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I don’t know whether to apologize or what, but we had this Christmas 4 part wonderful Christmas series planned for us as a church family. And then one Sunday I got the flu and another Sunday I was out of town. And I appreciate Richie filling in for me. He caught a call on Saturday night saying my plane got canceled and was prepared by Sunday morning, so I appreciate him taking that on last Sunday. And so this Christmas, wonderful four week series that we had celebrating advent and all that was involved, kind of took a back seat to life’s events. And and it’s it’s been a little different than what we planned, but it carries with it an idea that I want to bring to our attention this morning. And that is life is messy. Amen. Amen. I knew that that can be done now. I knew I was going to get that, go home and figure out what to do. Okay. I like it when people well, I don’t necessarily like it, but I often hear people say, save the drama for your mama, right? I don’t like drama. Typically, people that understand that life is messy and you take your mess somewhere else, right? We don’t like it when life gets messy. We don’t like failure and we don’t plan to fail. But nonetheless, life is messy, and especially around Christmas time. It seems that often during the holidays, especially when we are more involved outdoors and getting shopping and with family life can sometimes seem like a roller coaster.
And it gets difficult. It gets messy and bad things happen. No one plans for failure in life, but none the less it takes place. The question I think this morning is where? Where do we hang those events of pain and events of messiness within our life? You think within Christmas tradition? I know for me, as a child, my parents were divorced very early on, and so we spent Christmas at four different locations. And Christmas was messy as a kid growing up. No one plans for divorce, but it happens and it makes life messy. No one plans to lose jobs. No one really plans to lose loved ones, though we know it will happen in life when it does gets messy. Failure happens and we try to make sense of it as people. Sometimes we use clever slogans to encourage ourselves or encourage others when when difficult things happen, we say things like, I don’t believe it was a coincidence or everything happens for a reason, or it just wasn’t meant to be, or somehow it’ll all work out in the end, hoping that the messiness will be explained or the chaos will come to order. You know, the beautiful thing about it is I believe it’s part of God’s image placed within you, that within our souls, when complications arise and difficulty is is faced within our lives, we long for an explanation.
We we long for things to be worked out. We we long for the for the chaos to come to order. And God is the same way. God is a God who brings chaos into order. God is a God when things don’t make sense, can intervene within our lives and make things make sense. Jesus, in fact, loves intervening to make life make sense. The thing within us that desires to connect the dots. To get rid of the messiness, to lose the drama for your mama. It’s about God’s nature within us. It’s his image being reflected in our lives. We live life expecting a certain amount of order, and God is one who brings order into our lives. And the first thing that people want to know, when you begin to suggest that God can do such a thing as we, we just ask the question, Can God really do this? I mean, sometimes we think of circumstances within our lives and we look at it. We think, Can God really fix this mess? The Gospels begin to record a story for us in the Christmas story. A lot of times when we think about it, it is a beautiful, simplistic picture of Jesus coming to this world, right? You’ve got your manger scene. Everything’s perfect. These animals are just gathering, all paying attention to Jesus. And everyone’s just worshiping. We sang the Christmas song. Jesus didn’t Cry. You just saw that. That was debunked, right? That there’s no mention of Jesus not crying as a child.
But the Christmas story in our in our minds a lot of times is is beautiful. But when you study it within Scripture, what you begin to understand is Christmas is messy. The story of Jesus is messy, and Luke, when he begins recording the events of this in the scriptures, it says in Luke chapter one and verse one. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Well, Luke says to us as the same thing that we find basic within our own human nature. When something eventful happens within a life, we want the news. We want to know what happens. We we want to record it. We want to get the updates. We’re on Facebook. We we get on Twitter, we turn to headline news. What happened in Newtown. Right. Can we understand the details that took place you think I just went home to bury my grandfather? And something happens every time someone passes away. There’s someone within the family or a loved one who’s chosen to write the obituary and which will go into the newspaper to commemorate the life of the individual who’s just passed. It’s an event. We want to know about it. It impacts lives. And Luke says the same thing in Luke chapter one and verse one.
