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We all reach for something we can actually recognize and hold on to—some concrete person or presence we can truly know, not just a philosophy about. That hunger is exactly what John 1 puts its finger on: the Word who was with God in the beginning became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts abstract philosophy about God with knowing God as a real person we can encounter. What difference does it make in your own faith to think of Jesus not as a principle or idea, but as someone who actually ate meals, got tired, and walked alongside real people?
Marshall Ratliff wore a Santa suit to rob a bank because people wouldn’t recognize him. Why does the sermon say God did the opposite—not obscuring himself with a costume, but taking on human nature to be recognized? What would it mean if God had stayed abstract and distant instead?
The preacher talks about following wrong delivery instructions and ending up in the wrong place. How do you see people today trying to construct their own version of who God is or what salvation looks like, rather than following the “directions” God actually gives in Scripture?
John 1 opens with incredibly lofty language about the Word and God, then suddenly shifts to people asking Jesus, “Where are you staying?” Why is that jarring shift important? What does it protect us from believing about God?
The sermon says we can’t fully understand God’s instructions on our own, but we can know the person who wrote them. How does knowing Jesus personally change the way you approach the Bible or your relationship with God compared to just trying to follow rules?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Let’s see. There we are. You know, all this work before the service? It’s always interesting. We definitely have some gremlins here. Isn’t that interesting? And if you own a bank in Texas in the 19th century, you also had gremlins, but you didn’t call them gremlins and you didn’t laugh about them because they were bank robbers. Bank robbers, well, I don’t know if microphones going on the fritz are a good thing, but I can say this, bank robbers are definitely worse. Anyone ever heard of the Santa heist? By some, it’s called the greatest, using great loosely, greatest heist ever attempted. And that would put it above what Billy the Kid did, what Jesse James did. This was considered just an incredible heist.
And it started with a man named Marshall Ratliff, who was known as a no good troublemaker. He’d robbed banks. He’d gotten in trouble with the law a bunch of times. But it so happened that the governor of Texas in that time period, well, she decided to pardon about 3,500 different people as governor. Many people suspected there was a little corruption going on there. But in any case, whatever the reason, she decided to pardon Marshall Ratliff. But Marshall didn’t want to then enjoy his freedom and do an honest day’s work. And he didn’t just want to rob any bank. He wanted to go back to his hometown and rob the bank there. Only one problem. Everyone would recognize him because it was his hometown. And everyone would recognize him as the no good kid from that town, not even someone who was trying to get his life back in order. They would immediately be suspicious.
So what did he decide to do? He decided to hold off and attempt to rob the bank right around Christmas, wearing a Santa suit. And so that’s what he did. He went into the bank with his compatriots to rob the bank, wearing a Santa suit. And in fact, all the way up until the time they pulled out the guns and started actually robbing the bank, people thought he was just a jolly Santa. The little kid was following him, hoping to get to talk to Santa before suddenly it turned into a bank robbery. Why did he put on the Santa suit? So that people wouldn’t recognize him. And had they recognized him, they would have acted. Now sometimes the lack of recognition causes us to miss someone doing something bad, but sometimes lack of recognition causes us to miss someone doing something good. And in either case, if we need to recognize something and we can’t, well, that’s maybe even worse potentially than a bank robbery. In fact, it is if we don’t recognize what God’s doing.
So what did God do? He came into the world. That’s what we’ve been talking about. And that’s what God was determined to ensure wouldn’t happen. Because God could have appeared in any way he wanted throughout history. We looked at the Israelites earlier today, and he could have appeared to them in different ways. And he certainly didn’t have to. There was no higher power over God that said, you have to come into the world in human form and speak a human language and do all these things. But God did. Why? So we wouldn’t fail to recognize him. Instead of putting on a costume to obscure himself, what did God do? He came into the world, didn’t put on a costume. He actually took on human nature so that we wouldn’t miss what he was doing, that we could truly understand it, that we could be understood by him as well.
