At the beginning of this series, we started by establishing that Christmas didn\u2019t start with the pregnant virgin Mary and the birth of Christ. Christmas began in Eden, in the garden. We then looked at Isaiah\u2019s prophecy to try and better understand what the incarnation was; what Christmas really was and did and is going to do. And how that must inform and prescribe our worldview. Then we turned to Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon and heard their songs to more fully understand what those faithful children of God believed about the coming of the Messiah.<\/p>\n
This week we are going to go back to the beginning. We are going to zoom out and look at a more overarching view of our story of redemption\u2014of Christmas. We are going to look back to the dark before the dawn, to the night before Christmas.<\/p>\n
I want this sermon to accomplish a few thing in particular. First, I want to pull back the curtains and help us to see Christ. We are going to do this by looking mainly at two other characters in the redemption story, Adam and Noah.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
C.S. Lewis once said, \u201cI believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
I want us to see Christ such that through the lens of Christ\u2014through the lens of Grace, we would see everything else, whether we are reading our Bibles, shopping, wrapping or opening Christmas presents, preparing a meal or for a party, singing songs, or listening to a sermon. That in all of life, in the everything we would glorify God in Christ Jesus for His wonderful grace.<\/p>\n
Second, I want to help some of you to have a better idea of how you are to read the Bible. Namely, by looking for Christ and His Gospel from Genesis to Revelation. If you get board reading your Bible, or it often becomes something you have to force yourself do, or it is constantly confusing to you, perhaps you are reading it wrong.<\/p>\n
If in your personal reading you aren\u2019t seeing Christ and His good news, pray and ask your Father God to help you. Dig deeper. Think longer and harder. Because no matter where you are in the Bible, it is ultimately about Jesus. I want this sermon to help you recognize that. (If this is, in fact, something you do struggle with, I would love to point you to a few surprising resources that have really helped me and my family and could perhaps be a help to you too.)<\/i><\/p>\n
And finally, I want to give you the good news. Probably most of you in here today are Christians. Probably most of you in here have heard the Gospel before. I don\u2019t know for sure what you already know or where specifically each one of you are on your faith journey, but I do know that no matter who you are or where you are, you need the Gospel. You need to know or be reminded of His grace in all things. You need to know or be reminded of the wonderful Christmas gift and gifts given from the Father in Heaven.<\/p>\n
This morning I want us to be utterly overwhelmed by His Gospel of grace. I want us to be buried up to our eyeballs in it. Will you pray with me and desperately ask for God to do this?<\/p>\n
Heavenly Father would You overwhelm our hearts with Your grace! Would you saturate our minds; all of our thoughts this morning with Your precious Gospel! God we cannot live without a revelation of You from You. Do not allow us to be satisfied to waste our lives and our thoughts and our desires on anything else but Your glory. No one and nothing else could ever be worth it, but You God. For Your Glory alone!\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
Like deer panting for water, make our souls long for You. God we need You to do this for the people in our lives who are lost, who live in darkness. We need You to do this in us, so that our families and our neighbors and our co-workers and our communities will see You and fear You and put their trust in You! God make us desperate this morning for the Light of Christmas to break in to Taylor like a flood through our lives. Do this, whatever it takes, for Christ sake. Amen.<\/i><\/p>\n
In the beginning there was only God\u2014Father, Son, and Spirit. And this triune God, from nothing, created everything. And He created everything through Christ. He spoke the world and everything in it.<\/p>\n
God created a beautiful garden and named it Eden which means pleasure. God created\u2014God spoke Pleasure for Man, male and female, His masterpiece. And His creation was good. It was perfect. But our stay in Pleasure, did not last very long.<\/p>\n
You probably know the story. Eve was deceived by a serpent that was the great dragon, Satan. Eve believe his lie and took and ate. Something like a toddler with a full plate of food grabbing the last and guarded bite off of his brother\u2019s plate.<\/p>\n
This grabbing resulted in a curse, a fall. God gave Man Pleasure with every plant yielding seed for food except for one. This one tree wasn\u2019t ours to take and eat. In a garden that was full of a thousand yeses we grabbed the one and only no. Eve lusted after the one thing we were told we couldn\u2019t have and Adam followed right behind. In deliberate rebellion against the Creator, this was our fall: taking and eating.<\/p>\n
