Welcome to ECB's Weekly Sermon Podcast. ECB is an international church in Bangkok, Thailand,
with dozens of nationalities worshipping together. We invite you to connect with us from wherever
you are through our website, ecb.asia, or our mobile app. And now we pray that you are blessed
by this week's sermon. Good morning. It is an intense season, right? We know this. There's a
lot going on. Companies are working with their budgets. There's a lot of events, parties. We
have things going on here at ECB as well. And I am reminded with an extra level because I have a
daughter who has a birthday right after Christmas. And so she lets me know every single day,
okay, we're going to get Jesus's birthday out of the way. And then it's me. But the reality is that
we have wanted to invite you into this season of thinking deeply and profoundly of pondering what
the wonder of Jesus coming actually means. It's not just an idea. It's actually a reality that has
come to impact us. And so we have focused our sermon series on unwrapping Christmas, on looking
what it means that Jesus came. And we've looked at hope, this certainty based on what God has said
and promises to do. We have looked at peace, the way he brings shalom and a wholeness to who we are.
We've looked at joy, joy that is not just a momentary happiness like a balloon that you can
pop, but instead it's something that lasts with us deeply there. And all three of these come and
flow out of love, which is where we're turning this morning. God's deep and profound love for you and
his deep and profound love for me. So I want to do something. I want you to, I know you've greeted
one another, but I want you to actually bless one another by saying, God loves you. So turn to the
person next to you and let them know that God loves you. You join me in prayer. Good Father,
I thank you that although in the beginning you were the word and the word was with God and the
word was God, and that all things were created through you, that you made a way to step into our
very existence, to bring your light, your light that is the life of the world. Thank you for this.
Thank you for bringing heaven back down to us. Your kingdom here on earth made known in and through
you, Jesus. This is a beautiful love. And so we welcome this. We anticipate your second coming
with great gladness. And we ask that you Holy Spirit would encounter us right now, that our
hearts would be open to what you desire to do within us as we unwrap and consider the beauty of
Jesus coming to show us what true love is. So have your way. May we willingly surrender in Jesus'
name. Amen. Speaking of love and Christmas, a number of weeks ago when we had our International
Food Festival, I heard this word love quite a bit during that time. So for those of you who are just
joining us, International Food Festival is a time where we represent all the different nationalities
with food. We come together and we have a wonderful party to launch off the Christmas season. What
context did I hear this word love in? It was this one. A number of you came to me and you said,
have you tried the chocolate cake? It's so good. Now, then you followed it up with I love it. And
then you said you should try it. My question for you is that love? So here's my invitation to you
this morning. I want you to pull out your most deeper inner empathy and take on the role of the
piece of cake in this situation. Is this a relationship that is one defined of love? So
think about you being that piece of cake. Do you feel loved by the ECB-er during IFF as you are
taken against your will, you are consumed, chewed up, expended? No, absolutely that's not love. I
love the differences between the two services. We had about 15 teenagers here at the front. Is
that love? Yes, they said. But here's what this represents. This represents the reality that love
is something that is, we're confused about. We may or may not know what love actually is. It's a very
confusing idea and everyone is declaring that they know what love is. So I want to provide a
helpful definition and then we're going to go to the person of Jesus Christ eventually who will come
and show what this love is. So a philosopher by the name of Dallas Willard says the following. He
says love is will to good or willing the benefit of what or who is loved. Now leave it to a
philosopher to make a sentence as clunky as possible, but there's some real beauty in this
sentence here. And what is it? It's finding another, desiring and acting upon their good. Not like you
did to the chocolate cake. That was desire for your own benefit. This is one that is a good for
another that brings up and benefits the other. So my question for you this morning is how do you
relate to others? But maybe it's better to start with this. Do you feel loved by others around you?
Well pick on an easy one. What about your boss? Do you feel loved by your boss or do you feel used?