We don’t need some abstract philosophy of what we need to make our lives good. There’s lots of those around and there have been for thousands of years. We need someone we can recognize and who recognizes us, who will come into the world. We find that in Jesus. That’s what we’ve been looking at as we’ve been talking about the ultimate Christmas tree and the different roots of Christmas. We looked at the prophetic roots of Christmas. We looked at the human roots of Jesus in the genealogies, the historical roots. It’s not just human and it’s not just prophetic, but it’s actually grounded in real world history. We saw that in Luke. Tonight we need to find out, well, how does that actually do anything? Because if there’s just someone going around in a Santa suit, well, he might mean me good, but he might be trying to rob my bank. He might be bringing gremlins. But Jesus wasn’t. Let’s pray that we can see a little bit more of exactly what he does bring tonight.
Will you join me in prayer? Father, thank you for this evening. We thank you for your word. We thank you for sending your son into the world to guide us and to rescue us. Lord, would you direct us today? Would you help us to understand how you work in this world and in understanding that more fully, that we would receive the comfort and the strength and the encouragement that comes from that. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, we’re going to John chapter one, but we’re not going to do it what you would normally expect, which is start at the beginning. We’re actually going to jump to verse 14 tonight, and I left my clicker over here. Let’s see. Where did I leave my clicker? Well, I was trying to organize, and I organized myself away without it. Sorry about that. Okay. Leo’s just going to be my clicker tonight. Sorry. I’ll get to that during announcements, but we’ve been doing some new technological stuff, and I’m all the more scattered. I’ll save that for later.
But for now, let’s go ahead and look at John chapter one, verse 14. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Ooh, and we have a clicker. Leo’s been demoted from clicker. Sorry, Leo. We’re going to jump now to verse 35. “When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, ‘What do you want?’ They said, ‘Rabbi,’ which means teacher, ‘where are you staying?’ ‘Come,’ he replied, ‘and you will see.’ So they went and saw where he was staying and spent that day with him. It was about the 10th hour.”
Now, jumping in as we did right in the middle of it, that doesn’t really sound all that jarring, but if you remember, and for most of us, I think it’s a very familiar passage, and if it’s not, we’re going to get to it in a moment, so just hold on. But the beginning of John is an incredibly grand opening. It’s maybe some of the most majestic words in all of Scripture. I’ll go ahead and say some of the most majestic words, period, those first few verses of the Gospel of John. But only 14 verses in, John takes us from the lofty heights of heaven and starts to land down on earth. Imagine this helicopter landing down and the dust starts to spew up and it’s just dirty and messy because now we’re coming into human life.
And by a few verses later that we just looked at in the 30s, what do we find? It’s some people trying to figure out who Jesus is, what he’s doing. “Well, where are you staying?” It’s kind of jarring when you think about it. We’ve been talking about the creator who made the heavens and the earth, and who’s this Word, this Son, this light, and who is this in relation to God that we’ve confessed, and how does this all work, and all this grand stuff, and the ultimate battle of good and evil, and suddenly we’re talking about “Where are you staying tonight, Jesus?” John’s first chapter is perhaps the most jarring of the Gospels because when we look at Luke, we’re grounded in history. We’re just cruising along. When we look at Mark, we’re on that snappy high-speed tour. When we’re looking at Matthew, we go, and I mean, it’s the opposite of a high-speed tour. We’re going through a genealogy and going name by name by name to start off.
Why does John bring these two together? Because everything that we’ve been talking about the last few weeks needs to be brought together with the majesty of God. Because it’s one thing if there’s this man who has a clear lineage that we can talk about in history. He had parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents. That’s not a newsflash. But it’s entirely another thing if that one is the same one who’s God. And so John’s going to put the two pieces together, and he could just talk in the lofty heights. Lots of philosophers in the Greco-Roman world talked about gods, and even maybe the God, and the philosophy around that God. They could talk in all these abstract terms about the wonders of the divine mind, but John wants to say, let’s make sure that we don’t lose the fact that Jesus is the man whom we can know. It’s not just some abstract idea, some philosophy.
So he takes us on this crash course and goes into this jarring transformation here that we just picked up in the middle of, and says, “Let me make sure you understand,” and now I’m going to tell you for the rest of the gospel too, about this man whom we actually knew. We walked with. We were around. We had meals with. We were dense and asked him stupid questions. He was there. We were there. We walked for miles until our feet ached, and he was right there with us. We sat in a boat and went fishing with him. We had breakfast with him. He’s a man we can know. John’s going to say, “Well, I guess we’re going to talk about God, but by the way, this God whom I’m talking about, he’s the man whom we can know.”
