When carefully made plans fall apart, we can start to wonder whether anyone has both the power and the care to make things right. John 1 takes us back before creation, declaring that the Word was God and then became flesh to dwell among us. What does that mean for the “ifs” we bring to God when life feels beyond repair?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon describes how carefully laid Christmas plans—a pizza dinner, a guest preacher, an in-person service—all unraveled due to illness. When have your own well-intentioned plans fallen apart, and what did that experience reveal about the limits of relying on human strength or control? How does the pastor’s experience illustrate the broader human tendency to think we “have it all under control”?
The pastor notes that some beloved Christmas carols were written by Unitarians who valued Jesus as a moral teacher who improved humanity but denied His full deity. How does focusing only on “peace on earth” as social or ethical progress fall short of the gospel’s claim? Why is Jesus being fully God—not merely a wise teacher or reformer—essential to finding genuine peace in the face of broken plans and a broken world?
John 1:1–3 and 1:14 present Jesus as both fully God (the eternal Word through whom all things were made) and fully human (the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us). Why is holding both truths together essential? In what ways do modern culture—or our own everyday thinking and language—tend to reduce Jesus to something less than fully God, and how might that affect our faith and expectations of Him?
The pastor contrasts a well-meaning but powerless bank brand ambassador with the God who is both all-caring and all-powerful. How does this illustration clarify what we miss if we believe God cares but doubt His power—or believe He is powerful but doubt His concern for our everyday struggles? What comfort does the incarnation specifically add to our understanding of God’s character?
The man in Mark 9 says to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief.” The pastor returns to this verse as an encouragement for those who struggle to fully grasp the mystery of the incarnation. In light of John 1 and the Christmas story, how can we honestly bring both our confidence in God’s power and our genuine doubts or disrupted plans before Him? What does Jesus’ response to that man’s honesty reveal about how God meets us in our uncertainty?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, the last few days have definitely not been quite how we had them all planned here at Little Hills. It’s been crazy. As of Thursday and Friday, I was busy getting the dough ready for our big after-church pizza dinner that we were going to have tonight. We were looking forward—we’ve been looking forward, in fact, for months to having Jason come back and share God’s Word with us again as he was back in town for Christmas. So much that we were excited about sharing tonight.
Really, in some sense, you may not know this if you weren’t involved in the planning, but this night, this final Sunday before Christmas, was where we started planning the entire Christmas season of services here at Little Hills. So we felt like we had a great plan; we were excited about it. Of course, God calls us to take the gifts and abilities and strength that we have and use them. And so we do that, but then we start to think we have it all under control.
Well, Friday evening I started to really suspect I was coming down with some kind of cold or flu or something. I still don’t quite know what I have, but I definitely have something that I don’t want to share with you. So at that point, it seemed like it was time to call off the pizza dinner because I was going to make the pizza for all of you and I didn’t want to give it to you. But the rest of the plan was still coming together, and because of our wonderful church family, everyone was rallying to make sure we’d still have service tonight and we’d have Jason come and share.
That’s where we stood yesterday and where we stood until this morning when Jason wrote to say that he too was now sick and he was not going to be able to preach God’s Word to us tonight. And so then it became a question of, well, now what do we do? It’s been almost impossible, at least for my brain addled with whatever I’m fighting at the moment, to keep track of what’s been happening today. But here we are. We had all these plans, we had backup plans, and now we’re online only, and we’re so thankful that God’s provided us with this technology so we can still gather, but it’s certainly been kind of overwhelming.
And we find that in so many areas of our lives. We think we have everything under control. We think we know where the plans are going. Something we’ve been reminded of over and over again as we look at the gospel account of the Christmas story is that our plans don’t always come together how we would like, and they often leave us kind of scrambling. We need to know where to turn to instead.
Yesterday, as I was reading through the news, I like to read Christianity Today, and they had an interesting column on Christmas carols. It was talking about how many of the Christmas carols that we love and sing every year actually were written by Unitarians, people who deny that Jesus is even God. You might ask, well, why would someone who doesn’t believe that Jesus is God be writing Christmas carols? What it really comes down to, especially when we’re talking about 18th and 19th-century Unitarians and not modern-day ones, is that they didn’t believe that Jesus was God, but they still believed that God had sent him and had brought a change to earth—that something had happened.
