Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Henry McCushy, of the Texas Employment Commission, said they had a hard time getting men to be department store Santa Clauses one year.

The reason was the high percentage of children who were kicking Santa in the shins for not coming through the year before.

They expected Santa to live up to his billing, and deliver the goods as they requested.

Bill Adler, in his book, Letters To Santa Claus, reveals the hostility children can develop because of their excessive expectations.

One little boy wrote, Dear Santa Claus, "Last year you didn't leave me anything good.

The year before you didn't leave me anything good.

This year is your last chance."

Excessive expectation is the quickest way to the land of doubt, despair, and the drop out.

If you expect God, your parents, your children, or anybody to cater to your every whim, you are setting yourself up for a fall.

And if you expect Christmas to meet your every need, you are doing it again.

There is no promise in the Bible that Christmas is the way, the truth, and the life, and that by trusting in it, you can have abundant life.

It is a form of idolatry to expect Christmas to do for you what only Christ can do.

Nobody's birthday-not even Christ's-can meet all of our needs, and it is a major emotional mistake to expect it.

A large portion of the depression associated with Christmas is due to people's unauthorized expectations.

They expect milk to stop spilling, and people who haven't spoken to each other all year to be friendly, and the whole world to stop the folly of war, murder, robbery, and every form of evil, and they are shattered when they realize they can't even stop the spilt milk.

It is depressing if you expect Christmas to make the world a paradise.

The first one didn't do it, and to expect it of the next one is to expect what God does not authorize us to expect.

It is also unrealistic from the point of view of psychiatry.

One psychiatrist wrote, "Any celebration that sets up such unrealistic, magical expectations is very unfair to human beings.

People are pushed to deny the reality of their lives-their financial situation, their true relationships.

There is almost a delusional mood."

In other words, people try to live in the realm of myth.

They buy things they really can't afford.

They pretend to be more loving than they really are, but it doesn't work very long, if at all.

Tom Mullen says, "Seldom does reality measure up to the artificial and sentimental vision of Christmas which Hollywood, Hallmark Cards, the Chamber of Commerce, and our bad memories create for us."

He says, if we dream of a white Christmas and it doesn't snow, then we are upset, for even the weather is against us.

We go to get out the manger scene with the illusion it is ready to set up.

But what we find is a shepherd missing and a three legged camel.

Suddenly, it is no longer a manger scene, but a mangy scene.

The family sits down to read the Christmas story with the idyllic dream that the children will listen with awe, as if they never heard it before.

But one child is sure to say, let's open the presents right now.

The point of all this seeming pessimism is not to convince us that Scrooge was on the right track, but to help us keep our expectations from being excessive.

It is not only at Christmas, but all of life can be damaged by excessive expectations.

Dr.

Howard Henricks of Dallas Theological Seminary, one of the great marriage counselors of our time says, "The greatest reason for failure in marriage is unrealistic expectations."

People expect too much of each other, and assume that they could, if they would, make every waking moment of life full of excitement and satisfaction.

Nobody wants to put up with the reality of monotony, boredom, and routine.

A runaway in Chicago said, "I've done everything-had all the thrills, and I don't want to go on living.

There's nothing more to anticipate."

This is the pathetic end of those hooked on the emotional drug of excessive expectation.

Give me a thrill a minute or Christmas is a bore, and life is not worth living.

Expectation is not foolish in itself.

There is much enjoyable expectation that is a vital part of the Christian life.

Nowhere is expectation more acceptable than at Christmas.

We do not start playing Easter songs weeks before Easter.

There is no other holiday like Christmas, where expectation is so much a part of it's celebration.

We look forward to Christmas, longer, and with greater anticipation, then all other holidays combined.

The expectation is more than half the fun.

The day itself may not be that outstanding, but the overall impact of the season is greater than any other period of time in the year.

The journey is the joy, and not just the arrival of the day.

When we see this, we can escape the myth of living for the day, and enjoy the journey along the way.

Dr. Luke, who no doubt worked with expectant parents, is the one God used to record almost all the expectations surrounding the coming of His Son.

He tells us of the expectant parents of John the Baptist, as well as those of Christ.

He tells of the expectant angels who announced His coming.

He tells of Simeon, the old man in Jerusalem, who lived in expectation every day of the coming Messiah.

And Simeon tells us the whole world was expectant of a Savior.

Never before was there a period of history so pregnant with expectation.

Let's look at just three examples of this expectation.

I. PAGAN EXPECTATION.

This may be a surprise if you did not realize how God prepared the whole world for the gift of His Son.

God's Christmas preparation goes back a long way and covers all people.

God has built hope into the very heart of man, and so there is a natural expectancy in him.

God has never left Himself without a witness, and so men of every nation have expected God to act in history.

The prophet Haggai in 2:7, refers to the Messiah as the Desire Of All Nations.

This implies that God has put into all people a desire for a deliverer.

As we search the minds of men in all nations before that first Christmas we see this confirmed.

They expected a Christmas-like event.

The words of the poet are in harmony with the facts of history.

A little child-

A shining star-

A stable rude,

A door ajar.

Yet in that place

So crude, forlorn,

The hope of all

The world is born.

Author unknown

Was Jesus really the hope of the world?

Was anybody, but a handful of God's people, looking for a coming Savior?

Consider the evidence-

1. Plato, the Greek philosopher, said, "We must wait for someone to be a god, or god-inspired man, who will teach us our duties and take away the darkness from our eyes."

Here was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived, but he knew he could not deliver men from darkness.

He looked for another to be the light of the world.

He expected a man to come that was more than any man had ever been.

2. Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote, "People were generally persuaded in the faith of the ancient prophecies, that the east was to prevail, and that from Judea was to come the Master and Ruler of the world."

Suetonius, another Roman wrote, "It was an old and constant belief throughout the East, that by indubitably certain prophecies, the Jews were to attain the highest power."

The prophecies of Israel influenced the thinking of other peoples, and filled them with expectation.

3.

China also expected a great wise man, but they looked to the West.

In the Annals Of The Celestial Empire we read this statement, "In the 24th year of Tchao-Wang of the dynasty of the Tcheou, on the 8th day of the 4th moon, a light appeared in the Southwest which illumined the king's palace.

The monarch, struck by it's splendor, interrogated the sages.

They showed him books in which this prodigy signified the appearance of the great Saint of the West whose religion was to be introduced into their country."

4. Six centuries before Christ, Aeschylus wrote, "Look not for any end, moreover, to this curse until God appears, to accept upon his Head the pangs of thy owns sins vicarious."

This sounds like an expectation, not only of Christ, but of His cross and the atonement for sin.

4. Cicero writes of the ancient oracle which speaks of, "A king whom we must recognize to be saved."

5. Virgil, in his fourth Eclogue recounts the ancient tradition of, "A new order of the ages with a new race to come out of a virgin from the heights of heaven."

This child, said Virgil, would cast out fear and make the serpent die.

Is any wonder that the early Christians believed these pagan writers were prophesying about Christ?

Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, said that Virgil's poem, written for Augustus Caesar, was really a prophecy about Jesus.

Augustine, the great Christian theologian, also said this famous poet was speaking of Christ.