SPEAKER_00: Good morning to you all.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
SPEAKER_00: This is a bit strange, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: Uh thank you for your uh patience.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for those of you who showed up at half past eight to to make things work.
SPEAKER_00: It was all a bit kind of frantic right up to the wire, but we got there, didn't we?
SPEAKER_00: And uh thank you for those of you who have come to celebrate our uh first Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: My name's Mark, I'm one of the leaders here at the church, and uh it is uh a great thing uh to be starting the new academic year in this new uh venue.
SPEAKER_00: If you've got a Bible uh or if you need a paper Bible, you can grab one at the front.
SPEAKER_00: I'll pray, I'll close my eyes, and you can sneak down and sneak back.
SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, or if you've got one on your on your phone, uh turn it up again to to John chapter one.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to be starting that series, as has already been mentioned.
SPEAKER_00: Uh basically, uh, we'll do it in two.
SPEAKER_00: We'll do it up to Christmas.
SPEAKER_00: We'll do a short Advent uh series then and we'll pick it up in the new year, but we'll get uh up to uh the end of chapter six between now and Christmas.
SPEAKER_00: Uh let me pray uh for us as we as we begin.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we do indeed uh need you.
SPEAKER_00: You have been so kind and good and gracious to us as a church family in bringing us uh to this place, in walking with us all these long years, in growing us, in sustaining us.
SPEAKER_00: And we praise you uh this morning, Father.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that as we begin uh this uh this gospel account of the life of the Lord Jesus, uh, that you would help us uh to see him as John sees him, to see him clearly as that majestic eternal one.
SPEAKER_00: I pray for those who perhaps are struggling in their faith or have questions about the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_00: Would this gospel series bring them back uh to those first principles, uh, as it were, to what really matters and the essence of what it is that Christians uh believe?
SPEAKER_00: Uh be with us now by your Holy Spirit, we ask, in the name of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Uh take a moment and just uh think uh about where it is at your happiest.
SPEAKER_00: Can you remember a time that you felt kind of truly uh happy and at peace and at rest uh in the world?
SPEAKER_00: Uh where was that place?
SPEAKER_00: Where is that place?
SPEAKER_00: Uh if you're like Andrew Woodmartin, it's maybe here in this very room uh watching uh watching movies.
SPEAKER_00: Uh what are you doing in your happy place?
SPEAKER_00: Who are you with?
SPEAKER_00: What is that place of of just ah that soul sighing rest when everything seems to be right?
SPEAKER_00: Is there anywhere in your life that you go in order to feel that?
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you get out of the city, you get on your your bike, and you get out into the countryside, and there you feel at rest.
SPEAKER_00: When was the last time you you felt that?
SPEAKER_00: Those times and peoples and places and experiences, those are what enrich our lives, aren't they?
SPEAKER_00: They make us feel uh alive, they make us feel a bit more human.
SPEAKER_00: The hard thing about those is that they're they're fleeting, they pass us by, we have to go back into uh into normal life, our family commitments, our work commitments, all of those, all of those things.
SPEAKER_00: And and we wonder, is there can that sense of full life of uh of abiding rest and peace and oneness, uh, can that can that travel with me into those uh into those other experiences, into those other uh spheres of life, where can I go to to get that?
SPEAKER_00: Christianity is concerned about those sorts of questions.
SPEAKER_00: Christianity is concerned with helping you to answer that place of where do you feel truly at peace, where your life, your flourishing is maximized.
SPEAKER_00: It's a misconception to think that actually Christianity is about uh repression and giving up and abstinence and all of those sorts of rule keeping or faking it, coming in with your painted-on smile and saying, yeah, no, everything's fine.
SPEAKER_00: We all know what fine means.
SPEAKER_00: It means feelings internal, not expressed.
SPEAKER_00: And everybody comes, oh fine.
SPEAKER_00: They think that that is the sum total of Christianity, but that's a misunderstanding.
SPEAKER_00: The book that we are beginning, the book of the account of the life of Jesus, written by John, is concerned with these sorts of questions.