I can imagine, as he begins to pick up a manuscript and to record this gospel message, his first thoughts to us are, this story is so unbelievable. It’s so powerful, it’s so impacting, it’s so life changing that anyone who found out about it just saw the need to write this down that other people may begin to know. And Luke says likewise in verse two, I began to write this down as well. These things were handed down from us by those who were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. And he says in verse three, with this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus. Now I wonder within my mind. Can you guys stop that? Thanks. I wonder within my mind as as these. Luke began to pen this story. If he thought, as he wrote the Gospel of Luke, how this might impact generation upon generation of people for centuries to come, Or if you just thought about his immediate contacts, maybe those that he cared about and some others who may pick up the manuscript. I wonder if he thought about wars being fought and and lives being changed and lives being wrecked over who this Jesus is, how impactful this story would become for the sake of humanity. He tells us in verse three. I’ve seen all these people record of this event. I myself have gone through this world, and I have spoken with those who are a part of everything that’s taken place.
And in verse three he says, and I, I felt the need as a friend who cares about you, Theophilus, just to write these words so you can understand how significant it was to your life. Theophilus in the book of Luke is an interesting character because no one knows who this individual is. People have often speculated as to who Theophilus could be. If you read the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts, they go together. Luke wrote both of those books in sequence to one another, and both of them are written to Theophilus. And some have wondered if Theophilus was even a real person, because the word Theophilus literally means a friend of God. Luke could have been writing this thought just merely as a person of concern, saying to our world, these events in which I’m about to record within Scripture are so significant to your life that if you have any desire to want to know this Jesus that people feel so important to share as a friend, let me just share these stories with you and I’m bringing it from a place that I’ve I’ve gone where these people have gone, I’ve walked where they’ve walked, I’ve spoken with them as they’ve experienced what’s taken place. And now I’m here to share with you, Theophilus, old friend of God, what God has done.
God is interesting in how he chooses to work within this world. If I were to tell you, God is going to become flesh. Now map out for me what that might look like without reading the story itself. I could come up with a lot of clever thoughts for which I think God should come into this world. After all, he’s reigning on high in on his throne. Emmanuel, God with us, comes to dwell in this world and he obviously will be a king. He obviously will be rich. He obviously will rule everything. Everyone will bow down to him. That’s what kings do. And Luke is writing this story as if he’s saying to us in verse four, so that you may know the certainty of things that you have been taught. Guys, this story is so unbelievable from anything that we’d expect the King of the universe, the King of everything coming to this world. It’s so unbelievable that as a friend, I just want to take the time to share with you how significant and important it is, because every thought that we would have about God dwelling upon high, becoming flesh, and living on this earth is just decimated in what Jesus has actually done. And Luke begins to share the story. He opens in verse five. He starts to tell us the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Zechariah was a priest in the nation of Israel. God hadn’t spoken to Israel for over 400 years.
They they referred to this as the silent years. You ever wonder what happened between your old and New Testament? The book Bible ends the Old Testament. Malachi begins with the book of Matthew, and in between that you have 400 years of nothing. God is silent towards this nation, and all of a sudden, after 400 years of quietness, God now begins to speak, and the people that he chooses blows this nation away. Because in my mind, when God would choose to speak, the person he would choose to would be the most holy individual of this nation. It would be the high priest. It would be the one that everyone respected and all looked up on and and desired to hear from. But why God chooses is Zechariah and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a barren lady. She was unable to have children to her society. She would have been shamed upon because she couldn’t have kids during that time. It was a difficult thing for a lady to endure. Other women would look down upon her. And yet God, in this messy situation, begins to extend his grace. And rather than choose some elaborate and powerful individual within the nation of Israel, he just chooses poor old little, little, insignificant and unimportant. Zechariah and Elizabeth. And as if that story didn’t begin messy enough, he then begins to tell us that what he desires to work through at that point is a 16 year old virgin, or thereabouts, in her early teens.
