The Grand Miracle, John 1:1, 14-18

This sermon explores Christmas's significance, focusing on the grand miracle of Jesus's incarnation. Pastor Aaron Shamp discusses how the incarnation is central to Christianity, emphasizing its implications for hope, challenge, and salvation. The message calls for humility and worship in response to the miracle of Christ's birth and the salvation it offers.

Takeaways

• Christmas is a time when we reflect on miracles.
• The grand miracle is the incarnation of Jesus.
• C.S. Lewis argued that Christianity is unique in its miraculous claims.
• The incarnation challenges us to examine our beliefs about Jesus.
• The Word made flesh offers hope and fulfillment of our deepest needs.
• Salvation is not achieved through human effort but through grace.
• The incarnation reveals our need for divine revelation, not just reason.
• Jesus's dual nature as fully God and fully man is essential to salvation.
• The cross absorbs our sin and offers forgiveness and new life.
• Christmas calls us to humility and worship before God.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Advent Season Overview
01:18 The Grand Miracle: Understanding the Incarnation
04:08 The Uniqueness of Jesus in World Religions
07:15 The Logos: A Philosophical Perspective
10:09 The Challenge of the Incarnation
13:15 Hope and Salvation Through the Incarnation
16:12 The Insult of the Incarnation
19:26 The Cross: Bridging the Chasm
22:23 The Relationship of Grace and Salvation
25:07 Conclusion: Humility and Worship in the Advent Season

Creators & Guests

Host

Aaron Shamp

Lead Pastor of Redeemer City Church

What is Redeemer City Church - Lafayette, LA?

Pastor Aaron Shamp preaches about the Gospel and facets of Christianity at Redeemer City Church. These podcasts are his sermons.

Aaron Shamp (00:00.156)
for having our annual meeting.

Once again, whether you're a member or not, are welcome to attend. However, those of you guys who are members of Redeemer, we especially ask that you mark that on your calendar and you make plans to be here for that meeting and then afterwards we'll have a meal together. But also I want to thank Abby Sundbuckner for being here today. I didn't introduce her before, but she really needs an introduction. Abby's been a friend of Redeemer for a long time and so she's filling in since Legan's out of town today. So thank you so

much to Abby for being here today.

Abby's not only an extremely gifted worship leader who who fills in over here right now with them, but she's also a missionary with crew at LSU and and she's one of the missionaries that Redeemer supports. And so we are thankful for her and her work. Well, today we're going to be continuing and looking at Advent as we are beginning the Advent season. And so today we're going to be in John, chapter one. If you want to open your Bibles there, we're going to be in John, chapter one, the Gospel of John.

Aaron Shamp (01:21.446)
So once again, we'll be in John chapter one today and I'm going to be reading a couple of verses and then jumping down and reading some different ones. So we're going be reading verses one through five and then I'm going to jump down to verse 14 and we're going to read a few verses there. So you can try to keep along with me there or just listen along as we read. But once again, we'll be starting in John one and verse one.

Aaron Shamp (01:48.924)
In John 1, 1, it begins,

in verse 14.

For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son who is himself God and is at the Father's side, he has revealed him.

So we are beginning the Advent season. As I said before, this is historically what the church has called the Christmas season. And when we come to the Christmas season and Christmas time, we start to sing our Christmas songs and watch our Christmas movies. There's a theme that comes up a lot in our various songs and movies, and that's the theme of miracles. We talk about miracles a lot at Christmas, right? One of the, in my opinion, one of the best of all the classic Christmas movies is Miracle at 34th

Street, the original version, the old one. You know, such a wonderful movie and it's all about a miracle. It's right there in the title about a miracle. A lot of our movies are about this and are the songs we sing and so on. We think about miracles a lot at Christmas. You know, if if my sermon happened to be a little shorter today, we might even call it a Christmas miracle. Right. And we do this a lot. What's with the preoccupation of miracles at Christmas time?

