Immanuel: God With Us
Christmas 2017 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 46:07
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· 3,886 viewsChristmas leads many of us into a deep sense of loneliness. The exact opposite should be true, however. Find out how Christmas is the answer to our deepest loneliness.
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We are in full swing, getting ready for Christmas!
For us, this is a super busy, exciting time of year. There are plenty of activities for us to enjoy, and the kids bring such laughter and fun, since they are still young enough to enjoy the magic of Christmas.
I have to be honest, though. I don’t love everything about this season.
The kids are
However, for many of us, this season isn’t much fun. In fact, it honestly is pretty painful.
I’m not a scrooge or anything. I really do love Christmas.
But sometimes, when we are heading in different directions as a family, stressed and sometimes short with each other, I can feel a little isolated.
Even though I am surrounded by family and friends, we are often so busy that we don’t take time to connect. It can honestly get lonely, can’t it?
For some of us, there are even more noticeable reasons for loneliness at Christmas.
You may be an older adult, and the kids are gone and off living their own lives now, so you don’t have those joyful faces around the tree anymore.
You may be facing Christmas without your spouse, who you lost to either divorce or death. You may be single this Christmas, wishing you had someone there to celebrate with.
Maybe you are a college student or a teenager, and you are caught in that in-between where you haven’t started a career yet, you don’t have a family of your own, and you just don’t feel like you fit anywhere.
You might be here this morning, and you are somewhere in the middle, but you are still lonely. From the outside, your marriage and family look wonderful, you have a job, it seems like everything is together. What no one sees, though, is the fact that you sleep back to back, as far apart as possible, because you and your spouse aren’t even in the same book, much less on the same page together. Careers and kids have drawn you apart, and you feel isolated and alone.
s together. What no one sees, though, is the fact that you sleep back to back because you and your spouse aren’t even in the same book, much less on the same page together. Careers and kids have drawn you apart, and you feel isolated and alone.
By the way, men, don’t think that I am just talking about women here. Although our friendships and relationships often look different, we still know the isolation, the pain, and the insecurity that loneliness brings, even if we won’t own it.
Christmas can be an incredibly lonely time.
I don’t want, in any way, to make light of the loneliness you feel this Christmas. I don’t want to downplay it or overlook it at all.
However, I see a paradox here. The very event that causes us to realize our loneliness is the very event that set events into motion to give us the answer to our problem!
You see, Christmas offers hope in the face of our deepest loneliness.
No, not the overly commercialized Christmas as seen on TV. No, not the Hallmark Christmas where you fall in love with your old high school sweetheart, move back home, and save the town Christmas program. It isn’t found in thousands of Christmas lights or in a Red Ryder BB gun.
For Christmas to bring you hope in the face of loneliness, you have to look back to the very beginning.
That’s what we’re going to do this morning. If you have a Bible, open it up to .
We are going to read all these verses, but I really want to focus in on one phrase in verse 23.
If you walk out of here and only remember one thing, I want you to remember this: Christmas gives hope because God is with us.
We are going to do something unusual for us this morning. We normally like to break one passage apart and look at in depth, but today, we are going to try to take this one phrase and see why it is so earth-shattering.
To do that, we are going to take a walk through Scripture together. If you’re not familiar with the Bible, don’t worry; we are going to try to explain what is going on as best we can so you can leave here knowing just how incredible Christmas is.
If you are familiar with all this, I pray that the truths we cover today will help lighten the load of loneliness on your heart this Christmas as you hear again just how amazing it is that God would come to us.
Let’s start off by acknowledging a foundational truth: God is always present everywhere and always has been. Theologians call this God’s omnipresence.
In , as soon as God finishes creating everything, we see that the Holy Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the earth.
It’s a great picture to us of God’s presence from the very beginning of the world. He always has been present and always will be.
Perhaps the clearest statement of that is in :
Where can I go to escape your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I live at the eastern horizon or settle at the western limits, even there your hand will lead me; your right hand will hold on to me.
No matter how high I go up into heaven or how low into hell, how far I travel to the east or to the west, God’s presence is everywhere.
