Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning, church.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: What a joy to be together today. Amen.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: I wasn't supposed to be here today. Actually, it is a joy to be.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Here, especially after being sick. I don't like not being with you.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Guys on Sunday, but we were supposed to have Bruce Keller here today, and he's sick. So that's. That's what we do. We.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: We schedule people to preach and get them sick. That's the. The thing we do around here.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: It's a joy to be here.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: What we're doing is we're swapping weeks. So I actually wrote this sermon before.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: My time off for next Sunday, and since Bruce is sick, we're just swapping.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: So I'm going to go today, and he's going to go next week, and that won't matter. For most of us, it all works out, but it does do something a little weird. So if you're not familiar with Advent traditions, this is something we do every.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Year at Emmanuel Fellowship.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: We have the Advent wreath. We light the candles.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: We do. We.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: I say we light the candles.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: We turn the candles on. They're.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: They're digital.
They're digital. Someone in the past who shall remain unnamed tried to light the digital candles, and the. The LED lights inside them are still scorched.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: But we do this every year. And if you didn't grow up in a tradition that does this, it might be a little strange. And so I want to take a quick second to talk about it before.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: We jump into it.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: The whole thing of it is this.
Having an Advent wreath, having the themes and the candles and the specific texts. There is nothing magical about this, but I think it is incredibly helpful. It's incredibly helpful.
Many of us didn't grow up in any sort of tradition where we did this sort of thing, but I think it's what the reason we do it is. It's incredibly grounding.
Like, for those of us who just. You love Christmas like you were. You don't care about Thanksgiving. Halloween's over, and that means it's Christmas time. Like, those of you listen, and I'm not judging you, but I am.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: If you put your tree up before Thanksgiving. We put our tree up before Thanksgiving.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: But those of you who are just like, christmas is your time. This is your thing. You love all the traditions, all the joy. Like the wreath invites us to slow down and remember that December truly is not about us, that it's not about stuff, it's not about pleasure, it's not about memories with kids or grandkids. It's not even about traditions. It brings us back to the amazing truth that our time on this earth is about the glory of Jesus and.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: The amazing power of the Gospel.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: But the flip side to that is that for some of us, Christmas is a really difficult time.
It's a really sorrowful time, a painful.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Season that reminds us of loss and.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: Who is not there.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: And if that's you in this room.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: This tradition of Advent, I believe, is just as grounding.
I believe it reminds us that Christ is with us, that he is truly Emmanuel, that he's with you even now, even in your hurt, even in your.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Loss, even in the anxiety this season can bring about.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: You are not alone.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: The lover of your soul sees you and walks with you, cares for you.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: And so what we do is each passing Sunday, from now till Christmas Eve, we light another candle. And each candle is to remind us of a different theme, of our celebration.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Of Advent and our remembrance of the coming of the Lord Jesus into this world.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: We normally start with hope and then.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Move to faith, and then move to joy and then love. And then on Christmas Eve, we light the Christ candle.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: But today we're swapping that around. We're starting with faith.
Normally, we start with hope. But you know what?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: You guys can hope next week.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: This week, we're going to have faith. Okay? That sound good? We lit the faith candle today, and we're going to consider the truth of faith in our life, as well as.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: How it relates to Christ's incarnation.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: So turn in your Bibles over to Matthew chapter one. You thought we were done with Matthew?
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Matthew, chapter one is where we're going to be today. If you don't have a Bible with you, look underneath the seats in front of you. We have house Bibles around the room.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: We really believe in the importance of access to God's word here at Emmanuel. If you don't own a Bible, please take a pew Bible or talk to one of our pastors. We'll get you a nicer one.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: We're Matthew, chapter one. We're going to read. Starting in verse 18, I'm going to read the whole passage for us, and.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Then we'll pray and then we'll talk about it.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Matthew, chapter one. Starting in verse 18, we read this.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: The birth of Jesus Christ came about this way after his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph. It was discovered before they came together that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit.
So her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly.
But after he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.
Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Will name him Emmanuel, which is translated, God is with us.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Us.