Mary, out of all the people that God could have chosen, in my mind, I think God should select an individual of of great wealth and power, someone prominent within society that everyone knows. And he picks a little girl. Mary, this young virgin is chosen by God. She’s having a child out of wedlock and in the nation of Israel. It’s shameful. Joseph was betrothed to to her. But they hadn’t been married yet. And Mary, the 16 year old girl, was selected by God. Being made fun of by her own people. And the story of Christmas gets messy as you continue on with. In the Gospels, Matthew and Luke chapter three begin to record the genealogy of Jesus. And as you look at the genealogy of Jesus, you would expect within Jesus’s genealogy. Of course, he picked the best of the best of individuals to come from. And as you read the story of Jesus’s account in the gospels of his ancestry, Jesus came from a background that wouldn’t be the best as we would describe it. Tamar, the first lady that’s mentioned, had children with her father in law of Jesus’s lineage. Rahab, part of Jesus’s lineage, was a prostitute. Ruth wasn’t even a Jew. King David was a murderer and an adulterer. And all of these individuals listed are listed in Jesus’s family tree. You think the story isn’t exactly what I would think God would desire? This story is messy.
This story sometimes looks a lot like my life. Life is messy. As if the story weren’t to end there. Bible tells us that Jesus was born in a manger. I got to tell you, they don’t make ladies like they used to, right? Just kidding. Traveling by donkey or cart or whatever. It was nine months pregnant. Try that today. That ain’t happening, right? They just. They were tough. And it tells us when Jesus came to this world, he wasn’t born in a mansion. He was born in a cave which we call a manger. Of all the places God on the throne would come, why a manger? Animal filth. Everywhere I go in my back yard. After the dog’s been there and I hate walking. Could you imagine the the cave full of animals? The story is is somewhat gross. And then it goes on to tell us that when Jesus is born within this manger, they begin to wrap him in swaddling clothes. We practice this today. Babies born, their legs are all bent. Funky, right? It looks like something. They need to get that fixed. And we got to we wrap them up there. So they’re so used to the compression of the mother’s womb, they just want to be wrapped up and and held tight. We swaddle our children. The interesting thing about the swaddling of clothes, in which Jesus talks about in this passage is that the swaddling isn’t the same swaddling that we do today in the Far East.
When people would go on journeys, it was often likely that an individual would pass away. Journeys were difficult. You can imagine traveling by cart or by donkey, long distance and all the elements. No air conditioning and heat to keep you out. If you were to go through that and endure that for several days, there was a likelihood you could get some illness without any modern medication and pass away. And so what they would do back in the time of Christ is that they would take this strip of cloth, much like the size of an ace bandage today, and they would literally wrap it around their waist as they began to travel, that they had to place to to place the swaddling cloth. And while on the journey of someone passed away, in order to continue the journey and have time to bury their dead when they arrive to their location. If someone passed, they would take a swaddling cloth and wrap the individual like we would swaddle a baby like a mummy from head to toe. Jesus being wrapped in swaddling cloth is saying to us with in Scripture, right after Jesus was born, Mary likely wouldn’t be wearing one. Her belly was a balloon, but Joseph would have taken the swaddling cloth off of his waist and began to wrap his child. Think about the picture of that for just a moment. Jesus lived to die. He came to this earth to give his life for the sins of mankind.
The cross was always a part of God’s plan for Christ, and Joseph wrapped his child in clothing of death. This was so important and significant in the gospel story that when the angels appear to the shepherds in Luke chapter two, it tells us when the angels show up, that the first thing the angels say isn’t go find Jesus. He’s in a cave. Let’s go find Jesus. You wouldn’t believe he’s wrapped in these burial clothes, and he’s also in a cave. Jesus is wrapped for death, and this story is messy. Out of all the things we would expect when you read your Old Testament, you see, prophetically Jesus proclaimed and the details of his life shared with the nation of Israel. I mean, this was like a telegraph pass. This is like Tom Brady passing to any wide receiver. You just turn around and the ball’s right there. Right Jesus in the Old Testament is is explained in such detail that you can’t miss his coming. Right. Everyone should be there worshiping. The Bible tells us that all that showed up on the day that Christ was born are the lowly shepherds proclaiming and praising his name. As if that wasn’t bad enough and an insult to the nation of Israel who were giving God’s truth doesn’t tell us that the Jews showed up, but later the Magi showed up. The funny thing about this is sometimes we think these individuals are kings.
