What's the heart of God? What's the essence of his reality if you boil everything that's made known about him in the Bible down to the

essence how would you sum it up and he would say grace and truth

so what do grace and truth have to do with the heart of God? That's the question John Piper answers from John 1, 14 to 18 in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached

at Bethlehem Baptist Church on December 24, 1989.

I want you to ascend with me a flight of five stairs toward Christmas reality. The bottom level will start is the invisibility of God.

And the top level to which we're heading is the receiving this morning,

the actual receiving of grace upon grace from Jesus Christ.

Step number one, the bottom level is this, God is invisible.

Verse 18, no one has ever seen God.

And I want to reflect for a moment on the invisibility of reality. What fools we can make of ourselves sometimes about what we say about what we can't see. Chris Churnholm, who is one of the representatives, gave me a copy of a video sent to him by the Fund for the Feminist Majority in California called

Abortion for Survival. It's a video that makes a passionate plea for abortion as an absolutely indispensable element in birth control, especially in third world countries.

And in it is portrayed the manifold miseries that multiple unwanted pregnancies bring, especially among the poor.

And I wondered as we as a staff watch this the other day if they'd ever show the reality of the unseen child.

And they didn't.

The tacit assumption was that it didn't exist and the reason was you can't see it.

And the evidence that that was the main argument was this. Two times in the video they took a

syringe full of bloody material and squirt it into a bowl and said this is the result of an eight-week abortion,

hardly a child.

Which is a little bit like getting your finger caught in a meat grinder and then watching

what comes out and saying, oh, I guess it wasn't a finger after all. No big deal.

We don't have to wonder what a baby at eight weeks looks like.

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