Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Good morning, church.
[00:00:12] What a joy to be together today. Amen.
[00:00:17] Can I just say, you really know it's Christmas when a glockenspiel ends up on stage. That's like. That's how. That's how you know, like, when there are chimes, bells.
[00:00:29] I mean, glockenspiel. That's. Is there anything more Christmassy? That's. That's magical.
[00:00:36] Thank you. Thank you guys so much to the creative team. They put so much work into that carol. You were rocking chimes up on the stage today. That's sick. That's sick.
[00:00:47] Good morning. Merry Christmas.
[00:00:50] What a joyful season. I am so excited for us to continue our Advent celebration. Now, before we move on, really quick, I know we said this a few weeks ago, but just in case you're not used to a more formalized Advent celebration, I wanna take a real quick second to kind of explain and remind us what we're doing with this whole thing. So, really, guys, for more than a thousand years, like a really stinking long time, Christians have set aside the weeks leading up to Christmas to prepare their hearts for the celebration of Jesus's birth and the doctrine of the incarnation. And there are a couple ways that we do this, specifically here at Emmanuel. First, I mean, we do a dedicated sermon series that's set up to move our hearts toward worship in the Christmas season. But second, we build that series out of the themes of the Advent wreath. And we don't have, like, a big formal wreath up here, but we have the candles. And if you've never done that before, this is a tradition that goes back to the 19th century and was originally added to worship services to help kids keep track of how close they were to Christmas on Sunday at church, which I think is pretty amazing. Like, that's. To me, I'm like, that's reason enough to do it. And the actual original Advent wreaths were actually wagon wheels that they would stick candles on, which I think is. That's. That's just awesome, right? And there's a couple different themes that are assigned to the candles, depending on what faith tradition you come from. But in our tradition, we assign a theme to each candle, which each week, that's what we talk about. And we go through this order, we go through hope, faith, joy, love. And then finally, on Christmas Eve, we light the Christ candle. I love that progression because it's a progression of thought that you can follow when someone encounters the Gospel. Like. Like, think about it. We are all affected by the reality of sin, and that can be crushing. And when we first encounter, like, think back to your own Christian, your own testimony, your own story. When we first encounter the gospel invitation. For many of us, the first time we heard it wasn't the time we believed it, but it was this spark of hope. Wow. God. God might actually fix what is broken in my heart and in this world. And as you explored the gospel more and came to know God and to know his character, that hope slowly begins to turn into faith. God will fix what is broken in my heart and in the world. And as you begin to experience the wonderful gospel of our God, the only appropriate response to that is joy. God is fixing what is broken in my heart and in this world. And that's worth celebrating. And as we grow in the gospel and we realize that God's love is so great for us, we can pour out great love to the world and join God in this gospel work. My heart has enough love to join in fixing the world. And all of this is grounded in the person and work of Jesus that began with the incarnation on that night in Bethlehem. I love that. Like, what a what. What a great way to center ourselves on the meaning of the Christmas season in a time that, let's admit it, it's fun, but it's very busy and distracting. Right? And so today we lit, and I use air quotes because we clicked it on, but today we lit the joy candle. Today we're talking about how the Gospel of Jesus changes our hearts. And our main point today is going to be this. The only appropriate response to God's wonderful and fulfilled promises in Jesus is joyful praise.
[00:04:53] Joy is the normal and natural outcome of experiencing the wonderful love of our God. Amen.
[00:05:03] But, guys, I think there's actually a really important distinction of kind that I hope we're going to see in our text today. As we dig through this text, we're going to see that this kind of joyful praise that we associate with Christmas, this isn't like the precious moments and silk robes and harps and wings kind of praise. No, no, no, no. The joyful praise of the Christmas story, of the Nativity narrative.
[00:05:34] The joyful praise that Christmas hopefully will bring to mind and heart for us is really more the kind of desperate and joyful sound shouted out by soldiers on the verge of defeat when the reinforcements show up.
[00:05:49] I love that trope in movies and stories. You know what I'm talking about when you're engaging, whether it's movie or a book, a story of a major battle and everything seems lost and the good guys are falling back and Then suddenly, right at the last second, over the hill, here comes the needed help. You know what I'm talking about. I've been told that I've been using too many Star wars references in my sermons, and I need to make movie references that are more relatable. And I get that. I'm here for you guys. So, in Star Trek First Contact, there's the scene where the Defiant is about to be destroyed by a Borg cube. And that moment when the Lieutenant says, there's a ship coming in, it's the Enterprise, and it flies in and intercepts the kill shot.
