Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

Have you opened the only gift you really need?

Introduction: Let's jump right in…

I. Question # 10 (in series) : Have you opened the only gift you really need?

We had the Pastor's Christmas party here, a week ago last Friday, and the gift giving was a great illustration.

We wrestled over gifts in a back and forth exchange where you are allowed to take someone else's gift.. and then, they take someone else's, within 120 second's….

Q: How many men here, at some point had the green cordless drill in your hand? Q: How many, that just raised your hand, already have a cordless drill at home?

Q: How many women wrestled over one of the bath soap gifts?

Q: How many of you already have bath soaps at home?

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Webster; "Present" - Gift something given to show friendship, affection, support..

Gifts, by their very nature tend not to be…entirely practical.

Unless you're ready to buy somebody… new unmentionables…or willing to buy them their favorite toothpaste… many gifts don't really fall into the category of "need"… When we receive "necessities" as gifts, we nod knowingly and grunt about how much we needed them…but our heart doesn't skip with excitement…

At the party, I ended up with this "Programmable Message Clock"… I've seen them in some of your homes and thought how nice it would be to have one…and sure enough…at the end of the night I was the proud owner of what I'd had my "heart set on" for so long…

I knew it would take thought to set it up, so I waited for my daughter to come over…and sure enough when she left.. it was reading out the time and date along with subtle messages like, "Heather is my favorite child"..

Two days later…when the grandchildren came over I proudly displayed the clock on my nightstand for their viewing pleasure. When they left… three hours later…the clock sat strangely quiet…the ticker no longer spelling out the time in the air… After a half hour my wife got the ticker moving again, minus all previous programming…Fifteen minutes later… the clock dove off the night- stand onto the floor, with a crunch…and despite frantic CPR… it has never taken another breath.

Oddly my life went on… I simply turned my eyes 12 inches to the alarm clock already sitting on my nightstand.

Once in a while a gift comes along that really changes our life. Before the gift we are living on one plane…after the gift… our life is measurable changed for the better.

I think all of us here, at one level or another, understand that the whole Christmas present, gift-giving, production… point us back to the ultimate gift…

The origins of us giving gifts, this time of year, are muddy but many point us back to the unprecedented cross country trip of the three wise men to deliver gifts to the newly born Savior of the world. Even more… the focus of our Christmas, gift-giving is that:

John 3:16 “… God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. (NLT)

Little Muslim children aren't getting all excited about next week's celebrations, Jewish children aren't sneaking looks under the Christmas tree this week. Buddhist kids aren't jumping up and down with excitement about brightly wrapped packages …

…Except, of course, those cultures that have borrowed (or hijacked) customs from Christianity without understanding why they are observing them. In Japan… where only two percent of the population are Christians…Gift giving, at Christmas has become a huge celebration with Santa Claus at the center. I read this week where one Japanese store window had a display of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Mickey, and Goofy…."all the American fantasy figures"… helping the Japanese children celebrate the fictional excitement of the season.

We've heard the story of Christmas so often, it tends to loose it's eternal significance..

1) God made man… 2) Man rebelled against God… 3) Man was lost in his sins with no way out… 4) God provided a way for man to be redeemed… 5) God, Himself, came to this earth incarnated in human form… 6) God incarnate (Jesus) took all mankind sins on himself… 7) He paid the ultimate penalty of death for all our sins… 8) He then defeated sin, satan, and death and rose back to life… 9) He now offers each of us forgiveness of sins and eternal life

There is no gift on this earth… no unlimited combination of a million different presents, in this lifetime, that can equal one hour of forgiveness and eternal life.

Advertisers are working overtime to convince you there is something on a shelf, somewhere in this town, that will bring ultimate fulfillment into your life. If you've lived twenty years you, might, still believe that… If you've lived forty years you suspect that it's not quite true. If you've lived seventy years you know that it's a lie!

There is very little, in this life, that you couldn't ultimately do without… and there is only one thing in this life that will transfer on to the next life!

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(Point 2)

Several important Christmas truths…

1) The "real" Christmas was the first Christmas!

2) All following Christmases are memorial celebrations of the first!

3) On the first Christmas, God confronted the world with the only gift everyone really needs!

4) Christmas is about the gift no one seeks, but everyone needs!

