“Jesus: God’s Tsunami of Grace”

John 1:1-18

Doug Bixby in “An Honest to God Church: A Pathway to God’s Grace”: … evangelism is anything we say or do that helps another person move one step closer to Jesus”

[and]

In the church, we are not in the business of manufacturing grace. Grace has already been established through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The role of the church, quite simply, is to distribute this grace to others. We are in the business of helping people see and understand how significant God’s grace can be for their lives, their churches, and the world. Churches would become more effective at this if they began thinking of themselves as distribution centers for God’s grace.

John 1:16 (The Message): We live off his generous bounty, gift after gift after gift.

[Prayer]

Let’s put all of the above on the back burner to simmer for a while. While it’s simmering let’s review some basic information of that great mystery that is the Incarnation, that moment when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

· The incarnation was the culmination of God’s revelation to humanity. It is God’s self-disclosure of himself to us in Jesus Christ, who is the tangible revelation of God’s mind, the expression of God’s thoughts, and the revelation of God’s light, will, truth, reality, and holiness.

· The incarnation brings God’s light of life into the world’s darkness.

· This darkness –sin, death, and evil - is hostile God’s to will and all that is good.

· The Light is God’s love revealed in Christ that brings life and makes possible our reconciliation with God.

· The Life is the sharing in the very being of God.

· The Life of God lived and spoken by Christ cannot die.

· The Light of God cannot be extinguished.

· The Light and Life of God are more powerful than darkness and death.

· Jesus really was human, the embodiment of God’s covenant promises to be unfailingly faithful and unceasingly loving and merciful; the embodiment of humanity as it was created to be.

· Jesus is God’s meeting place with humanity.

In Jesus the grace of God revealed to us: gift after gift after gift, grace upon grace, wave after wave of mercy and love. The coming of Christ is a veritable Tsunami of grace, a wave so great that it smashes or overflows every barrier to its existence.

Let’s put all that on the back burner for a minute or so while we consider our response to such overwhelming grace. The Christian life, the lives we are called to live, must be incarnational. Our very lives are to reveal Jesus to others. The Christian life is summed up in Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength [and] love your neighbor as yourself.”

Among my favorite words of blessing are these, “Be gentle with yourself.” In other words show yourself a little grace. If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves we first have to love and accept ourselves. Before we look at others through the eyes of God we must look at ourselves and see not only the person God created us to be, but more importantly the sinful, imperfect person for whom Christ died. Then we can look at others the same way. Overwhelmed by God’s tidal wave of grace we learn how to be gracious to ourselves and others. Saved by the love and mercy of Jesus Christ we learn to share that love and mercy with others.

That brings us back to the words of Doug Bixby, words that remind us that obeying our Lord’s Great Commission to make disciples of all nations involves relating to the people around us in ways that bring them closer to Jesus. We don’t scare people into the Kingdom or shame people into the Kingdom; we love people into the Kingdom by sharing and revealing Christ to them.

The mission of the church is incarnational. The church’s primary reason for being is to make Jesus Christ known in the world. Part and parcel of that is thinking of Grace Presbyterian Church as a distribution center for God’s grace. Grace: not rejection, not condemnation, not coldness, and especially not hatred. Some say that we’re supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner but most of us, maybe all of us, can’t make that differentiation quite so cleanly. In our own sinfulness it is real easy for our hatred of the sin to spill over into hatred of the sinner.

Jesus was the Word made flesh. He was Emmanuel. He was God with us. He revealed the mind, heart, and will of God. He upheld God’s law but had use for neither the self-righteous legalisms nor pious hypocrisies of the Pharisees. To know Jesus is to know God. Jesus loved sinners. He came to seek and save the lost. He ate and drank with sinners, even women of ill-repute. He touched lepers and other ritually unclean people. He healed on the Sabbath.

Again, to know Jesus is to know God. Jesus still loves sinners. If we truly love Jesus, then so will we – we can’t help but. After all, if we are to love others as ourselves, we have to love the sinner that each of us is. To reject, condemn, or hate sinners is to reject, condemn, and hate ourselves. And a sad fact of life is that many people, including many Christians, condemn themselves, beat themselves up, and see themselves as unworthy of love.

I refuse to divide sinful humanity up into different classes of sinners, some supposedly worse than others. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We are all sinners. That makes each of us someone so valuable that God gave up his Son for us. To quote again those familiar words from Philippians 2, … [he] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born into human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

That, my friends, is an act of love, mercy, and grace beyond comprehension. God in the person of Jesus Christ gave up everything for us. In doing so he made it possible for us to love him with the very best of who we are and what we have. He made it possible for us to love others as we love ourselves.

When I speak of self-love I’m not talking about narcissism or socio-pathology. Narcissists and sociopaths may have a whole lot of the wrong kind of self-esteem, but they are incapable of loving anybody. I’m talking about plain old, dirt common, slightly neurotic, normal human beings like you and me. Your run-of-the-mill sinners, so to speak. Somehow, someway we have to believe that God’s grace is meant for us, that in the person of Jesus Christ he has unleashed a tidal wave of grace and directed it toward us. We have to accept the fact that God loves us with a love that will not let us go.

Until we do that we cannot fully experience Jesus, and until we fully experience Jesus we cannot reveal him to others. If we reject, condemn, and hate ourselves odds are that we will reject, condemn, and hate others. We may hide it behind a mask piety and propriety. We may cloak ourselves in the purity of our doctrine or our presumptions of political correctness. We may be able to out Pharisee the Pharisees. We may be rock solid conservatives or the most progressive of all progressives. But until we accept grace we cannot extend grace. If we are unwilling to step out into the light of God’s love we are condemned to suffer in our own self-imposed darkness.

Shifting metaphors, being a Christian means being willing day in and day out to stand before the oncoming Tsunami of God’s grace and let it wash over us, and allow ourselves be lifted up and carried by those immense waves of God’s grace. In order to love him with all of our heart we must experience his grace with all our heart. Then we can love others as we love ourselves.

As this New Year unfolds before us let’s let God love us and allow ourselves to be carried away on the tidal wave of his grace. Let’s be gentle with ourselves as we confess our sins, repent of them, and then let them be washed away by God’s Tsunami of grace. And then let’s be gentle with others as we reveal to them the immeasurable love of Jesus Christ that is in our hearts. Let’s allow this church to live up to its name: Grace. Let’s take this church and turn it into a true distribution center for God’s grace.

And now as we prepare make our way to our Lord’s Table let’s remember that our seats there have already been paid for. In Jesus Christ God has graciously provided them for us. And as we sit at Table with our Lord and one another let us experience in the broken bread and poured out cup God’s Tsunami of Grace. Amen.