I am enjoying the warmth of the weather down here. I talked to my wife, and she said it was two degrees up in New York, so I am glad to be here today.
Although, I have to confess that I have basically only known the teenagers from Richmond, except for Rob and Kathy and a few of you. So I take this as an opportunity from the Lord to be here today and to share from the Word of God with all of you.
I would like for us to look at John 1 this morning.
My thoughts turned in several different directions as to what to share this morning. But as I began to consider sharing on John 1, it seemed to be confirmed by three or four different brothers in the last few days that I have been here. So, the Lord willing, I would like to share on the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In John 1:14:
And the Word became flesh,
and dwelt among us,
and we beheld His glory,
glory as of the only begotten from the Father,
full of grace and truth.
John bore witness of Him, and cried out, saying, This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.
For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.
For the law was given through Moses;
grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.
Let us pray for a moment.
Lord, the desire of our hearts is to behold You in all of Your glory and to receive of Your fullness, grace upon grace. To this end, we pray that You would anoint by Your Spirit the message, the words, our ears to receive, and our eyes to see our Lord Jesus. We pray in His name. Amen.
These verses of Scripture, I am sure, are familiar to everybody. I found out that Mary Clayton, on the way here this morning, had already memorized these verses: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.”
Now, this is the Apostle John talking and confessing his own personal experience as he came into contact with this Man, Jesus. He was called from fishing one day and began to follow Jesus. Over the course of time, he began to see through the humanity of Jesus, and he began to see something deeper within—even the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.
As he looked at Jesus, he began to see this glory, and he realized that he was seeing a new revelation of glory, never quite revealed in this way before. In the Old Testament, the glory of God was revealed in God’s holiness, righteousness, and power. But here John says, “I was particularly captivated by the fact that I saw the glory of God, but it was grace that I saw. It was truth that I saw, as I had never seen it before.”
This glory was so unique that John began to understand: this glory is from the only begotten Son of the Father. This is unique glory. He had never seen it quite this way before.
If you take the Gospel of John and go through it, you will find one adventure after another in the life of Jesus where you see grace and truth—grace and truth—coupled together. The glory of God shines brighter and brighter.
It is no surprise that the Apostle John, in his letters, said, “I want to report to you what I have seen. I want to report to you what I have heard. I want to report to you what my hands have handled concerning the Word of life. The things which I have seen and heard, I want to tell you about, that your joy may be full.”
John had seen the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Then, of course, just as wonderfully for us, a few verses down it says, “Of His fullness we have all received.” Think about the significance of that verse: of His fullness we have all received grace upon grace.
This is the particular enabling of God that came to us: grace upon grace. Now, what does this word mean—grace? Or, if we put it another way, when you see Jesus through the Gospel of John and see Him full of grace and truth, what does that mean?
First of all, of course, it means what all of us know. Grace means unmerited love. Wherever John followed Jesus, he saw Jesus dealing with some of the awfulest people he had ever imagined. Yet Jesus dealt with them with such acceptance, such divine love, and such unmerited love.
He dealt with the woman caught in adultery with grace. He dealt with the woman at the well with grace. There was always that unmerited love, that attitude, that atmosphere of God’s presence—accepting and forgiving.
But this word grace means more than an attitude of acceptance and divine love. As John watched Jesus move about, he saw a divine enabling upon Jesus’ life. Whatever Jesus set out to do, He accomplished; He did all things well.
There was divine life in Jesus, so that He could do these things. He was enabled by the Father. When Jesus came down and became a Man, He left His glory. He did not have, as it were, a grace just within Himself. Rather, He had to depend upon the Father for the life and ministry that He had.
As we go through the Gospel of John this morning—what I am going to try to do is go through the whole Gospel of John; I hope the children have a long lesson this morning—I would like for us to see the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Before we begin, I would like to touch on a few verses that give us a clue to understanding how Jesus could minister and live so full of grace and truth that the glory of God broke through.
First, look at John 5:19.
Jesus therefore answered and was saying to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner.
Then look at John 5:30:
I can do nothing on My own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.
Now look at John 8:28:
When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.
Again, in John 8:42:
If God were your Father, you would love Me; for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me.
In John 12:49, Jesus says:
For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me commandment, what to say and what to speak.
And John 14:10 says:
Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.
Again, John 14:24:
He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.
There are two inescapable aspects to Jesus’ fullness and His ability to minister with such full grace and truth. First of all, He was able to minister with such enabling, power, and love because He was united with the Father.
