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John 1:14-18
Before we get started I need to send a Happy Birthday to my Son-in-Law, Michael Wade. And my grandson Collin James, A BIG HAPPY 5th Birthday to CJ. Papa loves you so much!!! Micheal you know I love you more than my luggage….(ba-dum-bum)
We are going to start a new devotional series today. The Gospel of Jesus According to John, or – the 4th Gospel, the book of John. We live in a world that loves Jesus as a teacher but doesn’t care for Him much as God. The truth is, though, that we can’t have one without the other.
Jesus didn’t come as simply a wise man, but as both fully God and fully man. I know the math doesn’t work because we want 50/50 (50% human and 50% God) but truly Jesus is 100/100 – if He’s not, then the sacrifice He makes on the cross and the resurrection doesn’t pay the price for sin, the sacrifice doesn’t work. How we react to this truth will affect how serious we take our Christian faith.
To accept Christ is to go all in. We can’t be a 50% disciple. A friend of mine a few years ago talked about riding the fence. It’s a saying that people use when they talk about not being all in. The problem is you can’t have one foot in heaven and the other in hell, it just simply doesn’t work. We have to be 100% in, we have to be offering Him our entire lives.
John 1:14-18 (NIV) The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
This devotional series on the Gospel of John calls for us to "come and see" the person of Jesus detailing his divinity through both His ability to save us, and through His victory over sin and death.
Think about it for a moment. Jesus was and still is the solution for a sin-ridden world. I know, I sure would just have liked it better if God had just not let evil in – not put the serpent in the Garden of Eden. But that’s not the solution to deal with sin.
Think about an empty cup, you cannot remove it’s emptiness – except that you fill it with something. In the same way, removing evil from this world is not the solution to deal with sin. Filling this world with the presence of the one true living God – now that’s a solution!
God did not remove the problems that Adam and Eve’s sin brought into this world, He did not remove the darkness. Instead He is shining His light. It’s the presence of the Holy Spirit. That’s the solution to the problem.
Just like you can’t solve emptiness simply by focusing on emptiness, you don’t overcome the problem of sin by focusing on sin – you overcome by focusing on God. I want you to learn an old name, which is made up of three Hebrew words: Eem – Anu – El…With – Us – God. That’s Who Jesus is.