🎄🔴✨New Christmas Sermon Series: “Are you Prepared for Christmas?” … Begins (THIS SUNDAY) November 30th - December 21st 🌟🟢
Are you ready for Christmas? The clerk at the grocery store asked me that question as I was checking out at the register.
I suppose you have heard that question many times already. What people really mean by that is Did you finish your shopping? Did you mail out all your cards? Did you make out your calendar of where you are going and when? We call this the Christmas rush, it becomes a very hectic time, that we forget what Christmas is really all about.
It seems that many of the people who lived at the time when Jesus was born were not really ready for Christmas. When the angel Gabriel told Zacharias that he would have a son that would prepare the way for the Lord, he didn’t believe it (Luke 1:20). When Mary heard the announcement that she would bear the Son of God she asked, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” (Luke 1:34) and heard the answer, “For with God nothing will be impossible,” (Luke 1:37).
When Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant he decided to put her away quietly and had to be convinced by an angel that “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit,” (Matt 1:20). When Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem there was no room for them in the inn (Luke 2:7). When Herod heard from the wise men that the King of the Jews was to be born in Bethlehem he had all the baby boys there murdered. Joseph and Mary had to flee to Egypt to keep Jesus from being killed. Even though the scribes in Jerusalem knew where the Messiah was to be born the Bible doesn’t record any of the powerful Jewish leaders going the short distance from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to see the child.
By the standards of the world, his birth was only a slight blip on the radar of history, a peasant child born to peasant parents. In Rome they paid no attention; in Athens and Alexandria no one took note. In China and India no one knew a thing.
For the most part Phillips Brooks had it right: “How silently, How silently, the wondrous gift is given.” He came silently, quietly (as quietly as a newborn baby boy ever arrives), without fuss or ruckus, without making a stir or announcing his presence. He came in the same way all babies come, and most of the world paid no attention. The Apostle John put it this way: “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him..” (John 1:10-11) His own what? His own world, his own people, his own nation. The very people who should have been happiest to see him, instead paid no attention at all.
But let me ask you as we begin this 4 Part Sermon Series: Are we any more prepared for the coming of Christ than they were in Bethlehem? That really is the crucial question as we begin the Christmas season.
