Advent - 4 - Love

Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25

Matthew 1:18–25 NIV

18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. 20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). 24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25 But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

12/21/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes: Standard

Opening Prayer:

Loving God, we confess that we often doubt Your promises. We struggle to trust Your presence among us. Forgive us for our lack of faith and disobedience. Open our hearts to receive the gift of Your Son, Jesus Christ, and help us to live in the light of Your love. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Love

From Receiving to Responding

This Advent season, we've focused on hope, peace, and joy. Have you noticed something? Most of what we've talked about requires nothing from us. We set our eyes on Jesus as our hope. We let Him hold us in His peace. We receive His joy as we wait in His presence. We watch what Jesus does in our lives.

That can be uncomfortable. We're more accustomed to doing than being. We like being the main actors in our own stories. But Advent invites us into another way: to step back and let Jesus take the lead. When we find ourselves in supporting roles, we begin to discover what God really wants us to do and how we can live out a story we could never write on our own.

Today, we turn to love. Love is different from the themes we've explored because it asks something of us. It calls us to respond actively to all that God is doing.

This brings us to Joseph. In Matthew's gospel, we glimpse what this season cost him. Matthew pays careful attention to how God fulfills His ancient promises through ordinary people who entrust their lives to Him, and Joseph is one of those people. His story is not comfortable. God called him into an impossible situation and asked him to love when it would have been far easier not to. In Joseph, we see what it looks like to receive hope, peace, and joy from God and to respond with love even when it costs everything.

Walking the Harder Path

Joseph chose to love Mary, and that was no easy choice.

Scripture tells us Joseph was a righteous man, which means he lived according to the law to the best of his ability. He was raised in a family that taught him faithfulness and gave him an honest trade as a carpenter. In Nazareth, he found a way to honor God without drawing trouble from the Roman authorities. That was no small feat in those days.

Godly people don't just work for their own benefit. They care about their community, lift up those around them, and teach their children to do the same. They understand they are blessed to share that blessing with others. Communities treasure people like that.

Joseph was that kind of man. That single word, righteous, meant everything in his community. It meant people trusted him. It meant families wanted their daughters to marry someone like him. It meant when he gave his word, people believed it. His reputation brought good work, which allowed him to provide for himself and for his future with Mary. Joseph had spent his whole life building that reputation, and it was the most valuable thing he owned. Not his carpentry skills, not his savings, not his connections. His good name before God and his neighbors.

When Mary told Joseph she was pregnant, his world stopped. The child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, she said. This was the Messiah, come to save the world. I don't know if Joseph even heard any of that at first. That opening revelation was enough to disrupt his entire life.

Even after he grasped the full truth, they both realized quickly that no one would believe it. That left Joseph with two choices. He could divorce Mary quietly, letting her shoulder the shame alone while he preserved his standing. Or he could stay silent and let whispers fill the mouths and ears of everyone around them. If he stayed, people would no longer see him as that godly man. He would lose his name, his status, possibly his work. In the eyes of his community, his friends and family, he would become just another one of those guys.

Ironically, if Joseph had not been godly, this would have been easier. He would have had nothing to lose. Stay with Mary or leave her. No one would judge him any worse than they already did.

God knew the impossible situation He had placed Joseph in. That is why He sent an angel in a dream saying,

"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" (Matthew 1:20–21).

Matthew adds that all this fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:

"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel," which means God with us (Matthew 1:22–23).

With God's assurance, Joseph chose the harder path. He entrusted his life to God's promise and found his place in God's greater story.

Loving Before Seeing

Joseph loved Mary. And he loved Jesus, too, before Jesus was even born.

In the Roman Empire, an unplanned child's life was worth very little. Men could demand that women end pregnancies with little cost to themselves, especially if the child was not theirs. The Jewish people held a radically different view of children's worth. Joseph, as a faithful Jew, may never have considered abandoning the child. But he was still within his rights to tell Mary that this baby was between her and God, not his responsibility. He could have proposed they wait and begin their family together after Jesus was born, so that those children would receive his full attention and provision.

He didn't do that. The stories surrounding Jesus' birth reveal a man willing to go further than required and give more than expected. Joseph did all of this for a baby he had never met, a child who did not belong to him. Yet he chose to love and adopt Jesus as his own.

Joseph was not the main character in this story, and he knew it. He stepped back so Mary and Jesus could step forward. Why? Because he loved them.

Peter later wrote to the early church about this kind of love: "Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory" (1 Peter 1:8). Those believers came to faith after Jesus ascended. They lived and loved sacrificially for someone they had never met.

Joseph loved Jesus before meeting him. The early church did the same. So do we. And Christ loved us before we knew him. He gave himself for us before we had anything to offer. Now he calls us to love him in return, to trust before we understand, and to follow him into the impossible.

