The music of Christmas.
In the sermon from this Sunday last, I mentioned that in 2012 the BBC published a documentary
that was called the world's top ten richest songs.
The highest grossing songs in the world, three of which are Christmas songs.
The first of the three was by Haven Galebsi and J. Fred Kootz, who collaborated on Santa
Claus is coming to town.
A song that grossed $27 million with a copyright on it until the year 2029.
The second song was written in 1934 by a jazz musician named Mel Tormé.
Mel Tormé wrote a song called The Christmas Song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,
Jack Frost Nipping at Your Nose.
Two tied carols being sung by a choir and folks dressed up like Eskimos.
He wrote it in 45 minutes in the middle of a blistering Los Angeles summer with his
collaborator and they made $20 million.
While it may or may not matter, Mel Tormé does not even celebrate Christmas because
he is Jewish.
Yes, music has the power to move us.
Music has the power to compel us to act.
Music has the power even to change our mood.
As a member of an oppressed, marginalized and disinherited community, I cannot now nor
have I ever been able to sing We Shall Overcome without being moved to tears because music
has a way of moving us.
Music has power which gathers us again to our text this morning in Isaiah chapter number
nine.
Isaiah chapter nine is not a letter.
It is not a story.
It is not a vision.
It is music.
It is the music of Christmas.
And we talked about him as a wonderful counselor.
A wonderful counselor means that his plans and his purposes are always right.
Even if we do not see it right now, there is someone above and beyond us that is able
to conceive the plans and purposes for our lives that we can't even see right now.
Jeremiah chapter 29 and verse 11 says, for I know the plans that I have for you, plans
for prosperity and not for disaster, plans to give you a future and a hope.
Romans chapter eight and verse 28 says, for we know, I wish I had a Bible reader, that
all things work together for good to them that love God and to those who are the called
according to his purpose.
This morning he's not only a wonderful counselor who solves my confusion.
He is a mighty God who shelters me from conflict.
Mighty God.
In the Hebrew El Gebo, he's the hero God.
He is the warrior God.
Mighty God, warrior God, fighting God, a God of battle.
Here is a title that is a source of some severe discomfort and agitation for liberal
theologians and Jewish scholars.
Mighty God cannot be understood as popular exaggeration, royal hyperbole or court flattery.
When within the context of the text and the book of Isaiah itself, one is inescapably
driven to the conclusion that mighty God is an affirmation of deity.
Not only does God love us, but God fights for us.
Mighty God.
Mighty God conjures up warfare and battlefield imagery.
The king with four names is a warrior God, a hero God who would fight a battle greater
than the battle that the Duke of Wellington waged against Napoleon at Waterloo.
He's a mighty God who waged a battle greater than General George Washington and the Continental
Army at Valley Forge against the British.
This mighty God waged a battle greater than the turning point of the Civil War or the
slavery that was fought at Gettysburg.
This mighty God fought a battle greater than the Allied forces under the command of General
Dwight David Eisenhower on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
No, this warrior God, this captain of our salvation would take the battlefield at Calvary and engage
the tightened forces of Satan and sin, death, hell, and the grave.
And when the death was settled, when the battle was fought, when the victory had been won
an empty tomb stands as an eternal monument that we serve a mighty God who not only loves
us enough to be incarnated, but he loves us enough to die for us.
And to die for us, he had to do battle with Satan and sin.
Sunday morning when he came out of the grave, an empty tomb is there to prove that the battle
was won in our favor.
Brothers and sisters, I want you to walk with me as a hurry.
Jesus is God's grace.
Jesus for us is God's grace.
He is victory over death.
Now here is what you deserve.
Here is what I deserve.
We deserve eternal damnation.
We deserve death because the wages of my sin and yours is not life, but death.
We deserve to be in hell this morning.
That's nothing that we bring to God that can assuage God's wrath towards us except somebody
die in our place.
The jest for the unjust, the righteous for the unrighteous.
And so in order to make his death and his life, his burial and his resurrection make
sense, a child is born.
That's human agency, but a son is given.
That's divine mercy.
For a child to be born, that was human participation.
But for a son to be given, that's divine initiation.
He became what I am that I might become what he is.
He lowers himself.
He lets himself be born in as well contaminated with weakness and sin.
Let me see if I can help us.
The transcendent one condescends.
The creator lets himself be created.
Infinity becomes time bound.
Perfect righteousness becomes sin for us who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness
of God.
Let me put it another way.
If there's a yardstick to measure sin this morning, maybe I'm at three feet and you at
two feet, but the measurement is a hundred feet.
