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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, Merry Christmas, and may God bless us as we meditate on the words and the deeds that our Lord has given and the things that he has done. Most especially, his birth in Bethlehem for us.
I think one of my favorite passages of the Christmas story is the one we just heard from Luke chapter two, where the angels come to the shepherds. They said, don’t be afraid. Look, we’re bringing to you good news of great joy. And there’s a word in there that is so important. It’s one that’s easy to miss. The word is you. You. The angels say to the shepherds, fear not for behold I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord and this will be a sign for you.
It’s easy for us to think that the things that the Lord has done and accomplished are for them. But it would not be a right celebration of our Lord’s birth if it was not understood that this is for us. Those are the words that make all the difference. I remember one time this, I think I told this story to a few of you this week, it was when I was a baby pastor and I was teaching a Bible class and I mentioned a book that I wanted to read, I hadn’t read, I didn’t have the book, wanted to read it, and a couple of days after Bible class, someone who was in there came into my office and they had the book and they showed it to me and they said, Pastor, look, this is the book you’re talking about.
And I thought that they were giving it to me. They thought that they were showing it to me. So there was this moment where I had my hand on the book and I was saying, oh, thank you, and I was pulling and they were holding on tight. And they said, well, you can borrow it when I’m done reading it if you want, pastor.
Now, here’s the point. They didn’t say, they didn’t say, this is for you. Try it out like this. What if I said to you, I heard that in the bank down the street there’s a million dollars, okay? I heard in the bank down the street there’s a million dollars for you. Now that’s quite a different sentence. Those words for you, this is what the angels are pressing now into the shepherds, that they cannot get away with thinking that this birth, that this miracle of God in our flesh is for someone else, it is for you.
Now here’s part of the problem, is that the solution that the Lord has determined for us. His solution is his incarnation, that he takes upon himself a body and he takes that body to the cross and it’s laid in the grave and it’s up out of the grave and it’s sitting at the Father’s right hand. Now that’s the Lord’s solution, but we have to make sure that the solution matches the problem.
Now I think, I’m going to suggest that there’s two ways that the devil would tempt us away from knowing the birth of Jesus for us. And here’s the first one, is that whatever it is that we think our problem is, it doesn’t require God to have a body to fix it. In other words, we have not properly diagnosed our own sinful condition so that the cross of Jesus, even the birth of Jesus, doesn’t make any sense.
I’m working on an illustration, I’ve got two that I’ve been, you’ll see which one you like best or you can choose neither, but if you could imagine, here’s one. Imagine that you’re sitting in your house and you see what you think is an ant walking across the floor. And so you call your neighbor to come over with his flip-flop and kill the ant. Okay? Your neighbor is a contractor and he comes over and he sees the ant and he traces it back to the hole and he realizes that your whole house is covered with termites. It’s about to collapse. He hustles you out of the house and he brings over a bulldozer to tear down the house.
Now you thought the solution was going to be a flip-flop, and it turns out that the solution is a bulldozer and a building crew. That’s something, I think there’s something like that. Like we think that our problem is that we’re not as nice as we should be, or that we get tired too easy, or something like that. But when God shows up in a body on a cross, we say it must be that I’m worse than I thought I was.
Here’s another example. Imagine you go to a friend, he happens to be a doctor, and you say, hey, could you scratch my shoulder? I have an itch. I just need someone to scratch my shoulder. And he looks at that spot on your shoulder that’s scratching, and he throws you into the car and brings you to the emergency room so that your arm would be amputated.
Now, I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but that’s the idea, is that you think it’s just an itch, but it’s a deeper sickness that requires a much more profound treatment. Well, that is what Christmas at least starts to teach us, that our condition is so bad, is so deep, that our sin is so profound a corruption of soul and body that the solution is much more radical than we would ever expect. We want a couple of baby aspirin, and the Lord has to die on the cross.
Now here’s the, to take another run at this idea, I’ve been thinking a lot lately, you’ve been hearing me preach about this, about how to have any sort of sense of meaning and purpose in life. We have to make sense of what’s going on in the world. We have to live in the midst of a story. We have to know where we’ve come from. We have to have an idea about where we’re going.
