Christmas Day 2025

Nollamara Church Of Christ Sermons.Raw transcript of meeting:

Date Of Sermon: Christmas Day 2025

Speaker: Jamie Boland

Sermon Title: Christmas Message

Scripture Reading: John 1:1-5, 14

  📍 If we could have the lights please. Thank you. Well, good morning everyone. Merry Christmas. Merry. It is great to see you all here today. This is the biggest turnout for Christmas Day in my time here. I did give a, uh. A gentle encouragement the other day, so thank you. It is wonderful to celebrate together the birth of our savior.

Amen. Amen. Let me open in a quick word of prayer. Father, we thank you. We thank you for the gift of your precious son for came into this world light coming into darkness to bring us new life, to bring us hope. Father, we thank you for the gift that we receive from you this day. The greatest gift of all. We honor you and praise you in Jesus' precious name.

Amen. Amen. So all the way back in 1977, I was a small child. I was about five years old. Star Wars had just came out and there was this great big fascination with everything out and the stars and beyond and, and that year this film came out. It's a short film called Bowers of 10. And what it does, you can see it actually on YouTube.

It starts with the camera focused on this man. He's lying on a picnic rug by a lake. We then watches the camera slowly zooms out into the sky and it zooms out all the way into the far reaches of space. It stops when our galaxy is visible only as a speck of light amongst the cluster of other galaxies.

There's all these lights on the screen, and you can just make out this dot, this tiny dot. That's the Milky Way. Then the camera reverses the journey. It zooms back in. It zooms all the way back to the hand of this man who's lying on the rug and then proceeds to go beneath the surface. It goes all the way under the skin, down to a protein of a carbon.

Atom inside the DNA molecule. They're actually stills from the film now to get the picture. It's 1977. They don't have the same technology we have today, but with the technology they have, they use it and they zoom out as far as they can go into the cosmos, and they zoom all the way back right down to the subatomic level.

Now the short film, it's only nine min nine minutes long. What it does is it brings face-to-face with two worlds that were largely unknown and unseen for centuries. You've got the cosmic world and you've got the molecular world. Now think about these two worlds. Ever since people have walked the earth, they've looked up into the sky.

They're, they're walking on terra firma, they look up into the sky. It's vast, it's mysterious. They see these heavenly bodies and they ask themselves, what are they? What are they made of? Is there anybody out there? Now we can begin to answer some of these questions today because we have things like the Hubble telescope.

We can look into the stars and see far beyond what anyone else has ever seen before. And some of what they're finding now is quite extraordinary. Now, the same is true of the molecular world. For centuries, this world was unseen and unknown, but what we have today are devices that help us know and understand that every physical object, every physical object, including the human body, is made up of cells and atoms and molecules.

That's why when we get sick, we don't go to a witch doctor, sacrifice a chicken cast to spill. Instead, what we do is retreat the virus or the infection at the microscopic level. Hopefully that's what the drugs I'm using at the moment are doing in my body. So what we have here is we have these two worlds, the cosmic world and the molecular world.

Worlds, which for a very long time were closed to us. We didn't know anything about them. They were closed to us. And yet now because of science, other technological advances, suddenly these worlds are opening up Today. What I want us to think about is another world, a world of even greater significance.

It's a world that's also unseen. A world which for, for a very long time, was closed to us. I'm talking of course, about the divine world. If there is a God, if there is someone who made everything we see and know, then how do we see and know him? Where do we find him? If there is a creator of all things, how do we see him?

How do we know him? Listen again to the words we heard in our advent reading. They're gonna shed some light on us. In the beginning. 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. The sun, the moon, the stars, the galaxies, cells, atoms, molecules. Nothing that has been made was not made by him. And John says in him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The word became flesh. I love these words.

These words were just sang in that last song. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only son who came from the father. No one. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only son who is himself, God has made him known. Let those words just soak in.

I mean, did you get all that? This is so theologically pregnant and rich, let them soak in.

