Christmas Presence
Following Jesus, part 8
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
We’ve been talking about following Jesus for the past eight weeks or so, examining what a Christ-following life looks like, digging in to the kingdom of heaven – the reality Jesus came to tell us about; because that’s the world He asked us to follow Him into. As we follow Jesus, we will increasingly live in that world. I want to stay on the topic of Jesus today – it’s a great topic, and we’ll be obviously talking about it at least through Christmas! But this morning I want to call your attention to something I said in a sermon a few weeks ago, when I came back after I was out sick that week. I said something like, “Folks, we are in big trouble when we are unable to appreciate the only thing we have been given that we can never lose.”
We are in big trouble when we are unable to appreciate the only thing we have been given that we can never lose. I want to remind of you that today, because it’s the presence of God through Christ that I want to talk to you about. I believe two things are true of you today no matter who you are: 1) there’s nothing you have that you did not receive from God; and 2) there’s nothing you have that you will not one day likely lose, except the presence of God Himself. Is that a scary thing to say? That’s freaky isn’t it? There’s nothing you have that you did not receive from God.
1 Corinthians 4:7 (MSG)
7 For who do you know that really knows you, knows your heart? And even if they did, is there anything they would discover in you that you could take credit for? Isn’t everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God? So what’s the point of all this comparing and competing?
And there’s nothing you have that you will not one day likely lose, except the presence of God Himself.
Luke 21:33 (NASB)
33 "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.
One day you will lose your health. You very well may lose your hearing, your eyesight, even your mind. You will lose more and more loved ones the longer you journey on this earth. You will lose promotions at work, arguments at home, and occasionally peace in your heart. Everything in the world is subject to decay – to falling apart – to coming unglued.
Romans 8:21 (NLT)
21 All creation anticipates the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.
So two things are true of you today no matter who you are: 1) there’s nothing you have that you did not receive from God; and 2) there’s nothing you have that you will not one day likely lose, except the presence of God Himself. That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? It is hard to imagine, but I believe that one day, for those who are following Jesus, the presence of God will be enough.
A few times I have told the story of when a pastor came to call on my grandmother who was dying of cancer in the hospital. The whole family was there, living there for – well, for as many days as it would take for “the moment” to come. Many of you have been there – you know what mean. And in comes pastor Brian one evening, and he leans over gramma’s bed and takes her hand and says, “God bless you, Laura.” She could barely get a breath, but in one powerful burst she said, “He does.”
I have never forgotten that moment. At that point gramma had already lost almost everything. She had lost one of her nine children. Her husband. The home she had lived in for decades. And she would lose her battle with cancer within days – but she had God – and the presence of God was enough. I don’t know about you, but I want to be a person for whom the presence of God is enough.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was a researcher who distinguished herself with her pioneering work on death and dying. She once said that people are like stained glass windows. When the sun is out they are shiny and beautiful, but when the sun goes down they are dark unless light comes from the inside. If you are a stained-glass window, what will you look like when the sun goes down? When the hard times come along in your life, will the presence of God be enough?
Today’s message is called: Christmas Presence
If the presence of God is the only thing we have that we can never lose, then isn’t that what we need to spend our time becoming aware of, and grateful for? If we want the stained-glass windows of our lives to be beautiful regardless of whether the sun is up or down – whether conditions are good or bad – will it not require us to cultivate awareness of, and gratitude for, the presence of God that never changes, no matter what goes on around us?
Since we just finished up with Thanksgiving, it seemed appropriate today to look at three portraits of Christ from three places in scripture that all involve Jesus at mealtime. Meals are much more than occasions to mechanically meet the material needs of our bodies for nourishment. They are times of sharing, times of closeness. Thanksgiving is one of our country’s most spiritual and least materialistic holidays, and it is a holiday almost completely centered on a meal. You want to get to know someone better? Take them out for dinner or coffee. Meals are excuses to be with people, to share with them, to see into their souls.
Food is so central in fact, that it has been said that we can stage our lives according to food. There are seven food stages of the human life and they are as follows:
Seven (Food) Stages Of Mankind
1. Milk
2. Milk, vegetables
3. Milk, ice cream sodas, candy
4. Steak, Coke, French fries, ham and eggs
5. Frogs’ legs, caviar, Crepe Suzettes, Champagne
6. Milk and crackers
7. Milk
Let’s take a look at Jesus on these food-related occasions. The first comes from Luke.
