Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Elenor Cicok had a three year old daughter who developed an emotional block and ceased to talk.

She never said a word, not even mama when she wanted her mother.

It was a terrible ordeal as she went month after month in silence.

Her mother taught her about God and prayer, and read to her about Jesus.

Her favorite picture in the book was of Mary holding baby Jesus.

After two years of this, one day just before Christmas she was walking past the church with Vicki, and she took her in.

There was the Virgin Mary and the child.

The girl suddenly broke her silence and said, "Look!

Baby Jesus!"

Babies have a way of opening up voices that otherwise are silent.

Go walking through a mall with a baby and total strangers will come up to you and talk about the baby.

They would never dream of approaching you without the baby present.

Babies break down walls like nothing else.

Babies may not talk, but they motivate more talk than most anyone.

The Christmas baby is no exception.

He has probably stimulated more words than any thousand babies ever born.

Not all talk of babies is positive.

Someone asked little Tommy, " how do you like your new baby sister?" "She is allright," he said, "but there's a lot of things we needed more."

There was nothing man needed more on that first Christmas, however, than the baby Jesus.

He was the first born so he did not stimulate any of the jealousy problems that often come with a later child.

Johnny said,"sure there are no favorites in this family!

If I bite my fingernails I get a rap on the knuckles, but if baby eats her whole foot they think its cute."

Jesus did not have this sort of thing, but he did have to contend with Herod who had no room in his heart for babies announced as the King of Israel.

He so despised this infant king that he killed all the infants in Bethlehem that could have been him.

He marred that first Christmas with tragedy because of his anti-baby attitude.

We do have to give Herod credit for one thing, he knew the potential of a baby.

He was not so naive as to think a baby is nothing to worry about.

He recognized that a baby can be a serious threat because babies represent the future, a future that will be changed because of them.

Herod, by his hostility to a baby, bore witness to the reality of baby power.

When God wants to change history He starts with a baby.

That is why the Bible is so full of begats.

Somebody is always having a baby, and that meant a new chapter in God's plan.

For four hundred years Israel was enslaved in Egypt.

Then baby Moses was born, and that marked the beginning of a radical change for God's people.

Their deliverance began with the deliverance of this one baby.

Moses had to be saved to become the savior of his people.

So in the New Testament story, the deliverance of all men began with the deliverance of the baby of Bethlehem.

He had to be saved from Herod to become the Savior of the world.

Save a baby and you may be saving a family, a race, a nation, or a whole world.

Baby power is a major factor in all of history.

In 1809, Napoleon was the master of Europe and all eyes were on him.

But the future really belonged to the babies born that year.

That was the year for the birth of Lincoln, Gladstone, Tennyson, Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Cyrus McCormick, Chopin and Mendelssohn.

These babies gave the world a creative future that outweighed all the damage done by Napoleon.

Europe was thinking of battles, but it was the babies that would change the future.

The decisive battles are all forgotten except to a few historians, but the decisive babies are remembered by millions.

Wise men recognize the baby power in history.

Socrates said, "Could I climb to the highest place in Athens, I would lift my voice and proclaim: 'fellow citizens, why do ye turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth and take so little care of your children, to whom one day you must relinquish it all?'"

He was wise enough to see the obvious.

The people of God in the Old Testament could see it as well for their hope of salvation hinged on babies.

God's very first command to Adam and Eve was in Genesis 1:28 where he says they are be fruitful and multiply so as to fill the earth and subdue it.

In other words, by means of babies man would conquer the rest of creation.

When they sinned and fell God did not change His plan for it remained baby centered.

We read in Genesis 3:15 that the offspring of Eve would ever be in conflict with the offspring of Satan, and that Eve's would crush the head of Satan's.

The very first promise of salvation was centered in a baby.

Baby power has always been the hope of man because that is how God intends to save man.

God confirms this again by His promise to Abraham that by his seed all the families of the earth will be blessed.

The reason Christmas is a universal celebration is because it celebrates the birth of the baby that fulfills that promise.

The Baby of Bethlehem is the central focus of the entire universe, and the entire plan of salvation.

This explains the reason for the child saving stories of the Old Testament.

God had to spare Isaac for the sake of His promise.

God had to spare the seed of David for the sake of His promise.

David had many sons but they were all killed by family in-fighting.

Only one child was left by the name of Joash.

The house of David hung by the single thread of one little baby boy, but one was enough.

By means of that baby God kept the line going to fulfill the promise in the baby boy of Bethlehem.

Plutarch's story of Themistacles has him saying of his own little baby at his mother's breast, "That child is master of the world!"

His friend asked, "How can that be?" Themistacles answers, "The Athenians are masters of the Greeks; the Greeks are masters of the world; I am master of the Athenians; my wife is the master of me; and this little child is the master of his mother.

Therefore, this child is the master of the whole world!"

If this was true of that baby, how much more was it true of the Babe of Bethlehem who made the world, and now had come into His world to redeem it?

Someone described Christmas as the story of a baby going after a lost ball to make it his own.

Jesus came into this world to retrieve the ball he made.

It was His by right of creation, but now He was going to make it His by right of redemption.

But why come as a baby?

Why not as a grown man riding in from the desert on a white stallion to take over the government of His people?

This baby business seems so slow.

Why mess with years of immaturity and the need to grow?

God could have taken a short cut and skipped all this baby stuff.

But instead, this baby stuff becomes the dominant theme of Christmas.

Dr. Luke makes the two long introductory chapters of his Gospel, baby centered.

They are detailed accounts of the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus.

Matthew, likewise , devoted the first two chapters of his Gospel to the babies of the ages, and to the birth story of Jesus and the wise men.

Christmas is baby oriented.

We have more detail about the babyhood of Jesus than any other period of his life until his public ministry began.

Let's look at how Dr. Luke is baby centered in two ways.

First look at his emphasis on-

I. BABY CENTERED COMMUNICATION

By this I mean baby talk and talk about babies in his first two chapters.

Dr. Luke even tells us about pre-natal communication.

It sounds too spectacular to be true, but it is confirmed by modern studies to be a reality.

In Luke 1:41-44, we read of how Elizabeth tells Mary that as soon as she greeted her the baby in her womb was so affected by the sound that he leaped in her womb for joy.

Can babies be affected by sounds outside the womb?

Do they receive some kind of communication from their external environment?

Two Japanese scientists, Ando and Hattori, did a study with two groups of infants.

The first group spent their prenatal months near the Osaka airport while the second group lived in a quiet neighborhood.

Babies from both groups were delivered at a hospital located under the flight pattern.

Those babies that grew up in their mother where the plane noises were common were five times more likely to sleep through the sounds of the planes overhead.

But those babies that did not live near the airport would wake up screaming about 50% of the time when the planes flew over.

They demonstrated that the fetus does hear and adapt to the sounds of its environment.