[00:06:34] It's so sweet. It's so good you guys didn't catch that one, okay, because this is a trope. This is in a lot of things. If that doesn't connect, that's fine. Think about the Alamo scene in Saving Private Ryan, when all is lost and they're literally getting swarmed and then the air support comes in at the last second and saves them. Or, guys, think about the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the Battle of the Stone table, when Aslan arrives with all the de. Stonified animals and they save the day. Or think about the return of the King in Lord of the Rings, right? Like Gondor calls for aid and Rohan answers. Right? Like this is a trope for a reason. It's a powerful kind of scene to see the heroes bedraggled and at the absolute end of their resources and their hope, only to have the help they need arrive in the absolute nick of time. Like, it's, it's, it's. It's a powerful moment. Like it's those moments that suck you into the story and you get excited with them. Right?
[00:07:41] Beloved, this is what we celebrate at Christmas time.
[00:07:46] God's promise fulfilled the. The wonderful mystery of God interceding for us when all hope seemed lost.
[00:07:58] It's exciting, it's wonderful, and it brings us to joy. Pray with me and we're going to jump into this relatively famous text. Jesus, thank you so much for today. Thank you for the privilege of church, family, God this morning. As we take a few minutes to dig into your word, I pray Jesus, that you would be our discipler. Draw us into this story. Give us some moments of quiet and present. Lord, withdraw the distractions from our heart. Each and every one of us has a million things on our calendar and our schedule and our hearts in the season. For some of us, the Christmas season is really joyful and excited, but busy. For some of us, it's really sorrowful and there's A whole lot of different things that are crowding into our minds even right now, Lord. So we pray that you would bring us the gift of presence, spirit. Draw us into the right now. Help us to engage what you have for us. You are a disciple, Lord, and we need you to do this work. We trust you for it, Jesus, so we pray it in your name. Amen.
[00:09:04] So we're going to be in Luke chapter two today. If you want to go ahead and turn there. If you don't have a Bible with you, we have house Bibles around the room. You can grab one of those. We really believe in the importance of access to God's word here. So if you don't own a physical copy of the Bible, I'd strongly encourage you to just snag a pew Bible and take it home or talk to one of our pastors and we'll give you a nicer one that has larger print. But we're going to be in Luke chapter two, and we're actually going to skip the good part. We're going to start in verse 8. I know what we're picking up after Jesus's birth, and I know that kind of feels like cheating, but you have to let me save that one for Christmas Eve. Okay? That's where that one is. Come back, we'll talk about it then. But Luke chapter two one through seven, right? This is the famous birth narrative. This is the whole no room in the inn and all that. We're picking up the story immediately after that. So let's start in verse 8 and read with me. It says this.
[00:10:00] In the same region, shepherds were staying out in the fields and keeping watch at night over their flock. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terrified.
[00:10:18] So verse 8 represents a shift in scene, what we're experiencing right now in the story. This is happening at the same time as the manger scene, right? Like Mary and Joseph are sitting with their newborn baby over in Bethlehem. But our text picks up in the same region.
[00:10:38] We're zooming out to the surrounding hills outside of Bethlehem. Shepherds, we're out in the fields keeping watch over their flocks at night. Now, I've got a major confession to make right here. I wasn't able to attend Emma's lecture last night. I had child duty. And that's fine. I tried to watch it, but I have four kids, so I didn't. Which means I now have a deep, abiding fear that I'm going to get Some historical detail incorrect right now, and you're all going to know. So here's what I need. Those of you who are at the lecture, Emma included, if I say something wrong, does I need a sign, like a.
[00:11:16] I'll recognize that, I'll redirect and we'll keep going. Sound good? Okay, awesome.
[00:11:21] But seriously, if you didn't get to come to Emma's lecture last night, of the little bits I got, it was just so good. Please go check that out. Online support. The work she's doing is such a blessing to our church family. Such a cool thing. But. Okay, so the shepherds are out in the fields surrounding Jerusalem, which did you talk about how that's part of what we talk about with dating, is where they were keeping the flocks. Okay, yeah, yeah. So the shepherds being in the fields surrounding Jerusalem. See, synced up there.