And so it does not matter if you come up to 90, the measurement is a hundred.
So there's some of us in here a little better than the rest of us in here, but all of us
in here deserve punishment because there's so much good in the worst of us and so much
bad in the best of us that it behooves each of us not to look down on the rest of us.
So the summer you looking down your sanctimonious nose at us because you ain't told a lie.
You ain't too much.
And for the rest of you who looking down at us because you haven't committed adultery,
you cheated on your taxes.
The measurement is a hundred, 99 and a half.
Yeah, you got it.
The wages of sin is death.
Now the free gift of God is eternal life.
And so God sent a child to be born and at the same time he gave a son.
And for the first time in human history, instead of the baby looking like its mother, the mother
look like the baby.
He's older than his mother and the same age with his father.
He was wounded for our transgression, bruised for our iniquity.
The chastisement of my peace was upon him.
I wish I had a witness here.
God laid on him the iniquity of us all and through Jesus Christ being born, he is for
us God's grace.
I don't care where you went to college.
I don't care what you drive, what you own, where you live or what you have.
All of us here this morning need the grace of God.
We deserve death, but he gives us new life through Jesus Christ.
I'm trying to hurry here.
Not only is Jesus God's grace, Jesus is God's glory.
He gave us victory over death by becoming God's grace.
And now he gives us victory over sin by becoming God's glory.
Augustine of Hippo, bishop of Carthage in North Africa, one of the most famous of the
early church fathers, posited the notion of human nature in his fourfold state.
In the Latin it's called posse picare, meaning able to sin.
Non posse non picare means not able, not to sin.
Non picare means able not to sin, all three of those I fall in those categories.
Not only am I able to sin, but I'm not able not to sin.
Paul helps us right here, cause Paul says every time, I wish I had a crook in here like
me, every time I have a desire to do good, evil is always present.
Have I got a witness?
The good that I would do, I find myself not doing.
And the evil that I don't want to do, that's exactly what I do.
Oh wretched man, not that I was, but that I am.
I'm able to sin.
I'm not able not to sin, and I'm able not to sin, but I sin anyway.
Can I run that by you one more time?
I'm able to sin.
I'm not able not to sin, and I'm able not to sin, but I sin anyway.
But then this last one, non-pose picare, unable to sin.
Jesus is the only living, loving personality who was incapable of sin.
In order for God to save us, there must be a sinless substitute.
God sent prophets and God sent fathers in the Old Testament, but they were pose picare.
They were non-pose non-picare.
They were pose non-picare.
They were not able not to sin.
Abraham lied and said Sarah was his sister when she was really his wife.
Moses killed a man, murdered him, buried his body in the same.
David took another man's wife to bed, and the cover of his sin had that same man killed.
David's son Solomon had 700 wives, 300 women on the side.
He was not able to save us.
David was a man after God's own heart, but God would not let David be our savior.
But he sent the son of David who is incapable of sinning, and he became my sinless substitute.
Because in order for God to redeem me, somebody had to die in my place.
I'm almost through.
He's God's grace.
He's God's glory.
He's victory over death.
He's victory over sin.
But this mighty God is God's greatness.
Because in him, we have victory over the grave.
We were born dying.
Everybody in here is born dying.
One day if the Lord delays his coming, we're going to have your funeral or mine.
Because each one of us have an appointment with death.
Because of Adamic sin, every one of us will taste death if the Lord delays his coming.
But when you are a child of God, you die twice and recognize that this death, this second
death, this first death rather, is death to sin and death to self so that you can come
to life in Jesus Christ.
And so when you die once, you can live twice.
But there is a second death talked about in the revelation of Jesus Christ for those who
are unregenerate and unredeemed whose names are not in the book of life.
Because I trust Jesus.
Because I serve a living Savior.
My name is not in that book.
My record will not ever come up again from that book.
Because from that book will be judged the dead, small and great.
But my name and the names of those who have been redeemed are written in the book of life.
And when he comes again, we will not be judged about sin because he took caravans on the
cross.
When I stand before God again, it's going to be victory over the grave.
Behold, I show you a mystery.
We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.
I'm talking about believers now in a moment in the twinkling of an eye.
For this mortal must put on immortality.
This corruptible must put on incorruption.
Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, death has been swallowed up in
victory.
Death?
Where is your sting?
Grief?
Where is your victory?
The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the Lord.
But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye step fast, unmovable, always abounding in the work
of the Lord for as much as you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.
So I just want to encourage somebody here this morning, keep on giving God glory.
Keep on thanking God for his grace.
Keep on basking in the sunshine of God's glory.
