God’s Indescribable Gift
This is a transcript. It may contain some inaccuracies.
In this chapter from which this text is taken, you will find, if you're to read this chapter, that Paul the apostle was stirring up the Corinthians to generosity, cheerfulness, giving toward the poor saints in Jerusalem. So he's stirring them up and commending their generosity, and their gift, to come alongside the needy saints in Jerusalem and to give. And he tells them that God loves a cheerful giver. He uses that word from which we get our English word, “hilarious”. God loves the hilarious giver.
He commended their desire to give, and exhorted them to be diligent in their commitment to give all the more. He told them in verse 6 of this chapter that “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows with blessing will also reap with blessing.” And while on the theme of giving, he couldn't help himself. Paul couldn't help himself but speak of another gift. And he began to write about it, as if to say, I am now thinking, my brothers and sisters, not so much of your gifts as I am thinking of another gift. Not so much of your gifts to the Lord's poor people, as much as of the Lord's great gift to you, His poor people. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!
Whatever you give, I can speak about, but what He gave surpasses all powers of speech, all ability to articulate, all human language. Let men give as generously as they may; you can always declare the value of their gift; you can describe its’ worth, but God's gift, oh, God's gift, Paul says, it's indescribable. You cannot fully estimate the value of what God gives, and particularly in giving this gift. The Gospel, beloved, is the Gospel of giving and forgiving. We may sum it up in those two words, “giving” and “forgiving”. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift. Paul's heart surges with a hymn of praise, exuberance, as he meditates upon the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became the Son of Man, to save sinners like you and like me.
This verse is a very dramatic verse. It's a very dramatic and powerful statement on the part of the Apostle Paul. You could see, you could read this. He is utterly amazed as he turns his thoughts to the greatest gift that has ever been offered to mankind. And would you see, first of all, as he makes this statement, in reference to the Lord Jesus Christ, that he refers to Him as a gift. Jesus is a gift. He's a gift from God. Paul says, Jesus is a gift. Jesus Christ is this gift that he's mentioning here. He is the gift of gifts. He surpasses all gifts. He's one of a kind.
No gift that has been extended to you and to me can even begin to compare to this gift, which is the Lord Jesus Christ.
How often you hear people speak about Christ and His salvation, as though they were some sort of a reward of merit. You know, it's like an air mile system, you know, you can contribute somehow to earning this gift, as though we did something by which to win His divine favor, that somehow what comes to us is more our due than really a gift of divine grace. But search the scripture, search the Bible, Genesis to Revelation from cover to cover, and what do you find? Well, everywhere in the scriptures, the great word is not “merit”. What is the great word? “Grace”. That's the great word. Grace. Not deserving, but receiving. How? Freely. Freely.
Of the great mercy of our God.
And I couldn't help myself at this point. I want to share with you some good exhortation, some good word from Spurgeon himself on this. In fact, he has an incredible sermon titled, “God's Unspeakable Gift”. And this is a section from it. Listen to what he says concerning this gift, and I quote: “Our Lord Jesus must be a gift to us, if we are ever to possess Him.
He could only come to us, sons of men, by way of gift. Consider the dignity of His person for a minute, and then ask how it is conceivable that we could have deserved that such a person as He should come here and live and die, that we might be saved? I can conceive of a man meriting this or that honor among his fellow men, but when I think of the Prince of life, the Lord of glory, equal with the Father, King of kings and Lord of lords, very God of very God, and when I see Him giving himself up to die for men, my very blood boils,” he says, “at the thought that we could ever have deserved that sacrifice.
“One is indignant,” he goes on to say, “that human pride should dare to go the length of even imagining that a life of perfection could have deserved to be rewarded by the gift of Christ. Nay, my brethren, if we had kept God's law without a flaw, if there had been no omission of duty and no commission of sin, and we could have taken the compound merits of a perfect world and laid them at the feet of God, they could not have deserved that Christ should become man, that Christ should live in poverty, that Christ should die in shame for man. There would have been no need of Christ's death if man had not sinned, but had there been a supposable need, Christ's sacrifice could not have been deserved, even if we had remained innocent, like our first parents in the Garden of Eden before the fall.
“I am sure,” he concludes, “that none of you could for a minute tolerate the thought that any human merit should deserve the incarnation of God upon this earth, the coming of the Divine Son in our nature into this world, and His shameful death upon the cross of Calvary.”
He's a gift. He's a gift. And you know, there are two things to make a gift.
Well, think about it. Today, many of us here exchange gifts, and in the next few days, you will exchange gifts, right? There are two things to make a gift. There cannot be a gift without, first of all, a giver, and then secondly, a receiver. A giver and a receiver. Have you received this gift? Have you received this gift, this indescribable gift? It is essential to make Him a gift to you, that you should receive Him. And it is absolutely unfathomable, that you should take into your empty hand, the priceless treasure that God bestows. I mean, think about this, we have this priceless treasure given to us. God's gift. And you cannot thank God for His indescribable gift unless God, having given, you also have received it. And you may receive Christ, and I may receive Christ only freely. So freely. You're trying to buy salvation, you're trying to seek to earn it, you will end up heaping up for yourself more condemnation. The more you try, the more condemnation you will heap up for yourself. It is a gift.
The Bible says, it is a gift. Salvation is a gift. Christ is a gift. And being a gift, nothing is freer. A poor person can receive this gift. A criminal can receive this gift. A trembling hand can receive this gift. And it comes not based on merit, not by reward, but entirely based on the generosity and the graciousness of the bestower. We didn't deserve it. And what a glorious thing it is that you and I, and all of us, can receive God's indescribable gift. And once received, once embraced, Christ is ours. And let me be quick to say, beloved, once you receive this gift, you will never, ever, ever lose it, never. “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,” Romans 11:29, which means that God never revokes or rescinds this indescribable gift that He has given. He will never say to you, well, you must let me have that again. No, no. If God has given you Christ, and you have received Him by faith, He is yours and He is yours forever. And this is the glory of this divine gift.
A court case may jeopardize your status, the status of your possession may be brought against you, and you may lose what you thought to be yours. I mean, the idea that you could go to sleep at night with fear that you should lose it isn't comforting at all. But if God has given you Christ and has given me Christ, and I have taken Him, and you have taken Him, then He is yours. He is mine forever. Nor death, no hell, nor anything else shall ever be able to separate the soul from Christ, or Christ from the soul that has embraced Him by faith. Christ, Christ is enough. Christ is all I need. As we saw this morning, “Take the world, but give me Jesus.” To have Christ would be far better than all the world without Him. Give me Christ, give me Christ, and let me die sooner than let me live without Christ, for that cannot be truly called life, which is without Him, who is the way, the truth, and the life. What does it mean? To have everything in the world, but not to have Christ, is to have nothing and to be utterly bankrupt. But to have Christ is to have everything. So much so that Paul could call this gift “indescribable.”
That is the one adjective that he uses to describe this gift. Indescribable. “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.” I mean, think about this. This is Paul the apostle. This is Paul who wrote majestic sentences about Christ. Paul who wrote wonderful paragraphs in his letters, where he piles up superlatives. He piles up his words, mountain upon mountain upon mountain, in order to glorify Christ and make much of Christ. I mean, if anybody could have spoken about Christ from alpha to omega and told all about Him, I mean, Paul was the guy. And though he did not give up the blessed task, but lived and died at it, he declared that God's gift was indescribable. Indescribable. This is an amazing statement for Paul to make. And we shouldn't miss this. It's an amazing statement for Paul to make. This is, again, Paul, the towering intellect. Paul, the capable theologian, the brilliant intellect, the highly educated apostle, who is articulate in several languages. This is Paul who was caught up, remember, to the third heaven, and heard what was not lawful for a mere man to utter. And yet, even Paul was stretched beyond the limits of his towering intellect, stretched beyond the boundaries of his command on words and vocabulary when he approached the Lord Jesus Christ.