What about your friends at school? What if you're having a down day? Do you feel loved by them? What
about your family? Now we're getting a little more close, right? What is the relationships like within
your family? Now if you visit me within my home, you are sure to hear this phrase floating around
the house and it would go something like this. I'm sorry that I did not love you well. And then it's
going to be followed up with something specific. Something like I prioritize myself over you or I
didn't listen well or I was impatient with you. But this isn't just simply expressing regret. This
is a confession. And what a confession is, is a confession says there is a standard of what is good,
right, true, and beautiful. There is something that we can know and I have not acted upon that.
There's a gap between these two. And so I'm confessing that I have acted in a way that doesn't
represent this up here. And this is going to be explained and expanded in Matthew's gospel. As he
recounts the coming of Jesus, he brilliantly tells the story by introducing three names for Jesus
that we're going to cover. And these three names are going to reveal the essence of what love actually
is. But to make this even more impactful, he knows that you and I fail in loving one another. And so
he's going to put at the backdrop of this whole story King Herod. And King Herod is one bad dude.
He is a guy who does not love well. And I presume that what Matthew is doing is he's putting these
two together not only to help us to see the beauty of who Jesus truly is, but also to help you
recognize the self-absorbed ways that we end up treating one another. The desire like the chocolate
cake where we end up consuming it within relationships rather than a genuine benefit of the other. So
let's take a quick look at Herod and the way that he has displayed distorted love. Now I'm just going
to recount these before we get to Jesus and we're going to get into God's Word there. But I'm going
to recount the story of Herod and some of the details about him. Who was Herod? Herod was a
king over Judea, over Israel and Judah. And he was known as Herod the Great. We'll get to the reason
why in just a moment. He ruled from 37 BC until 4 BC. So Pastor Rene ruined our Christmas last week
by telling us that there may or may not have been three Magi. I'm going to ruin your Christmas this
week by letting you know that our calendar in the West is off. Jesus was not born on zero. He was
born in the time of Herod which would have been before zero. So now we've got to go fix your
calendars at home. Herod is known as Herod the Great. His name Herod literally means hero,
hero song of the hero. Now why is he called this? Well his parents named him that. But it also
identifies that he thought he was the hero of his own story and that he got to make all the decisions
of what is good, right, true and beautiful. He was known as the Great because he had great impact in
the world around him. He rebuilt the temple. He had all these building projects that were on display
and were evident for people to see. So you might look at him and you say wow that's a good leader.
Look at the impact that he's making in the world around him. But how did this impact happen? This
impact happened at the expense, at the cost of others. He had slave labor to do his work and not
only that he was charging heavy amounts of taxes to crush the people in order to do this. To make
things worse he killed his own wife and then he killed a couple of his kids for fear that they
would take his throne. And he didn't stop there but he also killed some of his other family members.
And then he tried to kill God himself when Jesus came which we'll get to in a little more detail
there. Is this distorted love? Absolutely. This is a distorted version of the way that we might relate
to one another. Again he was treating others like Easy Beers were treating chocolate cake. But
Matthew doesn't just bring Herod into the story to say that's him, this is Jesus. He's also inviting
you to recognize how you are also found in Herod, how I am also found in Herod. So what was motivating
Herod? Herod was actually an Edomite. An Edomite was somebody from a different nation. He had come
in and this were between Israel and Edom they had this long-standing opposition to one another. So
he's a foreign ruler with the Roman rule and authority over him using him as a puppet king.
He doesn't care about those who he's serving. He's self-absorbed, self-protecting and self-promoting.