In fact, God himself says he fills the heavens and the earth with his presence:
“Am I a God who is only near”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“and not a God who is far away? Can a person hide in secret places where I cannot see him?”—the Lord’s declaration. “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?”—the Lord’s declaration.
There is no place in all creation where God can’t be found. He is present everywhere!
That is a good thing and a hard thing, isn’t it? It’s good, because that means God never misses anything. Nothing could ever happen to you that God doesn’t know about. It is also challenging, because that means God never misses anything—God sees every sinful choice and every selfish thought.
He is present everywhere.
Well, if God is present everywhere, then why do we feel alone?
I want to be careful how I say this, because I don’t want to give the impression that God was somehow disconnected from his creation before Jesus, because he was still fully involved and engaged with us.
God created us to have perfect relationships with him, with each other, and even with nature itself.
He speaks, works miracles, and even appears to people throughout the Bible.
Yet, we chose to break that relationship by doing what we wanted instead of what God said.
Yet, when Jesus comes, something changes.
God told Adam and Eve that if they chose to disobey, they would die.
However, before Jesu
Keep in mind that the key concept of death is separation.
When you die physically, you are separated from life on this earth.
When God told them they would die, they didn’t realize what that meant. They would eventually die physically, but they immediately died spiritually and relationally.
That’s why they hid from God in :
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
God was still present, and he was even showing his presence in a unique way by coming and visiting with them.
Now that they had sinned, they were alone and isolated, so they run and hid.
Our deepest loneliness goes back to that moment: Sin makes us spiritually dead, so we are separated from God.
But your iniquities are separating you from your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not listen.
That loneliness finds its way into every relationship, and the Bible shows that we have tried to soothe that ache in our hearts in all kinds of ways.
In , you have the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah.
When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb; but Rachel was unable to conceive.
Leah conceived, gave birth to a son, and named him Reuben, for she said, “The Lord has seen my affliction; surely my husband will love me now.”
She conceived again, gave birth to a son, and said, “The Lord heard that I am unloved and has given me this son also.” So she named him Simeon.
She conceived again, gave birth to a son, and said, “At last, my husband will become attached to me because I have borne three sons for him.” Therefore he was named Levi.
And she conceived again, gave birth to a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she named him Judah. Then Leah stopped having children.
Leah forgot the lessons she learned and would later try again to make her husband love her by having more children.
However, no matter how hard she tried, she always felt alone.
Years later, God delivered the nation of Israel from slavery in Egypt. He used Moses to lead them.
Then, God called Moses up onto a mountain for 40 days, telling him what his people needed to know.
The people worried that Moses had disappeared, so they felt alone in the wilderness. Here was their solution:
When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!”
He took the gold from them, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into an image of a calf. Then they said, “Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!”
When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of it and made an announcement: “There will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.”
They couldn’t find Moses and felt isolated from God, so they decided to make their own.
We do the same thing. Serving God can be challenging, so we decide instead that we want a God we can see, so we serve our jobs or our families or our appetites.
Yet, just like God rebuked the Israelites,
We want God with us, and we want him on our terms.
However, we never find him by making a god of our own.
Even David -
Israel would actually spend hundreds of years trying to work their way back to God.
Over and over again, they would get drawn away from the one true God to worshiping false Gods they could see.
It was so much easier to worship a god they could see than the God who didn’t show himself anymore.
For years, God would send them prophets, warning them to come back to him or he would bring judgement on them for their idolatry.
Finally, God did. He pulled his hand of protection off the nation of Israel and allowed them to be carried into exile.
Jerusalem would eventually fall, and in that moment, it seemed like God had completely abandoned the nation.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah would cry out:
Jeremiah -
You, Lord, are enthroned forever; your throne endures from generation to generation.
Why do you continually forget us, abandon us for our entire lives?
Lord, bring us back to yourself, so we may return; renew our days as in former times,
unless you have completely rejected us and are intensely angry with us.
God’s people had sinned, and he let them feel the full weight of it as he destroyed the city.
Jeremiah wondered if God had abandoned them forever, rejecting them and saying, “That’s it; I’m done.”
