C. John “Jack” Miller was born on Tuesday, 18 December 1928 in Gold Beach, Oregon. He died on 8 April 1996. Jack would have turned 95 years old today.
In November, I created a file called “Christmas with Jack Miller”—into which I uploaded, re-listened to, and transcribed several Christmas sermons Jack preached over the years.
This morning, on Jack’s birthday, I was transcribing a sermon Jack preached on John 1:1–14 entitled “The Personal Word Revealing the Glory,” when I looked at my watch and saw that the day had flown by me once again.
Another item on my agenda for today was to write an update to those who support our work here in Italy.
As a way of remembering Jack’s birthday and prepping you for an update to come, I thought it was a good idea to share Jack’s sermon so you, too, can enjoy “Christmas with Jack Miller.”
As I listened to Jack, I’ve said out loud several times, “I don’t think I really get the meaning of Christmas!”
I hope you find what Jack has to say about Christmas as meaningful and convicting as I did.
Merry Christmas,
Mike Graham, Vicenza, Italy, 18 December 2023
The Personal Word Revealing the Glory
[00:00:05] Open your Bibles, congregation, to John, Chapter 1. John, Chapter 1, reading with verse 1.
[00:00:23] “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him, all things were made. Without Him, nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
[00:00:43] There came a man who has sent from God. His name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light so that through Him, all men might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him. Yet, to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become the children of God, children born, not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
[00:01:25] The word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
[00:01:38] Marvelous passage of Scripture, is it not? You’ll find an outline of a message in your announcement sheet, and it says at the top: “The Personal Word Revealing the Glory,” “The Personal Word Revealing the Glory,” and then it says, “Revealed in Eternity,” and then “Revealed in Creation,” and then “Revealed in the Flesh,” for the points of the outline.
[00:02:02] The big idea here, the thing that we really want to remember, is that we’re talking about the incarnation of the Word. The incarnation. Now that’s a big word. And it means simply “come in the flesh.” That Jesus Christ took to Himself a body and a—what the catechism calls—reasonable soul.
[00:02:25] And that is the sense of the passage. He is an exalted person, supremely exalted, that He came in the flesh, in bodily form.
[00:02:34] And you’ll notice verse 1 and 14, “In the beginning was the Word,” verse 1, and then in verse 14, “the Word became flesh.”. That’s the progress of our passage. We’re not going to be able to cover in detail everything in between, but if you get that main idea, you will have the flow of the text.
[00:02:54] Now, as we look at it, what is it saying? Well, it’s really saying, in verse 1 and to 14, that the Highest has become the lowest.
[00:03:07] The Word is described, in verse 1, in the most exalted way. And then when you come to verse 14, we read this startling language—about the strongest way of pointing out human weakness and our frailty is to speak of mankind as flesh.
[00:03:26] Flesh indicates our frailty. It indicates the fact that we shall die. And “the Word became flesh,” He took upon us all our weakness.
[00:03:36] John Yenchko went to the hospital this week, and John is always on time. In fact, he was there almost before the husband was in the delivery of the baby. And so they took him in, I think, into the delivery room. And so John got to hold the Welch’s newborn baby, Lisa. And it was quite an amazing thing. They were still talking about it when we got there somewhat later.
[00:04:01] But anyway … there was a glory in this in John’s face, just holding this little baby. And the thought occurred to me: “Now, if John, who has worked so hard to get ordained, and has all those degrees,” remember Skip was talking about “all that labor behind him.” If we knew that Lisa was sick and dying, and if John would say, “Now, I, in my strength, will take Lisa’s place. I’ll become a little baby. “
[00:04:26] That would be just a faint picture of the humbling that Jesus went through in becoming flesh. That when there’s great strength, when it goes down to the lowest level of weakness. That’s the picture we have in our text.
[00:04:39] Now, when we think about that—the highest becoming the lowest—it means then a certain view of glory, which is hard for us to digest. Because we think of glory as ambition realized, fame accomplished. John wouldn’t think of that as fame, as becoming a little baby all over again. Think of all that work he’d have to do again, or the fact that he might die for the baby.
