The Gift Unwrapped

My name is René, I'm one of the pastors here at TLC and I want to invite you to grab your message notes that are tucked inside your bulletins as we continue our Advent series. As you get those out, I just want to give you a quick preview of what's coming up for you here at TLC. In two weeks, we start a brand new series for the new year that we call Habits. This came out of two things. First of all, all of us make New Year's resolutions, or most of us do according to the polls, but what if you knew how to actually make those resolutions stick according to both scripture and the latest scientific evidence?

Also, I have been reading the mega selling new book that's called The Power of Habit. It seems like every other person I know is reading this book. It's great. It is not a religious book, but it has a lot of the latest scientific discoveries about how to change your life and the power of personal disciplines and habits. It's really rich and I've been enamored of how really every single thing it talks about has already been taught centuries before in scripture. And so we're going to look at this. I think you are going to have a great new year.

We all have things in our lives that have been persistent, that we'd like to change, or that we'd like to introduce into our lives, right? Don't give up. You really can change. And we're going to talk about that starting in just a couple of weeks with this Habits series right here. Now let's plunge into this weekend's Advent message. I want to start by showing you something very personal. This is a recent rediscovery for me.

We had a whole bunch of family members over at our house a couple of weeks ago to decorate the tree, to decorate the living room. It was so fun. So I thought that since we had all the generations there to decorate, it would be fun for people to see what Christmas was like when I was a child. So I rummaged around in the attic and in shelves up in closets until I found an old photo album that I haven't looked at in a few years. I blew the dust off of it and cracked it open. I thought, I wonder if there's any Christmas pictures in here.

And I found two pictures from the earliest Christmas I remember. It was just before I turned four years old, sometime long, long, long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth. It's a picture of me. There are two pictures I found of me opening two different gifts. What's remarkable is I remember opening these two Christmas gifts like it was yesterday. I remember opening the box that contained this GI Joe character with lifelike hair and kung fu grip, as they said on the box. Do you remember those?

I can remember everything about this moment that's captured in time here. Honestly, I remember the smell of the box that he came in. I remember the feeling of the bristly lifelike hair. I remember the heavy plastic smell of the boots that once I took them off could never fit back on that GI Joe, and he was a barefoot warrior for all the years that I had him. I loved, loved, loved this next present, my first ever Bible. Now I know you're thinking you must have been destined to be a pastor when you were four years old to love a Bible as a present. But I really, really did love it.

I remember the feel of the zipper that closed it up and the smell of the metal and the leather and the paper that was all mingled together. I remember how I stared for hours at the pictures until I could read better. I don't know if you've noticed, both in this picture and the previous picture, you can see my little sister Heidi is there, and she apparently was focused on a little tea set that she got for Christmas. To me, this picture is evidence that I was a much more godly child than my sister was. I liked the Bible.

But now I do remember unwrapping a few other gifts. I remember this Christmas being excited about unwrapping a gift that was so obviously a basketball, and I was so stoked about it. I was excited, and I unwrapped it, and it was a globe. I had to hide my disappointment. But I ended up loving that globe too. You know what was reinvigorated in my heart when I looked at these two pictures was the thrill of unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning for a child. That sense of discovery and wonder and mystery and excitement. Just thinking back on it brings joy, doesn't it?

What I want to do with you together this morning is unwrap another present. I want to try to recapture some of that sense of wonder and mystery as we unwrap together the very first gift of Christmas. Here's why I want to do this. We can sometimes think, especially kind of veteran Christians and churchgoers, but really anybody in this culture, we can sometimes think, "I have heard it all before. I know everything there is to know about Christmas. There is no more joy or wonder or mystery or awe or discovery for me." Manger, check. Jesus, check. Joseph, check. Mary, check. Shepherds, Wiseman, check, check, check, check. I know it already. There's nothing you can say that's new.

