Sermon Tone Analysis

In January of 1941, missionaries Dick and Margaret Hillis “found themselves caught in China during the Japanese invasion.

The couple lived with their two children in the inland town of Shenkiu.

The village was tense with fear, for every day brought terrifying reports of the Japanese advance.

”At the worst possible time, Dick developed appendicitis, and he knew his life depended on making the long journey by rickshaw to the hospital.

On January 15, 1941, with deep foreboding, Margaret watched him leave.

“Soon the Chinese colonel came with news.

The enemy was near and townspeople must evacuate.

Margaret shivered, knowing that one-year-old Johnny and two-month-old Margaret Anne would never survive as refugees.

So she stayed put.

“Early next morning she tore the page from the wall calendar and read the new day’s Scripture.

It was Psalm 56:3—What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.

“The town emptied during the day, and next morning Margaret arose, feeling abandoned.

The new verse on the calendar was Psalm 9:10—Thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.

“The next morning she arose to distant sounds of gunfire and worried about food for her children.

The calendar verse was Genesis 50:21—I will nourish you and your little ones.

“An old woman suddenly popped in with a pail of steaming goat’s milk, and another straggler arrived with a basket of eggs.

“Through the day, sounds of warfare grew louder, and during the night Margaret prayed for deliverance.

The next morning she tore the page from the calendar to read Psalm 56:9—When I cry unto Thee, then shall my enemies turn back.

“The battle was looming closer, and Margaret didn’t go to bed that night.

Invasion seemed imminent.

But the next morning, all was quiet.

“Suddenly, villagers began returning to their homes, and the colonel knocked on her door.

For some reason, he told her, the Japanese had withdrawn their troops.

No one could understand it, but the danger had passed.

They were safe.

“Margaret glanced at her wall calendar and felt she had been reading the handwriting of God.” [Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed.

(Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 646–647.]

Today is the first day of Advent, that period of waiting for the celebration of the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

The Advent season is intended to remind us of the many years that the people of Israel waited for God to fulfil His promise to send a Messiah — a savior who would bring them redemption and who would establish God’s kingdom here on earth.

They had lived in hope of the fulfilment of this promise for many centuries, including 400 years of God’s silence since His last words to them through the prophet Malachi.

The promises of God fueled their hope.

Promises like this one through the prophet Jeremiah:

Much as Margaret Hillis during that terrifying week in 1941, the Jews at the time of Jesus lived in a place and a time when justice and righteousness and safety were hardly guaranteed to them.

Under the rule of Rome, the land of Judea could be a hard and dangerous place for the average Jew.

They faced taxes as high as 50 percent of their meager income, they could be forced into the service of Roman soldiers, and even their own religious leaders took advantage of them to enrich themselves.

For the average Jew living in Judea at this time, things might have seemed hopeless.

Now, the religious leaders of Judea tended to put their hope in their own righteousness and in their political alliances with the puppet kings and governors placed over them by the Roman Empire.

And the Romans who were in Judea put their hope in the mighty armies of Rome and in the great empire that nation had built.

And so, it should not surprise us that the people involved in the birth of Christ were average Jews, rather than religious leaders or Roman soldiers or politicians.

What we see in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus is average Jews whom we might have expected to be hopeless, but who exhibited great hope that was based on the promises of God in Scripture, the same promises that Margaret Hillis remembered as she heard the advance of the Japanese troops in China.

There was Mary, the young virgin from Nazareth, a town from which nobody expected anything of consequence.

She was visited by an angel, who told her she would miraculously conceive a son, whose name would be Jesus.

How Mary’s heart must have leapt at the reminder of God’s promise to King David, recorded in 2 Samuel 7:12-13:

2 Samuel 7:12–13 (NASB95)

“When your days are complete and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your descendant after you, who will come forth from you, and I will establish his kingdom.

“He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

Mary, that average young Jewish virgin living in an average little Jewish town had hope, because she trusted in God’s promises.

And then there was Joseph, her fiancé, an average Jewish craftsman in that average town of Nazareth, who had learned of Mary’s pregnancy and was considering breaking off their betrothal, when he was visited by an angel, who said to him:

Matthew 1:20–21 (NASB95)

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.

“She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”

And I wonder if Joseph must have remembered the promise of God through the prophet Ezekiel to bring scattered Israel back to the land of promise, but also to do something that God had never promised before:

Just as God had promised through Ezekiel to save His people from all their uncleanness, the angel told Joseph that the son that Mary carried would save His people from their sins.

How Joseph’s heart must have leapt with hope when he heard this.