[00:05:04] And so when we consider this, that the glory is revealed in Jesus humility and suffering, even on a cross. But that’s where the glory is going to be seen. My glory on a cross and my glory in you too, as you suffer and as you are humbled. That’s the pattern that we have here.
[00:05:23] Now, when Rose Marie and I went on vacation earlier in May, we had some days in Florida, and some of the missionary implications of this big idea were spelled out for us. We arrived and we were exhausted and we staggered off the plane.
[00:05:41] And Rose Marie is always an economy minded person, and so we had rented this car. Now it wasn’t a compact, it was a subcompact. You know, the kind that the pedals are there for you to work. And so we were just getting ready to, you know, rent our car, and this friend whose house we’re going to stay, where we were going to stay, he came along and he said, “That’s the car you’re going to rent?” And he said, “I don’t think that will quite do here in Florida. You need air conditioning and so on.” So he rented us a Century Buick.
[00:06:15] And so this was a glorious thing. I’ll just call him Tom and his wife, Sharon. And as we went to their home, they had arranged for us to stay in their house. They’re out of it most of the day, and they have a beautiful swimming pool. And the Gulf was not too far away for an air conditioned car to get there, you know, in style. So this kind of life kind of appealed to us and we enjoyed ourselves and a great time.
[00:06:39] But one of the most thrilling things that was there, and in some ways just sort of awesome, was we knew, we first met Tom and Sharon about six years ago when I had preached in a church, which they’re no longer are a part of, but it was in another place. And while we were there, we had, I had preached on this idea.
[00:07:03] And I had laid out the theme from the Gospel of John that the essence of missions is found in this book, and that the idea is that “You go down before you go across.” That you humble yourself and become Christ-like … in your love and your tenderness and kindness before you go across to your neighbor, or across the seas to anybody else.
[00:07:29] Now, the interesting thing was that Tom and Sharon both said they could not understand this. And they had hinted this at the time, and since then they had been coming back up here to Jenkintown, or meeting us someplace and just continuing to talk about this: that you go down, you humble yourself, you get kind of incarnational before you go across.
[00:07:56] And even last year when we were down there, and they were our hosts again at that time, they were still struggling with this. And I had labored with him to get him to see that only as you get down on your knees in prayer does God really teach you and use you. Only as you humble yourself as needy do you get a hold of things.
[00:08:16] Well, since those six years he heard me give this material, he has been so utterly humbled. Anything that could go wrong has gone wrong in his life. The only thing that didn’t go wrong was his business—that prospered. But the thing was, he even had a stroke and nearly died about two, three years ago. And he was in such bad shape that it just was incredibly bad. And yet out of this has come a wonderful love in Tom and Sharon like you wouldn’t believe. Not only did they help weak pastors with Century Buicks, which I feel is a great diaconal effort on anyone’s part and encourage it.
[00:08:55] Anyway, apart from that kind of grace, what does he do in his life? About three nights a week, he goes out with a team of men that he’s formed and they have appointments that are given to them. They have worked out a little program and they go out to drug addicts and alcoholics who are in the final stages of the problem. And they present three things: that you’re either going to die, you’re going to be imprisoned, or you’re going to go crazy if you keep on. And they try to work with them from there. But they only tackle them after they have gone into the depths of degradation.
[00:09:41] And he came in one morning and he says, “Don’t tell Linda but that split lip, I almost got killed last night. I was out there and had an appointment and a man happened to be with some of his former friends. And when they saw me and the team, they were ready to fight and they almost killed me. They were satisfied with just punching me.”
[00:10:00] Well, he goes out. And he goes out after night, after night, and there’s a sweetness and a joy in him. And he has this very prosperous business during the day, but at night he goes out and he looks, he finds these people through these appointments. And he brings them to Christ. Sometimes they die. He came in, he had his pray for one person, and he came in the next day and he says he died before I could get there. And but there’s a glory down there.
[00:10:24] And there’s a glory in her, too, because she learned many of the same things right along with him. That down is kind of up. That Jesus, his whole program of life and missions is humble yourself—there’s where you get my grace, because that’s where I stooped. You drink from the fountain, which is lowly. Do you see?
