Jesus' Birth Story

[00:00:06] Our heavenly Father, we pray to you and ask that you would bless us with your light and with your life through Jesus Christ by your spirit. Working in us, bring about the illumination that is necessary in our hearts that we might know and believe, hope and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, our savior, who comes into this world to save us from our sins and close that path, close that path to misery. We pray this in his name. Amen. [00:00:44] Let's hear God's word now from Matthew, chapter one, Matthew 118 through 25. [00:01:15] Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way when his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him and in a dream, saying, joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. 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 Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus. [00:02:29] May God bless his word. And you may be seated it. [00:03:00] Over the last few sermons, we've been thinking together about the world that Jesus was born into. [00:03:09] Or to maybe be a little more precise, we could say that we've been thinking about the broken world that Jesus was born into. [00:03:17] All the political maneuvering, the fear, abuse of power, suffering from the very top to the very bottom of society, never ending struggles of turnover and change and frustration, generation after generation of displacement and settling, but never not quite and displacement again, over and over again. And we've thought about this at a very high level, in terms of big sweeps of history and these kind of things. And we've also thought about it at an individual level. We can think about that a little bit more today as we think about Joseph and Mary. In the song we just sang, a come o'come Emmanuel, the last verse says, open wide our heavenly home. Make safe the way that leads on high and close the path to misery. [00:04:15] There's a sense that the world is broken and it's full of misery because of sin. [00:04:22] And we see some of that in the difficulties and the struggles of history and empires, but also individuals like Joseph and Mary here are they living in this land, a land of instability, a land of all kinds of societal, political division under this very powerful hand and the watchful eye of the roman empire as citizens of. Not officially, as I should say, not roman citizens, but belonging, being in the empire. They are called to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem, a three days journey, to register and take part of civil stuff, a census, a government call from Caesar that will likely involve things like taxes and soldier recruitment and perhaps other things as well. [00:05:22] So that'd be difficult, right? Imagine if right now you were called to travel to the place of your birth, wherever that was from, pack up your family, get on the move to register and go to a place. [00:05:35] Some of you would have to travel very far, some perhaps not so far, but nevertheless, it would be difficult. [00:05:44] What would you do? You would probably call your work, if you're in working mode right now, and find out how to take some time off. Hopefully it would be paid, but if not, okay, there's that. [00:05:57] You would what? Rent a hotel, get an Airbnb, a vrbo, something like that? Make sure that's locked in place, put gas in the car. Right. Make sure you've got all the things for the road. [00:06:11] Hit the road, get your family together and go down. Now, hopefully your wife's not pregnant, because that would be difficult. [00:06:19] When I first came to be the pastor here, my ordination service was two or three days before our third daughter was born. We were living in Phoenix at the time, and second daughter, third child, sorry. Julia Della, my wife, was very pregnant. And we obviously thought about that because we were in Phoenix. All our stuff was in Phoenix. We were coming down here for a moment, but we had to wait for the baby to be born. So we did what you would probably do, right? We got medical records together. We talked with the doctors ahead of time. We put them in the car so in case she had the baby while we were here in Tucson, we'd be able to get into a place, know a good hospital or something like that. We had everything checked out ahead of time. And of course, we had all these families and people here who would be willing to help us. So we're like, okay, I think this will be okay. Well, she wasn't born here. We made it back to Phoenix and she was born there. And then soon after we moved here permanently. [00:07:27] Mary and Joseph were in a little different situation. Right? They didn't have a room locked down. They didn't have many of the same kind of provisions for the roads or hospitals and all these sorts of things at their disposal. [00:07:43] Mary was very pregnant. And as she arrives, she arrives without medical records and the Internet and high speed this and that. [00:07:54] In fact, there's no room for them. [00:07:57] Some translations say it in. Some think about it or translate it as a guest room, which is probably more likely. No matter what, there's not an obvious place for them to go to stay. In fact, the situation is so bad, she doesn't have anywhere to put the baby except in the manger for the animals, a feeding trough. [00:08:21] What did she come prepared with as far