[00:11:51] This is actually part of what is used by scholars to try and figure out the time of year when Jesus was born. But for what we need to know is this. The shepherds kept their flocks in different areas depending on the time of year. And right now, they're out in the fields around Bethlehem. They're relatively close. You know, it's interesting because we like to romanticize shepherds as modern Christians and that we have a really good reason for that. The New Testament uses the idea of shepherds as a metaphor for church leadership. The word pastor literally means shepherd. Never mind the fact that in the Old Testament, it uses the image of the shepherd to refer to God's relationship with his people. I mean, Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. Right. And even add into that, how many of the heroes of the Bible were shepherds? I mean, you could go through the list. Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Amos. Like a whole lot of important people in the Bible were shepherds. It's easy to see why we romanticize that idea of the old, ancient Jewish shepherd. But first century Jews did quite the opposite. In fact, by the time of the writing of the Gospel of Luke, shepherds in this area were really looked down upon, especially in Jewish culture. In fact, shepherds were so mistrusted that they couldn't be sworn in as witnesses in Jewish legal proceedings. They were considered unreliable witnesses. A common truism of the day that actually made its way into some rabbinic teaching was that shepherds spent so much time away from civilization, they forgot the difference between yours and mine, meaning they stole stuff all the time.
[00:13:32] All this is to say that in the first century, good Jewish men didn't take the job of shepherd, much less night shift shepherd, if they had better options.
[00:13:44] This was not the job you took if you had a different option for a job. So the story has shifted to a group of poor men in need of a job who don't have other options. These are blue collar, hardworking men who were likely looked down upon by their communities. Almost like a weird combination of like truckers and used car salesmen wrapped up into a single package. By the way, no, shame on you if you work in either of those fields. Those are honest jobs. Just the same way shepherding was back then. It was just looked at a certain way through a certain lens in that cultural moment. So it's interesting that the scene moves from the birth of the Messiah to a group of shepherds. But there's also another detail here that's interesting. You see, there were so many sacrifices that took place in the temple in Jerusalem any given year, that there was literally on the map a sort of circle drawn around Jerusalem. And the vast majority of the livestock raised within that region was used primarily for worship in the temple, for sacrifices. And Bethlehem was within that circle. That means that these sheep being raised were almost certainly being raised for temple worship. And depending on the time of year, these could have easily actually been Passover sheep that we're being raised. And so what I'd like for us to do for the next few minutes is I want us to step into some kind of holy imagination right now. I'm going to set up the scene and what I'd like for us to do is to just kind of slowly do our best to work our brains into this story. I think there's so much imagery in this well known story that's really easy to move past because we sing the songs, we hear it read every Christmas. It's really easy to skip over texts like these. And so I want us to do our best to ground ourselves, to slow down, like close your eyes if you need to. Let us draw ourselves into this story. Let's be some poor blue collar night shift shepherds for a few minutes. Sound good?
[00:15:52] So you've got this group of guys with this group of sheep and they are having a very normal and boring night until Gabriel shows up. The text says, an angel of the Lord, and I won't get into the linguistics, but Luke is almost certainly telling us that this is the same angel of the Lord who appeared to Mary and Joseph. He appears to these shepherds and their sheep and the text says the glory of God was present in their field. And the shepherds were terrified. Now, I know we're getting a little granular here on the words, but I actually think this is helpful for us. They were terrified. They were terrified because the glory of God appeared in their presence. Not just the glory of Gabriel, the cool angel, but the glory of God. We talk a big game in our modern expression of faith about the fear of God. We like to think that fearing God has to do with awe and reverence for him. But I gotta be real with you, family.
[00:16:52] To say that the biblical fear of God is about awe and reverence is an expression of arrogance.
[00:16:58] It just is. Yahweh is the king of reality who created the universe from the spark of his own imaginative will.
[00:17:09] If you were to face him, you wouldn't go, wow, it's majestic.
[00:17:15] That's not what would happen. You would be terrified.
[00:17:19] It would crush you. And every biblical narrative we have where someone comes even close to encountering the presence of Yahweh, they don't go, wow.
[00:17:30] They fall on their face in abject terror. Because that's what you do when you face the kind of force that can imagine and create stars, Right? That's not something that you look at with a calm sense of mind.