[00:10:46] I think thats a great challenge for Stan and Lorraine as they think about going to the mission field—that down is up, that the glory is found there. I think it’s also true for the onymous son-in-law and daughter—that down is up, the glory is there.
[00:11:05] Well, now, having said that, we look at the text a little more closely and we see— having said something about the missionary implications both for right around us and overseas—we see that this was revealed first in eternity.
[00:11:17] And we’re going to look at verse 1 and 2. And we see the point that John wants to establish very clearly is the exalted character of Jesus, His greatness. If you just step down a little distance, it’s not that glorious.
[00:11:35] Now we discover here that He’s called the Word. This is not a New Testament title that’s common in being applied to Jesus. But here it’s brought up in a very forceful way. And what does it mean?
[00:11:47] Well, it’s same as the Word of God … as the Son of God. It means the One who is the image of God, the One who is the exact representation of the Father, the personal Word.
[00:12:01] And it probably has in it a couple of things at least. And one is that Jesus is, as the personal Word of God, is the wisdom of God. We have that whole Old Testament line of development of the wisdom of God.
[00:12:15] It also, I think, has in it the idea of the Word as revealing. If you think of how words reveal, you just couldn’t think really if you didn’t have words.
[00:12:26] I don’t know whether you have ever read the play or seen the play, The Miracle Worker by William Gibson. But Ann Sulivan is trying to take Helen Keller and bring her into the world. And she’s blind and she’s deaf and she can’t get her into the world until she can get it to understand what a word is. And so finally she gets her out to the water pump and she’s got her pumping water and she keeps spelling the words on her hands and her arms, but they’re just games. And suddenly it comes through to Helen Keller that the word “water” means this stuff coming over her. There’s a revelation. And that’s how words work, you see, they reveal. And so Jesus is in the eternity, the Revealer. And that leads us, I think, to the first, as we see what is here then.
[00:13:17] We look at the order of the text, and I’ll just go forward to that second part of the text: And the Word was with God. I think the idea is that the Word is revealing himself constantly in eternity to the Father.
[00:13:34] Now, our language here says He, as the Revealer, was with God.
[00:13:39] Now, often when we think of the word “with” as a preposition, we have in mind something alongside. Isn’t that what you kind of have? We might say Roger and Karen are with each other, they’re alongside of each other. But that’s not kind of the way the word “with” here is meant. Actually, it isn’t the word “with” in the Greek, the preposition is “toward.” Rather face-to-face.
[00:14:09] And so the Father and the Son are face-to-face in this eternal love relationship in which the Son is constantly giving of love out of the center of his being.
[00:14:23] Now. That’s marvelous. Face-to-face. The intimacy of persons lies in the very center of what God is.
[00:14:34] In the Muslim religion. I don’t think they say “God is love” because there’s only One person. But when the Christian faith and the biblical faith, God is love, because the Father and the Son love one another. It’s this intimacy of “with-ness” in this sense that is the very definition of what God is.
[00:14:57] Its bosom language. In John chapter 13, verse 23, you know when they’re talking, they’re at the Last Supper, John has his head on Jesus bosom. Remember that? Did that ever kind of startle you? That here’s John has his head up on Jesus chest.
[00:15:13] I’ve often thought, what a nerve you know. Somebody came and put their head of my chest. My grandchildren do. But you know, John Bettler says, “Jack, I hug em.” But still, if somebody put their head on my bosom, I would be startled. But here, John puts his head up on Jesus bosom … Loves him so much.
[00:15:35] Well, in that passage in John 13, verse 23, where it says it’s—there, the word actually is “with” or “on,” with or on. But when you look at it here—dropdown with me to verse 18—and you’ll see what you have here is something different. We read, “No one who has ever seen God, but that God, the One and only One, who …” Here it says, “at the father’s side,” that’s a little weak. It actually says “into” now, not “toward,” but “into the Father’s bosom.”
[00:16:13] Now, John, it says, was “on Jesus bosom,” but here it says, “the Son of God, in relationship to the Father, this word of God is into the Father’s bosom.” It’s an even stronger preposition of this intimacy in love. And so it really, the gospel of John wants to show you that the Father and the Son are different, but absolutely One in love and fellowship. That’s what lies behind all the things that happen in time when this One stoops.
