The Promise Fulfilled

Sermon Series: Preparing for Christmas

How many of you would say that you are preparing yourself for Christmas? Next question, what exactly does that mean? The answer to that question probably varies based on the individual who is answering the question. If we were to take a survey I would guess that we would discover many of us share some similar ideas. When we think about preparing for Christmas many of us think of things like putting up a tree, decorating the house, and purchasing and wrapping gifts. So here’s the “news flash” - there is more to being prepared to celebrate Christmas than putting up a Christmas tree, decorating the house, and purchasing and wrapping gifts. In fact, while many might say that they know that they are prepared for Christmas when they have accomplished those things, I would argue that if that is all they have done then they aren’t really prepared at all. Christmas isn’t about Christmas trees, decorative homes, or presents – Christmas is a celebration of something much, much bigger. It’s a celebration of the birth of Jesus! But with all the hustle and bustle that surrounds Christmas – the Black Friday shopping, the Christmas gatherings with family, the Christmas parties at our schools, at our work places, and with our friends, and the nightly barrage of Christmas movies that all have a different spin on what Christmas is and how everything gets done the night before Christmas – we tend to lose sight of what we are really celebrating and why that is such a big deal.

So for the next four weeks we are going to be working toward a very specific goal – really preparing ourselves for Christmas. As we are moving closer and closer to that day, I want us to have spent time doing two incredibly important things. First, I want us to be continually reminding ourselves that Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’ birth. Then second, I want us to make sure we’re taking the time to recall why His birth is such an enormous deal. If we’ll spend time over the course of the next four weeks doing those two things we will be far more prepared to really celebrate Christmas and worship Christ on Christmas day, which is really what Christmas is all about anyways.

So where do we begin this week? How do we kick this series off? By thinking about promises. Can you remember a promise that was made to you at some time that you were really looking forward to being fulfilled? Maybe someone promised to take you on a big vacation or road trip; maybe someone promised to give you a big gift like a car on your 16th birthday; or maybe the IRS promised to send you a much larger refund check than you were expecting. I want you to really try to think about a time when someone made you a promise like that. I want you to try to recall how you felt when the promise was made; I want you to try to recall how you felt while you were waiting for that promise to be fulfilled; and I want you to recall how you felt when that promise was finally realized. Perhaps the biggest promise that anyone has ever made me was when Amy agreed to my marriage proposal and promised to marry me. That was an awesome promise and the feeling I experienced at the time was unbelievable. We were at a semi-formal dance that Meredith College was putting on. All around me were guys and girls having a great time. Many guys probably had the sense of feeling lucky – they were spending the evening dancing with a young lady who had asked him to be her date and who had made herself beautiful for the night. But of all the guys who were there with their beautiful dates there was only one who was walking out with the promise that the beautiful girl who had asked him to be her date would also be his bride. None of the other guys there that night were recipients of such an incredible promise – just me. It was awesome!

The next several months continued to be awesome, but at the same time they were months of incredible anticipation. What would it be like to be standing at the end of a church aisle and watching Amy coming towards me in her bridal gown? What would it be like when nightly conversations were done together rather than over the phone? What would it be like when date nights didn’t end having to drop Amy off at one place and then driving home, alone, to my place. Dating Amy was a great privilege, but I was certain that being married to her was going to be even better. When our wedding day finally arrived it was a day of magnificent celebration. No hurricane, no amount of pranks played on me by my groom’s men, and no amount of ex-boyfriends in attendance could have wiped the smile off of my face that day. The promise that Amy had made me and the months of anticipation that followed had all led to that day – June 16, 2001 – when Amy did come down the aisle of the church and fulfilled the promise that she had made to me by marrying me.

I’m choosing to begin here because many of us tend to forget that one aspect of Jesus’ birth is that His birth was the fulfillment of an extraordinary promise. This is part of Jesus’ birth that we just cannot lose sight of. When we forget that His birth was the fulfillment of an extraordinary promise, His birth loses some of its significance in our eyes, and we tend to make lesser things more significant instead. So let’s spend some time this week remembering the promise, the circumstances surrounding the promise, and even some of the additional clues that were given as we were anticipating the fulfillment of the promise.

To get to the origins of the promise we have to go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible. The Bible begins with the story of how the eternal God created both the heavens and the earth. In Genesis 1 and 2 we discover God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit working together to bring creation into being. The crowning jewel of their creation was mankind, the creation of Adam and Eve. While everything else that God had created was considered good, God looked at the completed project after He had created Adam and Eve and called creation very good. One of the features that God had given to Adam and Eve was a ‘free will’ that allowed them to make choices for themselves. Free will was an important part of who Adam and Eve were because their free will had everything to do with their worship. God did not want Adam and Eve to love and serve Him because it was a requirement – He wanted them to see that He surpassed all things in beauty, power, love, and greatness and choose to worship Him as they saw His majesty and had an opportunity to respond to it. But Adam and Eve made a choice one day to listen to the lies of Satan. Satan had disguised Himself and told Adam and Eve that they could become like God if they ate from the one tree in the garden that God had commanded them not to eat from. Becoming like God certainly had an appeal to it – it was an opportunity for them to put themselves in God’s place. So both Adam and Even made a choice on that day to disobey and to eat from the tree that God had forbidden them to eat from.