Every one of those Scriptures said, “I only speak what the Father taught Me. I only do what the Father does. I only judge what the Father judges. I only come when the Father sends Me.” He was in such a living relationship with the Father that everything He did was marked with the indelible stamp: “My Father did this. This comes from heaven by the Father.”
Everything Jesus did was signed by the Father. If you remember John 1:14, when it says, “We beheld His glory,” it had a peculiar ring: it was the glory as of the only begotten of the Father. Everything that was done had the Father’s stamp upon it. We could see the Father through the Son.
But, on the other hand, in order for Jesus to minister and live full of grace and truth, He had to do nothing on His own initiative. He had to do nothing of Himself. That stands to reason: if He was going to be full of the Father’s life, then He could not be full of His own ideas, initiatives, judgments, statements, and actions.
Jesus had learned and walked in obedience to His Father, under divine command, through the whole course of His life. He was out of the way, and the Father could come through.
That is such a simple faith, but it is our hope. If we, as God’s children and now as the church, are to be the glory of God upon the earth and manifest the glory of God, then we have to be the same way: so united to Christ that everything we do has the stamp of His union, His life, and His activity; and we do not do anything out of our own initiative.
When you go through the Gospel of John, I think you see that in story after story. Let us take some stories and ramble through them.
In John 2, Jesus goes to a wedding feast, and they run out of wine. Jesus’ mother comes to Him and says, “They are out of wine. You need to do something about it.”
Jesus makes that unusual statement:
Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.
Why would Jesus make a statement like that? If you read the Gospel of John, you find that the phrase, “My hour has not yet come,” refers to the cross toward which Jesus was marching. In effect, Jesus was saying, “I am under divine command. I cannot just do whatever My mother says, or whatever anybody says. I cannot minister according to the whim of some friend, relative, or anybody else. I am under divine command.”
But then, obviously, He went to the Father in His own secret place, and the Father must have said, “Yes, do something about it.” So He took the pots of water, and the best had been saved for last. You know the story.
Here is the application, as far as I am concerned: Jesus was not willing to do anything of His own initiative, nor minister on the initiative of somebody else.
If we would be free to minister according to and by the grace of God, we have to learn to be free in this sense: free from ministering because others tell us to, or ministering under the influence of husbands, wives, relatives, friends, or whatever the case may be.
Brothers and sisters, I do not know about you, but I cannot think of how many times I have done things because somebody told me it would be a good thing to do. Without even checking back with my Lord—Who should be the Head and absolute Lord of any ministry we perform—I just charged into something on the word of somebody else, or perhaps through the arm-twisting influence of someone close to me.
The next thing I knew, I found myself doing something and out on a limb where I never should have been. How can I minister in grace if I have just taken my own initiative because somebody close to me has twisted my arm into doing something?
In John 3, you see Jesus talking to Nicodemus. Nicodemus thought Jesus was a great teacher. He said, “You have done all these miracles; You must be a great teacher.” Jesus simply turned and said, “I tell you, unless you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus ministered to Nicodemus with such grace and truth that we know from later references that Nicodemus was somehow caught by Jesus’ grace and Jesus’ truth.
But the wonderful thing about it—and something many of us have problems with—is that Jesus was not intimidated at all by the religious degrees and background of Nicodemus.
Sometimes we want to minister, witness, or be evangelists, but frankly we are intimidated by knowledgeable people. Nicodemus was a highly educated man. He knew what he was talking about. He knew the Scriptures and had memorized much of them.
Yet Jesus had the freedom, in His relationship with the Father, to speak the words of truth that Nicodemus needed to hear. He was free from the intimidation of the intelligentsia when it came to witnessing. He broke through all that crust, got right down to the essence, and said, “You need to be born again.”
My father is a psychiatrist. Being a psychiatrist does peculiar things to people.
My father was fifty years old before anybody ever witnessed to him. Why? Because people think psychiatrists are too smart to witness to. Or they think the psychiatrist will start analyzing them, and suddenly they will feel defensive.
But when my father was fifty years old, two things happened. I was saved, and I went to my father and said, “Dad, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. He forgave my sins, and He gave me eternal life.” It put tears in his eyes.
Then I had a Baptist pastor who had never learned that you were not supposed to witness to psychiatrists—nobody had ever told him that. My father went on a picnic with my wife, me, and my pastor. The pastor simply asked, “Doctor, what does the Lord Jesus mean to you?”