All he could say, just give thanks for God's gift, and let me describe it for you. It's indescribable. He is indescribable. What that means is that the fullness of Christ is beyond any one of us to grasp. He is beyond what we can convey in human languages. We draw near Him. We pursue Him. We press on to know Him, and yet the heights and the depths and the breadths and the widths of the fullness of Christ is absolutely indescribable. And no matter how long we have known Him, no matter how much more we will know Him, we will always be reduced to this one word, indescribable. Indescribable. Christ is beyond human words to fully convey who He is. He is beyond what human understanding can fully embrace.
This evening, as we ponder the Lord Jesus Christ coming to rescue us from our sin, I really believe that we truly worship our Lord all the more when we see how far He is above and beyond our human, limited, finite understanding. And so come, let us adore Him. Let us worship Him. Let us put our hands over our mouth and be stunned at this indescribable gift. Paul says, thanks be to God for His gift. And then he says, and by the way, this gift is indescribable. This word, by the way, translated indescribable, It means cannot be expounded. It means unspeakable.
One may ask, “Well, why then do we speak about Him?” Well, essentially because He is indescribable. Even at this time, after 2,000 years, if the theme we have to preach about were describable, we should have exhausted it, right? We should have. But as it is indescribable, unspeakable, a sea without a shore, an ocean without a bottom, we will keep on preaching for another 2,000 years and another 2,000 years, and if the Lord does not come, we shall never get to the end of this theme; I am quite certain. He is infinitely indescribable. When we come to speak about Christ, we have an unspeakable subject, an indescribable subject. Here is a well springing up that overflows, and we can speak forever upon this unspeakable theme and just scratch the surface. There is nothing like it. He is inexhaustible. Our Savior is inexhaustible. It's like a well that springs up forever and ever and ever. We can speak about Him, yet He is unspeakable.
2 Corinthians 4:6, “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” Where? “in the face of Christ.”
He is indescribable. He's the vision of God. “Jesus said, ‘Have I been with you all so long? And have you not come to know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘show us the Father?’’ ” John 14: 9. He is the image of God. “He is the image of the invisible God,” Colossians 1:15. He is the form of God who although existing in the morphi, the form of God, the essential form which never alters. Jesus pre-existed in the divine form of God, equal with God the Father in every way. He is the fullness of God. “For in Him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” Colossians 1:19. “For in Him, all the fullness of deity dwells bodily,” Colossians 2:9. The nature of God, we see the nature of God. He possesses the nature of God, who “He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of
His nature, and He upholds all things by the word of His power,” Hebrews 1:3.
Jesus Christ, our Lord, the One we worship, the One we celebrate, today and every day is the sum and substance of salvation, of God's gift. And the one who needs a savior most will tell you that Christ is God's indescribable gift. The one, you know, who sits down in deep distress of his soul, with such a heavy heart that he cannot even lay his hand on his heavy heart, it would break his arm to have to hold that heavy, laden heart up…laden with guilt and laden with fears. That one, for that one, there's no salvation but by Christ. How I need Jesus to lift all of that guilt up, to remove that guilt and purge my guilty conscience. I could better bear the whole world with Christ than live without Him. Beloved, when a person understands and feels his need of Christ, he knows that Christ is God's indescribable gift. Jesus is indescribable in
His person.
Not too long ago we saw this together; scripture teaches that Jesus existed from all eternity past, long before He entered this world in His incarnation. Christ is the eternal Son of God. He is without beginning, uncreated, pre-existent, before time. He always was. There has never been a time when Jesus did not exist. He was never brought into being. He was never created. Throughout all eternity past, Christ shared equally in the divine glory. There has never been a time when Jesus did not exist. And when He was born on that first Christmas morning, He was as old as His Father, and He was older than His mother. And 2,000 years ago, Jesus stepped out of eternity and into time as we read earlier, Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us, and the government will rest on His shoulders, and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” The Father of Eternity, He's the source of eternity, He is the creator of eternity. The indescribable gift that was never created. This is a gift that has always existed. “His going forth are from everlasting,” Micah 5:2, “from ancient days.” This too should be a great encouragement to us, because this tells us that Jesus Christ, our Savior, is always previous to everything in our lives. He's always previous to history and time. He's always previous to even our little lives. He's always existed. His plan for human history has been brought forth from an inner trinitarian council. And all of our lives are but a flowing force of His eternal plan and purpose for us. He is an eternal Savior.
Let me put it this way. He is the uncreated Creator. He is the first cause, which everything else is the subsequent effect. All things are from Him, and through Him, and to Him. He is the one in eternity past, working with the Father and the Spirit, who has set everything in motion. He has created the world and everything for His own purpose and for His own plans. Don't you think He knows what's best for your life and my life? Don't you think He has the eternal perspective and knows what lies out ahead of you? And so He speaks to us in His Word from the ultimate, unlimited vantage point, from an eternal perspective, and how our lives are fulfilled and satisfied as we know Him and live for Him. At the same time, how tiny and wasted our lives are when we do not live for Christ and only live for ourselves and live for the here and for the now. But how satisfied and how purposeful are our lives when we live for this one who is God's indescribable gift.
There has never been a gift like this. He's absolutely indescribable. He is beyond our human comprehension. He's absolutely far, absolutely above, beyond what we can grasp in our understanding. But we know Him and we love Him and we adore Him. And we are left as Paul to say, He is the indescribable gift. No wonder David said in Psalm 27, “One thing I have asked from Yahweh, that, shall I seek, that I may dwell in the house of Yahweh all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of Yahweh and to inquire in His temple.” And no wonder as well Paul writes elsewhere, Philippians 3, listen to the words of Paul. After so many years in the faith, so many years walking with the Lord, getting to know the Lord Jesus Christ, he writes these words, “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but,” dung, “rubbish so that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own which is from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God upon faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.”
And he says, “Brothers,” verse 13, “I do not consider myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
Who can even begin to explain the person of the Lord Jesus Christ? How can we even begin to express the vastness, the fullness of this truth? That there has never been a time that Jesus Christ did not exist. You want to sing as you behold Him. Lord Jesus, you are indeed “beautiful beyond description, too marvelous for words, too wonderful for comprehension, like nothing ever seen or heard. Who can grasp your infinite wisdom? Who can fathom the depth of your love? You are beautiful beyond description, majesty enthroned above.” The only thing I could do is, I can stand in awe of you. “Holy God, to whom all praise is due, I stand in awe of you.” He is indescribable in His person.
But not only that, Jesus is indescribable in His condescension. Think of the virgin birth.
Think of how indescribable His virgin birth is. He is a glorious God, yet became a perfect man. No tongue of Seraph, no tongue of Cherub, can ever describe the condescension of Him, whose name is a Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Father of Eternity, the Prince of Peace. This is He whom the Father gave for us and for our sakes. He is the Creator of all things, for without Him nothing was made that was made, yet He became flesh and dwelt among us. He fills all things by His omnipresence, yet He came and tabernacled among us on this earth. This is that Jesus who was born of Mary, yet who lived before all the worlds. I mean, try to wrap your mind around this. Who can even begin to fathom this indescribable truth? He was that Word who was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God. He is unspeakable, indescribable. It's not possible to put into human language the divine mystery of His sacred being. Truly man, yet truly God.
