Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements

Are there any announcements?

There will be a board meeting Thursday at 6:30pm.

For those of you that are on the board there will be an invitation sent out for Google meets via your email.

Please check your email because we send out different things like invites to events, cancelations, and prayer requests.

If you would like to be on our email list, please fill out the card on the back of the pew and place it in the tithe box as your exiting the sanctuary.

That box is on the wall just to the left of the door when you are leaving the building.

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to FCC where we worship God in Spirit and in Truth, one verse at a time, one book at a time.

For those of you visiting today we simply teach the Bible simply and we do this by going through books of the Bible.

As y’all know we are in between books right now, but will be starting Ephesians soon.

So please be praying that the eyes of our understanding would be opened and that we would become more like Jesus Christ!

We have come as far as verse 13 in Matthew 2. Let us therefore open our Bibles here:

Read Matthew 2:13-23

Prayer

Lord, thank you for this day, for this is the day you have made, we will rejoice and be glad in it.

And Father you have given so much, more than we can think or imagine.

So thank you Lord! Thank you for all the gifts, graces, and blessings that you have bestowed on us, not to store up, but so we can bless others.

Lord as we open your Word today we ask for the Spirit to speak to us individually and collectively as we close out the story of your birth.

May we leave here today refreshed and prepared for the week to come.

In Jesus Name, we love you amen!

Review

As we look back over the last three weeks about the birth of our Lord and Savior, i wanted to make three points of where we have come from:

It is impossible to please God without faith, and we see the magi or the wise men stepping out in faith to seek after the long awaited Messiah.

They followed the star church and because they leaped out in faith they met the Messiah.

They were persistent and they prayed and the Lord of the universe became a baby who would one day die for the sins of the world.

These wise men worshipped!

They not only bent their knees to the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world, but they brought him gifts!

This is a picture of us giving our resources to the Lord.

When we talk of resources it is easy for us to get held up on money here because of tithes and offerings, but much more important is our time and talents church.

I have found when we are serving, we are not swerving and that when one is down and struggling or depressed, that giving to others often brings healing and freedom from the affliction one is struggling with.

John 10:27 says that my sheep hear my voice and follow me!

The more we know God’s Word, the easier we will be able to discern his voice.

If we pump the world into us, we will drowned out the voice of the Lord church.

Yes, we are not of this world, but we are in the world and the Lord has spoken:

We see here in the text that the wise men and Joseph and Mary heard the voice of God and followed heard after him.

They did not let anyone or anything get in their way church.

Although there was obstacles, they continued to press into Kingdom

Thy Kingdom come, our kingdoms go was their motto!

It is interesting to me that in Matthew 1 and 2, God spoke through dreams 5 times.

Once to the wise men and 4xs to Joseph

And by faith Joseph listened

It is also worth noting that the term Young Child is used 7 times in Matthew 2.

In Hebrew repetition church is used for two things:

For order

For Memory because they did not have Bibles on their shelves like us

Mathew was a Jew who wrote to a Jewish audience church, but I thing it is placed here in the Greek or English if you may, for emphasis.

The focus being on the Child, the focus being on God speaking to Joseph church.

One last thing about the Young child being used 7xs in this text is that the number seven throughout the Bible means wholeness or completion.

The Son of man had fulfilled prophecy, he was here to save those who where lost.

So the Angel of Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said arise and flee to Egypt

I think it is important to share on the Angel of the Lord:

Who is the Angel of the Lord?

The precise identity of the “angel of the Lord” is not given in the Bible.

However, there are many important “clues” to his identity.

There are Old and New Testament references to “angels of the Lord,” “an angel of the Lord,” and “the angel of the Lord.”

It seems when the definite article “the” is used, it is specifying a unique being, separate from the other angels.

The angel of the Lord speaks as God, identifies Himself with God, and exercises the responsibilities of God (Genesis 16:7-12; 21:17-18; 22:11-18; Exodus 3:2; Judges 2:1-4; 5:23; 6:11-24; 13:3-22; 2 Samuel 24:16; Zechariah 1:12; 3:1; 12:8).

In several of these appearances, those who saw the angel of the Lord feared for their lives because they had “seen the Lord.”

Therefore, it is clear that in at least some instances, the angel of the Lord is a theophany, an appearance of God in physical form.

But what is interesting is that the appearances of the angel of the Lord ceases after this text

It is possible that appearances of the angel of the Lord were manifestations of Jesus before His incarnation.

Jesus declared Himself to be existent

As you know God spoke to many in dreams during Bible times and here we see him speaking and telling Joseph to flee to Egypt.

To be honest, this does not make any sense to me because Israel had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, but God’s ways are not our ways and Jesus here fulfills prophecy we will learn.

From pheugō (to flee) we get our word fugitive, one who escapes from something or someone.

The word is here in the present imperative, indicating the beginning of action that is to be continued.

Joseph and his family were immediately to begin fleeing, and were not to stop until they were safely within Egypt and beyond the reach of Herod.

The distance from Bethlehem to the border of Egypt was about 75 miles, and another 100 miles or so would have been required to get to a place of safety in that country.

Traveling with Jesus made the trip both slower and more difficult.

We know by now the Joseph and Mary were avid hikers...

Egypt in the Bible is symbolic of the world

DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT JESUS SAID ABOUT THE WORLD?

Jesus is about to betrayed and he is praying for unity and:

Church, there were many Jews there, and the treasures received from the magi would more than pay the expenses for traveling and living there.

But there was also another prophecy to fulfill, Hosea 11:1: “I called My Son out of Egypt.”

I find it interesting that God sends his only begotten Son to Egypt to fulfill this prophecy.

But that Moses brought Israel out of Egypt as well.

A person is identified not only by his friends, but also by his enemies.

Herod pretended that he wanted to worship the newborn King (Matt.

2:8), when in reality he wanted to destroy Him.

There are a couple of nuggets I would like to pull out of this text.

The first is that Herod was deceived and some of your versions say mocked or tricked:

Deceived-empaizo-to be fooled v. — to be or become embarrassingly deceived; especially making one liable to laughter and ridicule.

Church, Herod is not the only one that has been deceived, we all have been.

And we must beware because:

Satan is the accuser of the brethren and the father of lies.

It means that that he seeks to steal, kill, and destroy through deception.

Now we know that the wise men did not deceive Herod, but rather flee form him because he was not only going to put the Young Child to death, but probably kill them as well.

Herod would kill anyone that got in the way of his power and his throne.

He was full of pride and remember church that pride goes before destruction!

Herod was exceedingly angry the text says!

This is anger that is out of control, he was so angry that his anger lead him to murder children.

This was rage>>> He was in the limbic system of the brain....

We see violence all around us church, young men, teenage men taking the lives of other men why?

It is because of anger church!

Jesus had righteous anger when he cleared the tables of the money changers in the temple, therefore, his anger was controlled.

When we walk in the Spirit church, we will fulfill the lust of the flesh thereof.

When we walk in the Spirit we have self-control, therefore our emotions do not control us, but rather we control our emotions.

The prison house is full of angry men and women