We need to understand how deeply offensive that was to everybody that heard it. Two thousand years of Christian history, living in a Christian realm, if you’re here in the United States or Mexico or much of Europe, much of Africa, plenty of parts of Asia, it doesn’t sound all that shocking. But if you start to describe this, say, to a Jewish friend or a Muslim friend, they will maybe not be shocked because they know what Christians believe oftentimes, but they’re not going to like it.
Why is it so offensive to them? Because the idea that the God who creates the universe also took on human form seems almost contrary to what we confess, that there’s this giant, ultimate, not even giant—you can’t even quantify him because he created everything—being. And after all the polytheistic religions that tried to make gods that were just big people, what did Israel stand for? That God was bigger than that. So if you were a Jew at the time—there weren’t any Muslims—but if you were a Jew, you said, “John, what are you saying? Any of the disciples, what are you saying?” This is deeply, deeply offensive. We see this over and over during Jesus’s life as he alludes to who he is and what’s going on. The religious leaders always get mad because it’s not heartwarming to see a baby in a manger and talk about how he’s God. It’s blasphemous.
Now, as Jews, many of the more backwoods Romans probably weren’t so troubled by it because they had gods who were basically just big human beings. But the elites, the cultural folks, they didn’t want to hear about this either because the Greeks and the Romans had spent years trying to get a little bit away from this whole worshiping of these big human beings that came down to earth and went on tantrums, which is what you see in a lot of Greek mythology. You know, “I’m mad. I’m going to curse these people. I’m mad; I’ll swallow this boat.” They spent an awful lot of time trying to get away from that and start talking about the mind and the divine mind. Plato, for example—we hear his name tossed around—he was talking about this abstract stuff that we could try to rise to and it would be hard for us, but if we could set our minds to it enough, we could know ideas rather than things and get past this world and its dirty filthiness. Again, the dust rising up off the ground.
The idea that you take reason itself, the creator of reason itself—and that’s what we see. We’ll get to the beginning of John 1 in a moment. And you say, “And he came down into the world in flesh.” I say, “How stupid can you be? We’re trying to get away from that.” As the disciples preach this message, they preach something totally counterintuitive. It’s not the message you put together if you’re trying to impress people. But you know the reason why the backwoods Romans still worshipped their big humans that they pretended were gods? Why the Israelites wanted a golden calf? Why the other peoples didn’t just flock to the religion of Israel when they had their idols that were constantly leading them in defeat against the military of Israel? Why was that? It was because they could understand.
God wasn’t saying, I want to be so far apart from you that you will never understand me, that you can never encounter me. He was saying, “Wait until I actually do it my way. I’ll make sure you can understand me, but don’t try to do it for me. You can’t. You can’t make an idol that you can worship and it’ll represent me. You can’t look at your most annoying neighbor and say, ‘That must be what the gods are like,’ and worship that. But if I want to come down into the world in human form and a human nature and actually dwell with you so you can understand me, yes, I can do that.”
We need to know what we’re looking for. And when we really think about it, our human nature, we do keep chasing off after other things. And God’s saying, “Okay, I’m going to save you. I’m going to save you in a way that real people in real history could encounter this presence of myself, me myself, not some little bit of me, not some holographic projection of me, but actually encounter me so that they could take it to the world in a way that was actually understandable and say, this is where the delivery of salvation is.”
Those of you who are here in person or those of you online but have been here in person, I’m not telling you anything if I say, you know, sometimes our church is a little hard to find. You know, the rent is great. It’s a blessing to have this space. There’s so many happy memories in here and I love how God has used this space. But almost everyone, the first time they try to come here, gets lost. Because for those of you that haven’t been here in person, well, our door is on the back of the building. It’s not an alleyway. There’s an actual parking lot out there and windows and doors and so on. But you come up the street and people look at the address and look over and they see a laundromat and a barber shop at about the spot where their GPS says they should be. And they say, “Oh, I must have missed it.” They keep going or they turn around and go the other way.
Well, a few years ago at Christmas we were getting everything set up up here, all the trees and stuff. And I think I have a bit of an obsession with lights sometimes. And I think I was working—I believe it had something to do with, you know, I’ve been working on that Christmas tree over there in the window. And I used up all the lights. And so I’m looking for more lights. And some lights were going to be delivered. I ordered a delivery of lights that was coming.
