December 13

John 1:14 b: Who came from the Father, full of grace and truth……”

Dear Jesus, I wish to know your truth. I wish to know you for Who you are. I desire to be brought to a place of understanding, so that my life might become a conscious living presentation of your truth and your grace. Please open my eyes this Advent Season that I might be transformed into your likeness more and more today and every day to come. Amen.

The Trinity has often been looked upon as a strange and allusive doctrine. What if our knowledge of grace and truth is dependent upon the Christian understanding of Trinity? What if God’s grace is removed from us without the incarnation, without the Bodily Personification of Truth we receive in the Person of Jesus? What if our only hope in knowing Grace and Truth is completely wrapped up in the Person of Jesus revealing both of these realities to us?

The emphasis in John’s gospel is found in the restatement time and time again that Jesus came from the Father. Jesus seems to want his followers to clearly understand that He had a life before He came to us. He was not a wanderer or a lost soul. He was not a prophet in search of a people or a nomad in search of a place to call home. His entire existence is based upon relationship, a relationship He had shared from eternity past with His Father. Jesus came from the Father, and with the Father, Jesus had bathed inside an eternal relationship of Love and Power, Grace and Truth, Word and Wisdom. It is not as if Jesus needed to come to us, for eternity in such a relationship was more than enough for an incomprehensible God. God’s desire was not completion or addition, but grace and truth. He decided to share with us the Truth of God’s Being, the grace-filled essence of existence. The Love which had existed in God from beyond time is now being offered to humanity in the person of the God/man, Jesus the Christ. Jesus comes into the world to share with us the type of relationship He had enjoyed forever with His Father.

It is one thing to know where one is going. It is quite another thing to fully comprehend where one is going because of where one has come from. Jesus, having experienced the fullness of Love in relationship with His Father (See the first few verse of John 13), now embraces a future immeasurably linked to His past. He could not bring to us a life that was not intimately tied to His loving relationship He shares with His Father. Having come from His Father, He brings to us that which He experienced with His Father, a quality of love that has no option other than to communicate grace and truth as a gift to humanity. The nature of incarnation, the ministry of Jesus, was set in stone, so to speak, because of the place Jesus had come from. Just like a traveler from the south has little choice but to speak with an accent, a traveler from the Father has little choice but to speak forth grace and truth. Jesus can no more be unloving than my little dog Sassy cannot be cute. The incarnation, simply put, is Jesus bringing to this world the relationship He has eternally enjoyed with His Father, for this is the place from which He comes.

The postmodern Christian often forgets the past. Though we begin our Christian life on the cornerstone of Truth through bathing in grace, we quickly move to what we believe a more meaningful agenda. Truth finds a new function as we convince ourselves that the Truth of the past is outdated and no longer relevant, assigning ourselves the freedom to rearrange the truth as we see fit. Tradition and Orthodoxy have very little place in the postmodern search for truth. Grace, a highlight of our salvation, as we celebrate the reality that the God of the universe can love a “wretch like me”, lasts long enough for us to replace grace filled relationship with a new set of pragmatic religious expectations which we quickly apply to the lives of ourselves and others. It may not be the Law of Moses we embrace, for rootedness in the past is not our chief concern, but at the very least it is a law - a set of expectations and principles we impose upon ourselves to define our spirituality in a way that can be measured as I place my life in comparison to yours. A faith that begins in a relationship which began before time, that of Father and Son, becomes a faith that is defined by my version of religion I have given myself the right to embrace in a postmodern world where personal faith and piety take precedence over “grace and truth”. The incarnation is a great thing to celebrate during Advent Church services, but it has very little application to the practical implications of my life as an American Christian in the 21^st century. I reserve the right to define that for myself.

Consider the recent rise of Dispensational Theology over the past 200 years in America (Dispensationalism is a theological system which has taken root in the Western World in the last 200 years. The basic tenets of this system are as follows: A Millennial Reign after the 2^nd coming of Christ; distinction of two Kingdoms, one occupied by Israel upon the return of Christ known as the Kingdom of Heaven, and the other a Spiritual Kingdom residing in the hearts of believers who make up the Church called the Kingdom of God; a distinction and separation of the earthly promises made to Israel and the heavenly promises made to the Church; and most hold to a two stage return of Christ at the Parousia, or second coming of Christ, where by the Church is mysteriously raptured by Jesus, ushering in a period of Tribulation before Jesus returns physically to restore and redeem Israel and the Jews and set up the Millennial Reign.) I have known people who will flat out reject fellow believers and abandon churches because these other believers are not committed to the belief system that Israel is still God’s chosen people, theologically embracing The Universal Church as God’s chosen people following the first Advent . Although John clearly indicates that Jesus came to His own people, and His own people did not choose to receive Him, His own people rejected Him, I sometimes find myself theologically rejected some 2,000 years later because I buy into the idea that, because of this rejection, God has opened the flood gates of His Kingdom, promising that anyone who does receive Him has “the right to be called the children of God”. The fact that Jesus now chooses the world in response to rejection by His own people seems irrelevant to many. We have the right and the privilege of constructing a doctrinal system that has very little attachment to traditional theology, very little foothold in non-Western culture, and even less relevance to the important doctrines found in Scripture. Because we are often led in Western Society by a set of principles that seem important only to “me”/us, we have a tendency to forget our roots. Rather than search the fathers of our faith for the Grace and Truth brought by Jesus, succeeding generations seek to elevate our place in history by calling ourselves The Generation of His Return, the protectors of Liberty in the World, the Theological Experts when it comes to the Second Coming of Jesus.

