Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: Isaiah 7:14

N:

Welcome

Good morning, and Merry Christmas to you all!

Thank you for being with us this morning as we reflect on, celebrate, and worship the Savior of the world, born in a stable and laid in a manger nearly 2,000 years ago.

If you’re visiting with us this morning, either here in the room or online, I just want to thank you for being here, and ask that you would text the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004 and click the link that you receive back.

That will take you to our digital communication card.

If you could take a moment to fill that out to let us know you were here, we’d really appreciate it.

If you’d rather fill out a card by hand, they are in the backs of the pew in front of you.

If you’re a guest, I’d love to give you a Christmas present to thank you for being here today.

Please come and see me at the close of service for that.

I need to make two very brief announcements this morning:

Announcements

I know it’s Christmas, but we have to plan to “undeck” the halls.

We’ll be doing that at 9am on Saturday, December 31.

Come and be a part of the fellowship as we take down our Christmas decorations.

We are taking up our annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions through December and January.

Our goal as a church is $35,000, and through last Sunday, we’ve received $19,796.

Thank you for your faithfulness in giving and in praying for and about this important offering to support our overseas missionaries.

Opening

Today is the final day of our sermon series The Promise.

We have been exploring the themes of Advent each week leading up to Christmas.

The first week, we discovered that God’s promised hope came in the form of a person.

Jesus meets our deepest longings and is the hope for our present and our future.

The second week, we looked at the promise of peace that was given to the lowly shepherds.

There would be a new government that would come that would bring peace to the world.

Then along with our choir musical, we considered the promise of one small child who would change the world.

Last week, we discovered deep joy in the promise that the Savior of the world was coming.

It is a joy to receive and a joy to share.

Last night our focus was on the promised light of the world which came in Person of Jesus Chirst.

Today we will visit the promise of love that was born into the world in the form of a baby in a manger.

Let’s stand as we are able to as we look at our focal verse this morning, the promise made in Isaiah 7:14

PRAYER (Forest Meadow Baptist Church, Tijeras; Mike Hernandez, Pastor)

There is a very familiar depiction of this love coming into the world, and you may even have it displayed in your home today.

You may have a nativity scene set up in your living room or on the mantle of your fireplace.

Our nativity scene is one of the special pieces that we take special care of.

It’s one of those Willow Tree sets, but with a stable that we found at Hobby Lobby one year.

It is set up on top of our entertainment center, over our television.

Here’s a picture.

But what is a nativity?

What does it mean?

The word nativity comes from the Latin word meaning “birth.”

The nativity scene that we set out each year is a depiction of the birth of the God of the universe into the world as a human baby.

Surrounded by His mother and earthly father, barnyard animals, shepherds, and angels (we don’t have the angel yet), all eyes of the nativity are fixed on the baby Jesus because it is all about His birth.

Melanie and I have two daughters.

Each of them was what you could call a “surprise.”

We didn’t think that Melanie could have children, as Maggie was born 10 years after we were married, and then Maggie turned 8 before Abbie was born.

So for each little girl, we had a lot of preparation to do.

We didn’t have any of the stuff needed for our first child: a crib, changing table, all of the other things that go with having a baby.

And by the time Abbie came along, we had gotten rid of all of that stuff, and we had to get it all again, which was great because we got to have that “preparation” experience twice.

But what an exciting time that was for each baby girl!

Imagining what the nursery would look like, picking out the colors and theme and patterns, shopping and buying and painting and building, praying for them and talking to them while they were still in the womb.

Each time, there was so much anticipation for who was coming, so much preparation for each birth.

This is because we prepare for the birth of the new.

1: We prepare for the birth of the new.

You see, the reason the nativity, the birth of Jesus, is so significant is not because this birth happened one day long ago, but because God’s desire for each of us is for Christ to be born within us even today, for the love of God to be revealed to the world by the way we live.

So, as we finish this Christmas series, what would happen if each of us, full of expectation that God could birth something new within us as we close this season, truly began to prepare ourselves for all that God desires to do?

Our focal passage this morning is the promise given in the Old Testament that was fulfilled in the nativity scene that we are so familiar with.

There would be a sign given to God’s people that they had not been forgotten in their sinful and broken states, but instead, when they see a virgin give birth to a child, they would see the tangible love of God coming into the world to rescue us all.

The implication in this passage in Isaiah is one of anticipation and preparation.

Be ready for this revelation, because it’s coming.

Live your life with expectancy that God would come to us.

Make space in your lives for God being with us.

In the New Testament Gospels, we have two different accounts of the nativity, this birth.

Matthew and Luke each give an explanation of the way in which God came to us in the middle of our mess to be with us because of His love.

In the book of Luke there is captured within the birth narrative a bit of backstory to the nativity.

It begins with an angel called Gabriel, speaking to a young teenage girl named Mary.

The message brought by the angel is that Mary would conceive a child within her womb whose name would be Jesus.

Now, there is a big key to the story here.

Mary is a virgin.

Mary is engaged.

She has not yet been married to Joseph, so this announcement must have been a difficult thing to process.

What?

What do you mean I am going to become pregnant?

What do you mean this child, Jesus, will be the Son of the Most High, a king who will rule over all things?

You see, when God is ready to do something new, it almost always is a disruption.

In a world that is broken and marked by sin, the arrival of love is disruptive.

2: When God shows up, our lives are disrupted.

Mary’s life is taking a turn here that she could have never expected.

As far as she knew, she was about to marry this nice Jewish man Joseph, when suddenly she has been chosen to give birth to the Savior of the world.

This was a disruption, to massively understate it.

Or put yourself in Joseph’s sandals: your fiancée suddenly becomes pregnant, and it’s not your baby.

How do you explain this to all your friends and your family?

“I know that Mary says an angel told her that this baby is not from another man, but how do I know?”

For Joseph, this was a disruption.

For the political power of that day, King Herod was in control of all of Israel.

For this baby to come into the world and be the Son of God, the King of kings, this meant that all the old kings would have to go.

This was a disruption.

This disruption comes because of the promise that God loves His people so much that He would come to dwell with them through this humble young girl.

I believe there are two choices that any person has when it comes to God’s disruption within their life: to avoid it or to embrace it.

I believe that when God is trying to birth something new within us, it will feel like something confusing, something hard, something exciting, something inexplicable, something uncontrollable.

When this happens . . .

what will we do?

Avoid it or embrace it?

Over my 33 years of walking with the Lord, there have been many times when I truly experienced the disruptive love of God in amazing ways.

One such time was when God moved me to get ready for the next step: moving from youth pastor to senior pastor.

I was really reluctant to commit to even the idea of the church calling me into this role.

I loved being a youth pastor, and any change from that would have been an incredible disruption.

But God was hammering me in my quiet times and my prayer life, even to the point of my dreams, just ask the staff and they guys who were in my accountability group at the time.