[00:16:41] Then we see that “In the beginning was the Word.” Not only was He with God, but He had an eternal existence.
[00:16:50] He is also the source of all things. He holds it together.
[00:16:55] In science, the history of science, you probably recall vaguely from physics, there was a guy named Isaac Newton and he invented gravity? Remember that? No, he didn’t invent gravity, he discovered it. And so he said it’s a universal law that describes everything; everything is held together by gravity.
[00:17:13] That was pretty good insight, but it wasn’t true. And then Michael Faraday came along and said, there’s another force in the universe that holds things together, and that’s electromagnetism. And then in our century, we have people saying, no, there’s another thing called strong force, and then recently is a thing called weak force. And so on and on it goes, more and more things needed to hold the world together.
[00:17:35] But the point of our text is, “In the beginning was the Word,” that use of the language, words “In the beginning,” that is creation stuff; that’s language of of origin. And its saying that Jesus is the root and the power and the one who upholds all things by the word of his power. Do you see how it works then? How great is Jesus Christ? He’s the root and source of all things.
[00:17:56] And then the third thing, which John mentions as a climax: “and the Word was God;” He is equal with the Father. That when you have seen Jesus, you have seen the Father because Jesus is God along with the Father. “Before Abraham was, I am.” Jesus calls Himself by the divine name Yahweh. He is God Himself.
[00:18:18] So we have those three things, and now that’s the background. And we see in verses 3 through 14 that this is revealed in creation and history.
[00:18:29] In verse 3, we read “All things were made through Him.” That is, He was the agency, the Word of wisdom by which God spoke all things into being. The word, all things has the idea of everything—all the house of the universe, all the furniture in it, it’s all been made through Jesus Christ’s wisdom and power. The Father did it that way.
[00:18:52] Now, if you look down, you see that He’s the source of life. In verse 4: “In Him was life.” Everywhere you see life in this world. And if you haven’t seen life, you ought to see my garden this year. It’s the best garden I’ve ever had. It really is just growing. It just, I don’t know what it’s doing, but it’s really growing. I’m just so reminded. Life is everywhere. And it just comes at you from every angle. Not only the babies being born continually in the church, but it really is just the whole world is just abounding with it. It all comes from Jesus.
[00:19:25] Jesus is the Word and he stands behind it. And then we read that this also, I think the implication is for eternal life. That He’s a source of that kind of life as well. And then He also, out of this life which he brings, He’s the light of men—Intelligence; those who think, they think because Jesus is the Word of wisdom, tying it all together. You couldn’t think unless Jesus gave you the power to interpret, to understand.
[00:19:51] And then finally, this light comes as the salvation light. Jesus is the light as a Savior. He dies on a cross and He brings the light to men.
[00:20:01] And then we read, the darkness has not understood it. And what it means here, perhaps more, I’d translate this a little more vigorously. The darkness has not been able to put it out. The darkness has not been able to come and destroy the light. The darkness is defeated by the light.
[00:20:22] Now, when you see it in that way, I want to apply this to John’s sermon last week. All of you heard John speaking about hell, and everybody went away rejoicing that we heard about this wonderful subject. I think you did, didn’t you? No, I had several people who wanted to talk to me about the depression it put them in. Well, it’s bound to, isn’t it? Because hell is a terrible thing. We’re faced there with not only man’s sin, but the awesomeness of God’s holiness. And so Satan strategy is to get us to think, then, that hell is ultimate. That hell is really what you’re headed for. And what we have here is not that. We’re told that the darkness—which represents the world, the evil in it, the powers of darkness—that when they tried to get to Jesus at the cross, they thought they won, but hell was defeated at the cross.
[00:21:18] Do you see? The darkness did not overcome it. And that Jesus Christ threw it back, destroyed its power. And that now Satan and the world is a defeated enemy. Do you see that? It’s a little bit encouraging, isn’t it? The darkness did not put it out. Did not overcome it.
[00:21:40] But yet there’s even in your life, perhaps the feeling: there is darkness in your family. Do you secretly in your heart think that its going to be victorious? The darkness cannot put it out. Remember that? Remember those words? The darkness did not put it out.
