Sermon Notes 12-20-2020

Why Was Jesus Born?

 

 

So the big idea today, why was Jesus Born??

 

The topic today is why was Jesus born? Why did He have to leave heaven and come to earth? What was the reason? 

During the Christmas season, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, Immanuel, “God with us”. 

·      The eternal God entered into history, 

·      The Creator God entered into creation. 

·      God who made man came down as a man, starting as a baby.

 

 

Why was Jesus born? 

So, what made the one who made everything come into human history and live among us and be born into this world?

·      At Christmas, we celebrate that He was born, the question is, why was Jesus born?

·      Here’s the answer: Jesus was born so that we could be born again.

 

 

So today we are looking at 1 Peter 1:3, and before we do let's remember who he is:

·      For those of you who may not be familiar with the ministry of Jesus, He had disciples, students, and they followed Him and they learned from Him.

·      One of them was a man named Peter, and he ended up being the leader of the disciples. 

·      So when Peter wrote this, Jesus has died, risen, returned to heaven, and this man Peter is the leader of early Christianity.

 

1 Peter 1:3 (ESV)

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

 

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

·      He says, “I’m really excited about something. 

·      I want to share something amazing with you. 

·      And Peter is excited as we all should be to share the “Good News”

·      He lived it with Jesus, and he wants to tell the world about Jesus!

 

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy”

·      He’s here alluding to the love of God

·      The kindness of God

·      The compassion of God

·      The affection of God

·      The Father heart of God 

o   God is perfect love, and He loves us even in our sin, even when we are enemies of God, He still loves us

·      Some of us don’t understand this concept of a father’s love

 

 

What great mercy?

“According to his great mercy—” What has He done for us? 

·      What has this great Father (God) done for us? 

·      He brought us a savior 

·      In His mercy, He has given us a way out

·      So, Jesus was born that we might be born again, as Peter says “to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

 

 

So, what is being born again?

What he’s talking about is that we are born physically and we celebrate that. That’s why we have birthdays and we celebrate our birth. But in addition to being born physically, we need to be born again spiritually. We need a second birth of our soul. The first birth is of our body, the second birth is of our soul.

Why that is so important!!

 

Let me explain why being “Born Again” is necessary. 

·      We are born in sin. 

·      Some of you don’t like to hear about sin, but let me say, it is incredibly helpful to believe in sin. 

·      It explains why the world is not the way that it should be. 

·      It explains why we are not the way we should be. 

·      It explains why our relationships and why our families are not the way they should be. 

And the Bible tells us that it’s sin. 

·      Sin is in relation to God. The Bible says that God is holy, and God is good, and God is perfect. 

·      Sin is anything that is contrary to the will of God, the Word of God, the ways of God.

·      To make it as simple as possible, sin is whatever God is not. 

·      Sin includes our thoughts because God knows our thoughts. Sin includes our words, sin includes our deeds, sin includes our motives, why we do and don’t do the things we do and don’t do. 

·      All of that is what the Bible means by “sin.”

And we’re sinful from our mother’s womb. 

·      Psalm 51 says that we are sinful from our mother’s womb. 

·      Everyone is, with the exception of Jesus Christ. 

·      That’s why Jesus had an earthly mother but no earthly father. 

·      He did not have any inherited sin nature handed down to him; he was without sin. He was the beginning of a whole new humanity.

And the wage for sin is Death, physically, and eternally!

 

God's a good Dad!

God loves us so much that He chose to do something to save us from Sin. 

·      So God’s a Father, 

·      we’re all sinners, 

·      and Jesus is the Savior. 

·      And what He’s saying is this: salvation, this great gift of mercy, is the means by which we are born again spiritually. 

·      Because you could be physically alive but spiritually dead, 

·      God has done something to take away our sin problem, and He does that through Jesus Christ.

 

 

Jesus is our Savior!!

So now we’re back to the Christmas story. 

Why was Jesus born? 

·      Well, His name indicates the reason that he came. The name “Jesus” literally means He is our Savior; He is our Savior.

·      so Jesus is born, conceived in the womb of Mary. He does not have an earthly father, He does not have an inherited sin nature, He’s not a biological descendant of Adam, our first father, and He is born. And that’s what we celebrate at Christmas.

·      He preaches, He teaches, He heals people, He cares for the widow, the orphan, the outcast, the marginalized, the needy. 

