1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word this Christmas
Day we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord is taken from Matthew 1:18-25 and
is entitled, “Stir Up the Power of
Promises Kept,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
In 1990, a new Christian men’s
organization made headlines. It was Promise Keepers, founded by Bill McCartney,
then head football coach of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The idea was
to introduce men to Jesus Christ, teach them what real manhood was, and urge
them to be faithful husbands and fathers.
For a few years, Promise Keepers experienced explosive growth. Now I
don’t hear much about it. For whatever
reason, Promise Keepers isn’t in the news much. What happened? Maybe their focus was backward. Rather than
focusing on men keeping their promises (which isn’t at all a bad thing!), maybe
the focus should have been on God keeping his promises. One emphasis is Law,
while the other is Gospel. You see, no matter how hard we try, no matter how
sincere our promises, we’re not good at keeping God’s Law. That’s why we need the Good News of the
Gospel. The Gospel tells us that God
Keeps His Promises, Giving Us Confidence to Meet His Son When He Comes Again.
3.
What are God’s promises that give us
confidence? First, there’s the promise
God gives in Jesus’ name that gives us confidence. If there was ever a godly man who kept his
promise, it was Joseph. He was a devout Jew intent on obeying God’s laws.
Joseph followed all the customs of the day in his engagement to Mary. Marriages then were arranged by the fathers. Joseph’s
father’s name was Jacob (Mt 1:16). Mary’s father, according to tradition, was
Joachim. Jacob and Joachim probably sat down together, did some bargaining, and
at some point, Joseph and Mary, would have found themselves engaged. That’s the way it was done. An engagement was a legally binding contract.
The only way out was divorce. Men could divorce their fiancées and wives, but
generally not the other way around. It was expected that engaged people would
be celibate. Joseph would keep his part of the bargain. And Mary hers.
4.
But sometime after the engagement,
Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant. An angel has visited Mary and told her
she would bear the Christ Child So when Joseph learns Mary is pregnant, he’s
crushed. Apparently, Mary has been
unfaithful. That’s how it would look to Joseph. He would be within his rights
to divorce Mary or even have her stoned to death. The law allowed that. But
Joseph is n’t just a law-abiding man; he’s a man of compassion. He plans to
divorce Mary privately. That way, she can slip away to live with relatives,
sparing the families any shame. And Mary
does go away to live with relatives. She
goes off to the hill country and lives with her cousin Elizabeth (Lk 1:39–40). Meanwhile,
Joseph, hurting from discovering that Mary is pregnant, is working on the
divorce.
5.
He goes to bed one night, troubled
by all this, and guess who visits him? An angel! The angel tells him, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take
Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his
people from their sins” (vv 20–21). This
is one of the great miracles of the nativity! Not the miracle of the Virgin birth,
but Joseph believing the angel’s announcement. Joseph is a godly man. It
doesn’t even occur to him to question the angel’s message. He simply believes
it and takes Mary home to be his wife.
6.
Where does he get this confidence
and faith? I think it comes from the name the angel tells Joseph to give the
Baby, the name “Jesus.” In Hebrew, it’s “Yeshua,” or “Joshua,” meaning “Yahweh
saves.” In those days, the firstborn son was given his father’s name. But the
father isn’t Joseph. The name he’s to give this Child proclaims who the father
is: God. The Child of Mary is the Son of God who “will save his people from their sins.” So not only has Mary not sinned in conceiving
the Child, but the Child is the Son of God himself who saves sinners. In Jesus,
God has kept his promise to his people, and because of Jesus, Joseph keeps his
promise to Mary. Because of this Child Jesus, doing what his name promises,
saving his people from their sins, Joseph and all who believe in Jesus will
face God on the Last Day with no fear.
7.
Second, there’s the promise God
gives in Jesus’ birth that gives us confidence.
The nativity, or birth, of Jesus was promised in the Old Testament many
centuries before it happened. Isaiah writes these famous words: “The Lord himself will give you a sign.
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name
Immanuel” (Is 7:14). About this,
Luther points out, “[Isaiah] foretells
two signs: The one is hidden, the other open” (AE 16:84). The open sign is
given to Ahaz, the king of Judah. Ahaz was terrified at the prospect of enemy
kings invading his land. But he has nothing to be afraid of, says Isaiah. A
baby will be born, probably Isaiah’s son born to his wife (Is 8:3), and before
the baby even becomes a toddler, those kings Ahaz is so worried about will be
gone. “But,” Luther goes on, “since [Ahaz] resists the Word of God and refuses
a sign, how can his faith be strengthened? Therefore the prophet speaks of a
sign to come . . . a sign of lifting up and building up and strengthening for
those who believe” (AE 16:84).
8.
