The Gift of Christmas

INTRO

I gotta say, its hard for me to speak about a gift that I just remembered from when I was young.

Nerf guns one year was awesome! We got a DS one year!

One year I wanted to learn how to skateboard and I asked for one. Got it and immediatley regretted it, never learned how and i was terrified of it.

What is one gift that you got and it can be recent, that you remember being the best?

Do you still have it? Do you still play with it or use it?

TENSION

We all have these gifts that we get on Christmas or even for our birthdays, and they give that immediate happiness! You use it or play with it for a couple of weeks maybe months, and then it just gets put right in the toy box and never sees the light of day again.

I strive to find that joy when I was a kid about Christmas about the presents, but now being older I am having to gift more than what I receive! It stresses me out.

We get so caught up in the gifts that we oversee the true meaning of Christmas. It isn’t about giving gifts. OR receiving, which is all find and dandy.

Gifts we give can come and go. But the gifts that God gives stay with us.

TRUTH

We are going to the OT! To look at a prophet named Isaiah, who God appointed to speak to the kingdom of Judah about where they are heading.

Warning them that with their rebelling…they will be conquered by the Assyrian Kingdom. It comes with a cost.

BUT in the midst of warning THERE IS HOPE.

Isaiah 9:6 ESV

6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

PRAY that God will use His word to speak to the students.

Who is this? A CHILD! Jesus! God is saying that the one that will break the yoke off of His people will come as a child first. And is a GIFT.

Jesus is a GIFT from God. We looked at how He came down born a man, and having the FULL deity of God inside Him. Lived a perfect life, one we could not have and die the death we should have taken. And restored our relationship with Him. Conquering death and breaking the yoke of sin. The one thing that hold us back to being who God truly created us to be.

The whole government, the NEW kingdom that has been established, rests on HIS shoulder.

THIS IS HOW HE WILL GOVERN:

Wonderful Counselor: WISE

Ps 32:8 “8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.”

Go to Him for counseling. What is that? Direction, guidance.

Jesus is the One fit to guide our lives and should be the Christians immediate resource as a counselor. Jesus can help you with your problems.

He may use the words or presence of another Christian to do it, but Jesus is our Couneslor.

Mighty God: STRONG

He is God of ALL CREATION and glory, the Lord who reigns in heaven, and the one worthy of our worship and praise.

Col2:9 “9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,”

Everlasting Father: FOREVER CARING

Is 53:10 “10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.”

Prince of Peace: PEACE

He is the one who brings peace into the world, and will one day all the earth will be in peace.

Rom 5:1 “1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Eph 2:14-16 “14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.”

There will be no end to it.

APPLICATION

With reading this passaged I come to 2 applications