Within one week, my father was saved. Within one week of hearing the gospel, a psychiatrist—a Harvard man, no less—came to the Lord.
All that time, he bumped into born-again believers here and there, but everybody said, “Oh, I would not touch him with a ten-foot pole. He is so worldly, so materialistic, so knowledgeable.” But the Lord Jesus, full of grace and truth, walked right up to Nicodemus, looked him straight in the eye, and told him what he needed to know.
It is pretty much the same story in John 4, where you see Him talking to the woman at the well. Jesus was so sure of Who He was in relation to the Father that He could offer this woman grace and truth.
Even in the midst of her sarcasm, rebuffs, and insults, He simply came back with love, grace, and truth. What freedom He had!
When she got hungry enough, He inserted a little truth—a little prescription: “Go, call thy husband.” That was all He had to say. It totally unearthed her. It opened her up, and she realized that she was not standing before merely some charlatan or rabbi. There was something deeper about Him. She began to see glory behind His life.
The simple application for us is this: when we are to be those who bear good tidings and good news and go here and there sharing the gospel, how easily we become intimidated by rebuffs, sarcasm, or somebody coming back at us.
I find some people getting downright mad. We used to go out on Long Island in the summertime, farther out where there were many resort people. We would go out on the streets, hand out tracts, and witness to people as they passed by.
In the Jesus People days, many teenagers went out with me in a van to witness on the streets. They would get people into what I called a “holy hassle.” They would start talking about the fact that people were going to hell, talk about the Book of Revelation, and generally get people into a religious argument.
That actually led to one of two things: either somebody spit at them, or somebody fell down on his knees in terror and accepted the Lord. But we were so easily intimidated.
We would go up to somebody and share about Jesus, and when they came back at us—as I used to come back at people—I would get so intimidated. I would feel rejected, get my feelings hurt, or see the Christian hairs rise up on somebody’s back. Then they would start to scratch and argue, and the anointing of that witness of grace and truth was gone. It had gone down into a religious abyss somewhere.
How about us? When we say that we want to minister in grace and truth and share the gospel with people, do we fear the rejection of those around us? Do we become intimidated when our work associates say, “I do not want to hear that stuff anymore”? Usually, that is when they want to hear it the most.
Somehow, we have to know who we are in Christ, just as Jesus knew Who He was in the Father. Then, when He was being intimidated, He could keep sharing grace and truth with somebody who was obviously hungry to know the way, the truth, and the life.
In John 5, Jesus was full of grace and truth. This is where He went to the pool of Bethesda, where there was a multitude of sick, crippled, lame, and impotent people.
Jesus walked up to one man who had been waiting thirty-eight years to be healed. Jesus, full of grace and truth, asked him the truthful question, “Do you really want to be made well?”
Jesus had such enabling in His life that when He said to that man, “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk,” it was as if enabling grabbed that impotent man, and he stood right up. It was grace picking that man right up through the very words, authority, truth, and grace that poured out of Jesus at that moment.
But here is what impresses me: He did not take His own initiative as He walked into that pool area.
When I became a charismaniac—I went through a charismaniac phase in my life—I would lay hands on and pray for healing for everybody I saw. If I had walked into that pool, I never would have gotten to this poor man. I would have been exhausted, or deflated because of those who were not healed. I would have gone home exhausted before ever reaching the one man whose divine destiny it was at that moment to be healed.
Bear in mind that Jesus had more compassion for men than you and I will ever know. As He walked through that pool area, His heart was burning in intercessory prayer as He saw person after person there. But He waited, not taking His own initiative.
He waited to find the person whose eyes met His, and He waited for divine instruction before walking up to that one man. As far as we know, He walked out of that pool area without ministering to another person there.
What grace that takes—not to be carried away by your own compassion and desire, not to hold your own prayer-line ministries when God has a destination for you to go to one person because that is God’s divine appointment.
How sometimes we abuse the gifts God has given us by using them helter-skelter, arbitrarily, at our own bidding, and expecting God to come through. If we could learn to move in grace and truth in relationship to God, not taking our own initiative, what a difference it would make.
There was another time in Galilee when they brought the sick to Jesus, and He healed everyone. It is not that He did not have the capacity to do it or the faith. He was simply under divine orders.
In John 6, He broke bread instead of the five thousand, and they wanted to make Him king. It is a good thing they did not do that to one of us.