Sometimes we call them wisemen, sometimes we call them magi, but we really don’t know what they were. Bible just gives the indication they were prominent people. And in fact, if they were magi, that might actually mean that they are in the arts of magic. Individuals that weren’t Jewish dabbling in the arts of magic are coming to worship Jesus. They’re involved in astronomy. The Bible gives indication of that because they see the Star of Bethlehem and they they recognize there’s something significant about this. This star isn’t supposed to be in the sky. It’s not supposed to be glowing like this. Interesting. They came from the nation of Babylon, for which Israel had been carried away as captives in the sixth century BC. They were familiar with the the Old Testament, and of all the people in the world that could read the Old Testament and recognize the coming of the Messiah, rather than choosing the Jewish nation, God worked upon the hearts of the Magi to come and worship him. The Bible goes on and tells us that while Jesus was being born and while these individuals were coming to worship Christ and this messy situation, these messy circumstances covered in these swaddling cloths of of death, that not only did they have to worry about the elements being born in Bethlehem in December of all times, could you imagine that dealing with that weather? But there’s also a king coming to kill him.
The story of the king coming to kill Jesus and this messy situation gets so horrific that that an angel appears before Mary and Joseph and tells him, you need to leave. You need to head to Egypt. You need to live as an exile. The Son of Man born king. He’s King of kings, comes to this earth, is a humble servant living in exile. He literally has no place to lay his head. And while Jesus flees in exile, Bible tells us that children are just decimated in Bethlehem. You ever thought about the individuals left behind in this story? The Bible doesn’t give us the details of their lives. Could you imagine being the innkeeper and the one responsible for housing Jesus? The authorities come to your place. You can’t turn him over. Your lives being threatened. Your children being killed before your very eyes. God, knowing this is going to happen, God’s still bringing His son to the world, allowing the hearts of men to still live in that wickedness that they are craving in this king to slaughter innocent children. Can I tell you, just thinking about that and the messiness of life especially as it relates to us of recent news. We can relate to this and seeing the tragic events that happened in Connecticut. It’s the same story with this king. That’s just it’s messy. It’s ugly, it’s gross, it’s disgusting. And what hope is there in this situation? You think about Luke’s story or Matthew as he’s sharing now the thoughts that they would have carried in these moments.
The situation looks hopeless and the situation looks so difficult that even even living in it, you’ve got to be wondering how in the world is God going to use this situation for his glory? This is so messy. The Bible even goes on. The story of the Christmas events ends with this Mary takes her little baby to the temple to thank the Lord for his birth and to offer a sacrifice. A prophet comes up to her and says, oh yeah, Mary, you think it’s dumb, but it’s not. Your own soul is going to be pierced. You ever had to go through something like that where life gets so difficult that you feel like just your inner being is just being ripped apart? Fresh on my mind, because I just finished up a funeral of my grandfather and I remember sitting, talking with everyone and what they were going through and, and surprising to me, the person that was handling the most difficult was my mother. And just talking to her about it. She says, you know, I’ve lost grandparents, and that was difficult, but I’ve never lost someone so close to me, and my soul just hurts. I feel like my life is just being ripped apart. You think about the story of Mary as Luke writes this account, and Mary couldn’t quite understand what God was doing.