And I have clear instructions when I have a delivery to the church because I know it’s hard to find. I said, “We’re on the back of the building and you can deliver it. There’s a Little Hill sign. You can put the delivery right below the sign, right below the window. There’s 335 on the door right next to it.” I thought that was clear enough. But later that day decorating, there wasn’t a delivery out there. But if I looked at my phone, it said that the package had been delivered. So thankfully it was one of those packages where you can see the picture of the delivery. And I pull it up on my phone and I look and I think, clearly in the same building, but it’s not our doorway. It looks dark and it doesn’t look like our doorway. And all of a sudden it dawned on me that the place now was a barbershop right below us, which was at that time empty. And so I walked around, I went down the stairs to the other side of the building. And what do you know? In front of that vacant storefront, there was the delivery.
I thought, well, why’d the person put it there? At the back of the building. I had said the Little Hills logo. And here is what I believe happened because I couldn’t contact the delivery person. We have a Little Hills logo in the back window too. So as people are driving down the street, they can find us. And some flashing lights. Jeff Satterfield and I were just talking about those before the service. I have a light that sometimes strobes a little bit, trying to get people’s attention. But there’s that sign there. And I think the person doing the delivery thought, they can’t possibly mean the back of the building. And I see a Little Hills logo, so it must be there that it needs to go. Because Little Hills logo, door, sort of close numbering. Not quite, but it’s close enough. I’ll go with it. There’s the package.
I think that’s what happened. You know, for a lot of the people that heard about what was happening in the Incarnation, it was sort of like that. Yes, we’ve been wanting a Messiah. We want rescue. We know we need salvation. We know we can’t do it on our own. But let’s try to approximate something human because God says he’s going to do this incredible thing where God and man are one. There’s one God, man who’s going to save the world, and that doesn’t make sense. It can’t possibly be that. But there’s a little bit of the logo on the other side of the building. Maybe I’ll just go there and wait for delivery. Maybe it’ll come there. Not quite right. I know it’s not done quite that. The address is wrong, but it’s close enough, and the other doesn’t make any sense. Guys, pay attention to the directions. If you try to do it yourself, you’re gonna end up in the wrong place. And if I didn’t come in the flesh, that connection that is needed for salvation couldn’t happen. But listen, I’ll tell you where you’re supposed to go. You’ll actually get to relate to me. Encounter me in an understandable way. Don’t go by your imagination. Your imagination is too limited. Don’t go by your reason. Your reason is too limited. Listen to me.
And so he gives us his word. And here in the beginning of John, John has the delivery instructions. And God’s the one doing the delivery. He just wants us to show up at the place he’s going to deliver to. It’s not some vague deity that’s abstract and has prophets that spout off abstract things that can’t really be known. He’s not a God who is so far above us that he could never forgive us, or a God who is so far beyond us that he can never understand what we go through. He’s Jesus. He walked among us. Yes, those of us sitting here today, we didn’t get to walk side-by-side, sandaled-to-sandaled with Jesus, but we can read real human beings who did. And so we can know him. We’ve been talking an awful lot about that, but here, then, John fills in the story.
We’re gonna back up to the beginning of the chapter now, because John’s pulling this together. There’s a reason why there’s that grand prologue that jarringly goes into the mundane, normal human life. Okay, there’s a normal human being we’re talking about, but he’s not also normal. He’s truly human. But Jesus is also the God whom we can know. Verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” Jesus is the God whom we can know. And I think holding these two things, the human, the man whom we can know, and the God whom we can know, together in tension, is exactly why John writes this the way he does, why he was inspired to do that. Because this is hard.
And you might say, “But Tim, you started off talking about how we need something that can be explained, and that God’s not gonna put on a Santa costume and keep us from understanding, so now you’re talking about how this is hard. Did you listen to your own sermon? What in the world are you talking about here?” The reason for that is because the alternative is harder. It doesn’t seem like it. You know, when the delivery person delivered to the backside of the building, well, front side, backside to us, it probably seemed easier than trying to comprehend a really strange description. But you know what? The actual receipt of the package was much harder because I had to go out in the dark on a cold night and search for it and figure out where in the world this package was. And the whole process I described wasn’t what I was thinking initially, so I went down to the other side, I’m looking at the laundromat, I’m peeking in the window, seeing if someone carried it into the laundromat, and finally I realized, no, it’s right there. I finally found it. It was actually much harder.
