Unwrap God’s Christmas Gift to You

Second Sunday after Christmas                                                                  January 5, 2020
Text: John 1:14-18                                         CW 3 Year Series – A                    20:2167
Theme: Unwrap God’s Christmas Gift to You

My wife spends time wrapping Christmas gifts – much more time than I take. She carefully cuts the decorative paper, folds the corners neatly, and makes beautifully colored ribbons and bows. I think that she does not put a present under the tree or into someone’s hands without taking great care in wrapping it. The result? Her gifts look much more beautiful than the ones I wrap.
God wrapped His Christmas present to us very carefully too. Every year I “see” how a poor carpenter from Nazareth took his expecting wife to the town of their ancient ancestors. I “watch” how in a crowded town there was no shelter to be found except in some kind of a stable. I “observe” how in such a lowly setting, surrounded by animals and the smell of hay, her Child was born. I “gaze” upon her, very carefully wrapping her newly born Son in strips of cloth used by poor people for their babies and gently placing him in a cattle’s feed trough for a bed.
Modest baby clothes, a manger crib, a smelly stable, a poor newly-wed couple from Nazareth were the very plain gift wrappings God used. Every Christmas we look at them. But that’s not just what God wants, no more than my wife or family or friends want when they present me with a gift. “Unwrap it!” they urge me. And my gracious God urges the same. He wants me to look at the divine gift in the manger. He wants me to see His own Son, the Christ Child, my Savior, and to know how rich I am because He left all of His heavenly riches behind to come here. “Unwrap My Gift to You,” He urges. “It looks most simple and plain. But…

I. …in it you will find the mystery of the ages.”
John describes the mystery it in our text when he writes: “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us.” This “Word” that took on human flesh is none other than Jesus. When He was born, Joseph gave Him the name Jesus, but God calls that baby He wrapped up and placed in a manger “the Word.”
This has got to be one of the most unusual names given to anyone, and it’s not an easy one to understand. That’s part of the mystery. But we have to try to understand it if we are going to appreciate what it means when it says that His gift to you is “full of
grace and truth.”
It’s not really that hard to understand when we remember that through the words that a person speaks we get to know what the person is thinking. We hear his opinions, we begin to understand his feelings, we hear what he thinks of us, what he will do, and so on. Through words a person communicates important things about himself to others.
So it is that when the Bible calls the little Lord Jesus “The Word,” God wants to tell us that by looking at Jesus and by listening to Him we get to know the thoughts and attitudes of God. Through this Word we get to listen to the heart of God, hear what He is like, and find out what He is thinking about us. Only Jesus communicates that to us.
Think of it this way. If you have an important message to tell a friend, you could write it down on a piece of paper and send it to him through the mail; you could email him; you could text him. But if it’s so important that you want him to sit up and take notice, it would be better if you went to see him yourself. Someone once put it this way: “The best way to communicate one’s good will to others is to wrap it up in a person and send him out.”
In a similar way, yet so infinitely more sublime, that is what the Lord of heaven did that first Christmas. He had a “message” which He wanted to convey to the entire human race. It could only come through Jesus because only Jesus is close to the Father’s side, knows the fullness of His glory in heaven, and can tell us what we need to know. On my own I can’t tell you what God is. I’ve never seen Him; I’ve never stood at His side. But this messenger, called “the Word,” has. He can rightly reveal the things of God to us.
So it was that on that first Christmas, God wrapped up His thoughts in Christ and sent Him to us, not to stay here, but to sojourn (literally: tent) with us for awhile so that He could tell us what we need to know.

II. In it you will find that God has entered our world.
And that which we need to know is that in this gift God has entered our world. This Word is God. John makes that very plain at the very beginning of his Gospel when he writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Then the Evangelist John added to this divine mystery by recalling how another John, John the Baptist, said “This
One coming after me outranks me because He existed before me.’”
When John the Baptist said those words, we don’t know. But the Evangelist John records them because they are very important in revealing this mystery of ages to us. It is captured in a paradox.
A paradox is a seeming contradiction. To say that someone who was born “after me actually existed before me” seems to be a contradiction. That is like saying that my children, born more than 30 years after I was born, actually came before me. How can that be? It’s impossible. I’m in my 60s; they are in their 30’s. How could they possibly exist before me if they were born after I was?
John the Baptist was born at least 6 months before Jesus. But even though Jesus came into our world after John, it is also perfectly true that Jesus came before John if, as the Evangelist writes, “the Word was God.”
I know that we know this, dear friends, and perhaps we take this too much for granted. But don’t ever overlook unwrapping the greatness of that gift God gave to you in the manger. That baby is more than a human being; He is Immanuel – “God with us.” The Bible says that “He is the image of the invisible God…He is before all things…all the fullness of God’s being dwells in Him (Col.1:15f; 2:9). Since all the fullness of God’s being dwells in Him and God is eternal, there is never a time when He did not exist. So, if the Word which took on human flesh is God and existed long before John, He was there before His birth into our world. Many people cannot fathom what or how this can be. It’s a mystery. But the important truth God wants us to “unwrap” in His gift is that the eternal God came to earth and entered our world as a man.
This is huge for it confirms what all the prophecies said. Christmas is more than just a cute story about a baby in a manger. This is about the eternal, immortal God humbly placing Himself in a cattle stall. He didn’t need to do this for Himself. But we needed Him to do it for us.
Ah, I think you unwrapped this truth a long time ago. But never stop being amazed by it. You confess it every Communion Sunday before you receive His body and blood in the Sacrament, when you say: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all thing were made.” Next time you say those words, marvel at the mystery that you are confessing. On Christmas God overrode all kinds of natural laws to enter our world in human form because we needed Him. We needed Him to supply us with His inexhaustible grace.

III. In it you will find grace upon grace.
John writes, “Out of His fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” Now, there’s another challenging phrase. But what God wants you to understand as you unwrap His Gift to you is that through Jesus He gives you an inexhaustible supply of grace – it never runs out – blessing upon blessing. Think of it this way.
Have you ever been to Bennett Springs? When the water bubbles up from the ground, it gushes out continuously, gallon upon gallon. It never stops flowing. You can’t turn a handle and the water shuts off. Down below is an inexhaustible supply.
Could Bennett Springs ever run dry? I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s impossible for the almighty God to run dry of the eternal blessings of His grace in Christ. His forgiveness and life ever gush forth, inexhaustible. In Him you will find grace upon grace.
No matter how much or how often you go back to Him, He’s a gushing fountain of infinite grace and truth. Even if the entire world unwrapped the gift and drew upon it, it would never lose a drop.
And that is the joy of Christmas. It’s the kind of happiness that poverty, pain, sickness, or death cannot take away from you. For when you believe that…
· the mystery of the ages took place when God Himself entered our world through His Son who took on human flesh…
· He entered to tell us the message from God that we need to know and could not know without Him…
· through His life and death for sin He became the reason for our forgiveness and an endless spring of grace that never runs dry…
…when you believe that, then your Christmas is truly happy and the joy it brings will continue for you throughout the year. It will be seen in your face and your life by the way you carry yourself and interact with others. And if people should ask you the source of your endless joy, you tell them that it resides in God’s Christmas Gift to You which you have unwrapped in faith. It is the most beautiful gift ever! God grant it to us all in faith for Jesus’ sake. Amen.