·      Jesus lives the most amazing, extraordinary life in the history of the world. 

·      Jesus lives without sin, and He goes to the cross, and He dies in our place for our sins. 

·      Death is the consequence for sin, and because Jesus had no sin, death could not hold Him. And since He died for our sin, His resurrection is our victory. 

 

Here’s my question to you: Have you been born again? You say, “I don’t know.” Have you turned from sin and trusted in Jesus? See, what I don’t want you to do is simply appreciate the life of Jesus; I want you to experience the life of Jesus. Anyone can appreciate the life of Jesus, loving, gracious, merciful, kind, generous. But only someone who’s been born again can experience the life of Jesus, the resurrected life of Jesus Christ coming into your life.

 

That’s what it means to be born again. It means to be born again in Jesus Christ. That takes two things: repentance and faith. Repentance is where we see ourselves as a sinner in need of a Savior, and faith is where we trust in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Again, back to Peter. “He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

 

 

Closing:

The Great Gift Exchange:

 

How many of you are planning some kind of Gift exchange in the next few days? Some of you already have at work or school or small group you have already exchanged gifts. It's one of the fun things we get to do during the Christmas season, Amen!

 

Christianity is about a gift exchange. Martin Luther called it, “the great exchange.” Here’s the great gift exchange. Here’s what I want you to give Jesus, I want you to give Jesus something for Christmas. It's something that would give me more joy than anything in the world I could ever receive; please give Him your sin. He doesn’t need anything, but He wants your sin. 

 

Here’s what He wants for Christmas: what Jesus wants for Christmas is your sin. That’s what Peter is saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy.” Peter’s saying, “This is unbelievable.” In mercy, God wants our sin. 

 

Now, none of you would ask for that for Christmas, right? None of us on our Christmas list said, “I would like sin and I would like to be sinned against. That’s what I would like.” That’s what Jesus put on His Christmas list. “Give me your sin.”

 

And then He’s got a gift for you: born again, born again. He wants to give you Himself as your new Lord. He wants you to be a new person with a new identity living by a new power with a new mind as part of our church family, a new community, with new desires. 

 

This is the great exchange. Jesus invites you to give Him your sin and to receive from Him His resurrected life in you so that you can be born again.

 

And so, what we’re doing today is we’re celebrating Jesus and we’re inviting you, not just to appreciate Him, but to experience Him. 

 

Today we will do two things that are important. We are going to call our children over and pray over them because we are celebrating the birth of a child and we’re going to invite you to come give Jesus your sin and be born again as a demonstration of the mercy of God the Father.

 

 

Sermon Notes 12-13-2020

Ordinary People, Extra Ordinary Deeds

Joseph

 

 

Matthew 1:18–2:1 (NIV)

¹⁸ This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 

¹⁹ Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. 

²⁰ But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 

²¹ She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” 

²² All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 

²³ “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). 

²⁴ When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 

²⁵ But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus. 

¹ After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 

 

The condensed version (readers digest)

 Imagine it this way. The angel Gabriel comes to a teenage Palestinian girl and says she is to give birth to the Lord, the King. ‘I think you must have the wrong Mary,’ she would have replied. ‘I mean, you’ll need someone influential, important, of royal descent, well off (you can’t have the Lord running around in rags, or receiving a sub-standard education)… If the Lord is to be born into poverty, well, you’d need an experienced mother who’s got several kids already (who are healthy and well-adjusted)… I don’t even know how to hold a baby, and you’re telling me that my first baby will be the Lord. What if I drop him? And, by the way, what is Joseph going to say?’

Mary continues: ‘Then imagine the scene with Joseph. “Why Mary you’re looking big… Why, Mary, you’re pregnant! Who with?” And I answer, “With the Lord.” What’s his line after that?’

Doesn’t happen every day, eh?

 

 

Joseph would have to be one of the most amazing people – not merely because of what happened to him, but in his response to those events.

 

What do we know about Joseph? He was a descendant of David, a carpenter, maybe older than Mary who was alive when Jesus was twelve but may have died before Jesus’ public ministry. That’s it.

Oh no, it isn’t. When he learned Mary was pregnant – presumably by someone else – Matthew gives us some interesting insights into this amazing man. This must have been a staggering blow to him. His bride-to-be had betrayed him. She’d been ‘sleeping around.’ Most fiancées would have exploded in vindictive rage. His gut reaction might have been to humiliate Mary as well as drop her. But he didn’t.

