Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. The Psalms tell us that God is tender and long suffering. We saw what that looked like and how Jesus treated his disciples in failure and how he received children. Jesus is the perfect expression of the Father. In his words, we hear the Father's voice. In his smile, we sense the Father's heart. In his touch, we feel the Father's presence. Thanks for joining us today for Summit Life with Pastor J.D.
Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Today we begin another brand new teaching series just in time for Christmas. It's called Jesus, Lord at Thy Birth. Pastor J.D. will be taking us through what we can think of as Jesus's resume in order to better understand who he was and is. With so many misconceptions of Jesus prevalent in today's world, this is a task that is immensely important. Perhaps you've encountered churches that have embodied grace but not truth, or maybe pound you with truth and no grace.
If so, you can rest in the assurance that the Jesus who took on flesh and dwelt among us is full of both grace and truth equally. What a great message as we count down the days toward our Christmas celebrations. Let's join Pastor J.D. in John chapter one. John chapter one, if you got your Bibles this morning, and I hope that you do, John chapter one. John one, the story is told of a little boy who wanted a bicycle really, really bad but didn't know the best way to pray for one. So trying to imitate how he heard his parents pray that night before he went to bed, he got down on his knees and he said, Lord, if it be thy will, please grant your humble servant a bike in Jesus's name. Two days later though, no bike, and then he overheard a prosperity preacher on TV praying and decided to try it his way. So that night he got down on his knees and said, Father, in the name of Jesus, I command you to get me this bike. I claim a balloon with the studded tires and the racing stripes in Jesus's name.
I name it and claim it. He felt pretty good about this, but again, two days later, still no bike. And that's when he overheard his dad watching the movie The Godfather. So that night before bed, he grabbed the little statue of Mary from the nativity set, got down on his knees and said, Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again, you're going to get me this bike. Well, needless to say, this boy had some very, very misinformed views of Jesus. But the truth is it's not just little boys in our society or our congregation who are confused about who Jesus really is. Some in our society see Jesus as more of a mythical figure who makes for great religious fairy tales, but was not actually a real person, at least not a person like we talk about him being. And then there's of course, tweetable Jesus who feels somehow exactly like you do on most political and social issues of the day.
He comes in really nicely as a weapon on social media. Others have a genie Jesus who shows up at key moments to grant you wishes in pursuit of your life agenda. Others prefer precious moments Jesus who makes a cameo in your life at Christmas and Easter and marriage and funerals. And then there is fire insurance Jesus with whom you arrange a deal to ensure your entry into heaven. The most important question of our lives is who really was, is, who is Jesus? In the opening of his gospel, John aims to answer that very question.
You can almost think of John chapter one as Jesus's resume, who he really is and why he alone is qualified to be our savior. Y'all, this is one of my favorite passages in the entire Bible. But when I was looking back through my files this week, I am ashamed to admit to you that in the 20 plus years I have served here as your pastor, I think I've only preached on this passage one time. And that was 17 years ago, even though it's one of my favorites. And I think that's because I've always been intimidated by this passage, feeling like whatever I say is going to fall so far short of the majesty that it contains.
Like my words can only take away from it rather than illuminate it. I remember earlier this summer swimming in the Atlantic ocean with my 12 year old son. And as we swam out deeper, I was just a few yards ahead of him. And I got to this point where I couldn't touch the bottom.
And so I yelled back to him, hey, don't swim out here. It is so deep. Realizing instantly as I said that, how silly that statement would sound to God. Because just a few miles out, the ocean gets up to what, four miles deep out there? Feeling like, oh, it's so deep when you're in only eight feet of water seems like rather shallow thinking to God. Well, see in the same way, I feel like my deepest reflections on this passage pale in comparison to whatever is here. But the Holy Spirit put it in here for a reason.
And so, so let's take a dive. By the way, just so you know what we're doing for the next few weeks, we're going to be going through the first two chapters of the Gospel of John in a Christmas series called Jesus Lord at Thy Birth. John starts off Jesus's resume this way. In the beginning, in the beginning, John 1, 1. In the beginning was the Word.
Any student of the Bible recognizes that John here in his opening echoes the opening sentence of the Bible itself. Genesis 1, 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And do you remember from Genesis 1, what instrument God used to create everything? Did he create the world by waving a wand? Did he concoct up a magic potion? Or did he shape something out of raw materials?
No. Genesis 1, 2 says that he spoke and the worlds burst into existence. The most recurring word in Genesis 1 is the word said. And God said, let there be light.
