At the turn of the millennium, people are looking back to the great events of the twentieth century: the amazing journeys people have made, including this past week when for the first time in history, a woman made a solo rowboat crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Or in the 1980s when students walked courageously across Tienanmen Square in Beijing and stood alone against a phalanx of People's Republic of China tanks and stopped for a moment what was the world watched. Or in the 1970s when hundreds of thousands of Americans made the journey across the Pacific Ocean to the controversial conflict in Vietnam. Or in the 1960s when President John Kennedy traveled to Dallas, Texas, and went for a ride in an open, black Lincoln Continental and was assassinated. It changed the course of American history. Or the 1950s when Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger and launched the Civil Rights movement. These were some of the journeys that changed human history.

But the greatest journey of all was the Christmas journey, the journey from heaven to earth, from there to Bethlehem. We know the story well in its earthly version, about Mary and Joseph and angels and shepherds. We know it so well that some of us can recite it by heart. But this morning, I read to you the same Christmas story, not the earthly version but the heavenly version. It comes from the Gospel of John 1, and it begins like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. [And in verse 14:] The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Father full of grace and truth.

There you have it. That is the God' view of Christmas describing the most amazing journey ever amazing that there have been thousands of people over the last two millennia who have simply said they cannot believe it. It is too good to be true. It was the Christmas journey, the journey from heaven to earth.

Jesus journeyed from heaven to earth.

It says, "In the beginning was the Word." "Word" is a nickname for the Son of God. It is the Greek term logos, and it refers to the Son of God, who as the Word lived forever in heaven. To be accurate, we need to say that the Son of God as the Word designed heaven. He created it. He built heaven. John 1:3 says that "through him all things were made" "Without him nothing was made that has been made." So heaven was his home. He owned it. It was his perfect place, a place of satisfaction with the best of everything, more magnificent than all the stars on a cloudless night, more magnificent than the most beautiful sunrise or sunset you have ever seen or the most beautiful music you have ever heard, happier than the happiest days that any of us have experienced in all of life. That was home for him.

But the Christmas journey brought him from there to here. "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." He moved to our world. He was born to one of our women, in one of our stables, in one of our villages, in one of our countries, right here on our earth. It's hard to imagine the contrast between heaven and earth.

Several years ago I was visiting Manila in the Philippines and was taken, of all places, to the Manila garbage dump and saw something I have never seen anywhere. On the dump in Manila there are tens of thousands of people who make their homes. Shacks are constructed out of the things other people have thrown away, and their children are sent out early every morning to scavenge for food out of other people's garbage, so they can have family meals. People have been born and grown up there on the garbage dump. They have had their families, their children, their shacks, their garbage to eat, finished out their lives, and died there without ever going any place else, even in the city of Manila. It is an astonishing thing.

What caught my attention as much, if not more, is that there are Americans who also live on the garbage dump. They are American missionaries, Christians who have chosen to leave this country and go there to communicate the love of Jesus Christ to people who otherwise would never hear it or receive it. That is amazing to me. People would leave what we have to go and live on a garbage dump. Amazing, but not as amazing as the journey from heaven to earth.

The Son of God made that journey, and he knew what he was doing. He knew where he was going. He knew what the sacrifice would be. He journeyed from heaven to earth on a mission to save the human race. For the earth and humanity he had created had gone terribly wrong. Sin had turned us against God and polluted our earth, [once] full of paradise to what sin has left it to become. I think if God had a consultant who was a modern business person, probably the advice would be to cut his losses and forget about this human race and start over someplace else. Except God so loved the world and us in it that he sent his One and Only Son from heaven to earth.

Jesus journeyed from eternity to time.

It was a journey, a grand journey, but not only from heaven to earth but also from eternity to time. For this heavenly telling of the Christmas story says that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." When? When was the beginning? Go back as far as you can possibly imagine. Can you imagine 2,000 years ago or 10,000 or how about ten million or a billion years ago or a trillion or a billion trillion years ago? No matter how far in our wildest imagination any of us can go back in time, the beginning was before that.

In the beginning the Word was. He already lived and existed because he never began. And then he started this journey from eternity to time. He came to our calendars, to our clocks, to our way of thinking and organizing schedules. He counted birthdays and spoke of the days of the week and lived in terms of bedtime and time and work days and days off, and he must have felt terribly closed Son of God who had forever ago lived in all of the expanses of an untimed eternity. He must have felt caged by the clock.

When he came into time, he fit into our schedules. He became part of our history. He came, in fact, at exactly the right time. Even those who are not believers will say that it was the best of times for the gospel of Jesus Christ to be disseminated across the western world and beyond. Pax Romana, the Roman peace, had brought nations under the rule of a single emperor. People could travel on the Roman roads. There was a common language. But even those outside the Roman Empire saw a star that moved across the sky from the east, and they too came. It was the very best of times for the Son to come.

But he came not only from eternity to time. He came, in a sense, to reset the clocks of time. Once our calendars were calculated by the reign of kings or queens. For example, a year could be called "Tenth Year of the Reign of a certain emperor." But that is no longer true. Today calendars of the world are set in terms of the coming of the Son of God.

Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and must set their calendars and clocks by the coming of the Son of God from eternity to time.

And I suspect what is true on earth is equally true in heaven. For while heaven may in the past have not had calendars and clocks as we think of them, even heaven must be reset in terms of the coming of the Son from heaven to earth, from eternity to time. Our calendars and clocks are now synchronized so that heaven is connected to earth and earth is forever connected to heaven. Our time has changed heaven and eternity by the coming of the Son.

Jesus journeyed to spirit and body.