as water and making a fire and clothing? All these sort of things. Right. The more that they carried, the more difficult the journey, and yet the less they carried. [00:08:34] This is a tough situation. [00:08:37] We don't read about midwives or doctors or nurses or any guests or family members who are there helping out. [00:08:45] Can you imagine how scary that would be? [00:08:49] The loneliness, the fear, the traveling, all of these kind of things. [00:08:53] They would all be reminders of the world and its difficulties, the misery that surrounds us all the time. Not to mention childbirth itself. [00:09:06] A horrible, terrible thing where everybody's looking at you saying it's going to be okay, and yet you feel like you're dying. So I hear an aspect of the world that is specifically cursed. Because of what? [00:09:27] Sin. [00:09:28] Because of sin. [00:09:30] And so into this very cursed world, into this cursed event, into a world full of misery and darkness, the Lord is entering. We can think about Joseph's perspective as well. [00:09:49] Here he was marrying one girl, and she seems to all of a sudden be another person. [00:09:55] Can you imagine how stressful that would be? Perhaps some of you say, I can imagine how stressful that would be because you've been in relationships where you thought someone was one thing, and then they turn out to be something totally different. [00:10:10] You can imagine the difficulty and the stress and trying to figure out what you're going to do in a moment like that. [00:10:18] And yes, the angel comes to him and brings amazing amounts of reassurance. Right. The angel of the Lord telling him, this is what happened. Here's the situation. [00:10:29] We don't have any specific insights into Joseph's emotions in that he clearly believes the angel and he acts accordingly. But I think it's fair to say or suspect. We could say, I think it's fair to suspect that Joseph may have had doubts even after hearing the angel. Why would I say that? Because there's countless, countless examples in the scripture of the angels of the Lord and the Lord himself, speaking to people and telling them things, and they still doubt. It's not as though you hear from God, and then you never have any doubt anymore. How many of you have heard from the Lord through his many, many pages of his word and still struggle to believe all of us? [00:11:18] So, Joseph, I don't think it was necessarily 100% he's fully settled in his mind. Could have been. [00:11:25] He seems to be an amazing man. [00:11:28] It's also possible that he struggled. He had questions. He said, well, this seems like the right thing to do, and I guess we'll keep on moving forward. [00:11:41] And then after all of that, a short time later, Herod decides to try and murder their child. [00:11:49] They have to flee to Egypt. [00:11:53] All of us, as I say, as we think about the lives of Mary and Joseph at this moment and in the years to come, they live and are very much a part of a very sinful, confusing, dangerous, disappointing, grief inducing, uncertain world, as are we. [00:12:12] And this is the world that Jesus comes into, a world that Jesus saves us from. [00:12:22] I want to read from Isaiah 61, verses one through three. [00:12:28] We read that when the Lord was born, when the Lord came, he came with a mission, with an objective. This isn't just some random happening in the course of history that just sort of turns out to be well or is inspirational in some way or another, or a story that makes us happy because it's sweet or something like that. [00:12:52] Something much, much bigger is at play. [00:12:55] The God of the universe, the God who made this world, the God that we sinned against and brought suffering and misery upon ourselves. As a result of that, he comes into this world on a mission. [00:13:11] Isaiah 61 says, the spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. [00:14:02] This is the mission that Jesus is on. [00:14:05] We hear that also in the story that Matthew recounts for us in Matthew one, in the verses that we read. [00:14:14] Not only we read of that mission when we hear of the angel's words to Joseph when he says, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. [00:14:28] This name Jesus is like Joshua, the Old Testament. [00:14:33] He is going to be the savior who is a conqueror, a mighty man who goes in the name of the Lord and creates a place through his victories, a place of safety, a place of protection, a heavenly home for God's people. [00:14:54] We have a sense of his mission as well. In this other name, a quoting from Isaiah that he will be called Emmanuel, which Matthew tells us means God with us. [00:15:06] God is coming into this world to save us from our sins, to save us from the misery that we have. And in the counting of this, we have not only a sense of the darkness and the misery that is in the world, but also of the light that is coming into the world, of God's supernatural power, of his divine intentions and his work in doing these things. And I think as we think about those, we find comfort in this promise, comfort in this mission. [00:15:40] What kinds of things might we think about? [00:15:43] What sort of things in the passage like this bring us certainty and comfort that the Lord is on the move, that the Lord is at work. [00:15:52] Well, we see it in the miraculous