The Word Becoming Flesh
I am bringing to a conclusion a series of messages that we have been preaching through the Christmas season entitled “The Word Became Flesh”.
The first week, we looked at the Word Before He became flesh – Jesus is God, great and gracious.
Then we looked at The Word When He Became Flesh, that moment in time when Jesus was born of a virgin as our Savior.
Then we considered The Word After He Became Flesh: He dwelt among us and was rejected by some and received by others.
Today: What does it mean for those of us who have received Jesus that He is dwelling “in” us?
Does John 1:14, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” simply address the Incarnation? Is that all it means? I am convinced that many Christians never get to a fuller understanding of Christianity than that.
As far as they are concerned, the essence of their faith is:
Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. (Matt. 1:23 quoting from Isa. 7:14)
Years ago in a most unusual setting a little boy was born. He grew up to manhood and announced Himself as the long-awaited Messiah of the expectant Jews. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).
That’s what Christianity is all about: God came in Jesus to do something
1. For Us.
He came to forgive us of our sins, and cleanse us and fit us for heaven. . .
Christmas teaches us the blessings of giving over getting. At this season, people concern themselves with giving visible expressions of love to others. But our attention can remain upon getting for a long, long time.
I might ask, "What are you more interested in-getting from God, or expressing God to others at any cost?" All are interested in getting from God to begin with.
For example, I have noticed that "no condemnation" is one of the initial results of a person experiencing union with Christ. It is a getting. It is the desire of the Christian to get for himself. It is the proverbial carrot in front of the eyes. It gets our attention.
Thankfully this carrot can be reached by one and all. Many are first caught by the carrot truth of "no condemnation" which satisfies their desire to be getters.
And while salvation from that perspective is wonderful, that is not the sum total of the Christian faith – far from it.
For others, they have gone a little deeper. It is not enough that Jesus is merely for us, they are discovering the truth that Christ dwells
2. IN US
It is that relationship for which Jesus prayed in John 17: 20-26.
I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word;
21 that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.
22 And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one:
23 I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.
24 Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.
25 O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me.
26 And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them."
And we, as the adopted sons of God, are not only forgiven of our sins and made fit for heaven, we become vessels by whom and through whom the Father's work continues.
One of the objects of the prayer of Jesus is that “the world may believe that You sent Me”. The means of bringing that message to the world are Jesus-indwelt believers.
Listen again to verse 21:
We have now moved into a completely different realm from Christ For Me to
CHRIST IN ME
Expressing God to others by "Christ living in you" is another matter. This is what John talks about in his first epistle: "God dwells in him, and he in God" (I John 4:15).
The next verse carries us to the weightier matter, "God is love" (v. 16) God is agape. Agape is God. Write it either way-it is the same.
The Greek word agape-meaning love--is the key. The only source of agape is God. Isn't it the definition of the character of God having the welfare of others as His only concern-that most clearly describes Him to us? This love is not inanimate, but personal-"He." That is the trick. It is He Who is shed abroad in our hearts-Love is The Person.
But John doesn’t stop there. It’s not just being forgiven of our sins and enjoying the love of God, but that God’s love in us must be shared. This is the experiential side of John's statement, "As He is, so are we in this world"? (I John 4:17.)
That is to be our relationship with the world. We as God-forgiven sinners, enjoying a love relationship with God are to be his carriers of that same love into the world.
Poet Howard Thurman worte:
When the star in the sky is gone
When the kings and princes are home
When the shepherds are back with their flocks
The work of Christmas begins!
To find the lost
To heal the broken
To find the hungry
To release the prisoner
To teach the nations
To bring Christ to all
To make music in your heart.
Christ For Me
Christ In Me,
But it doesn’t end there. And here is the part that most of us miss. It is perhaps one of the most neglected aspects of the Christian faith, and yet so essential. In fact it is the key to the doing of what I’ve described for you so far, and that is, Christ desires to live
3. AS ME
Listen to Galatians 2:20
The God with us truth of Isaiah becomes the Christ in you reality of John 17 and the Christ as you of Galatians 2:20.
There is the concept in one verse.
