Joy in the Heart of Christmas

The Heart of Christmas

I want to share a few different scenarios, and tell me which ones would bring you the most joy. Are you ready? If this would make you joyful, stand up. If not, stay seated. (Consider having graphics/photos on the screen to accompany each scenario). Here is the first one: you go through the drive thru of your favorite coffee shop, order your favorite drink, and discover the car in front of you paid for it. Joy? Stand up or stay seated. Ok, next scenario. You wake up Christmas morning and find that it snowed four inches overnight. Joy? Or maybe pain because you now have to shovel it. Stand up or stay seated. Last one: you water your Christmas tree enough so it doesn’t become dry and crispy and drop needles all over your floor. Joy or no? (This illustration needs to introduce the idea that our joy often is connected to our circumstances.)

Maybe some of you saw these situations as reasons for joy. This week’s sermon is so important because, for many of us, our joy is reflective of this illustration. Our joy in life is largely connected to the circumstances in our lives. When things are going well, we feel good. When things are going poorly, we feel bad. Our joy ebbs and flows. I believe one aspect of the heart of Christmas is that Jesus came so that our joy would not have to fluctuate with our environment, but could remain steady as we fix our eyes and hearts on Him.

As John began his gospel letter, he gave a different perspective on the birth of Jesus. Rather than tell us his iteration with the shepherds, magi, and manger, he gave us a big-picture explanation of what took place in Bethlehem. What John wrote is a cause for joy no matter what we face in life.

John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.”

The Tony Evans Bible Commentary (I. Prologue: The Word Became Flesh (1:1–18))

This verse testifies to the glory of the incarnation. Conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary (see Matt 1:20), the divine Son of God became a man. He is thus the God-Man—not half man and half God, but one person with a fully divine nature and a fully human nature. He is deity poured into humanity. He is fully human so he cried as an infant, but he is fully divine and gave life to his mother! (Mary gave birth to a child but that child gave her life!). He is fully human so he had to sleep, but he is fully divine and can raise the dead back to life. Our God fully experienced what it is to be human—yet without sinning (see Heb 4:15). He faced hunger, pain, temptation, grief, hardship, and rejection. You face no category of human experience that your Savior has not endured.

Carried and nurtured by the womb of Mary, but Jesus gave Mary life.

As a baby (human), He needed sleep. As God he raised the dead.

As a baby he was hungry, as a King He fed thousands with scraps of fish.

As a man he experienced pain, as Lord he healed the pain of others.

Our God fully experienced what it is to be human—yet without sinning.

You face no category of human experience that your Savior has not endured.

This passage gives us two reasons for a joy that does not have to change with the seasons or shift with our situations. It can be a constant in our lives and a grounding attitude in the face of all the world has to offer.

WE CAN HAVE JOY BECAUSE GOD CAME TO US

Bible Study Magazine, Volume 14 (The Incarnation as God’s Tabernacling (John 1))

The gospel accounts open up by answering similar questions: Who is this Jesus? Where did he come from? What is he here to do? Like a prequel to your favorite superhero movie, the gospels provide us Jesus’s “origin story” to clue us in to who he is and what his mission is. But unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which begin with Jesus’s earthly life, the Gospel of John starts farther back, even beyond history and time itself. John’s origin story begins in eternity.

Bible Study Magazine, Volume 14 (The Incarnation as God’s Tabernacling (John 1))

The Greek word translated “dwelt” here was once a word picture meaning something like “to pitch one’s tent.” It is quite likely that John is making a play on words and therefore a reference to the tents or dwelling places in which God manifested his Shekinah glory in the Old Testament

John offers a different angle to the nativity of Jesus. John is different than the other Gospels in many ways and one is that he doesn’t want to just demonstrate his knowledge of what happened, his writing style can tell us that the people he’s writing too already had that knowledge so he’s rather than retelling what they knew, the historical knowledge, he wants them to know the theological significance of what happened. So, let’s look at that for a moment.

John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Pulpit Pages: New Testament Sermons (I. The Existence of the Word)

In the beginning was the Word. This is a very interesting phrase. In the beginning the Word existed. Before time ever began, Jesus was there. Before God spoke the heavens and the earth into being, He was there. Before the ground upon which Bethlehem would be built existed, the Son of God already existed.

