Now, I think it can be said without
any successful contradiction that the
holiday or event which has brought more song
to the world than any other is Christmas.
You have heard today, you've heard here tonight,
you have been hearing over the years, what
we might call the melody of the incarnation.
But in this chapter, ten short verses, John
gives us the theology of Christmas.
And there is great danger that we build
song on song song on song, and find
at the end that we have been singing
about our singing.
We must sing theology, or be silent.
And this is the theology of the advent.
I want to notice seven things.
Now, I'll point them out to you.
You may check them in your Bible if
you wish, or keep them in your head.
The first is the wonder of that eternal
life, that which was from the beginning.
I pointed out not too many Sunday nights
ago that this does not begin with a
personal pronoun at all.
It begins with the word that, because he's
not talking about person first.
He's talking about life.
The life was manifest, and that eternal life
which was with the Father was manifested unto
us.
We stand before this wonder as before a
great mountain.
There it is.
We can't explain it.
We can't lift it.
We can't go under it.
We can't move it.
There stands the great mountain of facts, that
eternal life.
And this life was in God, and this
life was God.
And this life is the first great wonder
of this season, that there is somewhere something
we call life.
We have a bit of it in our
minds, and a bit of it in our
bodies, but somewhere there is a great mountain
of life from which the jewel of our
lives was digged.
Somewhere a great fountain of life from which
the tiny trickle of our life flows.
That is the wonder, that eternal life.
Now, let's pin that down.
Let's mark that.
Let's underscore that.
And when the Christmas carols are laid aside
for another year, and the tinsel's taken down,
let's stand and gaze with wondering eyes upon
that eternal life which was with the Father,
and was manifest unto us.
And that's the second wonder, the wonder of
life manifested.
For that is what Jesus did when he
came to the world.
He manifested that.
Not who, not a personal pronoun at first,
but an impersonal something that is beyond personality.
That which is the key to all the
world, that out of which all flow, that
out of which all has come, that eternal
life.
And that eternal life now manifests itself as
a person, and that life was manifested.
And John said, John could say it, we
have seen it, he said, and we bear
witness of it, and we show unto you
that eternal life which was with the Father,
and which was manifest unto us.
And our eyes have seen, and we have
looked upon, and our hands have handled all
that wonder called the word of life.
Now the wonder is that word of life
manifests.
Every time you think of the incarnation, you
should bow your head for a moment.
Every time it comes to your mind, you
should utter a prayer.
You should utter that inward prayer which the
church has learned long, long ago.
The old father named Molinus, who went about
in Spain saying that it's all right to
pray according to your deeds.
He was an old Catholic.
He said, that's all right, pray the way
the church tells you to.
But then in addition to that, I got
a better way to pray.
He said, pray in your heart.
He finally put him in prison for saying
that.
But I recommend it, prison or no prison,
that you learn to pray out of your
heart, and that you learn to remember that
the best prayer is not the formal prayer
somebody else has written.
It is your prayer out of your heart.
If your child came to you and read
the little word, Mama, I love you, I
think you are very kind, and then folded
it back up and put it in her
little coat pocket, and then the next day
came to you again and said, Mama, you
are nice, I love you, that would get
tiresome, I think, after a while, wouldn't it?
Wouldn't your heart hunger for a spontaneous grin
that wasn't in print?
Wouldn't it get hungry for a little pat
that wasn't in print, that nobody else had
thought out?
Wouldn't it get hungry for spontaneity?
I think so.
And so while we pray prayers, I read
an article just recently condemning printed prayers.
How can you condemn printed prayers when the
psalms, 150 psalms, are there printed prayers?
You can't condemn them, but you can only
say that they teach you how to pray,
and you in the spirit of them can
have a spontaneous utterance of prayer.
Well, I got off on that when I
said, every time you think about the wonder
of the incarnation, you ought to send up
a little bit of prayer.
You ought to wake in the night and
pray.
I suppose five out of seven mornings I
wake up and begin to talk to the
Lord before I'm out of bed.
The other two I don't feel well, and
I have to remind myself I ought to
do it and do it, and maybe if
I live a little longer I'll get all
seven of them turned over to the Lord,
so that there'll be seven times and I
won't have to remind myself.
Well, now the third thing is, and this
mystery is here, this wonder, it is found
in the fifth verse.
This, then, is the message which we have
heard of him in declaring to you that
God is light, and in him is no
darkness at all.
Here is the wonder of the nature of
God.
God is light, and in him is no
darkness at all.
Life, this is the wonder of life, and
the scriptures mix up, and don't try to
keep separated light and life.
Light and life to all he brings, risen
with healing in his wings.
