Welcome once again on this Christmas morning 2003. Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 1 as we look at what this day is all about! I pray that you have had and will continue to have a blessed Christmas with family and friends. I know from experience that Christmas mornings can be hectic, but don’t let that draw your attention away from what this day is all about. This morning we are going to be looking at the birth of Jesus, the reason for the season! Today, many people have many ideas what Christmas time is about and many times their beliefs are not based in reality.
My oldest son, Joe, when he was in Sunday School, when he was very young, wrote these words regarding the meaning of Christmas. He said:
“Christmas means to me that the Lord Jesus, our Savior, is born. I’m so thankful for that, and my grandma & grandpa love the Lord. I also love the Lord for giving me my mom & dad. They are special people. He was born on Christmas. He was born so He could preach & die for our sins. I thank Him for that. Also I like getting presents, but that isn’t the true meaning of Christmas. I play with my cousins, uncles, brother, & friends. It is the best time of year to me, because He is born. I really like Christmas & I try to be cherry & obedient, but sometimes I’m not. I love Christmas.”
Out of the mouth of babes he spoke forth the meaning of Christmas. This young child had a better grasp of Christmas then many adults do! Let me show you what I mean:
A television interviewer was walking [the] streets of Tokyo at Christmas time. Much as in America, Christmas shopping is a big commercial success in Japan. The interviewer stopped one young woman on the sidewalk, and asked, “What is the meaning of Christmas?”
Laughing, she responded, “I don’t know. Is that the day that Jesus died?”
There was some truth in her answer.
- Donald Deffner, Seasonal Illustrations, San Jose: Resource, 1992, p. 16
I truly believe, as hard as this is for me to admit, that she hit the nail on the head! On the Friday after Thanksgiving the Walmart stores across America took in over 1 Billion dollars! Not only that, but if you include all the large retail stores across America, the total intake for that one day of shopping was over 5 billion dollars! Now, please, if you went shopping on that Friday, it is not wrong, it is not evil, unless you beat someone up to get the toy you wanted! Gifts are not wrong, as some believe. The problem comes when we lose the perspective of what this day is all about, what it is to represent to us.
We are also taking Christ out of Christmas. In Government buildings, they are not allowed to display nativity scenes because of the fallacy of separation of Church and State. In Public Schools it is not longer Christmas break but winter break or whatever. They can no longer sing songs about Jesus, the meaning for the season at school concerts during this time of year. And yet, look at all the people that celebrate Christmas, the only problem is they have taken Christ out, and thus, it is a meaningless, materialistic day without Him!
With that said, let’s begin reading in Matthew chapter 1, starting in verse 18 and see what the Lord has for us this glorious day!
In The Gospel According To Matthew, Matthew is presenting Jesus as the King of the Jews, the fulfillment of what the Old Testament prophets spoke of the Messiah! And in just these eight verses, Matthew gives us a lot of information regarding who Jesus is and what He was to do. The Holy Spirit supernaturally planted the seed of God into the womb of a godly woman named Mary, just a teenager at this point in her life. Mary was a virgin; she never had sexual relations with any man when the Holy Spirit implanted the seed of God in her womb.
Mary was betrothed to a godly man named Joseph. During this time the man would prepare a house, usually next to his fathers, for his wife. It could take up to a year to complete and unexpectedly the groom would come with the wedding party to take his wife home and the marriage was then consummated. Up to this point, they were considered married, during the betrothal period, and you would have to get a certificate of divorce if you wanted to separate, but the ceremony and consummation of the marriage did not take place till later, after the home was built and the groom came for his bride.
The problem for Joseph was huge. Mary was pregnant and not by him! That was of course bad, but it got worse if you could imagine, for Mary could have been put to death for having sex outside of marriage! But Joseph must have loved her for he was going to put her away, hide her until things settled down, until this was over. While he was thinking about all that had to be done, an angel of the Lord appeared to him and told Joseph to take Mary as his wife because this child that has been conceived in her womb is of the Holy Spirit, He planted the Seed of God in her and this male child, whose name will be Jesus, will save the world from their sins! Interestingly enough, the name Jesus, Joshua in the Hebrew, means the salvation of YAHWEH. And Joseph did exactly what he was told; he got married but did not have sexual relations with his wife, Mary, until after their Son was born, until Jesus was born and then they enjoyed a healthy and normal marriage relationship, having sons and daughters born to them besides Jesus.
