Princeton Presbyterian Church (EPC) Sermon # 1712
December 21, 2025
John 1.14-18 Click here for audio worship.
Dr. Ed Pettus
(This is an extended outline, not a verbatim transcript.)
“Full of Grace and Truth”
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
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The Christmas Story
John has a Christmas story and it is wrapped up in one verse – And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is a statement of incarnation, God with us, as Matthew calls it. Born in Bethlehem in Luke’s Gospel. The Divine God came to us in human form. We portray Jesus’ birth each year as a humble setting, and rightly so, with shepherds, animals, and the wise-men. John does not cover the actual events but he sums up Christmas with the Word becoming flesh. John begins at creation, in the beginning. He sends us all the way back to Genesis where God's word created all things. John gives us a very high view of Jesus. John reveals a new Genesis, a new beginning with the Creator who is Jesus. It is a glorified view that speaks of tremendous links to creation and Jesus' deity, holiness, and glory, full of grace and truth. The Word is set at the beginning of all things with God. Through Him all things were made. The Word existed before all things were. The Word exists in glory from the beginning.
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Glory to God
John’s gospel tells us more about the glory of Christ. In Christ we are able to see what cannot be seen - God’s glory in Christ. Most scholars recognize within John’s gospel what is known as the book of glory. Jesus turned the water into wine at a wedding and through it manifested His glory. He healed a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. He fed five thousand people with only two fish and five loaves of bread. He opened the eyes of a blind man and in a most amazing scene He is glorified by raising Lazarus from the dead. The gospel even says that Lazarus became ill not for a death, but in order to glorify God and the Son of God! Jesus is glorified through miracles that illustrate His power to create and to make things right (re-create!). Jesus demonstrates His divinity in spectacular ways. No doubt, word spread throughout the region about Him and many proclaimed His glory.
The Word - active, living, creating anew, glorifying God, and so John is able to proclaim "we have seen His glory!" But we do not want to exalt the divinity of Jesus Christ at the expense of His humanity. For we confess that Jesus was truly human and truly God. Both divine and human. Jesus Christ, who was and is and is to come, became a man of flesh and bone.
While John’s gospel shows many signs that glorify the divinity of Christ, it also reveals the humanity of Jesus. When Lazarus died, John says, "Jesus wept." The verb tense in the original language carries the feeling that, "He burst into tears!" Jesus knows our hurts, our tears, and our sorrows.
John's gospel bears witness to Jesus becoming tired from walking on a journey. The story of the Samaritan woman at the well finds Jesus resting because He was tired. Jesus knows our weariness, the days when we are worn down. He shares our humanity. And yet, Jesus works miracles in our lives to refresh us to new life. It sometimes seems unbelievable that we are able to get up each day after the rough day before! Jesus also shares joy with us. The wedding at Cana would have been an exciting time for Jesus. He probably laughed and smiled with excitement as a man and woman were joined in marriage and as they all feasted with food and drink.
The Word became flesh and lived among us. What a glorious, almost inconceivable event! Divinity and humanity embodied in the person of Jesus.
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Full of Grace and Truth
If you have not yet figured it out, this sermon outline covers only one verse - John 1.14. 1) The Word became flesh; 2) we have seen His glory; 3) that glory is in the Son who is full of grace and truth.
Full, not half and half like you pour in your coffee. Full of grace and full of truth. And it is not like we never had God’s grace and truth before Jesus. But in Jesus, we could and can see it more clearly. God’s grace and truth have been revealed from the beginning. Some people view the Old and New Testaments from a distorted perception. They see the Old Testament as the wrathful part of the Bible, the part dominated by Law (truth). They only see God as a God of wrath because God shows that anger when the Law is broken. The New Testament is viewed as the testament of grace or love expressed in the God of love in Jesus Christ. That is a very narrow and dangerous view of the Bible. 1) It just ain’t so! 2) It sets God up as ever changing rather than ever true, constant, and always the same yesterday, today, and forever. 3) In one sense it sets Jesus against the Father as if Jesus had to come correct the wrongs of the Old Testament. 4) It promotes supersessionism which believes that the New Testament covenant supersedes the Old Testament covenant and follows therefore that we really only need to take into account the New Testament, and some critics of the Bible would even boil that down to only what Jesus said.
