God with Skin On

Thank you for listening to an audio resource from Stanwich Church, located in Greenwich in Stanford, Connecticut.

The vision of Stanwich Church is to know Christ and make him known.

The Gospel lesson for today is from John chapter 1, verses 1 through 18.

John 1:1–18

This can be found on page 1053 of your Pew Bible.

John's introduction to the person of Jesus Christ describes him as the one and only God who has joined us in our humanity by taking on flesh and living among us.

A reading from John chapter 1, beginning with the first verse.

John 1 · chapter mention

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

He was in the beginning with God.

All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

He came as a witness to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him.

He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

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 all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor 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 our Father, full of grace and truth.

John bore witness about him and cried out, This was he of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.

And from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.

For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God.

The only God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

May God add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

This has been a weekend of memorial.

Remembering friends and loved ones and spouses of friends who didn't make it at 9-11.

Celebrating heroes, the Todd Beamers, the Wells Crothers of this life.

Wells was the one who was known as the man with the red bandana.

We need to keep telling those stories because they remind us that there have been people who have gone before us that allow us to experience the delight of our life.

And we have people like that from Stanwich Church.

We know that this is a story that the Holy Spirit is telling, but there have been people who have been used by God at different seasons to carry this church.

And one of them was a man by the name of Joe DeRuver.

Wow, only a few of us.

This is why we got to keep telling the stories.

Joe was a big guy.

He had a barrel chest, he had hands that were about this big.

He had these arms before it was popular to hug, would come and put a big bear hug on you.

And he had a booming voice.

But Joe had a connection with God that was so incredibly intimate.

He was a part of a group known as the Upper Room, and they would gather Saturday to pray, and he'd come to my men's Bible study.

And to be in the presence of Joe was to experience Jesus.

Joe sang in the choir.

This is the best picture I could find down in the archives.

He's all the way to the right.

See him smiling there.

And the story is told that one Sunday they were up there singing, and that little small chapel, if you haven't been over there, you've got to go see it to recognize what God is doing in our midst.

He's singing away, and when they were done, a little boy walked up and said, Are you God?

Now, for a little boy, God is big.

But I wonder if he was seeing something in the spirit that we saw.

See, inside that barrel chest was a heart that was so tender.

Those hands would reach with love.

That booming voice would speak the presence of God.

And so you saw God in him.

You saw the presence of Jesus.

A.W.

Tozer, who was a prophetic voice last century, said, The most important thing about you is what comes into your mind when someone mentions God.

For that little boy and for us who knew Joe, we saw something of God.

This fall, we're into our new preaching series, Walking with Jesus.

I can't tell you how excited I am about this.

I began preparing this 18 months ago for our launch in Stamford.

They'll still gonna get Jesus down there.

But we thought this would be the beginning point of it because we want to continue with what we do as a church best, to know Christ and make him known.

That is our vision of why we exist.

And the only way you can get to God is through Christ.

The writer of Hebrews says it this way: He's the exact imprint.

And our text, if you listened at the end, says, No one has seen God but only Jesus, and he's the one who will make him known to us.

History splits on this person Jesus, before Christ and after Christ.

The Bible centers on this person Jesus.

The Old Testament anticipates him.

The gospels reveal him in his full presence so that we can get close to God.

Acts unleashes him out into the world through you and I.

The epistles theologize him, and the apocalypse, as we saw last week, cause us to wait for him to come once again.

It all centers on Jesus because life and death center on Jesus.

He is the one that opens the door for us to experience the fullness of God.

It's possible that the most important thing that you and I will do this fall is to walk with Jesus.

No, I'm not even going to say it might be.

It is the most important thing that we're going to do.

And so we're going to begin in John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

In the course of our series, we're going to go after some of the human characteristics of Jesus that make him so approachable.

We'll look at his hands, we'll see his eyes, we'll catch a glimpse of his forehead, his back, different aspects of him.