God came and spoke to her, but it was 33 years of enduring hardship with Jesus before she finally saw God’s plan being worked out. A young virgin, not married, made fun of in her community. Throughout all of her life and then in the very end, her son being opposed against by her own people and being hung upon a cross, her soul was pierced. And this Christmas story is messy. Why in the world would God give us such a story? You can imagine, Luke when he writes this account. He’s writing to his friend Theophilus, old dear friend, whoever picks this up, you’ve you’ve got to look at the story. This is so unbelievable what’s happening. And if God’s not in it, it is just a mess. And there is no hope for this situation. It is ugly as life gets. Why in the world would this happen? Why would God choose such a story? Being a King of kings reigning upon a throne, God living in heaven, becoming flesh? Why would he pick to live such a life? I can imagine Luke having the opportunity of interviewing people who were there. Bible tells us after Jesus died, John took care of Mary. John and Mary lived in the city of Ephesus. Luke traveled to Ephesus with the Apostle Paul. Luke could have had the opportunity to talk to Mary about these events. Mary, now that you’re this is all behind you. I just want to get a broad picture of everything that took place.
Can you just tell me what was that time like when you knew you knew that you were going to birth Jesus in this world? Mary’s response to Luke happens in Luke chapter one and verse 46. It tells us in those moments that what Mary chose to do was simply worship. There comes times in our lives where we can’t understand exactly the way that God is working. We just know that he is. We don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. We just know that in those moments, he just simply asks us to trust him. Can imagine a 16 year old girl being low in income in life, and the world is just a large place for her. She can’t even begin to fathom all that life’s going to bring her. And then God comes to her before she’s even married and tells her she’s going to have a kid. You can just imagine the weight that’s just on her shoulders. And Luke sitting there with Mary. Mary, what did you do in that situation? The Bible tells us she worshiped. She pauses in those moments and literally sings a song. When you read the book of First Samuel and chapter two, you find out that the song that Mary sing was actually a song from a lady named Hannah. Hannah was a woman who never had a child and desired to have one, and she asked the Lord to bless her life, to give her a child who was Samuel.
God allowed her to become pregnant. She was so overjoyed with that, she began to sing the song of worship of the greatness of God. And if you read the account in first Samuel chapter two, it begins to share the story of a king that God would bring to rule the world before Israel even had a king. Mary, thinking about the beauty of the birth of Samuel to Hannah, begins to reflect that joy in her own life as God has chosen her with a special child. And she says this. My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me. Holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm. He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble. I would sing it for you, but I don’t know how it goes. He has filled the hungry with good things, but he has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors. Mary uses this moment to begin to reflect back on all that God has done, and seeing the course of history being played out because Israel was longing for this Messiah.
Recognizing that the weak of this world, the people who felt their lives were messy, the people who need hope and despair, the people who need to connect with this God and understand how this chaos can come to order. Those people who are searching will be whole and she just worships. Why would God choose such a story? Can I suggest to us, as Mary is discovering in her own life, as she’s beginning to worship God? That God chose such a humble story for us as people to say to us, there isn’t a place so dark and so lonely that God’s grace can’t reach it. God loves the messy, and God can take the difficult of any circumstance and make it make sense. Grace is created for the messy, which is a far different cry than anything that religion would teach us. So we think oftentimes as people, before we can begin our relationship with God, we’ve got to get our lives right and then come to him. But but God created such, this story that this king of king would come to the lowliest of positions of life as low as he could imagine within his mind, as low as we could conceive as people to say to us, no matter the place that you’re in, no matter how dark it may feel, no matter how lonely it may become, no matter how messy life can get, there is no depths for which you can go that God’s grace can’t grab you and pull you out.
God chose a humble story to show us. God isn’t a God who uses the equipped, but he equips the weak to be used. God doesn’t want the capable. In fact, I would say God more often desires to work through the difficult so that the beauty of his glory can be seen. And Micah five two talking about the coming of Christ, it says this but you, O Bethlehem, Ephrathah, you are too little to be among the clans of Judah, for you shall come forth for me, one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from the days of old, from the Ancient of Days. God chose such a messy Christmas story to reveal to us something about the beauty and power of who God is as he works within our lives. I can imagine Luke as he sits in these moments. Mary, how did you even begin to experience this, this wonderful blessing of God in your life? What what did you do? What did you say when you realized this messiness of what life was that God was going to begin to intervene in your life and turn it into a beautiful story? What what did you do? What did you say? The Bible says this.