Now you may not have killed your spouse or your children, I hope not, otherwise we need to have a
serious conversation. But yet we do act in ways with one another where you recognize that something
within us naturally chooses our own self. My youngest four-year-old who is waiting for Jesus's
birthday to move out of the way so her birthday can come is a narcissistic way that's appropriate
for a four-year-old. Yet it continues on with some of us, right? And we live and act in this way. So
Matthew presents an extreme example to invite you to let your guard down so that then we can come and
see the beauty of who Jesus is. But we also want to ask why is that within us? Why is there this
me first mentality of interacting with the world? Well to do that we're gonna go back to the beginning,
actually back to before the beginning, when things broke apart. So before the beginning, God the
Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, three in one, were forever, for eternity, passed in a perfect
loving relationship in that unit, that triune God. I can't quite understand it, but we do know that
this is who God is. And it's out of this perfect love that he brought humans into the world. It
compelled him to create us. He wanted to share that love with you and with me. So he creates
Adam and Eve, he brings them into the garden, and we know the story, right? God's enemy sneaks in
and whispers, does God really love you Eve? Maybe he's keeping what is good, right, and true, and
beautiful from you. And so we read of the following words in Genesis 3, 6. When the woman saw that the
fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye. We could replace that. When the easy
beer saw that the chocolate cake was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and then goes on, and
also desirable for gaining wisdom. She took some and ate it. Seems innocent enough, right? But this
is an act of rejecting God's perfect love and exchanging it for the love of another. Now, what's
the impact of that? Well, God shows them through exile of the garden that this relationship is
broken. But immediately he promises that he's going to bring a rescuer. So that promise is there,
while at the same time Adam and Eve have two kids, Cain and Abel. What happened with Cain and Abel?
Cain murders Abel. You siblings know this well, right? The tension, the rivalry that happens
between you. And from there we've had little Herod's, King Herod's, continuing to mark our
history from then on out. Another one of my daughters is going through a history class right
now and she comes home just undone by the accounts of history, of the ways that people have broken
and treated one another in failed or distorted ways of loving them. But God, God in his goodness,
God doesn't leave things there. He knows that there is something that we desperately need,
and so he acts on our behalf. And he doesn't just do this by proclaiming something, he actually
steps into our world, into the material world and physically shows us what true love or what perfect
love is. There's another author, Kirk Thompson, in the Soul of Shame, and he uses this quote here
that my wife recently passed along to me. We talk about love as this abstract thing, but for humans
it's not abstract. It's part of the material world. There's all kinds of videos that you can watch
online of kids being asked what is love, and this begins to show the distorted ways. And there's
this one teenager where she goes, it's this feeling, and it's right here, just on the left side. Now,
what does she mean by that is the abstractness of what we generally consider love to be. But this
quote here says that love is something you can know, the essence of it. And so Matthew is going
to introduce us to Jesus and give us three names within just a few verses, chapter and a half,
three different names. And these three different names, Jesus, Emmanuel, and Nazarene, all three of
those names are going to get at the essence of what love truly is. So there's hope, because we
can know what love is. So Matthew begins with the following. He says, now the birth of Jesus Christ
took place in this way. So we're unwrapping Christmas, the arrival of Jesus comes, and we've
taken back the peeling, and we're looking inside, and we see what is going to happen with Jesus
coming. Now, the backstory to this is you've got Joseph promised to be married to Mary,
but then he finds out that Mary is pregnant, and he knows this was not his doing. So now he's
disoriented and he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. And God visits him, encounters him through
the presence of an angel who says the following words, Joseph, son of David, to not be afraid to
take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from who? The Holy Spirit.
She will give birth to a son. So God promised right back with Adam and Eve, hey, I'm going to
send this son, he's going to fix things. Here it is right here. She'll give birth to a son,
and you will give him the name. And all the Crosstown kids said, Jesus, right? This is the
answer for every Crosstown question, Jesus. Because he will do what? Save his people from their sins.
So here we have the name given, Jesus. Now what Jesus means is Yeshua, or Jehovah saves, God saves.
It literally declares what God is doing when he's showing up. God is the one who is going to be
the one to take on the cost of your benefit, of my benefit. That cost is not going to go to you,
that's going to be on his shoulders. And this first name declares that emphatically that God
is the one who is going to do this work. He promised it from the beginning, 300, over 300
prophecies all come true in Jesus. And he acts this out in a beautiful way. So God is the one who
initiates willingly sacrifices for the good of others. And what we have is in the Bible,
the first John here in the letter. John, by the way, is the disciple that was most closely related
to Jesus. He spent the most time with him, an intimate relationship. And he says this about
Jesus. He says this is love. Not that we loved God, but that he, this is that sacrifice,
that initiation on God's part, sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Jesus himself
describes love in the following way in the Gospel of John. He says, greater love has no one than this,
than to lay down one's life for his friends. Very different than the love that we generally
will speak about, or again, that chocolate cake that we saw. And then in an act of love to you
and to me, demonstrated to his disciples, the God of the world, the God of the world,
he bends down on his knee just before he's about to be betrayed and crucified, betrayed by his
own followers. And he bends down on his knee and he washes their feet. This is the way that God loves.