This morning, I want to go way past some of the more familiar things, way past the outer wrapping. I want to peel that back and look at a couple of scriptures that you might not associate with Christmas. They're going to remind you, as we unwrap them, as we explain them, of the wonderful gift that you got when you received Jesus and believed in him. Are you ready for some rediscovery this morning? For some sense of mystery and awe and wonder? Well, let's dig in.

All Advent long, we've been going through the Gospel of John chapter one. Now this is a little bit different. Matthew and Luke, those are two other Gospels, and they also talk about Christmas, the more familiar details, Mary, Joseph, the Wiseman. But John, while he talks about Christmas too, he doesn't mention any of the details that we associate with Christmas. He talks about it from a more cosmic point of view, the light coming into the darkness. We've been going through this since the weekend after Thanksgiving. This morning we get to verse nine, where John starts this way. Let's read these verses out loud together. Let me hear you.

"The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." Now press pause there for just a second. You see, John is saying, "Do you see the irony of that? He created it all, and yet his own did not receive him. We didn't even recognize him as our Creator, as our Lord when he came into the earth, but some did." Then John says this next verse. John 1:12 starts this way. Let's read this out loud together too. Let me hear you.

"Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, dot, dot, dot." In the next three verses, John talks about three layers of the first gift of Christmas that you got. This is stuff you already have if you believe in Jesus and have received him. Yet we let it get so familiar that we forget these things. So let's peel back these layers and really see what John says in the next three verses. This is what you have in the gift of Jesus Christ, and you can jot these down in your notes if you'd like to remember it.

Number one, this gift makes me part of God's family. It makes me part of God's family. God didn't just send Jesus to become a child; he did it so that we could become his children. This is powerful stuff. Look at emotional stuff. Look at John verse 12. "Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name," and here's the first part of the gift, "he gave the right to become," what? Children of God. Children born not of natural descent nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

Deep, deep, deep down, we all long for this. Those pictures I showed you of Christmas have particular poignancy for me when I look at them because less than a month and a half later, my father, who's there in those Christmas pictures, was dead. It was the last Christmas, of course, any of us ever spent with him. In the years since, like a lot of you who've lost parents in childhood, I longed for a father who would never leave. The good news is we have that because of what Jesus Christ did for us at Christmas. He bridged the gap so that we could be adopted into God's family.

Now don't just think about that in terms of the intellectual details. Think about that in terms of what it means to your heart, what it means to your security, what it means to your sense of identity. I want you to watch a home video. This is a real heartwarming moment. A couple of Christmases ago on Christmas morning, Michael and Sarah Perks gave their three foster kids some real good news as they opened the first family gift of Christmas. Now they have three biological children. They've been taking care of these three foster kids that are all related, all siblings. The oldest of the three opens a gift. It's the official adoption papers for himself and his younger siblings. I want you to watch what happens in that special moment.

For you. And you. And you. It's for all three of you. Do you want to stay seated back so I can? Yeah, it's official. Did you hear what the mom said? She said we just got them two days ago, just in time to put them under the tree. Well, you know, Christmas is an adoption story. It's the story of your adoption into God's family. Just like that adoption, it all came through at just the right time.

I want to take you to a couple of related scriptures in the book of Galatians, one of my favorite books of the Bible in chapter four, starting in verse four. Watch this. It says, "But when the what? Right time came. God sent his son, born of a woman, subject to the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own children." Now look at this next. This is so good. "And because we are his children, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, prompting us to call out Abba, father." This is so beautiful because Abba is the Aramaic, which is a dialect of Hebrew equivalent of our English word Papa or daddy.

This is how intimate the relationship is that God wants to have with us. He's saying, "I came that far. I was born of a woman so that I could adopt you as my children, have a relationship with you so that you could call me not your most divine majesty, but Papa." And now you are no longer a slave, but God's own child. Since you are his child, God has made you his heir. This is really interesting. I was talking to a woman last night after the service. She adopted, she and her husband adopted two children this past year. When they went over to Santa Clara County to adopt these kids, the judge made them take vows, and they held up the right hand and they said, he made them repeat after him. He said, "Do you take this child as your lawful heir?" And they had to say, "Yes, we do." It's as if God was taking those vows to the universe. "Do you take this child," meaning you, "as your lawful heir?" And God saying, "Yes, yes, yes, I do."