We can have joy because God came to us

One of the issues people have with christianity is that in order to be united with God, to be saved, forgiven and accepted, we must work to be perfect in the eyes of God and anything short of that means that we are failures and doomed but that is not true. One of the greatest things that can rob our joy from us is believing that we are never good enough for God to love and forgive us. We must realize that God came into the world to save us from ourselves, that there is nothing we can do to make God not love us because God knows that we are not perfect, that we have made mistakes so we must remember that we cannot rely on ourselves to earn God’s love and if we do that we will be disappointed.

Story of Paul Thigpen cleaning his kitchen then came home a few hours later and it was a mess. Someone had been cooking and messed everything up again and he was getting upset. He found a note that said, “I’m making something for you dad.” It was signed, “your little angel.” He went from being mad about the mess to being filled with joy. His attention had been redirected from the mess to the little girl he loved. He then could see her hands at work in the mess that otherwise seemed disastrous.

We should look at God the same way, when all we see is one mess after another and we let those times get us down, we get angry, sad, anxious, we should look at the hands that are working in that mess. It can be hard to see the good in some things but when we look for the hands at work we can see God drawing near to us and He is making something when all we see is a wreck of our life. God sees more than that.

The joy of Christmas is God knowing that we could never make it to him by ourselves so He came to us, He came to be us, to put himself into the mess of this world, to know our pain, to know the mess we can make of things, to see the mess that we can’t even control and to show us that in all things He is there, He has always been with us.

Romans 5:8 “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

For Paul, there is not a naughty list and a good list that we have to work hard to escape or earn. The gift of God’s grace is offered to us generously without price because God knew we could never afford it on our own. While we were sinners, Christ died for us. This is why the characters in the Christmas story are so overjoyed—from the shepherds in the field to Simeon at the temple—because the long-awaited arrival of the Messiah meant God had finally come to rescue us.

GOD LOVES US JUST AS WE ARE AND TOO MUCH TO LEAVE US THAT WAY

Some may believe that God simply tolerates us and the things we do but that isn’t true, God loves you, the love that a father has for a child and He loves us with grace and truth. When Jesus came, he came full of grace for his people and this is a gift for his people that knows no end, and endless, matchless grace.

A grace you didn’t earn, you can’t buy it or borrow it, it is given to you so that no matter what you do in your life, grace is given to you but you must understand, this grace while available to everyone, must be received and we receive this grace through faith in Jesus Christ, that he is the Son of God, and through him and only him we are able to obtain salvation.

Wiersbe’s Expository Outlines on the New Testament Chapter 5

God revealed His love at the cross when Christ died for those who were “without strength,” who were “ungodly,” “sinners,” and “enemies,” thus proving His great love. Paul’s argument is this: if God did all that for us while we were His enemies, how much more will He do for us now that we are His children

1 John 4:9 “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”

The Message of John’s Letters (Chapter 14: Does God Really Love Us? 1 John (4:7–12))

John is not identifying a quality which God possesses; he is making a statement about the essence of God’s being. It is not simply that God loves, but that he is love.

In Romans 5:8, we read: 'But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.' This love is not conditional on our goodness. Think of a lifeguard diving into turbulent waters to save a drowning person. The act of sacrifice exemplifies true love. In the same way, Christ’s sacrifice illustrates that God’s love reaches into the darkest places of our lives, offering redemption and hope when we least deserve it.

Think of that lifeguard jumping in to save a life, the coast guard has a boat that is used for training where they strap in, take the boat through the breakers and turn it sideways so when the waves hit it, the boat turns upside down. Why would they do this? To teach them to trust the boat, you see, this boat is designed to always right itself no matter the conditions. Now they could simply tell them about or they could show them, make them go through it to teach them to trust that it will do what it’s supposed to do.

We must trust that God will do what He says and that He will be what He says He is and He is love. We must trust Him enough so that when difficult times are upon us we can find joy knowing that He is with us and we find joy in His infinite grace.

Our heavenly Father sent Jesus to a manger in Bethlehem because He wanted to dwell among us to demonstrate his amazing grace and life-changing truth. We can experience joy in our lives no matter the circumstances because we can be confident in knowing that God is with us, and God is for us.

This Christmas may you come to find at the heart of this holiday a deep and abiding joy because of the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus. It holds the power to change us and to change the world.