So sometimes when we sing, of course, it’s biblical language, so as we confess the truth of the fullness of who Jesus is, that’s what we’re thinking of when we sing it. But when they’d use terms like peace on earth, they were focused primarily on how Jesus had come into the world and changed humanity for the better and brought peace in some sense.
When we think about a song like “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” for example, and how it talks about peace on earth, goodwill to men, that’s straight out of the gospels. Yet the author of that was probably thinking in a much more “Jesus came, taught us some things, and someday that’s going to bring us to a better place” kind of mindset, rather than Jesus came into the world as the Savior of the world, God incarnate, and took away our sin.
You might say, well, Tim, why are you talking about Christmas carols? We were just talking about the changes of plans. What does this have anything to do with a passage of scripture? Here’s where it really struck me today, as I was thinking about this column I’d read yesterday and the way that everything’s been changing over the last few days, and suddenly I’m sharing this message with you online. The problem anytime that we look at even the promise of Jesus being born and the wonder of that but only look at the human side of it—we only look at here’s someone who was deeply devoted to God, rather than understanding the full truth that he is God—we come right back to all the changes of plans we’ve experienced.
Because no matter what a great teacher Jesus would have been, no matter how great a teacher we might have today, if we find different people explaining the Bible to us and explaining good morals to us and whatever else, it still comes down to the fact that in our own strength and our own plans, things fall apart. Whether it’s because of illness, whether it’s because of our own sin, whatever it might be.
The problem for some of those folks who were focusing on peace on earth but not thinking about the transformational nature of the incarnation is why it would happen: the utterly mind-blowing idea that God would come into the world as a human baby. If we’re just thinking of something more superficial, it can’t defeat that brokenness in life. We could learn a lot of great things, but it can’t make everything right.
Oftentimes, I think because of how mind-blowing it is to understand the incarnation, even if we confess everything that we would say is an orthodox set of beliefs about Jesus and about God in general and about the Bible and about Christianity overall, even if we do that in our functioning every day, we struggle with that because it’s so mysterious. God is so far beyond our comprehension.
As we turn to the fourth gospel tonight and look at the gospel of John, what we’re reminded of is just how beyond our comprehension God is. But that isn’t just beyond our comprehension; it’s how much more amazing he is, how much more loving he is, and therefore how much more he can speak into genuine peace on earth, how much more he can genuinely fix our broken plans.
So let’s go ahead and turn to the gospel of John now. John chapter 1, verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and he was in the beginning with God.”
We’re told that this incarnate Son of God, Jesus, was both with God and is God. That gets to the heart of that mystery, and I think that’s why even many of those who write the beloved Christmas carols, even those who often reflect on Jesus, even many Christians who genuinely, if pressed, would say, well, Jesus is God, still struggle with it. Sometimes we catch ourselves in our own language that we’re talking about Jesus. We talked about this last week. We slip into language that somehow minimizes how he is God because it’s so mind-blowingly difficult to wrap our mind around.
What John starts out and wants us to know is he reflects on the time he was with Jesus and the wonder of seeing him minister and everything that John has witnessed. That Jesus wasn’t just a great human teacher. He wasn’t just someone who had more insight into God. He wasn’t someone who had a little bit more of God working in him. He wants us to start to understand explicitly and directly, before we get into anything that Jesus did in his earthly ministry, that Jesus was God, is God, and has dwelt with God.
To wrestle with that mystery that God is one God in three persons—what a mind-blowing thing—and so different from what we find both in Jewish and Gentile conceptions of God or gods in the time period. It’s something that Christians have confessed for two millennia now, but it was so mind-blowing for everybody and in different ways.
If you think about this, and this gospel was written at least in part expecting that Gentiles would be reading it—John seems to be targeting them as part of his audience—they would have had a hard time imagining exactly how this story played out. Because on the one hand, they had no difficulty thinking of a God in human form, even a child of God in human form, because they had all the mythology about deities who basically were super powerful human beings, and then would have children who were also basically super powerful human beings, or half God, half human being, different entities, these sorts of things.
They had those sorts of things they knew, although they knew that they couldn’t count on those people, those gods, because they were just giant human beings. They could be tricked. They could grow weary. They could actually lie. They could do all kinds of things, and so you didn’t know you could necessarily count on them.
In the intellectual class of the Gentiles at the time, they had started to really reject all that mythology and say, well, there must be a deity that’s in control, but this picture that we’ve believed for so many centuries or millennia, we can’t count on them. They’re just big human beings, and they mess up, and they have wars, and they do all this stuff.