And there was light. And God said, let there be a sun to rule by day and a moon by night. And God said, let there be plants and animals. In Genesis 1, God created the world through his Word. And now John, in the opening to his Gospel, makes the staggering claim that the word that God used to create the worlds was actually a person, Jesus. Look at verse 2. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That is a confusing statement, right? How can something be with something and that same something at the same time? Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, if they show up on your doorstep and they knock on your door and they want to come in and talk about things that you've gotten wrong and your Christian upbringing, will both say that you ought to write that second instance of the word God there in that sentence.
You ought to write it with a lowercase g and put an indefinite article in front of it so that it would read like this. And the Word was with God, and the Word was a God. Jesus was special, they say. He was the first thing that God created, and he's more important than all the rest. And in some ways, you could even say he's divine, but he's not God himself because God created him. But the next verse takes that possibility off of the table, doesn't it?
Look at the next verse, verse 3. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In other words, if it was made, it was made by Jesus, which takes off the table that Jesus was a made thing, because that would mean that Jesus would have had to have made himself, which is impossible. Everything that was made was made by Jesus, and Jesus could not create himself, which makes Jesus an unmade thing, and the only thing that is unmade is God.
Does that make sense? So this Word was with God and itself God at the same time. You say, well, how can that be? How can something be with something and that same something at the same time? This, in part, is where Christians get the concept of the Trinity, that God has existed eternally as one being in three persons, each person distinct from the other persons, yet each represented in the others, and all comprising one singular being, God.
You say, but that doesn't really make a lot of sense. Three persons, only one being. Whenever I try to teach these concepts to people, I first remind them that we're talking about the nature of God, and our finite minds, amazing as they are, are just not built to fully comprehend divine realities.
One of my favorite illustrations of this, C.S. Lewis actually quotes somebody else, quotes a mathematician in the 19th century named Edwin Abbott, who wrote this great little book called Flatlands, in which he tells a little parable about all of creation existing in only two dimensions. He said, imagine that a three dimensional God had created a two dimensional creation. And so we, if we were in that creation, because we're only two dimensions, we'd be like dots on a page. God is this three dimensional sphere, like think of basketball. And so that God, three dimensional God, decides he wants to reveal himself to all of us two dimensional dots.
How could he do that? He can't just describe himself because us little dots have no capacity to understand the third dimension. And so he decides to reveal himself to pass through their two dimensional plane. Now, what would that look like? What would that look like? It would look like a dot that enlarged into a circle and then shrunk back to a dot. I mean, just imagine it going through the plane like that right there. See, that's how it would look going on a two dimensional plane.
Now, imagine the poor two dimensional dots trying to explain what just happened. How much more, Edwin Abbott said, Professor Abbott said, how much more we humans as finite beings is it trying to comprehend the incomprehensible God? He said the gap is greater between us and God than it would be between a two dimensional creation and a three dimensional God. Sometimes the best way for God to communicate these realities to us is through analogies.
And that's exactly what he does here. He calls Jesus the word. Jesus is to the father what a word is to us.
Think about it. In one sense, our words are separate from us, but in another, they are part of us. There's a famous story about a Christian missionary named Timothy I, who back in the eighth century was invited by one of the first Muslim caliphs to come to Mecca and defend the Trinity. One of the most Christians ever allowed into Mecca because the caliph, the caliph said that if Jesus was God, that would mean there had to be two gods and that was blasphemy because there was only one God. Timothy said, well, it is true certainly that there is only one God. And then he explained the Trinity using John's example of the word. He said, when we communicate with somebody, our minds first think a thought like, I feel hot.
That's the thought I'm having right now. I feel hot. We then form that thought into the words of whatever language we're trying to communicate in. And then our vocal cords create vibrations in the air that carry those words to somebody else's ears. Timothy said, so in the act of communicating, we have three different things. We've got thoughts, we've got words, and we've got vocal vibrations. They are all distinct from each other, yet all one in the act of communication.
You would never say I heard JD's words, but not JD. No, my thoughts and my words are me. The father, Timothy said, is like the thought, all analogies break down, he said, but you could at least begin to get your mind around it this way. The father's like the thought, the son is like the word, and the spirit is like the vibration that carries the word to our ears. There's only one God, and the God who sits on heaven's throne is the father. The God we see with our eyes and hear with our ears and touch with our hands is Jesus, and the God we feel moving in our souls is God the spirit.
The word was with God, and the word was God. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life, and we'll get back to our teaching in just a moment. But first, let me tell you about our latest resource created exclusively for our Summit Life listeners. There's nothing magical about the new year, but it does present a natural opportunity for reflection and change. It's a great time to take stock of your life and set some goals for ways that you want to grow in the coming months. Maybe you want to start reading your Bible every day, or maybe you want to get better at making time for ministry or leading your family in a new way.
Maybe it's a broken relationship that needs mending or an unhealthy habit you need to break. Whatever it may be, we hope our 2025 Summit Life day planner will be a great tool to help you prioritize your time and meet those goals. Reserve your copy today with a generous year-end gift by calling 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgrier.com. Now let's get back to the final moments of today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Jesus is the Word of God.