[00:22:10] Judas. Remember? He went out in the night. He belonged in the night. He conspired in the night. And they came back and they took Jesus in the night. But when Jesus Christ was crucified, he broke the powers of darkness by His fulfilling fully the love of God on a cross. The glory was revealed there, and the glory keeps streaming as a light into the world.
[00:22:39] And then that’s the basis of missions. It’s the basis of all of our going—of all of our self-giving, of all of our loving when we don’t feel like loving—It’s because Jesus Christ did not permit the darkness to defeat him.
[00:22:53] Now, having said that, I just want to point out, if you leave out Jesus’s cross and the glory, which it brought into time and into history, you lose all ability to identify yourself and explain history.
[00:23:07] Have you ever heard about the play Waiting for Godot? You don’t have to rush out and buy it because there’s not much in it. It’s two tramps are basically— Vladimir and Estragon—who are on this stage somewhat like this, and there’s a blasted looking tree and a garbage can, and the whole setting is a garbage dump, at least that’s what it seems to be.
[00:23:31] And they don’t do much except beat on each other a little bit and complain about the way the other smells. I mean, that’s pretty much the whole … It could use a little Woody Allen script writing, I would think. But anyway, the play is basically we’re waiting for this character named Mr. Godot, who never shows up. Well, obviously, Mr. Godot is God, and there’s no God there, and therefore there’s no values and there’s no self-identification. Your just two tramps beating on each other, etc, and that’s what life is seen to be. The question: Do you commit suicide or don’t you? Because there’s no point to it. Mr. Godot, you wait for him, but he never shows.
[00:24:11] Well, you see, the point of our text is that Jesus showed and he drove away the darkness. Jesus came into the world, and you don’t have to worry anymore about being personally identified. You are identified if you’re in Christ, you’re in the light. Amen.
[00:24:25] Now, having said that, we want now to quickly move on to our last point. Just for background, we can’t talk about a number of features there, but we notice that after John’s testimony that Jesus is rejected by the world, He’s rejected by his own, and now he comes in the flesh. And we read that this has reality. They say in verse, John says in verse 14, that “the Word became flesh,” the highest became the lowest, and “He made His dwelling among us, and we have seen …”
[00:25:00] Now the word here for “seen” is never used of seen in a sort of a mental sense. It is used of actually literal, physical seeing. That you can be sure that Godot has arrived because Jesus came into history, and the apostles and these first disciples really saw him. They saw him crucified, they saw him resurrected, and they talked with him, and this is for sure. That Samuel Beckett is wrong. Godot has arrived and he’s been seen.
[00:25:33] Now, if that’s so, then what we see is that His coming is in a way to upset us though and confuse us.
[00:25:43] In talking to Tom when we were in Florida, I said, “Now, why did you find it so hard to get aboard the theme of the Gospel of John—that you have to go down in order to discover the glory of God?”
[00:25:55] And he said, “Well, my whole Christian life had gone the opposite way.” He said, “I’ve been studying the Bible.” He said, “I’ve been studying Christian doctrine. I was an elder in the church, all the rest. And I tried to build myself up as a kind of a Christian fortress. And so that I would be the strong one and I can minister out of my strength to people. That I could help them by sort of reaching down. And here you came along and you very cheerfully gave me a push, not up but down.” And he says, “For a while I was with those in the congregation who hated you.” And he said, “There were a lot of people in this church who hated you.” But he said, “I was broken by the grace of God.” He said, “We did not want to hear that up was down. We wanted to be strong.”.
[00:26:48] A lot of them, we’re just not converted. We knew that. And their whole idea of salvation is getting stronger, clean yourself up, get nearer to God, do it in your own strength. Salvation by willpower. And here, the Gospel of John came and said, “It doesn’t work that way. Jesus went all the way down as the model. But He also comes to you as a Savior at the pits on a cross. He goes to the garbage heap, as it were, waiting for Godot. But the garbage heap is Calvary. And there he saves people in the pits.”.