Now it's commonly believed of the four gospels that Mark was written. First, you know, if you are new to church, let me just explain. We've got four gospels, Matthew, mark, Luke, John, and I commonly believe Mark was written first. Then you've got Matthew and Luke, and then lastly we had John. And it's an interesting development we see because Mark, if it's the first written gospel, it begins with the public ministry of Jesus.

Jesus arrives on the scene. He's a fully grown man, Matthew and Luke. What they do is they move the story backward in time and they begin with birth of Jesus and the events of Christmas. Gather the stories we heard today in our readings. But what John does is he goes back even further still. He goes back before Bethlehem, before Israel, before time.

What he does is he goes all the way back to the beginning of creation and as someone once said, after John, we don't need any more gospels 'cause we can't possibly go any further back. Now it's a wonderful scene in the TV series show The Chosen. It's a wonderful, wonderful show, and I love this scene. You see John as an old wiser man, and he's sitting there.

He is pondering, he's reflecting. He's about to put pen to paper and write his gospel, and he begins to reflect not just on the things Jesus said and did, but on who Jesus truly was. He's thinking, who's this man that walked among us? This one we touched. The one who loved us, the one we saw, the one we heard.

Who is he truly? You see, Matthew and Luke, they tell us of this child conceived through the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, but John fleshes out Jesus true identity. He tells us truly who Jesus is. He's more than a child born of a miracle in Bethlehem. He's the eternal God who made all things. And what we do at Christmas is we gather, we remember this point in time when God entered his creation, and you may have noticed the echoes of Genesis and John's opening words.

The Bible opens with the words in the beginning. In the beginning. In the beginning, God, and it then goes on to describe how God brought all things into existence. Through his word, he speaks light into darkness, order into chaos, life out of empty nothingness, God speaks, let it be, and it is. That's the power of his word.

And what we see in the story that follows is that God's creation rejects its creator. That's what we see in the story, and these very same themes are found in the first chapter of John's gospel. John tells us he was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.

People didn't recognize truly who Jesus was. He came to his own. John says, but his own did not receive him. Richard Spock on Sunday. If you were here, you would've heard this wonderful sermon about the scandal of grace that we see in the genealogy of Jesus. And Richard highlighted these five women, three possible four of them were gentile.

One was engaged in prostitution to deceive her father or a one one-off act. Another of his great-great-great grandmothers was a prostitute by trade. One was called by King David to engage in adultery against a will. You know you've just got scandal after scandal, after scandal. And then there's Mary, this young Jewish virgin who claimed to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.

Can you see the question marks all around this scandal after scandal, after scandal, and this is why the Pharisees would later say to Jesus, we know who our father is, and they openly accused him of being illegitimate. A bastard, a child born of sexual immorality. Now, I can tell you if I was, God, this is not the family tree I would make for the savor of the world if I'm bringing my son the Messiah into this world, this is not the family tree I have for him.

Here's the thing. He doesn't come in the way we expect, but he does come in the way that we need. Amen. Amen. Now, do you realize that these words we heard from John chapter one would've been equally scandalous to those who first heard them? Probably more scandalous than the questions of illegitimacy in the, the skeletons in the family tree of Jesus.

Lemme explain. John was Jewish, and in the Jewish mind there's us and there's God. God is sovereign. He's set apart where down here, God is up there where He creatures, he is the creator. This word of God that John speaks of the word of God was what God used to su know, create and sustain all living things.

It's this divine agent through which God's creative power is unleashed. God speaks and it happens. He says, let there be light, and there is light. It's all through this creative agent known as the Word, and John says this word, who was with God was God. That's scandal number one. And the word became flesh.

It became part of the creation. That's scandal number two. I think of the difference here. God is eternal. God is immortal, but flesh. Flesh is weak. Flesh is vulnerable. It's subject to death and decay. It's everything that God and his word are not. It would've been scandalous for the Jewish mind to think that the creator himself would become a creature.

