Christmas, it’s probably the most celebrated holiday in the world. If you were to stop your average man on the street and ask him about Christmas, I’d be willing to bet that you would hear all of the essential ingredients of the Yule time. The virgin birth, Mary and Josephs trip to Bethlehem, the full inn, the manger in the stable, the shepherds and angels, the wise men. All of those elements would be present, even in the most unchurched person. Our entire society proclaims Christ’s birth whether wittingly or unwittingly. Every time they write Merry Christmas they write the name of Christ. While they are shopping they are listening to the story of Christmas in song and because of that they have the Christmas story down pat.
The story is first told in the Bible in the book of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, and it’s fitting that we should be starting the New Testament during the Advent or Christmas Season, because really what better place to start then the beginning?
The book was written by Matthew who was one of Christ’s 12 Apostles. You may recall that Matthew was a tax collector and Jesus literally called him from the booth where he was collecting taxes, as tax collectors were wont to do. Immediately Matthew had a party and invited all of his grotty friends over to meet Jesus. Now there is an interesting concept.
The Gospel of Matthew, the word Gospel simply means “Good News”, was written primarily for Jewish readers. That’s why more then any of the other Gospels Matthew points his readers back to the Old Testament to show how Jesus fulfilled various prophecies. It was written around 70 AD although some believe it could have been written up to 20 years earlier then that. Why was it written? To offer proof that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah.
And it is here the story of Jesus begins a very familiar story that will be proclaimed in shopping malls and on secular radio stations for the next three weeks.
And because we have become so familiar with the entire story, the emphasis is now on the play rather then the main character. We all remember the play but what are some of the things we forget?
1) In the comfortable warmth of the manger scene We Forget Why God chose To Become A Human.
Ever since we have been little kid’s we’ve been taught to be self sufficient, told to “Learn how to do it yourself.” And that’s a pretty noble goal, that self sufficiency thing. It works well for learning to tie your shoes, doing your homework, eventually earning a living, providing a home and raising a family. After all as nice as it may seem people can’t do everything for you all of your life. And so we learn to “Do it ourselves.”
The one area that this fails in is trying to get to heaven. Throughout history man has tried to be good enough and moral enough to measure up to God. And it just hasn’t happened. No matter how hard we try the words of the prophet Isaiah 64:6 rings true We are all infected and impure with sin. When we proudly display our righteous deeds, we find they are but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall. And our sins, like the wind, sweep us away.
For two thousand years in the history of the Jews God sent his prophets to the people of Israel, and they were ignored in some cases, persecuted in other cases and sometimes just plain killed. And so God decided to take drastic action, after all in His word the Bible it is written in 2 Peter 3:9 (NIV) The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
All through the Old Testament God tried to explain through His prophets and servants the way to Him and yet because we were either unable or unwilling to seek Him God decided to make Himself one of us, Paul writes in Philippians 2:6-7 Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form.
We forget that the child in the manger was none less then Almighty God. That He was the one who created the heavens and the earth, and that the was the one who created each one of us. The Bible says in the book of Colossians 1:16 Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see—kings, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities. Everything has been created through him and for him.
John was one of Jesus best friends and he wrote in the gospel of John 1:1 In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God.
John continues to Write in John 1:14 So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father.
It was for our problems, our sins, our lives, our deaths, our past, our present, our future that Christ left His glory in heaven and came to this earth.
2) Because of the glory of the heavenly host and the glamour of the kings We Forget The Risks That God Took.
There is a big difference between becoming human, (which is what Christ did) and merely assuming a human form. I mean Christ could have simply said the magic words and violas, presto changeo he would have been a thirty year old Galilean Carpenter. Surely that wouldn’t have been too difficult of a task for the creator of the universe. He could have bypassed thirty years of life, and thirty years of trials and tribulations. But he wouldn’t have been one of us, would He? He would never have known what it was like to have been a man. He would never have loved, and never have lost, never have felt heartache, never have felt joy, never failed, and never succeeded, never really knew what being a human really meant. You say Christ never failed, oh really? Does that mean He walked on His first attempt, never misspelled a word, ever, never stumbled never fell? Just asking. And yet He was willing to give up being God, to become a man. God’s choice was to share the full human experience from birth to death.
Luke was a doctor who became a follower of Christ and he wrote the Gospel of Luke and he made this statement about Jesus as a child in Luke 2:52 So Jesus grew both in height and in wisdom, and he was loved by God and by all who knew him. Plainly speaking that means that Jesus grew up. Have you ever stopped and really thought about what Christ went through for us, starting with His birth. Birth must be a horrible experience, sometimes you hear mothers tell about what it was like, 4 days of labour, wouldn’t take any drugs or allow them to use forceps. Think about what the kid goes through. I’m sure that we block birth out of our memory banks. One minute you’re in a nice warm, dark, cosy spot. The next thing you know you’re in this brightly lit, cold noisy room and some stranger is holding you upside down by the ankles and beating you on the bottom, talk about damaging your psyche.
We talk about how wonderful it was to be a kid but that is because we blot out the bad memories. Whenever I think about going to sea I dredge up memories of Dad and I on the Bridge of the Ralli II. The ocean is like a pond not a ripple to mar the surface, the moon is full reflecting back off the mirror like surface of the sea. There is no land in sight, the sky is full of stars and you feel at one with the cosmos. and I remember Dad saying “You know a man would have to be a fool to leave all this.” And he was right, there is something about the sea. But very seldom when I think of the time I spent on the ocean do I think about the times that we spent days on end raging through one storm or another, unable to eat, unable to sleep. You’d gotten over your fear of death the first day, now you’d welcome it, anything to make the seasickness to go away. No I only cherish the good memories of the ocean, just like I only have good memories of childhood.
