Where would the monkey go?" That was this question. It was a famous psychology experiment in the 1950s. He had separated baby monkeys from their mothers, and now we set up a room with two fake mama monkeys in the room. On the one side, there was a cloth one. It was comfortable, cuddly, appealing. On the other side, he had a wire one. It was hard, bare, uninviting, but also it had the milk. So, he let the baby monkey loose. And invariably, what would happen is the baby would spend all of its time in and around the cloth mom. And when he got hungry, it would run over the wire one, drink up some milk, and run back to the cloth mom. So, as psychologists do, he switched it up. You know, when the cloth mom had the milk, then the baby's acted as if the wire mom didn't exist at all. They just stayed with the cloth mom. So, then he decided he would introduce a scary stimulus. He would put something in there that would scare the baby. And regardless of what he'd done before, all the babies would run to the Terry cloth mama and cling. None ran to the wire one. So, then he took out the cloth one and introduced something scary. And regardless of whether he left the wire mama in or took it out, they acted the same. As if it wasn't there. So, when he finally would reintroduce the cloth mama, the baby monkeys would run over and cling to her. Before, at least, the baby would play and wander and venture out a little bit and come back. But now, the baby would cling for a long period of time, maybe even grabbing the hand and stroking its own face, trying to get it to care. Now, about this time, the animal lovers among you are probably thinking, who is this guy? What is terribly wrong with him? It might benefit you to know while the rest of his peers were using clinical terms like attachment and disassociation. He didn't back away from calling it what he thought it was. Love or depression, despair. He thought it was personal. So, he used personal terms. His name was Harry Harlow. And really, the question was not just where would the monkey go. The question was, what mattered more? Food or love? I mean, how important is love really? When it comes down to it, can you live without it? Which one is more integral to survival? And it wasn't just a laboratory question for him. See, his pursuit of love cost him. Even though he was famous in psychological circles, it cost him his marriage twice. And alienated him from his own kids. It wasn't simply a theme he was studying in the abstract arena. You could really say that the experiment became the theme of his life. Where do we go to find love? Well, John, once where we're going, picking up where we left off last week. And the good news here is God is not a wire monkey or even a crazed psychologist far from it. As we've been saying all week, this master enters his experiment. Beginning at verse 10, your Pew Bible, page 1645, John 1, 10, let's hear from God. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him, yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name. He gave the right to become children of God. Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, or a husband's will, but born of God. This is God's word, let's pray. Jesus, there's all kinds of ridiculous mama monkeys we've been running after. Show us your birth and be born in our hearts again this morning. We ask it in your name. Amen. Got an email last Sunday afternoon from a good friend in South Carolina. Some of you know him, Clay Werner, he came and preached my installation service. He was preaching last Sunday and in the middle of his sermon, this is somewhat prophetic. The light fell and hit his youth pastor in the face and knocked his front teeth out. Watch yourself. I mean everything stopped, kind of, whoa, what just happened? And he went down, they dealt with the crisis and his youth pastor left to go to the hospital and he's coming back up and he's thinking there's no way I get the sermon back now. He's got to wrap it up and he wants to just hit him with the primary message and he gets up in the pulpit and he says, you know, Christmas is all about the light coming down, but not like that. If we're going to sum up last week for us, it's what Clay said to his congregation. It is about the light coming down, but not to knock your teeth out. So this morning, what does it matter? We studied that he came down last week. What does it matter for us? First of all, we talk about rejection here. John tells us about rejection that he was rejected by his own. Now, if you notice back what we said last week in verse three and again in verse 10, Jesus made everything. So there's a sense in which we're talking about who his own are. There's a general and a particular. He made everything. Jesus made all of this. So in one sense, it's literally his own in the sense that he has ownership. He's the master. He made all of this stuff. And now the world's maker comes and the world doesn't recognize the one that made it. But it's worse than that because in the particular, it says he came to his own, not just those he had made, but John, a Jew has in mind here some of the Jews to whom Jesus came who rejected him. Now, think this out with me. Who are the people that he's talking about? When he calls of God's own and he's got the weight of the Old Testament, which is the scripture that he had at this point, he's saying the people that God chose, the people out of the whole world that were his, that were especially his, the people who had the word who knew