Oh, how great the wonder of it. Surely this is an unspeakable, indescribable gift. Can anyone measure or describe how far Christ condescended, stooped, went from the throne of splendor? He came to a manger to be wrapped, to lie where the oxen feed. Just think about that alone this evening. This indescribable gift. That Jesus Christ grew in wisdom, He grew in stature, He grew in favor with God, He grew in favor with man, in Luke 2:42. Listen, beloved, this is way so high above our heads that we cannot even see it. What do we do with this? What do we do with this? That Jesus Christ humbled Himself and took upon Himself the limitations of humanity that He might be our Savior. He experienced humanity in its fullness. He suffered. He suffered. The Creator suffered. He got hungry. He got thirsty. He knew loneliness. He knew grief. He grew weary. He got tired. He slept. He wept. He was rejected. He died. The giver of life, the source of life. Yet, while He was absolutely human, He lived His entire life without committing a single sin.
Oh, what a stoop of condescension was that? The infinite becomes an infant. The one who made it all, controls it all, owns it all, laid aside His glory, became a helpless infant.
The eternal is rocked on a woman's knee. He's there in the carpenter's shop, obedient to His parents, earthly parents. There in the temple, sitting among the doctors of theology, hearing them and asking them questions. There in poverty, crying, the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. In 2 Corinthians 8:9, we have a beautiful description of this, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though being rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.” And He is there, in thirst, John 4, asking of a guilty woman a drink of water. Unheard of. Unspeakable. That He before whom all the hosts of heaven veiled their faces should come here among mere men, and among the poorest of the poor. That He who dwelt in the midst of the glory and the delight of heaven should stoop to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. That surpasses all human thought. Such a Savior is an unspeakable gift. How the two natures came together. What that means exactly is beyond us. It is indescribable what God has done in the incarnation. It's way beyond us. It's beyond words, our words. He's beyond our understanding. He is exalted in the heights of heaven. Let us worship Him. Let us adore Him. Let us fall before Him and be in awe before His presence.
He is indescribable, not only in His person, not only in His condescension. He is indescribable in His love. As Paul prays for the saints at Ephesus, remember those words that we studied together, Ephesians 3.18, he says, “My prayer is that you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ, which is indescribable.” It surpasses our knowledge. What we read here should be a marvel to our hearts and our souls. It's not just that Christ loves sinners, but Christ loves me. Christ loves me. Put your name there. Christ loves me. “ I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,” who what? “loved me and gave Himself up for me.” Loves me, Paul. You can put your name there if you're a child of God. It's not that just Christ loves sinners, but Christ loves me. This infinite God of heaven and earth, the God who existed throughout all of the ages past, the God who created all that there is out of the womb of nothing, the God of the universe, the God of the galaxies, the God who put the stars in place, the God of the planets, the earth, the God who has created every one of us in His own image, the God who hung the planets, the God who flung out the stars, and the God who strung the moon, the God who heaped up the mountains and filled the seas and stretched out the rivers and the fields…This great, awesome, holy, sovereign, righteous, majestic God loves you, and loves me.
The eye of Yahweh is set upon the one who fears God, those who wait for His loving kindness, Psalm 33. This Christ loves us. He cares for us. He feels for us. And because Christ is infinite, meaning He's without limits, He's the first and the last, the Alpha, the Omega, therefore, so is His love without limits. It is love so amazing, so divine. It is an infinite love. We can never come to the end of the love of this God for us. His love is as exhaustive and as limitless as He is. This is love beyond comprehension. That's what we celebrate concerning the coming, that first coming of our Lord, Advent. It's love beyond comprehension, love beyond comparison. This indescribable love was set in motion 2000 years ago in the coming of Jesus Christ to die for us on Calvary's cross, taking our sin, taking our shame, taking our iniquity, taking our shortcomings, taking them all on himself.
But beloved, I want you to know that it goes back even further than that. Before you were born, before I was born, before the cross, before the foundation of the world, God loved us. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” In 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He made Him who knew no sin to be made sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” How unfathomable is this? How unspeakable is this?
How indescribable is this? How could that be? How could all the sins, all of them that I've committed, sins that I have committed, sins that I will commit, be laid upon the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself 2,000 years ago? How could all the sins that I have yet to commit, be placed upon this Christ, 2,000 years ago? How could it be that this Savior, who was born and gave His life and died, bearing all the sins of all of His people, from beginning of creation until the end of this world, as we know it, how can this be? This is absolutely indescribable.
How could Jesus, upon that cross, cry out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken?” How could that be? How could there be that cry of dereliction? What does that mean? How can I wrap my mind around this? Yet upon the cross, Jesus gave Himself, shed His life, and was forsaken by the Father. How? How can this be? How can we put our arms around this indescribable gift? No wonder Paul says, “thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.”
Beloved, you and I, you and I need to go tonight and ponder that. Marinate our minds with that. Go and try to put your arms around this truth. And if that wasn't enough, if that wasn't, if that was not indescribable enough, that in Christ our sins are forgiven, when we come to Christ and believe upon Him, He comes to live inside of us. Can you believe this? Can you believe this? Try to wrap your mind around even that, that Jesus Christ has taken up permanent residence inside your heart, inside my heart, your soul, my soul. Can you grasp, can you even begin to fathom that? Paul writes to the Colossians, Colossians 1.27, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Can you imagine that? Sometimes we say these truths, we sing them, but we don't take time to really, really meditate upon all of, all the depths bound up in this. How indescribable that Christ lives inside of us. How can this be? How can this be? How can the spotless, sinless Son of God, the heavens cannot contain Him? How can He live inside of me? He does so by His Spirit.
It is this baby who was born in the manger so long ago, who is God's indescribable gift, unspeakable, indescribable, indescribable in His person, indescribable in His condescension, indescribable in His love. It is this infinite infant who has come to indwell you and me. And He says, “I am with you always even to the end of the age.” And He says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” And in Psalm 23:4, David says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.” Why David? Why David? “for you are with me.” You are with me.
Beloved, we receive and give all sorts of gifts on Christmas. These gifts diminish. They can't even compare. These gifts are passing. These gifts become outdated and useless and lose their value. But this gift, oh, this gift, this is the gift of the ages. This is the gift of eternity. This is the indescribable gift. And you know, beloved, what the only adequate response in the face of this gift is? Paul tells us in the text. “Thanks be to God.” It's the only adequate response.
Worship. Thanks be to God. Charis is the Greek word used here, which really stands for grace in the New Testament. In fact, Paul said something similar in Romans 6:17, “But thanks be,” charis, “to God, that though you were slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching, to which you were given over.”
And this word, it is usually translated grace, comes from the verb, charin, to rejoice, as well. Originally, it referred to the property in a thing, which causes it to give joy to the hearers or the beholders of it. It had to do with the grace or the beauty of something. Then it came to mean the favor, also the thankfulness that is produced by the favor. And in the New Testament, it is used predominantly as the favor of God to man. It is the favor of the worthy to the unworthy, of the holy to the unholy. It is God's unmerited favor bestowed upon the undeserving sinner. Would you please note now the response that is, that this indescribable gift stimulates in the sinner towards God, that it's also called charis? Why? Because what we offer back to God as thanks is only what He has already given to us. It's His grace. Of our own selves, we can't even thank God. We can't. He enables us to thank Him, and so we give Him what He already has given us.
