Sunday message · Good News (2020) series
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Message Summary
In the third message of the Good News series, preached during Advent 2020, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to John 1:1–14. When someone he had just met asked him about Clarity Church, he realized that explaining anything meaningful means starting at the beginning. John did the same. Near the end of his gospel, John says he wrote it so that readers would believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and have life in his name (John 20:31). If Jesus is the reason for the season, Phil says, setting our hearts on that good news is the main thing.
Earlier messages in the series showed that the gospel invites us to hope in Jesus’ return and let it reorder our priorities, and that it calls every believer to repentance and humility. This week asks what it means to be about Jesus.
John’s opening lines make clear that Jesus is more than a good teacher. The Word was with God in the beginning and was God, not a created being, and everything was made through him. He is the light shining in the darkness, the light John the Baptist came to point to. The world he made did not recognize him, but to all who received him he gave the right to become children of God. Phil describes the world Jesus entered as full of “disoriented God-seekers”: pagan gods seen as distant, flawed and self-serving, and a Jewish people who had not heard from God for four hundred years and had leaned into rule-keeping. Into that darkness God did more than describe himself. He came to be God with us.
Verse 14 is the center of the message: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the incarnation, God taking on flesh through childbirth so that we could know him, be reconciled to him, be transformed and be empowered to live for him. Before Jesus preached or went to the cross, he was a baby in a feeding trough and a child who grew in wisdom, in stature and in favor with God and people (Luke 2:52). Before he died for sinners, he ate with them and was called their friend. Phil draws on Hugh Halter’s book Flesh: Learning to Be Human Like Jesus to picture Jesus’ ordinary human life, warning that if we see him only as God, we may worship and study him but miss the joy of following his example. Incarnation means Jesus in the world, not against people but with them.
Just as the young Jesus was about his Father’s business, Phil says, gospel-centered living is a call to be about Jesus. He acknowledges that COVID made personal connection hard, but notes that early believers under Nero found ways to follow Jesus through brutal persecution, and that Christians in many parts of the world still face severe persecution even as faith keeps growing worldwide. He closes by asking whether we have forgotten to be about Jesus. Because our citizenship is in heaven, this season can be the moment for the church to stop sulking and be about Jesus in the midst of everything.