But there must have been rough times for Christ, hurting times. Times that he fell down the stairs or skinned his knees. Times that he was sick with the measles or mumps. Maybe he got a rough time in school, or a hard time from his brothers and sisters. Imagine growing up with Jesus as an older brother, and your parents always saying, “why can’t you be more like Jesus, He’s perfect” Scary thought isn’t it?
God even took the extra risk of being born far from home in less then ideal conditions, fleeing as a refugee to Egypt and then growing up under the tyranny of an occupying country. We forget how precarious a child’s life can be after all we have hospitals, doctors, immunisations, drugs, antibiotics and child abuse legislation. In the rest of the world children aren’t so lucky, and remember that Jerusalem two thousand years ago was far worse then even third world countries are today. I don’t think that God put a shield around Jesus, instead He had to grow up with the same risks, the same pains and the same passions as each one of us. And don’t think that the only time that Christ was tempted was during His trial in the desert, Paul wrote in the book of Hebrews chapter 4:15 Hebrews 4:15 This High Priest of ours (Jesus) understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same temptations we do, yet he did not sin. I’m sure that Satan was after Him from day one, and God voluntarily took those risks, and He took them for you!
3) Because we are blinded by the halo of the light surrounding the baby in the manger We Forget That He Was Not An Ideal But A Person.
There is always a temptation to think of Christ as an amalagam or mixture of each of us. We see Christ as representing the entire human race. Yet he had his own characteristics, his own face, his own hair, his own beard. People recognized him by his particular way of walking, his particular way of talking, the way he wore his hair, the way he waved or scratched his head.
He was an individual, a person who was in every way as unique and special as either you or I. Often when we run into some kind of opposition someone will say “Don’t take it personally?” And yet what other way is there to take things?
People responded to Christ because of who He was as a person. some no doubt never listened to His words because they were turned off by His Galilean accent, or by the way He dressed, or by the length of His hair, or by some mannerism that He had.
Christ was a person and had to contend with the reactions and prejudices and opinions of His peers, they never viewed him as an ideal, or something abstract. I doubt if on His first day at school if His teacher said, “Class, I would like to introduce Jesus the Christ, Prince of Peace, King of Kings, Son of the Almighty God.” No for all intensive purposes He was Jesus, Joseph the carpenters kid. And at the other end of the manger scene is Calvary, and the stark reality of the crucifixion. Christ’s death on the cross was not a philosophical response to an abstract ideal. I mean you don’t deal with an ideal by abstractly nailing Him to a cross, I doubt whether they said, “Hey, don’t take this personally.” They intended for Him to. You can’t separate the politician from his politics, the executive from his business practises, the preacher from his preaching or Christ from Christianity. Christ didn’t come as an example, nor as an ideal, nor as a pattern. He came as a man, and nobody who ever met him doubted that.
4) Because the Christmas story has an ending, when the wise men returned home, We Forget That It Was Really A Beginning.
The pageant has come to a close, our budding thespians have presented a glowing rendition of the Christmas story, with our eight year old Mary, and baby doll Jesus in the centre, surrounded by pre-teen rag tag shepherds with their heads wrapped in towels, and the traditional three kings wearing their father’s robes and tin foil crowns, and as the lights slowly dim to the strains of “We Three Kings” we deem the Christmas story told and go back to our work day week and wait for the magic of children to bring Christmas alive once again next year.
And we presume that just as the pageant has had a start and a finish that the Christmas story comes to an end as the three mysterious kings ride their camels off into the sunset. But the Christmas story is not the end, it’s just the beginning. Christ grew up, lived as a boy, a teenager, a young man and an adult. He learnt the trade of His father and He went to the Synagogue and learnt the Torah, or the Bible.
After He turned 13 the Rabbis would have felt that He was responsible enough to observe all the mitzvahs, which were the divine commandments or meritorious acts. As He grew He would have read the Talmud which were the books of wisdom written by the Rabbis through the centuries. And in those books He would have learnt things like “Never threaten a child, either punish him or forgive him.” or “A child’s tears move heaven itself” or “Why was man created on the last day, so when pride takes a man it can be said, ’God created the fly before you.’” He would have learnt all these things at the Heder or Hebrew school. Historians tell us that at a time when 90% of the world’s population was illiterate, that every Jewish boy over the age of five was learning to read. And well most of us do our best to struggle though with one language that Jesus was undoubtedly learning in both Hebrew the language of his people, and Greek which was the language of the marketplace. And that had a lot more to do with the fact that Jesus was Jewish then it did with the fact that Jesus was God. Or as one wag wrote “Roses are red, violets are blueish, if it weren’t for Christmas we’d all be Jewish.”
On His first day of school Mary would have included a honey cake in His lunch to remind Him of how sweet learning was and His teacher would have given him a taste of honey and told Him, “The study of God’s word is sweeter.”
The Christmas story is a beginning and it doesn’t end until we see that Christ lived his life as a perfectly righteous Orthodox Jew, who worked hard as a carpenter, and who was preparing for the closing act, which did not take place when the Magi left, but not until 33 years later. The Christmas Story is never complete without the shadow of the cross falling across the manger. And yet even when we view the crucifixion and Christ taking our sins upon Himself, even then that isn’t the end of the story, nor is the resurrection three days later, or Christ returning to heaven forty days after that. A gift given is not complete until it is received. And so the gift that God gave us in the birth of His son, and the gift that Jesus gave us in laying down His life for our sins comes to fruition only when you open your heart to receive that gift. And yet even that isn’t the end for it results in our eternal life, a life without end, without a period, only a comma.
Hope you enjoyed the message. PowerPoint is available for this message and can be downloaded free at www.powerpoint4preaching.com/christmas_messages.html
