with me. Father, we thank you that you have not left us alone, but in fact, you've given us your word to know Christ and to know you. I pray, Father, that as we consider this text before us, as we consider the Lord Jesus who was incarnate for us, I ask, Father, that the Spirit would open our eyes, unclog our ears, soften our minds and our hearts, so that we can see by faith the glory of Christ, full of grace and truth, to know him as our elder brother, to know you as our father. I pray this in the name of Jesus, amen. Well, Merry Christmas to you all. Today is our Christmas Sunday, even though it comes after Christmas this year, it's a delight to be worshiping with you today. All of us are sitting, trying to digest and work off the fat and sugar that we put into our bodies as our livers go into overdrive. I'm going to ask a question to the kids, and parents, this is when your catechizing is going to be revealed. So kids, this is a great opportunity to make your parents look questionable. If I were to ask you what Christmas is about, what would you say? Geneva, I'm looking at you. What is Christmas about? This is a pretty easy answer. What is Christmas about? God. Did I hear that? Did I hear God? Yes. Jesus. Jesus. Okay, that's a much better answer. When he died. When he died, okay. Who thinks Christmas is about God? Raise your hand. Who thinks Christmas is about when Jesus died? One or two of us. Who thinks it's about when God became man? Who thinks that? That's right. Now. Every year, every Christmas, we celebrate this fact, that God became man. This is the quintessential mystery of the Christian faith. That God, the eternal, the infinite one, the exists in glory, unapproachable, would, by the mystery of his will and his power, come down and look just like you and me. That's what John Donne said was immensity cloistered. Immensity cloistered in just a little womb of a virgin, excuse me. That'd be really impressive in a baby. Now, this question of how this happens has long perplexed Christian theologians for the better part of two millennia. And really, the best answer that has been given from the best minds, in church history, when asked how could the infinite and the eternal God become man, the best answer that's been given is, we have no idea. We have no idea, but we do know this, we know he was truly God, and we know he was truly man. We don't know how it works, we don't know what the mechanism is, we don't know how it all fits together, but we know those two things, and those two things have consequences for how you break down who the person, who Jesus was, what he's come to do, what his life was like. By affirming that he was fully God, truly God, excuse me, and truly man, we get a picture. It's an incomplete picture, one that our minds grapple with and struggle with. But when we turn to scripture, For all of our talk about that, and it's an important one, obviously, Scripture clearly teaches that God became man. When we turn to Scripture, especially the Gospel of John, we get a slightly more focused image. And I wanna, this is what our sermon's gonna focus on today, because we look at Scripture, we do absolutely get the emphasis that God became man. Christmas is about the deity becoming human. maintaining his deity, maintaining his divinity, and somehow assuming completely and perfectly a human nature. But the scripture makes us go in even deeper, because the scripture does not leave us with just God becoming man. The scripture is much more specific. God the Father did not become man. God the Holy Spirit did not become man. God the Son became man. God the Son became man. And His Sonship, who He is as Son, is not accidental to Him, nor is it accidental to His work. It's of the utmost importance about what He's come to do. The fact that He is the Son of God, not the Father and not the Holy Spirit, is absolutely crucial for what we say when we have been saved. We couldn't just rearrange it. We couldn't just say, well, the Father could have come, we'd have the same thing. No, what we have in Christian salvation, what we have as Christians, is completely determined by the fact that our Savior was the Son of God. If you caught along in our reading today, John actually says something peculiar about that. As he's saying, we have seen his glory, he makes a very odd comparison. May not have stuck out to you because you've heard it so many times, but it's not one I think that actually clarifies the matter for us. Go there in verse 14. The word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory. What kind of glory? Glory like heavenly angels coming down from heaven? Glory like light and imaginable? Glory like the greatest kings ever seen? No. Glory as of the only Son from the Father. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. What was the most distinctive thing about what Christ revealed? What was the most important thing that His disciples saw when they looked at His flesh? It was the glory as of the only Son from the Father. That's what was left with them. I don't know what it was like. The only thing I can say was it was like the son coming from the father. Son, S-O-N, not U-N. The son coming from the father. Later in the New Testament, the author of Hebrews says that God had spoken to us in many ways and in many times through the prophets, but now in this age, he's spoken to us by one who is son. If you read the English, it's his son, but the English actually supplies that pronoun, his, and the Greek is simply this, the one who is son. The one who is from all eternity and all time past, who always will be, who simply is son. And that matters to us. The Trinity is not just a little triangle that we can turn around. The