And when we don’t fully allow ourselves to embrace exactly whom God says he is and how he works, it seems easier, right? We make the golden calf or we decide, you know, there’s no way that God could ever be like us. He couldn’t actually come down like this. I’m just gonna talk about God as an overwhelming divine mind and talk about some wonderful abstract principles and I can impress everyone and it’s really easy because it’s too messy to actually think of a God who would sit down and have dinner with somebody. John says, no, that’s exactly what God’s done. And because of that, we can actually tell you about, not some philosophizing about God, not some wonderful vision, ecstatic vision of God. We can tell you about God as our friend, someone whom we love and care about and know.
And we can talk about not someone who was possessed by God, someone who sounded a lot like God, someone who had a special dose of God’s Spirit, but God himself. Because John says that the Word is the one whom they had dinner with and they stayed with and they lived life with. He also says the Word was the one who was with God in the beginning and was God. Because the overwhelming tendency is, again, to cut back a little on the imagination and say, well, maybe Jesus sort of became God. You know, he wasn’t actually God, but he got a lot of God radiation and he was kind of divinish. And that’s easier to imagine in a way, but it’s not easier when you realize, wait a second, but then I don’t really know how much of him was God and how much wasn’t. I can’t actually say that he understands what it’s like to live a human life, because God still hasn’t. And maybe, just maybe, when I look to Jesus, I’m actually looking at someone in a Santa costume who’s really just gonna rob my bank instead.
But light, the light that came into the world, he’s always been the light. Every single day, from the beginning, the light from the beginning. And this means that God is ultimately known. And that’s why it’s so much better and so much, actually, ultimately easier to know God than any of these ways that we come up with that we say, well, this would be a lot better, God. This would make a whole lot more sense. Because none of them actually allow us to know God, because we can’t comprehend God in himself, in his majesty, in his glory. And what does it mean to even exist before there’s existence? How does that work? We can’t know that, but we can know a human being who actually shows impossibly amazing love to us.
John speaks and goes from that lofty to that mundane, normal, dirty life, John saying Jesus as the Word of God, as the mind of God, as the reason of God, as the creator of the world, as the revealer of whom it is that we worship. We don’t have to look for others to try to come up with some way to understand God. No, he actually revealed it himself. God had come partway to this in the Old Testament. So we think about the Israelites. The painful part about what the Israelites did is God came and was in the camp, right? He manifests himself, the cloud, the pillar of fire. He showed them that he was around. And then he had them build the tabernacle, a temporary portable temple, and he would descend upon it. There’s no mistake as John says that the Word dwelt with them.
He uses the same word that could in, say, the King James English, we might say tabernacled, right? It’s the same as the tabernacle. In other words, a place where God dwelt. And God did. He descended upon that tent and people could look there and see this manifestation of majesty and say, well, we can’t really encounter him. In fact, we’re forbidden from going into the place exactly where that cloud went in that building because we’re told we’ll die. And that would be true. At least we can kind of look over and see that tent and know that he’s around. But you think about it, that’s still really abstract. There’s something out there, but how do we know it? How do we understand him?
God says, well, yes, that’s what I did then as I was preparing. But now I’m going to tabernacle with you in a much fuller way. I’m not going to go in a tent in all my glory. I’m going to come and actually live life with you and go through the whole experience of life with you. I’m going to live a human life. I’m going to experience what a physical body that I’ve made is. And I’m not going to do that sort of possess-this-machine kind of way. I’m actually going to take on a full human nature. And in this incredible mystery that we talk about, and this is lofty and it’s hard, what he’s really saying is, “I love you so much, I’m going to make sure that I actually am known by you.”
It doesn’t mean we can understand everything of God, but we can actually understand him. That we can know that we go through experiences in life and we pray that we’re not praying to God who only in theory understands what we’ve done and experienced the sadnesses, the disappointments, but a God who had friends who didn’t always come through. A God who had crowds that didn’t understand when he was tired and he needed to rest because he was actually going to live as a human being. Jesus as God, God never gets tired, but Jesus in his human nature, that human nature, he had rest. So he made sure he could actually understand.
