Do Not Fear - Emmanuel, God With Us

Announcements:

Christmas Dinner-to-go - last day!

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offering box at the back

Pastor Alfieri died. The funeral is Wednesday at 11am at Harbourview Funeral Centre in Thunder Bay. It will be available online - they are streaming it. BUT. if you can’t make that work, and would like to see it, we will open up the sanctuary that day, and play it on the screen.

MOST COMMON COMMANDMENT - Do Not Fear

MY STORY - I grew up in pretty humble circumstances.

KEY POINTS: not anyone important, or excellent, or well known. But God called me, He chose me, and He wants to work through me.\

Who am I? What difference can I make?

The problems are so big, and so deep, and so tough.

How can I make a difference?

Luke 1:28–33 NIV

The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

I think it’s important to note -

Who did God pick?

He COULD have picked whoever He wanted. ELABORATE

What do we know about mary prior to this point? Basically nothing.

Something we DO know, is that they were probably poor. PRESENT JESUS - Give offering ‘if they can’t afford a lamb’

Joseph is a descendant of the line of david - but we don’t have any reason to believe that he was any kind of anything important.

and… that’s it.

So this is God’s first goal - that, in every aspect of His plan, we have no recourse but to say ‘Man, God is REALLY great’.

So, sidebar. When God decides to do something, do you think you’re not the kind of person he’d pick? Because great. That’s the kind of people God picks.

2 Corinthians 4:7 NIV

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

This was the beginning of God’s plan to fix humanity. God’s plan to deal with sin, and all the problems of the world.

PLUS, this was God made man. Divinity in the flesh. The ultimate king of the world. And he puts it into weakness. Into poverty. Into a stable, rather than a castle.

This is the God we preach - the one who doesn’t just tolerate the broken people. He loves them, and brings them in, and uses them in mighty ways. Because

It’s not about what you can do - it’s about what He can do

The story continues.

POINTS: Mary goes to stay with cousin, Joseph finds out that she is pregnant, looks to divorce her.

Matthew 1:20–23 NIV

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. 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.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).

So, there’s already been much surrounding this to make the people involved ask big questions. And this prophesy, this was a core messianic prophecy.

The first, real, big problem is our separation from God

The people at the time, they were oppressed, they were suffering. There was good reason they wanted out.

But, they were missing the most important piece. It’s like haggling over tax equality while everybody starves to death - it IS important, but something else really needs to get dealt with first. You can’t benefit from a tax break if you starved to death.

Or at least - you shouldn’t.

And this is what they missed - and this is what we miss.

whenever we face a big problem, we ask God for help. We say, ‘we need God to send finances’, or ‘we need God to send health’. ‘We need God to fix corruption in government’.

And these things are all true, God comes through in miraculous ways. He can do great and mighty things. I’ve seen it.

But we need to start with the most important issue:

‘We need God.’

We need health, we need guidance, we need protection. But those things are nothing without God first. He’s the first need, he’s the biggest need. We were made for him, and we find our hope and our peace and our completion in Him.

The REASON sin is such a big deal is because, even a little of it separates us fully from God. And being connected to God was the very reason we were created.

The solution to this was when God came and bridged that gap Himself

See, earlier in the bible, he gave the law. And the people thought, ‘this is the way we need to act to be approved by God’.

But the thing was, the REAL purpose of the law, the real purpose of these rules - was for God to show, that they just couldn’t bridge that gap themselves.

So, God saw the biggest problem, and He desperately wanted to see it solved. So He came himself. He knew that we couldn’t possibly make it - so He came over to our side.

And this doesn’t seem like a big deal, except if you know the rest of the story. That, we couldn’t make it - and we were sentenced to death.

And God coming to earth, the divine made flesh, the little porcelain baby that sits in the fake little manger you may have sitting on your fireplace - this was God coming to help. It was God coming to die. And through death, to break the power of death over us all.

This is the message of Christmas

That the God who made us, and wants to be with us, loves us so much that He came down to earth, in the smallest of circumstances, to fight death itself.

He didn’t come in gigantic pomp and wonder, in the biggest castle to the biggest family. He didn’t come so that He would get the worship HE deserved - He came so that we could be free.

So in this Christmas season, whatever problems you may be facing - we invite you to get to know the God who is everything that you need Him to be - and who is everything that He created you to need.

Communion

1 Corinthians 11:23–26 NIV

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.