THE GIVING HEART OF GOD 3

"Christmas Message"

Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

Its Christmas…Tomorrow is the day most in the western world will celebrate the birth of Jesus. He left heaven and came to this earth to redeem mankind from sin.

Luke 2:13-16 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." 15hen the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about." 16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.

The Greatest Story ever told….. When you think about it…. It’s:

I. The Strangest Story Ever Told

In hundreds of thousands of churches today all across the western world people are trying to get their mind around the concept of God caring so much about his fallen creation that He wrapped all of who he was in the flesh of a human baby and made his entrance into our world… to somehow reverse the sin problem we had gotten ourselves in to.

Many of you heard the story as a child and simply accepted it as true. Some here wrestled with the story much later in life….some still are..

Think about how absurd it sounds: God loves His creation, but those He created rebelled against him. His solution is to supernaturally impregnate a virgin with the seed of a child who once born, into an animal food trough, will be all human and at the same time… all God.

This all human/ all God being would one day take every sin of every human being on himself … provide forgiveness and enable all who believe to live with him eternally….The strangest story ever told!

Today, in Japan, is the eve of Christmas Day. The Japanese people have put up decorations, decorated trees, sent cards, they are singing yuletide songs, Tonight, on Christmas Eve they will exchange presents…Only ½ of 1% of them believe in Christ. 99 ½% of all the people in Japan are Buddhist or Shinto.. not Christian.

Merry Christmas in Japanese is spelled:

メリークリスマス

It’s is pronounced: “Merry Christmas” but oddly the “Christ” part doesn’t make it into their yearly celebrations.

Why?? They’re not going to believe that ridiculous nonsense about God coming to earth in a human body. Buddhist’s (which is a disguised form of atheism) are far too enlightened to buy into a western fable of a God in a manger.

So who is the focal point of Japan’s Christmas celebration.. and Europe.. and much of the US.?

AP-AOL News poll; just released this week: Fully 86 percent of Americans believed in Santa as a child. And despite the multiethnic nature of our country, more than 60 percent of those with children still at home consider Santa important in their holiday celebrations this season.

How in the world does this one get such a high belief rate… able to cross over cultural and even religious lines.

Because this version of Christmas is so much more believable. This one didn’t come from heaven…he lives at the North Pole the most inhospitable and uninhabitable place on the earth. He’s not surrounded by ministering angels…he’s got himself and army of elves who spend all year making toys for all the world’s children. On Christmas Eve he loads enough toys for every child on the earth into the back of a 12’ sleigh. (Into a bag in the back of the sleigh) The sleigh is pulled by a team of flying reindeer.. the lead deer has a nose that glows like a red flashlight. In a few hours time Santa circles the globe landing on roofs….sliding his massive girths up and down chimneys (even houses without fireplaces) eats milk and cookies and is never, ever spotted by even one curious child.

That’s believable to 86% of American children… and why does Santa do it?... Because he cares so much….

This from FoxNews.com on Friday:

One little girl addressed Santa this Christmas season… "Santa, some people are saying they don't believe in you," she told him shyly. "Well, what do you say to them?" "I tell them they haven't met you."

That’s sounds to me like good theology that we can apply to the story of the Savior of the World coming to this earth…

Jesus… some people are saying they don't believe in you," "Well, what do you say to them?"…… "I tell them…… they haven't met you."

II. Meeting the Savior of the World

Let me give you some good theology here on Christmas day….A surprising number of Christians, who believe in Jesus, do not understand this truth.

Our God built this entire universe, and everything in it to house us… the focal point of his creation… He, lavishly, fashioned a most beautiful and intricate world to house that part, the only part, of his creation that he would fashion “in his image” Mankind, with all the gifts of God and the love of God being poured in his direction managed to rebel against his Creator and give his allegiance to sin and satan.

Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

That’s a real problem. God, who is in charge of the universe, gave the dominion (rulership) of the earth to mankind. When mankind transferred their allegiance, from God to satan, the dominion of the earth went with it. We made satan “boss” by passing on to him a gift God had reserved for those made in his image.

From that moment on, mankind, himself is under the dominion of satan and sin. There was nothing Adam or Eve or any who would follow them right up until today could do to control sin since we had given the dominion over all the earth to satan. Every human would like to think that they can control their inner sinfulness. Nobody can!... Mankind gave the control was given away! Mankind couldn’t unlock the sin problem in the world because mankind had given away the key. But…In God’s great cosmic justice system, if the key to man’s sinfulness was to be regained it had to be regained by those who had given it away.

Man had to get the key back…but a mankind was controlled by the one who held the key. What to do?

