The Stream that Leads Us to the Fountain
Sometimes during the Christmas season we hear people say, “Happy holidays!” and we really wish they would have said, “Merry Christmas!” We wonder how people could have the audacity to take Christ out of Christmas, so we make sure to (emphatically) say “Merry Christmas” whenever we can. But, of course, there is no Christ in Christmas for many people these days. So we can’t expect people who do not love Jesus to promote his name.
As Christians, however, we know that Christmas is about Jesus. Indeed, we know that there would be no Christmas season, no gifts or lights or trees or eggnog, apart from the incarnation of the Son of God. During Christmas, we remember that God became a man. And this is a good and holy thing to do.
But why did God become a man? The Bible has a lot to say about that. We could look at passages that talk about God’s desire to save the nations, passages about God coming to save his people from their sin, or passages about God wanting to bring light into a dark world.
All of these things, and many more, are true about the incarnation of God. But perhaps there is a more basic reason underneath all these other reasons why God became a man. In John 1:18, John writes, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (ESV). Or as another translation puts it, “No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side – he has revealed him” (CSB).
What does this mean? It means that the Son of God came to show us God. God is spirit so the fullness of his being is invisible to our physical eyes (“No one has ever seen God”). But because God wanted us to know him, he sent his Son to “make him known,” to “reveal him.” The Son is not less God than the Father. As John says, he is “the only God.” And because he lives “at the Father’s side,” he is well-suited to show us the Father.
Simply put, the Son came into the world to show us the Father. The Son of God assumed to himself human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth so that we can see the unseeable God. This is what Christmas is about.
But you may wonder, “Okay, what exactly am I supposed to see when I look at the Son? If the Son reveals the Father, what does the Father look like?”
Well, among other things, he looks like love. The apostle John writes, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8, 16). In context, John is referring to the Father. So he’s saying, “The Father is love.”
Connecting the dots between John 1 and 1 John 4, we learn that the Son was sent to show us the Father, the Father is love, therefore the Son was sent to show us the love of the Father. Christmas is about God the Father broadcasting his love to the world through God the Son.
In his book, Communion with the Triune God, the seventeenth-century English theologian John Owen argues that the Son came into the world in order to bring us into the love of the Father. He illustrates it like this: “Jesus Christ, in respect of the love of the Father, is but the beam, the stream; wherein though actually all our light, our refreshment lies, yet by him we are led to the fountain, the sun of eternal love himself.”
Like a good Puritan, Owen packages profound truth in dense language. Here’s what he is saying: The Father is the fountain of love and the Son is who brings us to the fountain to drink. We know the Father’s love through the Son.
In fact, Owen says, the only way we can know the love of God is through Jesus the Son. In a world that believes that God’s love is ambiguously known through all religions, Christianity says no, God’s love is only found in God’s Son. Owen again: “Though the saints may, nay, do see an infinite ocean of love unto them in the bosom of the Father, yet they are not to look for one drop from him but what comes through Christ. He is the only means of communication.”
Owen is saying that Jesus is the only place we find the infinite ocean of God’s love. We should not look for “one drop” of God’s love anywhere else but in Christ.
And the way we drink God’s love, Owen says, is through faith in Christ: “How, then, is this love of the Father to be received, so as to hold fellowship with him? I answer: By faith. The receiving of it is the believing of it.” With another beautiful analogy, Owen says that faith is how we extract the water of God’s love from the well of salvation:
“Love in the Father is like honey in the flower – it must be in the comb before it be for
our use. Christ must extract and prepare this honey for us. He draws this water from the
fountain through union and dispensation of fullness – we by faith, from the wells of
salvation that are in him.”
The picture he paints is of the Father’s love stored up like nectar in a flower. Before it can be of any use for us, it must be extracted and put in a “comb” so that we can eat it and enjoy it’s sweetness. Christ is the “comb.” The Son of God has the honey, or water, from the Father inherently by way of their relationship, or “through union.” We can have this sweet water by faith. Jesus brings us God’s love, but to have it we must receive it.
If this is true, then when the Son comes to show us the Father, we finally find what we have been looking and longing for our whole lives: the kind of love that gives us soul-level rest. Jesus brings us the Father’s love so that our hearts can finally exhale. We can finally know that we will be okay no matter what happens. We can finally feel seen and heard and accepted. We finally find that we are delighted in for who we are, not what we do, unraveling the lie of performance-driven acceptance. In the Father’s love, we finally find covering for our shame, forgiveness for our guilt, power over evil and bondage of any kind, and hope for the future.
At Christmas, we remember that the Son came to show us the Father. And the Father is love. So at Christmas we come face to face with the infinite love of God that is freely available to all through faith in Christ.
The Son is the stream that leads us to the fountain of the Father’s love. Have you drunk from that fountain? Have you tasted that sweet water? If not, you can today by turning away from your sin and putting your trust in Jesus. He came to earth to bring you to the fountain of his Father’s love. This Christmas is the perfect time to go to him and drink.
Merry Christmas,
Pastor John