The writers of the Bible have a gift
you and I don’t have, and that’s divine inspiration. Writing under inspiration
of the Holy Spirit, Gospel writer Matthew explains the other sign Luther was
talking about, the sign hidden from unbelieving Ahaz. Something far more
amazing than a baby born to Isaiah’s wife. This is the virgin birth of Christ. What’s so amazing about it? Well, virgins
don’t have babies, unless God makes it so. The power of the Holy Spirit
overshadows the Virgin Mary, and she conceives a child, Jesus, who has come to
save us.
9.
Thank God! Because if we take sin
seriously, then we know there’s no way short of a miracle we can face God on
Judgment Day and live. God is holy, and sin can’t exist in his presence. We
need to be perfectly holy or we can forget about seeing God and living to tell
about it. But we aren’t holy and never will be, short of a miracle. Christmas says the miracle we need has
happened. The unapproachable God has taken on flesh in the Virgin’s womb and
has been born as a human baby. He is Jesus, whom you and I are invited to
embrace by faith. When you and I trust Jesus, God declares us holy, able to
live in his presence, now and forever.
10.
In 1992, Jason Bohn, a student
golfer, was playing in a charity fund-raiser. He made a hole-in-one and won a
million bucks. Jason Bohn stayed out
late drinking the night before and just wanted to get his shot over with and go
home to bed. He’d signed up on a whim. He expected nothing. He was a very
mediocre golfer. It would take a miracle for him to be anything else. His turn
came. He connected with the ball. It went 135 yards, hopped two times, and
dropped into the cup for a hole-in-one! Taking
his million in annual payouts over the next twenty years, Jason Bohn polished
up his game, made it to the pros, and became successful on the PGA tour. It
took a miracle for him to get anywhere near the big names in golf. He got his
miracle.
11.
It takes a far greater miracle for
you and me to get near God. Guess what? God has given us that miracle. The
Virgin has conceived and given birth to Jesus, the Savior. By faith in this
miracle Baby, we stand and live in the presence of God, now and on the day he
comes again.
12.
Finally, there’s the promise God
gives in Jesus’ title that gives us confidence.
Besides telling Joseph to give the Baby the name “Jesus,” the angel also says, “They
shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)” (v 23). God has
miraculously intervened in human affairs. That’s what the name, really the
title “Immanuel,” memorializes. In the Old Testament, the miraculous event
memorialized was the birth of a child as a sign to King Ahaz that God was with
his people. Before the child was weaned and could tell the difference between
right and wrong, the evil enemies of King Ahaz would be gone. King Ahaz needed
a sign of God’s presence. The birth of a baby was that sign. Just as Isaiah prophesied, within a few
months of the baby’s birth the king’s enemies were gone and Judah was safe.
Clearly, God was with his people. The baby wasn’t God, but he demonstrated
God’s presence. That’s why that particular baby was to be called “Immanuel.” But in Luke’s Gospel, the birth of Jesus is
more than just evidence that God is with his people. As in Old Testament times,
Israel’s survival is threatened. The people are oppressed by Rome. Revolt after
revolt by the Jews are crushed. Has God abandoned his people? No! A Child is
born to a Virgin. He is named Jesus because he will save his people from their
sins—not from the Romans but from sin.
13.
The cross and the empty tomb would
be 30 years later. So how is Jesus’ birth a sign that God is with his people
till then? That’s where his title “Immanuel”
comes in. With the birth of Jesus, God is with his people, not in symbol, but
in fact. Because Jesus is God. In
orthodox theology, the Virgin Mary is called “Theotokos,” Greek for “mother
of God.” Protestants sometimes cringe at the title, thinking that calling
Mary “Theotokos” is saying she’s
superior to God. But that’s not what it means. It means that in the womb of the
Virgin Mary, God took on human flesh and was born as Jesus Christ. Jesus was
God and man at conception, when he passed through his mother and was born, when
he died on the cross, and when he rose from the dead. He is God and man today.
When he comes again, he will still be God and man.
14.
“Immanuel”
tells us all that. Jesus is God with us, and he always will be. He is God with
us in history at his birth. He is God with us in mystery as we receive the
Lord’s Supper. He is God with us when he comes again. As you and I receive
Jesus, our Immanuel, by faith, we are
confident that he will receive us when he comes.
15.
This day is really all about
promises kept. God keeping his promise—the promise made to Adam and Eve when
they first fell into sin, the promise renewed to God’s people through millennia
of Old Testament time, the promise voiced by Isaiah and the prophets—the
promise that God would send his Son, does give us confidence that he will keep his promise to bring us to
be with him for eternity. That is the “merry”
of Merry Christmas!
16.
We close with the Collect for
Christmas Eve: “O God, You make us glad
with the yearly remembrance of the birth of Your only-begotten Son, Jesus
Christ. Grant that as we joyfully receive Him as our Redeemer, we may with sure
confidence behold Him when He comes to be our Judge; through the same Jesus
Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and forever. Amen.”
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