SPEAKER_00: John, for those of you who don't know, John was a close friend of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Not only was he one of the twelve, but there was kind of in the twelve, there was like an inner circle of three of Peter, James, and John who were uh who were particularly friendly with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And and this is his account of the life of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We can be confident that this is John's account, that this isn't some kind of Dan Brown-esque uh later edition from the the second or or third century.
SPEAKER_00: We can be confident that John wrote it and that he wrote it around about 90 AD, so around about uh 55 to 60 years after the uh events.
SPEAKER_00: We can be confident of that because we have the textual manuscripts.
SPEAKER_00: You can go to the Chester Beattie Library here in Dublin, or you can go to uh to the museum in Manchester, and you can see uh fragments of John's gospel from about 60 years after the time that they were written, from about 150 AD or so.
SPEAKER_00: In his letter, so John wrote a gospel, that's what this is, a gospel account, but he also wrote letters, and in his first letter to the church, he talks about what I'm going to tell you is the things that I have heard, the things that I have seen, and the things that I have touched.
SPEAKER_00: He proclaims himself to be an eyewitness to the life of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That that phrase of things heard and seen and touched, that's an ancient way of kind of uh going in and saying, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
SPEAKER_00: That's how you did that in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to tell you by what I heard, what I saw, and what I touched.
SPEAKER_00: John is saying, I can give you a legal disposition that what I'm telling you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
SPEAKER_00: But why did he write this account of the life of Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: We've got three others: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
SPEAKER_00: And John comes in, uh, essentially writing the latest one.
SPEAKER_00: Mark's writing around about 50, 55, and John is using him as a as a source in his writing.
SPEAKER_00: But why does he write so late?
SPEAKER_00: Why does he see fit to write another gospel account?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he tells us, actually.
SPEAKER_00: He tells us, uh, not at the start of the book, but right at the very end.
SPEAKER_00: In John chapter 20, he gives you the purpose for writing.
SPEAKER_00: What do you hear what he says about why he was why it was that he was writing?
SPEAKER_00: He says, now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.
SPEAKER_00: But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
SPEAKER_00: He begins by saying, If I was to kind of write down all the things that Jesus did, there wouldn't be enough paper to contain it all.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not writing an exhaustive history of the life of Jesus, I'm writing a particular history of the life of Jesus with a particular purpose.
SPEAKER_00: And what is that purpose?
SPEAKER_00: That you may have life in his name.
SPEAKER_00: And that that that phrase that word life will come up all the way through the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: It is a mega theme.
SPEAKER_00: It's the word Zoe, where you get the girl's name Zoe from the word life.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to know life by knowing this Jesus that he's going to tell you about.
SPEAKER_00: That might sound strange uh to your ears, but it's a case that John's gonna be making over the next weeks and months that we uh study this book.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to know that if you want to find that place of true peace, satisfaction, uh, to truly have life, that you don't so much go to a place, but you come to a person.
SPEAKER_00: Today we're just gonna uh look a little while at the first five verses.
SPEAKER_00: We'll do the the whole prologue, which is verses 1 to 18 next Sunday, but we're just gonna zoom in on the first five verses of how he introduces his gospel because it's different, right?
SPEAKER_00: Where's the where's the shepherds?
SPEAKER_00: Where's the where's Bethlehem and uh and angels uh singing and wise men coming from the from the east?
SPEAKER_00: There's none of that here.
SPEAKER_00: You think about it this way, Matthew, Mark, and Luke almost kind of build their gospel from the from the ground up.
SPEAKER_00: John builds his gospel from heaven down.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew, Mark, and Luke start in time and space and then make the case of who Jesus is.
SPEAKER_00: John starts definitely, he starts in eternity and he starts in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: He starts there with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And so he begins, the opening words, in the beginning was the word.
SPEAKER_00: We all, I'm sure, have some sort of mental image of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If I just ask you to close your eyes for a second and uh and say, think of think of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You kind of get him in your mind's eye there.
SPEAKER_00: Uh he's the he's the fourth member of the Bee Gees.
SPEAKER_00: Uh he's there, he's got his his long flowing hair.
