Emmanuel
Week 1: Light and Life
Pastor Rick Henderson December 6-7, 2025
Note: This manuscript isn’t a transcript of the sermon, but a planning guide showing what the speaker intends to say.
I want to highlight a couple of things Quinton said in the video.
In the darkest times we can see his love most tangibly…it’s not meaningless. –Quinton Dols
This is the gospel in a nutshell.
I’m wondering if you’d give yourself permission to be unedited with yourself. What is your unedited response to his statement? The last thing he said is that it’s not meaningless. Even when you are enveloped in darkness, it's not meaningless if God is with you. There is something deep and unyielding in the gut of every person, longing for and looking for meaning. But does meaning have to be connected to faith or an experience with God?
No doubt, there are those of us in the room who are convinced this is true. And we are convinced that no amount of darkness can extinguish our life’s meaning and purpose, because God is with us. We have stories of experiencing his presence and goodness, amid profound hurt. Those experiences of God changed our lives. A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you my story of experiencing this.
The unedited response of some in this room is that it would be nice if it were true. Maybe you would say that you want it to be true. And yet, there are reasons, and I’m sure they are understandable reasons, that are keeping you from being able to trust this is true. You just can’t yet bring yourself to place the weight of your life on it.
And there are probably some here who are more than hesitant. If I’m talking to you, and we had the opportunity to sit down and talk together over a holiday beverage, as long as it’s not eggnog—that’s disgusting. But if we could have a long conversation over deep cups of coffee, I bet I’d discover that the intelligence you have and the resilience you’ve developed makes this seem unnecessary. Maybe your unedited response is that your happy faith has been helpful and meaningful for others. It’s just that you’ve figured it out on your own, and you don’t need it.
Wherever it is that you’re coming form, whatever your vantage point, the question that will be repeated this month is this.
QUESTION: What do you see when you look into the manger?
I’m not suggesting that what we see is a matter of perception. And yet, however it is that we respond is based on what we perceive the manger holds. As you think about that, I have another set of questions.
QUESTION: What feels dark to you?
Where does it feel like darkness is taking over, darkness is winning?
This week I’ve struggled to wrap my head around just how much money has been stolen from MN taxpayer funds. People taking advantage of a global crisis to steal over a billion dollars—that feels pretty dark.
How about the rampant dehumanizing speech from top to bottom and bottom to top in our country? That feels pretty dark. The normalizing of dehumanizing speech is conditioning us to normalize dehumanizing behaviors. That feels like the darkness is winning.
We could add to this list all day. A fact that I don’t want to admit is that I don’t have to look around to find darkness. All I have to do is look into the mirror. Things I don’t want to do, that I shouldn’t do—I do. Things I want to do, that I should do—I don’t. There’s darkness in me.
If you’re thinking right now, Rick, don’t be a downer. It’s the Christmas season. I want the hope and joy and happy stuff. Wonderful! I’m glad you want that. I want it, too. But it may be, maybe, possibly, you are thinking of Christmas as an escape.
My challenge to you is to NOT celebrate Christmas like you watch The Bachelor. Who watches The Bachelor? Bad Christians admit to watching it. Good Christians lie about it. I don’t really watch it, but I’ve seen it.
It’s fake. It’s relationship formation based on escapist excursions. It’s luxurious meals and helicopter rides. Naturally, they feel chemistry and excitement and confuse it for something more substantive. And when the cameras turn off, the escapist excursions are no longer funded, and they are forced to live in reality together for the first time, the bond quickly unravels.
Let’s don’t do Christmas like that. Let’s not reduce the arrival of Jesus and the life he offers; let’s not reduce that good news to a set of traditions and services that provide temporary escape from the darkness around us. Do you know this?
Christmas isn’t an ESCAPE; it’s an INVASION.
That’s the punch of Emmanuel. Emmanuel means God is with us. A light shines in the darkness. It’s not a time to create cocoons and escape from the stuff we don’t like. Christmas is gritty and glorious. It’s gritty enough for reality and so glorious that it can change it.
JOHN 1:1-18
Will you grab a Bible and find the gospel of John. It’s in the second major section of the Bible called the New Testament. It’s the fourth book: Matthew, Mark, Luke, then John. This is the passage that we will dig into and talk about this month. It will help us see the full and unfiltered vision of what exactly Christmas is.
JOHN 1:1-18 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 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. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ”) Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
QUESTION: What do you see when you look into the manger?
If we dare to take John seriously, the manger holds absurdities. There many things in life that are not true because they’re absurd. But there are some things that are absurd precisely because they are true.
There are people in my life who are continuously generous with me. They don’t seem to tire of ignoring some of my faults and flat sides. No matter what, they have my back. If you have people like that in your life, you have to admit that on some level it’s absurd to be loved like that. Not because it isn’t true or real, but because it is.
What do you see when you look into the manger?
JOHN 1:3-5 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The manger holds incomprehensible POWER, wrapped in vulnerable APPROACHABILITY.
John intentionally used language to get our minds reach back and grab a hold of Genesis 1. When we look into the manger, the first words in the Bible should unfold in our minds.
GENESIS 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
I don’t know if I can identify what the single most important question in life is. Certainly, one of the most important is the origin question. Where did it all come from? Why is there something instead of nothing?
Have you heard of the Cosmological Argument? It goes like this.
COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT:
(www.reasonablefaith.org/kalam)
- Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
You’re a smart crowd. We know enough to know that things don’t just pop into existence without a cause. Unless the universe is eternal, it began to exist.
- The universe began to exist.
