Well, here we are! We have made it to the eve of Christmas. Did you ever think we would? I know you kids are still counting down to the excitement that will soon come when you can open some gifts. Christmas can’t come soon enough!
And I think that’s true for all of us this year. What a year it’s been! A year like no other we’ve ever seen or lived through. We can all really use some Christmas this year! We can all really stand to rediscover Christmas this year.
As you know, we’ve been on a journey together over the past four weeks through Advent. We have focused on Christ’s coming – His coming to earth on that first Christmas long ago, and His eventual return to complete God’s work of redemption.
Each week of Advent we have focused on a different aspect of God’s character brought into our world in Jesus: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.
The Christmas story is a powerful story, filled with wonder and miracles and real life. It is the story of Jesus coming to earth as the most wonderful gift of all eternity.
As we have walked through various parts of the Christmas story these past four weeks, we explored the roles that certain people played in Jesus’ arrival. And we saw how He brought hope, love, joy, and peace into their lives in very real ways, which He still does today for us.
In our time together tonight, let’s briefly trace our way through portions of this Christmas story again, highlighting ALL that it means that Christ is come, and ALL we can rediscover about Christmas in Him. Let’s begin with…
Finding Hope in Our Uncertainties
When uncertainty surrounds us, the promise of Christ FILLS us with HOPE to carry on.
Hope is the breath that keeps us alive. It fuels our faith and dreams. Hope is those thoughts we have of “maybe”, “just maybe”.
In the worst sufferings and atrocities and catastrophes of human history, there has always remained a flicker of hope.
Throughout enslavement, imprisonment, torture, and tragedy, there have been those who have clung to the smallest sparks of hope, and fanned them for an eventual escape.
Throughout the history of the Jewish people, there was the hope of God’s covenant. There was the promise of restoration and blessing through the Messiah.
But time dragged on, and the nation was plundered time and again. Its people were exiled and conquered. “How long, O God?” was the cry of the ancient Israelite people as year after year, century after century passed.
But there were those who kept hope alive, living expectantly and faithfully, trusting openly and wholeheartedly that God would come through. Simeon and Anna were two of those people who encountered the baby Jesus.
They had lived long, difficult lives. They had known loss and disappointment. But they did not abandon hope. And when they saw the baby Jesus, who was just about six weeks old, they knew without a doubt that this was the Messiah, the promised one, the Son of God.
They were ready and waiting for this moment. And they embraced the moment of this “HOPE fulfilled” with rejoicing and spreading the news. The flames of their hope spread beyond and multiplied.
Let me ask you, how IS the flame of your hope today? This has been a tough year, the kind of year that certainly threatens to extinguish, or at least dampen, any hope that one may have.
But let me encourage you, no matter what you are facing and no matter where you are at in your life, let me encourage you to rediscover hope this Christmas in the coming of the Christ child.
With the arrival of Immanuel, God With Us, God has come to restore hope – the hope of salvation, the hope of being reconciled to God.
As we come humbly to worship Jesus, we can find the renewal of His HOPE within us, we can find the strength to take the next hopeful steps to carry us forward.
With the following verse as our prayer, let’s rediscover the HOPE that Jesus brought to us and is using in our lives today…
(READ together)
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit”. Romans 15:13
Through Jesus, we can definitely find HOPE in our uncertainties. But we can also find…
Peace in Our Struggles
The struggles we have in life are real and often have terrible consequences, but the peace of Christ transcends all struggles, even in the darkest of times.
Of course, Jesus’ birth announcement came in the dark of the night. Of course, the angels began their announcement to the shepherds with the words, “Don’t be afraid!” Because of course they were afraid. They were human, and there’s so much in our world that causes us to be afraid.
And there’s so much that happens that we struggle to understand. For the shepherds, that included why these magnificent, terrifying heavenly beings were showing up in the middle of the night sky.
For us, it’s the normal pressures and disappointments and uncertainties of our broken world. And that’s true even without the seemingly never-ending events of a global pandemic.
But Jesus, the Prince of Peace, arrived on earth that first Christmas. And then the angels proclaimed a new peace…
“Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angels, praising God and saying, “‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests.’” Luke 2:13-14
On whom does God’s favor rest? His favor rests on us, of course. The peace of shalom, the Jewish concept of completeness and wholeness, is available to us.
This is the peace of restoration with God. It is the calm acceptance that … “it is well with my soul” … regardless of what struggles I may have in this temporal life.
In a sense, it is almost like the coming of Jesus was the eye of the hurricane of human existence. The chaos of our world swirled before Jesus’s earthly life and ministry, and it swirls after Jesus’s life and ministry. It is as if there was a cosmic pause that night as angels sang and ordinary shepherds gathered around a baby who was God.
It’s my hope and prayer that we will all rediscover the peace of Christ, the peace that allows us to be contented regardless of our circumstances.
When the storms and winds hit your life, I invite you to step into the shelter of the peace of Christ. Bring to Him all your hurt and needs. This is the rediscovery of the peace of Christ in this season.
