know what it is, but there's something out there in the midst of all this change that is holding the world together.

And then the term was used frequently by uh Plato, which again, to the Greek audience, these these Greek philosophers are heroes.

This is like, you know, Plato, Aristotle.

Aristotle was the mentor of Alexander the Great.

Okay, these are, this is like their Mount Rushmore of heroes, right?

Aristotle and Plato, and they use logos to describe this something that we can't quite, we don't know what to name it, we don't know what to call it, but it's powerful, it's real, it's integral, and it's holding everything together.

It's it's it's keeping everything in relationship and connected.

So when you when the Greek audience hears in the beginning was the word, was the logos, they went, yep, yep, yep, we we've been hit to that for 600 years.

So the Jewish person, when they hear in the beginning was the word, was the logos, what would they think of?

They would think of the Torah.

They would think of God's law.

And not just the law, like when you look at how the law, the Ten Commandments, but then the 613 laws of the Torah were delivered to the nation, it was given to the nation in writing at Mount Sinai from Moses.

But they didn't think of it as like, hey, Moses came up with this and gave this to us.

They believed that ultimately the Torah was from the mind of God.

It's ultimately divine wisdom that's been in the mind of God since before creation.

Uh look at Proverbs chapter 8, verse 22 and 23.

Proverbs 8:22

This is a poetic book in the Old Testament that that has it basically the style is it's wisdom personified.

So wisdom talking like a person.

And wisdom says in verse 22 and 23, the Lord formed me from the beginning before he created anything else.

I was appointed in ages past at the very first before the earth began.

So both the Jewish and Greek audience, when they hear logos, the Greek hears the you know, Aristotle and Plato talking about this mysterious integral force.

The Jewish person hears the Torah, the law of God, the wisdom that's been in the mind of God since before creation.

And so John has them both, this is surgically done.

John has them both nodding their heads simultaneously.

He's pulling them in with common ground.

In the beginning was the Logos, yep, absolutely, and the Logos was with God.

They're like, yep.

And the and the Logos was God.

And they're like, yep, definitely.

We're with you.

Verse 2.

He okay, so he goes from this mysterious God, like we that we kind of realize there's something out there we can't explain, to then attaching their idea and their concept of Logos to He being Jesus.

And so John is saying the thing that's been mysterious to you, and the thing that you've been wondering about that you believe in, but you're not quite sure what to believe about, Jesus is the incarnate fulfillment of what you know to be true.

And he spends the rest of the book attaching who Jesus is, who God is expressed through Jesus to both of these audiences.

It says he was was made, uh was with God in the beginning, through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made.

Verse 4 in him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

Alright, so here's what he's about to do, and uh, I want to just kind of give you a glimpse of this.

He's going seven different times in the book of John, um, there are these seven I am statements that Jesus makes.

So he says, I am, and then he says he's he's something.

Um, this is one of the reasons, by the way, that most new believers, right, if they're like, they look at their Bible, they're like, this is a big, complicated book.

Where should I start?

Do I just go into Genesis and just start reading?

Where do I do?

Most people would tell someone, hey, start in John.

Because you start in John, you're gonna start with a revelation of Jesus, but John writes it in a way that's very digestible.

It's not like this super confusing stuff.

He uses terms like light and bread.

He's uh like a vine.

And so what you're gonna see are these seven I am statements.

And when you hear I am, again, think about his Jewish audience, he is taking them and attaching Jesus to Exodus 3 when uh God spoke, Yahweh spoke to Moses to lead the children of Israel out of bondage.

So he goes to the burning bush, right?

And he's like, Okay, this voice is coming out saying, I want you to lead my people, and you're the guy, you're gonna be the shepherd, you're gonna be the leader.

And Moses is like, What?

Like, when I go to the Israelites and I say, Follow me, and they go, Why?

What do I say?

Because I because I said so, what do I say?

And it says in um uh Exodus 3 14, God said to Moses, I am who I am.

This is what you are to say to the Israelites, I am, has sent you to you.