[00:17:48] This is in. Our text tells us that God's glory appears in this field with their shepherds in the middle of their night shift. Now, this is a very Jewish way of telling us that Gabriel isn't the only one here. Yahweh is present in this encounter. He's so holy and so powerful, he need not speak for himself.
[00:18:12] He has someone speak for him. His angel talks for him. But we know he's there by the presence of his glory, His Shekinah. And in spite of what some megachurch on YouTube would like you to believe, God's glory is not smoke and glitter.
[00:18:30] The scripture describes God's glory in a couple of ways. It's heavy and it's terrifying. That's how the Bible describes God's glory. It weighs something and it's scary.
[00:18:43] God's glory in the scripture always appears as fire and smoke. Go back to God's Covenant in Genesis 15, to the burning bush, to the pillar of wind and lightning at the Red Sea, to the column of fire and smoke at Mount Sinai, to the smoke and blazing cherubim in the throne room. In fact, when John describes the glory of God surrounding Yahweh on his throne in Revelation 6, he says the constant lightning striking in out of the tornado of smoke around God's throne causes rainbows to continually flow out of It.
[00:19:20] That's nuts, right? That's not a precious moment's experience.
[00:19:26] That's terrifying.
[00:19:29] So let's sit in this scene for a moment.
[00:19:34] You're on your night shift.
[00:19:36] It's 3am you keep chugging pebbles over at Hoshua to make sure he stays awake. It's cold and crisp. You're watching the stars. You hear sheep bleat. And suddenly, as you're sitting there, one of the stars gets bigger.
[00:19:56] And then it resolves into this humanoid form. And before you can get the word malach off your lips, you are crushed to the ground by an immeasurable weight.
[00:20:10] And you're flat. And as you're trying to pull yourself up, you look up and this angel is surrounded by pure tornado of fire and lightning that sparks out rainbows of color.
[00:20:23] And as you struggle to your knees, something in the absolute depths of your soul begins to scream into your brain, Unworthy. You can't be here. This will destroy us.
[00:20:37] And all of a sudden, every dirty joke and every dishonest sale shoots into your mind and you understand, for the first time in your life, the words of the prophet Isaiah. Woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips.
[00:20:50] Would you not be a little terrified?
[00:20:53] Two minutes ago, you were imagining your warm bed and the end of a long night. And now you are contemplating the reality of your sin and how this holiness will inevitably eradicate whatever is unholy within you.
[00:21:09] Now, at this moment, you may be thinking, preacher, I thought this week was about joy. You're right.
[00:21:14] Ride this train with me a little longer.
[00:21:17] Let's look how our text continues.
[00:21:20] But the angel said to them, don't be afraid. I don't think that helped. But that's what he says, don't be afraid. For look, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the city of Bethlehem, a savior is born to you who is the Messiah, the Lord. And this will be the sign for you. You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest heaven and peace on earth to the people whom he favors.
[00:21:59] As you're pressing up against this immaterial weight crushing you, you see the figure speak. And even as his commanding voice enters your ear, you realize something. This entire thing, this absolute force of smoke and fire and light, is almost entirely silent.
[00:22:19] And you hear this angel speaking, and yet at the same time, you feel this Small, gentle voice tingle up into your jawbone, into your ear. And you feel the weight and truth of every word. The angel voices.
[00:22:34] And you realize he does not speak except what is spoken to him. And the words coming from him are the words of God themselves.
[00:22:41] And what truth does he burn into your heart in that moment?
[00:22:46] Don't be afraid.
[00:22:48] I have good news for you. I have good news for everyone.
[00:22:52] Rejoice.
[00:22:54] And Gabriel tells these shepherds and their sheep that the long awaited Messiah is here.
[00:23:01] This is good news for all people. And notice that Gabriel, in this quick proclamation, says three things about the newborn baby Jesus.
[00:23:13] He is Savior. He is Messiah. He is Lord.
[00:23:18] He says three things about him in this proclamation. This already breaks the Jewish understanding and expectations of the Messiah. At this point in history, the Messiah was expected to be a military and political leader who would lead Israel to freedom from Rome, like the Maccabees had done a few generations earlier. But Gabriel says this long awaited Messiah is not just an anointed king. That's what Messiah means. Not just an anointed king, but a sav.
[00:23:44] God himself.
[00:23:46] He is Lord.