The Incarnation points to one source of Grace and Truth - Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the One who came from the Father, full of grace and truth, precisely because He came from the Father. He urges us to consider the source, return to our roots, and celebrate the Incarnation as a Timeless Bridge that ushers us into The Eternal Love Relationship of the Father and the Son. Our roots are not determined by our founding fathers, or the Scofield Reference Bible, or the Ryrie Study Bible, or Western Ideals of freedom and capitalism. We must go further, deeper, to a place where there was no time and before the universe existed. We must return to the roots of humanity, where God chooses to create a world in which God’s love is shared and entered into by those made in God’s image. We must return to a Birth and a Life when the Love of a Father and a Son set the course for Creation and Redemption. In doing so we will in fact return to Jesus, who came to us full of Grace and Truth, an Incarnation Of Love which was determined before the world began, precisely because Jesus comes from The Father. He can be nothing less than the Son He has always been. And we can do nothing better than return to the One who both creates and recreates us through the gift of God, His One and Only Son.

(With our eyes we behold His Glory)

December 14

John 1: 16: “From the fullness of His Grace we have all received…….

Dear Jesus, I had searched the world over for someone, anyone, who could love and accept me as I am. That search ended when I found you. Thank you, Jesus, for filling this world with your grace, so that someone lost and alone such as I might be found by You. Amen

The entire world is searching for grace. We see this when we watch television, we witness this when we go to the movies, we are made aware of this when we read our newspapers, and we are in touch with this need when we search our own individual lives. We understand intuitively that without grace this world is nothing more than a dog eat dog carousel bearing witness to the blind faith we exercise in a survival of the fittest motif, in which the weak are eaten alive and the strong are allowed to trample under foot all who would oppose them. We have all witnessed, one way or another, what this kind of world looks like. It may be the graceless bully of our youth who taught us this; or the x-spouse with a ruthless lawyer by her side; or the parent who we could never please no matter how hard we tried; or the best friend that abandoned us in our hour of need; or the government that summed up our worth as persons with rulings like Roe vs. Wade birthed within a culture preaching the “fact” of evolution; or the pharisaical brother who set us aside because of our shortcomings; or the son or daughter who never did embrace us as father and mother; or the sibling that left us long ago because we never quite lived up to our responsibility in maintaining the family name; or the preacher who never understood our value to the ministry of the church; or the professor who wrote us off because our thinking was a bit more creative than they were accustom to seeing; or the girlfriend that found “other options” while our heart lay crushed in her hands; or the boss who would rather risk a future without us rather than tread water alongside us; or the grandchild that found something else to do over Christmas holidays. We all have stories of un-grace, stories of what people have done to us, stories of what we have done to others, and stories of life being life and people being people. Within our memories and our dreams, dare I say nightmares, are glimpses of what a world without grace would feel like and be like and look like if un-grace had her way within every aspect of human life.

We search for grace because we know none of us would survive without it. We long for grace because we all know first-hand what it feels like to fail, to mess up, to fall short. We reach for grace because we understand what we are capable of doing to others, what others are capable of doing to us. Some of these people were among those who claim to care for us. Others, we suspect, care very little, but find a way to hurt us anyway. No matter the emotional connect or disconnect, we managed to find ourselves in a place called “hurt”. And all of this while we hold forth expectant empty hands longing to be filled with that which we can never earn, a gift we do not deserve, a soothing touch we cannot create. A world without grace is a world we would all quickly abandon in search of a distant land that we know we can never deserve or inspire. 

Advent is an explosion of grace. From the moment of conception, even before, Immanuel was for us a

gift of grace. Mary was told in her visitation: “do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with

God. Now listen: You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call his name JESUS.”

(Luke 1:30,31) Just call him Jesus, which means “Savior”. His name predicts his mission; His name

pronounces His destiny; His name ushers in God’s ultimate desire. Within the mere mention of His

name God’s grace is proclaimed: Savoir of the World. JESUS is the proclamation of God’s grace to

a fallen world from this day forward. A world lost and alone, people dead and dying, a planet enveloped

in darkness, has been given a gift that will forever bathe our planet in an endless supply of AMAZING

GRACE. God could have named His Son “Wrath”, or “Mr. Clean”, or “Condemnation’, or even “Mr.

Hammer”, or any name that contained a combination of these attributes. But to pick a name that means

“Savior”, pointing toward his upcoming death on the cross for the sins of humanity, forever makes

clear God’s intent to forgive and transform through the mechanism of grace. Jesus is full of grace

simply because God is a God of grace. That which defines Him is that which directs Him. That

which motivates The incarnation, God’s love, finds meaning and value and purpose in the greatest of

all the lasting benefits Jesus – The unmerited and underserved and never to be earned grace of The

Almighty God. Take a bath in God’s grace this Advent Season.