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Well, it’s officially Christmas time!
Intro
· Well, it’s Christmas time!
I know we began our Christmas series last week, but now that we are through Thanksgiving, we are officially into the Christmas season.
You’ve probably been busy shopping, decorating, maybe even beginning to bake.
The ladies have been here this week doing some tremendous work to make our Sanctuary and building look festive and beautiful.
Didn’t they do a great job?!
I imagine many of your houses are decorated, presents are being bought, and the calendar is filling up.
In the midst of it all, it’s easy to lose our focus, isn’t it?
We know that all this activity can make it hard to remember what Christmas is all about, which is why we are taking some time on Sunday in December to step back from the busyness and remember the true meaning of Christmas.
Last week, we started at the very beginning and saw that Christmas was about a broken world.
We saw that God made us for a relationship with him, but we chose to disobey God and that drove us away from him.
Maybe you feel a little like Charlie Brown…
What was one of the worst things about Christmas growing up?
For me, it was the WAITING.
It felt like the weeks after Thanksgiving were the most painful, slowest weeks in the history of the world.
· CUE VIDEO
At the same time, we saw a hint that God was going to one day send someone to set things right.
We didn’t get many details, but we saw shadows of what was coming.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to see the true meaning of Christmas come into focus as we see more and more detail about what this promise would really mean.
This is what we want to do this year—regain our focus on what really matters.
As we pick back up this morning, I would encourage you to turn in your Bible to .
We are just going to look at one verse this morning that is packed with information about the one God promised to send.
While you’re turning there, let me ask you: what was one of the worst things about Christmas growing up?
Not as an adult with all the responsibilities, but as a kid who was wide-eyed with wonder about all Christmas would hold.
Linus got it right, didn’t he?
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at different aspects of the Christmas story, examining exactly what makes it so special.
For me, it was the WAITING.
It felt like the weeks after Thanksgiving were the most painful, slowest weeks in the history of the world.
What was one of the worst things about Christmas growing up?
For me, it was the WAITING.
It felt like the weeks after Thanksgiving were the most painful, slowest weeks in the history of the world.
Waiting on your dream to be fulfilled can be extremely hard.
It’s draining, difficult, and disappointing.
When we make it to this morning, we will see God’s people still waiting for him to fulfill the promise he made back in .
You know that the scenes in Bethlehem and even in Nazareth before the birth of Christ aren’t the beginning of the story; they are the culmination of the promise made thousands of years before.
We see this throughout other places in the Old Testament, but I want us to look this morning at one in particular.
Throughout the Old Testament, we see God explaining to his people that he will be sending the Messiah, which means “anointed one”.
This man would be set apart in a unique way to deliver God’s people.
We see this throughout other places in the Old Testament, but I want us to look this morning at one in particular.
Perhaps one of the greatest places we find this promise of God is in .
It’s here, some 700 years before the Messiah is born that God, through Isaiah, beautifully explains some of the picture of who this man would be.
God’s people have been judged for the way they rebelled against him time and time again, and they are discouraged.
Now, God is pointing them to what he will do in the future on their behalf.
As we walk through this passage this morning, I want you to see at least three different characteristics of the Messiah God was promising to send.
One over-archinYou should see through this, first of all, that God keeps his promises.
Secondly, you should see who this Child was, is, and will be in the future.
Read with me.
What does Isaiah tell us here about the Messiah who is to come?
We’ll see three major facets of this individual in this passage.
· What does Isaiah tell us here about the Messiah who is to come?
We’ll see three major facets of this individual in this passage.
The first we’ll see is that..
1) The Messiah will be a person.
“For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us...”
This may seem weird to bring up, but this is one of the most crucial truths of Christmas.
Isaiah tells us that there will be a child born, a son.
This baby will be a real human child.
Why does this matter?
Because it tells us that God hasn’t completely abandoned humanity.
Remember how the world got in the mess it was in?
There was a problem created by sin, and He was the only one who could truly do something about it.
If you missed last week’s message, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it online, because it is critical for us as we understand Christmas.
When God first made the world, everything was just like it should have been.
However, we chose to push God away by disobeying him, thinking we knew better than he did.
Our choice to push him away broke everything as sin and death became the normal realities of life.
Now, put yourself in God’s shoes.
You took great care and concern to shape man from the dust, give him life, and walk with him.
Yet, in spite of everything you had done, he pushes you away, ruining everything you had made.
What would you have done?
Most of us would have either destroyed Adam and Eve or, at the very least, turned our back on them and left them alone to figure things out on our own.
However, with the promise God is making, he is showing us that he isn’t going to just leave humanity alone.
Instead, as we hinted at last week, God is becoming humanity for us!
Just a few pages before this promise, we see Isaiah saying this:
“Immanuel” means “God with us”.
We know that God is present everywhere, but when Jesus came and was born as a baby, he was uniting God and man like never before in history.
Instead of leaving us all to wallow in our own filth, He came as a person to wallow in it with us!
“who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.” (, NASB95)
Let’s talk about that passage, because it can be confusing.
- He Himself came, born as a child, to help us, even though it was our fault!
The first part of that says that Jesus existed in the form of God, meaning he is the exact same in character and nature as God the Father.
It isn’t wrong for him to claim to be equal with God because he is.
Yet, the second part says he himself came, born as a child, to help us, even though it was our fault!
John, referring to Jesus as “the Word”, says it this way:
“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
(, NASB95)
- It is incredibly important that the Messiah be a person.
It is incredibly important that the Messiah be a person.
God wasn’t sending us a standard we couldn’t uphold; we failed that test under the Law.
He wasn’t calling us to a better life; He was coming to give himself on our behalf.
What an incredible truth!
This is what makes Christmas worth celebrating—that the just, holy, righteous God of the universe would come as an actual human being to live among us.
By the way, I don’t understand how it worked, but I know what God’s Word says.
He did come, and when He did, He was fully God and fully man.
So Christmas is about a promise that God would send a child, a real human being, to rescue us.
That person was more than just a normal person, though.
The next thing we see is that…
2) He will be powerful.
“...and the government will be on his shoulders...”
Anybody else having a hard time not reading this with the meter of Handel’s Messiah?
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