Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcement

Please remember that there is no Wednesday Bible Study and Prayer this week or next week.

Instead, please join us for the following events:

On Christmas Eve at 7pm, please join us for Carols & Lessons in the Auditorium; we’ll follow that service with a dessert social in the Activity Room.

If you can, please bring a dessert to share with everyone, it doesn’t have to be homemade, you can just pick it up from Weis or Hometown (or if you want, please feel free to make a dessert as well).

On New Year’s Eve, please join us for a celebration and fellowship opportunity starting at 7pm—I keep mentioning this, but I want to make it clear that you don’t have to stay the entire night.

If you just want to come for an hour, hang out, and enjoy some food with us, but you really want to go home and sleep, feel free to do so; but if you do want to stick around, we’ll be here until midnight.

We’ll have food and boardgames in the Activity Room; and we’ll have the ball drop on the screens in the Auditorium.

On January 2nd after the Sunday AM Worship service, please be aware that we’ll have a quarterly business meeting.

All of our business meetings are open to the public, but I do ask that all our members plan to be here that Sunday for a brief update on the status of the church.

Let me remind you to continue worshiping the LORD through your giving.

To help you give, we have three ways for you to do so.

(1) in-person giving can be done through the offering box at the front of the room.

Or if you’d prefer, you can give via credit, debit, or ACH transfer either by (2) texting 84321 with your $[amount] and following the text prompts or (3) visiting us a gapb.church and selecting giving in the menu bar.

Everything that you give goes to the building up of our local church and the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Prayer of Repentance and Adoration

Call to Worship (Psalm 37:27-40)

Our Call to Worship this morning is the end of Psalm 37. Again, Psalm 37 is a psalm of David in which he writes of the need for Christians to wait on the LORD.

Through the first eleven verses, David encouraged believers to quiet their spirit and rest completely on God; the second section encourages believers to not be discouraged by the seemingly prosperous lives of unbelievers, but to rely on God; and this section ends the psalm by encourager believers to take the long view.

Don’t look at the temporal, but look for the eternal.

Please join me in reading Psalm 37:27-40 responsively.

I’ll read the odd-numbered verses; please join me in reading the even-numbered verses.

Congregational Singing

Joy to the World

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Away in a Manger

Scripture Reading (Matthew 1:18-25)

Our Scripture reading this morning is Matthew 1:18-25, which is Matthew’s record of the birth of Jesus Christ.

I’ve asked Natalie to read our Scripture reading and while she comes, let me encourage you to take note of two things in particular from Matthew 1:18-25: (1) notice that Matthew focuses on Jesus’ birth as fulfillment of prophecy and (2) notice the obedience of Joseph and Mary in a situation that seems completely out of their control and completely miraculous.

Natalie, please read Matthew 1:18-25.

Sermon (Luke 2:1-20)

Introduction

If you have your Bible, please turn it to Luke 2:1-20.

As you turn there, let me give you a brief introduction:

Over the past month, we’ve been working on a series for Christmas titled The Hope of Christmas.

And what we’ve essentially been doing is taken one of the primary themes utilized by churches that celebrate Advent and we’ve focused on that one theme through the entire Christmas season with the purpose of really understanding what hope means.

Over the first two weeks, we utilized what may be considered unconventional passages to show our reasons for hope and what exactly it means that we can have hope.

Week one focused on the fact that God wants to dwell with his people and it is that desire of God’s to dwell with his people that provides the initial concept of hope.

We can have hope because God wants to dwell with his people.

Week two focused on Isaiah 7, which was a prophetic statement concerning the coming Messiah.

I explained that the passage contains two prophecies, with one being a shorter-term prophecy that was meant to validate the longer-term prophecy.

Thus when the shorter-term prophecy occurred, the Israelites would realize that the longer-term prophecy was truly going to happen.

We then realized that the fulfillment of the longer-term prophecy, which was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus Christ, was then assurance that even longer-term prophecies would certainly occur—that Jesus will return to the earth, that he will take up his people, that he has prepared a place for those that genuinely believe, and that we can have hope in the future, because Jesus’ first advent assures us of his second advent.

Last week’s message was the first of our series in which our text was from the Christmas account in Luke.

And in the passage for last week, we looked at Mary visiting Elizabeth and the response that Elizabeth and John the Baptist had towards Jesus, and Mary’s own song of praise.

I explained that Elizabeth, Mary, and John were all responding to the eventual birth of Jesus; and they were responding with great praise because they had hope in what Jesus was going to do—despite the fact that they didn’t really know what Jesus was going to do.

They were filled with praise in their whole being to the extent that they couldn’t help but to sing, worship, and glorify God.

This week’s message continues that account, with our focus being on the birth of Jesus, himself.

And what we see in Luke 2:1-21 is that Jesus’ birth was in God’s control and his birth illicit an amazing response from all.

This morning’s message will cause us to see the birth of Jesus as something that God planned completely and as something that should illicit an amazing response from us.

Let’s read Luke 2:1-20 together:

As we study this passage, we’re going to break it into two parts.

(1) Vs. 1-7 is the Birth of Jesus Christ.

