Grace upon Grace
“A Plethora of Possibilities”
A sermon by Samuel J. Lindamood, December 25, 1977
Sermon Transcript
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O God, for You are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
One of the loveliest and most promising texts in the New Testament is the 16th verse of the first chapter of John. It’s a very short text but a very powerful one that says, “And from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”
A plethora of possibilities sounds like a mouthful, but it’s actually a very exciting title and possibility for us. The word plethora means profusion or excess. Last night at our service of communion I talked to you about the colors of Christmas and how our sanctuary was filled with a plethora of colors, a profusion, almost an excess of color. And I mentioned at the time that that’s very appropriate for this season of the year, because God’s love for us shown in Jesus Christ is exactly that. It’s a plethora of possibilities. It is an excess. It is a profusion. There is no way we can possibly take in the fact that His love was so great that He would come to us in the form of a little child, and then to grow into a man and live and die and be raised again from the dead. That’s a very excessive love so the word plethora has significance for us at Christmas. A plethora of possibilities is something we need to think about for what does that love mean to us.
John Calvin at age 25 wrote probably one of the monumental documents in writing to man. It’s amazing he could have written it at such a young age. In the very opening chapter of his “Institutes of the Christian Religion” Calvin says:
True and substantial wisdom consists principally of two parts; the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. But while these two branches of knowledge are so intimately connected which of them preceeds and produces the other, is not easy to discover.
The knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. And that’s really what Christmas is about and one reason we can celebrate it. For Christmas tells us something about God and something about ourselves that is very important for us to realize. I thought up three words for today as I usually do. Hopefully they carry the meaning of that plethora of possibilities. They are: implantation, identification, and imagination.
Wave upon Wave Images by Larry Ricksen
Implantation
One of the great hymns in the hymnbook that we sing quite frequently is “The God of Abraham Praise”. One of the verses from that hymn says “We have eternal life implanted in the soul.” That’s one of the things we celebrate at Christmas. From His fullness we have all received.
C.S. Lewis some years ago wrote a book called “The Four Loves”. In that book he distinguishes between love that comes out of need and love that comes out of a fullness. He says that many people love others because they have a great need themselves and so they are warm and gracious toward others in order that they can receive back that same kind of warmth and graciousness. Because the greatest love of all is that love which comes from the fullness of a person who does not need in the same way but is able to give and therefore save someone who cannot give so freely.
That is the meaning of this text really. From His fullness we have all received. He did not need us as we need Him. He did not need us as we need each other. We sometimes lean upon each other. Young couples establishing a marriage relationship often times make the mistake of feeling that they establish a love based on each other, they lean on each other.
Kahil Gibran wrote that great passage where he said “that each should stand like the pillars of a temple, apart, for if we lean upon each other too much we fall, we collapse, we implode upon each other.” We need a love that comes from someone who has more love than we can possibly understand. That’s the message of Christmas. That’s who Jesus Christ is. That’s what He was all about. He came to tell us that the love of God is overflowing. When we look at Him the scriptures says we see what God is like. No one has ever seen God but the only Son begotten of the Father has made Him known. And that love that overflows to us we see what we need so much. And as we are filled with that love we become those who are better able to love others and not demand a love in return. Our need is not quite as great because of His overflowing fullness.
I think the phrase “grace upon grace” is a beautiful phrase. There’s always something there to meet our needs. I guess the simplest analogy that comes to my mind is probably what happens in most of our homes today if it has not happened already it will. And that is you go in and look at the Christmas tree and there underneath the tree is certainly a plethora of presents. Most of us have been materially blessed greatly by God. We have much to give and we give it abundantly at Christmas, sometimes sharing things far beyond what we need. But it’s a joyful occasion. We have presents upon presents. Hopefully those presents represent love upon love, grace upon grace, freely given, not demanding anything in return.
That’s what that phrase is all about. God’s love meets us in so many ways. It may give us the courage to resist a temptation that constantly besets us. It may give us the strength to survive even the hard times. It may give us the inspiration and insight for accomplishing new tasks. It may give us peace in times of suffering and death. It may give us power to do more than we ever thought possible. It may give us rest from our labors. God’s love meets us where our need is. It’s grace upon grace, overflowing like the fountain, constantly going out to us. That’s what the message of Christmas is all about. We have eternal life implanted in the soul.
Identification
This is the day of the identity crisis. When I was in college there wasn’t any such thing as an identity crisis. I never heard the phrase. And I studied psychology. Identity crises are fairly new among us. Now everybody has an identity crisis. It doesn’t matter if you are young, or middle age or older. All of us are go through identity crises. It is strange that we never knew we were going through it before. But now we have a label to put on it. All of us need to know who we are.