And this is fitting, because remember, this indescribable gift is a what? A gift. You don't work for it. You don't deserve it. You don't earn it. It's a gift. The Bible says concerning this gift, “for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates. His own love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” He laid down His life for us. Romans 8:32, “He,” God, “who indeed did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all.” John gets swept away here in this verse of 1 John 3:11 as well by writing, “See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we would be called children of God. And we are.” See how great a love the Father has given to us. See, Edon, to look, to perceive, to perceive with the eyes, to perceive by any of the senses, to perceive, to notice, to properly discern, to turn the eyes, the mind, the attention to, to observe, to inspect, to examine. John is astonished, amazed, he's ecstatic with the reality that we are children of God.
Can you imagine? We're not only forgiven, but now we're adopted as children of God. He's overcome literally with astonishment when contemplating the amazing grace of God that makes sinners into children of God. And he starts by saying, Edon, an exclamation, calling for close scrutiny, attention. And then I love this, how great a love. Another translation says, what manner of love. Either translation doesn't do justice to the Greek text. The word is, potapos, in the Greek. It is classic Greek for something foreign, something alien, something that is inexplicable in known terminology. From what country? This is alien. Behold, how great.
This is love from another country, another place altogether. Alien, unknown to us. It is not at all like any human love. It is alien, it is a love that human experience does not know. It is a love that is outside of us, above us, beyond us. We can't really fathom this.
The same word is used in Matthew 8:2, when Jesus is still the wind and the sea, and they said, Potapos, what kind of a man is this? He's more than a man, that even the winds and the sea obey him. Who is this? He must be from a different planet. He is. That's the same term.
We have one who has come, who is foreign to any human being, the God Man. We have a God who loves us with a love that is foreign to anything we would know. He calls us to live lives that are alien to those around us. “See how great a love the Father has given to us.” See, behold, this unearthly, unfathomable, astonishing, agape love, this divine love, this supernatural love, this loyal love, the Father has given.
This is a verb, action. God has set His love on display in no uncertain terms by giving us the greatest gift of all, the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ. God's indescribable gift. And this gift has been offered freely to us, who are undeserving, who are unworthy. He is not offered as a reward. Jesus is not offered as a compensation for those who measure up to a standard that God has established. If this is the case, then Jesus would not be offered to any of us, for all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and there's not one of us who qualifies. We've all been weighed in the divine balance, and we've all been found wanting, but Christ Jesus, blessed be God, is offered as a gift freely, based on no inherent goodness within any one of us. In fact, in spite of us, He's offered as a gift. God, being full of love and grace and mercy, has chosen, by grace, to act in redemptive history by giving to us His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Remember those two questions. What do I deserve, and what have I received? What do I deserve? Hell. And what have I received? The gift of all gifts, the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's a free gift of grace. We cannot earn it, we cannot, we do not deserve it, we cannot manufacture it. Beloved, think about this.
As we bring this to conclusion, when we were helpless, when we were helpless, when we were separated from God, when we were without hope and without God in this world, when we were alienated from God, when we were condemned by the law of God, when we were filthy and violent depraved, when we were rebels and law breakers, when we were sick from the top of our head to the bottom of our feet, when we were impotent to save ourselves, when we were hell bound on the road headed for destruction, when there was nothing lovely within us, God intervened. God intervened. God has chosen to love us. He has sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to be our Savior, God's indescribable gift.
So I want to ask you tonight, can you think of a better time to give thanks to God than right now, than today, this season, for this indescribable gift that has been given so freely to you and to me? Can you remember what your life was once like before you received this gift?
Would you go back in your mind? Can you remember what your life was like before you received this gift? Can you go back in time and think what your life was like when you lived independent of this gift? When you were going your own way, doing your own things? Can you think where you were and what you were doing and what your circumstances were like when you came to understand for the very first time the value of this gift, this indescribable gift?
Can you remember what it was like when you first received this indescribable gift? Can you?
Are you there in your mind? Can you think of how He has altered the very direction of your life? I mean, there was a tectonic shift.
Can you think of what He has done for your soul? Maybe what He has done for your family? What He has done for your ability to face and endure and overcome the challenges in your life? What He has done for your personal life? Can you think about how He is so involved in your life even right now as you look back and you could see how He's working together all things for your good and for His glory? Oh beloved, it is absolutely fitting that today we join with the Apostle Paul and say, “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.”
I pray tonight, and I know I did not do the text justice, but I pray that we leave this place having grasped a little bit more of the glorious truth bound up in this text. I pray that the Lord will give new insight from His Word, and fresh understanding from His Word, and we can leave this place with our eyes opened a little more, more amazed, more astonished, and saying with the Apostle Paul, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways.” Oh child of God, if you have known much of Christ, you've often had to weep out your joys instead of speaking them.
To lay your hand over your mouth and be silent utterly, because you're overwhelmed by
His goodness, by His glory. You see how it was with John on the island of Patmos. He said, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.” Hold on, John, why? How come you didn't preach? How come you didn't preach? If he were here this evening, he would say, I could not preach then, the splendor of the Lord made me utterly speechless. So I fell at his feet as dead. This is one reason why the gift of God is unspeakable, because the more you know about it, the less you could say about it.
Christ overpowers us. He makes us tongue tied with His wondrous revelations. When He reveals Himself in full, we are like men that are blinded with the splendor of vision we could see, but blinded at the same time. Like Paul on the Damascus road, we are forced to confess, “I could not see because of the glory of that light,” Acts 22:11. We cannot speak of it fully. Human pens, mortal tongues, are utterly inadequate to speak of the full measure and the value of God's unspeakable, indescribable gift. And although we make constant effort, we try even throughout one's life, we try, and we try, and we try, and we try, oh, He is indescribable. You know, a servant of Christ may serve the Lord for 30, 40, 50, 60 years, even in the same place, in one church, and can never, ever say, I have exhausted preaching about Christ. Never.
If you preach Christ, you will never run short. If you have preached 30,000 sermons plus, like George Whitefield, about Christ, you have not yet left the shore. You are not out in the deep sea yet. You're still wetting your feet at the seashore. So, beloved, let us dive. Let us run a dive with splendor of thought.
Let us plunge into this mystery, this great mystery of free grace and dying love. And when you have dived the farthest, you will realize that you are as far off the bottom as when you first touched the surface. It's endless. It's an endless theme. Unspeakable. Indescribable.
I don't know about you tonight, but I'm left in utter astonishment and amazement and wonder. And I want to put my hand over my mouth. I just want to be still and be silent before the Lord and ponder His indescribable gift. In fact, I feel even more humbled, because even preaching this message, to be honest with you, made me realize how inadequate my attempt was and how feeble it was. May God have mercy. But think what it will be like, think what it will be like to step into His presence. Think what it will be like to come before Him that day in the throne room. Think what it will be like to behold the Lamb of God seated on high, surrounded by myriads and myriads of angels and all the redeemed of God down through the centuries. Think about how indescribable He will be when we behold Him, even when we will have at that time an enlarged understanding of who He is, even then, even then, when we have perfect ability to see, even then, He remains indescribable. And throughout all of the ages to come, we will grow to know Him more fully and deeply, yet we will never ever grasp the heights of Him or know the depths of Him. We will forever grow in our adoration, admiration of Him, but we will never come to the end of Him, and we will never come to the heights of Him. What a marvelous Savior.