Jesus thanked the multitude and sent them away. Is that not grace? Not only grace to provide for a multitude of five thousand men, but grace to turn away the offer of being king, because He already knew He was in relationship with His Father, and His Father had better plans.
When the multitude came around the shore, scurrying because this Man had given them bread the day before, He had the grace and truth to know that they were not following Him because they loved Him, but because they loved bread.
Jesus never got caught off guard as we might if we were suddenly appointed a super elder or a chief apostle or something. These things are hard to hold back—not that any of us has ever fallen into this problem.
It is a very tempting thing when you are ministering the Word of God and people start pushing you up and calling you names. But Jesus was filled with grace and truth.
In John 7, it was time for the Feast of Tabernacles. His brothers—maybe even James—came to Him and said, “Now, Jesus, if You really are such a Man of God, You need to go down to Jerusalem and make a public spectacle of Yourself.”
That is basically what they said: “You need to reveal Yourself openly and do works right there in Jerusalem. Why stay up in Galilee and the mountains? Let me be Your public-relations man. I will send out posters. We will get a tent, and there is no telling what we can do if You go down to Jerusalem and expose Yourself to everybody.”
Jesus replied, “My hour has not yet come.” He was under divine orders. He said to His brothers, “Your hour is always now. You always do what is expedient. You would jump off the temple if you thought it would draw a crowd. But My hour has not yet come.”
Jesus simply said, “No, thank you. You go on ahead.” Later, He went secretly, not out in the open, and ministered during that Feast of Tabernacles by standing up and saying:
If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.
There is Jesus, full of grace and truth.
In John 8, Jesus is writing in the sand, and they bring a woman caught in adultery. They say, “Now, Jesus, the law says—you know what the law says—what should we do with this woman?”
Jesus did nothing of His own initiative, but waited for the word of wisdom to come to Him. When that simple word of wisdom came, it was as though He were David, and with one swing He smote the heart of the whole multitude:
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
Everybody disappeared. Then He said, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” Grace and truth together.
I do not know what side you would have been on. I fear that among Christians, some would have been on the stone-throwing side. “Ah, we caught this person sinning. We know what is wrong. We have to discipline.” Secretly, we may like to see people go through that because we have been through it ourselves, and now we want to see somebody else go through the same mill.
This is not to do with proper correction in the church. It has to do with a heart that is self-righteous and wants to condemn another.
I think I would have been on the other side. My father was a psychiatrist, and I was raised in a liberal Democrat home. We were always for the underdog. I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan when I was growing up—they were always in last place. I have always been for the underdogs. Rob is one of my best friends—another dog.
When this woman was presented, except for the grace of God, I would have stood up and said, “No, listen here. What right have you got to do this to her?” I would have been under the stone heap along with the woman.
But Jesus neither stood in condemnation nor simply took up the side of the downtrodden through social causes and all that stuff. Much of what I learned in college was geared toward making me socially conscious. We are often concerned with the downtrodden because we live out of guilt.
Jesus did not live out of guilt. He did not minister out of guilt. He did not say, “Oh, now I have to serve God to prove I love Him.” Jesus ministered out of grace and truth.
In John 9, there was a man born blind. Maybe it was the Apostle John—I do not know—but one of the apostles, perhaps with a little theological training, asked Jesus, “This man who was born blind: is he blind because of his own sins or the sins of his parents?”
Jesus said:
Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
Then, of course, He took the clay, put it on his eyes, and the man came back seeing. What grace and truth—not to be locked into little theological cases and pigeonholes.
Brothers and sisters, many times I feel the grace of God cannot be ministered through us with fullness and effect because we are pigeonholed. Our theology says, “It must be this man’s sin. It must be his parents’ sin.” Because of that, we are always taking some side that limits what God can do.
With all the theology, truth, and principles God is giving us in this day, I still say that God is working over and above all those things in mystery that we will never understand. There is no way we can put Him in a box and say that it is always going to be like this.
God moves as He moves. The wind blows where it will. The only thing we can do is try to be sensitive to where His initiative is flowing and move along with Him.
Jesus ministered full of grace and truth in the raising of Lazarus. When He heard that His friend was sick unto death, He stayed another three days.
Brothers and sisters, He did not do that out of coldness of heart, nor to tempt God or show forth His strength. He did it out of simple obedience. When He went to that tomb, He told Lazarus to come forth, and Lazarus came forth in life.
It was that refusal to take His own initiative, even when His heart was throbbing for this loved one who was sick unto death. Still, He did not move.