To trust before we understand… To follow into the impossible… What made Joseph able to do that?

Loving God First

Love for God makes every other love possible. Joseph loved Mary and Jesus because he loved God first.

Stated that way, it sounds simple. Love God. Love others. Jesus summed up the entire law in those two commands. Almost everything we preach and teach comes back to them. In some ways, that's encouraging. We spend far longer learning to read and write than learning these two commands meant to carry us through life.

But simple to understand is not the same as easy to do.

Some days, loving God and doing what pleases Him comes naturally. Some days, loving others and considering their good as much as our own feels effortless. But other days, none of that is easy. We face disappointment, hurt, loss, and grief. We encounter people who don't love God or others, some who seem to love no one at all, and we find it agonizingly hard to love them.

That was Joseph's situation. It's the only story he's really known for: the challenge of loving God and others when everything in him resisted. His life could have been so much easier if he didn't care what God thought. But he loved God enough to take the most difficult path. He trusted God enough to walk it, knowing he might not survive. He put everything on the line: his name, his reputation, his livelihood, his life. Not for Mary. Not for Jesus. For God.

He didn't do it for recognition, and he received little. Jesus doesn't mention his earthly father in the gospels. When the people of Nazareth speak of Joseph, they don't even use his name. They simply call Jesus "the carpenter's son." But Joseph was not forgotten by God. He found his place in God's story. It was not a leading role, but it was his role, and he filled it with faith and love.

God calls each of us to do the same.

Impossible Love

We put our hope in Jesus. We let Him hold us in His peace. We celebrate as He fills us with His joy. All of this leads to one place: love. We want to respond to everything God has given us with gratitude and with love.

Yet in that place where we are so focused on Jesus and receiving so much from Him, it's hard to imagine what we could possibly give back.

In Scripture, Jesus shows little interest in acquiring things from people. He didn't demand a percentage of their income. He didn't require daily good deeds as membership dues. He didn't ask for property or buildings. He could have requested a house for rest between his travels, a horse to carry him, a boat. He had connections. He could have asked for anything, and those whose lives he transformed would have found a way to provide it.

With billions of followers across history, he could speak to us from the clouds and ask for whatever he wanted. We could take care of it. But he doesn't want that.

Instead, when you read the gospels, pay attention to what Jesus actually asks of people. He asks for love. Love shared with him. Love shared with God. Love shared with each other. It sounds so simple that we often brush it off.

But read more closely. Watch Peter and the disciples struggle to understand what it means to love Jesus. Look at Joseph and what it cost him to love Mary, Jesus, and God. We begin to see that when Jesus asks for love, it often feels impossible.

He rarely asks his followers to send flowers or declarations of affection. He rarely asks them to serve others' physical needs in conventional ways. Instead, he somehow knows each person's deepest need and meets them exactly where they are. Then he turns to us and says, "Come love them with me."

It always seems impossible. Like Mary, we ask, "How will this be?" Like Joseph, we wonder, "How can I do this?"

In those moments, we must remember the angel's words: "With man, this is impossible. With God, all things are possible." God connects us to his hope, holds us in his peace, and fills us with his joy. These are not extras in our faith but the building blocks that prepare us and put us into place. They connect us to God's power, which we cannot access on our own. They enable us to love God with all we have and all we are, and to love others as Jesus does, even in their impossible situations.

That is what Advent is about. Preparing ourselves. Getting into the right place, the right posture of heart and mind. Eyes fixed. Bodies still. Spirits ready. Hearts filled with anticipation. Because when Jesus shows up, there will be surprises. It will be greater than we expect, more than we hope for.

When we respond to God's love, we answer the call He has placed on our lives. We love Him and others in ways that seem impossible. That is what love is: preparing and waiting to do the impossible, and ultimately, to become the impossible, with God.

Reflection Questions

If you step away from the noise and busyness of this season for just a moment, what do you find yourself waiting for?

As you allow God to be your hope, your peace, your joy, what is that impossible thing He keeps directing you toward?

Closing Prayer

Jesus, we thank you for this Advent season. As we prepare our hearts, minds, and lives to celebrate your birth, remind us that this season is about love. The hope and peace and joy we find in You culminate in love. It's not about what we do. We celebrate because of what You did. Your love waited patiently for just the right time and entered our lives in an impossible way two thousand years ago.

You could have done it all yourself, but You called together and worked through humble, simple, sometimes broken people, those who were good and those who were not. We know You're coming back. We know You wait patiently out of love, wanting all people to share in that love. Once again, You're waiting for just the right time. As You wait, we wait with You. You call us to join You, to be part of Your grand story, to discover who we are, and to love in impossible ways because we are with You.

In Jesus' name. Amen.