You can trust what Paul says in Philippians 4:7…
“…the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 4:7
Through Jesus, we can find HOPE in our uncertainties, PEACE in our struggles, and…
Joy in Our Discouragements
We can all confess that this has been a difficult year in so many respects. But as bad as this year has been, Christ can still fill us with JOY that defies our circumstances.
King David wrote in the Psalms…
“Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” Psalm 30:5
But sometimes that night can feel really long. Sometimes, it seems like it is night after night after night as we try to carry on. Sometimes happiness feels so elusive and distant. Sometimes it pours out of us like the eruption of Old Faithful.
And sometimes JOY bubbles up slowly. But as we rediscover Christmas, the good news of great JOY that is alive in us through Jesus IS the strength that sustains us.
We saw this in the stories of Elizabeth and Mary, both shared joy for their miraculous pregnancies.
For Elizabeth, joy was a fulfillment of her dreams of motherhood, and the erasure of cultural shame because she had never been able to bear a child.
For Mary, joy was the acceptance, understanding, and celebration of being in the middle of God’s greatest miracle.
Surely Mary knew that she would face scorn, disbelief, and misunderstanding for her pregnancy, but in her encounter with Elizabeth, she finds the freedom of joy.
For some of us, Christmas is a joyful season filled with songs and celebrations and traditions and comforts.
For others, the expectations of Christmas joy serve as reminders of deeper pains and disappointments, and the lack of all this merriment we’re supposed to be enjoying. Probably for most of us, Christmas brings a mixture of both.
It is my hope and prayer that we will ALL rediscover JOY this Christmas as we CHOOSE to rejoice. Let’s read together this prayer from the Apostle Peter…
“Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” 1 Peter 1:8-9
We can rediscover through Jesus, HOPE in our uncertainties, PEACE in our struggles, Joy in our discouragements, and finally…
Love in Our Differences.
There’s so much in our world that drives us apart. However, the love of Christ runs deeper than our differences with a flood of grace, forgiveness, and unity.
The desire for love is dominant in our culture. When future archaeologists and anthropologists explore artifacts of our era, they’ll probably conclude that love was one of the most important qualities of our society. Our songs and movies and TV shows and literature are filled with themes of love – longing for it, celebrating it, mourning its loss.
At Christmas, there is even a whole genre of holiday romance songs and movies and shows. We are captivated by love, but we struggle so badly to love each other on individual and societal levels.
Instead of a culture that exemplifies love, we are a nation and a world filled with division and conflict and hatred. Despite our best intentions, our broken human nature continually divides us.
Jesus, on the other hand, is the bridge of love that can unite us. He is the long-promised Messiah, sent because God loves us so much that He allowed His only Son to be the sacrifice for all our sins and shortcomings. And when He did, Jesus made the way for us to be restored to God.
As we explored love on our Advent journey, we saw how God gathered a varied group of very different people to be involved in the arrival of His Son. And we discovered how these people represented the barriers and divisions that God was uniting.
There were young and old, the earthly and the heavenly, the lowly and the noble, Jews and Gentiles, clean and unclean.
But ultimately, there was God and humanity.
As we rediscover Christmas, it’s my prayer that we rediscover the love of Christ, the perfect love that allows us to be accepted and transformed by God. The perfect love that removes our fears. And as this love washes over us and fulfills us from within, I pray that it propels us to reach across the divisions around us, even to our enemies, with humility and forgiveness and grace.
Let’s read this pray from the Apostle Paul together…
“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
Ephesians 3:17-19
Wow, what a love. This is our God. This is our Jesus.
We can rediscover HOPE in our uncertainties, PEACE in our struggles, Joy in our discouragements, LOVE in our differences, through…
Finding Christ in Our World
Christ has come with HOPE, PEACE, JOY, and LOVE. Christ has come to change our world – and change us – forever.
It’s such a HUMBLE birth, such an UNDERSTATED beginning to life, yet such a normal entry into our existence.
Human birth as a fragile, helpless baby. Jesus is one of us, able to understand everything we go through, all our longings and struggles and pain.
Yet, Jesus is God. He is hope, peace, joy, and love personified; here to restore these characteristics in us as a byproduct of our restored relationship with God.
Jesus is life rediscovered. If you ever ask yourself, “Where is Jesus?” Let me offer this … Jesus IS IN our…
(7 transitions)
Uncertainties and Struggles
Celebration and Mourning.
Crying and Rejoicing.
Fear and Triumphs.
Losses and Victories.
Brokenness and Healing.
Sickness and Health.
Life and Death.
Bottom Line … WHEREVER you are, Jesus is THERE
And He is working, and He is moving. He is offering life and forgiveness. He is calling us to trust, and to see beyond our immediate circumstances.
Jesus is IN our world and IN every aspect of our lives.
He is Immanuel, God With Us, for eternity. And He will never leave you nor forsake you. Jesus is the discovery of Christmas.
Let’s rediscover Christmas in the life He brings to us and around us.
Merry Christmas! Christ has come! Christ is here among us! And Christ will come again! AMEN