As a Gentile reading this starts to read this, John wants to start out by saying, “I’m talking about something different. I’m not talking about a big human being.” One of the things I think we sometimes walk into a dangerous place when someone, say, draws a cartoon of God or something and starts to basically make God—sometimes you’ll see one and God’s sitting at a computer or something with a big white beard and so on—and we’re implying God is just a big human being, but God is so much more.
It made us in his image, but God isn’t confined by who we are. The God who John is talking about—and he’s going to lead us into understanding that what he’s talking about is the same person he knew, the one who did ministry that John was serving alongside of—yet this isn’t just some big, giant, oversized human being, but rather the very one who spoke the universe into creation.
John uses that language that echoes Genesis, so we know unmistakably that this is the God of the universe. He goes on to say in the rest of this prologue that everything that was made was made through him. He wants us to know that he’s talking about one who is all-knowing and all-powerful. He’s not like those pagan deities. He’s not even like our humanization of God that sometimes we do to try to make him more understandable, and he’s certainly not just a great teacher who comes and teaches some things, and if we do enough of them, we’ll experience peace on earth when we hear the bells ring on Christmas Day.
When we hear the bells ring on Christmas Day and there’s peace that ever comes, and we look forward to peace, and we look forward to restoration, it’s because Jesus is so much more than a human being.
I was thinking this past week about a saga that we went through here at Little Hills last Christmas time—actually, this was a year ago yesterday—that our bank account was closed by mistake, and it meant that we had no access to funds to pay the bills of the church, and we had no ability to take donations. It basically just shut everything down right at the end of the year. Through the help of a radio host on our local AM station, KMOX, who saw that I tweeted about it, trying to find anyone that might be able to help because the bank had been just completely useless in trying to correct their mistake and get our account back on, he got me connected with this brand ambassador for the banking company whose job is to make things right, to take a broken situation like that and pull it together and try to fix it for the client.
Here’s something that I realized as this man was trying to help. He wanted to help; he wanted to try to make things right for us, but he didn’t actually have the power to. As much as he wanted to somehow correct things for us, he kept running into problems. First, he was going to get the account back on. Actually, I found myself talking to him on Christmas Eve, and he wanted to get the account back on for us, but he couldn’t because none of the people who had the authority to do that were still in the office—they’d taken the day off.
Then the next week he got it partially back on, but he couldn’t bring it all up and get our balance restored and everything because he didn’t have the authority to do that, and so on and so on. It rolled for months. Finally, someone else was able to pull together enough pieces. What it reminded me of is even if he cared, he didn’t have the power to actually make it right.
What we need to understand with God is that He’s all-knowing and all-powerful, and so when we read this story, God is one who has the power to make whatever you’re struggling with right. Sometimes we’re like the man who approached Jesus asking for healing for his child, and he said, “If you can do this,” and Jesus challenged him, “What do you mean, if?” And the man said, “I believe; help me with my unbelief.” I come back to that verse so often. It’s so encouraging to know that someone can so humbly come before God and just say, “I’m struggling to believe,” and what does Jesus do? He helps that man. He walks with him in his doubt.
But the key thing Jesus wants them to understand first is that there isn’t an if with God. Whatever you’re struggling to work out, whatever you’re struggling to do, if you find yourself even just by accident saying, “God, if you could do this,” the reminder that we’re given here at the beginning of the Gospel of John is there are no ifs with God.
God’s going to do what He wills, and at times He won’t do exactly what we were thinking should be done or do it in the timing that we were hoping for, but it’s not because of an if. It’s not if He can do this. It’s because He knows better. But the thing that we need to know, the thing that we need to hold on to is that He can, He loves us, and He will.
When we come to the second thing that we learn in this prologue, it helps to shore up that caring part, because God could be all-knowing and all-powerful, and yet not all-caring, and He might not care what happens to us. Sometimes those conceptions of God that we heard from those in 18th and 19th-century American culture—and I don’t know if we talk about this quite as much today—but sometimes I think we almost take it as a given is that yeah, God wound up the universe. He has power, but He doesn’t really care that much about us.
Sometimes we slip into that when we’re talking about asking someone to pray for us and we say, “Well, this is really not a very big deal. I hate to even bother God with it.” Here’s what we need to know. God is powerful enough that there’s no if, but He also cares. We see that as we turn to John chapter 1, verse 14.