God's the one who molded humanity for clay. Why would he himself become an earth and vessel? God is transcendent. He's up there, set apart, over and above all things. Why would he come down and take on the limitations of flesh and, and, and, and the weaknesses of it as well? Why would he do that in their mind?

This is blasphemy, and this is the scandal we see in the incarnation in the first Christmas. These words also would've been a shock to the Greek minds of the first entry. You see, they believe that, you know, human beings, they're, they're made up of two components. We've got this body and we've got a soul.

And for them, the physical part, the flesh, it was completely and utterly inferior to the non-physical part, the soul. And in the Greek mind, salvation salvation's all about escaping, you know, the soul, escaping the corruption of the physical world and somehow, somehow attaining to coming one with the universe.

If you are Greek, you wanna escape the darkness and become one with the light. Whoever God is, God is perfect. We are imperfect and the longing of the Greek heart and mind is to escape the imperfect and become one with that which is perfect. If you are Greek, your heart was to shed the flesh and fly up to heaven.

But John shatters this when he says that heaven put on flesh and came down to earth. It would've been foolishness to this Greek mind to think like this. Why? Why would that? Which is perfect, come down and indwell that which is imperfect. Why would light choose to indwell and inhabit darkness? What's the answer to that question?

The answer love as John famously tells us, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son. For God so loved the world that the word became flesh. No other faith in this world has a God who becomes weak and fragile for the sake of love. No other faith has a God who comes down and gives himself to us.

Every other religion, you've gotta do it. You've gotta send, you've gotta make your way up. But in Christianity, we have a God who comes down to us,

not only comes down to us, he comes all the way down and he gives himself for us. I like what Tim Bella once said, in Jesus Christ, the infinite became intimate. How do you know that? Which is everything. We are not, we are fine. Not He is infinite, he is sovereign. We are subject. How does that, which is limited.

Oh, that which is unlimited in Jesus Christ. The infinite became intimate. The God of eternity came to humanity so that humanity could know God for all eternity. This is what Christmas is about. John says, the word became flesh maze dwelling among us. We have seen his glory. Now, the word that's used here for dwelling literally means to pitch tent.

Jesus, the eternal word became flesh and pitched to tent among us. Now, for those who know, it's in reference to the tabernacle, the place where God's glory was first manifest amongst people. You see the tabernacle that's built and, and it's finished and the glory of God fills the tabernacle. And I love the thought that he journeys with his people through wilderness.

He's there in the this tent, this tent of meeting his glory fills it. Now, I dunno about you when I, but I, when I hear this word of glory, what do you tend to associate it with when you hear the word glory? When I hear the word glory, I tend to think of things like majesty, beauty, strength, power, all this heightened stuff.

But that's not how God comes to us in Jesus. He comes to us in vulnerability as a child. The one who was uncreated takes on blood and skin a bone. He becomes what we are and identifies with us in deepest way. Every pain, every sorrow, every heartache, every struggle, every temptation, he understands it all.

He understands that not as the God who knows all things that someone who's experienced the full range of human life. God doesn't know what we go through simply because he is God and he knows all things He understand from inside the experience. This is the wonder of Jesus being our Emmanuel God with us.

Can I tell you the glory of God is not seen in majesty and power. It's seen in him who comes to us in loneliness and weakness, in frailty, in disgrace, and in shame. Wrap your head around that. When you think about glory, don't think majesty and power and beauty and strength and honor and wisdom, think loneliness, shame, vulnerability.

That's where we see the glory of John, of, of, of, of God. And that's what John held.

I love the words we sang today. Veiled in Flesh, the Godhead Sea Hail the incarnate deity. Pleased with us in flesh to well, Jesus, our Emmanuel. Jesus is God with us. He's God with us. Not just in the good times, not in the mountaintop experiences. He's God with us in the darkest spaces we experience. He's gone before us and he walks now with us.