Luke 5:27-32 (NASB)
27 After that He went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth, and He said to him, "Follow Me."
28 And he left everything behind, and got up and began to follow Him.
29 And Levi gave a big reception for Him in his house; and there was a great crowd of tax collectors and other people who were reclining at the table with them.
30 The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at His disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?"
31 And Jesus answered and said to them, "It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick.
32 "I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."
The first thing I think we need to see here is Jesus’ availability to those who need Him. Who is it Jesus has come for? Sick people. People who are at the end of their ropes. Messed up, beat up, broken down, down and out, out in the cold, cold and tired, tired-of-trying-to-seem-like-I’m-better-than-I-am people. In fact, Jesus not only hung around with people like this, he seemed to prefer them. I think there’s something real about someone who has come to the end of himself. Know what I mean?
I have told the story about how I got in trouble in a church once for getting a band together and playing a concert in a bar where “sinful people” were. The more I reflected on that the more I realized that the truth is that I often like “sinners” better than “religious” people. Oftentimes sinners don’t have illusions about how good they are. They are sometimes more in touch with their need for God, or at least for something. There’s a genuineness to them that we are sometimes really lacking in the church. I’m convinced that because of who Jesus was and how he lived his life, any person who claims to know Jesus but then becomes less genuine, less open about their ongoing need for God, more deluded about how good they are – has not really understood Jesus at all. Christians should be the most open people in the world about our brokenness. For so long we have tried to pitch to the world that Jesus is the cure for their brokenness. But that’s not true. Jesus will not cure your brokenness – he’ll help you see it for what it is. To be apart from God is to be broken, and we’re all apart from God in some degree while we’re in this world – wandering through a world that really is not our home, not our ultimate destination. To be apart from God is to experience a kind of homesickness – a deep, deep desire for God we can’t fully articulate but that leaves us wanting something we can never really get. That brokenness is like a deposit God has left in our lives – it’s traces of His Spirit in our hearts that ache to see Him, to know Him more fully. I like to joke about this but there’s an element of truth in the statement that I started Wildwind partly because so many Christians I knew quite frankly gave me the creeps a little bit. And I’m not saying they’re not “real” Christians or whatever. I know God lets really weird people into his family because he let me in. I’m just saying I needed to be part of a community where people could admit they had needs, where they could confess that simply having Christ in our lives has not put permanent smiles on our faces or erased all our pain or put a nice big red bow on every problem in life. The fact is that life sucks sometimes. I know not everybody likes that word and that’s fine, but we’ve all been in places where, like it or not, that’s how we feel – even if we don’t say it. I believe that to be a Christian is fundamentally to say, “Jesus, thank you that you are with me in my brokenness – that I am not alone when when I am at the end of myself.” It’s just not true that because of Jesus things that used to suck don’t suck anymore. What is true is that Jesus offers his presence, his friendship, to people who admit that all the pieces of their lives don’t fit together.
C’mon, you know what I mean, right? Haven’t you felt just completely beyond yourself – that you are out of optimism, out of fixes, beyond cure for whatever your problem is, outside of any circle of protection, running out of hope that things will ever get better than they are. I’m talking here about soul-sickness. Jesus knew the people he was hanging around with were soul-sick, and that’s why he said, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick.” There’s no indication they were physically ill. But what we do know they were was sinners. And it was right here among sinners where Jesus wanted to be. In fact not only did Jesus happen to be with them at that moment, he said people like that are the reason he came in the first place. He said, “I have come to call sinners to repentance,” I have come to ask soul-sick people to turn their lives around and give them something new to live for and to chase after. This picture of Jesus eating with sinners – with people whose lives are just plain old on the wrong track – this shows God’s presence to us when we are too messed up to reach for Him. This shows we don’t have to get our lives together before God will hang out with us, that Jesus will sit with us at the table while we have a smoke and even while we lose control and get drunk – God doesn’t snub us when we make mistakes, when our lives are out of control. God sits down at the table with us – shares our lives – listens to us talk, even when we cuss. He shakes our hands, even when he knows they are hands that may soon slap his face. That’s Jesus for you.
Christmas presence
Matthew 1:23 (MSG)
23 Watch for this—a virgin will get pregnant and bear a son; They will name him Emmanuel (Hebrew for "God is with us").
Next I want us to look at Matthew.
