Well, I want to draw your attention tonight to this passage of scripture that was read in your hearing so familiar to us all John chapter one. And this section 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. I want to say a few words of introduction. The greatest challenge to the world that the Christian faith provides is the challenge of the self-consciousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me explain what I mean. What he thought of himself and how he taught his disciples and anyone who would listen how they should think of him and respond to him. And I want to focus your minds on this to begin with, what Jesus considered himself to be. Now, I need you to be alert and use your brains. You don't put your brain with your umbrella in the umbrella stand when it's raining. Bring your brain, don't put it under the seat. You listen attentively about the words we've been singing, about the prayers I led you in praying, about the sermon preached. Who is this Jesus? You see, becoming a Christian is basically an intellectual revolution. You start to think. in different ways. When you think about him in a different way, then you think about the world and about other people and about yourself in a different way. So I'm saying, let's start by asking, what did Jesus think of himself? And then we're going to see from John what those who knew him best thought about him. There was a great Scots preacher, and he was John Duncan, and he was called Rabbi Duncan. He was the Old Testament professor, and the students called him Rabbi. And that name stuck. And he said, Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or he was himself deluded and self deceived, or he was divine. And then Dr. J. Gresham Machen, the great preacher of 100 years ago, brought out the book in 1923, Christianity and Liberalism, never been answered, shows that modernism is another religion. It's not Christianity at all. He said, the real trouble is the lofty claims of Jesus. if those claims were unjustified, they'd put a moral stain on Jesus' character. What would you think of a man who was no longer humble and sane, but that he stood before people and said, your eternal destinies are in my hands? that I'm going to allocate to every single person where you're going to spend eternity. Now, if he's just an example to us, he's not a worthy example because he claimed far more than a good man would claim. So then we come to C.S. Lewis, a professor of literature at Oxford University. He died the same day as President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. And he writes about Jesus and he says, three possible choices everyone has to make about the Son of God. All of Halesham, Let's challenge you now, every boy, girl, man or woman, old and young, rich, poor, whatever you come from, whatever your background is, you're faced with three choices as you face Jesus Christ. He's either a lunatic or a liar or the Lord. We say it even simpler than that, he's mad, or bad, or God. So we don't call that a dilemma, we call it a trilemma. Three choices, and one is right. I'm trying here to say, it's really a daft thing, a foolish thing to say about Christ. I accept him as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That's one thing you can't say. You can't say that. A man who is just a good man doesn't make the sort of claims about himself that Jesus made. He's not a great moral teacher. He's either a lunatic or he's a devil from hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman. or something worse, you can shut him up as a fool, you can spit at him, you can call him a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let's have none of this patronizing nonsense and saying, oh, he was a great human teacher. He has not left that choice open to us. He did not intend to. Now it seems to me very clear that Jesus wasn't a lunatic. He's the most sane man I've ever come across or ever will. And he's not a fiend, he's not a devil. Consequently, as strange, as terrifying it might be for you for the rest of your life, Jesus Christ is God. Now, the ordinary man in Hel Shem, he doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is God. They see him, they don't know much about him. They think he was a human teacher, I suppose, a rabbi. And that he's been made God by his supporters. Now, I'm one of the supporters of Jesus Christ. That's been my mission in life. But I don't make him God. I receive him as my God and my Lord, and I worship him and I try to do what he tells me, day and night, all my life. And so does the pastors of this church, the elders of this church and the church members, the godly women who you're mourning an evening and come to the prayer meeting and men who are just like that and you look at them and that's what they believe. They believe he's their God, their Lord. And then there are other churches in Hilton where the people believe the same thing. And then through Sussex and Essex and all the London area, full of churches. Congregations where the people believe these things. We're all saying Jesus Christ is God. Well, are we liars? Are we half crazy? men and women, or have we come across the truth about Jesus Christ? Are we bad men or crazy men to say you all ought to worship Jesus Christ as God? Well, you know, Some of these Christian people are your parents. Some of them are your best friends. And they're followers of Jesus Christ. They're not mad, they're not bad. They follow this book, this Bible. And what they've read there, It has a ring of reality and truth and beauty and holiness and loveliness about it. He's your creator. He's your God. He's the one who blessed you with so many wonderful gifts, mum and dad, your partners, your children. He is the giver of breath. Your breath is in his hands. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. All good gifts around us are sent from Jesus above. And what you think about Jesus Christ affects everything. The figure of this person self-consciously saying, I and my Father are one. He that believes on me has eternal life. I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. That's the church's message. And every true believer then is growing. Like when you fall in love with someone, you like to meet them and you like to learn all about them. And you treasure the moments you spend with them and what they say about the time before you knew them and where they came from. what they believe and you lap it all up. You want to know as much as possible about them. So that's where I'm coming from. Now I want to look at the book. I want to look at John chapter one. And I want to see nine ways in which John presses home the truth that Jesus Christ is God from these 18 verses in John's gospel. Now, understand, John was a good Jewish believer. Before he became a Christian, He was a good Jew. He cared about idolatry very much. He separated himself from everything in the world that was worshiped. Wouldn't worship cows, wouldn't worship mountains, wouldn't worship trees, wouldn't worship animals or men. He would only worship Jehovah, the God of Scripture, the great creator, the one true God. Now this is very striking. The first Christians tell you that Jesus of Nazareth was the object of their worship and that he did what the Old Testament says Jehovah God alone can do these things. And they tell us that Jesus Christ has all the names of God and that he has the attributes, the characteristics, the qualities of God. They're telling us he was something that was utterly revolutionary to their wives, to their children, to their families, to their neighbors, to the people they worked with. It shook their generation. Well, now, what did they say? Let's look here, firstly. First thing John tells us, Jesus is eternal. You notice that, first words of John, in the beginning was the word. Then he enlarges that in verse 14, telling us that the word became flesh. And then in verse 17 he says, the name of the word. He says the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. That's what he's talking about, he says. That's the one he calls the word. Jesus the anointed one, Jesus the Messiah, the one from God. And he tells us in the first six words of his 21 chapters of John's gospel, the first six words say, Jesus was in the beginning. When everything else began, he didn't begin. He was already in existence. Jesus is eternal. And that's not the only place, he says. Look at verse two. He repeats it. He was in the beginning with God. Now when any good Jew, any good Hebrew, would hear those three words, in the beginning, then you know what they expected the next word to be. The next word was gonna be God, because they all knew that the Bible starts, in the beginning, God. And so when the Apostle John begins his gospel, and he says, in the beginning, the word, He's making the most profound claim about Jesus Christ, that claim that Jesus Christ is eternal. He possesses the attribute of eternality. He doesn't begin. He doesn't end. And every Jew hearing that proclamation is going to know exactly what John is declaring and claiming, that Jesus Christ is eternal. Now there's no human being in the world, no, however great he is, that any self-respecting Jew would say, he's eternal. He's always been in existence and always will be in existence. Because you are then speaking about his divinity. You are speaking about his Godhead. It's John saying, this Jesus that I'm talking to you about, you must understand, he was in the beginning. When there was nothing else except God, there was the Word. and the word is Jesus Christ. That's the first thing I want you to see, that Jesus Christ is eternal. The second thing, he says again in verse one, he says, Jesus is a person distinct from the Father. He's a person distinct from the Father. And here we have the beginning of John's teaching about the Trinity. It's being unfolded. It's being set forth in his gospel. There's one God. John believes it, and Peter and James and Paul and the author of the Hebrews, they all say this. They all say, there's only one God. No matter what our Muslim neighbors think about us as Christians, we believe in one God. One God alone. Now, the New Testament makes it perfectly clear that one God exists in three persons. And here, John begins to unfold at the very beginning, in the first few words of this gospel, that Jesus is a distinct person from the Father. There we are. How does he do it? Well, he says, and the word was with God. He will identify the word and God in the very next phrase, but here he can say the word was with God. Now that word with, it means towards. Friends are like that, but a husband and wife, they are with one another, aren't they? The two become one. They're two, but they're one. The word and the father, the word was with the father. He says, we say, I was walking with my wife through the park. And here, the word is towards the father, towards the father in, knowledge, towards the Father in