Aaron Shamp (04:01.702)
Well, we can trace this all the way back to what Christmas is all about, the story of Christmas, which is the story of Jesus's arrival on earth. C.S. Lewis wrote an essay called The Grand Miracle. And in that essay, he argued that you can take the miraculous out of any other world religion and essentially leave it unchanged. But in Christianity, if you were to take out the miraculous,

then you would completely neuter it. You would completely gut it of all of its power and all of its meaning because if we take out the miraculous then we lose the grand miracle, the biggest miracle of all, which is Jesus's incarnation on this earth whenever God the Son came down and became man. And it's because of what Jesus accomplished through the incarnation that if we were to remove the miraculous at all, but especially

this grand miracle, then we would lose the meaning of Christianity in total. And so today we're going to be looking at the grand miracle and what it means for us. So we're going to start by asking what is the grand miracle? We're going to ask what does it do for me? And then how do I get it or how do I experience it? Okay?

So let's begin with our first point here. And you already know it because I said it in my introduction. But the grand miracle. What is it? Well the grand miracle is Jesus's incarnation. The grand miracle is his incarnation. The word incarnation comes from the Latin word carne which means flesh. Right. And so the incarnation is Jesus's being God the Son in spirit came down in human form and took on human

flesh. John describes this in verses 14 and 16 that we read in the passage just now. He said that the word who he was referring to as Jesus, the word became flesh. He uses this word, which is word, to describe Jesus in the beginning of the prologue there and throughout the first chapter until he gets down and names him towards the end as, you know, being Jesus Christ as the one he is talking about. But the word was was God.

Aaron Shamp (06:21.182)
That's what he says very clearly in the first paragraph that the word was from the beginning, that the word created all things, that the word was both with God and was God. He is describing Jesus here and Jesus's pre-incarnate form being spirit with God the Father who is spirit. But he left heaven, he left the throne to take on flesh and become a man. The miracle is this, that the word became

Now this is revolutionary.

Because if we explore what it means and especially compared to other religions, there's nothing else like this anywhere in the history of culture, philosophy, or in the history of religions. For example, in all Eastern religions, you know, despite their various different

manifestations or expressions, they all tend to see whatever God is as just being an impersonal force that is a part of everything. God is something that is transcendent, that is spiritual, but just really a part of everything and even to a certain extent a part of us. So anyone can come along and say, I feel God, right? Because well, if God is just this.

impersonal force like the force in Star Wars, then anyone can just say, well, I feel God or perhaps someone who's trying to pursue paths of enlightenment and escaping from the illusion of suffering to become more in touch and aware of this impersonal God force. can even say, you I am becoming God or we are all God. They can say that in Eastern religions because God is just an impersonal force that's a part of everything. On the other hand,

Aaron Shamp (08:28.95)
And in the pagan religions, such as in Greek mythology, you had these legends of gods who were basically just humans with extra strength, right? They would even leave their high places and come down and mate with humans and birth these half-god, half-human people like Hercules, if you're familiar with the story, even the Disney version of Hercules, who Hercules was not on the same level as Zeus.

right? But he also wasn't just a man. He was somewhere in the middle. He was half man, half God. But John's description is nothing, John's description of Jesus and the incarnation is nothing like any of these other things that we see in world religions. On the one hand, God is transcendent.

But in the incarnation, he becomes very imminent. He becomes very close in that he takes on human form. He remains distinct so that we cannot say, well.

the transcendence of God means that he's just a part of everything and we are all a part of him. It eliminates that. But then on the other hand, it eliminates the views that see God or the gods as something that is extremely imminent, but not transcendent, right? As something that is really just kind of like a slightly better version of humans because Jesus is still the word and Jesus is not a half God, half man. He is fully God. John doesn't say that he loses

his character and substance of being God wherever he took on flesh. The flesh did not eliminate the word, the word did not eliminate the flesh. He was both the word and flesh. He was both fully God and fully man. Now if we dig a little bit deeper into this.