This is so powerful because in the Roman world, that meant even more than it does now. In those days, your security, your health care, your retirement, they didn't have any social programs like we have here. They didn't have banks or any kind of retirement programs or welfare programs. It was all linked to your family. If you didn't have a family that was connected, if you didn't have a family that was wealthy, if you didn't have a family that could take care of you, you were basically doomed for as long as you lived to be somebody's indentured servant or slave. But once in a while, there was the legal provision for a Roman father to legally adopt somebody into the family. When he legally adopted you into the family, that meant your past was literally erased.

You had not only the father's love, which is huge, but you had all the father's connections, the father's name, the father's estate, the father's wealth, the father's property. It was all legally yours. You had the full rights of sons. John is saying, "God came to earth in Jesus Christ in order to establish that relationship." When we're secure in that, it relaxes us. When we're secure in our identity, we're no longer in chaos trying to find some kind of self-identity, trying to boost our own self-esteem, because we know who we are. We're heirs of the father.

Something else happens inside of us. We want to reach out to others who are lost and lonely children. I don't know if you saw this letter from a little six-year-old boy a couple of months ago. He saw a picture of a boy his age in Syria, who was a refugee, who'd lost both of his parents to the war. This little boy was lost and alone, and a journalist took this boy's picture. He wrote the president, this little six-year-old in America who saw this picture in the news. I want you to listen to him reading the letter that he wrote.

Dear President Obama, Remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria? Can you please go get him and bring him to our home? Park in the driveway or on the streets, and we'll be waiting for you guys with flags, flowers, and blue. We will give him a family, and he will be our brother. Together, my little sister will be collecting butterflies and fireflies for him. In my school, I have a friend from Syria, Omar, and I will introduce him to Omar. We can all play together. We can invite him to birthday parties, and he will teach us another language. Since he won't bring toys and doesn't have toys, Captain will share her big blue strawberry white bike, and I will share my bike, and I will teach him how to ride it. Alex, six years old.

That is one sharp six-year-old boy. But I want you to realize a couple of things with that. Do you understand that God's own son is extending that invitation to you and to all those who are lost and alone? He's saying, "I came to bring you family. You will be in our family, and I will be your brother, and I've been collecting lots of blessings for you." When we realize what we get, that we don't have to strive to earn this any more than a child has to strive to earn an adoption, it's granted us as a gift. Man, then our heart goes out to the others who are lost and alone, literally like this boy for the refugees.

We can argue about what governments should be doing in their government realm for refugees, but certainly as individual followers of Christ, our heart goes out to these refugees, and we do what we can. This is why the church, this church, has been in cooperation with a church in Amman, Jordan that has a huge ministry to refugees from Syria and from Iraq. This is why we do, you know, the prison fellowship angel trees and the Salvation Army angel trees. This is why we support the children's homes in India and Africa. Our heart goes out to those who are lost and alone, and also the grown-ups who are lost and alone right here who need to know Jesus came to bring us into the family and to be their brother, and he's collecting blessings for them to lavish upon them.

It's so powerful when you understand, when you begin to unwrap what we received in that first gift of Christmas, you can feel the emotion behind John's words as he writes John 1, can't you, when he says, "Oh, we got the right to become children," and it just keeps getting better as we keep unwrapping this. The second thing John says is this: "In Jesus Christ, he has revealed to me God's glory. He adopts me into God's family, and he reveals to me God's glory." Now, in case you don't understand where he's coming from, this one's really mind-blowing. I want you to watch this.

The next verse says, John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his," what? "Glory." The what? "The glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father full of grace and truth." Now, what does that mean? We have seen his glory. You will not understand what John, as a Jewish man writing this, is talking about until you understand this reference to the glory of the Lord. This is referencing a lot of places in the Bible, but it goes back all the way back to an amazing story in the very earliest parts of Scripture. In Exodus 33:18, Moses says to God, "I beg you, show me your glory." Now, what do you think is going to happen next? Is it going to be like thunder and lightning and all kinds of shock and awe? What is the glory of God?