There are some major philosophical and scientific problems with the belief that the universe has always been around. I’ll give you a few. On your notes is a resource that you can use to explore further.
- The universe is slowly running out of usable energy. That can’t be true if it’s eternal.
- The expansion of the universe and the red shift that has been measured mean that our universe springs outward from a single point in the finite past.
- An expanding universe cannot be timeless or eternal. It has an absolute beginning.
- Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Whatever that cause is, it’s not anti-science, but it’s beyond the scope of science.
SPACE, TIME, MATTER, ENERGY
Whatever that cause is, it’s by definition: spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and powerful. That’s exactly how the Bible describes God. John is saying to us, that’s what the manager holds. Believe it or not, we’re barely scratching the surface of the claim that is being made.
GENESIS 1:2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Genesis 1 gives a trustworthy account of creation. But it’s to our detriment if we read it like a recipe for baking galaxies and planets. There’s something more significant being communicated.
The earth was dark and deep. Those are words that are used and over again through the Bible to represent something. Deep waters, or the ocean, represent chaos, death, and the loss of life. That’s why when you read about the new creation in Revelation, it says there will be no sea there. It’s not because you won’t be able to go to the beach in heaven. It’s deeply embedded imagery that represents death.
Darkness represents evil, the inability to understand moral truth and wisdom, and being separated from God and his way.
From this chaotic state, God brought forth something good.
GENESIS 1:3-4 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
While God is the cause for those magnificent sources of light that hang in space, this is pressing upon us a more urgent truth. He brings order, stability, understanding, and life. The one who did all of that, the cause of it all, has been laid in the manger.
The manger holds incomprehensible POWER, wrapped in vulnerable APPROACHABILITY.
Esau McCaulley is a theologian, author, and pastor. He’s one of those brilliant thinkers who can show how gargantuan truth intersects with us personally.
Christmas is, in the words of the Gospel of John, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…Christmas suggests that God has not forgotten anyone. He came as a child, weak and vulnerable, unable to lift his head without assistance or to wipe his own bottom. He did this so the weak and broken things might feel comfortable approaching the divine.
–Esau McCaulley
He wants us to be comfortable approaching him, because like in the beginning, he is bringing something good to a world that is dark and chaotic.
The manger holds a NEW life who is ETERNAL life.
JOHN 1:3-5 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The guy who wrote this is a different John from John the Baptist. But they knew each other. This John wrote about that John. He quotes John the Baptist pronouncement about Jesus.
JOHN 1:15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”)
In the manger he was new, but he wasn’t that new. He’s the Ancient of Days. He’s the timeless one who stepped into our timeline so that he could bring life that is truly life, so that he could bring a kind of life that never ends.
There’s a reason that Christmas decorations center on light. We’re stringing lights on everything at Christmas time. It’s more than aesthetics or neighborhood competitions. Even for the Clark Griswolds in your neighborhood who are straining the power grid, who may not even be aware of why this started, lights are a deeply rooted visual that points to way, way back to this. The life that’s found in Jesus, is the light for all mankind.
What does that mean?
LIGHT OF ALL MANKIND: You never have to GUESS, SOLVE the riddle, or AGONIZE over what God wants you to do with your life.
I’m not saying you won’t agonize over which job to take, which school to apply to, or which person you should date. The Gospel can’t be reduced to ChatGPT for sifting through all the options you’ll navigate. It’s not that.
Here it is. When you know Jesus, when you trust in him, as you grow to understand him, the kind of life that you were made for becomes clear. It’s a life of loving communion with him. It’s a life that can always be simplified to this—do what is most loving for all others. Jesus is the one who illuminates what it means to love and be loved.
We could say that the manger holds the one who we want to be with and become like. He is the light that shines in the darkness. We owe it to ourselves to remember and admit that light is in conflict with darkness. The life of Jesus shines into the darkness that’s around us. And it shines into the darkness that’s in us. Here’s one more thing I see when I look into the manger.
The manger holds CONFLICT, not HOSTILITY.
People in the darkness might respond to Jesus with hostility. But do you know that Jesus didn’t come with a disposition of hostility toward those in the dark? The first 18 verses of John are called the Prologue. It frames what we should be looking for as we read the rest of John’s biography of Jesus’ life.
I want to skip ahead to a covert conversation Jesus had with a religious leader who was stuck in the dark. The details that we’ll find are not random. They’re included intentionally. Turn ahead to John 3.
JOHN 3:1-2 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
When did he come to see Jesus? He came at night. This guy recognizes something supernatural about Jesus. He can see enough to know this is no ordinary man. But he’s still in the dark and unable to see the truth in front of him.
JOHN 3:3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
We don’t have the ability on our own to comprehend the truth that Jesus embodies. It requires a transformation. It requires stepping into the light, humbling oneself, trusting his authority, and following his lead. That message might feel like conflict. And yet, it’s not hostile.
JOHN 3:16-18 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
What do you see when you look into the manger? The manger holds the one who is holding life as it should be. But to experience it, means trusting him as King, yielding to his authority to transform our lives however he sees fit.
I love how C.S. Lewis brings into focus exactly what we’re signing up for when we trust in Jesus.
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. –C.S. Lewis
Christmas isn’t an escape. It’s an invasion. The king has come to take over. He hasn’t come to be an accessory. He’s come as the authority who brings life, light, and goodness to who all trust in him. Do you trust him enough to let him take over?
For the rest of this month, every illuminated decorated that catches your eye, I hope you will remember this absurdly good news.
The one who is LIGHT stepped into the dark so that those in the dark could step into the LIGHT.