When that was written, theology was written, for
life and light are one.
This is that eternal light, and it is
also the light that lighted every man that
cometh into the world.
And I suppose that there's something deeper than
morals here.
A great German theologian, a generation ago, wrote
a book, has written a book, I started
to say, wrote a book which has become
very famous in learned circles, and in that
book he declares that the idea of holiness
goes back of personality.
That you think of the holiness of God
as a strange thing before you think of
the person of God.
I think he's right, I think I'm quite
sure he's right, and he says that the
idea of purity is not the first idea
of holiness.
The first idea that comes to the mind,
or that came to the mind when the
word holy was suggested, was not the word
of being pure, not the thought of being
pure, but the idea of being greater than,
higher than, beyond, other than, different from, lonely
in its self-sufficiency, uncreated substance of life,
that without a pronoun, that without a personal
pronoun, that.
And then, later on, we attribute purity and
holiness to God, so when God says, Be
holy for I am holy, he's talking about
moral purity, he's talking about spiritual cleanness.
But, beyond that, and back of that, and
prior to that, is the solemn, indescribable something
which cannot be put into words that there
exists a nature, a substance in the universe
which is life, and life, and it is
a thing, and it is that, but it
also has personality, and that personality is God.
And the wonder of this chapter here, the
third wonder, is the nature of God.
God is light, God is light, and in
him is no darkness at all.
Now, the church history shows us that nobody,
and this could be said of nobody, except
that eternal life which was manifested and become
flesh.
But, apart from him, nobody from Adam on
down, including David, and Joseph, and all the
rest of the great Old Testament patriarchs and
the New Testament saints, of not one of
them could it be said in him was
life, and no darkness was in him at
all.
But it can be said of God.
Does this mean anything to you that in
this hour of espionage, and of ambassadors going
about hiding facts this day, of slanted news,
and hidden truths, and top-secret conferences in
this day when you can scarcely trust anybody?
Does it mean anything to you that somewhere,
accessible to us now, there is that which
never, never, never sinned?
That which could not, cannot sin.
That which is light, and in it there
is no darkness at all.
I listen sometimes to a program called Night
Desk.
It's just news, only it's fresh news phoned
in or talked in on the radio.
And the other night, that is, I think
Friday night, they had a story about a
gold-plated store in the city, six stories
high, I think it was, or five, and
that suddenly at 8 30 in the evening,
when the customers were all in there, lights
went out.
Went out clear from top to bottom, and
it took them a long time to get
the customers out.
And the reporter said to one of the
girls, a clerk there, tell us about it.
Well, she excitedly told about it, and he
said, uh, was there anything stolen?
She broke out laughing, and she said their
shopping bags started to get full as soon
as the lights went out.
She said that they tumble this, and they
tumble that, whatever they could get, they tumbled
into their shopping bags, and she said they
all went out with their shopping bags full.
Now, those people aren't low down the dregs
of Chicago.
They're citizens of our fair city, an average
cross-section.
That's the way people are.
For that reason, I say you can scarcely
trust anybody unless he's converted, and then you
wait while.
But you can trust God.
If that means anything to you, you can
trust God.
God is light, and in him there is
no darkness at all.
God will never betray you, he'll never let
you down, he'll never lie to you, he'll
never shade a meaning.
You can begin within the beginning, God created
the heaven and the earth, and end in
revelation with even.
So come, Lord Jesus, come quickly, amen, and
you'll not find one shaded sentence, not one
covered paragraph, not one slanted word, not one
effort to deceive, nothing in salesmanship.
That's why I can't take this modern idea
that we're going to sell the gospel.
Go sell the gospel, get the convert's name
on the dotted line, away with you, you
children of the marketplace.
If Jesus were to come, he'd take a
rope and drive all such salesmen out of
the church and start over.
No, no, there's no salesmanship in the gospel,
my brother, none in the bible here.
No effort to persuade, no hiding one fact
in order to accent another one.
Everything in this book is as open as
the sky, as pure as the waters that
flow down from the melting snow yonder, or
the waters that flow from the mountain top,
so that there is pure, clean light, no
darkness at all.
God, you have God, my friends, you have
God.
Somebody said, Russians have the Sputnik, and we
have the soft vaccine.
Very, very, very good.
But we Christians can add one more thing.
We have God, and in God there is
no darkness at all.
Then the fourth wonder here is the terrible
mystery of sin.
We say we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves, and the truth isn't in us.
If we say that we've not sinned, we
make God a liar, and his word is
not in us.
This awful thing we call sin.
Sin, this terrible thing that's been renamed and
reshuffled and is now understood otherwise, but it's
still sin.
