Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Introduction:
Who here is excited for Christmas?
I am.
Who wouldn’t be.
Everyone gets excited for Christmas, but no where are we told to celebrate it.
It is not in the Bible.
There was no commandment.
Why do we celebrate it?
It is neither an ordinance nor a sacrament.
Sacraments are traditions, and practices that one must do to become saved.
They are required.
Ordinances are traditions or practices that are commanded to do.
But they aren’t required for salvation.
There are no sacraments that the Bible says you need other than putting your faith in christ.
There are 2 ordinances though:
Baptism.
Communion.
Anything else is not in the scriptures.
Easter, Christmas, etc.
Some have found problems with celebrating things that the Bible doesn’t spell out verbatim.
This is not how God works though.
There things called the adiophora.
These are things that are not commanded nor condemned in the scripture.
They are things that God gives us the liberty and the will to do.
I believe Christmas is an adiphora.
But the problem is that when people celebrate something, it becomes robotic.
We just like doing things to do them, and they just become a tradition.
God had
God is a fan of celebrating holidays and festivals.
He did this in the Old Testament many times.
I believe His intention behind anything is to have them remember an event or lesson.
That is what I want to accomplish tonight.
I want to bring us back to why we are celebrating a holiday that isn’t commanded by God to celebrate, but maybe His spirit inspired and stirred up some ancient people to do out of liberty.
I want to help us understand why we should be excited about Christmas, more than the gifts and the cultural phenomenon it has become.
When we celebrate something with meaning and intention, it can change our lives.
What is the Christmas story?:
Most of us always think of mangers and wisemen.
We think of a baby being born into a hard situation.
We think of angels and Mary and Joseph.
Most of our biblical thought of Christmas come from the beginning chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
They are the main sources and they are describing the events of Jesus being born.
There is another of the 4 Gospels that records the Christmas story, but most overlook it.
;
What is the word?
John is responding to the Greek philosophers of the day.
They taught that everything that exists, preexisted in a thought.
Words are symbols or representatives of a thought.
So the two were synonomous a word and a thought.
John is taking it a step back.
In order to have a thought you have to have a thinker.
A thinker is a mind in essence.
So John takes this idea full circle for his audience.
What John does in these first few verses, is explain what where and what Jesus was doing before Christmas.
The when is before He was born.
He was with God.
They were before time or anything else existed.
They were together.
Have you ever tried remembering back all the way to your first memory?
The farther back you get, the more you will come to a vanishing point.
God and Jesus existed before a vanishing point.
In eternity.
The word for ‘with’ here in Greek is not what we should translate the word as.
When it says that Jesus is with God, it is the word ‘pros’.
That can mean that they were looking at each other face to face from eternity past as equals and partners.
John is showing that Jesus is God.
It is even more obvious from verses 2-4.
He is the creator.
John also introduces Jesus as two other symbols.
As life, and the Light of men.
John will go on to use this symbol of light, and He will use it in His version of the Christmas story.
John 1:9-
What John does in this chapter is echo the creation passage in Genesis one.
The very first verse of the Bible says that God created the light out of darkness.
Now we have this same imagery being echoed in a different way.
John is describing the Christmas story.
God who is light, came into the world.
This is described in Matthew and Luke from a worms eye view.
We are getting a bird’s eye view.
If you could see the effect that God becoming a man could have, it would be like watching utter darkness, and then that darkness being consumed by the light of God.
The darkness is us and it says that we did not comprehend it.
Think about that.
The nature of light is that it reveals realities that were not known before.
It helps us to understand our world and yet we could not understand it.
Think about that… The author became a character in His story.
This is a common thing that authors do.
They will insert themselves and this will often affect the whole characters as a turning point for the characters.
God came down to His creation, and we still wanted darkness.
Because, people do not want light.
We want to have our own little darkness.
But there isn’t anything we can do to expunge the light.
It works the other way around.
Not only should we be celebrating the birth of God becoming a man....but what that means for us.
God could have become a man to come down and enslave His wayward creation.
He could have come down, and done so many things.
I think the problem most of us have is, we just take things for granted.
He came down, and those who believe in Him, and receive this light have the right to become His child.
Not by the will of man, or flesh, but only by His will and power.
We should celebrate with the understanding that we are only celebrating His birth.
But the fact that we can be and have been reborn, with His light.
I hope this means something to you tonight.
I hope there can be excitement for what He has done, and what you can be.
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