When Joseph woke up, he did as the Lord's angel had commanded him. He married her, but did not have.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Sexual relations with her until she gave.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Birth to a son.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: And he named him Jesus.
And this, beloved, is the word of the Lord for us today.
Pray with me, Church Jesus. We thank you so much for the gift of a holiday weekend, for time off work, for time to be with family, for time to go slow, for a gorgeous snowy day, to wake up to trees sagging and the light shining in the snow for many of us to see in person or through pictures and videos, kids and grandkids running and jumping and doing all the different stuff you do when it's cold and wet.
Lord, you have been so good to us.
You are so gracious to us, God, as we take a few minutes to slow down and be present in your word, we ask Holy Spirit that you would be our discipler today.
Speak to us, encourage us, challenge us. Remind us for those in this room today, Lord, who are hurting, who are struggling to trust you.
Father, I pray that today you would pour a balm of healing on the wounds in our heart, draw us to a place of deeper trust, deeper dependence on you.
Take us further down that journey of healing the wounds of this cursed and broken world and relying fully and completely on you.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: God, we love you.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: We trust you. Pray these things in your name. Amen.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Okay, so here's the thing.
Anytime you're talking about holiday texts, so the Christmas texts and the Easter texts, if you've spent more than, like 10 minutes in church, you kind of know.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: The basics of them.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: And so it takes a little bit of intentionality to make a decision to go, I'm just going to receive this fresh today.
I'm going to engage this fresh today. Because you all know how the story goes, right? Mary, Joseph, baby, there's animals involved at some point. They sleep in a barn, the whole nine yards. There's wise men, they give a newborn baby gold like it's a whole thing. We know the story. Most of us have the Nativity scene set up at our house or we'll.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Have it in the next couple days. Right.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: But I want to encourage us to step back and to look at this specific text today. I think this text is interesting because it tells us the Christmas story from the perspective of Joseph.
And we don't normally get Joseph's perspective. We're used to reading the Christmas story as a conglomerate of all four gospels. And as a result, Luke's account from Mary's perspective is usually given all the screen time.
That's because Luke gives a much more detailed account. And the whole scene with Mary and the angel is just so cool. Right. Like, we kind of want to zone in on that. But I think reading Matthew's account by itself can be really helpful if you can pull back into the deep recesses of your memory from 2022 and remember some of the main themes and interpretive lenses we used in Matthew. One of the main goals that Matthew had when he wrote his gospel was to establish theologically Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, that is Yahweh's anointed leader in the line of David, who will save God's people who are living in exile.
Because of this, Matthew is very concerned with establishing Jesus as being in David's line through Joseph.
That's a way of helping ground this messianic claim to the Jewish people. If you back all the way up to second Samuel, chapter seven, when David becomes king and becomes established and is sitting in Jerusalem, God makes a covenant with him where he says, I will establish your line, your family, your house, forever in eternity.
There will be a son of David sitting on the throne in Jerusalem. Which seems like a strange promise for God to make because Israel was destroyed and Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians, and a son of David is not sat on a throne in Jerusalem for a couple thousand years.
Right.
Well, God wasn't talking to David about.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: The ancient kingdom of Israel. He was talking to David about heaven, about eternity, about a new Jerusalem, and about the true king sitting on the throne, the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: And so Matthew really wants you to know Jesus is in the line of David. He is the fulfillment of this promise made by God through the prophet Nathan to David all those years ago. But there's a really interesting problem with that.
Jesus isn't Joseph's biological son according to the text.
Right.
And yet Matthew goes out of his way to establish Joseph's line back to David.
This certainly isn't the main point of.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Our text today, but I think it's an important one. It's a beautiful Reminder of the importance of adoption in God's eyes, because Jesus is Joseph's son in every way that matters and is the son of David through that.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: But also, guys, it places a really.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Big importance, and this is closer to where we're going with the text today.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: That places a really big importance on.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Joseph's acceptance of God's will in Jesus's birth and Jesus's place in his family.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: That's the weight that Matthew's telling of.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: The story puts us here.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Matthew doesn't start by telling us any narrative. It starts with a genealogy.
A genealogy? A genealogy of Jesus from Joseph's side of the family.