What happens next is something amazing because Moses gets to see the core of God. Moses gets to see from God a revelation of what is at the very heart of God. What God himself says is his glory. Here's the historical context. In the chapter right before this in Exodus 32, the Israelites rebel against God. They basically shake their fist at God. He's taking too much time. They set up an idol and start to worship him and degenerate into immorality. Moses has just about had it with these Israelites. He goes to meet with God on Mount Sinai as dramatized here by Charlton Heston. He's like, "God, I have had it with these people, and I'm not too pleased with you either, and I need to get my batteries recharged. So show me your glory, and I don't care if it kills me. I just want to see your majesty." God says something strange. He says, "Well, you can't see me because it'll overload your circuits, but I'll show you kind of my back, kind of the radiance, to give you an idea of my glory."

So what happens next? It says, "Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord, and he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming..." Now again, with the context in mind, what would you expect him to proclaim? Lightning and thunder and, "Thou art a disappointment and thy people are a disappointment, and I shall smite thee." Right? Well, here's what he says. Moses says, "Just show me your glory." God shows up and says, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God. Slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin." I did a whole message on this this summer, but for 60 seconds, just look at the words God uses. This is his glory. Compassionate. The word there means love rooted in a deep bond. He has a deep bond to us. Gracious. And grace means getting something that you didn't deserve. A gift. He's a gift giver.

"Slow to anger." Despite popular misconceptions, God does not have an anger management problem. He's not in a hurry to judge sinners. Isn't that a relief? Abounding in love and faithfulness. Now, think of that just for a minute. God is abounding in love and abounding in faithfulness, and this is huge because you may have had somebody tell you at some point in your life, "I love you." And then they said later, "I don't love you anymore." God is saying, "I will never, ever, ever do that. I abound not only in love, but in faithfulness. It just overflows from me toward you, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving the good people who deserve it, though forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin." I love that. Maintaining his love. He doesn't just kind of drop love like in a little note and then go away. He's constantly, daily, moment by moment, funneling love toward us.

God says, "This is my glory. This is what makes me glorious." When John says, "We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father full of grace and truth," what he's trying to explain is all the ways that Moses heard God describing his glory, we saw that in Jesus in the flesh. In Jesus, who was born in a lowly feeding trough in a barn, he says, "That's where we saw God's glory there because he abounded in so much love toward us that he took this step." We saw it in Jesus who received sinners without condemning them, who said to the woman caught in adultery, "Neither do I condemn you." Now go sin no more, the glory of a God who is gracious.

We saw it in the flesh. Moses heard it described. We saw it. We saw Jesus tortured and spat on and mocked. This man who'd done miracles refused to do them to get back and instead said, "Father, forgive him." We saw God's glory and we saw God's glory on the cross when Jesus gave everything he had to pay for all the guilt of our sins so that nothing could possibly prevent anyone who's willing to have a relationship with a holy God. John's saying, "Moses brushed up against it, but we saw it. We stared at it. We beheld it. We touched it. We experienced it with all our senses." That's what he means when he says in verse 18, "No one's ever seen God, but the one and only son who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father has made him known." He's saying, "You want an explanation of God? You want to know what God is like?" He's saying, "Read what those of us who wrote the Gospels are telling you what Jesus was like." Now, that's pretty awesome.

The Word became flesh, and as we unwrap it, we see that means we get the right to be adopted into God's family, and that means we get to see the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Believe it or not, it even gets better because as we unwrap the last layer for this morning, we're going to get to the very center of it. Number three, the gift of Jesus saturates me in God's grace. I want you to watch this and let it build. Verses 16 and 17, John says, "Out of his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace, for the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." Somebody said that verse has almost infinite possibilities of discussion. There's a book in that verse, but let's just unwrap the core phrase. What does he mean when he says, "Grace upon grace?" Grace means an undeserved blessing, a gift. This literally means in the Greek, "Grace in the place of grace." That's the Greek. Grace just keeps replacing itself. It's overlapping.