[00:23:48] And then Gabriel gives them a sign to confirm the proclamation. He says, go look for yourselves.
[00:23:55] This isn't hidden. Go find the newborn baby laying in a manger for a crib.
[00:24:01] God himself is your Savior and your anointed king. And he's sitting over in Bethlehem as a newborn human baby right now.
[00:24:11] What?
[00:24:13] What? Even as your soul burns with the truth of this proclamation, you have to admit to yourself that makes no sense.
[00:24:23] How could God be a human baby? How could God be in Bethlehem if He's right here speaking to you? But then, once again, before you can actually react to this experience, the scene shifts again. And the stars above you begin to move. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of them move and flut and resolve into the form of what are they people? Are they wheels within wheels? Are they a tangle of eyes and wings? You don't know for certain, but you realize this. You are looking upon the army of God.
[00:24:58] Legions and legions of angels pour out of the very heavens and surround you. And you hear a rumbling shout.
[00:25:09] I need you to hear this church. This is not the beautiful symmetry of a choir dividing Handel's Messiah into its various parts, but the gruff and gritty cry of soldiers at arms.
[00:25:22] The same voice that you imagined shouted the battle cry that tumbled the walls of Jericho shouts to you. Now you see, the Jews thought of God's angels as the stars in heaven.
[00:25:34] And then when they visualize, that's how they Considered it the host of the Lord. And they called the stars the heavenly host. His army is the heavenly host that burns the night every night.
[00:25:46] But you, night shift shepherd, have just been confronted with the reality of Yahweh, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of heaven's armies, that he is attended by a power that shakes the earth. You have seen the burning soldiers who terrified the servant of Elisha and blinded the army of their minion raiders. And this army is not silent. It cries out to you.
[00:26:16] Do you Remember the movie 300? Remember that one? Remember the scene where Leonidas is like, spartans, what is your profession? And they just go and like, raise their spears and like, are yelling. Remember that part? That was a trick question. You can't Admit you watch 300. It's rated R, guys. It's a trick. I'm writing that. Craig is writing all that down. All of you nodded.
[00:26:40] But you remember that scene, all these soldiers and it's like super tough and manly, right? Like, that's the kind of choir we're talking about.
[00:26:49] The soldiers of God, the army of the Lord, the heavenly host shouting.
[00:26:56] And what they shout to the shepherds is, glory to God. Peace on earth. Peace to you whom Yahweh favors.
[00:27:06] What a choir. What a song.
[00:27:08] God is doing something new. He shows up in cursed and broken and crushed earth, dominated by death and the curse since Genesis 3, with his army, with his power. And what do they proclaim?
[00:27:23] Not war, but peace.
[00:27:27] Peace to earth. Because Yahweh favors you. He is doing something new. He is fixing what is broken. His promise that is rung through the pages of Scripture and the hearts of men from the very beginning in Eden is finally here.
[00:27:45] God is bringing shalom peace.
[00:27:49] He's bringing it to the hearts of humanity. The very core of the garden is returning to this sin, scorched earth.
[00:28:01] Read on with me. In verse 15, when the angels had left them and returned to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, let's go straight to Bethlehem and see what has happened which the Lord has made known to us. They hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and the baby who was lying in the manger. And after seeing them, they reported the message. They were told about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary was treasuring up all these things in her heart and meditating on them. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had seen and heard which were just as they had been told.
[00:28:39] And just like that, it's over, the song or battle cry or somewhere in the middle stops. The weight lifts off of you.
[00:28:52] The glory and the terror are gone.
[00:28:55] And you were left sitting with your coworkers in a field in the dark.
[00:29:01] And I imagine it probably took a moment for reality to kind of settle back in.
[00:29:06] And all of a sudden you, like, hear the sheep bleeding and you're like, oh, I'm at work right now.
[00:29:13] And I imagine as they kind of looked at each other, one finally spoke up.
[00:29:18] So we have to go see this, right?
[00:29:20] We have to go see this Messiah. We have to go look. I mean, the angel said there would be a sign. A newborn in a manger. We have to go see. And they're off. They work their way through the village, finding other night owls and asking around Bethlehem. It was a small enough town, depending on who you read, maybe 300 or maybe a couple thousand. But regardless, it wouldn't have taken long. A huge amount of searching to figure out who was the one who had a baby and didn't have room for a proper nursery.