And he goes out of his way several times over the course of the genealogy to say Jesus is the son of David, he is the Messiah. Like he lets you know where he's going really quickly.
The emphasis here on the text we just read is the importance that God.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Is calling Joseph to something.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: That Joseph must accept God's will here, that he must accept Jesus place in his family. Joseph believing God and Joseph accepting Jesus as his son into his family is necessary according to Matthew, for claiming that Jesus is truly a son of David, the true Messiah.
And so again, it actually makes sense.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: That Matthew tells this purely from Joseph's.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Joseph's point of view, like we know from all our years of Christmas Eve.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Services and church plays, that the angel.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Came to Mary and told her what the deal was.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Right? But Matthew doesn't give you any of that information.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: He goes from genealogy straight into our text.
As we step into this text, we as the audience, we already know where it's headed. Matthew's already let the cat out of a bag and claimed that Jesus is the son of David. But that makes the text all the more confusing. Like, walk through this narrative with me. Okay, so Joseph is betrothed to Mary, engaged, and during the engagement, it's found.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Out that she is pregnant.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Now this needs just a minute of explanation. Some of you have heard this before, but just to make sure we're all on the same page, Jewish betrothment is a custom that is similar to how.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: We understand engagement before marriage.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: But there's some really important differences that affect the way we read a text like this. First off, you have to remember that in this day, marriage was almost always arranged by parents. That doesn't exclude the idea of marriage for love, especially amongst the working class.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Which Joseph and Mary would have been.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: But it means if a guy wanted to marry a girl, his parents would approach her parents to arrange it.
The father of the groom would engage in formal haggling with the father of the bride to agree upon a bride price. And when this was agreed upon and paid, the two were betrothed. So this literally might mean like my daughter's pretty beautiful, I think three cows.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Two chickens and a goat.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: Oh, listen, your daughter's great, but is she a three cow daughter? I don't think so. That's the kind of discussion that would happen. And once it happened and once the price was agreed upon and the goods were exchanged, they were betrothed. But this betrothment was a legally binding relationship because goods had been exchanged.
Right? This isn't the way we think of engagement where it's just two people and.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: They can break it off or keep it if they want to.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: This is a legally binding agreement. The groom generally had about one year to get his finances in order and prepare a home for his new family. Once you're betrothed, that's the groom's job. During this time, the couple was not married and they were not allowed generally to spend time alone together. They certainly were not allowed to be.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Physically intimate with each other.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: But they still had all the legal obligations of marriage, including in that fidelity.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Right?
[00:14:52] Speaker A: It was an interesting and unique way part of their relationship. You can read about the laws around this in Deuteronomy 22. But essentially betrothed were held to the same laws regarding sexual fidelity as fully married couples. This is distasteful to us guys, right? Like you just have to understand this bit. As modern Westerners, it's a little weird to us, but the reason for this is because of the formal legal nature of betrothal, goods and money were exchanged for the marriage. Specifically, if a woman was shown not to be as described or promised by her father in the initial agreement, then the betrothment was nullified. And if the woman had premarital sex with someone who wasn't willing to pay money to break the betrothal and then pay a bride price on top of that, she could be and often was executed as an adulteress.
Now notice there, I said if the woman had premarital sex, the woman couldn't break her betrothment if the man was.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Found to have premarital sex.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: But that's a different discussion about living in the near east in the Bronze Age, right? But all of this, it puts context around Joseph's response to the revelation that Mary is pregnant.
Matthew goes out of his way to.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Let us know Mary is pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: But I want you to do your best right now, to honestly imagine this.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Scene from Joseph's perspective, I want you.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: To put yourself in his place.
This is an interesting and intense season of life.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: He's probably in his late teens, Maybe his early 20s, but probably his late teens. She's probably in her middle teens.
They're betrothed to be married. He is working his tail off.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: He has about a year to earn.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: Enough money to make sure all his debts are settled and to build a literal physical house for them to live in. Literally build it himself or pay to have it built.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: He's working every extra hour he can.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Saving and scrapping every single dollar, thinking about the love of his life, who.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: He gets to spend no time with.