And I want to close with this scene in heaven, Revelation 5. “Then I saw in the midst,” verse 6, “of the throne and the four living creatures and in the midst of the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth. And He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sits on the throne. And when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each one having a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are You to take the scroll and to open its seals, because You were slain and purchased for God with Your blood people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And You made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign upon the earth.’ Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, wWorthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying, “To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be the blessing and the honor and the glory and the might forever and ever.’ And the four living creatures kept saying, ‘Amen.’ And the elders fell down and worshiped.
He commended their desire to give, and exhorted them to be diligent in their commitment to give all the more. He told them in verse 6 of this chapter that “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows with blessing will also reap with blessing.” And while on the theme of giving, he couldn't help himself. Paul couldn't help himself but speak of another gift. And he began to write about it, as if to say, I am now thinking, my brothers and sisters, not so much of your gifts as I am thinking of another gift. Not so much of your gifts to the Lord's poor people, as much as of the Lord's great gift to you, His poor people. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!
Whatever you give, I can speak about, but what He gave surpasses all powers of speech, all ability to articulate, all human language. Let men give as generously as they may; you can always declare the value of their gift; you can describe its’ worth, but God's gift, oh, God's gift, Paul says, it's indescribable. You cannot fully estimate the value of what God gives, and particularly in giving this gift. The Gospel, beloved, is the Gospel of giving and forgiving. We may sum it up in those two words, “giving” and “forgiving”. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift. Paul's heart surges with a hymn of praise, exuberance, as he meditates upon the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became the Son of Man, to save sinners like you and like me.
This verse is a very dramatic verse. It's a very dramatic and powerful statement on the part of the Apostle Paul. You could see, you could read this. He is utterly amazed as he turns his thoughts to the greatest gift that has ever been offered to mankind. And would you see, first of all, as he makes this statement, in reference to the Lord Jesus Christ, that he refers to Him as a gift. Jesus is a gift. He's a gift from God. Paul says, Jesus is a gift. Jesus Christ is this gift that he's mentioning here. He is the gift of gifts. He surpasses all gifts. He's one of a kind.
No gift that has been extended to you and to me can even begin to compare to this gift, which is the Lord Jesus Christ.
How often you hear people speak about Christ and His salvation, as though they were some sort of a reward of merit. You know, it's like an air mile system, you know, you can contribute somehow to earning this gift, as though we did something by which to win His divine favor, that somehow what comes to us is more our due than really a gift of divine grace. But search the scripture, search the Bible, Genesis to Revelation from cover to cover, and what do you find? Well, everywhere in the scriptures, the great word is not “merit”. What is the great word? “Grace”. That's the great word. Grace. Not deserving, but receiving. How? Freely. Freely.
Of the great mercy of our God.
And I couldn't help myself at this point. I want to share with you some good exhortation, some good word from Spurgeon himself on this. In fact, he has an incredible sermon titled, “God's Unspeakable Gift”. And this is a section from it. Listen to what he says concerning this gift, and I quote: “Our Lord Jesus must be a gift to us, if we are ever to possess Him.
He could only come to us, sons of men, by way of gift. Consider the dignity of His person for a minute, and then ask how it is conceivable that we could have deserved that such a person as He should come here and live and die, that we might be saved? I can conceive of a man meriting this or that honor among his fellow men, but when I think of the Prince of life, the Lord of glory, equal with the Father, King of kings and Lord of lords, very God of very God, and when I see Him giving himself up to die for men, my very blood boils,” he says, “at the thought that we could ever have deserved that sacrifice.
“One is indignant,” he goes on to say, “that human pride should dare to go the length of even imagining that a life of perfection could have deserved to be rewarded by the gift of Christ. Nay, my brethren, if we had kept God's law without a flaw, if there had been no omission of duty and no commission of sin, and we could have taken the compound merits of a perfect world and laid them at the feet of God, they could not have deserved that Christ should become man, that Christ should live in poverty, that Christ should die in shame for man. There would have been no need of Christ's death if man had not sinned, but had there been a supposable need, Christ's sacrifice could not have been deserved, even if we had remained innocent, like our first parents in the Garden of Eden before the fall.
“I am sure,” he concludes, “that none of you could for a minute tolerate the thought that any human merit should deserve the incarnation of God upon this earth, the coming of the Divine Son in our nature into this world, and His shameful death upon the cross of Calvary.”
He's a gift. He's a gift. And you know, there are two things to make a gift.
Well, think about it. Today, many of us here exchange gifts, and in the next few days, you will exchange gifts, right? There are two things to make a gift. There cannot be a gift without, first of all, a giver, and then secondly, a receiver. A giver and a receiver. Have you received this gift? Have you received this gift, this indescribable gift? It is essential to make Him a gift to you, that you should receive Him. And it is absolutely unfathomable, that you should take into your empty hand, the priceless treasure that God bestows. I mean, think about this, we have this priceless treasure given to us. God's gift. And you cannot thank God for His indescribable gift unless God, having given, you also have received it. And you may receive Christ, and I may receive Christ only freely. So freely. You're trying to buy salvation, you're trying to seek to earn it, you will end up heaping up for yourself more condemnation. The more you try, the more condemnation you will heap up for yourself. It is a gift.
The Bible says, it is a gift. Salvation is a gift. Christ is a gift. And being a gift, nothing is freer. A poor person can receive this gift. A criminal can receive this gift. A trembling hand can receive this gift. And it comes not based on merit, not by reward, but entirely based on the generosity and the graciousness of the bestower. We didn't deserve it. And what a glorious thing it is that you and I, and all of us, can receive God's indescribable gift. And once received, once embraced, Christ is ours. And let me be quick to say, beloved, once you receive this gift, you will never, ever, ever lose it, never. “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,” Romans 11:29, which means that God never revokes or rescinds this indescribable gift that He has given. He will never say to you, well, you must let me have that again. No, no. If God has given you Christ, and you have received Him by faith, He is yours and He is yours forever. And this is the glory of this divine gift.
A court case may jeopardize your status, the status of your possession may be brought against you, and you may lose what you thought to be yours. I mean, the idea that you could go to sleep at night with fear that you should lose it isn't comforting at all. But if God has given you Christ and has given me Christ, and I have taken Him, and you have taken Him, then He is yours. He is mine forever. Nor death, no hell, nor anything else shall ever be able to separate the soul from Christ, or Christ from the soul that has embraced Him by faith. Christ, Christ is enough. Christ is all I need. As we saw this morning, “Take the world, but give me Jesus.” To have Christ would be far better than all the world without Him. Give me Christ, give me Christ, and let me die sooner than let me live without Christ, for that cannot be truly called life, which is without Him, who is the way, the truth, and the life. What does it mean? To have everything in the world, but not to have Christ, is to have nothing and to be utterly bankrupt. But to have Christ is to have everything. So much so that Paul could call this gift “indescribable.”
That is the one adjective that he uses to describe this gift. Indescribable. “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.” I mean, think about this. This is Paul the apostle. This is Paul who wrote majestic sentences about Christ. Paul who wrote wonderful paragraphs in his letters, where he piles up superlatives. He piles up his words, mountain upon mountain upon mountain, in order to glorify Christ and make much of Christ. I mean, if anybody could have spoken about Christ from alpha to omega and told all about Him, I mean, Paul was the guy. And though he did not give up the blessed task, but lived and died at it, he declared that God's gift was indescribable. Indescribable. This is an amazing statement for Paul to make. And we shouldn't miss this. It's an amazing statement for Paul to make. This is, again, Paul, the towering intellect. Paul, the capable theologian, the brilliant intellect, the highly educated apostle, who is articulate in several languages. This is Paul who was caught up, remember, to the third heaven, and heard what was not lawful for a mere man to utter. And yet, even Paul was stretched beyond the limits of his towering intellect, stretched beyond the boundaries of his command on words and vocabulary when he approached the Lord Jesus Christ.
