Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Lead pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Christmas is getting close, so we've shifted our teaching now in that direction. In his incarnation, Jesus personified God's defining characteristics of grace and truth.
Yet religion so often espouses one without the other to the point of condemnation and exclusion. In today's teaching, Pastor J.D. continues to walk through Jesus's resume in John 1. In order to show us how Jesus is the glory of God in the flesh, and in turn, how we should respond to his offer of grace, truth, and eternal life.
Are you ready? Let's join Pastor J.D. in John 1 as we continue our teaching called In the Beginning Was Jesus. Order 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 going to calm storms and bring peace. His touch is going to heal diseases. He's going to speak to blind men, and they're going to begin to see again.
He's going to speak to the lame, and they're going to walk. He's going to speak to dead men, and they're going to 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 going to release the sinner from their sins, and it's going to 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 going to carry this idea of Jesus as the new creation.
He's going to 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. Do 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.
Do 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. There's more when Jesus appears to the rest of the disciples later that evening, John says. One of the first things he does to them is he breathes on them, and as he does, he says, received the Holy Spirit.
John 20-22. I pointed this out to you before. That wasn't a common Hebrew greeting in those days. You didn't go up to your friends and say, you know, hey Matthew, I'm blowing their face. It was weird. It was weird now.
It was weird then. But do you see what Jesus was doing? He was reenacting the creative moment of Genesis 1. Just like God breathed into the lump of clay he'd formed in the man's image, and man became a living soul, so now Jesus is breathing the Holy Spirit into his disciples so that spiritually they come alive. In the opening verses of his Gospel, John establishes, just like Jesus was the power of the old creation, he's also the power of the new creation, and those in him begin to live. So the first three words of Jesus' resume, the Word, the light, the life.
In verse 14 we find the fourth, verse 14. And that Word, that light, that Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory. The glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. That little phrase dwelt among us is literally, in the Greek there, the word tabernacled. In the Old Testament, the tabernacle was the tent-like structure that housed the presence and the glory of God on earth.
That's the word that John uses here. The word he uses here in the Greek version of the Old Testament was the word they used for tabernacle, because that's what the body of Jesus was. He says, in Jesus God took on flesh, and he dwelt among us.
Christians call this the incarnation, which literally means enfleshing, and that's your fourth word in your resume. Jesus was glory enfleshed. The glory of God took on flesh and blood so that we could see it and touch it and understand it. And what were God's glories defining characteristics?
You could put a lot of things there. You could say a lot of things about God's glory, but it's interesting. John boils it down to two. A person filled with grace and truth. Grace and truth. Religion is often characterized, isn't it, by one or the other.
Many of you grew up with this. Many religions are truthful without grace. They tell you what's right, but in a way that condemns you and excludes you. Or, if you're more of a progressive church kind of person, they're grace without truth.
They act all accepting and all gracious, but refuse to be honest about what God's word actually says. Truth without grace is fundamentalism. Grace without truth is sentimentality.
Both bring death. Jesus was full of both grace and truth, and only that combination brings life. Jesus' truth did not cancel out his grace, nor did his grace compromise his truth. Jesus told us exactly what God's righteous standards were, but then he died in our place so that we would not perish under them. Jesus did not lower God's standards, or he did not say that God's gonna grate on a curve. He could not have done that. God is holy. God is who God is.
Jesus lived out the full righteousness of God fully, but then he died in our place so that we would not perish. In 1964, a woman in Manhattan by the name of Kitty Genovese was walking to her apartment when she was assaulted by a man who began to stab her right there on the street. She desperately cried out for help. Lights in the apartments above that street in Manhattan began to turn on, and the neighbors pulled up their blinds and looked down at this horrifying scene. This woman being stabbed to death as she was trying to fight off and get away from her attacker, and yet not one single person came down to help her. One man, when he was interviewed later, he actually said, I didn't want to get involved.
