Sermon Tone Analysis

The last few weeks we’ve essentially been taking a microscope and taking a deep deep look at Jesus.

We started at looking at Jesus’ ministry to us as our true and better priest.

Then we focused on Jesus’ proclamation to us as our true and better prophet.

Last week we rejoiced over the fact that Jesus is our true and better king who conquered our sin, death, and satan.

Today, we our wrapping up advent with the amazing, and truly astonishing reality that Jesus is Immanuel, God with us.

We’ve been looking at Jesus under a microscope because the most important question every person has to answer is “who is Jesus?”

This is the question of all questions.

With this in mind,

I’m going to be focusing on what we learn from verses 21-23 today.

This is Matthew introducing Jesus to us: Jesus’ name means “God saves” while the name Immanuel means “God with us”.

Remember, names where important during Bible times.

They were given in hopes of signifying the purpose and identity of the person the name belonged to.

The ESV Study Bible unpacks this for us, in regard to Jesus Christ:

The name “Jesus” specifies what he does (“God saves”), while the messianic title “Immanuel” (v.

23) specifies who he is (“God with us”).

There are Two very important realities for us in this:

We needed to be saved from sin

God needed to be the one to save us

So, what I hope to focus on today is how we got to this point.

“How did we get to the point where Jesus, God with us, had to come to save us from our sin?”

Main Idea

We created a big problem and God came to fix it!

We used to have a good relationship with God

This is because God created us to know him and enjoy him and his creation.

Even though Adam had responsibilities, he lived a pretty good life with God being blessed by God abundantly.

They were on good terms and met and talked freely to one another.

In fact, God loved Adam so much that he gave Adam a wife, Eve.

Adam and Eve were free to live with God and enjoy his beautiful world that he created for them.

It’s important to note that everything Adam needed for life was a gift directly from God.

his body

his breath

becoming a living being

a place to live

food to eat

God was the source of everything Adam needed to survive.

Just like Adam, everything we have now is a gift from God that we need to survive.

We experience his love for us in this fact.

While this is all true, it didn’t stay that way.

Something terrible happened.

We ruined our relationship with God

Because God wanted to protect humans, God gave our great great great great great grandfather, Adam, a command that was clear as day: “You can eat this, but you can’t eat that.

In fact, if you do eat that, there will be terrible consequences.”

The consequence was death.

Remember: God gave Adam Life.

God was his source of life.

Adam’s consequence for not listening to God was God taking away his source of life: Himself.

This would make Adam spiritually dead.

The act of disobeying God is called sin

Sin

The purposeful disobedience of a creature to the known will of God.

Unlike moral evil it is a fundamentally theological conception.

So if Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they would be guilty of sin.

That is exactly what happened.

If Adam and Eve had trusted God and not the devil, they would not have sinned against God.

This one act of unbelief that resulted in sin broke humanity’s relationship with God.

This act led to us becoming God’s enemies.

Our sin made it impossible for us to fix our relationship with God

Now, in the history of existence, God made himself known by speaking through prophets.

One of them, Moses, was used by God to give us priests and the Law.

Which were both understood to help people with the problem that they couldn’t get to God.

The thinking was, if I keep the law, then I can be justified and get back into relationship with God.

The Apostle Paul tells us that is is actually impossible.

So why did God give the law?

God, in His kindness, gave us the law to show us that we could never live up to his goodness.

Our biggest problem is that we cannot, in our own power, be good enough to stand in God’s presence without him having to punish us for our sin.

Do you consider yourself a good person?

Summarize:

no other God’s before me,

don’t worship things you created instead of me,

don’t take on God’s name in vain,

keep the sabbath,

honor your mom and dad,

don’t murder,

don’t commit adultery,

don’t steal,

don’t lie,

don’t covet.

So, if we could never get to God ourselves, what are we to do!?

This is the big problem plaguing all people.

“God is our source of life yet we are completely incapable of getting to him on our own”

Jesus came to fix our relationship with God

This brings us back to the text we started with...

Jesus was born into this world because he is the one who can save us from our sin.

Remember what we established at the beginning.

The name “Jesus” specifies what he does (“God saves”), while the messianic title “Immanuel” (v.

23) specifies who he is (“God with us”).

So Jesus is God taking on human form in order to save us from our sin!

Sin kept us from getting to God, so God came to us and took our sin from us

When Jesus came, he could be described as the fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 because he was God, and so when he was among his people, God was with them (Matt.

8:23–27).

God dwelling with his people was the climactic and greatest blessing in the Old Testament (Ex.

29:46; Lev.

26:11–12), but a blessing hindered by their rebellion against him.

In Jesus, God has provided for salvation from sin and has healed the broken relationship between himself and his people, making it possible for God, in Jesus, to be “with” his disciples “always, to the end of the age” (Matt.

28:20)

That touches mostly on the fact of what Jesus came to do, but, let’s think a little bit more deeply about the amazing reality that Jesus is God taking on human form.

The son born to Mary was a fully human baby who was also fully eternal God

New word for you all:

Hypostatic Union - This describes the incredible reality that Jesus is both fully God and fully man.

Hypostatic Union.

The union of the Divine and human natures in the One Person (‘Hypostasis’) of Jesus Christ.

Think of how God is really really big… Now consider how big a hippo is… It would be impossible to fit a big hippo into a mini cooper... Think about this… Our big big God fit himself into tiny human flesh, which is almost as impossible to think about… But it’s true.