All he could say, just give thanks for God's gift, and let me describe it for you. It's indescribable. He is indescribable. What that means is that the fullness of Christ is beyond any one of us to grasp. He is beyond what we can convey in human languages. We draw near Him. We pursue Him. We press on to know Him, and yet the heights and the depths and the breadths and the widths of the fullness of Christ is absolutely indescribable. And no matter how long we have known Him, no matter how much more we will know Him, we will always be reduced to this one word, indescribable. Indescribable. Christ is beyond human words to fully convey who He is. He is beyond what human understanding can fully embrace.
This evening, as we ponder the Lord Jesus Christ coming to rescue us from our sin, I really believe that we truly worship our Lord all the more when we see how far He is above and beyond our human, limited, finite understanding. And so come, let us adore Him. Let us worship Him. Let us put our hands over our mouth and be stunned at this indescribable gift. Paul says, thanks be to God for His gift. And then he says, and by the way, this gift is indescribable. This word, by the way, translated indescribable, It means cannot be expounded. It means unspeakable.
One may ask, “Well, why then do we speak about Him?” Well, essentially because He is indescribable. Even at this time, after 2,000 years, if the theme we have to preach about were describable, we should have exhausted it, right? We should have. But as it is indescribable, unspeakable, a sea without a shore, an ocean without a bottom, we will keep on preaching for another 2,000 years and another 2,000 years, and if the Lord does not come, we shall never get to the end of this theme; I am quite certain. He is infinitely indescribable. When we come to speak about Christ, we have an unspeakable subject, an indescribable subject. Here is a well springing up that overflows, and we can speak forever upon this unspeakable theme and just scratch the surface. There is nothing like it. He is inexhaustible. Our Savior is inexhaustible. It's like a well that springs up forever and ever and ever. We can speak about Him, yet He is unspeakable.
2 Corinthians 4:6, “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” Where? “in the face of Christ.”
He is indescribable. He's the vision of God. “Jesus said, ‘Have I been with you all so long? And have you not come to know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘show us the Father?’’ ” John 14: 9. He is the image of God. “He is the image of the invisible God,” Colossians 1:15. He is the form of God who although existing in the morphi, the form of God, the essential form which never alters. Jesus pre-existed in the divine form of God, equal with God the Father in every way. He is the fullness of God. “For in Him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” Colossians 1:19. “For in Him, all the fullness of deity dwells bodily,” Colossians 2:9. The nature of God, we see the nature of God. He possesses the nature of God, who “He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of
His nature, and He upholds all things by the word of His power,” Hebrews 1:3.
Jesus Christ, our Lord, the One we worship, the One we celebrate, today and every day is the sum and substance of salvation, of God's gift. And the one who needs a savior most will tell you that Christ is God's indescribable gift. The one, you know, who sits down in deep distress of his soul, with such a heavy heart that he cannot even lay his hand on his heavy heart, it would break his arm to have to hold that heavy, laden heart up…laden with guilt and laden with fears. That one, for that one, there's no salvation but by Christ. How I need Jesus to lift all of that guilt up, to remove that guilt and purge my guilty conscience. I could better bear the whole world with Christ than live without Him. Beloved, when a person understands and feels his need of Christ, he knows that Christ is God's indescribable gift. Jesus is indescribable in
His person.
Not too long ago we saw this together; scripture teaches that Jesus existed from all eternity past, long before He entered this world in His incarnation. Christ is the eternal Son of God. He is without beginning, uncreated, pre-existent, before time. He always was. There has never been a time when Jesus did not exist. He was never brought into being. He was never created. Throughout all eternity past, Christ shared equally in the divine glory. There has never been a time when Jesus did not exist. And when He was born on that first Christmas morning, He was as old as His Father, and He was older than His mother. And 2,000 years ago, Jesus stepped out of eternity and into time as we read earlier, Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us, and the government will rest on His shoulders, and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” The Father of Eternity, He's the source of eternity, He is the creator of eternity. The indescribable gift that was never created. This is a gift that has always existed. “His going forth are from everlasting,” Micah 5:2, “from ancient days.” This too should be a great encouragement to us, because this tells us that Jesus Christ, our Savior, is always previous to everything in our lives. He's always previous to history and time. He's always previous to even our little lives. He's always existed. His plan for human history has been brought forth from an inner trinitarian council. And all of our lives are but a flowing force of His eternal plan and purpose for us. He is an eternal Savior.
Let me put it this way. He is the uncreated Creator. He is the first cause, which everything else is the subsequent effect. All things are from Him, and through Him, and to Him. He is the one in eternity past, working with the Father and the Spirit, who has set everything in motion. He has created the world and everything for His own purpose and for His own plans. Don't you think He knows what's best for your life and my life? Don't you think He has the eternal perspective and knows what lies out ahead of you? And so He speaks to us in His Word from the ultimate, unlimited vantage point, from an eternal perspective, and how our lives are fulfilled and satisfied as we know Him and live for Him. At the same time, how tiny and wasted our lives are when we do not live for Christ and only live for ourselves and live for the here and for the now. But how satisfied and how purposeful are our lives when we live for this one who is God's indescribable gift.
There has never been a gift like this. He's absolutely indescribable. He is beyond our human comprehension. He's absolutely far, absolutely above, beyond what we can grasp in our understanding. But we know Him and we love Him and we adore Him. And we are left as Paul to say, He is the indescribable gift. No wonder David said in Psalm 27, “One thing I have asked from Yahweh, that, shall I seek, that I may dwell in the house of Yahweh all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of Yahweh and to inquire in His temple.” And no wonder as well Paul writes elsewhere, Philippians 3, listen to the words of Paul. After so many years in the faith, so many years walking with the Lord, getting to know the Lord Jesus Christ, he writes these words, “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but,” dung, “rubbish so that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own which is from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God upon faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.”
And he says, “Brothers,” verse 13, “I do not consider myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
Who can even begin to explain the person of the Lord Jesus Christ? How can we even begin to express the vastness, the fullness of this truth? That there has never been a time that Jesus Christ did not exist. You want to sing as you behold Him. Lord Jesus, you are indeed “beautiful beyond description, too marvelous for words, too wonderful for comprehension, like nothing ever seen or heard. Who can grasp your infinite wisdom? Who can fathom the depth of your love? You are beautiful beyond description, majesty enthroned above.” The only thing I could do is, I can stand in awe of you. “Holy God, to whom all praise is due, I stand in awe of you.” He is indescribable in His person.
But not only that, Jesus is indescribable in His condescension. Think of the virgin birth.
Think of how indescribable His virgin birth is. He is a glorious God, yet became a perfect man. No tongue of Seraph, no tongue of Cherub, can ever describe the condescension of Him, whose name is a Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Father of Eternity, the Prince of Peace. This is He whom the Father gave for us and for our sakes. He is the Creator of all things, for without Him nothing was made that was made, yet He became flesh and dwelt among us. He fills all things by His omnipresence, yet He came and tabernacled among us on this earth. This is that Jesus who was born of Mary, yet who lived before all the worlds. I mean, try to wrap your mind around this. Who can even begin to fathom this indescribable truth? He was that Word who was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God. He is unspeakable, indescribable. It's not possible to put into human language the divine mystery of His sacred being. Truly man, yet truly God.