SPEAKER_00: It might be blonde, he might be a brunette, who knows?
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but he's quite tall, uh, he's quite serene looking, looking like the kind of guy that you know would give a lamb a good cuddle uh and be quite gentle.
SPEAKER_00: He's a he's a white Anglo-Saxon uh Protestant.
SPEAKER_00: Uh you might uh or you might, uh if you're particularly cultured, have in your mind's eye uh, you know, a uh a painting, a renaissance painting, or or you might think of a sculpture uh like the like the Pieta where he's there kind of draped on the arms of his mother.
SPEAKER_00: You might have that image in your in your mind.
SPEAKER_00: Uh the thing that uh we need to know from reading the start of the of John's gospel, they're all inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: They're all inadequate images, none of them live up to the reality.
SPEAKER_00: He begins with the words in the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: What that means is that no matter how far back you go, whatever your understanding is of how we got here, and I'm sure there are a multiplicity of understandings in this in this room, no matter what your concept of origin is, when you go right back to that origin point, he's there.
SPEAKER_00: That's what John's saying.
SPEAKER_00: Whatever your theory, he's there in the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the word.
SPEAKER_00: Who is Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he is the uncreated creator.
SPEAKER_00: You know, people often kind of they throw out the question, well, if God made everything, then then who made God?
SPEAKER_00: Well, then who made the thing that that made God?
SPEAKER_00: Or who made the God that made the God that made the God?
SPEAKER_00: And you kind of get this infinite regression.
SPEAKER_00: Some people like to throw that out as an objection to belief in God or to the idea of Christianity.
SPEAKER_00: That's an objection that was kind of answered long before Jesus ever came on the scene.
SPEAKER_00: It was answered by uh by Aristotle.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and he talked about how actually, when you go right back to the start of everything, what you need in order to kind of make sense of the rational universe that is around us is you need a you need a first mover who isn't himself moved.
SPEAKER_00: Or he talks about an uncreated creator or an unmoved mover who gets everything going.
SPEAKER_00: And what John is saying is that's Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He is first principles.
SPEAKER_00: He takes us further into that thinking when he describes him as the word.
SPEAKER_00: John calls Jesus the pre-existent word.
SPEAKER_00: In the original, this is the uh this is the word logos.
SPEAKER_00: He is the logos.
SPEAKER_00: The logos was a was a loaded phrase in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: It meant it meant a number of different things.
SPEAKER_00: Let me run through kind of what they mean because it also kind of resonates with where people tend to come from today.
SPEAKER_00: For some people in the ancient world, the the logos was the rationality that underpinned all other reason.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're a scientific, rational person, if that's your disposition, if that's your your bent, then for you the logos is the bedrock of that, the bedrock of all reason and your ability to think.
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's like the logos is the yardstick that makes reason reasonable.
SPEAKER_00: Like how do you judge that you are being rational?
SPEAKER_00: And what the Greeks understood was that the logos was that, he was fundamental reality.
SPEAKER_00: For others, who perhaps were more mystical in their thinking, who who thought a lot about uh the the essence of your your consciousness or your soul, for them, the logos was that divine spark that lived in everyone.
SPEAKER_00: It was your consciousness.
SPEAKER_00: You think about you think about it for a second, it begins to kind of cook your brain of what does it mean for you to be a conscious being?
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean for you to be aware of your surroundings and aware that you're here this morning?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the ancient philosophers thought, well, it's the the logos, is that divine spark.
SPEAKER_00: For those who had a biblical background, it would have been the uh the Jews in the ancient world, they would have had in their minds something else.
SPEAKER_00: They would have heard these words in the beginning was the word, and their minds, perhaps in your minds as well, went immediately back to where?
SPEAKER_00: To Genesis 1.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, God created the heavens of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And how did God do it back in Genesis 1?
SPEAKER_00: How did God create the heavens and the earth?
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Let there be light, God speaks, and creation comes into existence.
SPEAKER_00: But John says, in the beginning was the word.