the truth who were faithful were the ones that rejected him. Are we talking about this a lot? I want us to grapple with this. You know, last year a Pew forum poll said that only 35% of Americans believe that the Bible is literally God's Word. Now, our church, we believe that. We celebrate that and it's a good thing. But in America today, there's almost an overcompensation because of that, because of that shrinking percentage. We celebrate it. There's almost a sense of pride that we are the faithful ones. We are the people of God who believe in this word, who believe in him. We are the ones who represent him just like the Jews, the faithful ones thought. So you hear what John's saying. He's coming out of the gate swinging at us this morning. It's the day after Christmas. Some people came Christmas even. They thought, well, that's enough this week, but you were the ones who were faithful enough to come back on Sunday morning. And it's a good thing to come and celebrate. But I want you to hear, if you grew up in the church and churches what you do on Sunday, John is after you right now. His own rejected him, the people who were at church every time the door's opened. It's a good thing. How could that be bad? Why does this happen? Well, we talk about a lot. I mean, if you grew up in the church, you probably memorized Romans 3, 23, that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All. We've recited it. We use it in theological debates, but do we get it? Because if all have sinned, it shouldn't stone us that everybody in the room is a sinner. Including, and especially us, me, the people who represent Jesus faithfully. Now, if we got that, it would change how we interact with those we believe don't get it. Let me put this a little bit differently. When I was, when I was in seminary, I was hanging out with some guys and it was a late evening and we went out to this place and there's a lot of noise in the background. People talk, you know how you can be in public and almost feels private because there's so much noise and it's just your group. And we're talking. And all the macho bravado of six guys sitting around together sort of fades into real intimate discussion. It's one of those times where we start confessing things that we did when we were kids to one another, things that we maybe hadn't said to anybody before. And we're going around the table and each person sharing something and it comes to me. And I share a personal story from my past and it's almost as if everything's hurt. The jukebox stopped. Everybody turns and kind of stared in there. It's that Lewis Grasard joke, you know, well brother, I don't know if I'd have told that. It was, you know, we were all over here and you went there, you know, you're worse than we are. That's bad. That's horrible. And it is. I mean, I am that bad. It was that bad of a situation, but what stunned me was suddenly the old thought kicked in our pre-Christian understanding of, wait a minute. You're not as good as I am. So you're less than me. You're less of a human being than I am because of what you did. I mean, we spend our time building up our reputation building up who we are because we're insecure at the thought that all of us have messed up that we have to go around and say, well they've messed up more than I have. It's what I mean. Did they blame shifted because it makes me feel secure better about myself because how bad those people are. And that's what was happening. You know, that suddenly, well, Russ is the worst guy in the room and I felt it. That I was being made less of a human being than I was literally being dehumanized. That that's what we do to each other and how we treat one another when we do that. You see somebody else's sin and make it out to be worse than your own and believe that it is even though we memorize verses that tell us it's not. Let me give you a different example. You know, I grew up in the South in South Carolina and I went up north and met my Yankee wife. She had to come back south to realize this going north and having the cultural clash. You know, here, I'm living in New Jersey for six years and there's seas of people everywhere you go. There's more people. I mean, per capita, New Jersey is the most, I think it's the most densely populated state still. But you go everywhere and there's cars everywhere. There's people everywhere. And as a result, you know, you kind of begin to not see the people. You just have stuff you got to get done. The upside of is, you know, if you're going to survive as a business there, you move a lot faster. Fast food is really, really fast in the north because otherwise you don't survive. You know, but I'm staying in line in a grocery store. One of my first times in the grocery store is a seminary student. You know, I'm sort of independent but not really, you know, straight out of college. And I'm at the store. I'm still southern cultural norms and effect and everybody's in line shooting through. And I get the cashier. How you doing? You know, she kind of freezes. What is that? You know, people don't talk to me. I'm the cashier. I put things through. You know, we get this job done. But suddenly, her eyes kind of lit up. Like, you thought of me. I'm a human being and we interacted and even though it was just shallow, you know, how you doing. I mean, immediately there was a there was more and she was sharing more than a normal cashier in the southward as a result of that question. Because I mean, it was the opposite had happened. There