Oh, how great the wonder of it. Surely this is an unspeakable, indescribable gift. Can anyone measure or describe how far Christ condescended, stooped, went from the throne of splendor? He came to a manger to be wrapped, to lie where the oxen feed. Just think about that alone this evening. This indescribable gift. That Jesus Christ grew in wisdom, He grew in stature, He grew in favor with God, He grew in favor with man, in Luke 2:42. Listen, beloved, this is way so high above our heads that we cannot even see it. What do we do with this? What do we do with this? That Jesus Christ humbled Himself and took upon Himself the limitations of humanity that He might be our Savior. He experienced humanity in its fullness. He suffered. He suffered. The Creator suffered. He got hungry. He got thirsty. He knew loneliness. He knew grief. He grew weary. He got tired. He slept. He wept. He was rejected. He died. The giver of life, the source of life. Yet, while He was absolutely human, He lived His entire life without committing a single sin.
Oh, what a stoop of condescension was that? The infinite becomes an infant. The one who made it all, controls it all, owns it all, laid aside His glory, became a helpless infant.
The eternal is rocked on a woman's knee. He's there in the carpenter's shop, obedient to His parents, earthly parents. There in the temple, sitting among the doctors of theology, hearing them and asking them questions. There in poverty, crying, the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. In 2 Corinthians 8:9, we have a beautiful description of this, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though being rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.” And He is there, in thirst, John 4, asking of a guilty woman a drink of water. Unheard of. Unspeakable. That He before whom all the hosts of heaven veiled their faces should come here among mere men, and among the poorest of the poor. That He who dwelt in the midst of the glory and the delight of heaven should stoop to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. That surpasses all human thought. Such a Savior is an unspeakable gift. How the two natures came together. What that means exactly is beyond us. It is indescribable what God has done in the incarnation. It's way beyond us. It's beyond words, our words. He's beyond our understanding. He is exalted in the heights of heaven. Let us worship Him. Let us adore Him. Let us fall before Him and be in awe before His presence.
He is indescribable, not only in His person, not only in His condescension. He is indescribable in His love. As Paul prays for the saints at Ephesus, remember those words that we studied together, Ephesians 3.18, he says, “My prayer is that you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ, which is indescribable.” It surpasses our knowledge. What we read here should be a marvel to our hearts and our souls. It's not just that Christ loves sinners, but Christ loves me. Christ loves me. Put your name there. Christ loves me. “ I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,” who what? “loved me and gave Himself up for me.” Loves me, Paul. You can put your name there if you're a child of God. It's not that just Christ loves sinners, but Christ loves me. This infinite God of heaven and earth, the God who existed throughout all of the ages past, the God who created all that there is out of the womb of nothing, the God of the universe, the God of the galaxies, the God who put the stars in place, the God of the planets, the earth, the God who has created every one of us in His own image, the God who hung the planets, the God who flung out the stars, and the God who strung the moon, the God who heaped up the mountains and filled the seas and stretched out the rivers and the fields…This great, awesome, holy, sovereign, righteous, majestic God loves you, and loves me.
The eye of Yahweh is set upon the one who fears God, those who wait for His loving kindness, Psalm 33. This Christ loves us. He cares for us. He feels for us. And because Christ is infinite, meaning He's without limits, He's the first and the last, the Alpha, the Omega, therefore, so is His love without limits. It is love so amazing, so divine. It is an infinite love. We can never come to the end of the love of this God for us. His love is as exhaustive and as limitless as He is. This is love beyond comprehension. That's what we celebrate concerning the coming, that first coming of our Lord, Advent. It's love beyond comprehension, love beyond comparison. This indescribable love was set in motion 2000 years ago in the coming of Jesus Christ to die for us on Calvary's cross, taking our sin, taking our shame, taking our iniquity, taking our shortcomings, taking them all on himself.
But beloved, I want you to know that it goes back even further than that. Before you were born, before I was born, before the cross, before the foundation of the world, God loved us. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” In 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He made Him who knew no sin to be made sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” How unfathomable is this? How unspeakable is this?
How indescribable is this? How could that be? How could all the sins, all of them that I've committed, sins that I have committed, sins that I will commit, be laid upon the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself 2,000 years ago? How could all the sins that I have yet to commit, be placed upon this Christ, 2,000 years ago? How could it be that this Savior, who was born and gave His life and died, bearing all the sins of all of His people, from beginning of creation until the end of this world, as we know it, how can this be? This is absolutely indescribable.
How could Jesus, upon that cross, cry out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken?” How could that be? How could there be that cry of dereliction? What does that mean? How can I wrap my mind around this? Yet upon the cross, Jesus gave Himself, shed His life, and was forsaken by the Father. How? How can this be? How can we put our arms around this indescribable gift? No wonder Paul says, “thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.”
Beloved, you and I, you and I need to go tonight and ponder that. Marinate our minds with that. Go and try to put your arms around this truth. And if that wasn't enough, if that wasn't, if that was not indescribable enough, that in Christ our sins are forgiven, when we come to Christ and believe upon Him, He comes to live inside of us. Can you believe this? Can you believe this? Try to wrap your mind around even that, that Jesus Christ has taken up permanent residence inside your heart, inside my heart, your soul, my soul. Can you grasp, can you even begin to fathom that? Paul writes to the Colossians, Colossians 1.27, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Can you imagine that? Sometimes we say these truths, we sing them, but we don't take time to really, really meditate upon all of, all the depths bound up in this. How indescribable that Christ lives inside of us. How can this be? How can this be? How can the spotless, sinless Son of God, the heavens cannot contain Him? How can He live inside of me? He does so by His Spirit.
It is this baby who was born in the manger so long ago, who is God's indescribable gift, unspeakable, indescribable, indescribable in His person, indescribable in His condescension, indescribable in His love. It is this infinite infant who has come to indwell you and me. And He says, “I am with you always even to the end of the age.” And He says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” And in Psalm 23:4, David says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.” Why David? Why David? “for you are with me.” You are with me.
Beloved, we receive and give all sorts of gifts on Christmas. These gifts diminish. They can't even compare. These gifts are passing. These gifts become outdated and useless and lose their value. But this gift, oh, this gift, this is the gift of the ages. This is the gift of eternity. This is the indescribable gift. And you know, beloved, what the only adequate response in the face of this gift is? Paul tells us in the text. “Thanks be to God.” It's the only adequate response.
Worship. Thanks be to God. Charis is the Greek word used here, which really stands for grace in the New Testament. In fact, Paul said something similar in Romans 6:17, “But thanks be,” charis, “to God, that though you were slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching, to which you were given over.”
And this word, it is usually translated grace, comes from the verb, charin, to rejoice, as well. Originally, it referred to the property in a thing, which causes it to give joy to the hearers or the beholders of it. It had to do with the grace or the beauty of something. Then it came to mean the favor, also the thankfulness that is produced by the favor. And in the New Testament, it is used predominantly as the favor of God to man. It is the favor of the worthy to the unworthy, of the holy to the unholy. It is God's unmerited favor bestowed upon the undeserving sinner. Would you please note now the response that is, that this indescribable gift stimulates in the sinner towards God, that it's also called charis? Why? Because what we offer back to God as thanks is only what He has already given to us. It's His grace. Of our own selves, we can't even thank God. We can't. He enables us to thank Him, and so we give Him what He already has given us.