[00:29:49] And just like that, tired and exhausted, Mary and Joseph and their family are greeted as they're dealing with their newborn baby by a bunch of night shift shepherds.
[00:30:01] Those of you who have kids and remember the night your beautiful children entered this world, wouldn't it have been great to have a group of night shift workers just come visit you a couple hours later? Hey, let me see that baby.
[00:30:15] But they show up and they're babbling on about what a vision, angel, the glory of God, the Messiah.
[00:30:23] This would have been a scene, right? And the first witnesses, God chose to declare what amazing new thing he was doing in the world through Jesus, were the people absolutely least likely to be believed.
[00:30:37] I mean, Luke tells us these men spoke to Joseph and Mary and their family and whoever else happened to be awake and that they were amazed. Now, listen, I don't know about you, but I've been amazed by stories that I didn't believe, right? Like, if you've ever had a kindergartner come home from school, you know how to be amazed by stories you don't actually believe. Maybe you had a college roommate who got a little too tipsy. You've been amazed by stories you didn't believe. Right.
[00:31:04] We have no idea whether the Bethlehem community believed the shepherds or not, but they very likely did not. But we do know two things.
[00:31:12] Mary took it all in.
[00:31:15] Which, by the way, I guess that really hammers the nail in the coffin on the song, right? Whether or not Mary knew As if her own visit from Gabriel wasn't enough. We can see like, no, yeah, she knew. She knew.
[00:31:29] The truth is, Jesus is triumphant entry into this world to defeat sin and death and the curse.
[00:31:35] It was strange.
[00:31:37] It was upside down. It was nothing like what people expected, but it happened.
[00:31:45] It happened. And an exhausted mother of a newborn baby meditated on the truth of the Lord and Savior and Messiah announced by the very armies of God.
[00:31:56] And she did so while a group of shepherds walked back to work to finish their shift, which I think is the strangest part of the whole story.
[00:32:08] To have that experience, to go through that and to run into town and to see the sign verified and to talk to the mom. And you can almost imagine this moment when they all realize we're standing in some random lady's house who just had a baby. And this has got to be very weird for them, right? You can imagine that moment where the excitement kind of wears off and they come back to reality and go, oh, these people all think we're drunk and crazy. You know, we should probably, we should probably just go back to work. Yeah, you know what, thanks.
[00:32:39] Nice baby. I've actually got to go finish my shift by. And they just walk back to the sheep.
[00:32:46] The text tells us as they walk, they're rejoicing. They're praising God for what they've seen.
[00:32:54] Man, I love that they praised God and they rejoiced because everything that he experienced was true. It was nuts, it was wild. It's not the way anyone would have written the script except Yahweh himself, but it was true. God really was bringing the yes to his age old promise.
[00:33:18] Ever since Genesis 3, curse and death have been the defining reality of God's perfect creation.
[00:33:26] But now the curse would not be the final word on this reality. God had entered into the world to be both savior and Messiah. God favored them.
[00:33:39] Poor blue collar night shift shepherds. God saw them and favored them. And he was bringing shalom to the world and to them.
[00:33:50] Beloved, how can anyone, how can any of us encounter that truth?
[00:33:56] That God is who he says he is, that he keeps his promises, that he has entered into this world to slay death, to bring you and I peace the likes of you and I. How can anyone encounter that truth and respond with anything except joy?
[00:34:13] What a wonderful reality to be favored by God, to be sought out by God, to be saved and cared for by God himself.
[00:34:23] And this, beloved, is the invitation for each of us today. There is rejoicing for you today. No matter your circumstances. There Is joy enough for you? I know many of us in this room struggle with the holidays. This time of year can be just as painful as it is celebratory. You may be thinking of who isn't here. You may struggle with certain family relationships. You may be lonely. There can be any number of of reasons and circumstances that all remind us that no amount of cultural cheer, no present, no party, no decoration, no tradition can overcome the reality of the curse.
[00:35:06] We're still broken. We still need help. We're still desperate. And many of us are just more acutely aware of that in December.
[00:35:17] And if that's you this morning, beloved, take heart.
[00:35:21] God is not content for your suffering, your hurt, your injustice, your sin and your bad decisions to be the final word on you.
[00:35:32] He has promised to fix what sin is broken in this world and in your life.
