God so loved the world that he sent his son into it.

That's what we celebrate this week, the birth of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the incarnation

of God and the flesh of Manuel, God with us.

So of course we can ask the question, why?

Why was the eternal son of God born in a manger?

Why was he in flesh?

Why did he need a body?

This obviously is at the very heart of the incarnation and to explain here is a sermon

clip from John Piper as we find him preaching his way through the Gospel of John and particularly

as he and the church approached the Christmas season of 2009, here is to explain the purpose

of Christ's incarnation.

There is no Christmas story, no traditional birth of Jesus' story in the Gospel of John.

We're still in the Gospel of John, still in chapter six, but we're stepping back to

get a bigger picture now of how Christmas is woven into this Gospel.

It doesn't have a story at the beginning like Luke does and Matthew does.

Instead the Christmas story is woven through the Gospel and its meaning is given repeatedly

in the Gospel.

So begins, verse of the book, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and

the Word was God.

So all the way back into eternity there was the Word and this mysterious statement, the

Word was God and paradoxically the Word was with God, was God with God and immediately you're

into wavy, trinitarian matters, aren't you?

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