“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
What are we reminded of here? That God is not only all-powerful, but He actually chose to come into the world to show His glory to us, to become a human being and experience what we experience, so that in His glory, He also has understanding. He knows what it’s like, but He did it right. He did what we couldn’t do so that He could restore us. Jesus would take on our sin while doing what we always should have done.
That’s such a different conception of God than we run into. When we think about the Pharisees, what were they thinking of God? God is someone who has a checklist of things, and He’s going through it, and if you check off all these different boxes, God’s going to love you. If you don’t check off these boxes, He’s going to look down on you. If you don’t have the right status, if you’re not a descendant of Abraham, if you haven’t followed all the laws and all the extensions to the law, etc.
That basically comes down to that same powerful but distant God in a different way. Yeah, they knew that God had a relationship with His people, but did they really understand what that meant? Because a God who is just looking at the quality control checklist and seeing how good we’re fulfilling it doesn’t really sound like He cares all that much. He just wants everything to go smoothly so He doesn’t have to bother with it.
But here’s the anchor point that we get at Christmastime when we reflect on this miracle: God came into the world. Jesus was born because God cares so much He was going to actually come into the mess Himself to make it right.
Have you ever been to a little restaurant that’s family-owned? I’m sure you have. Something that struck me when that happens is what a difference it makes when the owner is there. What a difference it makes when the owner is the one back in the kitchen or waiting the tables, rather than just someone who’s hired.
I’ve been to a number of places like that over the years. If you go on a day where the owner’s there, the food tastes better. You can talk to him or her, and that person will be all excited about the special of the day or what you should order because it’s a favorite recipe passed down by a family member and so on. Then you go there one day and the owner isn’t there. It’s that person’s day off or they’re sick or whatever, and the food doesn’t taste quite as good. Everything is just a little off. You think, well, if this were the only time I’d ever been to this place, I probably wouldn’t come back because it’s missing something.
It makes such a difference when someone is willing to actually come into the mess. I’m sure there are plenty of people over the years that have owned a restaurant and at some point said, “You know, I’m doing pretty well here. I don’t need to dirty myself by being in the kitchen or going and talking to the customers. I’m just going to let the money come in.” I would bet many of those restaurants haven’t made it and certainly don’t last as long as those where the person’s there tending to the people and wanting to make things right.
In that, I think we get a little glimpse of what God is doing because God isn’t just content to say that He made us in His image, now go and put the recipe together and everything will be okay. No, what does He do? He comes into the world and He comes and makes it right Himself. He didn’t just wind up the world and then hope that we’d get the lesson. He didn’t just raise up some human beings that had a God consciousness to them that taught maybe a little bit better and then hope that maybe we would listen to them.
What did He do? He came into the world. The one who on the one hand is far more than we can imagine in the sense that He’s all-powerful and all-knowing and existed from creation and made the very foundations of the world and created time itself. Everything that exists was made by Him.
On the one hand, He’s that God. On the other hand, He’s the God who came and was born in Bethlehem as a human being. The very same God did that because He took all of His power and His glory and He came into the world as a servant that we might be made right, that He would fix the recipe in us when it’s not coming out right.
God is far beyond what we can imagine. Christmas gives us the understanding, the confidence that He understands, that He knows what we’re going through—that when our plans come apart, when we’re sick and our special plans for a special service aren’t happening the way we’d hoped, and our special plans for a special life aren’t coming together the way we hoped, when everything seems to be coming apart—God isn’t asleep at the wheel, and He isn’t off doing something that He thinks is more important. He’s right there with you; He’s right beside you.
This is crucial: He’s not like that brand ambassador that was helping me who had a giant if there—sure He cares, but can He make things right? If you can do this, there isn’t that either. He cares. He’s with us, and He can, and He will make things right. That’s what we know today.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, thank You for loving us and for being with us, for caring for us. When we turn aside, when we mess up Your recipe, You make it all right; You make us right. Would You help us to trust in You all the more at Christmas time, being reminded that You are both the all-powerful God and also the God who didn’t see Himself above coming into the world to make things right for those whom He created—that You love us that much.
Lord, would You be with us? As we reflect on the message of good news and of peace on earth that was proclaimed at Christmas, would You help us to understand why that will be? It isn’t because we’ll get things right enough intellectually in our head. It’s because You love us and that You have taken on our sin, that You’ve given us Your righteousness.
Lord, may we trust in You more each and every day. And it’s in the precious name of the Son, the precious name of our Savior Jesus. Amen.
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