Grace and truth are all over the Bible! In Exodus 34:6 we read about God, “The Lord passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.’” I offer this verse because steadfast love and faithfulness are synonymous in the Old Testament to grace and truth in the New Testament. Grace is every expression of God's steadfast love that we do not deserve. It is in the giving of the Law. It is in sending prophets. It is in the wrath that is expressed when we mess up. It is in sending His only Son. It is raising Him from the tomb so that we might live. It is everything God has done and promises to do. God's grace enables us to know the truth, to know Jesus, and empowers us to submit ourselves to the truth. In grace and truth our lives are reshaped into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
Truth is Jesus Himself, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). The truth is Jesus Christ. The truth is every word that comes from the mouth of God. Truth is that which changes us. It is not just knowing Scripture or knowing about Jesus Christ, but it is letting that knowledge grow in us in such a way that it regenerates our being, making us more like Jesus. Truth is not knowing facts and figures, it is in knowing the living Christ. It is in a personal relationship of faith and love. We know truth through God’s faithfulness. God’s faithfulness and truth do not change. It is not influenced by cultural whims, politically correct nonsense, or being woke. It is God's unchanging Word – dependable, constant, infallible, faithful.
As we meditate on John 1.14, I believe we will come to see that this is one of the primary truths of the gospel, that is the fullness of grace and truth. Randy Alcorn in his book, The Grace and Truth Paradox, has written, “Truth without grace breeds self-righteousness and crushing legalism. Grace without truth breeds deception and moral compromise.” Truth and grace must be held as one. Truth without grace is harsh and unfaithful. Grace without truth ultimately leads to “anything goes”! This problem is in the world, no doubt, but also exists in parts of the church. The reality is that grace and truth cannot be separated. Sin comes when we exercise grace without truth or truth without grace. It comes easy to us when we might think we are always right or if we think we should show grace without a shred of truth. If we do either of these, we need to confess and seek to grow closer to the biblical truth of living in the fullness of grace and truth.
The gospel of John says Jesus is “full of grace and truth.” The “fullness of God” – fullness of grace and the fullness of truth. Jesus reveals the relational character of God. God is full of loyalty and reliability, full of favor and consistency, full of love, full of mercy, full of faith, full of grace and truth. I imagine the people who received Jesus could see it in his face. He reflected the grace of God and lived the truth of God. He led a grace-filled life and a truth-filled life, never one without the other.
This is one of our goals as Christians – to be full of grace and truth. What we find is that God gives us grace. God gives us truth. In Reformed faith we preach the “solas”, Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Scripture Alone, Christ Alone, Glory to God Alone. But the irony is that none stand alone. They are together alone, that is, they do not stand alone but are connected. This is the message of John, Jesus full of grace and truth, not only grace and not only truth, but the fullness of both. Jesus was always acting in grace and truth. Even if we think Jesus was doing only one or the other, they are both present. When He taught truth, for instance, in the Sermon on the Mount, He was acting with grace. When He is protected the woman caught in adultery displaying extraordinary grace, He was also proclaiming truth.
It is an unfortunate situation that some parts of the church neglect grace or truth, either beating people up with the Bible (no grace) or falling to the cultural gospel of tolerance (no truth). But we all fall short from time to time on either side. It was said of the early church that they proclaimed the truth because they were also filled with grace. “And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all” (Acts 4:33). The church needs nothing more than to proclaim the truth, to proclaim the gospel and all that the Bible teaches as truth. And the church must also display the grace God has given.
John 1 gives us the Christmas story in the message of grace and truth. The world is starving for grace and truth because the world is starving for Jesus Christ. We are to embrace and embody grace and truth, love and faith, righteousness and peace in such a way that the world can see it in us, written on our hearts. Let us make preparation for Christmas by soaking our lives in grace and truth, that is, in the One who is full of grace and truth. Amen.
