John tells us something breathtaking: God is not distant, not unknowable, not hidden behind a curtain of mystery. While no human has ever laid eyes on God in His fullness, Jesus makes God known in a personal, intimate way. After Christmas, when the manger scenes begin to fade, this truth keeps burning—God has come near, and He wants to be known.

God Beyond Our Sight, Yet Not Beyond Our Reach

There’s a humility baked into John’s words: we don’t get to master God with our senses or intellect. However much we learn, God is still God. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD (Isaiah 55:8). That isn’t meant to frustrate you; it’s meant to free you. You weren’t made to carry the weight of figuring God out by yourself.

And yet the same God who is beyond us has not left us guessing. He has acted. He has spoken. He has drawn near. He did it for Moses—hiding him in the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:20–23)—and He does it for us far more fully in Jesus. The point isn’t that God is hard to find; it’s that God must be known the way He chooses to be known. And He has chosen to make Himself known through His Son.

Jesus Doesn’t Merely Teach About God—He Reveals Him

John’s claim isn’t just that Jesus brings information; it’s that Jesus brings revelation. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus—His compassion, His holiness, His authority, His tenderness, His truth. Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). That’s not poetic language. That is an invitation to stop settling for vague spirituality and to meet the living God in the face of Christ.

This changes how you read the Gospels. You’re not just watching a miracle-worker. You’re seeing the heart of God on display: welcoming sinners, confronting hypocrisy, touching the unclean, weeping at a grave, and setting His face toward the cross. “The Son is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). So when you feel unsure what God thinks of you, don’t guess—look at Jesus.

Christmas Continues: The Son Brings Us Into Closeness

John’s words also carry this warm, startling idea: Jesus doesn’t reveal God from a distance; He reveals Him from closeness. God’s self-disclosure is relational. The gospel is not merely that God showed up, but that God brings us in. “But to all who did receive Him… He gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). If you belong to Christ, knowing God is not a rare moment—it’s your new reality.

So today, don’t treat “knowing God” like an advanced class for spiritual experts. It’s the everyday privilege of God’s children. You can come boldly, because Jesus is your access: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest… let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence” (Hebrews 4:14,16). Let Christmas continue in you: not just admiration for Jesus, but fellowship with God through Jesus—trusting Him, obeying Him, and walking with Him in the ordinary hours.

Father, thank You for making Yourself known through Your Son; help me come near today—trusting Jesus, listening to Your Word, and living in obedience for Your glory. Amen.

One of the most telling indictments against many of us who compose our Christian churches is the almost complete acceptance of the contemporary scene as our permanent home! We have been working and earning, getting and spending, and now we are enjoying the creature comforts known to human beings in this land. You may bristle a bit and ask: Is there anything wrong with being comfortable? Let me answer in this way: if you are a Christian and you are comfortably at home in Chicago or Toronto, in Iowa or Alberta - or any other address on planet earth, the signs are evident that you are in spiritual trouble. The spiritual equation reads like this: the greater your contentment with your daily circumstances in this world, the greater your defection from the ranks of God's pilgrims enroute to a city whose architect and builder is God Himself! If we can feel that we have put down our roots in this present world, then our Lord still has much to teach us about faith and attachment to our Savior!

Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching. Verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.. - Luke 12:37

The first idea in watchfulness is keeping awake, and the second is looking out for something that is coming. Both these conceptions are intertwined in both our Lord’s use of the metaphor of the watching servant and in the echoes of it which we find abundantly in the Apostolic letters. The first thing is to keep ourselves awake all through the soporific night, when everything tempts to slumber. Even the wise virgins, with trimmed lamps and girt loins, do in some degree succumb to the drowsy influences around them, and, like the foolish ones, slumber, though the slumbers of the two classes be unlike. Christian people live in the midst of an order of things which tempts them to close the eyes of their hearts and minds to all the real and unseen glories above and around them and that might be within them, and to live for the comparatively contemptible and trivial things of this present. Just as when a man sleeps he loses his consciousness of the solid external realities, and passes into a fantastic world of his own imaginations, which have no correspondence in external facts, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision if but a poor cock shall crow, so the men who are conscious only of this present life and of the things that are seen, though they pride themselves on being wide awake, are, in the deepest of their being, fast asleep, and are dealing with illusions which shall pass and leave nought behind, as really as are men who lie upon dreaming couches and fancy themselves hard at work. Keep awake; that is the first thing, which, being translated into plain English, points just to this, that, unless we make a dead lift of continuous effort to keep firm grasp of God and Christ, and of all the unseen magnificences that are included in these two words, as surely as we live we shall lose our hold upon them, and fall into the drugged and diseased sleep in which so many men around us are plunged. It sometimes seems to one as if the sky above us were raining down narcotics upon us, so profoundly are the bulk of men unconscious of realities and befooled by the illusions of a dream.

Many of us have to acknowledge that the fervour of early days has died down into coldness. The river that leapt from its source rejoicing, and bickered amongst the hills in such swift and musical descent, creeps sluggish and almost stagnant amongst the flats of later life, or has been lost and swallowed up altogether in the thirsty and encroaching sands of a barren worldliness. Do not let your Christian life be like that snow that is on the ground - when it first lights upon the earth, radiant and white, but day by day more covered with a veil of sooty blackness until it becomes dark and foul. Even early failures, recognised and repented of, may make a man better fitted for the tasks which once he fled from. Just as they tell us that a broken bone renewed is stronger at the point of fracture than it ever was before, so the very sin that we commit, when once we know it for a sin, and have brought it to Christ for forgiveness, may minister to our future efficiency and strength.

The past is no specimen of what the future may be. The page that is yet to be written need have none of the blots of the page that we have turned over shining through it. The sin which we have learned to know for a sin and to hate teaches us humility, dependence - shows us where the weak places are; sin which is forgiven knits us to Christ with deeper and more fervid love, and results in a larger consecration.