We’ll see a series of different events that all line together to bring about the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, which shows us that God sovereignly utilized different events to bring about the birth of Jesus in a way that fulfilled prophecy.

(2) Vs.

8-20, which is clearly the longer section of the passage, then shows us the response to Jesus’ birth from angels, shepherds, and even the response from Jesus’ parents.

Both sections will hopefully allow us to see the birth of Jesus as something that God sovereignly and providentially brought to pass, which should show us the person who we should have hope in and it should cause us to respond to the birth of Jesus just like the shepherds, angels, and Jesus’ parents.

Prayer for Illumination

The Birth of Jesus Christ (1-7)

Now, I realize that this is a familiar passage for most of us, so let me encourage you to not look at it in that light.

Don’t assume that you know everything about the Christmas account in Luke, but look at this with discernment and fresh eyes.

Vs. 1-5 opens up this chapter with the setting.

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.”

A decree would be a command or a law from an official and its clear that the idea of this law is for the people to be registered.

We typically call these censuses, in fact, we just completed a census a year or two ago, which helps us see what the purpose of this registration was.

Leaders in countries utilize censuses to make decisions, in the first century it was utilized to make decisions concerning military service and taxes.

We know from historical data, that at this time in history, the Jewish people didn’t serve militaristically, they had exemptions from military service, so this is clearly a census concerning taxes.

The Bible gives us some other details that are of some note concerning the setting including who was in charge—at the time, most of what could be considered the “civilized” world was governed by Rome, and thus, it’s clear that Caesar Augustus is the emperor running Rome.

That would be why he has the authority to make a decree.

The Bible also tells us that “This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

Now, in the Old Testament, Syria was its own nation, but in this part of the New Testament, Syria is a part of the Roman Empire, thus, Syria is a region of the Roman Empire.

So, Caesar Augustus is the one at the top, ruling from Rome; Quirinius was the regional leader ruling over the area that Joseph and Mary lived.

Now, you might hear those details and wonder why exactly the Bible is giving these sorts of details, and the reasoning for it is actually pretty simple—it adds validity to the account itself.

Without the name’s of the people involved, one could easily read the account and just think that this is just some fairy tale or story to tell the children, but by including the details of who was leading the nation, who made the decree for the census, and even who was ruling another country nearby, the Bible does two things: (1) it makes it clear that this isn’t just a story, it is an historical event that occured in the midst of other historical events and (2) it makes it easy to verify when this happened—you can look through history and look at the records of censuses being done and come to a rough idea of when this one occurred based on who commanded the historical census and who carried out the census.

This census is a little different in that it required each person to go to his own town for the census:

The idea meaning that they had to return to their hometown to take part of the census, which for Joseph is Bethlehem because he was of the house and lineage of David.

And Bethlehem is the city of David’s lineage.

Vs. 5, then tells us that Mary accompanied him to be registered with him as “his betrothed.”

The Bible then reiterates the fact that she “was with child.”

Vss.

6-7 continues with that thought and tells us that she gave birth to this child in Bethlehem.

“While they were there, the time came for her to give birth.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

I think what’s going on in vss.

6-7, is fairly clear.

It’s clear that she was far along enough in her pregnancy that she gave birth to him while they were in Bethlehem, but there is something that I do want to point out, because the Bible itself points out the significance of this elsewhere.

Sometimes, when we think of the Christmas account we get caught up in the nostalgia of the season and the cutesy story of the Nativity that we have created in our mind and the cutesy image of the Nativity that greeting card companies print and TV shows emulate.

The issue is, that that image is usually entirely wrong: when we think of Jesus being born in a manger because the inn was full, we tend to still have a very clean, almost sterile idea of what this is like.

In reality, the word inn can be translated as guest room; that’s how its translated in Luke 22:11, when Jesus tells the disciples to go “tell the master of the house, The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”

So, instead of thinking of Mary and Joseph going to a hotel-like place, think of Mary and Joseph probably going to stay with someone that they already knew.

It is Joseph’s hometown and thus, they were probably trying to stay with family or friends.

Keeping that in mind then eliminates the idea of there being an innkeeper that’s harshly turning them away, instead, you have to think of this in light of first century homes, in which most homes had two floors, the bottom floor where you would have a small living area, kitchen, storage, and a small area for animals; and the upstairs with the main bedroom and guest rooms.

With that in mind, the picture changes slightly—Mary and Joseph weren’t turned away from a hotel-like place, they arrived to the place where they were supposed to stay and found that the guest rooms were already full, but the owner of the home allowed them to stay in the part of the home reserved for the animals.

Of course, since this is where the animals lived, it would have been dirty, smelly, and not exactly hygienic, but this is where God chose for his Son to be born.

Not in the part of the home that guests would typically reside, not in the clean living area, but where the animals lived and slept.

Mary gives birth to Jesus and in vs. 6, we’re told that she “wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger.”

The wrapping of swaddling cloths was a normal thing to do with a new born in first century Israel.

The fact that she did it herself is significant in that it tells us that they were alone.

When we think of mangers, we typically think of a cute wooden object with some hay sticking out of that, but that’s not what a manger typically was—manger’s in the first century were typically stone and they were feeding troughs.

The animals would eat out of the troughs.