But we begin in this glorious prologue that John has given us.

It's a passage that's just loaded with all kinds of glory.

People who have read it say, this is a place to take off your sandals because you're on holy ground.

And to get into the passage, I want to begin with just a little bit of teaching.

So the preaching will come in a few moments.

Let's just start with the teaching.

We have four gospels: gospel according to Matthew, gospel according to Mark, gospel according to Luke, and the gospel according to John.

But there's one gospel.

It's from their four different vantage points that they're trying to get us to understand who Jesus is.

You can't just get it with one voice.

You need multiple voices to even press in.

And the Holy Spirit is hovering over this whole process.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic gospels.

That's two words in the Greek, sin, S-Y-N, which is with and together, and optic.

It's to view together this one.

And they like to emphasize the humanity of Jesus.

And every once in a while his glory peaks through, the divinity peace.

John's gospel ends with this centurion saying, surely this was the Son of God.

And knowing this, some scribes later added to Mark's gospel in the beginning, this is the gospel of the Son of God.

In the early days, they were so captured with the humanity of Jesus.

Think about it, he's a carpenter's son, he's living next to him.

He even his brothers can't figure out who he is.

He's so human, it's hard to find God in him in the beginning until the resurrection.

Even the moments of doing these godlike things of forgiving and doing miracles and casting out demons and walking on water.

Oh, by the way, Gina said I should have preached on Jesus walking on water today, but that's just a little bit on the side.

My suggestion is I've built an ark, and if you'd like to join me, we're coming to the end of the earth.

But that's a different story of where we're going.

They could not get their mind around the fact that this guy that they were walking with was God.

There was no model for that.

Emperors and pharaohs were divinized as being a representative of God, but God and skin?

God taking on the forms that we have?

Well, John's twist is a little bit different.

It seems that after a couple decades, the people began questioning the divinity of Jesus.

And so John emphasizes the divinity that he's God and the humanity of Jesus peaks through every once in a while.

He's trying to correct some bad thinking.

He, rather than talking about miracles, talks about the seven signs.

He has Jesus taking on the nomenclature of Yahweh himself with the seven I am passages.

His connection, God the Father, and God the Son is just rich throughout John.

And Jesus keeps getting lifted up to that place.

Now we see his humanity sneak through.

His longest prayer, recorded prayer, is John chapter 17, the high priestly prayer.

John 17 · chapter mention

And here's what's interesting: his longest recorded conversation is with the woman by the well in Samaria.

That should tell us something about God right there.

And for John, the key word for him is witness.

In the Greek, it's the martyro idea where we get our word martyr.

All these different sources are giving witness to who Jesus is, to the point that Frederick Bruner, who has written a great commentary on John, says the basic question of John is, Jesus, who are you?

Really?

Because everybody's trying to get their mind around who Jesus is.

And it begins in verse 1 with this great declaration of his divinity.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Make no mistake about it, Jesus was God.

This is what got him killed.

In contemporary movements to find the historical Jesus and everything else, people tried to remove that aspect out of him.

Jesus was very clear on his identity.

He gets crucified for saying that he is God.

Bottom line.

We can't just have him as a nice guy who had good teaching.

He comes at a different angle.

And the early people got this after experiencing resurrection and ascension.

Pliny, who was a Roman secular historian, wrote to Emperor Trajan.

So he's not even a Christ follower.

And he describes the Christians this way: On the appointed day before daybreak, they sing a hymn antiphonally to Christ as to God.

The first hymn that we know of, the Philippian hymn, recorded in Philippians 2.

You remember this great declaration?

Paul says, you should have the same mind as Christ, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped or taken advantage of, but he emptied himself.

He kenosis, he got rid of his divine opportunities for a while, becoming like a servant and being found in human likeness, he became obedient to death, even death on the cross.

Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee in heaven and every knee on earth and every knee under the earth will bow, and every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

This is the Jesus we're pressing into these months.