God said that on the day man did this, we would surely die. We were cursed but in some strange and mysterious way, our curse was also a blessing. God gave us an out. Death.<\/p>\n
In a shadowy way, God was letting us know that, though we were cursed, sinful, stone-hearts, now enslaved to our dragon master, it wasn\u2019t always going to be this way. God told Satan that there was a dragon-slaying seed coming. God reminded Man that he was dust and promised that we would return to the dust from which we came.<\/p>\n
This was a curse and yet we must remember that this was coming from the God who had already proven what He could do with dust. God, in this shadowy way, was reassuring us. In this proclamation of a curse on His own prized creation, we can hear whispers of a coming and final re-creation. Whispers of a second and ultimate dust-Man.<\/p>\n
Adam and Eve\u2019s taking and eating lead to hatred and violence, perversion and injustice such that God destroyed the world with a flood save one righteous man and his family. Eight lumps of dust. Perfect for the Potter. This mess wasn\u2019t a surprise to God. This mess was a sign from <\/i>God. More whispers of a new genesis. More shadows of a new creation.<\/p>\n
Noah\u2019s flood was another beginning. Noah was the resistance. Noah was the line. Saved in an ark from the enraged waters, God made a covenant with Noah that He would never again destroy the earth and the sign of this covenant was a rainbow. A merciful and terrible bow.<\/p>\n
A bow in the sky, aimed, not to earth, not to us. God set that battle bow\u2019s sight on Himself. God was promising to never again destroy the earth and not because Noah and his family of grabbers and takers were going to get it right this time, they weren\u2019t and they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
And not because God was going to start winking at our sinfulness, He wasn\u2019t. Remember, Noah, that descendant of Adam was still a frail, hard-heart who would have (and should have) sunk like the stone he was with the rest of humanity if it wasn\u2019t for that grace-sealed ark.<\/p>\n
With that Heavenward bow bent, God was promising that when the time came, He would release an arrow of wrath and justice, rightly due mankind, pulled tight with bands of truth and grace and love, into the heart of another Noah and a better and final Adam.<\/p>\n
God promised that He would never again \u201ccut off\u201d all flesh by a flood, but that<\/i> Noah and that<\/i> devastating global flood silently spoke of another Noah and another flood. The true Noah would save His family of countless multitudes from every tribe and tongue and nation, from all peoples! But not from a watery grave. No. He would save us from the dragon, Satan, from sin and from death himself.<\/p>\n
Another global flood would come, the flood that Isaiah saw. A flood of the knowledge of the glory of God that would cover the earth like water is wet.<\/p>\n
This is what was written:<\/p>\n
\u00a0They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
God was promising that when the countdown was over, He would release an arrow of wrath and justice, pulled tight with bands of truth and grace and love, into the heart of the second Adam. An Adam who wouldn\u2019t lose His bride to the dragon. An Adam who wouldn\u2019t fail. Who at another tree would again take what didn\u2019t belong to Him but this time He would not be taking from<\/i> God. This time, He would be taking from us and from God, He would be giving. Giving freely to the grabbers. To the spoiled and ungrateful. Thieves and liars. Guilty. To the poor and naked and ashamed.<\/p>\n
God sent this new Adam; this better Noah from Heaven, to wear a belly button. To eat and pee and poop and even to pass smelly gas\u2014to really be human. To have parents who prepared Him meals and wash His clothes. And He would get here in the same manner every dust-man arrives here\u2014the beautiful agony God told Eve about. Childbirth. He would be born.<\/p>\n
Please don\u2019t get mad at me for saying Jesus passed gas. On average a person passes something like a half a liter of gas per day. My point in even bringing this up is not to gross anyone out or to be crass for the sake of being crass. I bring this up because it feels and seems irreverent and that is the point. Christmas, the incarnation, if it weren’t actually true, would<\/i> be irreverent. It would be blasphemy plain and simple.<\/p>\n
God becoming a baby? Bloody? Feeble? Breastfeeding? Dependent on parents? Farting? This holy and innocent and perfect God-Man would be condemned guilty in a kangaroo court and publicly humiliated and executed on a cross? This is<\/i> something so inconceivably extraordinary, it would be irreverent and even blasphemy except, that it is true.<\/p>\n
This is something so terrifying and tragic and yet so very reassuring. That the Father would send the Son to become the final dust-Man. Born to die. Born to bear the sins of His people. And if the fact that I said He farted offends you more than the fact that He died for our sins, you are missing something very important: grace.<\/p>\n
Hear the word of the Lord: Luke 2:1-20<\/i><\/p>\n
