Sermon Tone Analysis

Illustration:

So kids, what do I have here in my arms?

Yeah?

How many eyes?

Toes? ears?

Any guesses how many teeth he has?

Any kids her really like babies?

What do you like about babies?

What do babies do?

Eat, sleep, cry, need their diaper changed.

You know it was only a couple of weeks ago that Theodore learned to smile?

Before that he would only smile on accident, he did not even know he was doing it.

At Christmas time, tomorrow we will celebrate the mystery of when God, who made every single person in the room, and every thing ever thought of, and every star and planet, who holds everything together became just like Theodore, barely able to hold his head up straight.

Tomorrow we celebrate the babyhood of the Son of God.

Just barely able to hold his head up.

This is the supreme mystery of Christianity that God became human.

With all the hubbub of the Christmas season we can become almost inoculated to this the greatest of all miracles.

God became human, and he did so for a reason: as our passage says: He will save his people from their sins.”

God became human so that he might save us from our sins.

FCF: All the religions and philosophies of the world agree that something is wrong with us, with humanity, Christians call this sin.

It does not take much to look out and see sin.

You see on the news, hear it on the radio.

And it does not matter if you are a republican or democrat, there is no policy that can fix the human heart.

Some of you know the sin out there in the world but for you

you feel it very personally it is a daily struggle not to feel guilty or like you are not measuring up.

And as St. Augustine says so well sin is disordered love.

That is we love good things too much or love out of order.

God became human so that we can be saved from our sin and have rightly ordered love.

We need to be saved from our sin, so that we can have a rightly ordered love.

We need to be saved from our sin, so that we can have a rightly ordered love.

Some of you powerless over the sin in your life, or it is simply a daily struggle and longing to just not feel guilty or ashamed.

So what is the solution to all this?

We need to be saved from our sins.

We needed someone to do it for us, this is humbling and uplifting at the same time.

this is humbling and uplifting at the same time.

What is God’s solution?

Become a baby.

Truth really is stranger than fiction.

God’s answer to humanities problem is to become human.

And what we see in this passage is that

We can be saved from our sins because God became human

Because God became man we should joyfully receive his salvation

So first

God became human, this is the central miracle and mystery of Christianity, so lets look at this miracle this morning.

First we see in our passage that it was

GOD who became human

And he did so by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

Look at verse 18

Jesus was not conceived by the normal means of conception.

This was a supernatural conception from the Holy Spirit with the virgin Mary.

So the Bible tells us this is an extremely unusual birth but it is not simply a supernatural conception by the Holy Spirit.

And then in verse

It is the incarnation of God himself, look with me at verse 23

And then in verse 23

Jesus is God with us.

God incarnate, in- fleshed.

The God who created, became the creature.

Oh and in case you are thinking, hmm that seems way out there, not really possible, well you are in the same boat as Joseph was.

Look at verse 19

And it is just as incomprehensible today as it was then.

Look with me at verses 19

Joseph knew how baby’s were made.

He knew what was going on, so he was going to do the noble thing and have a quiet divorce and not draw too much attention to her.

You see it is not like people before the scientific revolution were intellectually inferior.

Sure he did not know about zygotes and cells division and so on, but he was no dummy.

God became human through supernatural means, all the scientific knowledge in the world will not help explain the incarnation of God.

That is not the fault of scientific knowledge, there are just some things that cannot be proved through the scientific method.

God becoming human is the supreme mystery of Christianity.

It is the gold standard of miracles.

Sub point: It is the supreme mystery of Christianity

And so we have the Christmas miracle that God became human, and he became human, as verse 21 says: “ to save his people from their sins.”

Humanity needed a savior, but we could not produce one, salvation had to come from the outside.

God to humanity, and the way God saves humanity is by becoming human.

Illustration:

Every movie maker knows that everybody has the same fear when it comes to outer space.

And it is this: is the fear of becoming un-tethered to the space ship and floating away with no way to get back.

This is why every movie about outer space either has a scene where this happens, almost happens, or at least is talked about.

Last year the movie Passengers had just this scene.

This man and woman are on this space ship and it hit asteroid field and there is a huge malfunction and the man puts on his space suit and goes out to fix it, while the other stays inside.

Well they fix the problem, but the man becomes un-tethered in the process and begins to float away into outer space, unable to do any thing, no matter how hard he kicks or swims or struggles there is nothing he can do that will change his direction, unless something or someone else comes into contact with him.

And just as you would expect in dramatic fashion the woman puts on her suit and just in the nick of time right before he is out of reach and about to float away forever she grabs him and pulls him back in.

his salvation had to come from the outside himself, it did not matter, how strong, smart, good, or creative he was, he was helpless until someone else came in and saved him.

I think that every move ever made about space has a scene or at least talks about the possibility of floating away into space with no way to get back

Application:

The same is true of humanity, we cannot save ourselves someone else has to do it, that is why God became human.

To do what no one else could do.

Apart from the incarnation of God we are all floating off into outer space unable to change our trajectory.

All the religions and philosophies of the world agree that something is wrong with us, with humanity, the question how are we saved?

The Bible says that salvation comes from outside of us from God, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, Emmanuel, God with us.

This means that a president cannot save us, the right political policy not save humanity, enough education won’s save humanity.

The right technology won’t fix humanity.

Salvation cannot come from below, it must come from above.

The only one who can stop humanity from careening off out of control into the nearest star is the one who holds the stars in his hand.

Humanity can only be saved by God himself.

So GOD became human in Jesus to save us

Only God can save people from their sins

And while we needed God to save us, we also needed a human to do the work that is why

Application: We need to God man to save us not, not a president, or sports team, or policies

God became HUMAN

Verse 21 says she will bear a son, and verse 25 says that Joseph did not know her until she had given birth to a son.