Not only is it dangerous for me, there's just too much legal liability and paperwork involved. It became a national scandal. What kind of nation have we become where a woman could be stabbed to death in plain sight with several dozen people looking on simply because nobody wanted to come down and get involved? Oh, friends, we were all kitty, but thank God Jesus came down full of grace and truth. He told us the absolute truth about our darkness. He lived it out in front of us, but then he died in our place so that we could live. If I might add, I find it significant that John puts grace before truth. That kind of word order is never accidental in the Bible. Jesus led with grace.
The accent of his life was on grace in him. We see how God really feels about sinners. God does not want them to perish.
He could have come down and led with truth, which would have left us all dead. He wants us to live. He takes no pleasure, the Bible says, in the death of the wicked. He takes delight and mercy. He takes delight and repentance. He takes delight in you being reconciled. If you were here this morning and you were separated from him and you got a lifetime of sin behind you, God does not desire your destruction.
He wants you to come to him and live regardless of what's there. Luke 15, Jesus claimed that there's more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 or 99 hundred of us who are already his. Jesus is more excited about you being here than he is about all of us serving him for however long we've been doing it. Sometimes when we do a baptism here, Christians will quote this verse and say, oh, and the first thing I baptized, the angels are partying in heaven. Let's join with the angels in celebrating this.
But what Luke 15, 10 actually says, do you ever look at it? There is joy before the angels of God when one sinner repents. It's not the angels that are rejoicing. It's God who rejoices in front of the angels. I'm sure they join along with him, but the point of that verse is not that the angels are partying, but that God is partying. In Jesus, we see how God cares about sinners.
We see it in how he responded to the woman caught in adultery, how he responds to the despised Zacchaeus, how he couldn't turn away the lepers or sinners or tax collectors. He was full of grace and truth. By the way, some of you know I had to name my first two daughters after this. Charis means grace. Aletheia, my second daughter, means truth.
Call her Ali. Grace and truth, it's just the center of Christianity. Verse 18, nobody has ever seen God because God's a spirit. No, the only God who is at the Father's side, the Word has made him known. There were some things about God that we sinful flesh and blood would never be able to understand so long as they were simply being described to us in words.
So he came down, down so that we could see him and touch him and experience him and understand him. We all start back at the gym, right? Or a new diet meant to change our eating habits and lose some weight. The truth is, it really is 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 people or leading your family in a new way.
Maybe a new ministry opportunity is tugging at your heart. Whatever it might be, we hope our 2025 Summit Life Day Planner will be a great tool to help you prioritize and ultimately meet those goals. Reserve your copy right now with your generous year-end gift by calling 866-335-5220.
That's 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgrier.com. Thanks for being with us today. Now let's finish up this week's teaching here on Summit Life. Once again, here's Pastor J.D.
Let me bring it way down for us, okay? We've talked about the theory of relativity. We've talked about all these analogies.
Let's just equalize everything, okay? You remember Joby, he was here a few weeks ago? And a message I was listening to by him explained this.
He explains that he grew up in South Carolina and next to his house was an empty, sandy lot, pockmarked with nests full of carpenter ants. He said, I used to love to go over there with my big wheel. How many of you remember a big wheel, right?
I don't know if they even make them anymore. Maybe they do, but think low-slung kid's tricycle with a fat front tire. The Harley-Davidson of tricycles. I am not sure how it ever got approved to be on the market because as a kid, you could not see over the front wheel.
And road blindness is exhilarating, but it doesn't contribute to safety. Well, the other cool feature on the big wheel was that the pedals attach directly to the front wheel, so at high speed you could lock the wheel in a dead stop, and if you turned the wheel real hard, you could donut for days. Well, Joby loved to take his big wheel over to the sandy lot and skid atop the anthills, leaving in his wake these billowing waves of sand and ants. One day, some grape jelly from the sandwich he brought with him dropped onto the sand and he said within five minutes, hundreds of ants swarmed to the spillage. So the next day, he brought over a full jar of jelly and just smeared several streaks across the lot. He said in five minutes, each of those streaks looked like bumper-to-bumper traffic on an ant highway. So he took his big wheel, and at full speed, he'd hit the ant river, turn the wheel, and then skid across the backs of the ants like a car on an oil slick. No, I'm just telling the story.