Aaron Shamp (10:24.484)
Whenever John is describing Jesus as the Word, he says it several times in the first paragraph, and then he says it again later on in 14th through 18th. Whenever he says that Jesus was or is the Word, he's using a peculiar term in the Greek whenever he's calling Jesus the Word. He wasn't just saying it or using it in the same sense that we use the word Word, which, know, whenever we say Word, we are just describing

you know, something that's a piece of communication, right? He was using something in the Greek, this special peculiar term that was loaded with a lot more meaning than just our English word. He was using this Greek term which is logos.

the logos. He was saying in the beginning was the logos. Whenever we translate logos into English, the easiest or the best translation we can come up with is word, but we kind of lose a lot of the meaning, especially in that time period of what he was referring to. Whenever John uses the term logos, he was pulling this term from Greek philosophy that had been argued and debated over for centuries before the birth of Christ.

For years, the Greeks had believed in this idea of the logos. The logos was this.

was this idea that behind the created world, behind all the things that we see, there is this force. There is this logical pattern to all the things we can say. There is this power that orders all the things that they looked around and saw in the world, and that gives purpose to all the things they saw in the world. They all agreed that there was something behind this world, but they debated on exactly what it is.

Aaron Shamp (12:19.802)
You know, is it just this power? Is it a logic? Is it something that just exists in our minds or is it something that exists in the skies? You know, what is this? They argued and debated over it for years, believing that through human reason and rationality debate that they could discover the logos and its true nature and then through discovering the logos, find their place in the world.

Right. Find their purpose in the world where once you find your purpose in your place in the world. What do we call that? We call that happiness. Right. It was a pursuit for happiness. was a pursuit for living a good life. Living a life well lived. But John comes along.

And he picks up this term that they have been debating over for all those centuries, the logos. He's describing the logos in verses one through three, which was very much affirming kind of what they believe that the logos is behind all things and that the logos, you know, depending on like what they they particularly debated was God. then he says something that would have completely blown all their arguments out the water, something that no one had ever considered before, that the logos is a person.

Number one, no one had ever really.

gone that far. No one had ever believed that before, but John says there is a logos. He is a person and he became flesh. That the God behind the universe, the ordering principle behind the universe, the thing behind the universe that brought about all things, that orders all things, that gives all things their purpose is a person and he has come down in human form. He's taken on flesh. John says we observed him. We knew him.

Aaron Shamp (14:07.184)
And that is Jesus Christ. John is saying into the culture that he was living in, the time that he was living in, he was telling them, you have been looking at all the wrong places. The Logos is not in the skies. It's not in your mind. It is not just a divine rationality, a cosmic purpose. No, but it is salvation that has come down to us in Jesus Christ.

Do you ever contemplate how significant it is that Jesus Christ, the word, the son of the father, the second person of the Trinity became flesh? Do we ever contemplate just how big this is and the things that it means? Let me just give you three things of what the incarnation does for us and what it means. First of all is this. First, the word made flesh is a challenge to us. The word made flesh is a challenge. Because wasn't Louis Wright?

Like I referred to before in his essay called The Grand Miracle, he argues that

that everything in Christianity, the truth of the gospel, the power of the gospel, all of the promises of what God will do in human history and in time and space, all of those things hinge upon that Jesus did come down and take on flesh. It all depends on this great miracle of the incarnation. Every claim of Christianity logically follows from the incarnation. And if the incarnation is true,

then that is a huge challenge to us because it validates all that Jesus said and did. It validates all that he said and did if in fact he was God who became flesh and took on flesh.

Aaron Shamp (15:47.864)
Because here's the thing about Jesus. He is completely unique among all religious leaders. He is completely unique among all world religions. If what he did and said is true, then it means that all other options are false. If his incarnation is true, then it validates what he said, whatever he said, that he is the way. It means that if he is the way, then all other ways are a mirage.

are false, are not true, will not take us to the home that we need. If the incarnation is true, it means that Jesus is the sole Lord and Savior over the universe. So if the grand miracle is true, then it challenges each and every one of us. Will we accept it? Will we receive it? Or will we deny it? Christmas is a challenge.

It pushes all of us to examine Jesus, who he was, his claims, what he did, and to come to a point of decision. Will we?

Follow him, will we abandon him? Will we submit and fall down before him as Lord or will we live as our own Lords, as our own authorities? Will we receive the blessing that he accomplishes for us or will we continue to work to build our own lives and blessings? So first of all, it is a challenge. Christmas is a challenge. The word made flesh is a challenge. Second, the word made flesh is a hope. The word made flesh is hope.

