Where does the Bible talk about logos?

• Genesis 1:1-3, the Word was in the beginning
• John 1:1-18, in the beginning was the Word
• John 3:34, "He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure."
• John 7:16, "Jesus answered them, `My teaching is not mine but his who sent me.'"
• John 8:26, Jesus has much to say about God
• John 12:49, "'I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak.'"
• John 14:24, "'Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.'"
• John 14:26, the Holy Spirit will teach you everything
• John 16:14, the Spirit of truth will glorify Jesus
• Revelation 19:11-16, "He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of God."

Sermon ideas about logos

In John's gospel, the pre-existent Jesus Christ is called "the Word," because he speaks for his father. Five times Jesus claims that what he says is not really from him, but from the one who sent him. He embodies and reproduces what God the Father wants to say to the world. "The word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me" (14:24).

Here's a crass analogy. In 1946 America's then-most popular singer cut his first album. It was called The Voice of Frank Sinatra. From then on, Sinatra was often called simply The Voice. The Voice sang "Come Fly with Me." The Voice sang "Strangers in the Night." The Voice sang "My Way." To call Jesus "the Word" is like calling Frank Sinatra "The Voice."

When John calls Jesus the Word, he is reaching deep into intertwined Hellenistic and Old Testament traditions. Greeks, particularly Stoics, had identified ho logos as the creative and rational principle of order in the universe. And, of course, Genesis 1 recounts how God spoke the universe into existence. John 1 echoes both traditions when he says of the Word "all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being." He's the creative ordering principle of the universe, and he's the Father's agent of creation.

During his career on earth, the Word brings the word of his Father. John then interprets the Paraclete as the word-bringer who extends Jesus' teaching. The Paraclete teaches the words of the Word. As the Son only speaks what he hears from the Father, so the Paraclete or Spirit only speaks what is the Son's (John 14:26; 16:14). The Spirit functions eschatologically in declaring what is to come (John 16:13) and retrospectively in reminding the disciples of all Christ has said. As the Word reveals the Father, the Spirit reveals the Son. Each is the way to another.

A sampling of what the Word had to say:

"No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above" (John 3:3). That is, no one can experience, participate in, belong to the kingdom of God without being supernaturally reborn. Jesus' teaching to Nicodemus centers on the regeneration of a human life by the power of the Holy Spirit, which is a miracle "that is at the same time most powerful and most pleasing, a marvelous, hidden, and inexpressible work, which is not lesser than or inferior in power to that of creation or of raising the dead" (Canons of Dort, Article 12).

"God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16). This is probably the most famous text in the Christian Bible, and understandably so. Here is the heart of the gospel — God's overflowing love for a sinful world, God's sending of God's one and only Son to save it, and the call to human beings simply to trust this Son and this plan. No familiarity with this text should numb us to its sheer, mighty grace that is as wide as the world.

"I am the bread of life" (John 6:35). Manna wasfor the Israelites in the wilderness; Christ is the bread of life for the whole world. The allurements of this world — fame, money, power — cannot finally satisfy our deepest hungers (Frederick Dame Bruner, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Eerdmans, 2012), p. 405). We were made to feast on God's love, personified in God's Son. To try for satisfaction from worldly substitutes is like trying to sate our hunger with a couple of sticks of chewing gum.

"It is finished" (John 19:30). Reported only in John, these words signify that Jesus has completed what his Father sent him to do. He has fulfilled his mission. He has given up his life, as "the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2).