was a rehumanizing. There was a value given and it was such the opposite of what we do. And before you think, especially if you're a Yankee who just happens to be in town, before you think I'm throwing the north under the bus, let's reverse it on ourselves in the south. Because in the south, we have the southern Christian version of this. The reason things tend to be slower. I mean, the reason that you're in line longer, people are interacting. They have the thing that they ask one another, but we just bury it deeper. We're just more sophisticated at it. You know, if I'm standing in line at a grocery store and it's slower than it used to be in New Jersey, I'm excited that there are all these people I can talk with. I'm aggravated that I'm in the slow line and these people are between me and what I want to get done. And it's the same thing that happens. I mean, I would be happy if these people just didn't exist, ceased to be there. I mean, that's the definition of dehumanizing, to wipe them off. We don't call it murder, but that's functionally the same thing. I just want to wipe them away because they're not as valuable as I am. If we believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, it shouldn't surprise us that everyone tears down one another, that we dehumanize one another, and some of the most guilty people are those who claim to represent the one who's fixing that. Because we claim to represent him and we don't do it. It should drive us to our knees. I mean, it said he made us. Right now, you know, I haven't seen the new movie, but Tron is out. And if you don't know what Tron is in 1982, a movie came out and the whole idea was a computer programmer wrote a program and then he figured out a way to go into the programming, wrote to go into the computer and interact with the programs. Now, if that didn't echo Christmas, I don't know what it does, but he gets in there with the programs and they go rogue on him. Even the ones who claim to represent the programmer, you know, he's a threat. And there's a betrayal. It's incredibly personal. We need to understand this. The gospel isn't just that religious thing we do that's window dressing. It's kind of like a stained glass window. You look at it, but you don't really pay attention to it. It's just kind of pretty. That's not what he, it's personal. He became a person. And when it talks about rejection, you know, if you just kind of reject, you know, when a college rejects you, you can be like, well, it's just a college or it's personal. They rejected me or you reject them. I decided not to go there. Somebody you know personally, it's much more intimate that he became a person that no other God did this, no other conception of the universe deals with this. When we reject the one we claim to own, we dehumanize not just others, but the very maker who would come, the one that we claim to build up. If you're not a Christian, you hear this morning, I'm saying aloud, I'm sorry. The church is both the place where we claim to represent Christ and the most embarrassing representation of Christ in existence. And yet, there's a reason I'm here this morning. Let's talk about that. What do we do from here? It's personal, but what does he say? He says, all those who believe in his name. I don't know how often you believe in somebody's name. What does that mean? He doesn't say believe in his example, but believe in his name. Let me give that to you again, because I think a lot of people in America hear Jesus and they read him through all of their other pre-existing grids and paradigms and the way that they see the world and they think Jesus is just one more way that I can do the thing that I'm supposed to do. He's one more method for me to climb the ladder. He's one more way for me to be what I'm supposed to be. That's not what John's saying from the outset here. We don't believe in Jesus' example as though you would follow it. We believe in his name. What's his name? It's his identity. It's his personhood as opposed to what? Believe in my name, my identity, my personhood. The problem with me is that all the stuff we just said, I'm not messed up. I do that to other people, even as I claim not to. I'm not believing in myself. I'm believing in him. When you put your faith in his name, it means you're trusting in him instead of yourself. Let me comment that a little differently. In the 1850s, there was a famous Scottish preacher, his name was Brownlow North. And the thing that most people didn't know was Brownlow North erupted onto the scene in Scotland. And he didn't really ask for it. He just started teaching Bible studies and suddenly people wanted to come here. And he was such a powerful speaker. And the crowds started coming. And even though he wasn't even ordained, churches started asking to preach because people were blown away with the things he was saying about Jesus. And they were coming in droves. And his word got out and finally a church ordained him because they saw God's hand on him. One day, he's coming to a church to preach. It's a weekend conference. It's a big deal to place this pact at the back door. Someone meets him. The secret of Brownlow North's past was that he had lived an incredibly wild life. You know, a lascivious backdrop. And one of his former lovers meets him at the back door. She had heard about him and she is upset. She has written a letter detailing all of the reasons that he is the last person in the world who should ever step in the pulpit and tell