After Mary heard that she was going to birth Jesus in this world, she says in verse 38, I am the Lord’s servant. May your word be made fulfilled. And the angel left her. Say to us this morning we think about experiencing God in the midst of our messy lives. Or as life becomes messy as we don’t necessarily plan for it. How can we begin to experience God in those circumstances? So the words are often familiar with that of Mary’s God have your way, God. Allow this to become so as your word has proclaimed. In the beauty of the story that Mary is sharing is she’s sharing this story with Luke after the death of Jesus, after her soul has been pierced, when life was all fuzzy, she’s now on the backside seeing God’s plan fulfilled within her life. And Luke is recording to us the most important thoughts that we could carry with us as we see the life of Jesus being played out in this world and within our own hearts. Mary, when life got hard, what did you do? Well, I worshipped. And when you couldn’t understand exactly what God was doing in your life, what was the most beneficial thing for us as people to begin to understand? I simply surrendered myself to who God was. God. I paused in those moments and said, Lord, I don’t understand everything, but this is what you’ve told me, and what I’m saying to you is, God, have your way in me.
I think about relationships with Jesus in this world and how complicated life makes it for us, and relationships with people. How many times we’ve got to be told the same things over and over before we begin to just let go and say to God, God, I don’t understand, but have your way with me. Mary’s encouraging us to have faith. Faith in what could happen in this world. Faith in a God who can bring order out of chaos. You know, real faith, biblical faith is not about moving God. Perfect faith is the faith that moves you to trust in God when you can’t see him moving at all. And what I want to be careful in saying to us this morning is we think about having faith when life is difficult, is that faith shouldn’t be ignorant. I don’t want us to think, walk away and think. Just be ignorant in your faith. Faith makes sense. Let me explain to you how, when we saw the story of the Christmas story being played out for us, we looked at four accounts of Luke and four accounts of Matthew. Beautiful thing about Luke’s story as he shares it as an individual who’s experienced it. He shares it from a personal place to a friend. Many of us in this room, if we hadn’t heard about Jesus from someone we trust, we wouldn’t accept Jesus. You think in foreign countries today, people who grew up under a different religious system that’s oppressing their lives, if we were just to show up, to tell them about Jesus, they may not give any validity to what we’re saying because they don’t know us from anyone else in the world.
Why should they trust us? Their parents raised them right. Trust them. But Luke’s account comes from a friend in which could be trusted. But when you look at the account of Matthew. Matthew begins to explain not just from a trusted friend, but a way that faith makes sense. And when he shares the story of Jesus’s life throughout the entire book, Matthew tells a story about Jesus, and then he goes back to the Old Testament and he shows how Jesus prophetically fulfilled that story. He’s saying to the Jews, Jesus makes sense. Listen prophetically. We have manuscripts of the Old Testament hundreds of years older than Jesus. And Jesus shows up and fulfills hundreds of Old Testament prophecy. All of it. It makes sense. Faith makes sense. There’s nothing else in this world. Nowhere else you could ever look to find something that is so logical that more logical than Christianity. No. No other religion in this world can prophetically proclaim and telegraph to you the events of everything that was going to happen, like Christianity does. Amen. Faith makes sense. But on the same token, faith is also blind. Because while we see God working his hand throughout history, we don’t always understand the way his hand is choosing to work in history.
Faith is trusting in God even when we can’t see him moving. I would say in this situation, as Mary writes this in verse 38, to us as people, she would be in that moment. She would say to us, I have no idea why God chose that family tree. I have no idea why God wanted to be born in a manger. I have no idea why these guys from Babylon came instead of the Jewish people. I have no idea why he chose me and Elizabeth. Out of all the people in Israel, I would have been the last people they picked. I have no idea why this story is working out the way it is, but in that moment, all I knew was God was making it work. And I was saying to him, Lord, I’m just here trusting in you. Faith is logical, but faith can be blind. Do you realize as you think about this Christmas story, apart from God’s involvement, this is a worthless and useless piece of history. None of it makes sense when you consider Luke’s writing. In the beginning, it becomes important to us to recognize what he’s saying as people. I’m going to tell you a story that is so unbelievable that unless God is in this, this, this history is just useless to us. But because God is in this, this story becomes so important for us as people that we begin to see how messy becomes good and how God takes chaos and brings into it order.
