We don't like being trapped in a claustrophobic space
with no escape.
Only our problems for company, do we?
In fact, for myself, when I feel the weight
and pressures of this world,
one of the best remedies for me is to get outside
and the great expanse and wide open,
to go out into my front yard and to sit underneath the sky
or to look at the stars in the sky.
The last thing I want is the cramped claustrophobic space
in my own head or my own heart or my bedroom
with the problems to keep me company.
And we may not like it, but it's also true
that our problems and our difficulties
and our sufferings in this life,
they actually have the ability to shrink our world.
They shrink our world.
If you're having financial problems, for instance,
it's almost impossible to have big, spacious dreams
when you are struggling to make ends meet.
To put food on the table or to pay bills
or maybe you're having marital problems.
It's hard to have a vision for hope
or a vision of hope for the future.
Everything shrinks down to our problems.
Each day is focused on managing our problems.
Sure, there may be a wishful longing for a better future.
We all have that, but plans can't be made
until the problem is fixed.
Even economies, world economies don't like uncertainty.
They don't like, if you have any investments, you know this.
World economies don't like uncertainty.
Instead of expanding and growing,
economies shrink back in the face of looming issues.
Well, it doesn't take much looking around for us
to see the problems of our world, does it?
They are in the news each and every day.
They are filling our timelines on social media.
They are the conversations that is oftentimes
the easiest to have with a stranger.
Back in the day, we used to make small talk
about the weather.
Now, we make it about wars, about political corruption,
about pandemics and more.
We are inundated with all of this
and it can make us easily feel like we are locked
in the smallness of a world of darkness and gloom.
This is nothing new for humanity though.
Ever since the fall of humankind into our sinful rebellion,
we have lived in dark days.
In fact, all the darkness we experience out there
and in here is a result of the tumbling of humanity
into the undoing of God's good creation because of sin.
Humanity, which was once the crown of creation,
the God of sin, was a symbol of the darkness
and the darkness of the world.
The guardians of God's special work
now stumble about in the darkness
and the smallness of their world
as echoes of Eden call out to them
and only impressions of the glory that they once were
seen in pale reflections and dirty mirrors.
Sure, this is nothing new,
but it keeps popping up in the timeline, in the history.
There's something else that keeps popping up
and visiting humanity even in its darkest place.
It's beams of light that cut through the darkness
and stir in the heart of humanity a hope.
In Isaiah chapter nine, it is said,
it is something like this.
People walking in darkness have seen a great light.
A light has dawned on those
who are living in the land of darkness.
Maybe this darkness isn't all there is to life.
Maybe the problems, the suffering, the pain of defeat,
the desolation isn't it.
Maybe there's more to the story.
And this proposition keeps breaking through,
keeps breaking through and it's carried along
one generation to the next in the songs that we sing
and the stories that we tell
and in the practices and yearly rhythms that we keep.
In fact, if you are here today,
you are keeping one of those yearly rhythms,
light beams breaking through the darkness.
This is one of those moments.
Christmas reminds us of the time
where the script was flipped,
where what seems to always be and just the way it is
got rewritten and Christmas is an invitation
to enter a real life story.
A reality that is far more spacious
than you or I could ever imagine.
C.S. Lewis once wrote in the Chronicles of Narnia,
the last battle in a dialogue
between a couple of the characters talked about a manger
and that a manger once had something inside of it
that was bigger than the whole world.
A manger once had something inside of it
that was bigger than the whole world.
What was that something?
That was bigger than the whole world, what was that something?
What was in the manger that was bigger than the whole world?
Well, it was a someone,
a someone whose very presence on this earth
was an act of love,
an act of love toward rebels and sinners.
It was an act of self-giving
from the giver of life himself.
That something in the manger
that was bigger than the whole world was a gift.
And we read about that gift in John chapter three verse 16,
one of the most famous verses
or the most famous verse there is.
For God loved the world in this way.
He gave his one and only son
so that everyone who believes in him will not perish,
but have eternal life.