He just sees snippets of her in town here and there, never allowed to talk to her, maybe getting notes or messages from her through his brothers and.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Sisters or her brothers and sisters or their parents.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: All this anticipation, all this eagerness, all the love and hormones that are building.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Up in his person over the season of life.
And then he hears news that she's pregnant and it's confirmed to him, Nah, she's pregnant. She's pregnant.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: And to make it worse, like that would be crushing by itself.
But to make it worse, she is claiming that she wasn't unfaithful to him.
She's telling people that an angel of God appeared to her and told her God was making her pregnant to bear the Messiah.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Now, listen, we have 2,000 years of.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Religious understanding to look back on that Joseph did not.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: You have to imagine how hurtful that.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Would have been, how that would have made a deep hurt, a deeper hurt.
She's not only hurting him, she's not only been unfaithful, she won't even own the wrong.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: She's stamping God's name on it.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: You can almost see, you can almost.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Feel Joseph's dreams for his own future, for his family, for his home, for his life, crumbling through his fingers.
This would have been devastating news for him, right?
But praise be to God, the text tells us that Joseph is a righteous man.
He obviously actually loves Mary.
He doesn't want her to be put to shame or to expose her to the potential of real harm through prosecution. So he decides to just quietly break off the betrothment, which, by the way, in Jewish eyes was divorce.
He would have been seen and stigmatized as a divorced man from that point on.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: And in verse 20, we get this awkward phrasing after he had considered these things.
But what we're actually supposed to See here is that Joseph has decided on.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: A course of action.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: He has decided to divorce Mary for what he believes is infidelity and unfaithfulness, betrayal.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: And by the way, all the social pressure would have been this direction for him.
Every one of his friends, every one of his family, his parents would have been pushing and pressuring him toward divorce. If he chooses to marry Mary even though she's pregnant, the assumption would be that he is admitting he is the.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: One who was unfaithful and led her into sexual immorality.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: That would have been the assumption of everyone who knew them, everyone who saw them. If he actually goes through and marries her, he's just admitting that he's not.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: A godly man and he had no self control and he led this young woman into sin. And that would have real consequences for him. In that day.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: He lived in a place that was incredibly conservative, where Pharisaical Judaism was the.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Norm, where people lived a pretty intense application of their faith.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: He would have been open to actual lawsuit from his new father in law for violating their betrothal. It would have affected people's willingness to patronize his business.
He would have been known in his community.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: As the guy who got his girl pregnant before they were married, who couldn't have self control until their marriage.
You can see how Joseph, in his own hurt, in the midst of social pressure, would feel like he has no real choice but divorce and to do it as quietly as possible so as not to shame her.
But God intervenes.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: And God sends an angel to Joseph.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: And confirms everything that Mary has claimed.
She really is pregnant by the Holy Spirit.
God really did do this. And God has a task for Joseph in the midst of all of this.
Joseph is to marry Mary and he is to bear this son.
And he is to name him Jesus.
Which by the way, in English we call him Jesus for sake of clarity.
But it's Yeshua, Joshua. It's the same name.
It means the Lord saves.
He has to name him Jesus.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: In this culture and at this time.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: For a man to name a child was to formally accept him into the family, into the tribe.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: To formally name a child you didn't.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Create was legally to adopt him.
God is telling Joseph to marry Mary and adopt Jesus.
And there is a reason for this.
Jesus is the Messiah.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: He will save God's people from their sins. The baby Jesus will change the whole world. He is the fulfillment of messianic prophecy. He is the Emmanuel. He is God with us. And God wants Joseph to be his dad.
I love that As a dad myself.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: That is really hard.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: God, the father of the universe, our Creator looks at his son and looks.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: At Joseph and says, I want you to be the one to raise him.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: I want you to be the one who is there when he scrapes his knee, when he wakes up from nightmares. I want you to teach him how to shave and how to love, love others and how to serve his neighbors and how to prepare the sacrifice for the family. I want you to be his dad and all the stuff that goes with that.
And if your dad in the room like that gets you, you know, the weight of that, the God, the father.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Would look at Joseph and say, that's what I have for you to be the father of Jesus.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: And by the way, it's going to.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Bear a real cost for you.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: No one's going to believe that we.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Had this conversation, right?