And this is fitting, because remember, this indescribable gift is a what? A gift. You don't work for it. You don't deserve it. You don't earn it. It's a gift. The Bible says concerning this gift, “for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates. His own love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” He laid down His life for us. Romans 8:32, “He,” God, “who indeed did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all.” John gets swept away here in this verse of 1 John 3:11 as well by writing, “See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we would be called children of God. And we are.” See how great a love the Father has given to us. See, Edon, to look, to perceive, to perceive with the eyes, to perceive by any of the senses, to perceive, to notice, to properly discern, to turn the eyes, the mind, the attention to, to observe, to inspect, to examine. John is astonished, amazed, he's ecstatic with the reality that we are children of God.
Can you imagine? We're not only forgiven, but now we're adopted as children of God. He's overcome literally with astonishment when contemplating the amazing grace of God that makes sinners into children of God. And he starts by saying, Edon, an exclamation, calling for close scrutiny, attention. And then I love this, how great a love. Another translation says, what manner of love. Either translation doesn't do justice to the Greek text. The word is, potapos, in the Greek. It is classic Greek for something foreign, something alien, something that is inexplicable in known terminology. From what country? This is alien. Behold, how great.
This is love from another country, another place altogether. Alien, unknown to us. It is not at all like any human love. It is alien, it is a love that human experience does not know. It is a love that is outside of us, above us, beyond us. We can't really fathom this.
The same word is used in Matthew 8:2, when Jesus is still the wind and the sea, and they said, Potapos, what kind of a man is this? He's more than a man, that even the winds and the sea obey him. Who is this? He must be from a different planet. He is. That's the same term.
We have one who has come, who is foreign to any human being, the God Man. We have a God who loves us with a love that is foreign to anything we would know. He calls us to live lives that are alien to those around us. “See how great a love the Father has given to us.” See, behold, this unearthly, unfathomable, astonishing, agape love, this divine love, this supernatural love, this loyal love, the Father has given.
This is a verb, action. God has set His love on display in no uncertain terms by giving us the greatest gift of all, the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ. God's indescribable gift. And this gift has been offered freely to us, who are undeserving, who are unworthy. He is not offered as a reward. Jesus is not offered as a compensation for those who measure up to a standard that God has established. If this is the case, then Jesus would not be offered to any of us, for all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and there's not one of us who qualifies. We've all been weighed in the divine balance, and we've all been found wanting, but Christ Jesus, blessed be God, is offered as a gift freely, based on no inherent goodness within any one of us. In fact, in spite of us, He's offered as a gift. God, being full of love and grace and mercy, has chosen, by grace, to act in redemptive history by giving to us His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Remember those two questions. What do I deserve, and what have I received? What do I deserve? Hell. And what have I received? The gift of all gifts, the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's a free gift of grace. We cannot earn it, we cannot, we do not deserve it, we cannot manufacture it. Beloved, think about this.
As we bring this to conclusion, when we were helpless, when we were helpless, when we were separated from God, when we were without hope and without God in this world, when we were alienated from God, when we were condemned by the law of God, when we were filthy and violent depraved, when we were rebels and law breakers, when we were sick from the top of our head to the bottom of our feet, when we were impotent to save ourselves, when we were hell bound on the road headed for destruction, when there was nothing lovely within us, God intervened. God intervened. God has chosen to love us. He has sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to be our Savior, God's indescribable gift.
So I want to ask you tonight, can you think of a better time to give thanks to God than right now, than today, this season, for this indescribable gift that has been given so freely to you and to me? Can you remember what your life was once like before you received this gift?
Would you go back in your mind? Can you remember what your life was like before you received this gift? Can you go back in time and think what your life was like when you lived independent of this gift? When you were going your own way, doing your own things? Can you think where you were and what you were doing and what your circumstances were like when you came to understand for the very first time the value of this gift, this indescribable gift?
Can you remember what it was like when you first received this indescribable gift? Can you?
Are you there in your mind? Can you think of how He has altered the very direction of your life? I mean, there was a tectonic shift.
Can you think of what He has done for your soul? Maybe what He has done for your family? What He has done for your ability to face and endure and overcome the challenges in your life? What He has done for your personal life? Can you think about how He is so involved in your life even right now as you look back and you could see how He's working together all things for your good and for His glory? Oh beloved, it is absolutely fitting that today we join with the Apostle Paul and say, “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.”
I pray tonight, and I know I did not do the text justice, but I pray that we leave this place having grasped a little bit more of the glorious truth bound up in this text. I pray that the Lord will give new insight from His Word, and fresh understanding from His Word, and we can leave this place with our eyes opened a little more, more amazed, more astonished, and saying with the Apostle Paul, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways.” Oh child of God, if you have known much of Christ, you've often had to weep out your joys instead of speaking them.
To lay your hand over your mouth and be silent utterly, because you're overwhelmed by
His goodness, by His glory. You see how it was with John on the island of Patmos. He said, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.” Hold on, John, why? How come you didn't preach? How come you didn't preach? If he were here this evening, he would say, I could not preach then, the splendor of the Lord made me utterly speechless. So I fell at his feet as dead. This is one reason why the gift of God is unspeakable, because the more you know about it, the less you could say about it.
Christ overpowers us. He makes us tongue tied with His wondrous revelations. When He reveals Himself in full, we are like men that are blinded with the splendor of vision we could see, but blinded at the same time. Like Paul on the Damascus road, we are forced to confess, “I could not see because of the glory of that light,” Acts 22:11. We cannot speak of it fully. Human pens, mortal tongues, are utterly inadequate to speak of the full measure and the value of God's unspeakable, indescribable gift. And although we make constant effort, we try even throughout one's life, we try, and we try, and we try, and we try, oh, He is indescribable. You know, a servant of Christ may serve the Lord for 30, 40, 50, 60 years, even in the same place, in one church, and can never, ever say, I have exhausted preaching about Christ. Never.
If you preach Christ, you will never run short. If you have preached 30,000 sermons plus, like George Whitefield, about Christ, you have not yet left the shore. You are not out in the deep sea yet. You're still wetting your feet at the seashore. So, beloved, let us dive. Let us run a dive with splendor of thought.
Let us plunge into this mystery, this great mystery of free grace and dying love. And when you have dived the farthest, you will realize that you are as far off the bottom as when you first touched the surface. It's endless. It's an endless theme. Unspeakable. Indescribable.
I don't know about you tonight, but I'm left in utter astonishment and amazement and wonder. And I want to put my hand over my mouth. I just want to be still and be silent before the Lord and ponder His indescribable gift. In fact, I feel even more humbled, because even preaching this message, to be honest with you, made me realize how inadequate my attempt was and how feeble it was. May God have mercy. But think what it will be like, think what it will be like to step into His presence. Think what it will be like to come before Him that day in the throne room. Think what it will be like to behold the Lamb of God seated on high, surrounded by myriads and myriads of angels and all the redeemed of God down through the centuries. Think about how indescribable He will be when we behold Him, even when we will have at that time an enlarged understanding of who He is, even then, even then, when we have perfect ability to see, even then, He remains indescribable. And throughout all of the ages to come, we will grow to know Him more fully and deeply, yet we will never ever grasp the heights of Him or know the depths of Him. We will forever grow in our adoration, admiration of Him, but we will never come to the end of Him, and we will never come to the heights of Him. What a marvelous Savior.
And I want to close with this scene in heaven, Revelation 5. “Then I saw in the midst,” verse 6, “of the throne and the four living creatures and in the midst of the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth. And He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sits on the throne. And when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each one having a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are You to take the scroll and to open its seals, because You were slain and purchased for God with Your blood people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And You made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign upon the earth.’ Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, wWorthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying, “To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be the blessing and the honor and the glory and the might forever and ever.’ And the four living creatures kept saying, ‘Amen.’ And the elders fell down and worshiped.
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