Once again, the Logos was this idea that if you could just discover it.

Aaron Shamp (17:24.74)
What is the logos and what does it mean and how do I live in line with the logos? Well, then that would mean living in line with your purpose and place in the world, which would lead to a good life. That's essentially what the Greek philosophers were really all about was trying to discover how does someone live the good life? So through human reason, they were trying to to find this. They were trying to discover it through exploring and analyzing and trying to grasp the power that they witnessed behind

all of the creative and physical things in the universe. Really what they were at was nothing less than a search for salvation. They're trying to find a meaning that gave them a place in the world, a purpose that gave them significance beyond just the mundane experiences of this life and our inevitable death. They were looking for a search for salvation. But the Logos being a person,

who has revealed himself to us means that what they were hoping for is possible. That our deepest needs can be satisfied and found in the true logos, in the true word of the universe, because they can be found in Jesus. It means that salvation is possible for us, not if we can discover the trick or the mechanism to it, but because of what Jesus did by taking on flesh.

This is what John is getting at in verse 16. He says, indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness. And into verse 17, for the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. If the grand miracle is true, then we are offered in this grace upon grace that

John describes is available to all of us. What is this grace upon grace? Well, number one, this grace upon grace means the grace of

Aaron Shamp (19:22.778)
being able to meet the logos in Jesus and then having our deepest needs and hopes fulfilled, finding and discovering our purpose and our place in the universe, a meaning, a source of meaning that sustains us through the difficulties of life and even facing the finality of death. It means that first of all, and then secondly, the word become flesh means salvation.

our sins eliminated, our guilt and shame removed, the great chasm that lays between us and God is bridged, it is brought together in Jesus. So it is a hope. The word made flesh is a challenge, it is a hope. And lastly this, the word made flesh is an insult. It is an insult to us.

This flows logically from the last point because consider this. What Christmas says, what the incarnation says is that salvation has come down to us. Salvation has come down to us. Jesus came down to us. He took on flesh. He in a great act of humiliation, he left his place next to the Father at the Father's throne.

and became like us. And whenever he walked on this earth, Jesus did not teach us how to climb up to heaven. Instead, he came down. He brought heaven to us in his presence and in his person. Remember, the Greeks believed that they could find that salvation through the achievements of human reason. If we can just.

practice the best logic, the best rationality, debate it out in ideas, then we can climb that mountain. We can find that salvation. They believed in this power of reason. But the incarnation is not placing hope in the power of reason, but it is showing us our need for revelation.

Aaron Shamp (21:32.976)
They thought they could be saved through reason, but the gospel tells us we need revelation. We need God revealed to us, which is what John says Jesus is in his incarnation. He says no one has ever seen the Father, but we have seen Jesus. And he reveals the Father to us. What's the point of this? The point of Christmas is this, that you can't do it. You can't climb that mountain.

You can't go through those achievements of reason. You can't follow any moral paths that would enable you to make your way up to heaven. You cannot do any number of good works or of payments to overturn all of the debt of sin that you have before God the Father. Christmas tells us, the incarnation tells us that you can't do it. The chasm between us and God is far too great. Now you might be thinking to yourself, but

I live a good life. I live a good life. I make better choices than much of my family, than my neighbors. You know, I'm put together. I am not committing any grievous sins. I try to live as a good person. Surely that counts for something, right? Well, look, I'm happy that you're doing all those things. It makes society a lot better. What if we do all those things? But you know what? None of them.

can help you to bridge the chasm between us and God. No amount of good and moral works is able to do it. Imagine this, imagine if salvation was left up to us.

And so the way to salvation was that you had to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. Like that's kind of the image of like the chasm, the space between us and God. And God says, you can do it, just swim to me. And so we got to swim across the Atlantic. Some people are going to make it a lot farther than others. Some people, you know, I wouldn't make it very far from the shore. Some people might make it farther, but no one would make it across.

Aaron Shamp (23:41.125)
That's the same way that we can kind of put our good works into perspective. Sure, they're good things. I'm not denying the morality of your life and to the extent that you have good morality in your life, but it cannot bridge the divide. It cannot cross the chasm. The chasm between us and God is a sea of death.