Paul says: it is the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me, and here I am right now alive in the flesh in relationship with Christ living inside me. But when properly understood, it is not Christ and me, co-existing in the same body.
That’s the mistake that many make. Christ is just an addition to all the other stuff in their life. Religion will be put in the list with all the other good and admirable traits and qualities. That is not the Christian faith.
Paul says, I have to die so that Christ might live as me.
That is the full manifestation of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us.
We’ve all read the verses that remind us when we become Christians, we are supposed to be "new creatures in Christ" ( 2Cor 5:17).
But, look around at those claiming to have had the experience, including yourself. Ever wonder where all the new creatures are?
Are we not still sinning, not perhaps as the worldly folk are sinning, but certainly many are not living as new creatures in Christ.
It’s as though we claim the forgiveness, we are glad Christ came for us. We even like the fact that He shares our life with us. But are our lives really His life?
The process is called in theological terms: Sanctification. It is referenced in a number of ways: Jesus talked about taking up your cross, and dying to self. Paul said we are to mortify our members. John the Baptist said. “He must increase; I must decrease.”
The dictionary defines it this way:
1. to make holy; set apart as sacred; consecrate.
2. to purify or free from sin
3. to impart religious sanction to; render legitimate or binding
4. to entitle to reverence or respect.
5. to make productive of or conducive to spiritual blessing.
That is God’s desire for every child of His. Not just to get us saved and safe from hell. But to set us a apart as miniature reproductions of Jesus Himself. Thyink about those definitions in the context of Jesus:
He was holy and set apart, he was free from sin, He was legitimatized by God Himself (beloved son, resurrection), It is at the name of Jesus that every knee bows and tongue confesses, and He is the source of and recipient of every blessing of God.
And what God has done in Christ, He desires to do in you.
Now this morning we don’t have time to fully develop the whole teaching, so for the next three weeks we will explore what it means for Christ to live as us from a single verse of scripture found in Philippians 2:12.
For this morning think about this:
Before I can truly become a new creature, I must go through the same type of experience as Christ did. I must die, I must be buried, and I must be resurrected just as Jesus was. The end result of that is sanctification.
That’s what Paul is saying here in Galatians 2:20.
Read it again:
When and only when that happens will the Word become flesh, not only in me, but as me.
To be born again simply means that the Spirit of the living God comes to dwell within me. But to live the sanctified life means that the Living God within me is seen in every expression of me. In fact, when that’s happening, people don’t see me, they see Jesus.
As a born-again child of God, you are closer to hat becoming reality than you may think.
In fact, right now, you are already housing all the power and authority which Jesus gave His disciples the day He ascended to heaven. The kingdom of heaven dwells within me (Luke 17:21).
I have all His attributes because I am a sacred tabernacle, an earthly vessel wherein He dwells (2 Cor 4:7). What I am is not because of my own goodness or badness. I am what I am because I am now the righteousness of Christ because He died to give it all to me.
I am all of these things only because Jesus died as the Lamb of God to pay for all my sin and guilt. I now live under Christian grace, and therefore I cannot boast because I am becoming like Jesus. It is Christ who lives in me who is all of these things.
Heaven is now within me; I am righteous in His sight (Rom 8:1). I am His wisdom ( 1 Cor 1:24). I am His love (John 14:23).
I am His joy (John 15:11) and the list goes on. He has chosen me to bring all the qualities of grace, mercy and peace to a world who does not know Him.
All of who He is is resident within me. The key to that being demonstrated to the world is getting to the place where He is living as me, and the key to Him living as me is me dying to self.
And that’s what we are going to discover over the next several weeks. By the way, we will never fully get there this side of heaven.
Jesus ascended to be with the Father and is now glorified, that is, His body is not the same as ours.
The end for us is that we too will be completely and finally like Him ( 1Cor 15:49). So, whether by death or by rapture, our blessed hope is Christ in me "the hope of glory" (Col 1:27).
So whatever glory others may see in me now is but a small sample of what all true Christians will later be like. We will be truly like Jesus!
But for now I can rest assured there is no power in earth or heaven which can snatch me out of the love of God in Christ Jesus because He himself dwells within me.
