Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements

Are there any announcements?

Please pray for Art Stubbs as he texted me this morning to sahre that his dad passed away.

And please continue to pray for Mikey who lost his mother recently.

The next Revelation Bible study is on Thursday, February 10 at 6pm, hope to see you there!

We have an exciting ministry opportunity!

We give away free bottles of water and could use more cases of water.

Thank you!

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to FCC where we worship God in spirit and in truth, one verse at a time, one book at a time.

I wanted to take a moment to say thanks to each and everyone of you for your service to the Lord, to the church, to your families, friends, and communities.

When we surrender our lives church, we move from being a taker to a giver.

And I think it is important to always remind ourselves that Jesus’ ministry is one of serving.

And always remember, “If we are serving, we are not swerving!”

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”

But the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” – Martin Luther King Jr

So let us serve as the Holy Spirit leads!

Read Matthew 2:16-23

Prayer

Lord Heavenly Father,

We thank you that your mercies are new every morning and your compassions fail not!

We have gathered here today Lord to worship you in spirit and in truth and ask that you would fill us with a double portion of your Spirit and that are time together in the Word would be fruitful and life changing.

So come Holy Spirit and do a work in our hearts today!

For our hearts desire is to be more like you, to live like you would have us, and to love like you desire.

In Jesus Name we love You! Amen

Review

We have come as far as verse 16 in this amazing narrative of this Young Child.

And we can see right away that the minute he was born, that not only was prophecy fulfilled, but men wanted to not only worship him, but also to take his life, and there was fierce hostility as we will see throughout this gospel.

Last week we focused in on the seriousness of anger and how it unfolds in a persons life when it is not dealt with:

Anger turns into resentment when it is not dealt with.

Resentment is unforgiveness and if not dealt with will turn to bitterness and we read in Hebrews last week that bitterness defiles many:

So we must forgive church, we must forgive!

Personally, I believe that when we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we come to the place of accepting the forgiveness that he extended to us because of the finished work on the cross.

And it is accepting and believing by faith that we are forgiven that we extend forgiveness to others.

Therefore, forgiveness begotten, is forgiveness bestowed upon others.

The forgiveness of God that we have recieved church, should compel us to quickly forgive others, lest a root of bitterness grow in our hearts and defile us.

Two thoughts and we will move on:

Forgiveness can be an event or a process depending on the level of the offense.

And example of this would be someone cutting you off in traffic for some of us we forgive rather quickly, while others this is a longer process.

Remember last week when I shared the story of Dr. Bigger’s daughter being brutally murdered?

For him and his wife, forgiveness was not an event, but rather a process.

Forgiving my father who had taken his life, was not an event, but rather a process.

But the bottom line is: The quicker we forgive church, the less we suffer!

When I think of unforgiveness, I think of the parable of the unforgiving servant:

2.5 Unforgiveness produces suffering and even torture church...

Who do you need to forgive?

Here is a terrible illustration of what men will do to get rid of Jesus Christ.

If a man is set on his own way, if he sees in Christ someone who is liable to interfere with his ambitions and rebuke his ways, his one desire is to eliminate Christ; and then he is driven to the most terrible things, for if he does not break men's bodies, he will break their hearts.

Herod should have realized that the Magi were not tricking or mocking Him (as some translations put it), but rather it was God working, the One who traps the wicked in their own deceptions:

When we think of Bethlehem we must remember that it was not a huge town, but rather small.

So when he put to death all the male children under two in Bethlehem and its surrounding vicinity, scholars believe it was 20-30 children.

This is third fulfilled prophecy in Matthew thus far, with more to come church.

The first mention of Bethlehem in Scripture is in connection with the death of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel (Gen.

35:16–20).

Rachel died giving birth to a son whom she named Benoni, “son of my sorrow.”

Jacob renamed his son Benjamin, “son of my right hand.”

Both of these names relate to Jesus Christ, for He was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isa.

53:3), and He is now the Son of God’s right hand (Acts 5:31; Heb.

1:3).

Jacob put up a pillar to mark Rachel’s grave which is near Bethlehem and when you visit there on a tour they always point to Rachel’s grave.

Jeremiah’s prophecy was given about 600 years before Christ was born.

It grew out of the captivity of Jerusalem.

Some of the captives were taken to Ramah in Benjamin, near Jerusalem; and this reminded Jeremiah of Jacob’s sorrow when Rachel died.

However, now it was Rachel who was weeping.

She represented the mothers of Israel weeping as they saw their sons going into captivity.

It was as though Rachel said, “I gave my life to bear a son, and now his descendants are no more.”

Jacob saw Bethlehem as a place of death, but the birth of Jesus made it a place of life!

Because of His coming, there would be spiritual deliverance for Israel and, in the future, the establishment of David’s throne and kingdom.

Israel would one day be restored Jeremiah writes and this promise was fulfilled.

But he gave an even greater promise that the nation would be regathered in the future, and the kingdom established:

(Jer.

31:27ff).

This promise shall also be fulfilled.

Very few people today think of Bethlehem as a burial place; they think of it as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.

And because He died for us and rose again, we have a bright future before us.

We shall live forever with Him in that glorious city where death is no more and where tears never fall.

So we see a dual purpose with this prophecy in that it was fulfilled when Israel was exiled and here when these mother lost their children church.

It is only natural to ask the question as to why would the Lord who is overseeing the protection and providence for the raising of His Son not also protect these innocent little children from this murderous and completely undeserving attack by Herod?

There occur some things in life in which we should honestly take the position that we really do not know why the Lord allows them to happen, however we must also keep in mind that He is in control and that all of His actions are taken for the noblest and most benevolent of reasons

It is also the case that many evil things that happen in this life are simply the result of the sin of man and that when God created man as free moral agents that He considered the risk of doing so worth while, knowing of the great good that would later come as a result of the outpouring of His grace upon undeserving men’s lives

It has also been suggested that these babies were the first martyrs for Christ, and that since most believe that Christ’s death atones for the sins of those who do not know any better and have not reached an age of accountability, that these babies will be given the crowns of martyrs in heaven.

It is a sad note here that this verse in Jeremiah reveals that these women ‘refused to be comforted’, for we Christians should never refuse to be comforted, for the Lord will always give us His comfort in all of our affliction if we will but let Him do so..

You don't have to be alone in your hurt!

Comfort is yours.

Joy is an option.

And it's all been made possible by your Savior.

He went without comfort so you might have it.

He postponed joy so you might share in it.

He willingly chose isolation so you might never be alone in your hurt and sorrow.

- Joni Eareckson Tada

God is a God of love and therefore a God of comfort.

I am sure that we can all relate to refusing to be comforted in the midst of pain, loss, suffering, trail and tribulation.

Let’s humble ourselves and allow God to comfort us and much of the time he does this through others.

Here we see Jospeh having another dream and an angel of the Lord speaking to him.

Notice when he knew it was the Lord, he immediately responded church.

He arose and went.

There was no delay.

There is a nugget here church!

There will be times in our lives that God will speak to us go do this or that and should we not respond quickly, we will fall out of the perfect will of God for our lives.

There is other times we sense him leading us somewhere and we do not know where, therefore, we need to wait and pray.

He will often give us greater directions on which way to go or not to go!

How do we learn obedience?