He is the perfect expression of the Father. Everything that God was, Jesus was. Leviticus taught us, for example, that God is holy. We saw what that looked like and how Jesus lived. Exodus told us that God is a deliverer. We saw what that looked like and how Jesus healed the sick and cast out demons and how he treated the outcast to the oppressed. The book of Exodus told us that God was love, that he was full of compassion, that he was gracious. We saw what that looked like and how Jesus treated the woman caught in adultery and how he responded to somebody like Zacchaeus.
The Psalms tell us that God is tender and long-suffering. We saw what that looked like and how Jesus treated his disciples in failure and how he received children. Jesus is the perfect expression of the Father. In his words, we hear the Father's voice. In his smile, we sense the Father's heart. In his touch, we feel the Father's presence. In verse 4, John continues this, Genesis 1, Jesus parallel. He says, in him was life. Now life was the light of men. Light is going to be used seven times in these opening verses to describe Jesus. Light, well, interestingly, Genesis 1, light was the first thing God created in Genesis 1. It is fundamental to everything else. Light brings life.
We know that today. We call this process photosynthesis. Light actually gives life to plants. John would not have known the word photosynthesis, of course, but he saw the effects. When light shines on something, it becomes alive.
Jesus is like that. It's like that, John says. Light dispels darkness. When the lights are on, you can see things. You can avoid dangers.
You can stay alive. One of the most annoying things about getting older to me is the fact that I can't make it through a full night's sleep without having to get up and go to the bathroom. Now I have walked that little path from my bed to the bathroom many, many, hundreds, even thousands of times. It's a fairly straight shot, but somehow, somehow my left pinky toe still manages to find that corner of my dresser on the way there, I swear. It's like it's got a homing beacon or a magnet or something down in there.
Even though I've walked that path many times, without light, I still run into things. Jesus is like that, John says. He illuminates our lives. He helps guide us through decisions. He makes sense of our relationships and our problems and our questions, our deepest longings.
We understand who we are in him. Light creates color. Color doesn't reside in the objects themselves.
Color is in the light that reflects off of them. In the same way, Jesus reveals the beauty and the distinctiveness of creation. We find our distinctiveness and our color in him. There's a movie that came out in the early 2000s called Pleasantville. It stars Tobey Maguire. It's got one of the worst messages of any movie in the last two decades.
It's like the opposite of John 1. Tobey Maguire and his sister Reese Witherspoon are able to travel back in time to the 1950s, where everything is in black and white. And as they and their enlightened 2000 selves, as enlightened people, as they teach people to throw off their societal chains and embrace specifically sexual freedom, well, the characters in the 50s begin to take on color. Now, we agree, of course, that self-expression is a healthy process, but what brings us color is being near Jesus. His light draws out our beauty and our distinctiveness. C.S. Lewis said, in the dark, everything looks the same.
It's light that reveals distinctiveness. We are most ourselves when we are in fellowship with him, or to borrow a different analogy from C.S. Lewis, a fish is most free when it's in the water, not when it frees itself from the water and flops out on the shore. If a fish were to say, you know, I am sick of this really limiting ocean. I just want to be free. I want to be out there, up where the people are. I want to be part of that world. You're like, is this a movie?
Yes, it is, okay? And that fish were to somehow flop up onto the shore, it's not going to go well for that fish. And that's because the fish, C.S. Lewis said, was created for water in the same way we were created for Jesus. And that means we're emotionally free. And that means we're most free when we are in him. There's one more dimension that I want to draw out there, and I might be taking this too far. I'll just go ahead and say that.
So just give me three free minutes, okay? But only now, only now are we learning how fundamental light is to the structure of our universe. Light was the foundation of Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity, a scientific idea that is so complex that only Einstein, myself, and a couple of other scientists understand it.
Basically, it works like this. You know the famous formula, E equals MC squared. E is energy measured in herds, E-E-R-D-S. M is matter that is measured in mass. And C is the constant, or the speed of light, which, you know, travels at what, 186,282.2 miles per second. Matter, G, and energy are somehow connected along the principle of light.
Einstein showed that even time itself was tied to light. The theory of relativity works something like this. If I'm in a car, and I'm going 60 miles an hour, and you're in a car going 40 miles an hour in the same direction, and I pass you, my speed relative to yours is 20 miles an hour. Relative to the ground, I'm going 60 miles an hour, but relative to you, I'm only going 20. If you're in a car going 50 miles an hour, and I pass you the opposite direction going 50 miles an hour, then my speed relative to yours is not 50, it's 100 miles an hour. But Einstein said, if you could hijack a sunbeam, if you could ride along on top of a ray of light traveling at 186,000 miles a second, and you pass me going the opposite direction from you also at 186,000 miles a second, you would think your speed relative to mine would be double the speed of light, but not so. Whether I'm standing still or moving at the speed of light opposite of you, or anywhere in between, our speeds relative to each other remain at 186,000 miles a second, which is just mind-boggling, and that's because light is the constant.