[00:27:20] He doesn’t save good people. He saves sinners. Right? And there’s where the power is, when you know where you really are, and you don’t lie and you don’t cheat when you pray and all the rest. You tell Him the truth, and there’s where he meets you. Ha ha ha. Rejoice. You’ve been doing a lot of Christian fortress building, too. Its the biggest problem at New Life Church. I do it all the time.
[00:27:47] But as I preached in that church, and I watched the Spirit begin to take the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John—As the Father has sent Me, so send I you—not so much first across, but I came down, and you come down, and then you can go across. As you see that, then the power is in you—not because you feel like a neon sign flashing power, power, power—but because within you there is a humility and God loves it. Because that’s the way the Son works. Hallelujah.
[00:28:23] Look, there’s no problem in the world can defeat you anymore if you just hold on to that. Every defeat will become a window of opportunity, because there you’ll get down and you will pray and you will pray and you’ll be sort of incarnating, as it were, what Jesus is talking about. And life will become an adventure.
[00:28:42] The worst possible thing that can happen to you, you can see it as part of God’s bringing you down low, where He can really use you and teach you and reveal his heart of love to you. And you’ll be able to put your head on Jesus’s bosom with John and listen and hear Jesus in a way you never did before.
[00:29:04] I’d like to draw out … He speaks here in verse 14 of “full of grace and truth.” Now, Moses, he was up on a mountain. Jesus is down in the valley, as it were. The glory of Moses was one, but the glory of Jesus is another. And you can taste it, you see. It’s full, it’s full—grace and truth, reality, no error mixed in it, no deception.
[00:29:28] But then he speaks here of appropriating it. And the word of appropriation is given to us back in verse 12: “receiving,” “believing.” And this means personal religion.
[00:29:43] John uses faith, never as a noun. He never says the faith, but he always speaks about it verbally, an action. And of course, that means like receiving, depending upon, needing. It has an idea of weakness in it, of constantly going to Christ. But there’s something more in it, too, that you might easily miss. Not only is it passive in just collapsing on Christ, but it’s aggressive … in that in your need, you constantly go to Christ for fullness—Aggressively seeking Christ.
[00:30:26] That when you have your devotions in the morning, you’re not satisfied unless you’ve had something of Christ come to you through that passage. That you’re hungry for Christ.
[00:30:41] Hendrickson says, Its like … the faith in John is like the roots of an oak tree. It doesn’t have anything, this great oak tree, in the way of water and nutrients, but what it does—those roots are aggressively going down in their need deep into the soil to get the water.
[00:30:57] And so that’s the way with you and Jesus. You have nothing. You need everything, and faith is the way you go aggressively into Jesus. I will have Christ. I will have more of Him. I need Him. I have nothing. Give me Jesus. I’m hungry. Feed me. Let me see. Let me look. Because Jesus died for me and nobody else did. Jesus loves me. He lives for me and He gives me life.
[00:31:21] Applications and they flow, I would say very simple. I would train your children in a different way than what I think almost any of you do it. I would train them to suffer.
[00:31:34] I went to see my young grandson, Jason Correnti, and he’s really making a splendid recovery this week. He was a mess, but he’s looking great and now he’s back to normal, American normal, and he’s starting to complain. He was criticizing the nurses for their care. So you can see he’s getting better. And that’s against the law in their family. They call that “air pollution.” So he had to write a letter of apology to one of the nurses for criticizing her for her lack of competence and care.
[00:32:09] Well, now you see, in talking with Ruth about him, she said we have trained these children that they’re going to die someday and they have to expect others to die. And there’s no place for complaining because this is where God meets you, right in the struggle, right in the suffering, so you can’t get away with that.
[00:32:24] Do you train your children about things like death and suffering? Do you even train yourself about it? Do you think you are going to live forever?
[00:32:33] You ain’t. I said that as an English teacher, you know. Gets people’s attention when an English teacher says, “Ain’t.” They all listen. Listen, you’re not going to live forever. You have a short time in this world. Use it. Don’t be afraid to suffer. Toughen up. Be a man. Die for Christ. Wherever you are, die every day.