How many times have we moved because we see somebody who needs help? We move right upon them instead of waiting the three days for God to order all things rightly, and then seeing God’s glorious resurrection. No, we move two days early and prematurely try to do something that fouls up the whole machine.
In John 12, Jesus was honest as He approached Jerusalem. As the Greeks came and said, “Sir, we would see Jesus,” Jesus said, “Now is My soul troubled.”
He knew He was going to die. He frankly admitted, as He lifted His voice to heaven, “Now is My soul troubled.” His mind was filled with thoughts regarding His soon-coming death, and His emotions were cluttered with fears and all these things.
“What shall I say? Shall I flee from this hour? Father, shall I say, ‘Deliver Me’?” No. He said:
Father, glorify Thy name.
Our Lord Jesus worshiped the Father in the midst of soul trial. In the midst of despair, troubled thoughts, and anguish of emotion, He still had the freedom to worship the Father and say, “Glorify Thy name.”
Here was a Man Who was more than a man, for He knew how to pray when His soul had no response. He knew how to move right through from His spirit, intercede, come to God, and make request of Him.
Jesus was so full of grace and truth that He never did things out of His own initiative or out of His soul. He was free.
Brothers and sisters, to me it is a gospel for John to be able to say, “Of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.”
Paul’s story is full of the grace of God. Paul says, “By the grace of God I am an apostle.” When Paul had the thorn in the flesh, the Lord said, “My grace is sufficient for thee.”
Paul said, “I am the least of the apostles. I am not worthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church. But by the grace of God I am what I am.”
That grace did not prove vain, for Paul labored all the harder. Yet it was not he; it was the grace of God in him. There was an enabling that came by his appropriation of the Lord Jesus.
Grace came out, and Paul was an apostle though he never should have been. He did not deserve to be, but he could say, “I am what I am.”
The writer of Hebrews can say:
Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need.
This throne of grace is ours to come to and receive from. For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.
Now, brothers and sisters, in closing, let us return to John 1:14 and see what it means to behold His glory.
It was the beholding of His glory, full of grace and truth, that enabled John to say a few verses later, “Of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.” It is the beholding of His glory that enables grace to be liberated, as it were, and allows us to appropriate the grace of God.
How did John, the Christians of his day, and the Christians of our day behold Jesus? They beheld His glory: His enthronement, His divinity, and His God-likeness. They saw that He came from the Father. Through Jesus, they saw God.
Thomas, at the end of the Gospel, could say, “My Lord and my God,” in reference to the Lord Jesus. They saw the divinity of Jesus, and their seeing of His divinity enabled them to receive of His divinity and minister in grace and life.
But, brothers and sisters, the disciples not only beheld His transcendent deity, divine glory, and glory; the thing that caught John was this: John not only beheld divine glory, but John beheld a human being.
Jesus was flesh. John was completely turned around by the fact that he not only beheld glory as in the Shekinah glory of the Old Testament, but he beheld this glory within flesh.
The Word became flesh. It was fleshed out. It became incarnate. There it was, right where we could see it.
That is the thing that eventually, as it was assimilated in John’s life and made real in him, gave him the liberty and grace to be an evangelist and minister the works of God. Why? Because he saw glory in human form.
It was brought down to earth. It was not just something God does; it was something God did in man. The incarnation became the liberating secret John beheld as he kept looking at Jesus.
At first he saw humanity, then he saw divinity, and then he saw humanity again. He began to put it together: divinity and humanity. He began to see God’s glory coming through the flesh of Jesus.
This is what arrested him.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord wants to make Himself real to us down here.
It is wonderful when we see by revelation the glory of Jesus enthroned at the right hand of the Father in this day. But, brothers and sisters, the only way we will live by grace is to see Jesus walking on this earth, having lived by grace.
The only way we will be able to minister by grace is to see Jesus walking on this earth by grace.
I want to share one practical note before I close. I saw in the Gospels Jesus the evangelist. Oh, what a sharer of good news He was! But I did not know how to be an evangelist myself or how to do the work of an evangelist.
It all seemed so glorious and so divinely other that I would always say, “Oh, Jesus, You evangelize.” Certainly, that is the truth. But somehow I needed to see that, although we cannot see Jesus walking in a totally perfect way on earth today, we can still see Jesus.
We see Him as we look at a brother or sister who, gifted and yielded to God, has appropriated this grace to do the work of an evangelist. When we see them, we see Jesus in them.