Don’t try to interpret this as symbolic or mystical… it’s just as strait-forward as it can be. I’ve been showing you, over the last two weeks, that the entire Old Testament is about God getting the pathway ready that he would use to bring his gift into the world. He formed a whole nation of Jews just to bring his Messiah. He set up a whole system of laws and festivals just to get people’s hearts ready to receive his gift. It took 5000 years but finally when everything was ready:

Galatians 4:4 … when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law,

John 1:14-17  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace/gift…16 And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses, but God's grace and God's truth came through Jesus Christ. (NKJV)

The truth here is profound… This was the only possible way to solve our sin problem. All mankind was in bondage to sin, yet the sin problem had to be addressed by mankind. Talk about a “catch-22”..

God had to become man! If he wanted to redeem his creation (that alone is amazing…why did he care so much. Why didn’t he just vaporize us and start over. Why were we, in our fallen state so important to him that he was willing to give everything to redeem us back into right relationship with him?

Only God can answer those questions…and he does:

John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (NIV)

This is what the poor Japanese teenage girl who is right now celebrating her Christmas Eve doesn’t understand. This isn’t some traditional Western story that Christians celebrate because it’s fun… this story is at the very root of our existence.. without it there is no reason to keep on existing.

The Buddhist, the Shinto, the Muslim, in fact all religions are about mankind’s search for God.

Christianity is about God’s search for mankind!

We didn’t go looking for him…He came looking for us! The God of the Bible is our Father, our loving Heavenly Father who heart is so full he can’t wait to pour out his graces/gifts on his children. His coming to earth, as our Savior, is the centerpiece of that love.

James 1:17-18 Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures. (MSG)

Everything God is…is invested into his pursuit of us! If you haven’t accepted his love and grace he is still pursuing you.

But there’s more….

III. Birthing the Savior of the World

Let’s say we all, here, accept that history is “His Story” and all of His Story is about the Heavenly Father’s pursuit of his children.

But…why did he go about it like he did? He could have amid a violent earthquake appeared, fully grown, in the courts of King Herod demanding an audience. If he was going to use the birth method….why not be born to royalty?... that would have removed many of the barriers to his acceptance. That’s not how he chose to go about it…

God chose a peasant girl tucked away in the unknown village a Nazareth. He declares: My divine grace is on this young virgin. She will encounter the same Holy Spirit who hovered over the face of the waters at Creation… He will impregnate her womb with the Son of God. She will, amidst great pain, push the king of the universe out into the light of day. She will breast-feed the Savior of the world. She will one day have her heart torn in two as she watches her son (and God’s son) die on a cross. She will experience mind bending euphoria when she hears the news that her dead son is no longer in the tomb…he’s alive and has been seen walking around Jerusalem.

God’s conversation with Mary is still significant to us today. We’ve been talking about the giving heart of the Heavenly Father. We saw that God calls his Son Jesus his gift (charis) to us, his creation. We looked at other Scripture where God’s just keeps pouring grace in our directly through his Son Jesus…but there is another awesome lesson about God’s grace right here is the story of Jesus birth.

When God approaches Mary he says these words:

 26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored!( gifted/graced) The Lord is with you."

30.. the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor (grace/gift) with God. 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High….

 34"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?" 35 The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

Please don’t try to make Mary into something she isn’t. She’s a frightened peasant girl. She isn’t “highly graced” because of what she is or has done. She is graced because of what God is going to do in her and through her.

God has been pursuing his wayward children for 5000 years pouring his gifts in their direction. Finally when everything is set he focuses all his giving-ness into a minute human embryo, hanging precariously to the wall of Mary’s womb. It becomes her job to nurture that embryo until “God’s grace-in-person” is delivered into the world.

Jesus is the epitome of all of God’s love and gifting. No wonder Mary is “highly graced”. What would it be like to have all of God’s giving nature imbedded inside you? Many look at Mary with awe and wish they could experience a fraction of the grace she experienced.. If only you could have within you the full concentration of all of God’s giftedness in the form of Jesus Christ.

As the New Testament unfolds…it describes that very thing as happening in the lives of each believer. That’s an underlying message of the New Testament…as God incarnated Jesus in Mary’s womb and on out into the world…so he, now, incarnates Jesus into our hearts and through us out into the world.

After the coming of Jesus we don’t read so much about God demanding His life from us…we read about the Father’s desire to birth Christ life in us!

Suddenly Scripture is filled with phrases like our “new life in Christ” and “Christ in us the hope of glory”….

Ephesians 1:4-8 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. 6 So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. 7 He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. 8 He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding (NLT)