It is for your benefit. And he does so willingly. In the Gospel of Mark 10, 45, it says, Jesus did
not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for you and for me, for many.
This love is quite different than Herod's, isn't it? And this love is freely extended to you. So
when you recognize, I didn't really love well, you turn and you receive his embrace even in that
moment. But this is only one aspect of love. Jesus is going to introduce, or Matthew is going to
introduce another dimension through another name. And this other name is Emmanuel, which literally
means God is with us or God with us. Now here's where this comes. Joseph, after being met by the
messenger, Matthew continues by identifying Jesus and saying this. He says, all this took place
to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name what? Emmanuel. And then Matthew puts in here, or the translators do,
which means God is with us, God with us. I remember when my wife was first pregnant with our first
daughter. I remember as she grew inside of her, my wife would just kind of put her hands on her
belly, and she would proclaim and wonder, there's someone living inside of me. Now, us guys, and
for whatever reason, God chooses some to and some not to, but us guys will never experience this,
right? So we'll never know what it is like to have someone living inside of us. But Mary not only had
someone living inside of her, but had the God of the universe dwelling within her. You can't get
closer than that. That is the most intimate form of love that God has shown, and he has willingly
done this by stepping into the world to do that. In Philippians 2, we read the following. We read
that Jesus, who being in the very nature of God, so that's his divine nature, did not consider equality
with God as something to hold onto, something to grasp, something to be used for his own advantage.
Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
Here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to take your two hands and hold them out in front of you.
And your one hand is going to represent 100% divine nature of God. The other hand is going to represent
100% human nature. When we look at Jesus, when he comes as a baby, he comes as this. Put your hands
together, link them. Now, this is a broken illustration because I can see where one ends and one begins and
all of that, and I can take it apart. But the fact of Jesus, when Mary is holding little baby Jesus,
she's looking at God's intimate promise that he will be with you forever. He will never leave you.
He will never forsake you. And for those who have God, who can be against them? Now, some of you are
still holding your hands. You can release them or keep holding them and remember as we continue
forward in this. But that is union. But I want you to remember our friend Herod, our friend Herod who
sends people to try to kill Jesus in a way to promote and protect himself. He tries to end
Jesus's life. But last week, Pastor Rene introduced us to the Magi, the wise men that had come and they
come to worship Jesus. And then we have this passage in Matthew 2, where it says, when they,
meaning the Magi, had left, an angel, there's a lot of angels in these stories, of the Lord appeared
to Joseph in a dream. Get up, he said. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay
there until I tell you. For Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. So not only does
Herod try to kill or does kill his wife and some of his kids, but he tries to kill God here as well.
Mary and Joseph, they make a journey in the middle of the night, leaving in the middle of the night
for several hundred kilometers through a wilderness with a powerful king that is trying to destroy them,
trying to kill their baby. What do they have for this journey? This. At this moment, Jesus,
in his helplessness, doesn't look like he's going to accomplish much. But it's a promise that God is
with us, that God has bound himself forever with us. And our lives will have times of feeling like
they are in the wilderness, feeling like we are running for our own lives. King Herod is going to
look far more powerful. And the invitation is for us to look down and hold on to the God with us
promise, Emmanuel, that baby Jesus is actually with us. See, true love is not only sacrificing
for another, it is also intimately stepping into your world to understand and walk and journey along
with you. And God does that willingly because he loves you. It's two names, right? We've got a
third name and this one is a little less known. Nazarene, God for nothing. What is his name,
Nazarene? And why does the author, why does Matthew bring this up? Well, Matthew is going
to conclude the account and he's going to mention the following. He's going to say, and he, meaning
Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus, they leave Egypt and they come up to Jerusalem. And then they hear,
because they heard that King Herod is dead, but they hear that his son has now taken the throne.