[00:35:38] And Christ entered into this world as a triumphant king to do exactly that.
[00:35:44] I don't know, even as I say this, that some of you are riding high today. You love Christmas. You love December. This is a great time of year. You are in full, holly, jolly mode and that's great.
[00:35:55] But let me remind you that your God has much more for you today than the treasures of this world.
[00:36:03] The best earth has to offer. The most Christmassy Christmas you can imagine pales in comparison to Christ and his heart for you. Your God is not content for you to find your greatest joys in the fleeting pleasures of a broken and sinful world.
[00:36:22] He has promised to fix what sin has broken in this world and in your life.
[00:36:30] I think one of the most powerful aspects of the Christmas story is found in this uncountable host of God's army and authority announcing Christ's incarnation to night shift shepherd.
[00:36:44] This is why Jesus Gospel work on our behalf is so often called the wondrous mystery.
[00:36:50] Because God doesn't do what we expect.
[00:36:53] What most people saw on that night in Bethlehem, if we're going to be honest, was a young sexually immoral couple who had a baby in unfortunate circumstances and a group of shepherds who got too deep in the wine on their shift.
[00:37:10] And by the way, why would anyone think anything else?
[00:37:14] I mean, Jesus was a poor peasant baby, and yet he is Messiah.
[00:37:22] He is Lord, he is Savior, he is God. He is Yahweh in the flesh, the Lord of hosts, the God of angel armies.
[00:37:34] Jesus. Birth was quiet and mostly unattended.
[00:37:39] But on a cosmic scale, we know the truth.
[00:37:42] That Jesus is the triumphant king. That he may have come to this planet in the most humble way humans could Imagine. But he really entered into reality as a conquering king. His army standing behind him, shouting the praise of his authority, his power and his love. Our King invaded this broken and cursed world. And here, this church, he is victorious.
[00:38:10] He accomplished what he set out to accomplish. He won. You and I. Come on, church Beloved, today let us remember the promise of God is as good as accomplished. The hope you have in Christ, the faith and trust you give to Christ, they find their yes in Jesus.
[00:38:32] Jesus, who is our Savior. Jesus, who is our Messiah. Jesus who is our Lord. Jesus, who enters into our world. Jesus, who rests in a borrowed manger.
[00:38:43] Jesus, who announced himself by way of cosmic army to night shift shepherds.
[00:38:50] Jesus, who has no need of pomp or palaces or hype, but rather seeks out the lowly and ill regarded those who won't even be believed when they proclaim who he is.
[00:39:04] This Jesus is your Lord, your treasure. And he's here.
[00:39:11] He's worth rejoicing. Mandy, if you want to come back up, I'm going to end by just reading us a psalm. We got a little snippet of this earlier in the gathering. This is a psalm that both prophesies the ministry of Jesus, but I think invites us to slow down and consider the reality of the Incarnation.
[00:39:33] It invites us to see that Jesus himself is the gift of Christmas. It's why we give gifts is to remember the Incarnation itself is an amazing gift God gave us.
[00:39:47] So let this be spoken over you. And then I want to invite you guys to just take a few minutes to pray, to remember Christ and to celebrate him.
[00:40:00] This is Psalm 16. It says this.
[00:40:02] Protect me God, for I take refuge in you.
[00:40:07] I said to the Lord, you are my Lord and I have nothing good besides you.
[00:40:12] As for the holy people who are in the land, they are the noble ones. All my delight is in them. The sorrows of those who who take another God for themselves will multiply.
[00:40:22] I will not pour out their drink offerings of blood. I will not speak their name with my lips. For Lord, you are my portion.
[00:40:31] You are the cup of my blessing. You hold my future.
[00:40:35] The boundary lines for me have fallen in pleasant places. Indeed. I have a beautiful inheritance.
[00:40:41] I will bless the Lord who counsels me. Even at night when my thoughts begin to trouble me. I will always let the Lord guide me, because he is my right hand and I will not be shaken.
[00:40:52] Therefore my heart is glad. My whole being rejoices. My body also rests securely, for you will not abandon me to Sheol. You will not allow your faithful one to see decay.
[00:41:04] You reveal the path of life to me.
[00:41:07] In your presence, Lord, is abundant joy.
[00:41:13] In your right hand are eternal pleasures.
[00:41:19] Let it take a minute to remember the Gospel and to rejoice.