SPEAKER_00: Or their minds might have gone back to somewhere like Psalm 33.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 33, verse 6 perhaps puts more, even more of a finger on it when it says, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, their starry hosts by the breath of his mouth.
SPEAKER_00: The word in in biblical thought, in Jewish Old Testament thought, is the creative agent that brings about everything that is around you, everything that you see in this room.
SPEAKER_00: For John, uh the the logos is something that connects with with each of those.
SPEAKER_00: That as they uh that as the the Greek sat down and read his account, I thought, oh, this he's telling us about fundamental realities.
SPEAKER_00: He's telling us about that that divine spark, that consciousness.
SPEAKER_00: As the Jew reads it, he's he's taking us right back into those first principles of of biblical theology and of what God has done.
SPEAKER_00: The logos in John's mind is fundamental reality, it is the thing that gives your soul its meaning, and it is the agent of God in creation.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the surprising thing.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the new thing that John brings to the table.
SPEAKER_00: The logos is not a force, it's not an idea, it's not a philosophy, it's not an energy, it's a person.
SPEAKER_00: It's not an it.
SPEAKER_00: It's a he.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the word.
SPEAKER_00: He goes on, verse one.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
SPEAKER_00: You see the emphasis in verse two, he, not it.
SPEAKER_00: He was in the beginning with God.
SPEAKER_00: Here we see the the personality of the word, not so much, not personality in the sense of, oh, he's quite extroverted, you know, good sense of humor.
SPEAKER_00: No, personality in terms of his personhood, that he's not a a force or an energy.
SPEAKER_00: He was with God.
SPEAKER_00: This this phrase with uh means means to be face to face with, towards, in relationship with, that's what it means.
SPEAKER_00: Uh to me uh to be facing, looking at God.
SPEAKER_00: What this means is that the word is himself a distinct person from God the Father, but in eternal relationship with him.
SPEAKER_00: There was no time when there wasn't the word.
SPEAKER_00: The word was there in eternity.
SPEAKER_00: It's over and against our uh our friends in uh who who are Jehovah's Witnesses, who would say, no, no, actually, actually, Jesus is the first created thing.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what this is telling us.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying that the word, who became flesh and who we know is the person Jesus Christ, was in eternal relationship with the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And he goes on and says, And the word was God.
SPEAKER_00: Not simply that the the word was himself divine and distinct from God, maybe a demigod or another god from somewhere else.
SPEAKER_00: There's a very there's a very particular word if you were to write this.
SPEAKER_00: If you want to just say that he was generally divine, that's not the word that John uses.
SPEAKER_00: That's the word theos, but he doesn't use that word, he uses the word theos, saying that he was God, that he shared in that divine essence that God the Father has.
SPEAKER_00: So the word is a distinct person from the Father, sharing in the nature of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: It's quite technical, so let's just try and land the plane here and to work out why any of that matters.
SPEAKER_00: Well, to the to the atheist who's skeptical about the existence of God, John is saying that what underpins your rationality, your ability to think, is the God who is absolute reality, who gave you your brain and your rational functions.
SPEAKER_00: He is the one who helps to, who he is himself the yardstick of your reason.
SPEAKER_00: Moreover, he is saying to us that us who search for the other, for experiences of the transcendent, those things that we long for.
SPEAKER_00: John's saying, don't search for an don't search for an it, don't search for an experience, search for a he.
SPEAKER_00: John is saying that God is not simply absolute and uh and and sovereign and separate and transcendent and removed, but that he is personal, knowable.
SPEAKER_00: So we'll see more of next week that he's made himself known.
SPEAKER_00: That is what the word has done.
SPEAKER_00: The word has come as the ultimate self-disclosure of who God is.
SPEAKER_00: Some people like to talk about the uh the illustration uh when they're kind of comparing world religions, this idea of uh of uh of God's elephant.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know the this this image where or this story that is told that there are blind men all kind of feeling at an elephant, and there's the uh there's a king who sees the whole picture and uh and he sees that it's an elephant, but there's these blind men and they're grouping at it, and and somebody says, Oh, it's it's like a it's like a large leaf.