We have to begin with his Godhead.

Now this is mysterious.

He's always God, but he's always man.

He's not a hybrid.

There's no logic to get around this.

We trusted on the declaration of the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit that Jesus came in the fullness of God.

But to make God known to us, he had to take a big step.

I'm going to jump over 13 verses.

Some of you were thinking, wow, this is going to be a really long message.

And I know the giants are playing soon and they're going to lose, so you don't really need to get home and watch it anyhow.

Did I say that out loud?

Yeah, my Ohio State got killed last night, so I'm not going to talk about it anyway.

Go H IO.

So in the beginning was the word.

You hear the echoes of creation there.

In the beginning, what God created.

There's a chaos.

The Holy Spirit hovers over the chaos.

Who does the Holy Spirit hover over?

Mary.

The chaos of our earth is about to be addressed, and then God speaks into creation.

Now the one speaking is the word himself.

The word's in our midst.

Verse 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Literally, he came and he tented and tabernacled in our midst.

That's what the text says.

Eugene Peterson says it this way: He moved into the neighborhood.

It's a good line.

He got down and dirty.

He was so present as God in humanity that we're going to miss it for 30 years.

This is called incarnation.

This is the greatest mystery of the faith.

Crucifixion and resurrection and ascension and the coming of the Lord are all part of the Christ event.

But how do you get your mind around God willingly being born as a baby, putting himself in surrender, Gina, as you prayed today?

Jesus is the ultimate example of surrender into a place of weakness so that we could experience the fullness of God.

And he did it so well that all throughout history, every culture paints him according to their culture.

I've had the privilege in being in a lot of museums, the Prado and Madrid and the Van Gogh Museum and Le Louvre, and the cloisters right here on the Hudson.

The cloisters has a lot of paintings of Jesus.

What's amazing is that in every period they paint him into their culture.

He's wearing that culture's clothes.

This is one of my favorite images that I've collected over the years of the different pictures of Jesus.

There's the African Jesus, there's the Latino Jesus, there's the Asian Jesus, all these expressions.

Now we all know that Jesus was a Semitic Jew living in Jerusalem.

He did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, like a lot of our movies dictate.

And we're not saying that he was any of these, but it shows that every culture sees Jesus incarnated so much that you find him in your own stuff.

So in Thailand, he eats sticky rice.

In Morocco, he eats couscous.

And in New York, he eats pizza.

Because Jesus enters our world fully.

He's showing us the love of God by crossing every boundary to get to us.

And how does he do it?

With grace and truth.

The early hearers of this who would have been connected far more to Hebrew culture and Aramaic would have heard two Hebrew words there.

Grace is the loving kindness of God, and truth is emit, the faithfulness of God.

When Jesus gets expressed, he comes as the friend of sinners.

He is grace upon grace, the text tells us.

He's always in trouble because he's hanging around with the wrong people.

Because he's a boundary crosser.

He says, I didn't come to save the righteous.

I came to save those who were lost.

I didn't come for those who were healthy.

I came for those who needed a doctor.

But he hates sin.

Absolutely hates sin.

Why does he hate sin?

Not because he's a killjoy.

He hates sin because he knows what it does to us.

It destroys us in the purpose that God has designed for us.

He has a way of blessing for us that if we will walk in it, we will flourish and we will have life.

But we choose sin so many times and it just leads to destruction.

Does anybody have any good results they want to report about following the path of sin?

No.

It gets us in trouble.

John records the only one who to record the uh encounter with a woman who's caught in adultery.

Remember the story?

The religious leaders bring her to Jesus.

They're not really concerned about her.

It says in the text they wanted to trap Jesus.

Because an adulterer needed to be stoned, according to the law.

And they put her in front of Jesus, and Jesus classically goes down and writes in the sand.

People spent years trying to figure out what he was writing.

I think he was stalling.

I think he was saying, Holy Spirit, I need a good answer here.

Because remember, he emptied himself of his omniscience.