love, towards the Father in adoration, towards the Father in total contentment and peace and joy, the Father and the Word. And so, Jesus is distinct from the Father. So, you're with me now, that he's eternal, he's distinct. Thirdly, John makes it clear that Jesus Christ is very God. Jesus Christ is divine. He says it point blank. He says it in verse one, and he says it again in verse 18. In verse one he says, and the word was God. And he says it once again in verse 18, no man hath seen God at any time, The only begotten Son, He hath declared Him. We haven't seen God, but we've seen the only begotten Son of God. Now, you know everything that a father is, a son is as well, isn't he? You know, I've used this illustration before. The two men, they've gone to the maternity ward. Their wives have given birth to little boys the night before, and they go down the corridor, and there's a big glass screen, and there's an area where there are cribs. There are two cribs there, and their sons, their newborn sons are there in the cribs, and they're looking through the window, through the glass, One says to the other, let's imagine him saying, my son is 98% human. And the man looks back smugly and he says, my son is 99% human. Well, of course they don't say that. The father's human, 100%. Both men, 100% human. And our children are 100% human. God, 100% divine. God as a son, only begotten son, 100% divine, as divine as his father. So that's the second thing. The third thing that we are told, the fourth thing we are told, Jesus is the creator of everything. this unimaginably vast cosmos. And the more the rockets go up and the pictures come back and the telescopes go more and more powerful, the sheer unimaginable vastness of this world. Jesus made it, he thought it, and he spoke it into being. All things, we read, verse three, all things were made by him without him, not anything made that was made. Then he wants to repeat it. He says it later on in the chapter again, that the world was made. Verse 10, he was in the world and the world was made by him. Now every good Hebrew boy, every good little Jew, he knew God made the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, it said, the opening words of the Bible, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And that's the Hebrew way, a Hebrew expression for everything. Everything was made by God. There were two categories for the Hebrews. There was the world and then there were the heavens. and the heavens and the world was made by God. All things came into being through him. Apart from him, nothing came into being, he says. That's how John says. Is there anything at all that pops up and says, I wasn't made by Jesus? Nothing, nothing at all. If it exists, the Word made it. Because all things were made by the Word. Now, you go back to Genesis 1, and it floods your mind with light when you think of this truth. What happened on each of the days of creation? What happened, you know? And God said. God spoke. light. There was a greater light on the fourth day for the day and a lesser light on the night. On the second day there was the heavens and there was the earth. And on the third day there was the sea and the dry land and it was all made and then the animals were made, everything, everything. Atom was made by him. The molecules were made by him. The subatomic particles were all made, all designed and then made by the Word. What does God Almighty do? He speaks the Word into existence, into being. Let me tell you that that word that worked then and made everything in the cosmos, that word has become flesh, has become incarnate in the person of Jesus the Messiah. God's been speaking, of course. He's been speaking through Moses, he's been speaking through Elijah and Samuel, the preaching prophets, and then he's been speaking through Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the writing prophets. He's been speaking all the time. And Jesus occasionally comes, he's longing to come. And so there are these theophanies where the angel of the Lord appears and he's glorious and great. He appears to Abram, he appears to Gideon, and he is there and Daniel sees him. He longs, and then he comes. He comes to Bethlehem, and he comes to Nazareth, and he comes to Jerusalem, Capernaum, and he is here. God the Son comes. The one who spoke no longer sends his messengers, but he is here. in the world. Fifthly, Jesus Christ is the source of all spiritual life. John isn't finished, his testimony to Jesus Christ. In verse four he says, he's the source of all spiritual life. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. He didn't receive life. He wasn't given life, he was life. He was eternally alive and full, infinitely, immeasurably full of the life of heaven. In him was life always, that life. It was innately his, it was underrivedly his. And from that life of his, light comes. Light comes to men. every man made in God's image, the like that Caesar and Aristotle and Plato, the like that Alfred the Great and King Harold and King William, the like that Shakespeare had and John Bunyan had and Bach and Mendelssohn the great painters and the artists and Bach and Handel and Prokofiev, the great composers, the life they had, the life of care that's in a family, husband and wife caring for their little ones, the life of picking up people and helping people and ministering people and the life we show in kind words and patience and self-denial. comes from Jesus Christ. He won't let this