The night before Christmas was just that, night. It was dark. It was dark when Jesus was born. It was dark when the angel heralds gave the good news for the world, to the shepherds. It was despairingly dark in the world from Adam to Noah to Abraham to David to Isaiah to Mary and Joseph and those shepherds before the Light came.<\/p>\n
J.R.R Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit<\/i> and The Lord of the Rings, <\/i>invented a word that every Christian should know. The word is \u201ceucatastrophe.\u201d Tolkien was a Christian and his stories are consistently reflective of that. Toward the end of the first Hobbit movie, when the enemy has Bilbo and Gandalf and the dwarves trapped in a tree hanging over a cliff, a eucatastrophe occurs. They are rescued by the eagles.<\/p>\n
Another example of eucatastrophe would be when the prince finally comes and wakes the sleeping beauty with a kiss.<\/p>\n
Eucatastrophe, according to Tolkien, is the \u201csudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears\u2026 it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Man, in our fallenness desperately needed saving. But this is no fairy tale. We cannot just snap our fingers and out of nowhere, abstractly get to a happy ending. This is the world that God made and that means we need to be redeemed according to our nature. And that means we need a Savior who is one of us, to do what we could not do. \u201cMan the story-teller,\u201d says Tolkien, \u201cwould have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tolkien gave us a word that perfectly described the incarnation. Christmas, the incarnation is the eucatastrophe of human history. And he further observed that the resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the incarnation. The light has come. A new day has dawned.<\/p>\n
When I hear Christians bemoaning materialism at Christmastime, I always wonder if they really even know the story. That Christmas is about the Spiritual becoming the Material?<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think I am going to give gifts this year.\u201d They say. \u201cMy kids really don\u2019t need anything. They are spoiled enough as it is.\u201d Or you have the folks\u2014the Scrooges who just don\u2019t want to be wasteful. If our children are spoiled, it most certainly isn\u2019t because they have too much. It is because we haven\u2019t given them anywhere near enough.<\/p>\n
If we are concerned about waste, we would do well to remember how wasteful our God is on us. He orchestrated the most magnificent choral performance this world has ever witnessed all before it could even be put on YouTube and shared on Facebook. His audience? A handful of shepherds, but mostly sheep. And you are worried about wasting half a turkey and some wrapping paper?<\/p>\n
Our God wastes one sunrise and one sunset on us every day. Every day. Just to be forgotten. We take pictures of them, but there are so many, we easily and quickly forget the ones from before because we know tomorrow there will be another. They are generally taken for granted or ignored all together. And yet He apparently doesn\u2019t mind because they keep on coming.<\/p>\n
Have you ever seen the close up of a single snow-flake? They are stunning. Every one unique. And yet there are so many of them, we don\u2019t stop to admire any. We couldn\u2019t if we wanted to. We settle to pack them into balls and throw them around or shovel them out of our way. And what does He do? Dumps more on top. What a waste?!<\/p>\n
So some of the depth and meaning of your Christmas festivities and gifts are lost on your people. So your labors of love go largely unnoticed or mostly unappreciated by your children and family or your self-invited guests or your co-workers or the strangers looking into your decorated home. Much from your Father is lost on you too. He doesn\u2019t stop giving, even for a second.<\/p>\n
Think about that night. Mary and Joseph finally make it to Bethlehem only to find there is no room for them. Not a single vacancy. Couldn\u2019t God have just saved one single room?! Of course but He obviously didn\u2019t want to. God, in His infinite wisdom, decided that an animal cafeteria should be the drop zone for the King of kings and Lord of lords.<\/p>\n
That pregnant mother was ready to go and at that moment, it didn\u2019t matter where they were or weren\u2019t. It was time. Contractions. Pain and sorrow set in. The baby was coming. And finally like a dawn of joy breaking the dim shadow of anticipation, Mary looked upon her Messiah\u2019s face. It was feeble and bloody and beautiful.<\/p>\n
Eucatastrophe. Joy and sorrow meet.<\/p>\n
The true Noah and the new Adam has come. The God-Man is born. Our Savior King. The Warrior Lord and with arms so weak they could be tamed with cloth. This mother, at this moment no doubt could see the beauty\u2014the joy. It was right there in her baby\u2019s face. But she also could see the terror, and sorrow.<\/p>\n
Probably, Mary knew this wouldn\u2019t be the last time she saw her Jesus bloody and weak and wrapped in cloth. This wouldn\u2019t be the last time a man named Joseph would take Jesus\u2019 wrapped body and lay Him to sleep. As Simeon took up the Christ child, it wouldn\u2019t be the last time someone with that name would bear up our Lord.<\/p>\n
