This year, I want to focus on reading a whole book of the Bible every month. Maybe I’ll end up reading the whole Bible this year, on one of those times where I end up sitting down and not getting up until I finish Deuteronomy or something like that. It is possible, or maybe I’ll get in on the Bible reading plan that my wife is going through this year. But, for January, I thought I’d tackle the Book of John on the blog. Tackle may not be the right word. Soak is probably better.

So, this week I’ll be reading John 1-5 every day with the hope of reading the next 5 chapters next week and so one for the rest of January (this is a method I learned a few months ago from Jeremiah Morris, the Director of Evangelism and Mobilization at First Presbyterian Church of Houston). It takes me about 30 minutes to read 5 chapters without rushing it. I just timed myself. I, occasionally, stop at a verse that jumps out and write a note on the side it. It helps having a journaling Bible. It also helps if you read the English Standard Version of the Bible, but that’s another story. 🙂 I may not write a blog about every chapter, because of lack of time, but I wish to write a few posts about what I am reading. I hope you are blessed and encouraged by it. Today, we look at some of John 1.

John comes right out of the gate with a sweeping statement of who Christ is. The imagery of life, light, darkness, flesh, grace, truth is thick and grand. When you read it, you wonder who this John, this author of this book really is. But, then you realize that it was the Holy Spirit who inspired John to write these words and John comes out saying that Jesus is God. In the first few verses, he writes that Jesus was in the beginning with God and that He is God and nothing that is made was made without Christ having a hand in it (John 1:1-3). This is one of my favorite theological topics for me.

There are wonderful shifts that takes place in verse 14 and 19. Verse 14 describes that this Jesus who is God became a human. That is huge! The God from eternity shows up on earth as a human being. Not rejecting his deity, He takes the form of a servant and becomes a human. See Philippians 2:5-8 for a little bit more on this. But, John chapter 1 verse 14 lets us know that Christ became human, was full of grace and truth and that He gave Himself to people who were to receive Him. Verse 18 is clear that although no one has seen God, God has shown Himself and revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Jesus has made God known by Him standing there in a physical body and fully expressing His deity at the same time. This causes one to worship.

Verse 19, though, brings Jesus to the time where He is a grown man and John the Baptist, his cousin starts to cry out in the wilderness telling everyone that Christ is coming. Remember that John, the author of this book and John the Baptist are two different people. John was a popular name back then, I guess. So, Jesus shows up and John starts telling people that Jesus is the lamb of God, the one that takes away the sins of the world. John, Jesus’ cousin, says that he didn’t know Jesus, as God obviously, until He saw the Spirit descend from above and fall on Jesus. He didn’t know He was God until it was confirmed to him by the Holy Spirit. In reality, we don’t know who Jesus really is until the Spirit reveals it to us. As we see Him working in our lives, the Spirit will show us that Christ is God. Without the Spirit’s help we cannot say that Christ is Lord. We need the Spirit to guide us and lead us to this truth.

Jesus, then, starts to call men to fulfill His mission. I’ll pick this up in the next blog post and write about this later.

For now, the message is for you to believe that Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit is the one who reveals this to you. I encourage you to continue reading the account of John so you can see that Jesus is God. After all, John wrote his book “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31) May you come to believe this truth: Jesus is God and only He can take away your sins.