Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRODUCTION

· What is the meaning of Christmas?

People have been asking that question for years and years.

We get all sorts of answers to the question.

Our Christmas movies and shows tell us one thing:

Christmas is a big commercial racket.

–Lucy Van Pelt, Charlie Brown Christmas

Christmas is when we realize the most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.

–The Polar Express

That one isn’t bad!

Christmas isn’t just a day—it’s a frame of mind.

–Valentine Davies, Miracle on 34th Street

This one, on the other hand, is a bit too new-age/Oprah for me.

And of course, Dr. Seuss tells us that, “Christmas doesn’t come from a store.

Christmas perhaps, means a bit more.”

(The Grinch Who Stole Christmas)

Our songs try to tell us as well:

If you ask Stevie Wonder, he will tell you, “Candles burning low, lots of mistletoe, lots of snow and ice, everywhere we go.

Choir singing carols, right outside my door, all these things and more…That’s what Christmas means to me my love.”

The Eagles say that “Christmas is the time of year to be with the ones you love.”

And Run DMC say it’s all about “mom cooking chicken and collard greens, rice stuffing and macaroni and cheese and Santa putting gifts under the Christmas Trees.”

Or maybe we can laugh at the dry, frank language used by GK Chesterton.

He was known for his wit.

He said Christmas is all about sentiment and symbolism and if you don’t care for that, he had advice for you:

If you do not like sentiment and symbolism, you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else.

G. K. Chesterton

We can hear what all these voices say...

But in 1 Timothy 3:15 God settles it once and for all.

He tells us exactly what Christmas means.

He tells us exactly why the first Christmas came to pass in the first place.

He tells us why Jesus was in that manger.

So that is what we will do this morning.

Just one verse with two clear truths for us.

Let me pray for us and then we will read it together.

PRAY and READ 1 Timothy 1:15

WE ARE SINNERS

The first thing we learn from this passage this morning is not good news.

It is bad news.

But if the good news and great joy of Christmas is going to make any sense to us, it must be preceded with the bad news delivered by the Apostle Paul in this verse.

Before we can celebrate that Jesus came into the world to save sinners, we have to face the reality that we actually are sinners.

I think that right off the bat, the true message of Christmas becomes hard for us to swallow because we like to fancy ourselves as fairly good people.

People who are not in need of saving.

In fact, if you know anything about the guy who wrote this letter in the Bible, you might feel more entitled to your case that you are a pretty good person.

After all, this guy in 1 Timothy, who says that he is the “foremost” of sinners—the chief of sinners—he is a pretty rough character.

Before the Apostle Paul was the Apostle Paul, he was murderous bully.

He was a Pharisee—a keeper of the law—who was out making sure the movement of Christ followers in Judea would die with their leader Jesus.

In Acts 8, after the murder of Stephen, the Bible says:

And then in Acts 9, Saul is out on the prowl looking to do more harm.

But Jesus interrupted his plans.

Saul’s whole life changed that day.

He would be stricken blind, make his way into the city of Damascus, met a guy named Ananias who prayed with him, regained his sight, stayed with some disciples there (who were all very freaked out about this murderer hanging out with them), preached the Gospel and escaped the city in a basket after a plan was made to kill him.

And this Jewish man who sought to kill followers of Christ, ends up being known as Paul.

He takes on a non-Jewish name after his conversion and spends the rest of his life taking the Gospel to non-Jewish people!

It is an amazing story of change and transformation, but you might be sitting there thinking, “Well of course THAT guy had to be saved.

He was murdering people and destroying families.

There is no way God looks at me the same way!”

I take care of my family

I pay my bills

I’m friendly with my neighbors

I don’t do drugs

I volunteer in the community

Sure, I am not perfect—but I am generally a good person.

Surely I am the sort of person who does not need saving.

And what I would graciously suggest to you this Christmas morning, if indeed this is how you are looking at things, is that your whole view of morality is missing the mark.

Your view is, “As long as I don’t do anything that would make me bad person by societal standards, I should be considered good.”

And that means that God should consider you to be good as well.

He should be count your societal goodness as being worthy of His acceptance and eternal life.

Essentially, it is the Charles Dickens morality.

As long as I am not a greedy crook who skims off the backs of the poor and makes them work on Christmas Eve, I am okay.

“I give to charities, I eat turkey with Bob Cratchit and I am a nice person.”

When God judges me at the end of my life, I shouldn’t be in chains forever like that bum Jacob Marley.

I should be eternally free.

But here is how the Bible deals with morality.

It is framed up by how the Bible starts.

It starts with good God creating the heavens and the earth.

And a good God’s spirit hovering over the face of the waters.

A good God saying, “Let there be light.”

A good God filling the seas and the earth and the skies.

And ultimately a good God creating human beings in His own image.

And this good God, who is perfectly holy, created a world that was perfectly holy and people that were totally righteous.

And He ruled over the earth and empowered the first people, Adam and Eve, to rule on the earth as His representatives.

This was the moral ideal.

God in heaven, people ruling the world according to His direction and everything is right in the world.

But in Genesis 3, sin enters into the world:

The good God who gave Adam and Eve thousands of trees to eat from told them not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

If they did, they would surely die.

And they doubted God’s Word and God’s trustworthiness and they ate from that tree and sin entered into the world.

And now, just as God had promised, Adam and Eve were going to die one day.

They were now separated from God.

They were no longer perfectly righteous.

The world was no longer perfectly good.

And Adam and Eve’s children were born by sinful parents into a sinful world.

They were born sinners—separated from God.

And so it has been with every child born since.

The moral ideal is gone now.

God is still good in heaven, but the people ruling the world do it according to their own desires and not God’s direction.

Everything is not right in the world.

This is what sin does.

It breaks things.

Sin is a thief.