Glory in the highest, born in the lowest. Christ who fills all in all, this night fills a manger. A manger. This is what animals eat from. Our Christ is welcomed into this world on a plate in Bethlehem which means \u2018house of bread\u2019. The Bread of Life, right where bread belongs, in the house of bread on a plate.<\/p>\n
These parents knew that Jesus\u2019 journey would be marked by sorrow and grief and torment. Joseph and Mary being good jews, knew what it meant when the Angel told them that this man would \u201csave His people from their sins.\u201d They knew this meant blood and death.<\/p>\n
Adam took and ate and sent every man in him\u2014the whole human race, plummeting into sin and death. Adam II would not grab, He would not follow. He would lead, He would offer. \u201cTake me instead.\u201d Willing to die to defend His bride from the dragon. He would freely offer Himself, the Bread for the world. No prohibition. No conditions. Only a call: \u201cTake and eat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The whole Bible is about Jesus, and this means the whole Bible is about Christmas and gifts. It is about the incarnation\u2014The Son of God come in the flesh, leading the way. The whole Bible is about His work. Our Father and our big Brother going behind our backs and conspiring to give us the most amazing Christmas gift we could never have imagined. This is good news. As a matter of fact, this is the<\/i> Good News. In Christ, in this Baby, in this Bread, all the families of the earth; all the nations would be blessed.<\/p>\n
God preached the Gospel to Abraham saying,<\/p>\n
\u00a0I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:3)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And lest you assume I am reading too much into this, Paul gives us the inspired commentary of that glorious promise.<\/p>\n
\u00a0And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, \u201cIn you shall all the nations be blessed.\u201d So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. (Galatians 3:8, 9)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The thread of Christ begins in the beginning. Christmas began in a garden. No matter where you find yourself today, no matter how dark and impossible your circumstance may be, remember the eucatastrophe. Christ came and died and rose again. He has ascended to the Father and received all authority in Heaven and on Earth. Go therefore, and go rejoicing, into all the world.<\/p>\n
You have every reason to rejoice, to be optimistic as we disciple our children and families and as we take this good news to the lost and hopeless. The Sun of Righteousness has risen indeed (Malachi\u00a04:2)! The bright morning star is shining (Revelation 22:16)!<\/p>\n
I want to close by reading from the first chapter of Colossians.\u00a0Colossians 1:11-29<\/i><\/p>\n
Heavenly Father, thank You for delivering us from the domain of darkness and transferring us to the Kingdom of Your Son. Thank you, that through Christ, who is supreme and preeminent, we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Thank You for sending the Bread of life into the world. We confess Father that as a congregation, our view of Christ has been much too low. Our understanding of Christmas and of Your Kingdom has been at best lacking and at worst perverted with our own false assumptions.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
Make our souls thirsty, to long for You. God we need You to do this for the people in our lives who are lost, who live in darkness. We need You to do this in us, so that our families and our neighbors and our co-workers and our communities will see You and fear You and put their trust in You! God make us desperate this morning for the Light of Christmas to break in to Taylor like a flood through our hearts.<\/i><\/p>\n
Renew our minds. Reassure us and establish us by Christ, the hope of glory. We ask these things in the strong name of Jesus Christ. Amen<\/i><\/p>\n
The charge is this:<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Be merry because of the eucatastrophe. Be bright because the Sun of Righteousness has shone in your heart. Be generous. Confidently take risks for the Kingdom. Urgently and in all of your life, tell the world the good news and show the world Christ. Live the story of redemption genuinely.<\/p>\n
Benediction:<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Grace to you and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to come\u2026and from Jesus Christ the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His blood and made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the beginning of this series, we started by establishing that Christmas didn\u2019t start with the pregnant virgin Mary and the birth of Christ. Christmas began in Eden, in the garden. We then looked at Isaiah\u2019s prophecy to try and better understand what the incarnation was; what Christmas really was and did and is going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[124],"tags":[127],"class_list":["post-1532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons","tag-christmas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5C2eY-oI","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calebripple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}