SPEAKER_00: I'm uh this is a large leaf feeling at his ear, and so it's no, it's a Snake, and he's at the business end of the elephant, you know, he's got the tail, right?
SPEAKER_00: Um you don't want to be the blind guy down there, and other people are going, no, it's a tree, and he's hugging onto the leg.
SPEAKER_00: And people think that that's what world religions are like, that we're all just kind of feeling and groping the same elephant.
SPEAKER_00: It's a weird way to think about divine religions, but here's the difference with Christianity, and here's what explodes that whole analogy.
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that explodes that whole analogy is that the elephant spoke.
SPEAKER_00: God has disclosed himself.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine, instead, you got those blind guys, and they're all kind of feeling the ear and the tail in the trunk, and the elephant goes, I'm an elephant, stop me in my tail, I'm an elephant.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine if the blind guys are like, Oh, no, no, no, it's uh it's a it's definitely a snake.
SPEAKER_00: I'm an elephant, you're tugging on my tail.
SPEAKER_00: That's what God has done in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That is what God has done in the Word.
SPEAKER_00: He has disclosed Himself to us, He has revealed Himself, He has made Himself knowable.
SPEAKER_00: What did the Word do?
SPEAKER_00: Carrying on verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that has been made.
SPEAKER_00: In Genesis, God spoke creation into being.
SPEAKER_00: That's why in the in Narnia, Aslan sings creation into being.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's also if you uh uh are a student of the Silmarillion, uh Luviatar sings Middle Earth into being.
SPEAKER_00: Uh first Sunday here, we need to have a kind of Lord of the Rings Middle Earth reference.
SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we have saddled in, we've arrived.
SPEAKER_00: Good.
SPEAKER_00: God spoke creation into being.
SPEAKER_00: Now John is telling us that the word is that personal agent of creation, the Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Paul says in Colossians that everything was made by Jesus and for Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Without him was not anything made that has been made.
SPEAKER_00: You think about that for a second.
SPEAKER_00: How marvelous and remarkable that is.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew, Mark, and Luke talk about narrative stories.
SPEAKER_00: Particularly Matthew and Luke go into detail about Bethlehem, and Matthew talks about the uh the star of Bethem, and Luke talks about the star of Bethlehem guiding the wise men.
SPEAKER_00: You know what John's telling you?
SPEAKER_00: John's telling you that Jesus made the star that shone over the place of his birth.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus made the star.
SPEAKER_00: He spoke it into existence.
SPEAKER_00: That shone over the place of his birth.
SPEAKER_00: He has made every subatomic particle.
SPEAKER_00: He has made the crab nebula.
SPEAKER_00: He has made you.
SPEAKER_00: He has made me.
SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
SPEAKER_00: You are a created person, created not just by your parents, but created by him in a fundamental sense.
SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean for your life?
SPEAKER_00: Well it means it means lots of things, but one of the things that it means is it means that you belong.
SPEAKER_00: You're made by a person who knows you.
SPEAKER_00: You belong.
SPEAKER_00: You belong to him.
SPEAKER_00: You belong with him.
SPEAKER_00: What is your life?
SPEAKER_00: It is his.
SPEAKER_00: And it comes from him.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe one of the things that will happen in the course of this series is that you will really get to know the Jesus to whom you belong.
SPEAKER_00: In whose image you were made.
SPEAKER_00: And what did the word bring?
SPEAKER_00: We're nearly finished.
SPEAKER_00: It might not always be this way.
SPEAKER_00: But first Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: We'll ease our way in.
SPEAKER_00: In him, verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: In him was life.
SPEAKER_00: And the life was the light of men.
SPEAKER_00: The light shines in the darkness.
SPEAKER_00: And the darkness has not overcome it.
SPEAKER_00: I changed my mind on what this means this week.
SPEAKER_00: That's quite exciting.
SPEAKER_00: I think I always read it as it's the it's the it's the light of salvation that has come.
SPEAKER_00: It's the the life, the resurrection life of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it means that.
SPEAKER_00: I think certainly that's picked up in uh in other parts of John's Gospel and becomes bigger and bigger in the course of John's Gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm happy for you to disagree with me, but I'm going to make a case that it means something else.
