It’s not really so easy to look at a baby and see the Word of God.  Oh, we see a baby and think how precious and amazing—a baby most definitely is!  Seeing a baby, we might even understand what someone is saying when he or she calls the baby a miracle—and I know, for some of you, having a baby was a miracle, because you were told, definitely, by experts, that a baby just wasn’t within the realm of possibility for you.  So, a baby truly is a miracle: you know it!  A baby is also possibility, a future and a hope.

But the Word of God?  What does that even mean?  Is the baby like the Bible or something?  The Word . . . that’s God, speaking, God who has something to say.  The baby born in Bethlehem in the first, darkest hours of the new day is God who has something He wants to say to us, a Message for us.  Open up the Bible, and you’ll find out soon enough that God has a lot to say.  You’ll also begin to figure out that God’s Word makes things happen.  When God speaks, things happen.  That’s a little different from what we’re used to.  Politicians talk, and not much happens—well, things get worse.  Parents talk to their children, and five minutes later it’s like the parents never said a word.  Wives talk to their husbands, and five seconds later it’s like they never said a thing.  We’ve heard that phrase “all talk and no action.”  With God, speaking is action.  But I know that’s easy to say and not always easy to see, or believe.  And what’s all this got to do with any of us here, anyway?

John knows he is writing about a difficult topic, hard to understand, easy to misunderstand.  He doesn’t pretend to have it all figured out, but he does want to share what he had come to understand after experiencing it personally, powerfully, and then thinking about it for many years after, praying over it, relying daily upon the truth of it.  John had the advantage, the unique, blessed advantage, of having known Jesus, personally, for some three years, of having heard and seen what happened over that time, of having felt all of it, from the most exciting highs to the most devastating lows, and back again.

If anyone knows what he is talking about—who he is talking about—it’s John.  But how to help us to know what he is talking about, who he is talking about?  He is talking about a living person, a flesh and blood man who is also Spirit.  A man who was born and who died and rose again, who also has always been and will always be, because Spirit doesn’t die.  We don’t have much experience with any of that.  In our experience in this world, people are born, and people die, and that’s about as much as can be said, definite and done.  And if that’s all that can be said about life—if that’s all there is—you’re born, you die—well, I guess that’s something, but what does it really amount to?  It’s not super helpful, not even all that interesting.

We get the sense of the saying “live it up while you can.”  When you make time to pick up the Bible, this Word of God, and begin reading in it, soon enough you’ll begin to figure out that “live it up while you can” is not what God is saying.  This God speaking to us through the words of this book, this Word of God, is saying live for Me while you can and you will live with Me forever.  Live for Christ . . . that’s a call to a commitment that takes more than an hour on a Sunday every so often.

We all feel love, and we all need to learn how to love.  But how shall we learn?  Who can teach us?

Live for Me while you can and you will live with Me forever.  Huh.  Life that goes on forever might be fun, for a while.  The life God is talking about is a life we haven’t experienced yet: it’s not a matter of sheer quantity—on and on and on—but of quality: life like we’ve never known it, never known it could be so . . . wow, like learning what love really is and not just itching with a burst of insistent desire every now and again, like that drug all those sad singers keep singing about on the radio.

Why should anyone believe any of this?  What John says, what John says Jesus said, is that, until the Spirit gets hold of you, you won’t believe it.  Until the Spirit gets hold of you, you can’t believe it.  I can stand here and beg and plead with you to believe it, telling stories and making arguments and pointing to all sorts of places in the Bible to help make the case for why we all should believe that we all need to be living for God while we can.  Until the Spirit gets hold of you, all my words are just hot air and wasted breath.  We only have so much time.  How are we going to use it?  Yes, there’s making money, getting new stuff, going to exciting places, having fun experiences—and there’s only so much time.

Then what?  For many of us here right now, that “then” is still a long way off.  In the meantime, who has time for wasted breath?  John is trying to share with us, tell us about what he’s come to know about the Breath that isn’t wasted, ever, never: the Breath of Life, the Word of God, who comes to us in the most unusual usual way, a beautiful way, to show us what love is, if we’ll take a real moment really to look, who makes the depths of love come alive for us, and in us, if we’ll truly ask and then wait with renewed patience and sturdy hope.  How to make sense of any of this, this God who comes to us, this love that’s knocking on the door?  This Spirit apart from whom none of it matters or can matter?

Have you ever made plans for something big, something down the road that’s going to be so happy and so good?  Now, if you never carry out those plans, I guess the thing you planned is still happy and good, but it doesn’t come to anything: it’s just daydreaming, which is fine, in its way.  But there are some plans that are just play (I guess we could call them good intentions) and there are other plans that we’re actively working on, laboring for, that we very much want to happen, unless we’re just going through the motions or have no real idea what we want in life.

God has plans, for all of us.  God is offering a chance at a beautiful, blessed life, hereafter and also here.  We all have ideas about what makes a life beautiful and blessed, whatever that may mean.  God wants to show us.  That’s what Jesus, the Word of God, comes to do.  That’s what Jesus came to make fully possible for people, anyone and everyone who would trust him, trust what he was saying, and then put that trust to work.  He comes as new life to offer us new life.

All it takes is trust.  Trust that is never put to work is all potential and no action—just good intentions.  Jesus is the answer to our hurt—we’ve all got them!  Jesus is the fulfillment of our hope.  And none of us can know it until we try.  Try praying.  Try to make being part of a congregation a regular part of your life.  Try reading the Bible—let God guide you where to begin.  It doesn’t have to be Genesis 1.  Above all, try trusting this God who wants to speak with you.  Call it an experiment if you like, but you’ve really got to try on your side, too.

I guess we all have plans for tomorrow.  In our home, Christmas morning is present-opening day.  Maybe you can imagine that, in all the flurry of paper, ribbon, and bows flying this way and that, piling up, one gift got overlooked, maybe just some small thing, like that one ornament still in the tree when it’s time to put it away for another year.  Well, if you notice there’s a gift that got overlooked, you’re probably going to open it.  Come along with me for a moment more, though.  Imagine that, rather than opening that overlooked gift, or even bothering to see who it’s for, the decision is made to get to it, later.  You know how it is: later can take a long time to come; sometimes later never comes.  What a shame.  I wonder what was inside that pretty paper?  Maybe there’s still time to find out.  You know, it would be good to find out.