And in fact, to live in the story, everyone is living in a story that has four chapters. How did things start? How did things go wrong? How do things get fixed? And where are things going? Now, here’s the quite amazing thing, is that every single one of us has our own story. It might not be consistent. It might not all match up. We might have picked up chapter one from our biology class in school and picked up chapter two from our friends in college and picked up chapter three from going to Christmas Eve services when we were kids, or picked up chapter four from watching the news or whatever.
In other words, they might not be consistent, but all of us have this story that we’re living in. And here’s the difficulty that we have, because we get to Christmas and it’s the very first page of chapter three. This is how the Lord is going to fix things. The virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit and gave birth to a child and called his name Jesus. But if we don’t know what chapter one was or chapter two, it’s kind of confusing.
And in fact, it gets really confusing if someone tells you different chapter one and twos. Could you imagine sitting down to watch the movie Home Alone with friends for the first time and you’ve never seen the movie and you start right at the time when the guys are coming trying to break into the house. You don’t know any of the setup, you don’t know anything that happened; all you see is this kid running around smashing people with paint and doing all these pranks and everything like this. And you say to your friends, what happened? And they tell you, oh, those are his two uncles who are coming to bring him Christmas presents. None of it makes sense, right?
In other words, the whole plot is wrecked if you don’t have the right setup, and so this is for Christmas to make sense. We have to have the right setup and here it is. Chapter 1: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and not only did God create everything but specifically on day six after he was creating all the beasts and creepy things he went and he formed up some mud and created Adam and breathed into him and created Adam in his own likeness and then he put him to sleep and he took the rib and he created Eve and he married the two together and now there’s husband and wife and the Lord said now this is very good.
Here’s humanity, be fruitful and multiply, have dominion over the earth. He planted a garden and put Adam and Eve in the garden to tend it and to work it. In other words, you are created by God. You are the result of God’s thought and conversation. You bear the image of God according to your creation. You are valuable. You are not just an accident. You are not an explosion. You are not a cosmic just showed up. No, the Lord Jesus specifically created each one of you and values you.
But then there’s chapter 2. We heard just the end of it in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve eat from the fruit and bring corruption into their bodies, which is death. They bring corruption into their soul, which is sin, and they now set themselves as the enemies of God. And that is really the whole history of the Old Testament, death and war and bloodshed and violence and selfishness and sin and exploitation and all sorts of corruption. Rather than having dominion and bringing this garden to fruition, humanity has wrecked it and ruined it and run from God in every different way.
Now that’s the problem. And what we expect the solution to be is something like Noah’s flood. I mean, really, the only problem with Noah’s flood is that God missed eight people. That should have been the solution, but that’s not the solution. That is not God’s solution. That he looks on you, and he looks on me, and he looks on your neighbor, and he looks on the person next to you not with anger or vengeance or justice but with love and mercy and pity and he comes down into your flesh and into your humanity so that he can take upon himself your sin and the anger that you deserve from God so that he can have that in your place and instead give you life.
The Lord’s solution is wondrous. It never could never be expected, even though the Lord promised it through the prophets for ages and ages, here’s what I’m gonna do. No one could have ever expected God to be this good and this kind and this gracious and this loving and this willing to suffer and this humble and this meek and this crucified and this dead and this buried and this raised all for you. This is what the Lord has done and this gives you now a very nice chapter four. You know how it’s gonna end? The Lord who has come down to redeem you will come back for you and bring you to himself so that where you are, so that where he is you will be also.
Now, this is the story of the Scripture. There’s a lot of other competing stories. There’s a lot of other options for chapter one and chapter two, even chapter three and chapter four out there. You’ll hear them on the news tonight. You’ll read them in the paper tomorrow. Wherever you look, there’s different chapters, but I to tell you that this story, this creation and fall and redemption and glory of the resurrection, not only is it true but it’s wonderful and it doesn’t, it cannot get any better.
And dear Saints, you are in it. You are in this story. Jesus is your friend and your Savior. And his birth, which tonight we celebrate on the 2000th and 25th anniversary of His birth, His birth is, like the shepherds heard from the angels, it is for you. God be praised. Merry Christmas. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all our minds and hearts can even begin to imagine, strengthen and keep you in the true faith unto life everlasting. Amen.
