As we begin to return to our seats, please join me with a responsive call to worship.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.
Come, let us worship our God and King.
Our first lesson comes from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 9. The prophet writes, ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, unto them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder. And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace, there shall be no end upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom to order it and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
Please stand as we sing our first carol, number 256, ‘Love Has Come.’
In the darkness of the year, my glory to God. Glorious love is everlasting. Love is born.
Please be seated.
Our second lesson comes from the Gospel of Luke. And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.’
And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast into her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, ‘Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and he shall be called the Son of the highest. And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David, and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’
Then Mary said unto the angel, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’ And the angel answered and said unto her, ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee. Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And behold, thy cousin Elizabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. For with God, nothing shall be impossible.’
And Mary said, ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word.’ And the angel departed from her.
Our next carol is number 245, ‘Oh Come, O Come, Emmanuel.’
What is your shall? We will see.
Our third lesson comes from the Gospel of Matthew. Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise. When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph, her husband being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privately.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.’
Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is God with us.’
And Joseph, raised from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife, and knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son. And he called his name Jesus.
Our next carol is number 249, ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful.’
Oh, for the King of God. Let us adore him, by the angels and sing. Let us adore him. Oh, let us adore him.
Our fourth lesson comes from Luke chapter 2. And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was made first when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, unto Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.
Our next carol is ‘Away in a Manger.’
Hallelujah.
Please pray with me.
Almighty God, heavenly Father, King of the universe, Lord of creation, God our Father, we gather into your presence because you call us to you. We gather to celebrate and remember this wondrous miracle of the birth of your son Jesus, God the Son, Emmanuel.
This is a joyous occasion for us because, as we’ve enjoyed this Advent, this season of preparation coming to Christmas, we look forward even more to your second coming, the second great Advent shall return.
But in the midst of our joys during this season, there are those who find it mixed with sorrow. And so we pray and ask that you be with and bless those who mourn during this time. Whether it be simply because it is the first of these seasons when someone that they love is absent. Let the memories that come not make them sad, but let them take comfort in the joys of the past as they look forward to hope and to the joy that is yet to come and that shall be completed in you.
We pray for those who, you know, are unable to gather with family or friends during this season because they are far from home or because they have undergone recent surgeries or illness and are still in a period of recovery. We pray for them that they may still feel your presence. That they may be reminded of your love and know that they are missed and loved by us as we are sure that they miss us and love us as they love you.
We pray for those else in the world who are still trapped in darkness. Let them see your light. Let them hear your voice calling to them, calling them to come out of that darkness, the darkness of worldly temptations and of sin, of misery, of fear, of death, calling them to come to your son in faith and hope.
Give them the courage to answer that call and respond with faith and with gladness. Even if there is trepidation at first, help them to take those steps to be drawn near to you, to come close, to rest beside you at your throne of grace.
As we gather together, your children gathered around your throne to worship and to rest in you, we pray for the world that your kingdom would come and that your will be done and that peace shall reign. We know that this shall be one day. But even still, we pray that you would hasten that day and come quickly, Lord Jesus.
We pray these things on Christmas, the way that your son taught us to pray by praying, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.’
Our fifth lesson comes from Luke chapter 2. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’
And it came to pass as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, ‘Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.’
And they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at these things which were told them by the shepherds.
But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen as it was told unto them.
And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
Our next carol is number 272, ‘While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks.’
Please be seated.
Our reading this evening comes from the Gospel of John, chapter 1. The evangelist writes, ‘And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.’
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your son, the word, through whom all things were made at the power of your voice and his word, which came, and was a tangible word among us.
And now we have our word of scripture that tells his story to us, that contains his word as he is the word speaking your truth. Open our hearts to hear you speak and receive your love. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So tonight we are gathered to remember and to celebrate the day when the wondrous miracle known as the incarnation occurred—the birth of Jesus Christ.
Now the incarnation of Christ is one of the five most important moments in history: creation, the fall, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and finally his future oncoming, impending, imminent return. Each of these other four events revolves around the incarnation as the pivot point of history.
Creation gave us a place, a perfect world, which was just waiting to be filled with life. But Adam’s fall introduced sin into God’s good creation, changing and corrupting this perfect world and causing our need for salvation and redemption. Together, Jesus’s death and his resurrection satisfied our debt of sin, justifying us and redeeming us from the righteous wrath that we all deserve.
And then when Christ returns in glory, he shall make all things new, restoring everything to its original state of perfection or making them even better.
Now those first two events established and created the need for the incarnation, while the latter two, as consequences of the incarnation, satisfied and fulfilled that need. That’s how we make the wondrous birth of Jesus and understand it as the fulcrum point and center of history.
That is why we celebrate and remember Christmas because it is truly the most important day in human history. It’s the day when the word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is the day when God lovingly gave his son as a gracious gift for the salvation of his elect children.