Now many Jewish children were called Joshua or Jesus in the Greek. In fact it was the desire of the Jewish women to bring forth this child but it was now going to be Mary and Joseph who would be blessed with this honor. But who is this child that has been brought forth by the power of the Holy Spirit? We are told that He will be called Immanuel, which means God with us! They didn’t call Him Immanuel, His name is Jesus, but Immanuel shows us His title, His deity and how God became flesh and dwelt among us! Notice it is not “a God” but “God with us!”
Now this is a difficult concept for many to believe, that God actually entered into a human body of flesh. The comic strip by Johnny Hart called B. C. even pokes fun at people that have a hard time believing that God has done this, those who find it difficult to understand this. In this comic strip the man with a wooden leg is sitting under a tree and he is writing down on a tablet the following:
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT SINCE THE “FALL”
- WITHOUT EVEN THINKING IT ODD –
THAT MAN HAS HAD NO TROUBLE AT ALL
BELIEVING THAT HE CAN BE GOD.
HOW HE WOULD DO THIS I CANNOT CONCEIVE,
THO, HE CERTAINLY THINKS THAT HE CAN
- AND YET, HE CANNOT BRING HIMSELF TO BELIEVE,
THAT GOD CAN BECOME . . . A MAN.
- Johnny Hart, B. C., 1997
Many, many people reject this idea of God becoming a man, dwelling among us to pay in full the penalty for our sins on the cross of Calvary. And yet, look at the bizarre things that people do believe, supposedly intelligent people. The Guru who was up in Oregon got many people to sell all they had, give to him their money and possessions because they were evil, and they lived on his farm in poverty while he rode around in gold Rolls Royce’s because he could handle possessions and they couldn’t! Some people believe that we are god, that god is in everything. Shirley McLain believes in this and wrote a book Out on a Limb and had a movie about it. She now has written another book Out on a Leash which are reflections of what her dog taught her, he even wrote one of the chapters of that book! Now we laugh at that, but when she was interviewed on television they thought nothing of her dog writing a chapter of her book! The thing is, we are not gods, the problem comes when we think we are and all the evil that comes forth as we try to obtain all that we deserve, since we are god! Then there was the Heaven’s Gate cult that thought Jesus was hiding behind the Hale – bop comet in a space ship and to get to him they all committed suicide! Now we would laugh if it wasn’t so tragic. These were highly educated people that did these things and yet, when the Bible tells us God became flesh and dwelt among us they laugh and call us uneducated, simplistic!
Now if I had nothing to substantiate what I believe then it truly would be my words against theirs, my faith against theirs, but there is a big difference between what I believe and what they believe, I have proof! You see, there are over 300 prophecies of the first coming of Jesus Christ in the Bible!
If the Jewish religious leaders could have proved that Jesus was not whom He claimed to be, they would have exposed Him as a fraud, but they couldn’t and thus, they claimed that the miracles that He was doing were of the Devil and not of God. The thing is, they couldn’t prove that He wasn’t the Messiah because the Old Testament Scriptures proved that He was and is! Jesus said in John 5:39-40 to the Jewish religious leaders, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.”
We too have the Scriptures before us with all the prophecies that have come to pass in just one man, in Jesus. And folks, like it or not, it is beyond any mathematical possibility for all those prophecies of Jesus to come to pass. I know that is hard for some to believe for they see men like Nostradamus and other psychics, but folks, they were wrong most of the time and their prophetic statements were vague at best. Let me show you what I mean:
A study of prophecies made by psychics in 1975 and observed until 1981 showed that of the seventy-two predictions, only six were fulfilled in any way. Two of these were vague and two others were hardly surprising – the United States and Russia would remain leading powers and there would be no world wars. The People’s Almanac (1976) did a study of the predictions of twenty-five top psychics. The results: of the total seventy-two predictions, sixty-six (92 percent) were totally wrong. . . An accuracy rate around 8 percent could easily be explained by chance and general knowledge of circumstances. In 1993 the psychics missed every major unexpected news story, including Michael Jordan’s retirement, the Midwest flooding, and the Israel-PLO peace treaty. Among their false prophecies were the prediction that the Queen of England would become a nun, and that Kathy Lee Gifford would replace Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show.”
- Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict, pp. 194-195
But what about the Bible and the predictions of Jesus, are they also vague and could fit any man in history? The answer is simple, not at all! The many prophecies of the Messiah were beyond any human control, Jesus could not manipulate them after He was born and grew up. Also, these prophecies were date sensitive and now, if the Messiah hadn’t come in that first century, He could never come! But Jesus did come and He fulfilled all that the prophets spoke of down to the tiniest detail! In fact, Peter Stoner in Science Speaks shows to us the probability of just eight of the over 300 prophecies regarding the first coming of Jesus coming to pass. He tells us:
We find that the chance that any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is 1 in 1017 [(10 to the 17th power). That would be 1 in 100,000,000, 000,000,000 (17 zeros after the one). In order to help us comprehend this staggering probability, Stoner illustrates it by supposing that] we take 1017 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote them according to their own wisdom.
Now these prophecies were either given by inspiration of God or the prophets just wrote them as they thought they should be. In such a case the prophets had just one chance in 1017 of having them come true in any man, but they all came true in Christ. This means that the fulfillment of these eight prophecies alone proves that God inspired the writing of those prophecies to a definiteness which lacks only one chance in 1017 of being absolute. (Stoner, SS, 100-107).
- Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict, pp. 193-194
You see, it was not just random chance happenings but God told us what would take place before it happened and then it came to pass to the exact detail. Let me show you what I mean by looking at the birth place of Jesus. In Micah 5:2 we are told, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Though you are little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of you shall come forth to Me The One to be Ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth are from of old, From everlasting.”
First of all there were two Bethlehem’s; one was located in Zebulun and the other in Judah. God told us it was in Bethlehem of Ephrathah which puts this Bethlehem in Judah, the ancient name for this city! God is very clear; this is not some veiled prophecy!
Not only that, but that phrase, “whose goings forth are form of old, From everlasting.” speaks of being from beyond the vanishing point. Why is that important to us? Because it speaks of the eternal existence of God, that Jesus always existed. Jesus was from beyond the vanishing point, that no matter how far back you go, Jesus was there. Then, when God, when Jesus became flesh and blood, He stepped into the time – space domain, He was born in a manger in the town of Bethlehem in Judah just as the Scriptures tell us! Chance happening? I don’t think so!
But why did God have to do that? Why did He have to become flesh and dwell among us? That is a great question and I think this story illustrates it for us beautifully. We are told:
One raw winter night a man heard an irregular thumping sound against the kitchen storm door. He went to a window and watched as tiny, shivering sparrows, attracted to the evident warmth inside, beat in vain against the glass.
Touched, the farmer bundled up and trudged through fresh snow to open the barn for the struggling birds. He turned on the lights, tossed some hay in a corner, and sprinkled a trail of saltine crackers to direct them to the barn. But the sparrows, which had scattered in all directions when he emerged from the house, still hid in the darkness, afraid of him.
He tried various tactics: circling behind the birds to drive them toward the barn, tossing cracker crumbs in the air toward them, retreating to his house to see if they’d flutter into the barn on their own. Nothing worked, he, a huge alien creature, had terrified them; the birds could not understand that he actually desired to help.
He withdrew to his house and watched the doomed sparrows through a window. As he stared, a thought hit him like lightning from a clear blue sky: If only I could become a bird – one of them – just for a moment. Then I wouldn’t frighten them so. I could show them the way to warmth and safety. At the same moment, another thought dawned on him. He had grasped the whole principle of the Incarnation.
A man’s becoming a bird is nothing compared to God’s becoming a man. The concept of a sovereign being as big as the universe He created, confining Himself to a human body was – and is – too much for some people to believe.