fact that this was the glory of the only begotten son is of the utmost importance to us. And what I wanna do is I wanna look at that question of what does it mean that the Son of God, not just God, but the Son of God became incarnate? And why is that so important? Why do we wanna insist with the scripture that the Son of God became incarnate? And we're gonna do some theology today. Some people don't like doing theology in church, but that's something that's important. But what I'm gonna hope that you're gonna see is actually theology done well leads you to singing. Theology done well leads you to glory in the mystery and the wonder and the riches and the beauty of your salvation. Because Christmas is absolutely about God becoming flesh and we can marvel at that and glory in that, but even more, Christmas is about the eternal Son of God who became man. And what does that mean for us? Here's the three things I want us to see as we think about this. There's three emphases that we see throughout scripture that we can see in this passage here. I wanna suggest to you, because it's the son who's become man, what does that mean? I wanna say three things. First, it means that because it was the son, we get to know the father as sons. Second, we get to be adopted by the father as his sons. And third, we don't just get to know Him, we don't just get to be adopted by the Father, we get to be united to Him as sons. We get to know the Father, we get to be adopted by the Father, and we get to be united with the Father. So if you will turn, if you have your Bibles open, I encourage you to go there to our passage we have before us. I want us to focus now on the bottom verse. Verse 18, no one has ever seen God. The only God who is at the Father's side, He has made Him known. Now before we jump into what that means, this only begotten God has made the Father known, we need to understand what the nature of the mystery of the Trinity is. We all probably know the basics, but it's good to go over it, to have it in our minds, Christian theology has always said from the beginning, as the Trinity is this, that there's three persons in the Godhead. There's the Father, there's the Son, and there's the Holy Spirit. These three are all God, fully, completely, and yet they're not each other. So the Father is God, but he's not the Son, and he's not the Holy Spirit. The Son is also completely God, and yet he's not the Father nor the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet he is neither the Father nor the Son. Each person, completely divine, yet distinguished by how they relate to one another. Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, and the Spirit comes out from both the Father and the Son. Now, let's put that aside for a second, but it's important to understand that this is one being that we're talking about. It's one God. And yet, in the incomparable mystery of this one God, it's three persons. Now already, that language of father and son suggests a very deep intimacy, a very deep understanding. There's scarcely, apart from maybe the husband and wife, there's scarcely a more intimate relationship imaginable than that of a father and of a son, at least as it ought to be. that's already presented to us by these two names, the Father and the Son, and yet, the fact that both are fully God, the fact that both are completely divine, suggests that this intimacy is actually far more than we can scarcely imagine. It's not the unity of, or the, excuse me, the knowledge of two human people, this is the knowledge of one individual. This is a little difficult to understand, but it is one individual, and the son has complete knowledge of the father. The son knows him down all the way to the bottom. There is not a drop of the father that is not given to and contained by the son. He knows him perfectly, and has known him perfectly from all eternity. When I was a young man, I still am a young man, but this was probably 15 years ago. I was in Franklin, this was when I was in college, and a man walked up to me and we started talking. And as I was about to leave, I had never seen this man before in my life and I have not seen him since, he looked at me and said, are you John Brewer's son? And I said, yeah, he's my dad. How'd you know? He said, I just saw you and I knew. I knew you were John Brewer's son. Some people have said that about my son, Hudgens. They'll look at him and say, he's more Britain than Britain, right? Or you'll have, have you noticed that, that you can see a child and you actually see perhaps a physical characteristic an emotional characteristic or something along the lines that's so the parent, and yet it's far greater than what the parent has. It's like the parent distilled into a perfect form, right? I'm a pretty outgoing guy, I love meeting new people, I love talking, and my son, Hudgens, puts me to shame. He is so gregarious and so outgoing and so extroverted, he won't be kidnapped, he will just go with the kidnapper, talking to him. We can see, we've experienced this where we see the child and we know the father because we've seen the child. We know the parent because we see this young one, we see so clearly that this person has come from a parent. That's, when Jesus comes, remember, Jesus as the Son has complete, exhaustive knowledge of the Father, and John says that when He comes, He makes His Father known. He makes His Father known. When we see His glory, when we see that glory as of the only Son from the Father, we are seeing something that has existed for all eternity. When we see Christ, we get to participate in that knowledge that He has had from the very beginning. He knows the Father all the way down to the bottom, and