Jesus loves messy. God loves the way his glory can be revealed in our messy lives. God loves the way that his grace can just be presented and show forth, and the beauty of who he is radiates in our hearts and our minds because of what he presents, how he brings order out of chaos. Jesus didn’t come for the perfect. Jesus came for those in need and God is working it all to make make sense for us. I love the way you look at the story of the Christmas events, how God now begins to take the story of faith throughout the Old Testament, and he interweaves the story of redemption into the life of Mary. And God is working together, his plan throughout all of history. And you think about now what he does in this room, the gathering of his people and worshiping of the coming of Jesus and the Christmas season here this morning we gather together and God is taking all of us in our lives. And each story that we carry in the way that God has made himself known to us and he’s interweaving within us his story of redemption together. It’s beautiful. The story for us becomes a story of hope like everyone else experiences. And this morning, I could say that all of us, to some degree, need some sort of hope.
Jesus ultimately came to this world. We said to live, to die. He came to offer eternal life, that we may know him intimately from now and into eternity, forever. Forever. We’re created for a relationship. We have that hope. We need hope in our marriages, hope with our kids, hope in our struggles and oppositions, whatever adversity we face. The Bible tells us this Ephesians one and verse 11. The Bible reminds us throughout all of Scripture that what God’s message is about has always been hope. It says Ephesians 111 God works out everything according to his will. Romans 828. All things work together for good to those who love God. And Isaiah 43 and verse 30, even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall, but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. Psalm 23 the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leads me. Second Corinthians 12 nine. My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness. Philippians 413 I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Second Corinthians 517. If anyone is in Christ, he’s a new creation. The old has gone. The new is here. Revelation 21 five Jesus, seated on his throne, said, I am making everything new. Jeremiah 2911 for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Life hands us events that we don’t plan for. Mary had 30 years of opposition before she saw a resurrected son, and realized how much since God was taking out of this chaos and turning into this world of the beautiful order that he desires. Our faith, like Mary’s, will be defined by trusting in Christ when life doesn’t make sense. Faith can be logical, as Matthew shows us. Jesus fulfilled prophecy. But faith also becomes a time in our lives in the midst of adversity, where we just have to cling to the one that we’ve trusted, knowing that he’s promised us to work all things out. Some of us could say this. This could be difficult for me to do. Do you know what I’m going through? Do you know what I’m facing in my life? And I would just say this morning. What better in your life do you have to hope in? You look at Jesus’s track record of everything that he’s done in history and he has redeemed it all. You read the stories of the Old Testament that that didn’t make sense to the lives of the people who were encountering horrific events in their lives, and God intervenes and makes it make sense. And if you believe in the same God of the Christmas story, the same God of the Christmas story is the God you worship today. God is able to turn the messy into beautiful. And Mary’s experience began with a place of worship.
Mary, as we’ve seen all that Luke has recorded, how did you still experience God in the midst of that adversity? She worshiped and she just praised. In those moments, though she didn’t understand, she just wanted to engage him. God didn’t have to work through her, but he was. And she just sang a beautiful song of praise to the Lord. And then she just surrendered her life. God, I may not understand. God, your story doesn’t often make sense to me, but I know that you’re working it out. And, Lord, I just want to trust. I just want to trust. You think about Christmas, and I love Christmas. I don’t necessarily like the stuff that hasn’t to do with nothing to do with Jesus about Christmas, But I love the story of Christmas, because what it gives me the opportunity to do as an individual is when life gets messy for other people, not just myself. It gives me a chance to just come beside them, put my arm around them and say, you are exactly where God wants you. You’re exactly in the place where God can just move in your life in powerful ways, to reveal to you how he can take chaos and bring it to order. God loves placing his story in our messy lives. All of Scripture is about God placing his story and lives that are just a mess, because he knows the beauty of his grace can transform it into a wonderful thing.