But perhaps the least understood part of this Christmas journey was the journey from spirit to body. John 1:14 says, "The Word became flesh." That is obviously to say that the Son of God, nicknamed the Word, was not previously flesh, was not previously the eternal Son of God was a spirit, and only a spirit. You couldn't see him. You couldn't touch him. No one could because there was nothing to see. There was no one to touch. He was invisible, invisible just as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit still are today.

But being invisible does not make anything or anyone less real. And if any generation knows that, surely our generation does, because here in this room there is radiation. There are radio signals. There are television signals. There are all kinds of things we know to be not only real but though we cannot physically touch them and cannot see them. The eternal Son of God was invisible as a spirit.

He didn't have a body forever ago, and he really didn't have a name, at least not in the sense we think of a name. He may have been called Son, or he may have simply been called God. But when he embarked on this amazing Christmas journey, he gained both a body and a name, for he was given the name Jesus. Up until that time, that was not his name. He was given a name that was not the least unusual. It is the Hebrew word for Savior, and there were hundreds, thousands of Jewish boys and men who had the name Jesus. It was common.

If you do as I occasionally do, and read the Minneapolis phone book, you will find there are 20 pages of Andersons in the Minneapolis phone book. You knew that. You've read it. I'm a little embarrassed to say there are 29 pages of Johnsons in the Minneapolis phone book, but we're working on catching up to the Johnsons. We only have nine pages to go, and then we have caught up. And I have concluded that if you want to be anonymous and lost in the crowd in MSt. Paul, a name like Johnson or Anderson is a good choice to have. And if you wanted to get lost in the crowd in Bethlehem or Nazareth or Jerusalem, Jesus was a good name to have because there were lots of people named Jesus. It wasn't the name that made him special. He made the name special.

He gained not only a name but, far more important, he gained a body, a body he had never had before. The Son of God became limited by space. He became human not at Christmas but at conception nine months earlier.

That is, then, to understand that this eternal, powerful Son of God left heaven and became contained in a microscopic human embryo. He had not yet formed eyes or hands or feet or brain. God was contained. God, who is described in John 1 as the light, and yet for nine months was in total darkness. And when he was finally born on Christmas day, he looked like any other human , maybe seven pounds in weight, unable to feed himself, with eyes slow to focus, hands not quite able to grasp, certainly unable to speak, wearing diapers, totally dependent upon a recently married couple for every necessity of life. And he was the Son of God.

What an incredible journey that he became human, a body for us in order to reach us, in order to communicate to us in our language in our way, in order to save us from sin and death. This eternal Son of God came from spirit to body.

Now, as astounding as that was, be even more astounded that this was not a temporary change. It is not that he took a body for the 33 years of his biography that we know from the four Gospels of the New Testament. Never think that the body was only for the one generation from Bethlehem's manger to Calvary's cross. This was permanent. God became human forever.

There was no going back. The body that was conceived inside of Mary is the same body that was born on Christmas day, the same body that grew up in Egypt and in Nazareth. It is the same body that was crucified on the cross, the same body that was laid in the grave, the same body that rose back to life on Easter Sunday morning. It was the same body that ascended up into heaven and is there now. It is the same body that the Bible predicts, and Jesus promises, will come back to earth again. It is the same body he will wear forever and ever through all of eternity.

Please, do not miss the wonder and amazement of this Christmas truth: that God became human, that spirit became flesh, not only that he came to us, but that he became one of us forever. What an amazing journey.

Jesus journeyed to deity and humanity.

But there is one more piece of this Christmas journey from God's point of view. It is the amazing reality that deity became humanity, and that is the most amazing part of the story. John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." He was God, fully God, 100 percent God. Everything that God powerful, all present, anywhere, everywhere at the same time, all knowing, not a secret withheld from him, God, holy, powerful, God of very God. And he became human?

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us so that with the name Jesus the Son of God became fully human. He gained a human body with human organs, a human appearance. But even more than that, he felt human and delight, all the feelings we have. He had human thoughts structured the way our brain structures fully human as any and all of us. But here was the miracle: when he became human, he was no less God, 100 percent God and 100 percent human at the same time. He is unique. He is absolutely one of a kind, and he did this so that he could become our Savior.

In the simplest forms of arithmetic we could figure out that one perfect man could, perhaps, pay for the sin, atone on the cross for one other sinful person, but not for all of us. Unless, of course, somehow there could be a unique combining of that human's humanity and God's infinity. He was 100 percent human and 100 percent divine. Add to the arithmetic formula a multiplication factor of infinity so that when he died on the cross he could die and pay for all our sin. He was the perfect match to our eternal needs.

When we speak to Jesus, we speak to God. When we experience him, we experience God. When we see him, we see God. And yet he is one of us, fully human. God almighty, fully divine.

Conclusion: God journeyed to us to save us from our sins.

The Christmas story is a story of journeys. It is the journey of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It is the journey of the angels from heaven to earth. It is the journey of the shepherds from the hills and to the village of Bethlehem. But the greatest journey of all is the journey of the Son of God from heaven to earth, from eternity to time, from spirit to body, from deity to humanity. Oh, to be sure, let us enjoy the human side of Christmas that is familiar to us. Enjoy it and love decorations to all of the season's festivities and the music and the celebration and the family gathering and the giving and receiving of gifts. It's wonderful.

But let us not forget God's side of the Christmas story. "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." He came to us. He came to save us from our sins. Accept him. Be saved from sins, and let the purpose of the great Christmas journey be fulfilled in you. Respond with heart and life and soul. Join your voice with the voices of heaven shouting, singing praises, hallelujahs to Jesus Christ the eternal Son of God, our Savior and our Lord.

Leith Anderson pastors Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and is author of several books, including Leadership That Works (Bethany, 1999).

 

(c) Leith Anderson

Preaching Today Tape #208

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Leith Anderson is president emeritus of the National Association of Evangelicals and Baptist pastor emeritus of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.