It's the foundation. What changes as we approach the speed of light is not speed, but time. At the speed of light, Einstein said, time stands still. Like I said, it's hard to understand, and who knows how much we're still getting wrong, but the point is that light is fundamental to creation.
It's the constant. The same thing is true of Jesus, John is saying. Paul says in Colossians, he backs up John, and he says, not only did Jesus create all things, not only is he before all things, in him all things hold together. They still can't figure out how an atom holds together.
You got protons in the center with a positive charge and electrons with a negative charge, and that should drive them apart, but somehow they hold together. I'm not trying to say there's no scientific explanation for that. I'm just saying that there is in that an analogy for Jesus. He is the light that holds together the first creation, and he is the light that's gonna hold together the new creation.
If you're taking notes, here's your first three words on Jesus's resume. Jesus is the word, he is the light, and he is the life. Main thing to understand here, y'all, is that John is connecting Jesus to the original work of creation.
Did you get that? Let me say it again. The main thing to get here is that John is connecting Jesus to the original work of creation. In Genesis 1, God spoke, matter sprang from nothing, order came from chaos, light came from darkness, and life sprang from deadness. In the same way, John says, Jesus's word brings order to chaotic, confused lives. His words are gonna calm storms and bring peace. His touch is gonna heal diseases. He's gonna speak to blind men, and they're gonna begin to see again. He's gonna speak to the lame, and they're gonna walk. He's gonna speak to dead men, and they're gonna be raised to new life. His word will deliver the oppressed from their demons.
His word will break the chains of addiction. His word will fill the broken with joy. His word is gonna release the sinner from their sins, and it's gonna turn graves into gardens. Just like Jesus was the power of the first creation, John says, so he is the power of the new creation. The apostle John is gonna carry this idea of Jesus as the new creation.
He's gonna carry it all the way through to the end of his gospel. It's one of the things that makes John's gospel my favorite. It's John, the apostle John, who points out that Jesus was crucified on the sixth day, which was the same day of the week in Genesis 1 that man was created. But then John points out Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday, which was the first day of a new week.
You see what's being taught? Jesus died on the sixth day, absorbing the curse that man had brought into the first creation by sin. And in his resurrection, he is commencing a week of new creation. Get this, John points out that the first place that humanity encounters the resurrected Jesus is in a garden. John 20, Mary Magdalene, a former demon-possessed woman, is in the garden weeping, looking for the body of Jesus when Jesus suddenly appears behind her and calls her name.
You see what's significant about that? Well, where had been the last place that God and humanity had been together? A garden where we had rejected God and hidden from him. Jesus returned to the same place, found us just outside the tomb of death we had hidden ourselves in. And he says, here I am.
You hid from me and I found you. And with these wounds, I have saved you. Today, as we began this brand new teaching series leading up to Christmas, we are reminded of how magnificent our Savior is.
This is Summit Life. Okay, Pastor JD, simple question. How can others partner with us as we look for God to do even more in 2025?
Great question, Mollie. What I would say is you could help people get a grasp on what God wants to do in their lives by sharing our daily devotional with your friends and family who want to go deeper with God. Or maybe you can start a Bible study in your home using some of these monthly resources that we created Summit Life.
That's why we create them. So that along with the program, you can share with others in a Bible study setting or a one-on-one setting the things that you're learning. Or maybe you could go to jdgrare.com and look at some of these church plans that we partner with and pray for them. You could join us as a gospel partner so that we can share Summit Life broadcast in more, not just more states, but more countries around the world. However you want to grow your faith this year, why don't you go to jdgrare.com so that you can be equipped through access to old podcasts or messages, or whether you want to give and become part of the mission of God taking the gospel wider in the world, or just to let us know what you're doing and how we can be praying for you.
We love doing that here. We love hearing from our listeners and praying along with them for what God is doing in their lives. Thanks, JD. As God has blessed you this past year through the teaching of this ministry, will you extend that gift to someone else by donating today? Your support right now is critical to help us continue this ministry in the coming months, and we would love to have you partner with us.
As our way of saying thanks for your support, we'll get you a copy of our exclusive resource, the 2025 Summit Life Date Planner. Ask for a copy when you donate today at the suggested amount of $45 or more. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.
Or give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. I hope that you'll join us tomorrow as we continue our brand new teaching series called Jesus, Lord at Thy Birth. We'll see you Friday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
