Who will receive him?  Who will welcome him in?  Go from our worship gathering today with the expectation of this question on your lips and in your heart.  We take the Word with us.  Treasure the Word; store it up in your heart.  Share the Word: always be looking, conscientiously, actively, for opportunities to share the Word with others.  Jesus was among us in this very way; Jesus came to proclaim. 

          John says it is by receiving and believing in the Word, Jesus Christ, that we “become children of God” (1:12).  We all exist by the will of God.  Everyone belongs to God: we are all God’s creatures.  To become a child of God, you must be “born of God,” we are told (1:13).  Born again, as Jesus was telling Nicodemus (Jn 3) who just couldn’t understand.

          Born of God, born again—that very Presbyterian document, the Scots Confession (1560), says that to be born of God is to have “assured faith in the promise of God revealed to us in His Word.”  To have faith is to be born of God.  Not to have the Spirit is not to know God, is not to believe, is not to receive, is not to be a child of God.  You and I are here this morning because we have been born of the Spirit, born of God.  Not everyone wants that.  Some are quite happy not being in church, not knowing about Jesus or the Bible.  All they want of Jesus and the Bible is nothing.  Our faith is the faith God has made possible for us, that God has birthed in us, because we are loved; we are now beloved children of God, by the Spirit.  A miracle!  Your growth in the faith and in the love of righteousness, which is the love of God, are gifts of the Spirit.  God loves to give gifts, especially His gift of love; He will not force anyone to accept this gift.  Is it a gift if the gift is forced upon you?

          Jesus “came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14).  He came to give grace, to lavish upon all who wanted it, all who would receive it, all who knew their deep need for what God offered: kindness, mercy, forgiveness, power for renewed living, for salvation—the love of God.  All people live through the love of God; not everyone lives for the love of God.  Not everyone lives to love God.  Here today, you are wanting to live to love God: this is a gift of the Spirit; this is to have and to know Jesus Christ.

          Jesus came full of grace, to give, and full of truth.  People may squirm when you try to talk about the truth.  Truths, alright.  My truth, your truth, alright.  The truth?  No.  Be quiet.  If we are all God’s children, and if God loves all His children, then how can anyone be lost?  If no one will be lost, then why did Jesus come, why did Jesus die, why did Jesus rise from the dead, if no one shall be lost because all are already beloved children?  These are unhappy questions that lead to unhappy thoughts.  I shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t say such things in church.

          Jesus says he is the way and the truth and the life.  If Jesus is full of truth, came from God full of truth, then Jesus tells no lie.  We don’t gather here to listen to lies.  We can hear plenty of those non-stop outside these walls.  Some are very pretty, lies we sort of like, sort of wish were true.  I know.  Jesus came full of truth to tell us the truth, to guide us along the way of truth, which is the way to life.  Any other way, be it ever so alluring, is a false way.  To welcome Jesus is to welcome truth; to reject Jesus, to have no use for or interest in Jesus, is to have no use for or interest in the truth.  No wonder it’s hard to get people to listen, talking that way.  If Nicodemus couldn’t, if most wouldn’t even when Jesus himself told them, what hope is there if we should try to tell?  God says go, tell; tell of my love, share my love, show my love.  My love looks like something.  We go as if with an impossible task, yet “all things are possible with God” (Mk 10:27).

          Jesus did not come to show us fullness of grace and fullness of truth that we could not have.  He did not come to torment us with impossibility but to save us by grace and truth, by the Spirit, by the love of God.  This table is a reminder, a sensible, palpable reminder, of God’s love for us, offered in Jesus Christ, full of grace and truth.  “Out of his fullness we have all received grace” (1:16).  All the fullness of God dwelled in Jesus (Col 1:19).  God is grace, mercy, peace, life.  God comes in Jesus Christ to give these blessings to who will receive them, to who wants them from God’s hand. 

          The reservoir of Christ cannot be measured, cannot be fathomed; it can be experienced: grace like the ice-melt waters streaming down from high mountains wrapped in snow pure and brilliant; grace like the playfulness of a plashing fountain, bringing delight and relief on a sweltering summer day; grace like the quiet spring of sweetwater, deep in the shaded, fragrant forest.  To find it, you need to know where to look, and how.   

          God comes to us.  He knocks on our door, seeking entry.  He doesn’t barge in, doesn’t come loud and obnoxious.  He doesn’t come laying down the law.  He comes with grace and truth.  How will people respond?  When we hear truth, God’s truth rather than what we’re supposed to accept as truth in this broken, muddy world of ours, when we hear God’s truth, we can receive or reject it.  There’s the question.  Truth invites a response.  Grace invites a response.  Grace and truth are God’s invitation into reality.

          There is grace without truth.  The pastor, theologian, and concentration camp martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it cheap grace, no grace, no change.  Grace without truth is heart overriding mind, feeling filling in for fact: softness, accommodation, self-applauding.  Chillax.  Everybody gets a gold star.  I don’t want a gold star.  I want a golden crown; I know I can have it only from the one who can truly give it: my king and my God.

          There is truth without grace: judgment, lethal guilt, hard as those stone tablets, the way blocked by the hardness of our hearts, the hardness of our heads. Truth without grace is mind overriding heart: fact failing to feel.

          Neither is God’s way.  Both are ways of fallen, broken, misguided human beings, every one to its own way, muddied and muddled.  God’s way is grace and truth: systole and diastole of the heartbeat of God’s love. 

          The one who can bring us into closest relationship with God must be someone who knows God perfectly.  We know this one; we can know him: Jesus Christ, sent to us from God to invite us into closest relationship (1:18).  God wants to get acquainted; He isn’t going to force you.  You may have many facebook friends.  A few friend requests you’ve probably turned down with a decisive click, others you’ve just politely passed by.  God isn’t going to force you to be His friend.  He will ask you through Jesus Christ.  John tells us, plainly, gloriously, joyfully, that Jesus “is himself God” (1:18).  If you grant this, accept this as true, then you must grant the rest—Jesus comes full of grace and truth; Jesus is the way and the truth and the life.  Jesus is the one, and the only one, who can bring you into blessing, joy, and life: into closest relationship with the Father.  Astounding!

          Jesus is the one who makes the Father known.  Is this a God we want to know, want to love, want to try to please as we would want to please one whom we love and care about deeply?  Here from this table this morning, Jesus invites you to know him, to see him.  He is the one who came, full of grace and truth, that “he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9).  He tasted death; we taste grace.  Remembering his death, and his resurrection, by this word and this table here today, we can, by Spirit and faith, truly taste his life: grace, power, joy, peace, faith.  “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him” (Ps 34:8).

          Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.