For God loved the world in this way.
The first point I wanna make today
is number one, God enters.
Just like our actors up here came on and off
stage, they entered the scene
and they began to do their work,
so God enters the scene.
And something that we need to remember
is that love is an action.
We often think of love as a feeling,
but love is an action and is measured in action.
It's not just any sort of action.
It is primarily the act of self-giving.
Love is self-giving.
When someone truly loves another person,
they give themselves to them.
The more fully, the greater measure the love.
So how great is God's love for us?
He enters our world.
The eternally existing God enters the person of Jesus,
takes on flesh, takes on flesh,
and a human nature and is born, a baby.
We heard throughout that presentation the refrain,
oh come, oh come, Emmanuel.
Oh, you may be wondering, who's this Emmanuel guy?
When does he come?
When does he show up on the scene?
Well, Emmanuel means, it's an old Hebrew word,
and it means God with us, or God is with us.
And so the song that we sing is a cry.
It's a longing to have God with us, to have God present,
because where God is, all things are made right.
Oh come, oh come, God with us.
The story doesn't end with just a baby in a manger.
No, that baby grows up to experience our pain
and our suffering.
He knows what it is to grow through all the stages
of adolescence.
He knows what it is to be a young child.
He knows what it is to be a teenager.
He knows the loneliness of despair.
He understands the social outcast.
He walked the hardest miles that we have ever walked.
He understands the pain of the world.
He understands the pain of a beating,
the sting of a whip, and the tearing of flesh and bone.
He experienced it all, even our death.
Every other religion will tell you that you must work
your way through good deeds and good living,
earning your way up to God.
You must climb the mountain, doing the good deeds,
doing the works, earning your way one step at a time,
pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to get up that mountain
up to God.
Every other religion will tell you that.
Christianity is different.
Christianity says that God came down to us.
In all of our weakness and in all of our failing,
God enters our story.
This is the greatest gift ever.
Some of you guys are gonna get some good gifts
in the next 24 hours, some pretty, pretty good gifts.
None will be greater than the gift of God
entering into our story.
But not only did he enter, number two, he acted,
or he acts.
The self-giving of Christ isn't only in his coming to us.
It reaches his apex where?
At the cross.
At the cross, if God came and he experienced our plight
and he understood our suffering, and he got down to our level,
and then he went, man, that sucks.
Whew, that's rough.
I'm gonna head home.
Hope it works out for you guys.
That would not be enough.
That would not be good news.
There would be no gospel in this.
That would just be sentimentality.
That would be, man, I feel your pain.
But nothing would change in our situation,
but that is not what he did.
God enters and then he acts.
He doesn't leave us in our despair
to figure out a way for ourselves.
This is, again, how we know the full measure
of the love that God has for us.
No, he acts by doing the one thing
that we could never do on our own.
He acts in a way that, the one way that we could never do
on our own, he takes on himself,
this is that self-giving of love,
he takes on himself the penalty for our sins.
And he pays for them at the cross.
Everyone is under the curse of sin and death.
Every one of us.
Everyone has participated in the treason against heaven.
Everyone has lived for themselves
and lived for their own gain.
Everyone has placed themselves at the center of the universe
and in doing so have stolen glory
that is reserved for God and God alone.
It is God's love that demands justice.
God's love is so fiercely wrathful
toward the destruction of what is good
and glorious and true,
he cannot let that treason just stand.
And because the offense is so great,
the love of God displayed in wrath toward sin
demands a penalty that matches the crime.
And the only just penalty for the treason of sin
and rebellion against heaven
is that you would be separated
from the eternal source of life.
Eternally.
I'm telling you, you can crack your piggy bank open at home,
you can take off all of your couch cushions
and go looking for quarters,
and you can never find enough of anything
to satisfy the debt you have before the Lord.
The debt of sin.
You and I are hopeless.
But Jesus paid the penalty.
Jesus could pay the debt.