When Dwight Lyman Moody set out to see the world at the tender age of seventeen, God and Christianity were far from his mind. He was determined to make himself rich — and to leave behind the backbreaking farm labor and poverty that had defined his youth.
Because Moody's father had died unexpectedly when Dwight and his siblings were young, his mother struggled hard to feed and care for the family, with the children working and contributing whatever sustenance they could as they grew older.
Though Moody was respectful of his mother and loved her, he was also restless and wanted to break away from the monotony of life in rural New England. Eager for material success, he left home and headed for Boston — with several strikes against him. He had no money, no place to stay, and no assurance of a job, and he was barely literate, with only about four or five patchwork years of schooling.
Through the years, Dwight's mother, Betsy, had read to the children from a Bible at night. Evidently the seeds had not taken root in Dwight's heart, for he showed no interest in spiritual matters at the time he left home.
For several days he walked the streets of Boston in search of a job, but without success. His earthy country-boy attire and rough mannerisms evoked stares of contempt and ridicule from the city-cultured Bostonians and raised doubts in the minds of prospective employers.
Dwight's uncle, Samuel Holton, had a shoe store in town, but initially Dwight was too prideful to ask his relative for a job; he also knew his uncle to be a stern taskmaster. Besides, this same uncle had earlier told him to stay away from Boston because he wouldn't fit in well.
After several days of fruitless searching, Moody humbled himself and asked his uncle Samuel for work. Samuel was willing to hire the young man — but with two stipulations: First, the hardheaded youth had to be willing to adhere to his uncle's exacting methods of work, and second, he was to attend church with his uncle each Sunday
Moody's attendance at church was regular, but his chief preoccupation continued to be financial gain. Then one day Moody's Sunday school teacher, Edward Kimball, came to the shoe store to talk with Moody. Kimball's visit led the young man to a spiritual awakening:
“When I was in Boston I used to attend a Sunday school class, and one day I recollect my teacher came around behind the counter of the shop I was at work in, and put his hand upon my shoulder, and talked to me about Christ and my soul. I had not felt that I had a soul till then. I said to myself. "This is a very strange thing. Here is a man who never saw me till lately, and he is weeping over my sins, and I never shed a tear about them." . . . It was not long after that I was brought into the Kingdom of God.”
After Moody became a Christian, he continued to attend church and work for his uncle. But eventually youthful restlessness beckoned again for him to move onward, and in the fall of 1856 he took a train westward to Chicago, a wild and fast-growing city that abounded with opportunities for aggressive young men like Moody.
Within four years, Moody had saved up around $10,000 — no small feat in a day when most men seldom earned more than a few hundred dollars per year. He was making solid progress toward his financial goals. But during this time, another passion began to burn within him. Upon arriving in Chicago, he had dutifully become a regular churchgoer, but a notable turn took place in his heart during his first year in the Windy City.
A spiritual awakening of sorts swept the city, and in a letter written to his mother on January 6, 1857, Moody wrote, "There is a great revival of religion in this city."4
Up to this time Moody had been actively inviting people off the streets to attend church with him, yet he hadn't taken steps to show personal concern for their spiritual condition. But during this period of revival, Moody met and came under the care of Christian mentors who inspired him to take a more serious interest in prayer, spiritual growth, and evangelism.
In time, Moody's passion for ministering to people — particularly the poorest children in Chicago — grew to the point where it was a challenge for him to divide his energies between church and business. While Moody still lacked in personal spiritual development and ministry skills, he experienced tremendous success in his church work.
As a result, the varied demands upon his time grew greater. What's more, he sensed God's calling upon his life — a calling for him not just to serve the Lord but to make it his full-time occupation. Some twenty-five years later at a Christian workers' conference, Moody related the struggle in this way:
“When I came to Jesus Christ, I had a terrible battle to surrender my will, and to take God's will. When I gave up business, I had another battle for three months, and I fought against it. It was a terrible battle. But oh! how many times I have thanked God that I gave up my will and took God's will.”