when we see Jesus, it says He makes Him known. He literally, if we translate it in how it's spelled in the Greek, He exegetes Him. He interprets Him, He brings Him out. He brings out all the fullness and the richness of the Father. And to see Jesus and that in His glory, His glory as of the only Son from the Father, means that we get to know the Father like Him. There is no God hiding behind the back of Jesus. There is no divinity just putting on a mask that should make you think that you don't really know your Father in heaven. When you see Jesus, Jesus says, you see the Father. When you see Jesus, you see the Father and you know him. And amazingly, Jesus does this in a way that has never been done before. You go to stories like Exodus 33, the one that we just read, Moses didn't get to see the glory of God, he got to see all the trail of his glory. He got to see the residue of his glory. He couldn't see his face though. When Isaiah, in his vision, Isaiah 6, looks at the glory of God, he's seeing it mediated through the prophetic vision, because the glory is so great that the angels in heaven have to cover their eyes, lest they be destroyed. And this is the glory that Jesus has now revealed in him. that that thing that used to be we couldn't even look upon lest we die, this is the thing we now get to see because it's coming to us with grace and truth. It's coming to us to know Him, to be known by Him, to be fellowshiped with. And to see the Son, this one who has been one with the Father for all time, when we know Him and we see Him and we know the Father, what we're getting privy to are the family secrets of the eternal Trinity. Have you thought about that? We are getting alerted to and made conscious of the intimate, eternal mysteries of God himself. Not just things about life. Not just things about how to live our lives, of course that's something important, but we're getting the greatest, most wonderful knowledge available to us, which is the knowledge of the triune, eternal God. We get to know him. We get to look at him by faith, as if face to face. And we get that because this is his son who's come to us. Not just another prophet, not just another priest, not just another king, but his very son. And it gives us eyes to see his father. He gives us ears to hear his father's voice. He gives us minds to understand and hearts to comprehend. the depth and the glory of his father's love and grace. So we get to know the father. We get to know him, not as if he's just trying to hide himself. We're not just merely acquainted with him. We get to know him like his own son knows him. We get to have fellowship with him like his own son has fellowship with him. But not just that, we don't just get to know our Father. We don't just get to become thoroughly acquainted with Him. We actually also, because the Son has come, we get to be adopted by this Father. We get to know Him not just as our God, but actually, truly as our Father. And here I want to zero in on something that's often neglected. but that is absolutely important for understanding the person of Christ. It's the name that John gives him in this passage. Going back to the section we looked at, that we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Now that word only could be translated as only, but I would suggest a better translation is not simply only like unique, the better translation would be this, only begotten. Only begotten. The only begotten Son from the Father. Now why would that make such a difference? Why add the begotten part? We confess it every week, if you listen when you're going back to the Nicene Creed, we confess every week that the Son, excuse me, is begotten from the Father before all worlds. Have you ever thought about what that means? The Son is eternally begotten. What we're saying is that from all eternity, the son has been coming forth from the father. That the nature of their relationship is an eternal one of fatherly begetting. Now it's difficult for us to understand this. We are creatures whose minds are very limited. And it's difficult to understand what begetting means when we try to do away with things like sequence and time and material. We're trying to think of an eternal begetting. It does boggle the mind, and yet that's what scripture describes the relationship of this father and son is. It's one of begetting, the son being begotten and the father begetting. Now, we don't necessarily need to be precise on what it's trying to say, but here's what it's trying to communicate. Here's what Christian theology has always tried to say about this nature of begetting. is that the Father is nothing more and nothing less than the Father, and He's always been the Father, He always will be a Father, and the Son always has been, always will be the Son. From all time, He is being begotten by the Father, and therefore, for all time, He is Son. For all time, the Father is begetting, and therefore, for all time, He is Father. You can't know the Father as anything else other than the Father. You can't know the Son as anything else other than the Son. Their relationship is one completely of fatherly and filial begetting and being begotten. Now why does that matter? Why does that matter to us? I'd like to suggest to you that the nature of that relationship The reason John says it twice, he says it in verse 14, this is the only begotten Son from the Father, and then in verse 18 again, the only begotten God is the same word, only begotten God. He uses that a couple other times in John 3.16 and a few other times. He uses that because that becomes the model that we have when we're adopted by our Father. It's not eternal. The relationship we have with our Father