SPEAKER_00: I think that John is so steeped in creation in Genesis 1.
SPEAKER_00: That it means something else.
SPEAKER_00: It means something like that this is the in him was the light of creation shining in each human conscience.
SPEAKER_00: The divine light, the divine life that God has placed in you and I that longs for eternal things.
SPEAKER_00: That's the light and the life that was that was in him, it's been given to us.
SPEAKER_00: Because that was it was the light of men, it's the light of illumination, of conscience, of reason, of morality, that that light has shone on us.
SPEAKER_00: And what does he mean by the darkness has not overcome it?
SPEAKER_00: It means that ever since our first parents rebelled in Genesis 3, though it has been, though our conscience, our morality, our image barreness has been marred and broken and twisted and distorted, it has not been overcome, it has not been obliterated, that there is still something in each of us that longs and yearns for eternity and transcendence.
SPEAKER_00: And what John is saying is that the word has come into the world that will call that part of you out, that will summon that part of you.
SPEAKER_00: And those of you who come to faith in the Lord, you will find that compelling, and you will find that that life, that light is fired, that those embers, though they they grow dim because of sin, they begin to flicker and to flame.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's what it means.
SPEAKER_00: The light that shines in the darkness, the darkness in John's gospel is a moral term, it's not just nighttime.
SPEAKER_00: Darkness is not just the absence of light, it is positive evil in John's gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And he's saying that even though the darkness has pervaded across our world, still that light shines, and it has not been overcome, and it will not be overcome.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus comes to fully make it known.
SPEAKER_00: We know that at some deep experiential level that we have these longings and these desires that cannot be met by anything in this world.
SPEAKER_00: C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis said it like this.
SPEAKER_00: He said that he has concluded that I feel if I feel in my heart longings that nothing in this world can satisfy, I must conclude that I am made for another world.
SPEAKER_00: The light that shines on men and in men and women's hearts has come into the world.
SPEAKER_00: It is telling us that God did not abandon humanity in Genesis 3.
SPEAKER_00: Though he had every right to, he could have snuffed out our light, started again, but he didn't in his grace and his goodness.
SPEAKER_00: He persevered with us.
SPEAKER_00: We are still image bearers, even in our sin.
SPEAKER_00: We're like myrrhers that have been cracked.
SPEAKER_00: We reflect something of what it means to be an image bearer of God.
SPEAKER_00: We reflect something of what it means to be human, but it is distorted.
SPEAKER_00: The image doesn't look right.
SPEAKER_00: The light, the word has been made flesh as that perfect image bearer, and to restore our image-bearedness.
SPEAKER_00: God has not human abandoned humanity, he has not abandoned you.
SPEAKER_00: He has left the flickering embers of his life, his light, in your heart.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus has come to fire that flame and to renew your life in the light of his glory and his grace.
SPEAKER_00: Where are you happiest?
SPEAKER_00: Where do you go to feel truly at peace and at rest?
SPEAKER_00: The answer that Christianity gives is that we find it most fully not in a place, not in a thing, not in a experience, but in a person.
SPEAKER_00: And that in coming to Him we find that we ourselves become more truly human.
SPEAKER_00: I'm excited.
SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to journey with you in this place.
SPEAKER_00: I'm excited for restrictions lifting tomorrow that'll allow more people in here.
SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to journey through this gospel with you.
SPEAKER_00: May we know the life that the Lord Jesus has brought to the world for us.
SPEAKER_00: That's my prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus, we praise you that you have come into the world, bringing life and immortality to light through the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And we thank you that you are that pre-existent one to whom we belong and in whom we find life.
SPEAKER_00: Help us by your grace to live into that life.
SPEAKER_00: To be those lights.
SPEAKER_00: That city on a hill shining so that others might be drawn to it.
SPEAKER_00: We praise you for your grace to us.
SPEAKER_00: And we pray that in our lives, in our world, that the darkness would continue to be pushed back and that the light of your kingdom would shine all the brighter.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.