[00:23:37] Speaker A: No one's going to believe that that's what's going on.
You're just going to bear the weight.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Of this the rest of your life.
That you were the guy who got his fiance pregnant and let her sit in shame and then finally owned up to it and adopted the kid. That's just going to be how you're known.
But you and I will know the truth, that this is my son and I've asked you to adopt him and I've asked you to raise him. And Joseph hears this and he says yes to it.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: In our text, the God of the universe looks at Joseph and says, this is what I have for you. All the dreams, the plans you had for your life, they were cool.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: But the one I have for you.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: Is this father, my son.
And Joseph says yes to that.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: See, we have the hindsight to see.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: What an honor that is.
You got to raise Jesus. He gets to be a part of God's gospel, salvation for reality.
But Joseph didn't have that perspective, right?
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Joseph said yes through the death of.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: His hopes and dreams for his own life, through the death of the plans he made.
He set them down and said yes to social stigma for his family.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: He said yes to his community, assuming he was sexually immoral. He said yes to the potential consequences.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: That would have on his finances and his business.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: He said yes to the first year of his marriage, to his brand new wife being, taking care of a pregnant wife and a newborn child versus marital bliss.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: He didn't even know this, but in just a short year, his saying yes would be saying yes to fleeing the country in the night for fear of his life and becoming a refugee in Egypt.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: But our text tells us that Joseph believed God.
Joseph said yes to the calling God handed him.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: He allowed his personal dreams to die on the altar of faith and obedience to his God.
And I love how the text ends.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: But Joseph married Mary. He cared for her in her pregnancy. He abstained from sex until the child was born. And finally, it says he named him Jesus.
He brought this boy into his family and named him, making him a son of David. It's such a simple and quiet ending to the text.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Matthew doesn't talk to us about a census.
There's no crowded inn. There's no labor pains. There's no animals eating a few feet away.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Matthew just gives us the few short words that paint all the picture we need.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Of course, Joseph did take Mary to the census. Of course he helped deliver the baby in a barn.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: He believed God. He said yes, she was his wife and Jesus was his son. Joseph did what fathers do for their.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Pregnant wives and newborn children.
And guys, this week of faith.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: I really believe for us, Joseph is such a beautiful picture of gospel faith.
And if we're honest, going back to what the white shared with us, faith, I think really is a strange concept in our day and our culture.
I have a friend named Andy who's an atheist, and we've done some podcast stuff together. We've hung out since high school, and he would say, he's told me this several times, that faith is just believing in something without enough evidence to support the belief.
That's what Andy would say. Faith is if you want to believe in something, but you don't actually have evidence, you insert faith in replacement of actual evidence.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: It's a logical leap where we shut.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: Down our reason and just decide to believe something.
And, guys, this idea isn't restricted to my buddy Andy.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: This kind of idea about faith is.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Honestly one of the most common ones in our day.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: But thankfully, it simply isn't an accurate definition.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: It's just not what it actually means.
One of the most famous passages about faith is the one that was referenced in our reading today.
Faith is about trust in future decisions based on evidence observed. Right?
Faith is. It's the hope we have of things unseen.
And you know, something saying that faith really is trust based on decisions based on evidence observed. Like, that's the kind of faith we practice every single day.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: That's that. That's a normative thing that you observe.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: And you gather data and you make predictions for the future based on the data you gathered.
That's a better definition of faith. It's the collection of the observations you've made it's assurance of things hoped for, things unseen.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: I'm guessing most of us didn't do.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Much work to check the sturdiness of the chairs in this room before you sat in them, right?
[00:28:44] Speaker A: You didn't walk up and go, that.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: One, like shake a little bit, drop your bag on it a few times.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Kick it a little bit. I do walk around and kick all.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: The chairs before church, but that's not to see how strong they are. That's because I want the rose straighter.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: I'm guessing most of us didn't do that, right?
You walked in, you picked a chair, you thought, how close am I to Wayne?
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Okay, I can sit here. Listen, you can all ignore. That's how we all pick our seat. It's okay. I'm sorry, Wayne, that's not true.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: That's not true.