He only goes where the Father's going.

He only does what the Father's saying because the Holy Spirit is operating through him.

He doesn't do that stuff before the baptism when the Spirit comes upon him.

And he's waiting.

And he says to all the people standing there, Whichever of you has not sinned, you throw the first stone.

And I can just hear the rocks hitting the ground.

And what I love about the text, it says, and the oldest ones left first.

He then looks at the woman and said, Where are your condemners?

They're gone.

Jesus says, I don't condemn you.

But what does he say next?

Go and sin no more.

Because he knew the Father had a better way for her.

See, Jesus operates in that kind of grace and truth that invites us in to the journey.

So what's the so what of our fall series?

It's an invitation to find life.

I wish I had time to go through all the other images that are between those two verses.

But one of them is significant.

It says, Jesus came to his own, and his own did not receive him.

But then he goes on and says, This but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

This is a life or death issue.

Either being a child of God or not being a child of God.

John will end his gospel by saying this These things were written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

It's not only a life eternal, but it's a life abundant.

There's a life that comes upon us that is liberating.

The more we go with Jesus.

Jesus is regularly trying to get people to understand who he really is.

Remember the time he's at Caesarea Philippi.

It's at the base of Mount Hermon.

They worship the god Pon, the uh the goat god.

Hey, the goat god.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Wow.

I just stopped there.

All kinds of plots are going through my mind.

I and there's a grotto there, and there's all of these idols behind the disciples.

And Jesus says, Well, who do people say that I am?

And the disciples say, Well, you some are say you're Elijah, some say you are one of the prophets, you're the one preparing the way.

And then Jesus turns and says, But who do you say that I am?

And in those moments, Peter has his glorious moment of saying, You are the Christ, the Messiah, which Jesus says, that was not revealed to you by men.

That had to have come from the Father above.

Because the veil needs to be moved off of our eyes to see that.

I sense there's some veils going up right now.

That God's inviting you into a deeper understanding of who Jesus is.

You see, we can't be neutral when it comes to Jesus.

There are no neutral people in the gospel.

The self-righteous reject him and kill him.

The self-content get annoyed by him and slowly walk away.

But the self-aware, knowing that they're sinners, find the very thing that they've been looking for, which is a Savior and a Lord.

And Jesus is here today and says, Who do you say that I am?

And let me tell you this: that's not just a one-time decision.

The more I walk with Jesus, the deeper it gets, the wider it gets, the longer it gets.

We have an amazing Lord.

And he's waiting to release his flourishing on us.

So, what's my now what?

Come on, guys, let's go on the journey.

Let's make this more than just a Sunday pursuit.

Let's make this an everyday thing.

Let's get into the story in ways that we've never gotten before.

How about taking the invitation to join a life group?

Maybe you'll see Jesus in a way that you haven't seen before.

Jesus said this when two or three gather in my name, I'm right there in the midst.

Now, since he's with us all the time, it sounds like he's saying, I'm even more present when there's other people in the room with you.

And through the Holy Spirit, we'll hear aspects of Jesus by going together.

Let's inhabit the text.

In our life group books that we've put together, I've given you the poem by Doreen Kustenike.

It goes like this.

Follow Jesus around the scriptures.

Be an observer.

Watch how he looks.

Watch how he touches.

Watch how he is present to people.

Watch how he prays and takes time out.

Let him look at you.

Let him touch you.

Let him hold you.

Let him heal you.

Let him be present to you.

Let your sanctified imagination get in the story with Jesus.

And watch how he transformed.

Then become the look, become the touch, and become the presence.

See, if you will inhabit the story with the master, he will inhabit you, and you will become the incarnation of Jesus in this world.

And maybe one day a little kid will look up to you and say, Are you God?

You'll say no, but you'll be able to point that kid to the way.

Amen.

To learn more about the mission and vision of Stanwich Church and how you can get involved, please visit Stanwichchurch.org.