And so again, when he says, I am, by the way, this was ultimately what really upset a lot of people that Jesus kept saying, I am, because they're like, Who do you think you are?

He's ultimately, when he says I am, he's attaching himself to the God of the Old Testament.

Okay, so this is about to get good.

Here we go.

He says, I am, John 6.35.

Jesus declared, I am the bread of life.

Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, whoever believes me will never be thirsty.

Now let's go to the original audience.

What does the Jewish person hear?

The Jewish person hears, I am the bread of life.

So they hear the I am Exodus 3, and then they hear bread of life, they hear manna in the wilderness, they they hear uh go back to ultimately their theological belief of God all the way from the Old Testament, God's provision.

What does the Greek person hear?

The Greek person hears an allusion to the Greek goddess Demeter, who is the goddess of agriculture, the goddess of harvest, and ultimately the goddess of grain.

So he's what is he doing?

He's finding common ground.

You you make sacrifices to Demeter when you're expecting bread, but Jesus is saying, I am the bread of life.

Both audiences, he's connecting to something in their theology and ultimately showing Jesus as the expression of that.

Uh look at uh John 8, 12.

Jesus spoke to the people and he said, I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

What is the Jewish person here?

The Jewish person, when they hear, I am the light of the world, they think back Genesis 1.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

He said, Let there be light, that God created the light, that God was light, a pillar of light in the wilderness.

Okay?

Thy word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path.

So not just creating physical light, but also illumination, wisdom.

You're in darkness, you're confused in a season.

I need a light turned on in my emotions.

I need a light turned on in my marriage.

I don't know why we keep fighting.

I don't know why we can't get on the same page.

I don't know why we fell out of love.

There's there there's wisdom.

When the light comes on, I now can define reality.

And so the light of the world, right?

Jesus says, I'm the light of the world.

What would the Greek have heard?

The Greek would have heard the God Apollo, who was the God of the sun, who was the God of light, and who was the God ultimately of prophecy and again illumination, wisdom.

Uh the third one, John 10, 11, I am the good shepherd.

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

Okay, to the Jewish person, they would have, they would have connected the dot to Moses, who was a literal shepherd, leading sheep in the wilderness, and then leading a whole nation out of wilderness uh out of captivity through the wilderness.

They would have heard David, who was a shepherd, who said, uh, the Lord is my shepherd.

The Greek person would have heard the Greek God Pan, who was the God of the herds and the shepherds.

The Greek God who they looked to to oversee not only their herds, but the one who was taking care of the herds.

Think about that.

The Lord is my shepherd.

The Jew hears this, the Greek hears the God Pan.

Um so he's going again.

We see the love of John, frankly, through this text that he loves the people that God has sent him to serve and connect with, and he's trying to help them see Jesus and starting with common ground.

I'll give you one more, and then we're gonna kind of flip it a little bit.

So uh the the fourth one, there's seven of them, and I'm not gonna read you all seven, I'll just stop at four.

But the the fourth one is John 15, one.

And it says, I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener.

Okay, a lot of vine references in the Old Testament, the book of Psalm, uh, Psalms, the book of uh Hosea, the book of Isaiah, all have vine, vineyard, vine dresser references.

Um, to the uh Greek audience, the Greek god Dionysus was the god of wine, fertility, and the vine.

Um, and this is where you in this text you see fully what John is doing because he starts off with common ground, like hey, light, bread, vine, shepherd, good things.

Yet Jesus is like that, but you're gonna see now him not only compare himself to their beliefs about God, but contrast himself with their beliefs about God.

So he goes on.

Uh I'm gonna skip the first few verses in this guy, I'll just summarize it, and because I don't I don't want to read too much and everybody go cross-eyed.

But basically the first part of it, he says, I'm the vine, you're the branches, remain in me, I remain in you, you'll bear much fruit.

And so you start to go, okay, that makes sense.

Like if I don't continue to, you know, stay connected to God through Jesus, and I detach, just like a vine that's not connected, or a branch not connected to a vine, it withers, it dies, and it doesn't bear fruit.