Is that where you are this morning? Maybe you realize you have made mistakes, and you may have hurt people you loved dearly.
Maybe they left you, and you are convinced everyone always will abandon you like that.
After all, isn’t that what you deserve?
Maybe your life has been a string of pain, problem, and heartache, and you think you are all alone this Christmas.
You are not alone! How can I say that? Because Jesus is Immanuel, God with us.
Perhaps you can’t point to a major issue where you got off track, though, and it still feels like God has left you. You know you aren’t perfect, but you have tried, but you still feel like God is a long way off.
You have tried, but you still feel like God doesn’t
You could join with the psalmist in praying:
Lord, why do you stand so far away? Why do you hide in times of trouble?
Lord, why do you stand so far away? Why do you hide in times of trouble?
Going back to , couldn’t Mary and Joseph were in the same place?
God shows up to Mary and tells her she is going to be the mother of the Messiah, and all of a sudden, her fiance is ready to divorce her!
What? That’s now how this is supposed to work, right? When you do good things, good things are supposed to happen?
Can you imagine the fear in Mary’s heart as she wondered what life would be like without Joseph supporting her and this baby?
Can you imagine the confusion in Joseph’s heart, where the woman he was getting ready to marry had obviously been unfaithful?
Then, can you imagine this lonely couple, having to give birth miles away from family and anything familiar?
Yet, all of this took place to bring Jesus into the world, so that God would be with us.
You see, Jesus came to rescue a lonely world. He came to bridge the gap caused by sin.
He came for us.
He came to be with us.
He came to take our sin and give us his life so we could once again be right with God.
He came to bring peace and joy and life to our hearts, and to be the ultimate answer to our deepest loneliness.
Listen to me: I don’t know who has left you. I don’t know what is making you lonely this Christmas, but I do know this: God made a promise that this baby would bring his presence to us in a new way.
Jesus took on flesh, lived and breathed and walked and laughed and cried and grew and felt pain with us, ultimately taking our pain upon himself as he died on the cross.
In that moment, he cried out a bitter, desperate, lonely cry.
From the cross, when he had become the recipient of the righteous punishment we deserved, he cried out:
About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Elí, Elí, lemá sabachtháni?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Listen to me: In a real and almost unimaginable way, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, was abandoned by God the Father, and he was alone, taking the wrath of God upon himself and dying in our place.
John would say this about this child who would grow to die for us:
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
With grace and truth and glory we had never seen, Jesus, the most completely human person to ever live, died in our place and was raised from the dead to show that he would be with us forever!
Notice something amazing with me about the book of Matthew.
In chapter 1, Jesus is called Immanuel because he is God with us, walking and talking and taking on our lives. He is present with us in a new way, unlike ever before.
If you fast forward to the very end of the book, right before Jesus leaves earth to go back to heaven with the Father, what does he tell his disciples?
teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Just a few weeks after Jesus ascended back to heaven, the Father sent the Holy Spirit to come and permanently take up residence in the hearts of those who believe in Jesus.
Right now, if you are saved, God is with you, inside of you.
That doesn’t always cure it, does it? We still fight that loneliness because the house is quiet and still and sometimes God still feels distant.
Are you lonely this Christmas?
Jesus is with you.
How do we handle that?
First, make sure you aren’t looking for people to fill the void only God can.
However, if your heart is in the right place, and you are still feeling lonely, hold tight to the truth that God is present, even when you don’t feel it.
Not only that, look forward to the day when we won’t have any separation any more:
Then the one seated on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new.” He also said, “Write, because these words are faithful and true.”
Then I heard a loud voice from the throne: Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.
Every manger scene you see is a reminder of the fact that God came to be with us. We have a promise of his presence now, and we have the certain hope of his promise forever.
You are not alone.
Rest in his presence in your own heart.
Once you know that he is with you, you can then take that same comfort to others who need to know Jesus.
Look in the eyes of the people you see and know. Do you have a neighbor who lives by themselves? Bring the light of Jesus to them by being present with them.
If God could come alongside us, then we should come alongside others.