Keep giving praise and hallelujah to God for his greatness because he didn't have to do
it.
He didn't owe me anything, but I owe him everything.
Have I got a witness here?
God did not owe me to wake me up this morning because I've sinned enough last week that
I ought to be in my grave.
But thank God for grace.
Thank God for mercy.
Thank God for forgiveness.
Thank God he looks beyond my faults, and he sees all my needs.
I hear you, I'm reading your mind.
You say, Reverend, I haven't done anything wrong this week.
If you woke up and your mind was functioning, something wrong came across your mind.
That's enough right there for you not ever to come in the presence of a holy God because
you don't have to commit and act to sin.
You can just think it and it becomes sin.
And that's enough for you to be in hell this morning.
For grace, favor, redemption, the goodness of God in our lives, all of me because glad
this morning for grace, we have victory over death.
We ought to be glad this morning for God's glory.
We have victory over sin.
We ought to be thankful this morning for God's greatness because when this earthly house
of this tabernacle shall be dissolved, we Christians have another building.
We have a house not made with hands, but eternal in the heavens.
The older you get, the more you start looking forward to that brand new house because there
is a leak in this building.
I need somebody who will help me tell the truth this morning.
I don't care how good you look in this morning.
I don't care how well you are feeling this morning.
If you tell the truth, there's a leak in this building.
If it's not your back, it's your shoulder.
If it's not your shoulder, it's your blood pressure.
If it's not your blood pressure, it's diabetes.
If it's not diabetes, cancer is trying to invade your body.
If it's not cancer, you've got to have an operation for some other malady or another.
There is a leak in this old building.
But one day my soul is going to have to move.
And brother and sisters, I'm glad that when my soul has to move, I have a forwarding address.
This world is not my home.
I'm just a pilgrim and a stranger traveling through this barren land.
I'm on my way to my father's house.
Is there anybody here?
Got grace in your life this morning?
God has given you victory over death.
Is there somebody else in here this morning?
Got the glory of God shining in your life?
You've got victory over sin in your life.
But hallelujah this morning, if God is a mighty God, you've got victory over the grave.
Because I'm glad morning, when this life is over, I will fly away somewhere where the
wicked will cease from troubling.
Where the weary can be at rest.
No more suffering.
No more dying.
No more pain.
No more separation in our family.
Because the form of things are passed away.
Have a God to witness here.
We see through a glass darkly.
But then face to face, I will know as also I am known.
You're going to help me close this, won't you?
God has told his disciples one day, let not your heart be troubled.
Come on, you can help me say it.
Come on, use your preaching voice.
If you believe in God, believe also in me.
Because in my father's house are many mansions.
If it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you under myself
that where I am, that you will be also one of his disciples said, Lord, we don't know
where you're going.
How can we know the way?
Jesus said, I am the way.
I am the truth.
I am the life.
No man can come to the Father except become through by me.
Is there anybody here knows something about God's grace?
Is there anybody here knows something about God's
glory?
Is there anybody here shouting over God's greatness?
If he woke you up this morning, that's something to shout about.
If he put food on your table, that's something to shout about.
If he gave you a job in the morning, that's something to shout about.
If you got your health and strength, that's something to shout about.
But here's why you ought to really shout.
Because one Friday, one Friday on a hill called Calvary, he died.
Didn't he die?
But early, early Sunday morning, he got up from the grave with all power in his hand.
I serve a risen Savior.
He's in the world today.
I know he is living whatever men may say.
I see his hand of mercy.
I hear his voice of cheer.
And just the time I need him, he's always near.
He lives, he lives.
Christ Jesus lives today.
He walks, he talks with me, living.
He loved me, dying.
He saved me, buried.
He carried my sins far away.
But rising, he justified.
Freed me forever.
One day he's coming back.
What a glorious day.
Why don't you grab somebody?
Shake somebody's hand.
Tell them he's coming back.
He's coming back.
Yes, he is.
No, he's all right.
He's a waymaker.
He's a problem solver.
He's a burden bearer.
He's a mighty God.
He's an everlasting father.
He's a prince of peace.
He's Adam's redeemer.
Abel's vindicator.
Abraham's sacrifice.
Don't know him, don't you?
He's Noah's ark.
Moses bush on fire.
God's only son.
Mary's baby boy.
Distinctive in supernatural capacity.
Superlative in sovereign majesty.
Exclusive in spiritual beauty.
Radiant in eternal splendor.
Matchless in superlative deity.
He's the God of God.
The prince of princes.
The famerous of 10,000.
Have you tried him?
Won't he open doors?
Won't he make a way?
Say yes!
Yes!
No, he's alright!