Merry Christmas 2023

# Merry Christmas 2023

Test your Christmas IQ, Play That Christmas Tune:
 * It's beginning ...
 * I'm ...
 * Sleigh bells ring ...
 * Chestnuts! ...
 * It'll be a blue ...
 * You're a fowl one ...

That's tradition, which is great.  What Manner of Man? 1 Jn 1-4

A message about Christmas from Jesus's best friend and eye witness, lived with Him for 3 years.

Gnosticism is the 2nd heresy of the New Testament, the first is that you have to mix Grace and Law, to become a Jew.  That one came from the Jews.  The second came from the Greeks Gnosticism (Christ + Plato), that you don't have the Truth but that you need Jesus plus more knowledge.  It says Jesus wasn't God and Jesus wasn't Man, that He was an angelic creation, not God and not Man just an angelic visitation.  He was Clarence basically.  Paul wrote about it in Colossians, Peter wrote about it in 2nd Peter, the book of Jude is dedicated to it. That's why John said over and over by this we Know, that they beheld Him, that they touched Him.

We only have 52 days of Jesus' life, and not days but short little sound bites.  If we had everything He did, you're having a problem w/ a quiet time now ...  He is the Word of Life, in His Life is the Life of Men.

Every civilization will always have 2 things: (1) a discontent of where they are (sicker, violent, crooked, ...), and (2) an idea of what they should be ... Utopia (no place).  We can have revolutions (communist, industrial, socialist) and awakenings (first, second, back to the Bible) but we can't change the nature of man.  We have to have something to tell us exactly who God is and how we can change. It's as if God has to come down as one of us, live the life we ought to live, die for our failure, and rise again, come inside of us and energize us to head towards Him.  That is called Christ-ianity.

In Genesis we see God and Man together, the Fall, and then in Revelation God and Man back together. It ends like it began but it is better than before.  This is the way back home.  It answers man and civilizations' highest longing.  And it's not a moral ladder.  Religion is man's attempt to find God and Christ is God's attempt to find man.

https://dentonbible.org/sermon/christmas-2022-what-manner-of-man/

1 John 1:1-4
Introduction, The Incarnate Word

1 What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— 2 and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— 3 what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. 4 These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.

5 This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.