Grace & Truth

Jn 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
    
Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, something in you goes, “Oh no!” There are the people who are completely self-centred and all they can talk about is themselves. They tend to be loud, brash, harsh, even offensive. Then there are those who are a charade. They are putting on a front, Billy Liar personified. You never really get to know the real them because they are putting on such a show. What is sad about both sorts of people is that they are so far from what they were designed to be, because they don’t know who they are.
      
What is it these two groups of people lack? Grace and truth! Jesus was full of it. He didn’t just have a bit of it; everything about him was full of grace and truth. So what are these two characteristics?
      
Grace we sometimes describe as a divinely supernatural ability to cope, to be, to achieve. It is God’s ability for you and me to be the people He wants us to be. It is His enabling, Him providing something of Himself, it is His favour or ‘handed-out-goodness’. This grace that comes from God is a combination of His character and His ability. Thus when we receive His grace we receive something of His nature and an ability to be and to do as He wants us to be and do. And Jesus was full of this.
     
Why? Because of what goes before it: he was and is the Son of God, the one and only Son of God who has been formed out of the Father. He has the nature and being of the Father. In the same way that my daughter, say, has flesh because I have flesh, Jesus is Spirit because the Father is Spirit. But there the comparison stops, because my daughter may have a number of similar traits to me, but there is much of her that is unique to her. When we see Jesus, we see the Father, but limited in the flesh on earth and distinct in heaven. No I don’t understand it either! We only will when we get to heaven.
    
Truth is what is, what really is. There is nothing false, pretend, fake, or artificial in truth. It is real, genuine, actual. To use a modern phrase, what you see is what you get. In each one of us human beings there is something of falseness. We do not express perfectly or exactly what we are. We pretend, we’re not sure who we are or what we ought to be, and so we act as we think people expect us to act, or as we think we should act, but God is not like that. God is utterly true to Himself. He doesn’t have to put on a show – when you are The Supreme Being there is no one to impress! He is just Himself.
   
Jesus similarly, because he is of the essence of the Father, is just himself. He never said or did things because of others’ expectations. He did them because it was right to do them. Jesus, who knew all things, knew what was exactly right to say and do. That is why you can never fault anything he said or did – he was sinless (Heb 4:15). We may not understand it and may therefore wonder, but the error is never or his side; it’s always our misunderstanding. No, everything about Jesus is truth. If you realise that, it makes him a bit scary. Living with someone who is utterly real, utterly true – because we are not – is a bit scary. He shows us up. He showed up the religious leaders of his day and that’s why they had him killed.
    
Jesus arrived on earth and, as he pondered this many years later, John realised that his master was truly FULL of grace and truth, the essence of the Father.