You can call cancer by a beautiful name,
but it's still sin.
Maud Smith goes to Hollywood, and they rename
her Lamour something or other, but she's still
Maud Smith, and you can't make her any
better by changing her name.
They called, what was her name, Smith, Mary
Pickford, but she was still Miss Smith.
Well, Mary Pickford and all that crowd, they're
what they are, and a pretty name doesn't
make them any better.
And when you call sin by some other
name, it's still what it was before.
Call a cancer something else, and it kills
its victim.
Call infantile paralysis by the name of poliomyelitis,
and you have a big word, but you
still have a killer and a crippler.
And call sin by some other name, a
complex or something, and it's still sin.
And if we say we have no sin,
we deceive ourselves.
And if we say we have not sinned,
we're calling God, who in whom is light,
and in whom there is no darkness, we're
calling that holy thing, that holy one, that
world-filling mountain of eternal life and light
and purity, we're calling that a lie.
So, this terrible mystery is sin.
It's here.
It's all about us.
It flows around us like the bilge water,
like an overflowing sewer, slimy and smelly and
filled with silk, and it leaks in everywhere,
soaks through, and you scrub and come back
the next day, and it's there again.
Sin is everywhere about us.
That awful mystery, the mystery of iniquity, Jesus
called it, the one of the apostles, the
mystery of iniquity, that's the fourth thing in
this theology of Christmas.
All these things we have, my friends, don't
let's get off on a tangent and be
carried away with the sound of pretty bells.
There's theology, or something sound and hard.
You can come up to it and pound
it, and it doesn't ring hollow.
The world will take any kind of a
crazy thing and put a wreath in front
of it, and a ribbon around it, and
turn it into a Christmas gift, but it's
all hollow.
Everything the world has is hollow.
But you can take this sound doctrine of
that eternal life, and the manifestation of that
eternal life, and the fact of God in
his everlasting, impeccable purity, and the awful fact
of sin.
These are hard, sound bullets, as hard as
cannonballs, and you can't beat them down.
You can't get rid of them if you
try, and you needn't fear them.
They are there.
They're as solid as the rock of ages.
Then there's the fifth one, and that follows
normally the fourth, and that is the wonder
of sin forgiven when confessed.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful
and just to forgive us our sins.
There is the wonder of deliverance from sin.
The church is not yet mature, and so
we're sometimes shocked by seeing Christians lose their
temper, or we're shocked by seeing a Christian
do something that we feel shouldn't have done,
and the reflect on his Christian character.
Well, that ought not to get us down,
brethren.
You don't expect of your children, your growing
children, the same degree of maturity that you
expect of them when they get into their
middle twenties, and I think that God does
possibly not expect of us quite the degree
of perfection that he would expect of us
later, so that we may forgive the church
and certainly forgive each other, and Jesus said
to do that 70 times a day, and
Paul said that if thy brother sins against
you, forgive him.
Forgiving is God.
For Christ's sake, forgive us, so that there's
a margin there, but here we have it.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful
and just to forgive.
Now, there's forgiveness with God that he may
be feared, the psalmist said, and there's forgiveness.
Now, that's a wonder.
That's a wonder that this holy God, in
whom is life and light, and in whom
is no darkness, this one who is inoculate
and impeccable, in whom no shadow of darkness
is found, this one can forgive sins in
his own creatures.
Yes, he can do that, and he does
do that, and don't ask me to explain
how or why.
I don't know.
I know that he does.
The sixth is the wonder of cleansing from
unrighteousness.
Now, it isn't enough to be forgiven.
There must be cleansing, or the work of
God is not complete.
There must be cleansing.
Jesus Christ came not to forgive us only,
but to cleanse us as well as forgive
us.
The best illustration I know is that of
a man condemned to die.
He had been condemned by society as unfit
to live because he took a human life,
say, or betrayed his government, say, and was
guilty of treason.
So, he's sentenced to die, and then some
president or governor, or one able to do,
pardons him, pardons him, and he goes out
into society like these poor boys, brainwashed kids
that came home from Korea.
I haven't a hard word to say about
them.
Mostly, they were ignorant boys who'd been brought
up in poverty.
They had no education.
They'd never been taught what a wonderful country
America was.
They didn't know what democracy was.
They didn't know the distinction between democracy and
totalitarianism, and when they went over there as
kids going out of the woods, they couldn't
take the pressure of the subtle, damnably diabolical
brainwashing techniques of the satanically clever communists.
And so, they said, we'll stay, we'll be
communists.
Now, they're filtering home one at a time,
and apparently the government is going to let
them do it, and say a little to
them, and forgive them.
