Leawood, Kansas, United States - The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Daily Guide grow. pray. study. for Tuesday, 23 December 2014 “We have seen his glory”

Leawood, Kansas, United States - The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Daily Guide grow. pray. study. for Tuesday, 23 December 2014 “We have seen his glory”
Daily Scripture: John 1:6-8 There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.
9-13 The Life-Light was the real thing:
    Every person entering Life
    he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
    the world was there through him,
    and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
    but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
    who believed he was who he claimed
    and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
    their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
    not blood-begotten,
    not flesh-begotten,
    not sex-begotten.
14 The Word became flesh and blood,
    and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
    the one-of-a-kind glory,
    like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
    true from start to finish.
Reflection Questions:
The Bible writers often pictured the tension between good and evil as “light” and “darkness.” The apostle John was able to define what he meant by “light” more specifically. Jesus, he said—the Jesus he had seen, heard and known—was the light who broke into the world’s darkness. As darkness couldn’t put out light, so Jesus could deliver us from the darkness we find within ourselves. (We act out this text’s meaning at each Christmas Eve service. For a schedule, see www.cor.org/christmas, and “come and worship.”)• Greek thinkers like Plato said “the logos” was too pure to enter the corrupt material world.
Hebrews usually saw God as so awesome and distant that they feared to even say the divine name. John drew on both those thought worlds, but he boldly wrote, “The Word became flesh.” How can it help you realize how much God values you to believe that he “became flesh,” like us, rather than just wishing you well from afar?
• Being born is the way each one of us begins our life in the world. John, taking his cue from Jesus (cf. John 3:3-8), said that the life Jesus brought is so qualitatively new that it’s like being born, this time as a child of God. When did your spiritual journey start? In what ways has trusting and following Jesus given you a whole new life?
Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank you for being born, for becoming flesh, so that you could give me the authority and power to be born anew, as a child of God. Thank you for my new life. Amen.
Insight from Brandon Gregory
Brandon Gregory is a volunteer for the worship and missions teams at Church of the Resurrection. He helps lead worship at the Vibe, West, and Downtown services, and is involved with the Malawi missions team at home.
The opening of the gospel of John is one of my favorite passages of scripture. John mentions a concept that was very familiar to first century people, but is relatively unknown to us: Logos. The Greek philosophers defined and developed this concept as they invented and refined philosophy as an art. At first, the word simply meant an opinion or an account. The Sophists applied it to discourse, as they spent time discussing teaching things like virtue and excellence through rhetoric and philosophy. Aristotle brought it a step further and defined it as reasoned discourse–it wasn’t simply an opinion, it was an opinion that made sense of the world and used higher thought to bring understanding. Over time, it came to mean an underlying sense of logic and order that ran through our universe and everything in it. Learning more about the Logos meant you knew how life worked. Later on, the Stoic philosophers stated it was a divine logic that set the world in motion–it was the gods themselves that imbued our world with this logic, and it was our mission to spend our entire lives trying to understand this logic so we could learn more about life and the universe. The Jewish philosopher Philo would later say that our God was the Logos, and this gave a new understanding to both parties.
But John, in this passage, says something none of them had ever dreamed of: the Logos became flesh and dwelled among us. Like many philosophers before them, Jewish believers had a vague understanding of Logos (God), and sought to learn more about Him, did not recognize Him (verse 10). Unlike the Greek concept of this grand but ultimately unfathomable concept, God came into the world to make known the underlying logic and order of the universe. He came so that we would be able to know Him, to see Him, to learn from Him, and to finally understand Him.
Christmas is the time of year that we celebrate that God was not content with us having a vague understanding of Him. He wanted us to know Him like He knew us. It was such a monumental event that John likened it to being given an entirely new life–being born a second time, into a divine family.
The term “born again” is thrown around so much today that it’s lost a lot of its meaning and impact. For many of us, we don’t take the time to truly contemplate how this new life is different from the old life, how the new family is different from the old one, and how this new understanding has changed our perception of the world. So here’s what I want you to do in your spare time this holiday: think about and define what this new life means to you. And don’t use convoluted spiritual terminology that will surely impress your Christian friends–put it in the same language you use everyday to talk to people. Write it down to make sure you think it all the way through. You don’t have to share it with anyone (although you might want to!)–this is more for your benefit. When you’re done, hopefully you’ll have one more thing to truly give thanks for this Christmas season.
But the best part is that that’s not the end of your story. Hopefully this exercise also got you thinking about other ways you want God to be your Logos, how you want to gain a better understanding of life and the universe. God, the Logos, came into the world to grant us understanding. This next year, always be on the lookout for ways that God can teach you, grant you a greater understanding, and be for you a change worthy of the name “born again.”
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