You walked in the room, you picked a seat and you sat in it, right?
And you did it for a very simple reason.
You've sat in these chairs before and most of the time they've held you up.
There may be a few exceptions, but most of the time they've worked.
And you've sat in other chairs like.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: These, in restaurants, at houses, at other churches.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: And I'm going to go on the limb and I'm going to guess the vast majority of the time you've sat in the chairs and they've held you up.
And so you didn't feel any need to gather any data about the strength of this chair.
You used all the observations you've made in the past and you made a.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Prediction about your future and you sat down.
I had a terrible experience where my faith in chairs was not validated. Once I was on a mission trip to India.
And in India, where I was in Mumbai, 99% of the chairs were plastic, like patio chairs. You know the ones I'm talking about, where they're all one piece, but they're supposed to have little rubber feet on them, right? No, no, these had no rubber feet. The feet were plastic and all the floors were tile.
Now, I just need you to think about that for a minute. That's a bad combination.
And I am a large man.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: And so I was in a secret. I was in a underground seminary.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: We were teaching like church planners, like how to go out and plant churches in places where it's illegal to do that.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: It's very heavy, it's very serious.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: We're there in secret and I'm like, the next speake is they point me to the back and I go and I sit in a chair and it just explodes underneath me. And I sprawled onto the floor and they're like.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: And they help me up and I'm.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: Like, wow, this is embarrassing.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: And they hand me another chair and.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: I sit in it and it exploded and sprawled on the floor.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: And so at that point, the guy who was running this said, let's stack up three chairs.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: And then you sit on it.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: And I'll be honest, I just said, no.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: And I'm going to stand for the next three hours.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: I'm never going to sit in any.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Of your presence ever again for any reason.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: And I will tell you, for the rest of that trip, I did check every single chair I sat in to test its sturdiness.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Does it ever have a feet on the bottom?
[00:31:24] Speaker A: How tile slick is the tile here?
Because my faith had betrayed me, right? The chair broke.
But then I came home to our church chairs, and you know what?
[00:31:34] Speaker B: I never checked them.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Because, guys, that's actually.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: How faith works. In real life, faith is incredibly useful.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: But when your faith is flawed, it can bite you in the butt, right?
[00:31:51] Speaker A: And in the same breath, even though when your faith is flawed, it can bite you in the butt, it's a really big pain to live your life fearful of every chair you sit in so that you must live with, with like, vigilance, checking every single chair for signs of damage. So out of sheer convenience, we learn to live lives of faith.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Because that's just a better way to live.
And we can say all day long.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Well, that's just ignoring reason.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: But it isn't. It isn't, it isn't.
It's a collection of your observations, if.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Anything, that's running, running statistics in your brain, right?
Running percentages.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: But guys, that's just with stuff, that's.
[00:32:39] Speaker B: With objects in our life, when we put our faith in a person, the whole thing becomes much more complex, right?
You trust a person because of your past experiences with them or maybe with the position they hold.
So that could be a spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a friend, a co worker, a teacher, a pastor. Fill in the blank.
Faith in people is sometimes rewarded.
Sometimes you put your faith in people because of their position, because of what you know about them.
And it's amazing. And you have wonderful relationships and it benefits you and serves you and serves your family. But sometimes you put your faith in people and it's terrible.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Sometimes it burns you horribly. Sometimes your faith is broken because someone was allowed to be a pastor when they shouldn't have been one.
Or that boyfriend presented a certain face to you at the beginning of the relationship, but then their true colors came.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: Out, or that coworker act like they.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: Were on your team until it didn't suit them anymore.
Many of us have been so wounded by people.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: That we actually are checking every chair before we sit down.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Relationally, we've been so wounded by a person that any human being who falls.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Even close to that category.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: We check.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Every facet of it. We've had our faith so broken that it's extremely difficult to extend it to anyone new anymore.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Often the argument given against religious faith.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Is that Christianity, that is God, simply asks too much of us without enough evidence that the whole thing is real.