But, oh, my friends, there's one thing that
no president, no judge, no no governor can
do.
He can't cleanse.
He can't wash them from their brainwash.
He can't take out of their heart the
knowledge that they once did that terrible thing.
Nobody can cleanse anybody else.
Can't reach in and sponge out of their
poor minds the fact that once they sinned
against that starry, spangled flag.
They move around among us, poor fellow that,
in a burst of boyish nonsense, killed a
Japanese woman over there.
He's back home, they say.
Nobody's noticing.
We made a great international business out of
it, and now he's home, and scarcely anybody
knows he's around.
They, as good as exonerated him over there,
save oriental face, they sentenced him, and then
suspended the sentence.
That was to save face.
But, they let him go.
He's gone.
He's home.
He's either been, or will be soon discharged
from the army.
They can't take that out of his heart.
Still there.
He was guilty, even guilty of a foolish
burst of boyish carelessness.
He's still guilty, and he knows it.
He'll remember it when he sleeps at night.
He'll remember it when he stands by a
gravesite, every time he stands by one.
You can't take out of a man what
he's done, even though he's pardoned for doing
it.
But, the scripture says, he's faithful and just
to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse
us.
And, wonder of wonders, that cleansing takes out
the psychology of having sin.
It changes the psychology of having sin.
Heaven will not be filled with a lot
of ex-sinners who can't get over it,
and who are still walking about looking down,
afraid to speak.
He not only forgives the act, but he
cleanses the mind so that there is not
a psychology of sin anymore.
If I had been ever guilty of treason
against my country, and had sold, say, information
to the enemy, and I'd been pardoned by
a president, I still could not look at
my fellow citizens.
When we gathered together, and people were gathered
around, and tried to act natural and relaxed,
and couldn't, and they couldn't look at me,
and I couldn't look at them, I never
could feel right, because I would have the
psychology of a traitor.
And, I would feel that I wasn't fit
to be there, and didn't deserve to be
among them.
And, when anybody mentioned Washington or Lincoln, I'd
suffer inside.
But, the wonder, the sixth wonder here, and
mystery is how God can take a sinner
who knows he's a sinner, knows he's sinned,
and so cleanse him that he loses the
sense of having sinned.
And, he can be as though he had
not.
I've often used another man's phrase here that
I borrowed somewhere from the Middle Ages, but
they used to call it restored moral innocency,
and that is what we have here, restored
moral innocency.
How is that?
Well, it is verse 7, the blood of
Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.
Never forget it, my friends.
The babe in the manger never saved anybody.
Let us not allow ourselves to be fooled
by sentimentality love babies, or even of appreciation
to the eternal Word made flesh.
The babe in the manger cleansed nobody, but
the man on the cross did.
And, it was the blood of Jesus Christ,
one of the great cults, one of the
major cults, I'll tell you which one, Christian
science, one of the great cults.
Now, if anybody here is in that church,
don't come to me and start arguing afterwards.
There's no use, I know about it.
But, they have said, and one of their
great teachers, that is great to them, has
said, the blood of Jesus Christ has no
more power to deliver from sin now than
it had when it flowed in his veins.
Which is to say that the Lamb of
Abel had no more power to open heaven
and bring the hand of God in benediction
upon Abel's head when it was shed than
when the Lamb gambled among the other lambs
in the meadow.
No, no, my brethren, the life is in
the blood, and the mystery is how that
the blood of Jesus Christ shed on a
cross can now come to the heart of
a returning sinner and cleanse him so that
he's free from sin.
Theologians sit down and try to figure how
it is.
How do I care how it ends?
If someone were to come with a bottle
of something, or a ray, or something else,
and say, here, I can cure your cancer,
and someone who withered away to 90 pounds
and was ready to die, take a spoonful
of that in five days, be up and
back at work, I wouldn't protest that I
didn't know how it worked.
I would say I saw it work, so
I don't know how the blood can cleanse.
I only know it cleanses, and I only
know that it will populate heaven yet with
a company of happy people who forgot they
sinned, and yet in their memory they know
they have.
They will sing together about the worthy being,
the Lamb that was slain to redeem us
and wash us from out of all kindreds
and tongues and tribulations.
They'll remember it, but they won't remember it
with a sneaking feeling.
They can look on the face of God,
the scriptures say.
They shall look on his face, and his
name shall be in their forehead.
The sinner can't look on God's face because
he has the psychology of the traitor.
He knows, he knows he can't look on
God.
Adam couldn't look and ran and hid among
the trees of the garden.
Peter couldn't look and ran and cried, Depart
from me, O Lord, I'm an unthin man.