As soon as I was saved, I wanted to be an evangelist and tell other people, but I did not know how. You know what I had? I had a father-in-law who had appropriated the grace of Jesus Christ in his life to witness to other people.
When I was only two weeks old as a Christian, he put his arm around me and took me out on my first witnessing venture. I did not know what to do. The first thing I did was hide my pipe.
I did not know what to say, but I watched my father-in-law. No, I did not—I watched Jesus witness to somebody. I saw my father-in-law share his testimony, but no, I saw Jesus sharing how to be saved.
I saw somebody come to the Lord, and I saw Jesus. I saw glory come down. I said, “Oh, that is how it can be done.”
He took me out again and again, and the next thing I knew, I was going out. I have to admit, I sort of aped his method for a while. But then the Lord broke through to me and said, “No, Dana, you are not supposed to be Donald. That is your father-in-law. You are supposed to be Dana, indwelt by the Spirit.”
As time went along, I began to be liberated. Initially, I was liberated by going with somebody who could show me Jesus out there witnessing to somebody. Do you know what I am saying? It is just as practical as that.
We read in John 4:23 that God desires those who worship Him. What liberated me was the day I began to see brothers who knew how to worship in spirit and truth.
As they worshiped, I was brought before God. I was whisked in on this carpet, as it were. I began to see, “Oh, that is what it means.”
I never saw it in a perfect way. As I got to know my father-in-law better, I saw that he did not do everything right when he witnessed. When I see a worshiper and grab hold of what I see manifested before me, after a while I realize those people are not perfect.
But meanwhile, I see the Lord Jesus and how He worshiped the Father in spirit and truth. I am liberated. I am able to take the grace of God and begin to walk that course in my own life.
Brothers and sisters, I do not want to preach to you a gospel that is up in the sky, all glorious and design only. I want to tell you the good news that Jesus came in the flesh. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Today, to be liberated by the grace of God, we need an incarnation of Jesus again in our midst through one another. It is really very simple in a way. It is very contagious.
If you are a brother who has appropriated the grace of God and knows how to pray, stand alongside two or three others and begin to pray. After a while, they will see Christ in it and begin to respond.
If you know how to witness the gospel, do not just sit around all the rest of your life. Take somebody along with you and share. You will find that God will begin to incarnate Himself as He releases people, not just with a theory of how things are done, but with the actual practice.
I thank God for the brothers who began to show me what it was to allow Jesus to be Head over the church. I saw it when I saw brothers taking authority in a proper way.
Do you understand what I am saying? It is not just all up there. It needs to be translated right down here.
I believe this revelation that the Apostle John saw so changed his life that he no longer remained merely an introspective, intellectual young man. He was so shaken and disturbed by a human being able to transmit the glory of God that something got hold of him.
He could not sleep at night. He was divinely disturbed until he began to share by means of the written Word and by going from place to place, simply sharing the things he had seen, heard, and touched of the Word of life.
Thus John was faithful. Having received of His fullness, grace upon grace, brothers and sisters, we need the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. But we need to behold Him.
We need to have our eyes open—wide open. As we look at brothers and sisters, we need to have our eyes wide open to look through the humanity and see the glory that has become flesh.
Lord, we come to You. We have heard this so many times: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you.” But Lord, we want to be Your people who have been enabled by divine revelation.
We want to be disturbed out of merely a heavenly-mindedness, that You would get us out of the little hidden clefts of the rock and bring us right down here, that Your Spirit could so translate Himself and unite with our lives that we could learn to abide in You.
Oh Lord, we want to be liberated that we might be Your children. We want to be those who are all of grace. We believe the day will come when we see the completed stone placed on top, and we will shout, “Grace, grace, grace,” with no pride or boasting at all.
But, oh Lord Jesus, do hold us in the revelation of Yourself. Show us, Lord, what it means to be a worshiper, a prayer, a teacher, a helper, and an evangelist. Lord, flesh it out for us right here in our midst. Help us see, and liberate us, Lord.
Lord, we shudder under the exhortation of Scripture that we not take the grace of God in vain. We have been given so much. Your revelation has been so wonderful to us.
But Lord, we want to respond to the revelation we have seen and take hold of what You are doing right here on earth. Oh Lord, set Your children free. Lord, reveal Yourself to us.
Lord, we want to live so that Your glory can be seen. We want to minister so that Your glory can be seen. We thank You for Your grace and Your truth, revealed to us in You.
We bless Your name.