Series: Christ The Savior is Born

Pastor Nate Walther

Christmas Day, 2025

Have you ever met someone famous?  Maybe it was a president, or an all-pro athlete, or a famous singer.  But when you told someone else about it, perhaps you were immediately met with skepticism: “No you didn’t!”  That’s where you may have responded with something like, “I’m not kidding!…  I saw him with my own eyes. I saw her IN THE FLESH.”  Those final words are an appeal to the senses: this was so real that I could actually see, hear, and touch this person as I shook their hand.

It’s those same words that illustrate for us the blessing of Christmas.  Sometimes the things that religion offers can seem to be “pie in the sky”, too good to be true.  I mean, how can the divine and miraculous and transcendent actually cross paths with me?  Sure, God says he’s there for me, but how does that help me with the unexpected bill in my hand that needs to be paid, or the cancer in your body that is literally destroying it, or the sinful temptation in our hearts that keeps rearing its ugly head just when we think we’ve got it under control?  How can I be sure that I really will go to heaven, or that there really are good things waiting for me after I die, or that I really will see my loved ones again?

God’s simple, yet brilliant answer at Christmas is this: SALVATION IN THE FLESH.  i.e. Christmas is all about what’s standing right before us in skin & bone.  Through his birth into human flesh, Jesus offers the one place in all of time & space where the divine actually crossed paths with our human flesh, as unbelievable as it may seem. 

That’s exactly what God talks about in our sermon text today. Listen again to what we heard in verse 14 ^“The Word became flesh and dwelled among us. We have seen his glory, the glory he has as the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth…”  It’s a special title the Bible uses for Jesus.  What we heard at the beginning of our reading is also repeated here: Jesus is the Word.  Somehow, miraculously, Jesus is the same Word we pick up and read as we gather around it at home and in church.  Somehow, Jesus is also the same Word through which God once spoke and all things were created, as we were told back in verse 3. But he’s not just Word: metaphysical & abstract. No, “The Word BECAME FLESH and dwelled among us.” That’s really interesting. The Bible doesn’t just tell us that Jesus became a human being or a man – there were other words they would use back then for that.  No, the Bible takes it a step farther and says Jesus became flesh.  It’s a gritty, dirty kind of word.  The Bible even uses this word flesh elsewhere to describe our sinful flesh!  Of course, as the Son of God, Jesus didn’t have sinful flesh himself.  But this inspired word choice does remind us that Jesus got his hands dirty – he entered into our universe and our lives (tainted by sin) in a very real way – as real as the flesh on our hands that we can hold right before us…

Do you realize how much that changes everything?  Now we can look at all the other things God promises that may seem abstract – divine power to help us, which created everything we see with just a word; warm light, which can drive out the darkness of the sin in our hearts and evil in our lives; new life, which gives us hope even when we’re staring into the hopelessness of a grave – and we can finally believe that these impossible things really are true.  How?  It’s SALVATION IN THE FLESH.  It’s as real as a child lying in flesh in a manger, whom those shepherds first laid their very eyes on.  It’s as real as that child beginning to grow up found in the temple, whose understanding of God’s Word blew away the sharpest minds of his day.  It’s as real as that child now a man, who offered a glimmer of light through his love & his teachings to those lost in darkness with nowhere else to turn.  It’s as real as that same man raising the dead to life, who gave back to a grieving father his daughter & sisters their brother & masters their servants…

Dear friends in Christ, your help and your hope in this world doesn’t rest on dead prophets who once said some thought-provoking things, but whose words now ring hollow and distant when you’re hurting and suffering.  Your help and your hope rest on a living Savior whose birth is as real as any other event in history. That also includes the end of this child’s story: he died on a cross, for your sin and for mine; he rose from a grave, to deliver us from death undo the very worst thing this flesh does to us!

Again, it’s the value of something actually being in the flesh.  Granted, maybe you and I haven’t seen Jesus in the flesh personally.  But the fact is that he was seen in the flesh by others.  Countless thousands saw him, many of whom wrote about him, including the Apostle John who penned the words of our sermon text.  That makes it no less real to us.  Finally, if Jesus was going to enter our time and space, this is just the reality of it.  He could only come at one time, like all real things that have happened, and he could only come in one body, like all real people who have lived.  That means that not all the world would see it. But that doesn’t mean all the world couldn’t benefit from what he did. Just like the Caesars or the Popes, Johannes Gutenberg or Isaac Newton, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln had a lasting impact on things after them, though we have not seen them… so also Jesus, only in a far better and far more lasting way, and for all people.  In particular, this child was born to bring salvation to all who believe in him. Today, on this festival celebration, find a simple joy in the fact that you have all of God’s power, you have light in darkness, you have new life – as unbelievable and impossible as these things may seem!  Where is it all found? IN THE FLESH.  In Christ.  Your SALVATION is as real as a warm baby lying in his mother’s arms.  Amen.