What Child Is This-A Child Of Joy
Genesis 3:1-19 Luke 1:46-55 12-10-2017
We are in part 3 of our series, What Child Is This: We have looked at the Child of promise, the Child of pain, and today we look at a Child of Joy. Christmas is to be about joy, but some see it as a time to argue over Christmas itself. There are the debaters over when Christmas occurred.
The chances are greatly that Jesus was not born on Christmas Day. The Roman pagans use to have a big celebration on December 25th to celebrate the return of the days becoming longer after the start of winter. They worshipped the Sun and now the Sun was gaining the upper hand over the darkness.
By the year 300 when many Romans were becoming Christians, they took that same day but instead of worshipping the Sun in the sky, they celebrated it as the birth of the Son of God. They would have a big worship service called a Mass like the Catholics still do today. This mass was about Christ so it became “Christ Mass and was later shortened to Christmas.
The other argument will be over what does Santa Claus have to do with Christmas. Does anybody know what Santa Claus’ name really was. St. Nick. St. Nicholas was a priest who would collect coins and one night a year would go and drop coins in the windows of the poor to show them God’s love for them.
What he did became so popular that churches would Celebrate St. Nicholas Day on Dec. 6th each year. Children would put out boots by the doors and stockings in the window or by the fire place with hopes that St. Nicholas would visit them. Nicholas gave gifts to show the love of Jesus. He wanted to give back to others, because of what Jesus had done for him.
When the Dutch moved from Europe and established New York City, they brought the tradition of St. Nicholas with them, but in Dutch he was called Cinta Claus. The practice of giving out gifts was popular, but people who didn’t speak Dutch changed the word Cinta for Saint to Santa and hence we get Santa Claus. The two holidays of St. Nicholas Day and The Christ Mass were combined into one and that’s how we got the giving of gifts on Christmas Day.
So you don’t have to argue over what day Jesus was born, or what does Santa Claus have to do with Christmas, or why we give presents on Christmas Day to each other rather than to Jesus since its his birthday?
What makes Christmas Day important is that God intended for it to be a day of joy for people. It’s not the date Jesus came, but the reality of his coming that is significant. You will not understand the joy of Christmas without understanding the love of God for his creation including you. When God created this world, God made everything good. There was no sickness, no death, no pain, no suffering or anything like it. You could hear God coming through the garden and have a conversation with God, and talk directly to God just as you were talking to another person.
When God created the first two people, “Adam and Eve”, he told them, you can have it like this forever, just as long as you choose to obey me by trusting me to know what’s best for you. Things were great until Adam and Eve decided for themselves, they wanted to choose what was best for them. They disobeyed the one commandment that God asked them to keep, and they discovered they had given birth to an evil nature inside of them.
They could not get rid of that nature. They quickly turned against God-by hiding from Him, against each other—by blaming the other person for the problem, and against themselves by feeling ashamed of the way they looked. All of creation was thrown out of whack. There was nothing they could do to get back the perfect world that they had before.
But God gives them a promise, that God would restore the joy that they had lost. He let them know, that one day a woman would bear a child that was going to crush the head of Satan who had robbed them of all that they had lost. Satan has been robbing us with the same tricks as He did Adam and Eve. He’s still telling, us, “if you do this, you will know what real joy is.” There is always pain behind his offer of joy.
But God loved us enough to send Jesus Christ into the world to let us know what Joy is. Although it took centuries for it to happen, God waited until the time was right, and God took on flesh in order to intersect the life of a poor young girl by the name of Mary.
An angel had come to Mary to let her know that she had been chosen to give birth to a child who would become the savior of the world. The child would be the Son of God who would take away the sins of the world. This was the child of promise. This was the child of pain. This would be the child of joy.
In Luke chapter two, Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth. She is tired, confused, and worn out. Nobody has believed that she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Her marriage to her fiancé now has a dark cloud over it. Her relationship with her family is rocky. Elizabeth has had a miracle of her own, in that she is an elderly woman who has gotten pregnant for the first time in her life.