5) Once this gift is offered and understood…finding it becomes the most important search in the world.

6) Once this gift is received it does not sit on a shelf but grows into the most important "possession" in ones life…

7) This gift is really several gifts within a gift… Opening the outer gift un-wraps the next and the next… each one expanding the original gift until it becomes the biggest thing in this life….(and the next life)!

Obviously; the ultimate gift is Jesus himself, sent to this world to save mankind from their sins. Unfortunately many accept that Jesus came to this earth as the Savior of the world without every actually opening the gift of eternal life that he brought with him.

Jesus coming to this world…while it was a gift from God to mankind…is not really a personal gift to you. His coming provided for the gift that is being offered to you.

Jesus came as a gift for all mankind but not without some conditions…

John 3:36 …anyone who believes in God’s Son has eternal life. (that sound simple and all encompassing) …Anyone who doesn’t obey the Son will never experience eternal life but remains under God’s angry judgment.”

John 5:24 “I tell you the truth, those who listen to my message and believe in God who sent me have eternal life. They will never be condemned for their sins, but they have already passed from death into life.

The issue here is not just accepting Jesus as God's gift to the world…but in internalizing the Gift of Jesus into whatever God intended His gift to accomplish inside of us.

That's where I'm saying that un-wrapping the Gift of Jesus is actually unwrapping gifts within gifts that make the gift swell bigger and bigger…

Let me illustrate what I'm saying: I have here a wrapped present we'll call; Jesus gift of eternal life. We already saw that this gift is available to anyone who "believes in God's Son…. I don't have to convince most of you that that has to be more than a mental belief.

We all know people who acknowledge that Jesus is God's Son…but that head knowledge has never changed their heart. Belief that changes the heart as well as the head starts with:

Luke 5:32 I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners and need to repent.”

Acts 3:19 Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out

That's our part… Then God begins to open the gift of salvation and eternal life

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(Take out second box insert) Our repentance brings, to us, a secondary gift of God's grace: It is part of the gift of eternal life, but it's the first thing you receive right now:

Forgiveness!

One minute before I die…it's going to be terribly unimportant to me if I ever owned a "programmable message clock". What's going to be overwhelmingly important to me is whether or not I have received God's forgiveness for my many sins.

Jesus says…as his gift to you… you can go from hopelessly offending God, stained by your many sins... to experiencing the gift of complete forgiveness!

Psalm 103: 12 He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.

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There are two sides to this part of the gift… Not only does he wipe the sin out… he expunges your record so completely…it like you never committed the sin to start with!

What does the Bible call that part of God's gift?

Justified!

Ephesians 1:4 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us, in Christ, to be holy and without fault in his eyes. (NLT) … that's a gift…

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Let me add another side to this gem. When you are a rebellious sinner you are, in fact, an enemy to God… As a gift to you; God wants to move each of us from His enemy clear across the spectrum of relationships to _____________________?

John 15:15 I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn’t confide in his slaves. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me. (NLT)

The Bible calls this move from God's enemy to God's friend ___________________?

Reconciled!

As long as we're on the subject of which gifts you most need in this life…which things you really can't end this life without… let's dig back in to this box called "eternal life"…

If God forgave your sins and expunged your past record…but did nothing to change you…you would be condemned to go on sinning over and over…doing the very things He already forgave you for…right?

In order for the gift to be truly eternal, starting right now, there needs to be some part of the gift that will change you from a sinful person to a "righteous" person…Does anybody know if that is part of the gift that Jesus provided?

What might Jesus' gift of Grace be called that moves us from being spiritually dead to vitally alive? …. like this……

2 Corinthians 5:17 … anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! (NLT)

If we used to be slaves to sin, acting like our father, the evil one, and now we begin to increasing exhibit righteous actions more and more like our Savior, Jesus Christ… is there a name, in the Bible, for that transformation? ________________________

Regeneration!

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Let me dig one more gift out of here… We could lift, at least, three more big gifts out of here and within all these big gifts would be scores of smaller gifts…

But the last I want to point out to you today is:

Sanctification!

That process whereby God will continue the growth process in you… right up until the day you die… then continue to use your transformed life throughout all of eternity… as you finally begin to figure out what your time on earth was, really, all about.

1 Thessalonians 5:23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at (until) the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (NIV)