world become a hell. He gives life. The greatness of that life. He says, I am the resurrection and the life. If a man believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. because anyone who lives and believes in me shall never die because I am the life. And every Hebrew preacher, every human, every Jewish speaker, every Jew, every good Hebrew, he would know that he's claiming that Jesus is God. because all life comes from God and all life comes from Jesus. John says here, sixly, he goes on to say in verse 14 that Jesus is God in the flesh and the Word became. Oh, what did God become? Flesh and dwelt among us. Now, When he became human, he did not cease to be divine. It wasn't a diminution, it was a plus, it was an addition to his eternal, infinite, immeasurable glory. He added now a human nature. It isn't an act of subtraction, It's the addition of humanity. The old theologians put it like this. He became what he was not without ceasing to be what he was. He became what he was not, he became human, without ceasing to be what he was, the eternal and glorious second person of the Godhead. He was the creator. He didn't lay aside his creating power. As we see in the Bible, he could make water become wine. He could multiply five loaves and two fishes. He could create eyeballs. He could give life to the dying and to the dead. He was fully human, but he hadn't ceased also to be Eternal God. The word was enfleshed. God was enfleshed in Jesus Christ. So no longer did you have to listen to men like Isaiah, the greatest writing prophet, who could say also, woe is me, I'm undone, I'm a man of unclean lips, I dwell amongst people of unclean lips, my eyes have seen the king and ah, feel his unworthiness to represent this God. Jesus never expressed his unworthiness. He never said, I'm a man of unclean lips. He said, what I say to you, the Father is saying to you. I and my Father are one, he said. The seventh thing that we learn here in John's Gospel is that Jesus shares his Father's glory. He shares it, verse 14. Okay, John is saying, if you haven't got it yet, that this person that I'm talking about is fully divine, let me tell you one more thing about him. Jesus shares the Father's glory. Now, you know, if you're a Hebrew, you know this one truth. If you know no other truth, no one shares God's glory. God's glory is divine. glory. Nothing that is not God enters into the fullness of divine glory. The glory that he has in himself as glorious father, glorious son, glorious Holy Spirit from all eternity. John says, you know, he says, we saw his glory. Who is glory? Glory as of the only begotten. from the Father. He's saying Jesus shared the Father's glory. Jesus' glory was the glory of the Eternal Father. When Jesus came down, it's as if the Shekinah glory was enfleshed in him. He hid it from them. until on the Mount of Transfiguration he revealed his glory. Like the sun shining in noonday brightness and they were overwhelmed when they saw him speaking with Moses and speaking with Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration, they saw his glory. And they bowed before him. Full of grace and truth. The eighth thing we see here, that Jesus in What he said and in what he did was exactly what God said and did. What God wanted him to say and do and what he did say and do. He accomplished God's will. Now, God created Adam. Adam was to glorify him and enjoy him forever and in doing God's will, being fruitful and replenishing the earth and multiplying, and he would please God and he would show the glory of God in Adam. And Adam, of course, sinned. He failed. And God has to speak. He has to give 10 words from Sinai to tell the people now how they are to live because they're his people, they're his children. They have the covenants and the promises and they have great responsibilities. Grace and truth. comes through Jesus Christ. What does John say? John says, Jesus Christ is the perfection of all that God requires. If you've seen Jesus Christ, you've seen what God is like. You've seen the Father, you've seen His beauty, His love, His kindness. You've seen how He delights to pardon sin. That's what God is like. Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. That's what God is like. Who is a pardoning God like Thee? Who has grace so rich and free? You see it in Jesus Christ. If you read the Bible, if you read it with an open heart and a mind that's asking God to enlighten you and show you, please show you Jesus Christ, give you a grasp of Him, you are seeing God. No man has seen God at any time. Ah, the only begotten Son in the bosom of the Father, He's revealed Him, He's shown Him. He's telling us what God is like. On the last day, it won't be Peter on the throne. It won't be John, it won't be the Apostle Paul on the throne. It won't be Moses as the one who was full of grace and truth, who did everything that God required. It will be the Lord Jesus Christ. And finally, ninthly, Jesus is the only begotten of the Father, the only begotten, the only revealer of God. No one has seen God at any time. The God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known. If you want to see God, and I want you all to see God, I want you all to see my God, I want you to see your God, the God who has looked after you and cared for you and helped you. I want you to know this God. I want you to understand this God and speak to Him. And I want you to hear Him when He speaks to you in preaching and in reading the Word of