And while this verse is set within the evangelist’s preamble to his gospel, it is the simplest and most perfect summary explaining God’s gift of his only begotten son, Jesus. Now earlier John has already explained that the word, the logos, is eternally God. And now he tells us about what God, the word, did after his initial work of creation.
That God became flesh and dwelt among us. God, the word, became flesh. He came down from heaven and entered into our world, into our space and time. God became incarnate, but he did not become in the sense of changing. That which had only ever been purely spirit now became physical as well because the physical was added to the spiritual without change, confusion, or mixture.
And so God became man, adding humanity to his divinity without changing either. He became a human person, a male child, a baby boy. He was born Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, with all three of them being descended from King David, the man after God’s own heart. He was born in Bethlehem in Judea during the reigns of King Herod and Caesar Augustus. He was born at a specific moment in history.
He grew up and was raised to be a carpenter like his earthly father, and he was raised to be the king like his heavenly father. But by saying that God the word became flesh, the evangelist does not mean that God just suddenly changed. God did not transform and stop being the transcendent God and become an infinitely lesser creature.
When he took on flesh, God did not surrender his divine nature, nor did he corrupt or mix it with the human nature. Instead, John shows us that in becoming flesh, by taking on flesh, God added a finite human nature to his eternally existing infinite divine nature, making the incarnation truly a mystery—a mystery of addition.
The spiritual added physical to itself and in so doing, the spiritual divine nature continued unchanged but now was clothed in flesh by his human nature. Then the evangelist goes on to explain that God, the word, dwelt among us. See, God tabernacled with us. Transcendent divinity came down and lived imminently among us, base humanity.
God chose to pitch his tent, to settle down and join the community life of his people Israel. God made himself easily accessible to everyone who wanted to draw near. However, what John describes here is different from what the Lord had done in the past.
This here was the truest fulfillment of God’s promise of Emmanuel, of God with us. Remember back near the beginning during the cool of the day, the Lord walked in the garden where Adam and Eve lived, strolling among his people. And then Enoch walked with God, and then he was not, for God took him.
See, the Lord brought Enoch directly up into heaven without suffering death to be with him and to dwell among his divine presence. And the Lord spoke to Abraham through visions, and he even visited his tent. But God never did dwell with that wandering Aramean.
However, during Israel’s time in the wilderness, the Lord commanded Moses to build him a tent to dwell in so he could live among the people. And this tent was set up and traveled right in the midst of the Israelite host, with all of God’s people organized around it. And whenever their traveling ceased, the Lord’s glorious cloud, the Shekinah, would settle upon the tent, covering it as a visible sign of his presence.
And after David had conquered the city of Jerusalem and he established it as his capital, he had God’s ark of the covenant brought into the city with him. But while he was forbidden from building a magnificent temple to the Lord, to build him a house of cedar like his own, his son Solomon was permitted to build the Lord a house, and the cloud of the Lord’s glory filled it as well.
Thereafter, whenever Israel was faithful and obedient to God, their lives revolved around God’s temple, his religious calendar, his requirements of purity, his law, and his divine authority mediated through the Davidic kings.
So back in the past, while the Lord God did dwell in the midst of his people, now, now when the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the character of his dwelling changed dramatically and extraordinarily.
I mean, previously the character of his dwelling was like mixing oil and water. God and man may have been together, you know, placed in close proximity, but they never truly really mixed. Our respective natures are indissolvable because the Lord is holy while we are not. And God is spirit while we are physical. The Lord is the creator while we are creatures. The Lord is righteous, but we’re wicked.
And although his presence was right here, it was imminent, he remained still transcendent above and beyond. God is the one who’s worshiped and obeyed, while we are the ones who worship and obey. And while we were in community and in relationship together with him, it was with God as our king and we as his subjects. He is the Lord and our master, and we were his servants.
But now, God became clothed in flesh. And although his divinity was obscured by his humanity, it could not be entirely hidden because glimpses of his glory still broke through. Now, instead of simply dwelling among us, God, the word, dwelt with us.
The Lord lived with us. He lived like us. He lived as we lived, experiencing what we experience the same way that we all experience. God experienced the fullness of humanity, except for the human flaw of sinfulness. Except for suffering the tragic effect of our sinning.
We are still reminded that we are all sinners because we sin, and we sin because our human nature was corrupted by Adam’s sin first. But God the Word in his incarnation enjoyed the benefit of the true and perfect human nature, sinless—the perfection that each and every Christian that we long for and will someday receive when the final trumpet sounds and we’re all raised into glory.
Clothed in flesh, God the word, the logos Theos and Andros, experienced and suffered every human temptation both without sinning. Clothed in human flesh, the logos and Andros kept the law of Moses. He obeyed the Lord and he perfectly satisfied all of the requirements of his holy law by not breaking the law and by positively doing what it commands.