 

But my point this morning is not about what happened, but what he did with what happened. Here is a man who is invited to collaborate with God in the most dramatic event in history: God being clothed in human flesh.

 

How should we respond to a situation like this? There are six very helpful clues in the Joseph-story.

 

First, Joseph was a thoughtful person. 

·      So the first thing he did was to do nothing. 

·      He ‘considered’ the situation. 

·      For days, weeks, months… who knows? 

·      No doubt he prayed fervently as well. 

The moral for us: when you have to make a difficult decision, don’t be in a hurry: more mistakes are made by haste than by delay.

 

Second, Joseph was a ‘just’ man (verse 19).

·      That is, he lived under the law of God. 

·      His obvious question here would have been, ‘What does the law of God say?’ Answer: (see Deuteronomy 24:1): he had to put Mary away.

·       According to Jewish custom, a betrothal could only be terminated by ‘divorce’. Indeed, Mary should have been stoned. 

So the moral for us: Always ask ‘What does the Word of God in Scripture say about this?’ Nothing is ever right if it contradicts God’s will for us.

 

Third, Joseph was a tender, compassionate man (verse 19).

·      He believed that justice must be tempered by love. 

·      He had to obey the law of God, that was clear. But how to do it in Mary’s interests? 

·      How could he avoid embarrassing her? Joseph did not want to put Mary to shame. 

·      We know the sequel: it was revealed to Joseph that Mary was not guilty of adultery at all, but was highly favored by God, impregnated by the Spirit of God. 

The lesson here for us: Always ask, not only what God’s law requires, but how to apply that law in love. 

·      Not even Joseph’s hurt feelings or his religion’s legal requirements could overrule something more important: his compassion for someone who was ‘down’. 

‘In spite of the terrible thing he thought Mary had done to him and to their dreams, Joseph still had deep feelings for Mary the person and could not find it in his heart to add to her burden, or to use the modern phrase, “to stomp on her while she was down’.’ (John Claypool, in an unpublished sermon).

 

Fourth, Joseph was open to mystery, to the incredible. 

·      Now he was a male and would have prided himself on his logical approach to things (and carpenters have to think in those terms too!). 

·      Mary impregnated by God? What? Is there a precedent for this? Ridiculous! 

·      But no, Joseph’s response was not circumscribed by his logic or his experience. What Gabriel said to Mary, Joseph also obviously believed: ‘With God all things are possible.’ 

·      That’s what faith is all about – letting God be God, not restricting God within the limits of human experience…

Find an example!

 

Fifth, Joseph was humble enough to be willing to listen to the voice of God, even in a dream.

·      Where has our child-like wonder gone

·      We talk last week about listening to the quiet voice of God

·      That we all somehow miss that 

·      God can come to us in many ways

o   His word

o   Through other believers

o   Through circumstance

o   And yes even in our dreams!

 

 

Sixth, Joseph was a man of action.

With only the word of Mary and words in a dream to guide him, he took Mary to be his wife and took her away from Nazareth (supposedly to register in his home-town of Bethlehem, but also, I have no doubt, to get Mary away from the Gossip!). He later moved the little family to Egypt to get away from the murderous Herod, then back to Nazareth rather than Bethlehem to avoid the political climate.

 

‘Sam Keen defines a wise person as one who knows what time it is in life, and Joseph qualifies for that title… 

·      He was aware of what was going on around him, and just as importantly, had the courage to act. 

·      The courage to trust Mary, an angel, and a God who he had faith in.

·      It was that courage that allowed God to use him, an ordinary man to do extraordinary things!

 

What is the Bible all about ‘It’s about a God who gives us laws but who then gives Himself permission not to enforce them sometimes,’. When Jesus was confronted with a woman who had committed adultery, He first said ‘I do not condemn you’ before He said ‘Go and sin no more.’ Pharisees, ancient and modern, who only ask ‘What does the law say?’ and not ‘How can I act like God, with compassion?’ could never say that. Jesus had learned some wonderful lessons from this wonderful man named Joseph.

So this Christmas, I invite you to use this wonderful man Joseph as your guide when confronted with a difficult moral situation. Let us do what Joseph did, namely: reflect deeply, for as long as it takes; ask ‘How does the Word of God instruct me here?’; act always with compassion; be open to mystery; listen for the voice of God, in whatever medium God chooses to speak; and then act.