people about who Jesus is and with the good news of Jesus. And in graphic detail laid out why? And said, I dare you to tell people that you don't belong in the pulpit. And Brownlow North was hit pretty hard by this. He walked in. He walked up front. He got in the pulpit. He pulls out this letter and he read it word for word. And he looked down. He said, I am the man described here or at least I used to be. How in the world could he confess his deepest darkest sins in front of all those people? Well, if your whole existence is about building up your own reputation, your own identity, and you're desperately insecure, you cannot do that. But if you're building your identity on something else, on his name, he was abandoning himself to Christ. He was pushing back and saying it's not about me. If God can show grace to a punk like me, then that's the good news of Jesus. And that's why I am the person to be sharing this. Because I'm not worthy. Because it's not about my personhood. It's about his. See, when we try to make life about ourselves, we misuse it. We co-opt it for a purpose to which it wasn't meant to go. When we got married, I don't remember who it was, somebody gave us these little brass deer. And they were the kind of decorations that you sit by the fireplace or on the mantle. These cute little brass deer. And in our house in Chattanooga, the fireplace happened to be right beside the door where you came in. So the brass deer sat right there. Well, it's an old cottage house. And you open the door and everything wasn't balanced. And if you try to open the door to leave it just where the glass door was there, the door would swing shut. So the brass deer got co-opted to be a door stop because they were kind of heavy. Which was alright except they scraped my floor a little bit. Because they weren't meant to do that. The stairs were right beside the doorway. And old house that it was from where and tear the nails and the stairs would pop up from use after a while. Well, being the work hard, go get the tools kind of guy that I was. The hammer was too far away. But there are these brass deer right here. So I get the brass deer that would hammer back in the nail. But you know what I found? brass deer weren't meant to be hammers. So what you got from it is a mangled deer. When we try to do life for a purpose that it wasn't meant to be, we become mangled deer. I wasn't meant to drive that nail. I wasn't meant to be my own savior. I can't. And when you set out to accomplish something that you can't, you're just going to get mangled. And angry and frustrated along the way. If you build your identity on yourself, it will crush you. You weren't meant to do that. You can't. And the good news of Christ is he gives his name for us to rest in. All right. We trust and believe in his name, his personhood, his identity, not ours. Look at what it does. He says, all those who believe in the name, he gives the right to become children of God. What rights do children have? And they get to call him daddy. They get in on all of daddy's stuff. They get on a being with daddy. They get all the intimacy of having daddy. It's a privilege. So what? Let me give you the negative here. This is controversial and offensive. But John doesn't step away from just stating the fact. Today in America, it is popular to believe that we're all children of God. Everybody on the planet, the child of God. But that's not what John says here. Just read the words to all who believe in his name. He gives the right to become children of God. You see that? It's personal. It's about your relationship with Jesus. And if you don't have a relationship with Jesus, you can't be a child of God. Now let me catch that because if you're really attuned to political correctness, I want you to hear both sides of it. The danger there is to say, well now you're less of a human being. That's not what I'm saying. Remember what we said in the first point? We're all falling. None of us deserve this. But if you don't have a personal relationship with Christ, you can't be a child of God. This is what Christmas is about. He took on flesh and blood. He became, well as one person puts it, the son of man, the son of God became a son of man, so that the sons of men could become sons of God. He took on flesh and blood and was abandoned the way that we should be. So that instead of being abandoned like we deserve, we would get to become children of God. It's the trade. It's the cross. It's what Christmas is running to. It's what we were made for. Christ comes to fix it. And if we reject that, it is a personal rejection. And we all have rejected it apart from His grace. Well, let's go to the positive side. What does it mean? How in the world can we claim God is daddy when we're illegitimate children? We weren't born in the family. We got to have someone who brings us in. The story of David and Goliath is well known. Get the contrast through this. David and Goliath is a famous story because the Philistines had gathered in the Old Testament. They gathered to fight the Israelites. And instead of just laying into all out warfare where there's all kinds of bloodshed from everybody, one of the old ways was to send out a champion. And the Philistines chose their champion. It was Goliath. And the Israelites chose theirs. It was God. You understand that? If we read David and Goliath and we think, well, the Israelites chose their champion. They chose a little boy. We missed the whole point. It's us reading the Bible through