Achieving an active state of righteousness, something that is impossible for sinners like us because of our inherited corruption. Clothed in flesh, God the Word was unjustly condemned and died as an atonement to satisfy our debt of sin—the righteous for the unrighteous, the innocent for the guilty, divinity for humanity, clothed in flesh.
God the Word was raised from the dead, proving that he truly is the holy and righteous Son of God, and confirming the justification that he has purchased for us for all those who believe in and trust him.
Then after describing what God has done, the evangelist next describes what we do, describing our Christian response, saying, ‘And we have seen his glory.’
But that’s not as simple or straightforward as it seems because the glory—this glory of Christ, this glory of God the Word, the glory of the logos—was not obvious or plainly evident to everyone clearly. Because since we’ve read the rest of the story, we know that not everyone saw this glory.
Because otherwise, if they had, then everyone who saw it would have known and understood that Jesus is God and therefore believed. Instead, our expected relationship of cause and effect concerning the idea of seeing is reversed. They and we did not see the glory and then believe, but rather we believe and therefore we saw his glory.
The Holy Spirit opened our eyes to see Christ’s glory, and he opened our hearts to receive Jesus. And then we believed because we were caused to believe and our God-given faith was further rewarded by the sight of Jesus’s glory.
So in seeing, we were also believing and receiving. In seeing and receiving, we were also becoming. We were becoming the children of God as John wrote just immediately before tonight’s verse: ‘But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’
Seeing, receiving, and becoming by the soul power and will of God. What a Christmas present!
So, in seeing and becoming children of God, we’re also becoming obedient to God. We’re gaining the desire to try, at least, to try and obey our heavenly Father as our response of love. And we were gaining credit for Christ’s, for Jesus’s active obedience, his justifying righteousness through our belief and trust in him.
But what is this glory that we’ve seen?
We’ve seen the glory as of the only Son from the Father. We’ve seen the glory of the word made flesh. The word who is God. The word who was with God in the beginning. The word through whom all things were made. We’ve seen the glory of God the Son, which is the glory of God the Father, whose glory also belongs to the Son and the Holy Spirit. We have seen the glory of God.
A glory which is full of grace and truth. The Lord is glorified, and he is glorious in his merciful grace. God is glorified by his forgiveness. And God is glorified through justice and the judgment of his wrath. God is glorified in his holiness, his perfect righteousness. And God is glorified in truth and with truth because he is the truth. He is the absolute standard that defines everything which is true.
God is glorified through his word by truthfully keeping every promise he makes. So all of this is mixed into and it’s filling throughout the whole wonder of what we call Christmas.
So the miracle of the incarnation can really be reduced to one simple fact: when the word became flesh and dwelt among us, when God entered into our world in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, he was giving himself to us to give himself for us so that he might bring us to himself as his adopted children.
So God gave us his son for Christmas to be our sacrificial lamb. God became incarnate so that we could become his beloved sons and daughters forever more. The word of God came and dwelt among us on earth so that we could go to dwell with him in heaven and upon the new earth that is to come. That is why Christmas, the day of Christ’s incarnation and birth, is not only the most important day in all of human history but also the most important day for your own life.
So if you believe this, and if you can already see how gloriously wonderful this is, then you may know and you may trust that Jesus was born for you. Jesus lived for you. Jesus died for you. Jesus rose from the dead for you. Jesus ascended into heaven for you. And guess what? Jesus is coming back for you.
But if you do not yet believe that truly, then search your heart. Confess your sins and repent. You have a gift in this very moment to take the opportunity to repent and turn to Jesus Christ in faith, to believe, to receive mercy, to be forgiven, and to be saved from unending wrath.
The offer and the promise of God’s gift of grace is here before you, waiting to be seen and received. So ask the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to see and open your heart to receive so that you may truly believe and fully experience the Christmas miracle tonight and forever more. Amen.
Our next carol is ‘Joy to the World.’
For you come, twinkling single. No more blessings. Christmas. Of his love.
Is love.
Our sixth lesson comes from John chapter 1.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name, which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
Herald of Silent Night. I would ask that we wait to begin singing until everybody has their candles lit. And as a reminder, when lighting, I will come down the center aisle holding my lit candle up. If you would take your unlit candle, tilt it towards me, and then pass it down to me.
Silent night. Holy night, all is calm, all is bright, round yon virgin, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace.
Silent night, holy night. Shepherds quake at the sun. Glory stream from heaven afar. Heavenly host sing hallelujah. Christ the Savior is born. Christ the Savior is born.
Silent night, holy night, son of God, love pure light. Radiant beams from thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace. Jesus, Lord, at thy birth. Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
Silent night, holy night, wondrous star, let thy light with the angels let us sing hallelujah to the King. Christ the Savior is born. Christ the Savior.
Merry Christmas.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God our Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each of us now and always. Amen.
Go in peace.