And if you've had a lot of broken faith in your life, parents, friends, lovers, authority figures, then that actually makes a lot of sense.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: God does ask a lot of you, right?
He does ask a lot of us. He asks you to sacrifice your own self interest to his glory and for his kingdom. I mean, that's a lot. Look at Joseph.
Look at the price he paid to live a life of faith in God. His whole life was shifted. His whole life was changed. God asks a lot of us.
And if you've been burned a lot in life, relationally, it can be easy.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: To look at what God asks of you and just say, that's too much.
[00:35:13] Speaker A: How can you possibly trust God when the stakes are that high?
When he asks for your whole life, the one life you get, and he asks for all of it, Your affections, your decision making, your time, your money, your ethics.
That's a lot.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Look how it turned out when you said your yes in the past to.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: Others and they asked a lot.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: I fear that many of us in this space, or maybe even unconsciously guilty of projecting the bad faith of our experience with earthly authority onto God himself.
We look at our parents, we look at our teachers, we look at our romantic partners, we look at our bosses.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: We look fill in the blank and we assume God must be similar.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: He treats me like that person did.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: And so the risk is the same to trust him.
But beloved, you must hear this today.
That is not so.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: That is not who God is.
God is faithful.
It is in his very nature. He cannot. He will not deny his nature. He is faithful.
He's trustworthy. Your yes to Jesus.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: Beloved, hear this.
[00:36:39] Speaker A: Your yes to Jesus is never betrayed.
It's never wasted. It's never held over your head.
The word of your God is as good as fulfilled. Your sacrifice to him. Your loss is experienced in obedience to Him. They're never wasted.
Jesus himself Said that whoever has lost family or field will be repaid tenfold.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: In the kingdom of God.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: If you had asked Joseph two months.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: Before his angelic visit if he wanted his life to take the change it would take, right?
[00:37:11] Speaker A: If you'd found him on the workspace and said, hey, do you want all these things to happen to you? Do you want people to think about you this way? Do you want this to happen to your business? You want your life to change like this? He would have told you no, right?
Of course he would have.
Who wouldn't?
[00:37:29] Speaker B: But Joseph believed God.
Joseph trusted God.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: He walked forward into what God had for him in faith, and it cost him.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: It changed his life. He had to sacrifice for his faith. But I guarantee you, beloved, if you.
[00:37:44] Speaker A: Asked him today.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: If you asked him today, he would not trade that honor for anything.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Because he got to be dad to.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: A baby named Jesus.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: And that was worth it.
[00:38:01] Speaker B: Beloved, you must know.
You must know the life of faith that God has for you will be more difficult than you realize it is.
It will ask more of you than you realize it will.
He will never regret it.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: God is trustworthy.
Your yes to God is never wasted.
The cost, the cost of giving God your yes. He's nothing in comparison to what he has for you.
The goodness, the life, the joy, the freedom, the eternity he has for you.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Is so worth the cost.
And I know many of you, many.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: Of you struggle with that truth.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: You go, surely God must be like my father. Surely God must be like my pastor. Surely he must be like my boss. Sure.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: No, I understand why you hear that. I understand why you feel that.
But I tell you today he's not.
He's not like that.
He's love.
His trustworthiness itself, his faithfulness itself.
Your yes to him is never wasted.
Band, if you want to come back up, I'm going to end us by reading the whole passage connected to our Advent reading this morning. This is just going to be how I land us today. I want to encourage you guys, let me read this over you as a prayer.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: And encourage you to receive this text as your prayer to the Lord today.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: When I'm done reading, I'll let us sit in silence for just a minute.
I encourage you to meet with God the way your heart needs.
And those of you in the room who are in Christ who want to respond to the faithfulness of God with the declaration of trust, we have communion available today.
The text tells us that when we partake of the elements, his body broken for us, his blood poured out for us. We're proclaiming his death until his return.
To take communion is to proclaim to God, to ourselves and to each other that Christ's work is sufficient, the faith in God is sufficient, that the work God has done on your behalf is enough for your heart.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: And so when you've met with him, when you've heard from him, if you want to respond, if you're in Christ and you want to respond in communion, I'd encourage you to come up front and do that. If you're in the room and you can't get up and walk forward, you can just raise your hand and someone, I think Jim, will bring communion to you.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: Let me read this to us.