our own way of thinking again. The Bible's really about me. No, it's not. If you think you're David, that you're meant to go out and be the champion and slay the giant, you will become a mangle deer when he crushes you. The whole point is, why in the world would they send a little boy to face a giant? Because it's not about the little boy. It's about God fighting through him. And the reason the giant has slayed is because it points to the truth that there will be a real David. See, the people who put their faith in David, they found that he betrayed their trust pretty quickly. He became a pretty horrible king who betrayed his kingdom, didn't go to war, but betrayed his own family, his best friend, killed him, adulterer. David wasn't the hope. It's that there would come another champion who would slay the real giants that we can't kill. The only real giants that could ever kill us. See, when Jesus goes to the cross as our representative, he dies in our place. He goes out and does what we can't. We are more like Israel standing back and watching our family champion take the field in our place. We have a family champion who goes out to fight the battle for us. A big brother who says, Daddy, let's make them family. If you read in John 17, which we haven't gotten to yet in our study of John, in the high-preachly prayer, Jesus says these two words that one of our friends pointed out to me that should just blow you away. Jesus is talking to his daddy and he says, Father, love them even as you have loved me. If you don't understand what we're talking about, we're talking about adoption this morning. God calling us kids when we weren't his kids, making us his. Jesus is defining it for us right there. Father, treat them like you treat me, even as you treat me. When you look down and see your little boy go out and slay the giant, treat them as if they did that. When you look down and you treasure this little baby in a manger, treat them as if they were your child like that. Somebody brings a newborn baby to the church and they walk down the hallway. How do people respond? There's an ugly, look at the baby and you can see it in the parent's eyes, the hall, the wonder over their child. There's a connection there. It's beautiful. Do you realize God looks at you like that because of what Jesus did? Did He treasures you that way? I mean, this runs contrary to everything we think in the South. You know, as the old saying goes, blood is thick. I know of a young couple that was married and they were struggling and the husband has had a drug problem. And the young mother took the evidence to her in-laws and said, do you see this? This is what I'm up against. Help me. Help me fight this. And the parents, good, Southern Christian folk just couldn't. They sided with their son. They saw a failing marriage and they sided with their son. Why? Because blood is thick. If we're going to get this contrast, if you're going to understand what God did that was thicker than blood, for him to make this trade with his own son to draw us in. Ray Cortese tells a story of going to a conference. And a man there was speaking, talking about his down syndrome son and how when the child was born and was unexpected and there were health problems and all of a sudden, you know, they're going through all sorts of problems at the hospital. There's a hole in the intestinal tract and surgery after surgery after surgery and the financial toll is mounting. And he's watching his wife just the emotional toll wear her down. And he starts saying, we can't handle this, we just can't handle this. And he starts going to God saying, God, we can't take this. We can't do it. He says, in the moment of despair, he said, Lord, maybe, maybe be just better if he didn't live. And he said, it was almost audible, the sense of God coming and responding, saying, Andy, you have no idea how little I get from our relationship. You have no idea of how much it costs me to love you, to make you my own. And yet I do. I mean, you're the most special needs child off God. And he said, everything changed. Suddenly, they're well up in him as a daddy. This unbelievable sense of his father's reckless love for him and the passion emerged for his little boy and he poured himself out on this boy. And now here he is looking back at a life that was difficult raising this adult son that is utterly dependent on his daddy every day costs. And yet it's just a reminder that his heavenly father had that kind of reckless love for him that he loved like that, that it cost him that much, that he had a love for him that was thicker than blood. You won't rejoice over Christmas until you understand how far your daddy's willing to go to bring you into his family. And then it's time to run home and celebrate. Jesus, you were reckless with your love. You were reckless. And I'm just a wreck. Thank you that you love messes like us. Lord, melt us with the joy that we are special needs, kids, and that we are treasured by your love. That you draw us because of your joy, not because of anything we've done. Lord, let us build our identity not on who we are but on what you did. Let us celebrate that you came into this world to trade with us, to give up humanity so we could regain what we were really meant for. I pray if there's anyone here who hasn't trusted in you that you would take mangled dear like us and make us alive and let us run free and joyful. We bring all this before you and said it at your feet this morning and your name. Amen.