Matthew 14:14-21 (NIV)
14 When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.
15 As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food."
16 Jesus replied, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat."
17 "We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish," they answered.
18 "Bring them here to me," he said.
19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.
20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.
21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.
We just looked at how Jesus is willing, in fact eager, to hang out with broken people. Here we see that not only does Jesus want to hang out with broken people, but he knows what to do with your brokenness. See God has not merely said, “C’mon over here with your hunger. I’d rather you be hungry over next to me than hungry over there by yourself.” God has the ability to fill you. Your lack of resources aren’t a problem for God. For most of us, if we want to eat, the first thing we need to do is determine if there is actually any food around. This is so obvious that it sounds funny to even say it. But for Jesus, all he has to do is see a need, and he is able to muster out of himself whatever resources are required in order to meet that need.
Notice Jesus both healed their sick and fed their bellies. Notice also that Jesus provided for them what they could have provided for themselves. The disciples said, “Send them away so they can go buy some food.” Jesus replied, “They don’t have to take off. Just give them what they need.”
Some say God helps those who help themselves. Not in the Bible. More Biblical is that God helps those who are willing to get close enough to let Him. These people could have bought their own food, but Jesus was willing to muster food out of thin air to keep them close to Him. Remember, Jesus loves hanging out with sinful, broken, needy people. And he has the power to deal with your brokenness.
Christmas presence
Matthew 1:23 (MSG)
23 Watch for this—a virgin will get pregnant and bear a son; They will name him Emmanuel (Hebrew for "God is with us").
Finally, we took communion together last week. Let’s look again at the occasion of that last meal Jesus shared with his friends.
Luke 22:14-20 (MSG)
14 When it was time, he sat down, all the apostles with him,
15 and said, "You’ve no idea how much I have looked forward to eating this Passover meal with you before I enter my time of suffering.
16 It’s the last one I’ll eat until we all eat it together in the kingdom of God."
17 Taking the cup, he blessed it, then said, "Take this and pass it among you.
18 As for me, I’ll not drink wine again until the kingdom of God arrives."
19 Taking bread, he blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, given for you. Eat it in my memory."
When he realized he would no longer be among us physically, Jesus gave us a meal to eat together to remember Him – to celebrate the fact that once upon a time He came to this world and physically shared space with us.
John 1:14 (NLT)
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.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for God to share this world with us. On the one hand, it must have been horrible. Leaving heaven to come here must have been like one of us deciding to go live on the streets of Calcutta for a few decades. He had to be part of our pain, had to experience the deaths of people he loved like Joseph – his step-dad, had to work hard and get bit by mosquitoes and experience hunger and heat and thirst. He had to smell yucky people. And of course He finally had to experience suffering unlike any suffering we can imagine. On the other hand, I think Jesus relished being here – I think He loved it. After all, this is where the people were who He loved to be with. I think He loved it when he was able to bring healing to people who were sick and sight to blind eyes. I know how proud I am and how filled with joy I feel when one of my children opens a Christmas present I bought and really seems to love it – I can’t imagine how Jesus must have felt when he saw the looks on the faces of people he healed. I’ll bet he just never got tired of the rush that would bring. He came here to share life with us. And for 33 years, that’s what he did. And when it came time for Him to lay down His life, He shared one last meal with his disciples – kind of like what they do on death row today – they get one last meal. And at that meal he asked his disciples to remember that He had been here – that He was present in a way that was unlike anything before or since.
Someday you’ll no longer be on this earth, but you still want to be remembered by those who love you, don’t you? So does God. God asks us to remember His presence.
Christmas presence
Matthew 1:23 (MSG)
23 Watch for this—a virgin will get pregnant and bear a son; They will name him Emmanuel (Hebrew for "God is with us").
What I wanted to communicate to you today is that God was, and is, present. He walked this earth and ate with broken, sinful people. He met the needs people had because I believe it brought Him joy. He left this world and before He did he asked us to remember His presence in a ritual, which we still do today.
But God is present to you now. In fact Jesus said he had to leave this earth so that God could send the Holy Spirit – the actual living presence of God that would be able to spring to life in every person who longs to know God. What an incredible blessing – an amazing gift of God – what a great Christmas present! God’s presence is the greatest present ever – the only thing we’ve been given that we will never lose, that will be with us through thick and thin – through all the seasons of our lives.