Now. There's so much more I could say from this passage. I mean, I had so much more planned and then decided just to tweak it. It's so theologically rich, this passage, but I wanna close with word of hope. I wanna bring us back to hope. John writes in verse five, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

The light shines in darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Now, how do we understand these words? Given everything that's happening in our world right now? We can read these words at Christmas. We can say amen, but then when we try to correspond them to reality, to the events that are happening in, in the world around they've, they've been far away for so long, but now they're on our doorstep.

Do you know, we can think about what happened at Bondi and it can feel like the, the darkness has come and it's actually snuffed out the lights. Think about it, it's Christmas time. It's a time of joy, time of celebration. It was a Sunday afternoon on a beach, a day of fun, a religious day. You've got Jewish people lighting candles for Harken.

There are also some Christians there lighting candles for advent. And in darkness, ascends and the light of 15 lives was brutally snuffed out. It was a prophet Isaiah who said, darkness like a shroud covers the whole earth. That's what our world can feel like right now. Yeah, we look around and what do we see?

If you ever go online, see hatred of division, that's all you see, and it can look like darkness has overcome the light. When John says the light shines in darkness and the darkness is not overcome it, he's not giving us a metaphor for the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity, nor is he speaking of an ideal born out of blind, naive, or optimism.

He's speaking about a light that first shown in a stable. And at first it was only a faint flicker, a real faint flicker. You've got this child that's conceived in scandal and born in a in obscurity, and we can look at this and we can say, well, it's not really much of a light. How can such a small light stand against the forces of evil and darkness in this world?

Surely this light will easily be softed out. Just as you know, you might blow out a candle on a birthday cake. That's what the darkness thought. That's what the darkness thought when they saw this light. It's what we see in the life of Jesus. He came to his own and his own did not receive him. He was despised.

He was rejected. He was given over to be crucified on a Roman cross, and for one bleak moment at scene, that evil had triumphed and that darkness had extinguished the light. That's what it would've looked like on Good Friday. But this light that comes to us in Jesus, I can tell you it is enough to defeat the darkness.

The darkness can never overcome this light because this light, John says, is the light of life itself. Amen. And the fullness of that light. Where do we see the fullness of that light? We see it when Jesus rose from the dead into new life. Yeah, John said, we've seen his glory, the glory of the one and only son who came from the father.

Full grace. Truth, the darkness can never overcome a light that comes to us in Jesus because the evil can never, it can never block out God's grace and truth.

Evil can never extinguish the light 'cause God himself is that light. Did you get that? Yes. All this darkness in this world, and it seems like it's overcome the light, but it cannot, it will not ever overcome the light because that light is God himself and he has given himself to us. In Jesus, the light of the world and evil had its way with him and and looked like it snuffed out his light, but he rose victorious over the powers of sin, death, and evil.

The lights can never be extinguished by the darkness because the light is God himself, and that's the gift he gives to us at Christmas at Calvary Resurrection Life Easter Sunday. And one day that light will return and light as it was in the beginning, will cover the entire Earth. As the prophet said, the knowledge of the glory of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Amen. Amen. Can I exhort you this Christmas? We've had many Christmases for men. Many, many Christmases. Bill's had 95 of them. Well done Bill. Christmas can become familiar, well known. And what I say, familiarity breeds contempt. We don't want that. Let's look to the light that comes to us in Jesus this Christmas.

Things may seem dark, but we can take comfort from the knowledge that this light will never be put out. It couldn't be extinguished 2000 years ago. It will never be extinguished today. And that's the hope that comes to us in Christmas. Would you bow with me and pray?

Father, we thank you that we were in darkness, that we, your creatures had rebelled against you and this world was dark, dark place. You didn't look down and speak like you came down to be light. He gave us the greatest gift of all gift of your son, who is the light of the world and the promise we have that if we walk with him, we will experience the light of life.

Father, thank you for coming. Thank you for sending Jesus. Thank you for bringing light and hope into this dark world. Help us to rejoice once more as we remember that light. Reflect on more deeply today. I pray in Jesus' precious name. Amen.

Amen.