I'm not advocating for this, okay? Every day, he said, I'd lay out a new jelly trap, setting up the ants for my joyride of death. Now, say that you have a soft spot in your heart for these ants and you are appalled by Joby's antics.
Okay, see what I did there? So you want to warn the ants not to take the bait of Joby's jelly. You want to tell them, hear ye, hear ye, all ye ants.
Don't fall for the jelly. The ant who eats of this jelly surely shall die. So you go to them and you want to warn them.
How do you do it? If you stand above their ant hill and you yell down at them, the ants would just look up at you and say, man, look at the size of that guy's boot, and they would just scuffle away. They wouldn't listen to you. The only way to really communicate with them, to really save them, would be to get down on their ant level to become an ant. But now with a human perspective, only then could you communicate with them in terms they could understand and lead them to safety. And this, my friends, is what Jesus did in the incarnation. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us so that he could communicate with us. In him we saw what lofty things like love and holiness and grace and truth actually looked like. We beheld them. We felt them.
We saw God's glory and flesh and lived out in front of us. Some imagine you are distant and removed, but you chased us down in merciful pursuit to the center. You were grace to the broken. You embraced, and in the end, the proof is in your wounds.
Yes, in the end, the proof is in your wounds. Blood and tears, how can it be? There's a God who weeps. There's a God who bleeds. Oh, praise the one who would reach for me. Hallelujah to the Son of Suffering. Nobody has ever seen God, the only God who is at the Father's side. That's the one that's made it known. If you're taking notes, here's the four words on Jesus' resume.
Word, light, life, glory and flesh, full of grace and truth. How did we respond? How did we respond? Verse 10, he was in the world. The world was made through him. The world did not recognize him. We didn't recognize him.
He was like a healthy person coming into a room full of sick people. His health seemed odd to us and threatening and humiliating. We thought him too obsessed with God, his radical God focus. We thought that irrelevant in a world of business and politics and practical needs. We thought his insistence on holiness, we thought that was prudish. We thought his love for the poor, impractical and wasteful and threatening to our livelihood. We thought his grace too extreme. We thought his demands too fanatical. Many teenagers today think, well, I don't want to be a Jesus fanatic. Yeah, I want to go to heaven, I want to be a good person, but I don't want to be a Jesus fanatic.
That's no fun, that's weird. That's what it means when it says he was in the world. And though the world was made through him, the world did not know him.
I know a lot of church people who would say being religious is great, but don't get radical ideas in your head like giving your life away for the poor or inconvenience your life to embrace people you wouldn't normally embrace or giving your life away to go overseas to reach the lost. That's what it means when it says he was in the world. And though the world was made through him, it didn't even recognize him. When true light shines in the darkness, the darkness resents it because the light exposes how dark the darkness is.
Read a book over the break called Live Not by Lies by a guy named Rod Dreher. And in the book, he tells the stories of faithful Christians who suffered unspeakable things at the hands of the communist regime. There was this one prison known as Pateshti, known for its cruelty. In 1966, in a testimony before the U.S. Senate, one of the escaped prisoners from Pateshti, a man named Richard Wurmbrand, testified to its horrors. One story was told about a prisoner named Constantine who was sick from the day he got put into the cell.
The communists had beat him so badly, he was so weak, that he could barely even talk anymore. But every word he said to his cellmates was about Jesus. One survivor said, just looking at the flood of love on his face and hearing him pray forever changed me. Even though his captors tortured him for nearly three years, he would not curse his torturers.
He would only pray for them and bless them in Jesus' name. How did those communist guards respond to prisoners like this? Richard Wurmbrand explained that they took one young Christian and tied him to a cross. One young Christian like this tied him to a cross, stood it upright and left it for days. But twice daily, they would lay the cross, bearing that young man down on the floor, and 100 other inmates were forced by the guards to urinate and to defecate on him.
Each time, the cross was erected again, and the guards would say to the Christian prisoners, look at your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and yet the world did not know him. He came to his own. His own people did not even receive him. His own, of course, means first the Jewish people. Jesus was born to Israel.