[00:32:53] Do you know what? You’ll suffer a lot less. Do you know who suffers the most in life? The people that are determined not to suffer. The people who do not want any pain are the ones who go through the most agony. They spend all their lives dodging the things coming down the road. They dodge here. They dodge there. They protect their reputation. Awww they’re afraid of that there and their health and all the rest. Oh, man, what a way to suffer.
[00:33:20] “Cowards die many times before their deaths, but the valiant taste of death only once.” It’s not original with me, a fellow named Shakespeare said it. But it’s true. It’s true.
[00:33:34] The other application is, I would say for teenagers. Somehow the word got around in the last 20 years among teenagers, you shouldn’t suffer. And many teenagers make their life a kind of a musical chairs. You know, what you do when you play musical chairs as a person? You don’t want to be the last one that sits down because you’re left standing up and everybody else is sitting down looking at you. They’re all smug. They’re you are all by yourself. Well, many teenagers organize their life so they will never be caught standing up while everybody else is sitting down. They don’t want to be odd man out.
[00:34:09] And that thing has got so strong among teenagers, it’s ridiculous. It’s really ridiculous. And it means that you’re just abdicating all character and real fun. How can you have any fun in life if you’re just a clone of everybody else? I can imagine a teenager getting up and say, “Well, how can I be a clone of all my friends today? That’s such a wonderful, thrilling experience to be a clone.” Teenagers will be merciful to me; I’m not trying to be hard on you, but that’s no way to go. That’s no way to go. Christ didn’t come in the world to be a clone. He came in to be that striking personality that commanded the allegiance of millions because he was both with us and he was different.
[00:34:54] Don’t be afraid then to identify with other teenagers with love and kindness and character and courage. But then don’t be afraid to be different. Amen.
[00:35:05] And then within family, how cold are you to your wife or husband? Do you have bosom religion? Do you have face-to-face love? Are you constantly kind of cold, alienated from one another?
[00:35:22] How about you as singles? Are you constantly trying to calculate your relationships and trying to figure out what you could get out of a relationship and you’re not really face-to-face with God and Jesus Christ, and face-to-face with people—there’s always defenses and barriers—there’s no place for it in Jesus; you don’t need it. Nobody can hurt you anymore. You’re safe. You’re in the Eternal. The Most High has become the lowest in order to lift you up to the heights, so what are you doing looking as though you were a slave or something. You’re free, brother. You’re free, sister. Rejoice.
[00:35:53] And then I would say for children, the final application: what would I say for children? I think from the point of view of children, I would want to ask dad and mom to make sure their devotions were interesting.
[00:36:13] My children came to me one time and told me my devotions were boring. Well, I agree that might be the case. I found a little difficult to believe … But I think it was.
[00:36:29] And I think what they lacked was more of this heart religion, of getting down where the others were and really letting them feel I really cared. I was really with them where they suffered, you know, incarnational thinking—the highest becomes the lowest—that’s the pattern. Grace is down here. Grace is down at the cross and so on. And so that the children really feel that I as a father and a mother, I’m really down there with them, that they feel some of that heart being given to them.
[00:36:59] I think we’ve said enough. Let’s pray. Father, God, we thank you for such a glorious revelation that the personal Word is revealing glory in creation. He’s revealing it in the, His flesh. He’s revealing it in this worship, and we know that He’s constantly, constantly revealing Himself to the Father.
[00:37:23] And we stand before this marvel and we say, “How is it that Jesus could stoop so low?” Oh, God, how we thank You that there’s a radiance where He is. And we plead with You for that kind of shining in our homes. We pray for that kind of humble, shining in our relationships with people—our relationships with our children; our relationships with others if I’m a single; oh, Lord, my relationships with others if I’m going to be a missionary with the field; oh, God my relationships with my fellow elders; my deacons; the children I teach in Sunday school; Lord, we want to just be down there where they are.
[00:38:02] But then, Lord, we want to also have this gospel message clear. That we know the Word became flesh that He might take away the sins of the world. That He might give the Holy Spirit to them. And so we thank you that we have no weak message about this Word, but that we have a powerful Word, a powerful spoken Word, and we pray even now this Word of the gospel will be compelling belief, drawing those who’ve heard this message to Jesus. We ask it for His glory. Amen.