He took the punishment that's yours in mind
to pay for it, and instead, he paid for it
with his own death.
Only a human, only a human could stand
in substitution for you and I.
We're humans.
This is an affliction of the human race,
and so only a human could stand
on behalf of all humanity.
And only a perfect one could stand
before the judgment seat, guiltless on his own,
undeserving of the punishment.
See, if he had been guilty of his own sin,
and he stood before God,
he would have first had to been punished for his own,
and that would have been the result of death,
and there'd be no salvation for you and I.
But we have a perfect human
who can pay the substitute for you and I.
But how can this perfect human
stand under the judgment of death
because of the guilt of our sin?
Because he's God.
He's not just human.
He's also God.
And God can endure the penalty,
and God can triumph over death.
And therefore in Jesus we have the perfect human,
divine, two natures together,
the perfect God man who could take away
the sins of the world.
John 3, 16 says that we were perishing.
A lot of people want to believe,
oh love, man, love conquers all,
and it's applied to everyone.
The Bible says that we're perishing.
The Bible says that we're lost.
The Bible says that the just penalty
for our lostness is death
because our lostness is a result of sin
and rebellion against God.
And yet the Bible also says that we were perishing,
but we don't need to perish
because God so loved the world.
He loved the world in this way
that he gave his only son
that anyone who would believe in him
does not need to perish,
does not need to be lost.
And that leads to the final point,
which is God saves.
For God loved the world in this way.
He gave his one and only son
so that everyone who believes in him
will not perish,
but have eternal life.
The good news this morning
about the gospel of Jesus Christ
is that no amount of working,
no amount of money,
no amount of anything can buy your way
into the salvation of God
because God, it is a gift.
It is a gift,
as many of you will receive
tomorrow for Christmas.
So it is a gift.
And you receive it by believing
and trusting in God's work.
That gift is believed and received,
is received by believing and trusting
in Christ's act of love on your behalf.
C.S. Lewis, who already got a little,
I dropped his name a little earlier,
he's one of my favorite authors,
and therefore I'll drop his name again.
He once wrote about how so great
a God could come down.
How could so great a God come down from heaven
and take on the state of a lowly human?
Why was that the plan?
Why did that, and why did he condescend to our level
to such a humble place?
And Lewis, in the way that C.S. Lewis can only do,
he begins to talk about, well, you know what?
The truth is that in order for any strong man
to lift up something heavy,
to lift up anything heavy,
what does he have to do?
He has to stoop.
He has to get down.
To pick it up.
And if it's super heavy, he has to get really low.
He has to get underneath it.
He has to feel the weight of it on top of him
before his strength can triumph over that thing.
To lift something heavy up, he must stoop down
to the level of that something.
And if it's a big something,
he might even be hidden underneath it for a while
until his strength engages and lifts that thing up.
Jesus Christ came and stooped down.
He got his hands under the burden of humanity's sin,
and he felt the whole weight of it upon himself.
And by the power of the Holy Spirit,
as the eternal God man,
he stood up and lifted us all up on his shoulders.
We didn't have to climb the mountain.
Christ did the lifting.
Lifted us up before God.
All we must do is receive.
In the coming of Jesus,
we see that the all-powerful God stooped down to our level,
that he might lift us all up by his eternal love
into and unto eternal life.
To borrow from another great author, J.R. Tolkien,
because of Jesus,
one day everything sad will come untrue.
Everything sad in your life
because of Jesus can come untrue.
We say some things, you know,
some things become true,
some things come to be true,
but they don't come true.
Some things come to be true.
I'm looking forward to the things that come untrue.
The pain, the suffering,
the despair, the hopelessness.
All of these can come untrue.
And that's our invitation this morning,
this Christmas morning.
You are invited to escape the smallness
of an existence marked by fear and marked by shame.
You are invited to escape the smallness
of an existence marked by anxiety and hopelessness.
And instead you are invited to enter into the reality
of what God has done and given to you.
And I want to invite each one of you to believe him.
Friends, believe him.