conception, of course, here is God coming into this world in this amazing way. [00:16:04] He comes into Mary's womb, this miraculous conception in which she had not yet known her husband. She is impregnated by the Holy Spirit. [00:16:17] A strong, strong statement and testimony and action in which the Lord reveals to us that this is of God. [00:16:26] Perhaps theologians say sometimes, perhaps salvation could have come some other way, perhaps God could have done it some other way. Who knows? But we know he did it this way. And we know in this way he makes it very, very clear that the work of salvation, that the work of saving us from our sins is his work, a divine work, a supernatural work. [00:16:51] There is this sense of new, of creation that even hearkens back to the very beginning of creation in which God by his supernatural power, created nature. [00:17:08] This moment in which we celebrate at Christmas, this moment of life, of the sun coming into the world, we see the almighty power of God. [00:17:26] Perhaps you know about Frank Borman. He grew up in Tucson and came to be one of the astronauts on Apollo eight. [00:17:36] And he's the one who took that famous picture called earthrise. [00:17:43] You know, that famous picture of the earth in space. These were the, he and the other crewmates on that mission were the first people to look at Earth from this perspective, to look out through space and see our planet held there. [00:18:03] Well, on Christmas Eve, 55 years ago, 1968, they broadcast back to Earth, and he quoted these words. [00:18:17] In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and the darkness upon the face of the deep. [00:18:29] It amazes me that at this moment of one of the greatest moments of man's supremacy, here he is, having gotten himself into space, looking at the planet Earth. [00:18:51] His mind goes to the divine, and he looks at it and says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He looks at the earth rising, so to speak, and he can't help but marvel at how amazing God is on that Christmas Eve 55 years ago. [00:19:16] In some ways, the more that we see of ourselves, whether it's our capabilities or our sinfulness, the more we ought to see the importance and need for a savior, a divine strength, the strength of God to come into this world, the world that he made, and to save us from our sins. [00:19:43] In this moment, here in Matthew one, we're seeing the sunrise, but S-O-N right. [00:19:53] The birth of the son of God into this world. And something new is happening. And it is a supernatural birth, a birth which testifies to the power of God working in us, working in this world, his sovereignty over it, his initiative to bring comforts to our hearts. Brothers and sisters, this passage testifies that salvation is really happening. [00:20:22] It's really happening. [00:20:24] We see that in the prophecies being fulfilled, these prophecies made long ago, that are now being fulfilled here at this moment, God being with us. Out of the deep, out of the darkness of Mary's womb, emerges life. And God gives himself a body, and he does that. He takes on that body, as we read earlier in Hebrews two, so that he could die, so that he could take our place, so that he could close the path to misery, so that he could say no more to sin and death, so that he could be a perfect sacrifice for sin. [00:21:19] God comes into this world not just to inspire us or to move us or to delight us, but to save us, Hebrews 726 says, for it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens. [00:21:46] This is our mediator. And so when we consider this birth, when we consider the sweep of his whole life, when we consider his death and his resurrection and his ascension, as we look forward to the coming, glorious coming of our king, we can have hope, we can have comfort and freedom from our sins, because the Lord has come, and the Lord is with us. Emmanuel, let's pray. [00:22:27] Most glorious father, we pray to you as your adopted children through the son, Jesus Christ, our savior. [00:22:38] It is an amazing thing to behold and to see the goodness and power of you at work. [00:22:47] Thank you for coming into our world and bringing about such a perfect and final salvation. [00:22:55] Lord, thank you for saving us from our sins and taking all of the miseries of this life and sanctifying them for our good. Who could do this but you alone? [00:23:07] But you could take our sins and forgive them and then use them as a way to bring yourself glory. [00:23:18] Who but you and can bring a salvation that is so wonderful, so pleasing and so healing? [00:23:26] Your power and your majesty is on display here in your word and in our lives. [00:23:35] Lord, we ask that you would continue to work this salvation in us and that you would strengthen our faith as you strengthened the faith of Joseph and of Mary, as you strengthened those who followed Jesus and went to their own deaths in his name. [00:23:51] Lord, we thank you for those who have come before us. And we thank you for the generation that is coming after us. We ask that the mighty works of your steadfast love would continue to be passed down and that the gospel would continue to spread so that the whole world might confess your name. [00:24:12] Jesus Emmanuel. God with us and our savior, we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.