In 1861 Moody made the decision to step out in faith and leave the business world. All through the first half of the 1860s, he was actively involved in numerous avenues of ministry, including the YMCA and speaking to Union soldiers in Civil War camps. In 1867, again Moody struggled when he felt God calling him — this time, the call was to take his ministry beyond the city of Chicago.
“Then there was another time when God was calling me into higher service, to go out and preach the gospel all over the land, instead of staying in Chicago. I fought against it for months; but the best thing I ever did was when I surrendered my will, and let the will of God be done in me.
If you take my advice, you will have no will other than God's will. Make a _full and complete surrender.”
It was from this time onward that Moody's ministry would never be the same, experiencing continuous explosive growth in the decades to come.
The key to Moody's tremendous business success was his all-consuming drive to be the very best at what he did. And though in his early years of ministry he had much to learn, there's one truth he recognized immediately: Any work done for the Lord ought to be carried out to the very best of our ability. As Moody said, "When [God] gave Christ to this world, He gave the best He had, and He wants us to do the same." 7
Thus Moody went from pouring every ounce of his energy into building up treasures here on earth to building up treasures in heaven. Just as he had held nothing back in his ambitious pursuits in the business world, he now held nothing back in his spiritual endeavors. To him, doing anything less was unthinkable.
Moody's conviction that Christians ought to live in total surrender to God was reinforced in the early years of his ministry while in England. There he heard British evangelist Henry Varley say, "The world has yet to see what God will do with and for and through and in and by the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him."
Moody thought to himself,
He said "a man." He did not say a great man, nor a learned man, nor a rich man, nor a wise man, nor an eloquent man, nor a smart man, but simply "a man." I am a man, and it lies with the man himself whether he will or will not make that entire and full consecration. I will try my uttermost to be that man.”
Henry Varley's encouragement had a tremendous impact on Moody, who, because of his lack of education and ministry training, faced frequent reminders that, from a human perspective, in many ways he was inadequate.
Yet as he came to realize that it is God who does the actual work of ministry and that the most effective channel for ministry is a wholly surrendered life, he resolved more than ever to avail himself completely for the Lord's use.
All through his years of ministry, Moody shared these discoveries with his fellow believers and constantly urged them to fully yield their lives to God.
“One of the sweetest lessons we can learn in the school of Christ is the surrender of our wills to God, letting Him plan for us and rule our lives . . . I cannot look a day into the future. I do not know what is going to happen tomorrow; in fact, I do not know what may happen before night; so that I cannot choose for myself as well as God can choose for me; and it is much better to surrender my will to God's will.”
“The first thing a man must do if he desires to be used in the Lord's work, is to make an unconditional surrender of himself to God. He must consecrate and then concentrate. A man who does not put his whole life into one channel does not count for much, and the man who only goes into work with half a heart does not amount to much.”
“It seems about the hardest thing, to get to the end of self, but when we have got to the end of self, and self is lost sight of, self-seeking and self-glory thrown aside, and Christ and His cause are uppermost in our hearts, how easy it is for God to use us.”
“It's when we're totally surrendered that God has the freedom to accomplish the work He desires to do through us. And it's vital we always remember that it's God Himself who is doing that work. It is He who brings forth the results, not us:
It wasn't David or the sling, but it was the God of David. It wasn't Samson, but the God of Samson. It wasn't Joshua, but the God of Joshua. It wasn't the rod of Moses that did the work, but it was the God of Moses. And, my dear friends, what we want is to learn that lesson.”
You have got nothing to be proud of. If you are ever used at all, bear in mind that it is God speaking in you, and not you yourself.”
Was Dwight L. Moody a man “fully and wholly consecrated “ to God? I don’t know. That’s between God and him. But I know this: That was his aim. And every one of us have to start somewhere.
Christ for me and Christ in Me is where the journey begins. Christ as me is the destination.
They tell me at the foot of one of the Swiss Alps is a marker honoring a man who fell to his death while attempting to climb to the top. The marker gives his name and then this brief epitaph “He died climbing.”
The truth of the matter is we only climb after we die. The key to living is dying. The way to gain is to lose. The way to the top is found at the bottom.
Galatians 2:20
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