- Paul Harvey
What a beautiful picture of what God has done for us, became flesh, dwelt among us. You see, man was lost in his sins, running to and fro, aimlessly going through life, and many times crashing into things just looking for safety. It is as Isaiah tells us, “All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way. . . .” Isaiah 53:6a-b. So God stepped in and He sent us prophet after prophet to lead us back to Him, to show us who the true and living God is and that we need to believe in Him by faith, not by works. But man refused to listen to the prophets of God that He had sent and they rebelled against Him, killing many of His prophets and man continued to go astray! Then, at God’s appointed time, He sent us His Son, He sent to us Jesus, God Incarnate to point us back to God and do you know the way? If you don’t listen carefully for Jesus tells us, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6.
Jesus is THE WAY, He is THE TRUTH, and he is THE LIFE and if you want to enter into heaven, it is only going to happen through Him, you can’t get to the Father except through Him. Why is that? Because our sins have separated us from God as Isaiah tells us, “Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy, That it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear.” Isaiah 59:1-2. That is the problem but God has given to us a great and glorious gift, His Son for as Paul tells us, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” II Corinthians 5:21. And in I Peter 3:18 we are told, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.”
The thing is this, God became flesh, He dwelt among us in that He might bring us back to God! Why are you running? Why are you ignoring Him? Why are you remaining out in the cold? Come to Him; receive the free gift He has for you, eternal life! It is as Jesus said to those Jews who were burdened by the Law, trying to enter into the presence of God by good works, and they were miserable, they couldn’t do it and Jesus said, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30.
When you think about how this one man, how Jesus has impacted generations of people in life-changing ways, and yet, there still are so many that refuse to hear His Words to them, see what He has for them, receive Him into their lives as Lord and Savior and it is not because the evidence is not there, it is they suppress the truth to believe what they want, but they are missing out on everlasting life with Jesus and heading for everlasting existence apart from Him! Yes, Jesus came as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world but He is coming again as the Lion from the tribe of Judah to pour out His wrath on a Christ rejecting world. If you doubt that, there are over 500 prophecies regarding His second coming, and if He fulfilled the over 300 prophecies of His first coming down to the tiniest detail, do you really think that He won’t on these regarding His second coming? He will fulfill them, they will come to pass, you can take that to the bank!
Think about this God-man named Jesus for a minute as I read you this poem called: ONE SOLITARY LIFE. It goes like this:
He was born in an obscure village. He worked in a carpentry shop until He was thirty. He then became an itinerant preacher.
He never held an office.
He never had a family or owned a house.
He didn’t go to collage.
He had no credentials but Himself. Nineteen centuries have come and gone. And today He is the central figure of the human race.
All the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that ever sailed; all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that.
- One Solitary Life
Folks, Christmas is not the day that Jesus died, but if it is in your own life, come to Him, for He is not dead, but alive and waiting for you to come to Him. You see, Christmas speaks of His birth, the incarnation, God becoming man and dwelling among us, it shows us God’s love for sinful man. We give so many gifts this time of year, and yet, God has given to us the greatest gift of all, His son to die for us so that we might live. It is as Jesus said, “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.” John 3:16. He is calling to you, He is asking you to receive His free gift for your life, Jesus and as you do, you will be His, and what a awesome gift that would be for you this year, eternal life with Jesus!
If you know the Lord but have lost sight of Him, become stressed out this Christmas as you have been trying to get those perfect gifts for your loved ones, overwhelmed at what you have to do and have done, you need to just return to Him and receive His peace for your life because He wants that relationship with you. You see, there is only one perfect gift and that is Jesus, so don’t stress out, but reach out to Him and enjoy His peace!
We started out this morning looking at what the meaning of Christmas was all about, and I think my son put it very simply and very accurately when he said: “Christmas means to me that the Lord Jesus, our Savior is born. I’m so thankful for that . . .” Never lose sight that Jesus is the reason for the season and may the Lord bless you and your family this Christmas and in the coming New Year! Merry Christmas and remember to keep Christ in Christmas!