is not identical to the relationship that Jesus has with his son as the eternal son, but it is the model for us. It's the model for us when we are brought into this as sons and daughters of the king. So what does that mean? Remember, if you know the Bible, if you know the first chapter of John, John says very clearly that when Jesus came, he came to give those who believed in him the right to become children of God. It's one of the most important things he did was that so when he came, we might become children of the living God. Now why is it important to then say that Jesus is the only begotten son? We're adopted in this only begotten son. When we see the glory of Christ, when we believe in him, when we find our lives hid inside of him, there's only one son of God and therefore any children that are adopted, their childhood, their sonship, their daughtership is going to look like the one true son of God. The father is always the father to his son. When people are adopted into the family of God, when they are brought into Christ, that eternal fatherhood becomes their own. Think about that. The eternal fatherhood of God becomes yours. Something that you can claim, something you can lay hold of. And just as that relationship with Christ and his Father will never pass away, that same durability exists for those who are in Christ. To be in Christ means to find your life completely wrapped up in the sonship of Christ with the Father. It means that your entire lives, your entire orientation in life, everything about you becomes redirected and redefined by the statement that you are a child of the living God. And that's yours because the Son came and gave it to you. That's yours because the eternal, only begotten Son of God became flesh so that sinners like you and me could become children of the living God. So again, we're not just acquainted with him. We don't just know him even all the way down. We actually get to be children. We get to be children of the living God in this one son who became man. I want us to see finally this. We get to know him, our father. We get to be adopted by him. And then finally this, and this is maybe the most amazing one. the most compelling one, the most glorious one, because we don't just know Him, we're not just adopted by Him, we get to be united to this Father. We get to be united to Him, and to get this one, we have to go a little askew from our text that we read this morning. I would like you to turn, if you have your Bibles, to John 17. John 17. Now remember, as I said, this Son is God. He doesn't lose anything by being Son. He is God. He and the Father share in that divinity. They share in the glory of eternity that they've had from the beginning. And Jesus, throughout John, several times insists on that the fellowship they have is a fellowship of unity. It's a fellowship of identity. So for instance, in John 10, verse 30, beginning in verse 29, Jesus says this, my Father who has given them to me is greater than all. and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one. I and the Father are one. They've been one from all eternity. They will be one for all eternity. And that oneness, though, does not just remain with them. In fact, amazingly, John 17, when Jesus is praying to his Father, This is what he prays, this is what he prays. Now keep that unity in your mind, the unity that exists between the Father and the Son from all eternity. Here's what he prays. I do not ask for these only the apostles before him, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you. that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. See what Jesus is asking his Father. He's saying that we, the believers, may be one, just as you, Father, are in Christ, and I, Christ, are in you, the Father, that they also may be in us. That we, as believers in Christ, people who have seen the glory of God in Christ Jesus, that we might be one with the Father, one with Him and the Son. And when Jesus comes into the flesh, that's exactly what He gives us. He gives us a knowledge of the Father that goes down to the very bottom of who our Father is. He gives us a relationship that's completely contingent and based upon His own eternal relationship with His Father. And then He gives us this, the most inexpressible gift, that we could be united with our Father, that we could be one with Him. In fact, more than that, we are one with Him. We're one with our Father in heaven. What does this mean? We could talk about this for a very long time, but the biggest takeaway is this. My children, when I come home from work, their response is incredible. My daughter has just learned the word daddy and she runs squealing, daddy, daddy, daddy. with her little legs sort of moving along. My boys, they want me to do all sorts of things with them. They want me to play with them. They want to show me some recently found stick. They want me to wrestle them. It's wonderful, right? That feeling of being together again, of being united. But, you know, the next day is going to come, and I'm going to have to go to work. And eventually, they'll leave the house, and they're their own person. They'll go off and do wonderful things, hopefully. Time will tell. And then eventually, at least on this side of glory, there's gonna be a time when that relationship ends permanently. Where I will not be their father anymore. At least not physically, but only in memory. That doesn't happen to us in Christ with our father. What does He promise? He's promised He'll never leave us nor forsake us. He's promised that when we walk through the fire and through the water, He'll be with us and we shall not fear. The infinite, the eternal, the only wise God is our Father. And