If I'm not connected to Jesus consistently being reminded of who he is, what his kingdom is about, and what that means for my life, I'll probably just start doing what I want to do.

I'll probably start seeing through my lens, I'll probably become short-sighted.

I'll probably fall into a lot of things that you fall into with flesh, uh giving in to temptation, uh, thinking I know more than I do, the selfishness connected to it, and influenced by culture and the people around me.

Okay, so I see where that goes.

I've got to remain in Christ and have him remain in me, and I'll bear much fruit.

And then he goes on, and it says in verse 9, now I am gonna read this as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Okay, now we read something like that, we don't think much of it, it's like, okay, a verse about love.

You gotta understand, when you think about Greek audience, their belief about the gods, they don't have a belief that the they are loved by the gods.

The gods are powerful, they're they're they're over us, but the idea of being loved, he says, as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Now remain in my love.

If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my father's commands and remain in his love.

I've told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Quick pause.

What was a Greek belief about the gods was we have to appease them.

We have to make them happy, otherwise they will destroy us, they will hurt us.

And again, even to the Jews, there was a lot of even their belief about their own plight, their belief about the situation they were in was we God is mad at us.

And so then ultimately they're mad at each other.

My belief about God, my theological beliefs often, almost always spill into my interpersonal relationships, and it shapes how I see other people.

So he says, keep my commands, which when I read that, most of us read that, we go, What commands?

Like which ones are you talking about?

Because there's 613 laws of the Old Testament.

What commands am I supposed to keep?

And look what he does here in verse 12.

He said, My command is this love each other as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friend.

You are my friends if you do what I command.

What command what?

I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business.

Instead, I have called you friends, for everything I learned from my father I have made known to you.

You did not choose me.

I chose you.

I appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

What what fruit?

What fruit, Jesus?

The fruit that look at he says, verse 17.

This is my command.

Love each other.

So this is where you have the comparison of the common.

Ground of light and shepherd and bread and vine.

And then Jesus now starts to really contrast their belief about the gods.

It was interesting if you look at the origin story of Zeus, right, who is the god of gods in the Greek pantheon.

Zeus was born to a titan, and his father was afraid of his children because a prophecy that one of his children was going to be greater than him had been told to him.

And so he was worried that his children would exceed him.

And so he ate them.

He devoured them.

And the only one that escaped this was Zeus.

And Zeus's mother deceived his father, basically wrapped a stone in, uh, you know, swaddled a stone and gave it to him.

And he thought he was eating Zeus, but he was eating a stone.

And so Zeus escapes.

And when Zeus becomes a grown-up, becomes an adult, he goes back to seek vengeance from his father.

And he tricks his father, and his father, he gives him something to eat, and it causes him to vomit, and he vomits up all of his siblings.

And now Zeus and his siblings fight their father, they have revenge on their father, they destroy their father, and now they divide up power over the world.

And Zeus says, Okay, I'm the god of the sky.

My brother Poseidon is the god of the water, my brother Hades is the god of the earth and the underworld, and now we've taken over the world.

And now we have shaped the world and the culture of the world around vengeance.

And so you now have a Greco-Roman culture where the way that you gain honor and glorify yourself is through vengeance.

If somebody hurt you, if somebody did you wrong, it was not only accepted, it was expected that you would go regain your honor one way through revenge and through vengeance.

And so John so beautifully finds common ground with light, he finds common ground with shepherd, he finds common ground with bread.

But all the way at John in John chapter 1, he says, Jesus came fully empowered, full of grace and truth.

John 1 · chapter mention

And so now the accuracy of their theology is not just in some of the things they kind of had right through their pantheon, but he then draws a stark contrast between an attitude of vengeance, revenge, and bitterness, and a an empowered deity who came, gave up his very nature, took on the nature of a servant in their world.

A distinguished person would never ever appear like a servant.

Would never do that.

You wouldn't fraternize with a servant, you wouldn't be around a servant, anything that resembled a servant, you would never let someone see you do.

And so we see Jesus, who takes on flesh, becomes an infant, and the weakness of an infant has to grow, grow up, have growing pains, has to go through puberty as a teenager, has to, you know, go through loss.