So how are we supposed to experience this grace upon grace that John tells us about? One of the church fathers named Augustine, he wrote the City of God and his memoir, Confessions, he asked the same question. How is that ocean, that sea of death that stands between us and God to be bridged, to be dealt with? And he said this.

Augustine wrote, speaking of Jesus, he said he had nothing where he could get death from. He was life. He was the author of life. So he says he has nothing where he could get death from. He accepted death from what was ours.

in order to give us life from what was his. How did he get death from what was ours? He quotes John, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He accepted from us here what he would offer us. He was life for us, we were death for him. Because of the incarnation, Jesus taking on human form, he was able to be broken. He was able to suffer.

As long as Jesus was only the Word and not the Word made flesh, then he was invulnerable. He could not be hurt. He could not be broken. He could not endure suffering and pay the penalty for human sin. In order to do that, he had to take on flesh and become a human because only a human can die in the place of a human, but only God can die in the place of humans and then overcome death. This is why Jesus had to be both God and man.

Aaron Shamp (25:48.525)
it absolutely was for him to take on the incarnation, you know, in the shadow of Christmas there was a cross.

Taking on the incarnation, he accepts what was ours, Augustine says, which is death, so that we might receive what was his, which is his life. The cross falls down in the midst of that great chasm between us and God. And the cross doesn't work so much like a bridge as much as it works like a sponge. If the chasm between us and God is a sea of death and condemnation, then the cross falls down and in Jesus' death, he soaks.

all of that up, all of that death, that condemnation, the wrath of God on our sin, the cross absorbs it all so that we are offered freedom, we are offered forgiveness, new relationship and eternal life in Christ. For the Greeks, salvation was in your ability to reason.

For Eastern religions, salvation is in your ability to escape the illusion of reality and suffering through paths and works of enlightenment. For every system of thought, the answer has always been salvation is your ability to blank and fill in the blank with whatever they say. But only Christianity says no, salvation is not in your ability to do X, Y, or Z, salvation is in Jesus.

Salvation is in the invisible eternal God who made himself vulnerable, even to the point of the cross. Salvation is a relationship. It is not trying to weigh out the balances so much. It is not just trying to pay off the debt, but it is a relationship with the God of the universe that we are invited into. And that relationship can only be mended together by grace and not by our works.

Aaron Shamp (27:48.975)
This is what flows and is made possible because of the grand miracle, because of Christmas. It is the message beyond all of the movies and songs and parties and foods and things that we do at Christmas. It is ultimately about this, the God who humbled himself, taking on the form of man and then dying the death of a slave.

The God who humbled himself at Christmas calls all of us to meet before him in humility and to fall down and worship before him. In the Christmas story in scripture, we see that both kings and shepherds are called to come and fall down and worship before this savior, this Christ who has come to the world. And we are challenged to do the same.

No matter who you are in here, whether you are, you know, morally and spiritually speaking, whether you are a king or a shepherd, wherever you stand in life, whatever your background is, whatever your levels of education are, whatever your levels of income are, and so on, it doesn't matter where you come from. You are called to do the same thing. Will you come before him in humility and fall down and worship before him? And if you do, will you experience the grand miracle?

and all that it means for us in this Advent season through faith and repentance. That was shorter. Christmas miracle. Let's pray.

Aaron Shamp (29:27.395)
Lord, we.

Our minds struggle to wrap around the grand miracle that you have accomplished. Father, we are left maybe less with answers than we are just with awe in what you have accomplished for us. Not only at Christmas, but in what Christmas was pointing towards and what Jesus's birth was pointing towards. He was born in a manger, but destined for a cross.

Father, we are left in all of these things. And let us at the beginning of this Advent season and in this Christmas season, let that all move us into worship. Whereas we come before you and we adore you, the grip that idols have on our hearts is loosened. The pains and the hurts that we carry are healed.

and we find our purpose, we find our meaning, we find hope, we find forgiveness from sin, we find the removal of guilt and shame, all the things that we need in you. Lord, let that be our experience of Christmas this year. We pray these things in the name of our King and Savior, Jesus Christ, amen. I invite you to