Maybe it’s not so funny. When we live in a world that has great anxiety and tension, great pressure, constantly we are beset by worries and cares. Sometimes we almost lose our minds trying to make sense of it all. And it’s very easy to get sucked into that whole vortex and get lost, going round and round and round. If we aren’t careful we do lose some knowledge of ourselves. We lose our identity. We are no longer able to identify who we are.
Erik Erickson, the great psychiatrist, has made his reputation on talking about identity. He has written great books on identity. There is a favorite folk song of mine called “They Call the Wind Moriah”. The song says, “the rain is Joe, the fire is Tess, but there ain’t no name for lonely”. Whenever I hear that song that phrase always stands out in my mind. There ain’t no name for lonely. And if you have no name you have no identity. We are called by our names because that gives us our identity and where we do not call each other by our names, we often lose that identity. Some people wonder why I like to be called Sam. That’s my name. That’s my identity. I identity with that. Sam means something special to me. Because my parents gave it to me it was something special to them. We call each other by name. Those of us who are sometimes overwhelmed by loneliness, lose our identity. We indeed have an identity crisis.
This passage from John tells us that we all have a unique biography and that we should be aware of the fact that we are unique in the eyes of God. And that we have a special identity now. It’s a gift to us because Jesus Christ came and that gift is that we are now children of God. And that gift came not because of something that we thought up in our minds, not because of human intentions, not because of human action, not because of the will of the flesh, but that gift came as a gift from God. It came to us in the love of Jesus Christ. We are made His children and that is a gift, not a reward. It’s a happening, not something that we have earned. It’s something that God gives to us freely out of his overflowing excessive love. A plethora of love that we can identify with.
And you and I can rejoice in the fact that the 12th verse of the first chapter of John says that “He gave us the power (the authority) to become children of God”. You are no longer lost. You don’t have to be anxious. You don’t even have to be lonely. For God has come to you in the midst of your worst problems and He will be there. Grace upon grace, overflowing in His love to meet our needs.
I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. (Genesis 9:13)
Imagination
Albert Einstein once said “imagination is more important than knowledge”. That’s quite a statement coming from a very brilliant man who gave us the Theory of Relativity. But most of us I think are aware of the fact that we to some degree are only limited by our imagination. We have such limited perspective about life. We have such limited perspective about ourselves. We don’t image ourselves as being able to do a great deal more because we have more power flowing through us than we claim. God’s love comes in our time of need. It flows through us. His fullness is there. Our identity is enlarged. We have greater capacity but we have to claim it. We are only limited by our imagination.
I came across a new word yesterday, only it’s an obsolete word, unfortunately. The word is “inusitation”. It means disuse, and unaccustomed. And I was thinking about who we are and our identity and our imagination that word made sense to me, for most of us don’t use most of what we have. We are unaccustomed to really letting our mind go and imagining other possibilities, unused to dreaming, to having visions about what God can do with us and through us.
I remember some years ago taking a test - a series of dots. And it says place your pencil on the paper and without removing the pencil, draw three straight lines through all the dots. I couldn’t do it. I thought about that crazy thing and tried in a variety of ways. And you know what my problem was? My imagination was limited. I would not go outside the dots. You had to make a line way over here and way out here and way like that and you took in all the dots. But most people don’t do that because our minds are so structured. We’re so captivated. We’re so used to doing things in the same way. How often I have people say we can’t do that. Why not? Because we’ve never done it. We can’t do that because we don’t do things like that in Piedmont. We can’t do that because our minds won’t let us think differently. We won’t use our imagination. Somehow we expect God to have all the imagination. Well God has done His bit. And what we have to think about is that Christmas means is that the imagination comes in the dimension of the ordinary. Ordinary folk like you and me. God came at Christmas time. The magnificent doctrine of the incarnation says that God came as a man. God used His imagination in coming to us. How? In the ordinary event of life. In the birth of a small child. He could have come as a great king, as a military ruler, as an overpowering statesman, or as a brilliant person. Instead He came as a small child. In the ordinary dimension of life. What a magnificent bit of imagination!
Christmas for all of us is a time when we can feel ourselves infused; implanted with the love of God. When we can once again think about the fact that we have an identity as His children and as His children He calls us to use our imagination. That great big wide world out there is filled with possibilities. It is a plethora of possibilities. There are so many things that you and I could do if we would only do it. We are limited only by our imagination in our claiming the love of God and letting that fullness flow through us, grace upon grace. Christmas is a marvelous time because it’s a plethora of possibilities. Let us pray.
O God, our Father, as we come to you today and celebrate this special time of the year. Speak to us anew of your love. If perhaps somehow we have wandered from it, if we have lost it, strike anew in our hearts that marvelous chord of the love of Jesus Christ. And let Him infuse us with a new power and new courage and a new imagination that we might reach out in that that world about us and share with others the same marvelous love that you have shared with us. Hear our prayers now and grant us your peace in this special season. For we ask it through Christ our Lord. Amen.