In this passage, Mary has made the journey to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is also expecting a very special baby, who will be born and become John The Baptist. When Mary arrives at her cousin’s house and speaks to Elizabeth, the baby, John the Baptist in Elizabeth's womb leaps for joy.
I want us to see that we can sense the presence of God even before we are born. A child in the womb has a connection to God’s plans and purposes just as we do. That’s why it is so important for us to recognize and admit, that all lives matter even those in the womb.
Elizabeth responds by telling Mary that she is blessed because she has believed the Lord, and that God will do all that He has said He will do to and through her life. These are probably the first few words of affirmation that Mary has heard. This child is now becoming a child of joy for her.
All of a sudden it didn’t matter that she is young, unmarried and pregnant, she begins to lift her voice in praise to the Lord. In doing so, she reveals a heart that is in love with the Lord, and also a mind that has been filled with the Old Testament Scriptures.
Mary teaches us that we can have joy in the Lord in spite of our circumstances at the moment, and that God's grace is sufficient even in the most troubled of times. Mary breaks out in her own song of praise, and it has come to be known as the Magnificat. Just think how rich she would be if she had kept the copyright to her song. But she had something more important than the copyright, she had Jesus living inside of her waiting to come out.
Although the NIV translates the verse, my soul glorifies the Lord, the literal translation is “My Soul Celebrates the Lord.” Her joy at Christmas is because she was celebrating the Lord. This is what it is to worship our God. Her song It reminds us today that the birth of Jesus is about far more than gifts, trees, myths like Santa Claus, Rudolph, Frosty, and the Grinch who tried to steal Christmas.
The Joy of Christmas is about our relationship with the Lord and about learning to celebrate His glory and His goodness. Mary gives us some reasons for seeing this child as a child of joy for our lives.
When Eliazbeth told her she was blessed for believing the truth about what God had told her, Mary not only glorified God, she rejoiced in God her savior. So many people will be looking for something to rejoice in this Christmas other than Jesus. What at first looked as though it was going to be something great, is going to end in disaster if not for them, then for someone else.
We find ourselves living in an opiod epidemic, which means there are healthy people today who will not live to see the New Year because they will have overdosed in their method to celebrate Christmas. Some child will lose a mother. Some dad will lose a child. The time has come when many of us may need to visit Walgreen to purchase the drug Narcan to save a life in our own home from someone who is using fentanyl, heroin and other painkillers.
64,000 people overdosed in 2016 all because they looked for joy in the wrong place. Narcan is being sold over the counter because it counters the effects of a person having overdosed and can bring the person back to life. Mary’s depression and discouragement led her to the Lord rather than away from him.
Mary could see that the present is not all there is when it comes to life. Some people had dampened her joy for the Lord when they talked about her being pregnant and not married. They put her down for being just a step or two away from being a prostitute. The laughed at her about being pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Of all the lies she could have told, this had to be one of the biggest.
Yet she hold on to her joy and said, “I know what people are saying about me today, but one day the future generations are going to call me blessed, because the Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is his name.
Some of you are going through some hard times right now. You have people giving you all kinds of advice and saying what they would do if they were you. Hold on to the Jesus that has called you. This life is not all there is. They may see you down and discouraged now, but one day they are going to see you seated in the heavenly places because like Mary, you believed the Lord.
Like Mary, you said, okay Lord, whatever You plan I am willing to do it. Like Mary, things didn’t go as thought it would, but you’re still okay, because of the grace of God in your life. You have the big things covered
Think about it, because you have been saved, you will never go to Hell, you will never stand in judgment, you will be granted access into Heaven, you will experience the presence of the Lord throughout eternity. You are a child of the King right now! I am simply saying that we have abundant reason to rejoice, as did Mary! Can we offer God a round of praise for what we do have.