Isaiah couldn't look and fell and said, I'm
undone.
But the ransomed sinner can look, for there's
a wonder of cleansing here.
The blood of Jesus Christ takes away the
sense of sin.
And then in the third verse is the
seventh, and that is that ye may have
fellowship with us.
Truly, our fellowship is with the Father and
with his Son, Jesus Christ, and this is
the wonder of communion.
Communion is more than the Lord's Supper.
It's more than a name given to a
church.
Communion is union, for it couldn't be commune.
There must be union, and there is a
union.
Union of people from everywhere.
If I were to take a poll tonight
in this relatively small congregation of your nationality,
I suppose I'd have 15 nationalities right here.
And if I were to take a poll
of your educational background, I suppose it's scarce
to be a half dozen of you that
had the same.
But yet, in Christ Jesus, we as Christians
have a fellowship.
A fellowship that isn't forced, that isn't strained.
It doesn't depend on our beating the drum,
or wearing badges, or hating anybody.
You know, some people have fellowship, a fellowship
of hate.
They're joined together by their mutual hatred for
something, but you and I are joined together
by our mutual love for somebody.
And so, there is a fellowship, and you
don't have to ask what's your background.
The fellowship that's as wide as the world,
it's the fellowship of saints.
It's the communion of the redeemed.
Truly, our fellowship is with the Father and
with his Son, Jesus Christ.
You know, we stand rather awed in the
presence of angels.
If we get among angels, we'll be rather
awe-stricken.
And we say, we say, what a, how
wonderful angels are.
And that's right, they are.
And they're so much ahead of us now.
They're way ahead of us now.
And they really, I suppose there's a reason
we should think about them with a good
deal of awe.
But you know, there's going to be a
time when they're going to stand at attention
and look at us, because no angel, no
angel was ever redeemed.
God did not redeem angels.
He took not upon him the nature of
angels.
He took upon him the seed of Abraham,
the nature of Abraham, that man.
And how God, that eternal light, and that
light, and that holy one in whom is
no darkness, how he can walk arm in
arm with men who've walked knee-deep in
the slime of sin, whose mouths have been
filled with cursing all the day long, whose
throats have been an open sepulcher, whose thoughts
have only been evil continually, now transformed, and
forgiven, and renewed, and reinstated, and cleansed.
God conveyed a fellowship with them.
I think the angels are going to stand
around in respectful attention and say, we don't
understand it.
I wonder if that's not what Peter meant
when he said of such things angels desire
to look into.
We may be a mystery to them, they're
a mystery to us, but perhaps we'll be
a deeper mystery to them.
So, here we have the theology of Christ.
You take this with you, and when you
take the tree down and run the vacuum
over the needles that's spilled on the floor,
and you put the decorations away for another
year, settle down to just living in the
United States, you still have this hard, and
solid, and big.
You can build on it, and you can
live on it.
It'll be bred mountain high to eat.
It'll be a rock mountain high to build
on.
It'll be a fountain of light to light
you through all this world, and the world
to come.
Thank God for the melody of Christmas, but
thank God more for the theology out of
which that melody sprang.
For all the melody in the world, and
all the lovely dreams of beauty would be
nothing if they had no foundation.
Here's the foundation.
They rest as solid as the holy throne
of God.
You and I can believe them, we dare
believe them, stand on them, and live on
them, and when the time comes, die.
Now, I think it can be said without
any successful contradiction that
the holiday or event which has brought more
song to the world than any other is
Christmas.
You have heard today, you've heard here tonight,
you have been hearing over the years what
we might call the melody of the incarnation.
But in this chapter, ten short verses, John
gives us the theology of Christmas, and there
is great danger that we build song on
song, and song on song, and find at
the end that we have been singing about
our singing.
We must sing theology or be silent, and
this is the theology of the advent.
I want to notice seven things.
I'll point them out to you.
You may check them in your Bible if
you wish, or keep them in your head.
The first is the wonder of that eternal
life, that which was from the beginning.
I pointed out not too many Sunday nights
ago that this does not begin with a
personal pronoun at all.
It begins with the word that, because he's
not talking about person first.
He's talking about life.
The life was manifest, and that eternal life
which was with the Father was manifested unto
us.
We stand before this wonder as before a
great mountain.
There it is.
We can't explain it, we can't lift it,
we can't go under it, we can't move
it.
There it stands, the great mountain of facts,
that eternal life.
And this life was in God, and this
life was God, and this life is the
first great wonder of this season, that there
is somewhere something we call life.
We have a bit of it in our
minds, and a bit of it in our
bodies, but somewhere there is a great mountain
of life.