Let me pause here to briefly touch on the idea that our obedience can be an act of worship. When we act in obedience we are (1) recognizing that the one whom we are obeying is in a position of authority and has a superior knowledge concerning our best interests, and (2) submitting to that authority, making much of that individual. (Still, this requires some good discernment in order to understand who we are directing our worship to. When we obey our father and mother as children, or obey our employers or our governing figures as adults, that obedience isn’t necessarily an act of worship towards those individuals, but it can be an act of worship towards God. God has called us to obey our fathers and mothers and to obey those who are in authority over us. So when we act in obedience towards them we can be doing that as a greater act of obedience towards God, Himself, and the commands that He has given to us.) Disobedience on the other hand can (1) communicate that we don’t recognize that individual as authoritative or having a greater knowledge concerning our best interests, and (2) makes much of ourselves by elevating ourselves to a position of superior authority and wisdom. Our disobedience therefore can become an act of self-worship

When Adam and Eve chose that day to disobey God, not only did they act in disobedience, but they made themselves the object of their worship. We call these acts sin. And this sin had horrible consequences. God is by nature ‘holy.’ That means that He is perfectly and eternally righteous. There has never been and never will be any hint of sin or unrighteousness in Him. When God created Adam and Eve, He created them righteous and holy too. As a result they were able to have unbroken and unhindered fellowship with God. But when Adam and Eve chose to sin they became separated from God. Sin had entered into and tainted their lives. And because God is perfectly holy He could no longer have any contact with those whose lives had been stained by sin. Genesis 3 gives us an account of these events (which we often refer to as “the fall”) and some of the consequences that God put in place. It’s absolutely devastating news as we see God’s perfect creation marred by man’s sin, man’s fellowship with God completely broken, and God sending Adam and Eve out of the garden He had placed them in. “Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden . . . He drove out the man” (Genesis 3:23-24).

I share all of this to set the stage for the one glimmer of hope that we find in the middle of such devastating news. As God was declaring what the consequences would be for each of those who had played a role in causing His perfect creation to be marred by sin and mankind to be separated from Him, He also made an extraordinary promise. Listen to what God said to the serpent in Genesis 3:15, “I [God] will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” God said to the serpent (Satan) that it wasn’t love for Eve that caused him to deceive her – it was ill will and hatred towards her. And in the generations to come God was going to place an active ill will between Satan and his demonic forces (his “offspring”) and one particular descendant of Eve’s. God says that there was one individual that was going to come and that He and Satan were going to meet in battle with one another, and when it was all done, though Satan would appear to strike a blow to Eve’s descendant, it was her descendant who would come out victorious by bruising (some translations say “crushing”) the head of Satan. Put yourself in the context for just a moment. Because of your sin, because of your disobedience, you have been separated from God, and you are in the process of being driven out of the presence of the most glorious, the most majestic, and the most magnificent God. Before your choice to sin you had had unbroken fellowship with Him. Now, because of your sin, you will have to live in his absence, unable to go back and undo the sin that you had committed and which now stains your heart and life. But in the midst of this great sadness and hopelessness you here God say to Satan, “This isn’t over! I’m sending someone. And when I send Him, He’s going to defeat you and help restore all that has been broken.” That’s an extraordinary promise! The God, who by the power of His spoken word created all things, just spoke a promise that He would send someone to rescue and restore us and creation.

Adam and Eve, and you and me, and every other individual who has lived and walked on this earth became recipients of the greatest promise ever made. The greatest thing that you and I could ever imagine and one of the things we were created for – unbroken fellowship with God – had been lost because of our disobedience and our sin. And we were (and are) without any power to go back and undo our past sins or to cover over them. Our sin stains our hearts and lives. Then God made a promise to make a way for us to get back what we had lost. Even though we didn’t deserve it and there was nothing we could do to earn it, God made a promise. His promise was that He was going to send a rescuer.

As you can probably imagine, Adam and Eve and the generations that followed lived in great anticipation of this rescuer. Who would it be? When would He come? And how would things change after He arrived? They knew that His arrival would have eternal significance and they could hardly wait. As the years went by, God continued to remind us that His plan had not changed and He continued to give us clues as to who this promised One would be. Listen to a couple of clues in particular this week:

“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14)

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” (Isaiah 9:6-7)

“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, he Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” (Isaiah 11:1-2)

“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me One who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days . . . And He shall stand and shepherd His flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord His God. And they shall dwell secure, for now He shall be great to the ends of the earth. And He shall be their peace.” (Micah 5:2,4-5)

These verses played an important role in helping people to discern the lineage of the coming Rescuer, the conditions under which He would be born, and the place where He would be born. The coming Rescuer would be born from the line of David, in the city of Bethlehem, to a mother who was a virgin. So when we get to the NT and particularly to the Gospel accounts of Matthew and Luke, this is what we discover about Jesus: His father, Joseph, was a descendant of King David; His mother, Mary, was a virgin at the time of Jesus’ conception and birth, and He was born in the city of Bethlehem at a time when His parents had traveled there to be numbered in the census. The extraordinary and highly anticipated promise of God to send a Rescuer for us had been fulfilled in Jesus’ birth! God’s promise had come true! This is reason for great celebration! The hope of regaining fellowship with God and coming into His presence again was made tangible at Jesus’ birth!

But year after year we tend to lose sight of the promise in all the other ‘stuff’ of Christmas. We think more about what we want for Christmas than what we lost when we sinned! We tend to think more about what we are going to give than what was promised to us! And year after year we tend to rejoice more in the gifts wrapped in colorful paper than we do in the gift wrapped in swaddling clothes. We’ve got to spend time this year remembering the result of our sin, remembering the promise that was made, and celebrating the One who made the promise real!