because we're united to Him, He will never depart from us. We will never be left without a Father. Because our elder brother came, he has given to us the greatest gift that so many people long for, the gift of a father. Do you know that feeling in your heart? Some of you may have had terrible human fathers. Jesus gives you the best one. And however good your father may have been, the father that Jesus offers you that unites you is far better. One who will never leave you, one who will never fail you. In fact, one who has loved you so much from all eternity that this son who is with him, whom he knew, whom he loved from all eternity, he actually sent to get you so that not only could you know him, but he could know you, and he could adopt you, and he could be united to you. God became flesh, yes, absolutely. And we'll be pondering it for the rest of our lives. The Son of God became man. And everything He has, we get to now have. We get to know the Father. We get to be adopted by the Father. We get to be united to His Father. And that's what Christmas is really, in the end, all about. The Father giving us His Son so that we could be with Him. The glory that comes from the Father, the glory of the only begotten Son from the Father, it came here so that it could bring children back to the Father. And He's still doing that today. And He'll do that when we're far gone as more and more children come to know their Father as they see by faith the glory of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son from the Father. Next year we'll get to remember it again and again and again and again until We get to see him with the eyes, not of faith, but of sight. And we'll see our elder brother and we'll see our father. Let's pray. Father, what a joy it is, what a mystery it is to know that in Christ, you have given us your very self. You've given us the riches of your love, the glories of your grace. I pray, Father, that as we think about these things, as we lay them up in our hearts, as we consider them, that you would help us to find the great comfort and the assurance that this ought to bring us, that we have been ushered in to the very heart of our God, and we get to know you as our Father, and we get to have Christ as our elder brother. We ask that you would cement this in our hearts, that we might live as children, more and more becoming of our Father. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen. In Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink from Him and shame at His coming. If you know that He is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of Him. See what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as he is pure. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. We have the privilege of doing the Lord's Supper here every Sunday. And it's a remarkable gift. It's a privilege to do it. And every Sunday we remind ourselves everything that we currently possess with Christ, everything we currently have gained from Christ, and everything that we're going to gain when he returns. And we find Him and see Him by sight. And something that Pastor Bo and I say very regularly when we do this is that when we gather at this table, we are gathering to eat with, to sup with, to dine with our resurrected King. We get to meet Him here at this table. Now I want to, without detracting from that, the fact that we get to meet Jesus here. I wanna add something else just in light of what we spoke about this morning. When we come, if we come to meet Jesus, the amazing thing is we actually are coming to meet our Father too. We're not just meeting Jesus, we are meeting through Christ, we are meeting our Heavenly Father. That's actually what we're gonna be doing for all eternity, is worshiping and meeting our Father through the Lord Jesus. And we get to practice that and really have it right here. And we think of this table as the sign of what Christ has done for us and that's absolutely true. We proclaim Christ's death as often as we drink this until he comes. Another thing we do, we need to remember is that when we come here, this table is the sign of what the Father did for us. of what our father continues to do for us. The father who loved us and so he sent the son who he knew from all eternity to rescue people like us, rebels and sinners, and to know us himself. He sent his only begotten son, the one he loved from all eternity, so he could turn us into children of God and have us eat with him around his table. He sent his son, the one whom he had been with, united with for all eternity, so that he could have us as his own. Remember, when you come to this table, that's who you're meeting. That's who you're meeting, that Father. You get to see Him afresh. You get to meet Him afresh. You get to be reminded of all that He's done. Now, amazingly, even though we know Him and we have been united to Him, we've been adopted by Him, there's so much that remains. There's so much that remains of what we haven't yet even begun to explore. And we're going to keep knowing Him and keep learning of Him and keep growing in our understanding as what we are as children. And we get to start that here as we see Christ by faith and our lives are conformed to His image and we become more and more conformed to the image of our Father through Him. And we're going again, like I said, we're gonna be doing this for all eternity. So come and meet your Father, receive the gifts He's given you, and know that you know Him, that you've been adopted by Him, that you've been united to Him, and Christ as your elder brother continues to stand in your stead, even now in glory. Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us keep the feast.