Again, now we're in trouble again. So they flee to Nazareth where they were, was actually their home,
which is way up north in Israel. But what does Matthew say here? So was fulfilled what was said
through the prophets that he would be called a Nazarene. Now, most of you may not actually
dig into this to know well enough, but there is no prophetic mention of Nazarene, of Nazareth,
that God will be called the Nazarene. So has Matthew made a mistake here? No, he's actually
doing something profound. And here's what it is. We need to understand that Nazareth was a town that
nobody wanted to be from. Nazareth, we say this in English, it's the sticks or the podunk area.
Nobody wants to be associated. I should have gotten an amen from the Texas Life Group over
there for using that phrase, by the way. There we go. This is an area that you would not want to
be associated with. How do we know this? Well, history will tell that, but we also have an account
here where Philip, the disciple, comes to Nathaniel and he's calling him to come and follow Jesus.
And he says the following, he says, we have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, about whom
the prophets also wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. And this is where we get it.
Nathaniel responds, Nazareth? Are you kidding me? Nothing good is going to come out of Nazareth.
That's how Nathaniel responds. And it tells us how the culture viewed Nazareth. Now, what is
this getting at? Well, let's look at one of the prophetic connections that draws our attention to
this. And we see this in Isaiah 53, very well-known Christmas passage here. He, meaning Jesus, was
despised and rejected by mankind. He was not welcomed well. He's a man of suffering and
familiar with pain, like one from whom people hide their faces. He was despised and we held him
in low esteem. Now, if somebody comes to visit my home, if I keep them outside the door and talk
with them, that's kind, but that's not deeply impactful on my end. It's not a gift to them.
If I invite them inside and have them come and have a conversation, maybe a little bit of a
meal, and have a conversation, maybe some snacks, that's a little bit more. If I have a meal with
them, a little bit more. What if I and my wife move out of the master bedroom? We prepare it for
them and we give them this. We give them the royal welcome and we let them stay as long as they want.
They owe us now, don't they? We have blessed them richly and now they owe us. By Jesus being called
Nazarene, by Jesus coming and living in Nazareth, a place that nobody would consider him as somebody
to listen to because he's from there, he does something important. He does something by showing
that his love is unconditional. His love is unconditional. See, if I had welcomed you into
the home that way, our relationship now is constantly muddied in a certain sense by the
hospitality that I showed you. Large corporations, companies such as Nike, will ask their employees
to not accept gifts over a certain amount of money. Why do they do this? Because if I accept
a gift over a certain amount of money, my interaction with my clients is now muddied by that
gift. And by Jesus coming in Nazareth, where nobody could care less if he was there,
born to this little poor family, living in fear of being killed by the king, what he does is he's
coming and he's saying, you get me for nothing. And why is that so valuable? That's so valuable
because what we see here in Romans five that Paul says, you see, at just the right time when we were
still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person,
though maybe for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die. Here we get a human
transactional way of doing. If you're a pretty good person and you're of value to me, maybe I'll
sacrifice for you. But here's what Jesus did. But God demonstrated his own love for us in this.
While we were still sinners, Christ did what? He died for us. He takes it up a notch in the way
that he loves us. You get God for nothing. The arrival of Jesus as the Nazarene, the
Jesus as the Nazarene reveals that what unconditional love looks like. True love has no strings
attached. And this is valuable because it removes the constant fear that is between us and others
in relationship. What are we talking about there? Well, John says the following. He says, there is
no fear in love, but perfect love does what? Drives out fear. What is he meaning? If my
relationship with God has nothing to do with what I have blessed him with, then I can rest
completely insured no matter what he sees in me. He has received me. He has welcomed me.
And that's a confident love that we can hold on to. It's great news. Absolutely beautiful,
wonderful news. Perfect love is not an abstract idea. It doesn't just lead to a thousand different
definitions of this. Perfect love is willing the good or the benefit of the other. And Jesus has
come knowing that you and I, we do, we fail to love well. But he doesn't want you to hide in that.
He wants you to come forward to him and make that confession to him and one another in it.