He lost his earthly father Joseph.

He had to be misunderstood by his own people.

He had to come into his power and yet never use his power selfishly.

To have people mistreat him, ultimately execute him, only to have the power to resurrect and then come back and forgive everybody.

So John, who is an eyewitness, who was Jesus' best friend, who had been so deeply impacted by this, he's the guy who pinned God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son.

So whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life, everlasting life, life connected to God, not just in the day to come, the age to come, unto the age, but even here, right here, right now, to live in connection to God.

This is the book of John.

So beautifully written.

And as I read it, I thought, you know what, I'm going to share this with our church for a couple reasons.

One, I think it's a beautiful revelation of Jesus to an audience that was loved by John.

You know, you think God so loved the world, he sent Jesus, but Jesus loved the world, he sent John.

And he sent you.

And he sent me into the world to really do, you know, I found myself really inspired by John's love for Asia Minor.

He loved these people enough to go, you know what?

These Matthew, Mark, and Luke, no disrespect.

These are great books, and they were written for somebody, but I love the people in my community, the people that God's put in front of me enough, I realize that I can take who Jesus is.

I'm not going to distort who he is.

I'm going to present who he is in a way that will be revealed to them.

And so even that whole attitude, that whole spirit, I'm like, man, may that permeate our church.

I want that inside of me.

I was, I felt almost convicted.

I'm like, Lord, help me to love like that.

Help me to love like that.

And then our church is an expression of the body of Christ.

We need to be like that.

To go, who are the people God's put in front of us?

Let's love them enough to find what is the common ground, but to help them to see the distinction.

And ultimately, what we have is an empowered, omnipotent God expressed through the incarnation of Jesus who showed us how to bring grace and truth in full.

Not half grace, a little bit of grace, a little bit of truth.

Full grace, full truth through the power of God expressed through Jesus.

I want to end with this before we uh take a moment to continue on together.

You know, we've been doing this more to the story thing, and we've been using it as an approach to the Bible, which I think is been good, and we'll continue to do that.

But I want you to think about your story.

Like there's more to your story.

And just like in the Bible, you know, the more we know history and context and characters and some of the stuff we talked about today, the more it makes sense.

And you're here today and you have a story.

And for many of us, you know, other people relating to our story, they don't know the backstory and they don't know who you are, they don't know what you've walked through.

And there's even some things in your own mind you've been trying to sort out intra-personally, like what's going on in my head, and what am I feeling, and what do I really want?

What do I really believe?

And so you find yourself in these moments, and and often, you know, we even get to a place where, especially the older we get, and you have decisions that have been made, and there's some things in your wake that we can almost feel like the story has been ruined or the story is over and it's irreparable.

And yet it's in moments like this that we come back and realize there's more to the story.

First of all, there is more going on than you'll ever know.

There's more going on than you can even understand, even the things that are only you're the only one that's aware of.

And one of the beautiful things about welcoming God into our lives, the God expressed through Jesus into our lives, the Spirit of God inside of us, is that we are, he fully knows us.

That is He is uh helping us to navigate through life, He's doing it full of grace.

And he is that light, he shines a light often in darkness, dark places where we feel like we're alone, and yet he brings light and he brings bread and he brings wisdom and he brings guidance.

And if we will remain in him and he remains in us, there's still fruit yet to bear.

And so today, however, however confusing or even how dark your story might be, I encourage you today to believe that there's more to your story.

There's more to your story.

God is still up to something inside of you.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we come to you in the powerful name of Jesus, the name that's above all names.

And today, Lord, as we take a moment to uh to sing some carols and to celebrate ultimately uh your birth.

Uh Lord, we're not just celebrating a baby, we celebrate a Savior.

We know who you are and what you were about.

And in the same way that uh John, Lord, was so touched by his relationship with you.

Lord, it's in relationship with you ultimately that we find eternal life.

And so today we take a moment to receive that, to celebrate that.

And I pray, Lord, in a very specific personal way that you would meet people right where they are in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.