And that then he could teach us, and that he could do what we couldn’t figure out how to do. Because we couldn’t figure out how to play the game. We couldn’t figure out how to listen to God’s rules. Adam and Eve in the most perfect situation human beings have ever lived in up to this point couldn’t figure out how to just avoid eating the fruit of one tree. But Jesus says, “Well, here, I’ll come into the world. I’ll come into the world, it’s all messed up and everything’s been scattered and tossed to and fro and things are broken, and I’ll go ahead and do it the way it needs to be done for you.”
Years ago, we had a family gathering, and usually the staple family game at family gatherings was always Catchphrase. Fun game, I really like Catchphrase. Anyone play Catchphrase? I love Catchphrase. We have the little electronic one that’s a little disc that you can pass around and it shows the word, right? And so Catchphrase is a lot of fun, but we did it every year, year after year after year. And so at one point, we got inspired. There was this new game, it’s supposed to be an amazing party game. I think it was labeled Game of the Year. We said, “Okay, we’re going to do this one at the Christmas party this year.” And so we get the game and it’s supposed to be a party game, it can’t be that hard, right?
So we open it during the party and pull it out and there’s this massive instruction sheet. And there’s different piles of cards and there’s different designations of positions for the different players in the game. I can’t remember anymore. And the reason I can’t remember what it was called is because we never actually managed to play it. I remember we took turns, our game that night was taking turns reading the instructions and trying to figure the thing out. And none of us did. We tried to get it going, but it just wouldn’t work. One day we had to figure out what the game was and actually figure it out, but it hasn’t happened up to this point.
It struck me though, what people actually can’t—it is possible to play the game. What would have happened if the creator of the game had happened to be there that night and showed up at the knock on the door and said, “Hi, I’m the creator of that game and I understand you’re having some trouble and I don’t want you to spend the whole night playing the game of read the instructions. Let me show you how.” Well, we would have played the game, I’m sure, because someone would have totally understood. “Okay, you sit here and you sit there and here’s how the cards go out and I’ll do it. I’ll do it for you. I will get through this with you.”
The problem with the instructions is they were so abstracted. It’s sort of like, if you don’t actually see any of the movement and how the game is going to play and you’re trying to get like pages and pages of instructions in your head, it’s really kind of hard to stick because you have nothing to attach it to. So I’m going to show you how to play the game. And when we treat God as a series of propositions, of a series of ideas that somehow we’re supposed to follow, you know what? It’s really hard to actually hold on to that and to follow him because it’s like that giant page of instructions. I can’t understand it.
And then there’s some guru or life improvement coach saying it gives a bunch of ideas and we say, “Well, that sounds a lot better, but how do I know I can listen to it? How do I know that that person isn’t a Santa Claus bank robber?” There actually is someone who has something good to say. Well, in God’s plan, he didn’t explain everything out of the gate because he knew we couldn’t absorb it. But over time, the prophets again and again and again echoed a plan. Over and over again, God gave his plan that he was going to bring together history, that he was going to bring together genealogy, that he was going to bring together everything to one point so that the creator would actually knock on the door and say, “Here, let me do this for you. I know you’re not kidding.”
John says, that’s not a hope. That’s not a dream. That’s not something we wish would happen someday. That’s something that happened and we can tell you it actually did happen. And now we can start to share what the game is because we understand it. Now we actually know who can actually do it. And it turns out we will never understand the instructions fully, but we know the one who does. He came and he played. He walked through it with us. He got us through it. There’s something concrete. There’s someone concrete that we can know.
When we come down to what all the different roots for Christmas are, they’re all going together to that one place. Christmas is about an incredibly, incredibly grand gift. Yes, we all know that. But it’s really about the grandest gift, the gift of God making himself knowable to us so we can encounter him in his love. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for not leaving us to struggle on our own, reading the instructions and never getting through it. Instead, you made it so we could understand. You didn’t try to obscure yourself. You made yourself known. And we have a God who doesn’t leave us wondering, but a God who has dwelt with us and a God who will restore us and bring us fully into his presence. Lord, would you help us tonight to hold on to that truth, that promise, and to know in that, indeed, Christmas is the picture of hope indescribable. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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