If you’re thinking, Pastor Rick, I just don’t have anything to praise God for, well remember that Mary is speaking out of a personal relationship with God. She knew what she was talking about. When you’re saved and you know, it will put some rejoicing in your heart! You may not shout, but you will want to!)
Mary knew that she did not deserve all the attention that God had given to her. But the Lord had done it anyways. When she says the Lord has been mindful of the humble state of his servant, she’s saying to Elizabeth. “Look I realize that I am a nobody. But that didn’t keep God from turning His eyes upon me.”
Have you ever looked at somebody holding up a sign, Please help need food, or help a vet out, or help spread the Christmas cheer, and you didn’t mind looking at the person so long as your eyes didn’t meet. There is something about looking into the eyes of another person, that takes the contact between the two of you to another level. Mary understood that when God turned his eyes on her, God wanted to take their relationship to another level.
We miss out on the Joy Jesus has for us at Christmas because we don’t want to take it to a higher level. Going to a higher level means something different for each one of us, because we have different flaws, different sins, different attitudes, and different actions that God wants to deal with us over. Yet God wants to make eye contact with us and we know if we let him, we’re are going to have to make a choice to make a change.
Some of us just keep walking around with our head held down busy with the things of this world to keep from having time to look up for God. Some of us have put on shades to pretend that it is alright and hope that God can’t see us. Yet there are tears of confusion behind those shades. We have ourselves in a predicament and don’t know how to get out. Some of us are admitting, yes Lord, I do have a problem with that and I need your help.
One of the worse things we can do is tell God, “God I got this, I don’t need you.” This is either arrogance in its highest form or pride disguised as my independence from God. Mary said, God knows how to bring down the rulers from their thrones, but God has lifted up the humble.
Not a single one of us knows what tomorrow is going to bring, so how can we tell God, “I Got This” or “I Don’t Need You.” I depend on my heart to beat to stay alive, and yet I had absolutely no control or knowledge of how it even started to beat. If I can’t guarantee my heart will keep on beating, how can I boast of anything else.
You can’t have the joy which comes from Jesus, without first recognizing a need for Jesus. Mary says that God has filled the hungry with good things. Have you ever noticed how some food tastes a whole lot better when you are hungry. I am a breast and wing man when it comes to eating chicken. If I’m not hungry, I will pass over the leg and the breast and just not eat meat that meal. But if I am hungry, that drumstick with a slice of bread can taste so good.
There is verse in the Bible, Psalm 34:8 that says taste and see that the Lord is good. Some of us have not tasted because we are full of other stuff. Some of us tasted and didn’t get too excited, because we were not really hungry for God. All we wanted was an answer to prayer so that we could go about our regular business.
To have the joy that this child was to bring in the world, we have to remain in Christ. Jesus said John 15:7-8 (NIV) 7 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. 8 This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
What is the fruit we get when we remain in Christ. 'The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." This fruit is the fruit of Christ's own character within us. It is his love, joy, peace, and so on, within the Christian. Once we see this, we see that a fruitful life can belong to any child of God regardless of his age or circumstances.
Your fruit reveals itself when you are in pain, when you are angry, and when you don’t get your own way. What is on the inside comes out. Whenever someone lays down their religion to tell somebody off, They laid down what they had. They had religion but they didn’t have Jesus. There’s a huge difference. You are always in charge if all you have is religion. You can’t be in charge in you have Jesus.
Mary didn’t try to tell God what to do. She let God be in control of the events of her life and left the issue of joy up to God. How much do you want to know the joy of Christ this Christmas? How much do you want God to be glorified in you? How much do you want to bless others with your actions? These are the things we should be thinking about over the Christmas season.
Mary realized that God was doing something pretty wonderful things through her life. After all, she was to be the means, by which the God of eternity enters human history. While many in her day ridiculed her and talked about her, she knew that in days to come, others would look back on her obedience and know that she had been blessed by the Lord. Her reward was in the fact that God was to be glorified and that others would be blessed by her actions. Let the Holy Spirit produce fruit in you this Christmas season so that you might know the joy of God.