And he came inviting you to taste and see that his love, his perfect love, is really good. And
it's about your benefit. The arrival of Jesus is the arrival of an unexplainable and rather crazy
love. Let me introduce you to some of our friends. These are some of my friends from Ecuador, where
we used to live a number of years ago. Juan Manuel and Shauna. Juan Manuel is Ecuadorian,
but he works for a multinational oil company and he was doing quite well. Shauna, on the other hand,
had two master's degrees and was a marriage and family therapist, was also doing quite well.
They had what seemed to be life in the palm of their hands, kind of like Herod's palace there.
They could make decisions and move things and cause that to happen. But something happened with
them that messed their life up in a really wonderful way. And that was that they encountered the
incredible love of Jesus that we just talked about. A love that is sacrificial, a love that is
unconditional, and a love that is deeply intimate with who they were. That love captured their hearts
and their story is told on their shirts there. We read out what is on their shirts. What does it say?
Chosen, loved, accepted, adopted, forever. Those words capture what it is that God had done for them.
Now why do they have these words on their shirt? I didn't tell you about one other person in this
story. That's Baby Janelli. Baby Janelli was, before she was born, the doctors knew that she had
a condition where she would never be able to do the things that most of us, that you and I can do.
She would never be able to speak. She would never walk. She would never be able to eat on her own.
She would never enjoy a relationship with another like a friendship. She would never go to school.
And actually she would live a very short life. She was unwanted. She had nothing to offer.
But that's if we're thinking in Herod's way of thinking about life, not in the way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus is one that transforms how we think. So Jesus loved Juan Manuel and Shauna
into a deep love that they gave towards little Janelli, knowing exactly what they were getting into.
They chose Janelli. They loved Janelli. They invited her into their home and at great cost to them,
gave her a benefit that she could never repay. That is what God has done for you.
That is what God has done for me. And so no matter what Satan tries to whisper within our own hearts,
God really loves you. Maybe he doesn't actually care for you. Maybe Herod is much stronger.
For those of you who have received the greatest gift, which is Jesus,
God is with you and you can hold on to that. And through the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit
that actually brought that life into Mary's womb, that same Holy Spirit dwells within you as a
follower of Jesus and shapes within you a love that does something like we see in this story here.
It's a radical and crazy love, a love that is unexplainable. So as Jesus, meaning God saves,
God has come to you offering you a love where he willingly and sacrificially does
what is needed for your benefit. He initiates that. Rest in it. He initiates that.
He initiates that. Rest in it. As Emmanuel, Jesus is so committed to life with you that he has come
to join you on whatever journey you may be in and he's bound himself to you forever. And you are
invited to live in that life with great joy. And as the Nazarene, Jesus offers you a love like no
other, no strings attached. God for nothing, an unconditional love that you can receive.
So I recognize that there's different groups of people here this morning. For some of you,
you may be visiting or you may not know Jesus, you're curious about him. And hey, I want to
invite you to just wonder at him. And if the Holy Spirit is nudging you, if you're drawn towards
this love of Jesus, please don't pass it by. Come up after the service and come and talk to either
myself or one of the prayer team. For the rest of you, no matter where you find yourself at this
point in your life, continue to meditate on, receive that love that he has given you.
Take this time of Christmas that we're going to continue to celebrate and recognize with wonder
what God has done. Good Father, I thank you for the gift of who you are. I thank you for the way
that you have encountered us in a profound, unexplainable, radical, faithful, generous,
and somewhat crazy love. We desire that that would flow increasingly within our own lives,
that we would be people who are loved into loving others well. Thank you for sending Jesus. Thank
you for the example, but also for the gift of his love. We honor you. We worship you for that.
We ask that in these next few days as we take time to recognize
the coming of Jesus and remember that, that we would give him the honor that he is due,
that we would worship him with all of who we are. We declare that you are worthy of this and we pray
this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for tuning into the ECB Sermon Podcast. Whether near or far,
if you are looking for community or are in need of prayer, we welcome you to engage by sending us
an email to office at ECB.asia. If God is calling you to support our ministries, you will find giving
options on our website. And remember to join us next week. God bless you.