God and in your conscience, the great monitor that is the citadel of the soul that tells us when we're doing right and when we're doing what's wrong. Listen to your conscience. Listen to the Word of God. There's only one way. It's through Jesus Christ. because he's the unique revealer of the one true God. So, Jesus is making it very clear. There are not many ways to God. There are not many roads up the mountain where God is. There's only one road. There's only one way. There's only one person. When he speaks, the winds and waves obeyed him, this person. When he spoke to a man dead three days and said, Lazarus, come forth, he came forth. When he cast out demons in the worst case of demon possession that this world has seen or ever will see, then the Gadarene demoniac was clothed and in his right mind in a moment. Power over demons, power over creation, power over disease, power over death, all given to God the Son. The one way to God, he's the great Redeemer. So you see what Jesus is according to John. John is building up then all these attributes, the name, the works, the worship of the one God. And he's saying, it's Jesus I'm talking about, the word made flesh. And so we worship him. We worship him today. We've sung about him. We've prayed to him. We've asked for his presence with us. And if he's not God, all that is blasphemy. It's only justifiable because He is the living God. There's a poignant scene in Revelation where an angel comes to John and says, don't write that now. John seeing this angel, you know one angel destroyed the whole Syrian army of 70,000 people and he bowed and he fell. Get up, the angel said. Don't worship me, only worship God. When the disciples fell before Jesus in Matthew 28 verse 17, he doesn't say, come on boys, get on your feet. Don't worship me, I'm a man like you. He didn't say that. He accepted their worship. He accepts our worship because we worship God through Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ cleanses. all that's defiling, takes it all away, and he passes it on to his father. He gives it to his father. Our worship, descend in the name of Jesus Christ. And God has received our praise and our singing and our prayers and our preaching and our whole response. Does all this matter? Men and women, It matters more than anything else in the world. Your salvation depends on the fact that Jesus Christ is God. Why was it necessary for Jesus to be fully divine? Well, because it was necessary for this company of people, more than anyone can number, millions and millions, like the sands on the seashore, all the redeemed, to experience the fullness of salvation. That is, they are going to be like him. Not divine, but like him morally, like him ethically, like him affectionately, emotionally. They're going to be like, we are going to be like God. When we see him, we're going to be like him. We're going to be transfigured. We're going to see him as he is. If he's not God, we are still in our sins. Here is the greatness of God, that he so loved the world that his son, he didn't send Gabriel on a message or Michael, the archangels. He came. Son, you must go. Yes, Father. I delight to do thy will. I've sent Moses and I've sent Elijah and I've sent the prophets, but now it's time for you to go. And the son waves goodbye to the father, and he comes over the clouds of heaven, and he comes to the womb of the Virgin Mary, and he's born in a stable, and he grows up in Nazareth, and he makes his appearance, and he inspires apostles to write about him. Sure in this book, sure in this beloved Bible, we meet Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and he speaks to us. He says, you know, I sent a man from London, and I gave him a message about who I am, and I brought you here tonight. to hear about him. And I want you to trust him. I want you to believe in him. I want you to receive him into your life as your God and serve him all your days. Present your bodies a living sacrifice to him and do his will. That's why. That's why this service has taken place now. That's why Jesus himself is here. And he's nudging you, and he's talking to you, touching your conscience. Are you paying attention? You're going to believe I'm mad or bad? You're going to believe I'm a lunatic or a liar? Impossible. Then I'm gone. The only God there is, oh, I know. I know God. I have God as my Lord and Savior, and his name is Jesus. And his name is Father, and his name is Holy Spirit. He's the one God. That's what I want you to believe, and go on believing, and growing in understanding it. When you get home, read John 1, and check what I said. Is it faithfully? recounting what John says here in this chapter. God bless you in your coming to this God. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, thank you for loving this world and sending your own dear Son, that the word was made flesh and lived. and ate and drank with people and spoke to people, loved them and cared for them and blessed their children, raised them from sick beds and raised them from the dead and said, because I live, you will live also. Oh, what hope that gives us. Everybody here may bow. and many Hailsham sinners come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and God. Please do it. Have mercy, Lord. We ask in Jesus' name, amen. Let's sing about the Word made flesh, number 150. Thou art the everlasting Word, the Father's only Son, God manifestly seen and heard, Heaven's Beloved One, one hundred and fiftieth hymn.