Church, get in the posture of prayer.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: Hebrews 11 says this.
[00:40:35] Speaker B: Now, faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: For by this, our ancestors were approved. See, by faith, we understand the universe was created by the word of God, so that what was seen was made from things that are not visible.
By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith, he was approved as a righteous man because God approved his gifts. Even though he is dead, he still speaks through his faith.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: By faith, Enoch was taken away, and he did not experience death.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: He was not to be found because God simply took him away. And before he was taken away, he was approved as one who pleased God. Now, without faith, it's impossible to please.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: God, since the one who draws near to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: Now, by faith, Noah, after he was.
[00:41:26] Speaker B: Warned about what was not yet seen.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Was motivated by godly fear to build an ark to deliver his family. By faith, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes. By faith.
By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed and set out for a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. He went out, even though he didn't know where he was going.
And by faith, he stayed as a foreigner in a land of promise, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, coheirs of the same promise, where he was looking forward to a city that.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Had foundations, whose architect and builder is God himself.
By faith, even Sarah herself, when she was unable to have children, received power to conceive offspring, even though she was well past the age since she considered that one who had promised was faithful.
[00:42:13] Speaker A: Therefore, from one man, in fact, from one man as good as dead, came offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and as innumerable as the grains of sand on the seashore.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: And Hear this church.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: They all died in faith, although they.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: Had not received the things that were promised, but they saw them from a distance. They greeted them and confessed that they.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: Were foreigners, temporary residents of Earth.
[00:42:39] Speaker B: Now these who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But they now desire a better place, a heavenly place. And therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for him.
By faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He received the promises, and yet he was the offspring, as his one and only son, the one to whom it had been said, your offspring will be traced through Isaac. He considered that God was able even.
[00:43:09] Speaker A: To raise someone from the dead, and therefore he received him back.
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Figuratively speaking.
By faith, Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: By faith, Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph he worshiped, leaning on top of his staff. By faith, Joseph, when he was nearing the end of his life, mentioned the exodus of the Israelites and gave instructions concerning his bones.
[00:43:31] Speaker B: By faith, Moses, after he was born, hidden by his parents for three months because they saw the child was beautiful.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: They didn't fear the king's edict. By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh's daughter and chose to suffer with the people of God, rather enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin, for he considered the reproach for the sake of Christ to be greater than the wealth and treasures of Egypt, since he was looking ahead to a greater reward.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: By faith, when he left Egypt behind.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: Not being afraid of the king's anger.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: For Moses persevered as one who sees him as invisible. By faith, he instituted the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood so the.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch the Israelites. By faith, they crossed the Red Sea as though they were on dry land. When the Egyptians attempted to do this, they were drowned. By faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after being marched around by the Israelites for seven days. By faith, Rahab the prostitute welcomed the spies in peace and didn't perish with those who disobeyed.
What more can I say?
The time is too short.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: Can't talk about Gideon or Barak or.
[00:44:36] Speaker A: Samson or Jephthah or David or Samuel or all the prophets who by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, gained strength and weakness, became mighty in battle and put Foreign armies to fight.
Women received their dead, raised to life again. Other people were tortured, not accepting release, so they could gain a better resurrection. Others experienced mockings and scourgings, as well as bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawed in two. They died by the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted and mistreated. The world was not worthy of them.
They watered and deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground. All these, all these were approved through their faith.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: But they did not receive what was promised.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: Since God had provided something better for us. So they would not be made perfect without us.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: Hear this part Church.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Therefore.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: Since we have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: All of them, all of our brothers and sisters, generation upon generation of faith and endurance.
[00:46:04] Speaker B: Let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares.
Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us.
Let us keep our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer, the perfecter of our faith, for the joy set before him.
He endured the cross, despised the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Beloved, you are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: Every minute, every word of the history of our faith tells us God is trustworthy.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: Regardless of what you are facing today.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: I promise you your God is trustworthy and your yes to him will never be wasted.
Beloved, meet with the Lord as your heart needs.