Let me give you a mental image. One scholar said it's like the waves. You go down to the beach here in California, you watch the waves, and they just roll on top of each other. They never end. They never stop. That's the way this is framed in the original language, this idea of waves of grace just rolling on us. We are literally engulfed in waves of fresh grace every moment. You don't live on past grace. You don't live on stale grace. You live on grace replacing grace, replacing grace, replacing grace, grace upon grace upon grace, grace like a rolling stream flowing constantly every moment of every hour of your life. No minute, no split second are you ever apart from the satisfying, overwhelming, continuing goodness of God shown through Jesus Christ in grace to sinners like you and sinners like me. Are you not glad that John talks about that truth to you and me? Don't you need fresh grace?

The Bible says in Lamentations 3, I love this verse, "Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed. For His mercies never fail." They are what? New every morning. Never stale grace. Great is your faithfulness. Sometimes you feel like you sin, and maybe God hates me now, or maybe God's going to drop me as an experiment that didn't work. There are no gaps in His grace. He just maintains relentless grace to you wave after wave after wave. So look at what we've unwrapped here. As a believer in Jesus, you've received the right to become part of God's family. You get to see God's glory. You're saturated in God's grace. Man, how do you respond to all that?

Well, how does Moses respond when he sees God's glory? Well, there's only one way to respond. It says when Moses saw this, Moses bowed to the ground at once and worshiped. What other response is appropriate? We're going to do that in just a moment together. But I want to suggest to you all during this week leading up to Christmas weekend that you continue to saturate yourself in this gift, that you keep unwrapping this gift, making it real to you, rediscovering the wonder of it so that when you come back to the Christmas weekend services, man, you are primed to worship.

Next Friday night and Saturday night, multiple beautiful candlelight services, two things. Would you pray for me that my message about the light of the world coming into the darkness would be compelling and would draw people into fellowship and relationship with Jesus? Second, would you please take just a stack of those invite cards? I've been keeping them in my back pocket all week long, and it's amazing the opportunities we've had already in restaurants and at the Santa Cruz Warriors game Friday night just to hand these out to people because it comes up in conversation. What are you guys doing for Christmas? People are looking for a beautiful service to come to on Christmas Eve. Invite your friends, invite your family.

Again, just to clarify, Christmas morning at 11, I'll be here with a completely different message. We'll have completely different music. It'll be a beautiful time, new time, 11 a.m. this Sunday morning since Christmas is on a Sunday. We'll put the services all together. I hope you can make it. But listen, I want to address something before we close. Some of you are going, "That sounds so beautiful, but I don't deserve it." Well, that's why God came to give you the gift. You don't deserve it, but He knows you need it. So He says, "You don't have to earn this. This is my gift to you, and you'll be enjoying this for the rest of your life. Welcome to the family. See my glory. Receive my grace." If you're not sure you have ever received and believed, as John puts it, I just want to give you a chance to settle that issue right now, and you could have the best Christmas of your life this year. Let's pray together. Would you bow your heads and your hearts with me?

Heavenly Father, thank You so much for Your love for us. We confess to You our sins and our distractions, how sometimes we feel overwhelmed by our failures or our anxieties, and we forget how spectacular the gift is, that we receive relentless grace, that we get to see Your glory in Jesus Christ, and that we get to be adopted into Your family. This has all been just given to us. Lord, I pray, first of all, that those who've already received that would keep soaking in that this week, sitting in traffic or listening to the news or trying to find a parking spot or shopping. May we realize there's something beyond all that overwhelms us with its glory. God, I also pray that if there's anybody here this morning who would want to say to You, "I want that in my life. I want to be a follower of Jesus. I don't understand it all, but as much as I do understand it, it sounds beautiful." I pray that they would say, "Lord Jesus, I believe in You, and I receive You into my life. I need You. Thank You for this gift." In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.