And then there were the shepherds tending to their flocks on the night of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.

You could not get more average than shepherds in first-century Judea.

In fact, they were below average on the social scale.

But God chose them to be the first witnesses to His Son’s incarnation on earth, and He once again used angels to remind them of God’s promises.

Now, we often think of this word, “Christ” as Jesus’ last name, but the Greek word Christos is actually the translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah, the anointed one, the promised deliverer and redeemer of Israel.

This is the Anointed one of Psalm 2, where God says to Him,

Psalm 2:7–8 (NASB95)

"You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.

Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance, And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.”

This is the Messiah-Son whom God declares in that same psalm that the nations should worship with reverence and rejoice with trembling, the one whose wrath is deadly and in whom those who take refuge are blessed and delivered.

These average shepherds on a hillside outside of Bethlehem were visited by angels who reminded them of the hope to be found in the promises of God, and they hurried into town to see this child.

And after they had seen him, they went back to their flocks, “glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen, just as had been told them.”

It is fitting that the theme for the first week of Advent is hope, because Advent is all about waiting, and waiting is all about hope.

Now this isn’t the kind of hope you might have as you’re waiting for your number to be called at the DMV — the hope that you might be next or that all your paperwork will be in order.

Instead, what we’re talking about here is the kind of hope that Margaret Hillis had, a hope that rests on a faithful God’s faithful promises.

The hope of Advent is a hope that is founded on the promises of God, a confident assurance that the God of all faithfulness will faithfully keep His promises because He IS faithful.

Mary and Joseph and those shepherds had confident assurance that this child who had been laid in a manger was the promised Messiah who would save His people from their sins and one day rule on the throne of David, because they knew God to be faithful to His word.

Now, it’s tempting for us to think about Advent as a season of waiting that concludes with our celebration of the birth of Jesus.

But that wasn’t the case for Mary and Joseph.

It wasn’t the case for the shepherds.

And it wasn’t the case even for those who followed Jesus during the three-year ministry at the end of his life.

Indeed, it wasn’t the case for the early church, and it’s not the case for us today.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The Son of God, whom Mary laid in a manger that night in Bethlehem grew into a man who lived the sinless life that we could not live and sacrificed Himself on a cross at Calvary to pay the debt that we could not pay for our sins.

God made Him “who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

But God’s promise to we sinners who follow Jesus in faith isn’t just that we will be saved from the just penalty of our sin.

God’s promise is that those who put their faith in Jesus will be adopted as sons and daughters of God, that we will be resurrected as His Son was resurrected, and that we will have eternal life — life in everlasting fellowship with the Father and the Son, the way it was always meant to be.

If you have followed Jesus in faith, you have been saved, but there is also a sense in which you are BEING saved as you live your life in Christ.

You are being saved through your sanctification, that process of being made ever more into the image of Christ.

And you are being saved through the Holy Spirit’s work to keep you from sin.

And there is also a sense in which you WILL BE saved when your salvation is made complete in the resurrection.

That’s what the Apostle Paul talks about in Romans, chapter 8.

Just as God’s creation groans for the day it will be set free from its bondage to corruption that was a result of mankind’s sin, we ourselves groan inwardly as we wait for the fullness of our salvation.

In this advent, we await the redemption of our bodies.

Even if we who have followed Jesus in faith die before He returns, we can have confident assurance based on God’s promises that our souls will return with Jesus from heaven and be reunited with our bodies, which will be transformed into their glorified state, no longer subject to sickness or death.

Paul wrote about this in his first letter to the church at Thessalonica.

This is the hope in which we were saved — not that we’d be disembodied spirits floating on clouds in heaven for eternity, but that our very bodies will be redeemed and resurrected.

And we can be confident about this, Paul says in that passage from Romans, because we have the firstfruits of the Spirit.

God has given us the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of His promise to redeem us completely, body and soul.

He has given us the Holy Spirit as a downpayment on the promise of inheritance as His sons and daughters.

And it’s interesting to me that the ESV and the NASB translate verse 25 so differently.

The ESV says we wait for the fulfillment of this promise “with patience,” but the NASB says “we wait eagerly for it.”

The reason for the difference between the two translations is that the Greek word behind the translations means to wait eagerly AND patiently.

We SHOULD be eager for the redemption of our bodies and adoption as sons and daughters.

Our desire for God to fulfill these promises should cause us to groan within ourselves, much as many of the Jews of Jesus’ time were groaning for the arrival of the promised Messiah.

But, like them, we must be patient in the knowledge that God is doing things in His timing.