He came from Israel after all the prophets and the promises, but they rejected him. But you know that phrase, his own, implies more than just that. His own means ownership. All of us were people he had created. He created you. He created me. And because he created us, he rightfully owns us. But we scorned him. We didn't want a Lord. We wanted to be the Lord. We somehow thought that we could commandeer creation and give no thought to the creator as if life was inside of us. And when he insisted that he alone was Lord, that he alone could be the resurrection and the life, when he alone was the God of creation, our resistance became so violent that we crucified him.
You say, well, not me. If I'd been alive back then, I wouldn't have crucified Jesus. That's because you've never been pushed to see what his lordship would do to your life if it really threatened you. But then comes one of the greatest verses in all the Bible. But to all who did receive him, who just believed in his name, it was to them he gave the right to become the children of God.
To all who would simply receive him and just believe in his name, it was them he gave the right to become the children of God. Imagine that you awoke to find yourself on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. You're not even quite sure how you got there.
You don't remember it. But as you feel the panic begin to rise in your heart, the EMT puts their hand calmly on your head and says, you were in a really serious wreck. You lost a lot of blood. You were unconscious. But thankfully, we got to you in time. We stabilized you. Somebody called 911, and now we're taking you to the hospital where you are going to make a full recovery. You're going to be okay. At that point, the EMT is not asking you to do anything. In fact, if you got up and tried to help them, you just messed everything up.
You just need to trust them that they're going to keep their promise. This is what John said Jesus was doing for us. Sin had wrecked our relationship with God, and sin had sent us hurtling back toward death and nothingness. Jesus came as a new creation, and he rescued us. Discovering the gospel is like waking up on a stretcher looking at Jesus who is saying to you, I got this.
I got this. I'm saving you. All you got to do, all you can do is receive me. Believe that I'm doing what I said I was doing.
Come every soul by sin oppressed. There's mercy with the Lord. He will surely give you rest just by trusting in his word. Only trust him. Only trust him.
Only trust him now. He will save you. He will save you.
He will save you now. One final verse, verse 13. Who were born not of blood, not of the will of the flesh, nor the will of man. The ones who received him were born of God. You see, just like the original creation didn't have a will when God spoke into it. Not a dead mass of whatever.
Then like, hey, create me. Just like God spoke into deadness and nothing in the life, nothingness in life sprang forth so you and I don't have spiritual life when God speaks to us either. It's his voice that creates life in our hearts. When you are reborn, it's not of blood nor the will of flesh. It's of God. See, if you're sensing a desire right now to know him, a desire to be reconciled to him, to be saved by him, those desires don't come from you.
They come from God. But all I can tell you is this. If you're sensing him moving in your soul, don't resist him. Don't resist him.
Those feelings aren't from you. He's inviting you to life. All you got to do is open the door. Whatever you do, don't harden your heart toward him because he may not knock at your heart's door forever.
Come every soul by sin oppressed. There's mercy with the Lord and he will surely give you rest just by trusting in his word. Only trust him. Only trust him. Only trust him now and he will save you. He will save you. He will save you now. As we look forward to celebrating our Savior's birth this Christmas, we're reminded of just how worthy he is of our praise.
Don't worry. There's more Christmas teaching on the way next week. It's a joy to be here with you on your station and online so that you can dive deeper into the gospel message with us each day. While these programs come to you free of charge, they actually take a lot of financial support to produce and distribute.
And that's where friends like you come in. When you donate to Summit Life, you're bridging that gap. So when someone stumbles on this program while scanning the radio and hears the gospel for the very first time, they actually have you to thank for that. At this time of year, your donation is more important than ever. You can join the mission by giving a special year-end donation of $45 or more. And we'll say thanks by sending you the 2025 Summit Life Planner. Ask for a copy when you give today. Our number is 866-335-5220.
That's 866-335-5220. Or give online at jdgrier.com. While you're on the website, you'll also want to subscribe to Pastor J.D. 's weekly newsletter. The articles and resources go in-depth with many of the topics we cover here on the broadcast.
Sign up online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, wishing you a wonderful weekend as you gather with your local church. Be sure to join us next time as we consider Jesus' first three questions.
Curious? Well, don't miss it. Next time here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
