December 24, 2024

Luke 2:1-20

Advent Proclaimed

Sunday Sermons

Wonder, Worship and Witness

Disenchantment. It’s a word that describes much of our modern and post-modern ennui. We live in a world that has turned away from transcendence and perhaps that is why wonder has been eclipsed by cynicism, worship is given to ephemeral pleasures, and witness so often feels hollow and hypocritical.

In Luke 2:1-20, we find an antidote to this disenchantment. The birth of Christ draws us into a story that rekindles our sense of wonder, redirects our worship, and compels us to become witnesses of God’s glory and grace.

Join Pastor Jim as he leads us out into the ordinary fields of the shepherds, down into the Bethlehem stable, and into the greatest story ever told about when God became one of us.

Speaker

Jim Thomas

Series

Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus

Go to Series

Scripture

Luke 2:1-20

Topics
Worship

Sermon Notes

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It”, Forum and Century 1930

1. The birth of Christ restores wonder to a disenchanted world.

“Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

2. The birth of Christ redirects our worship to the God who came near.

“Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.”
Eugene Peterson

3. The birth of Christ compels us to witness to the good news of great joy for all people.

“As we meet the incoming tide of refugees from the meaning crisis, the church needs both apologists in the academy and storytellers in the arts. We need people in the mold of C. S. Lewis, showing not only that the story is true but why we have wanted to believe it all along.”
Justin Brierley, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

“These Gospel narratives are telling you not what you should do but what God has done. The birth of the Son of God into the world is a gospel, good news, an announcement. You don’t save yourself. God has come to save you.”
Tim Keller, Hidden Christmas

Discussion Questions

  • Read the passage together: Before today’s sermon, what did you already know or believe about this passage? Did anything in your understanding shift after hearing the message?
  • Challenge and Reflection: Was there a part of today’s message that was particularly challenging or surprising for you? Why?
  • Unpacking the Message: Pick a quote from today’s sermon notes. Discuss what it means to you. 
  • Personal Impact: What’s one specific way you feel called to change or grow after hearing this message?
  • Practical Application: What’s one step you can take this week to put today’s message into practice?
  • Connecting Scripture: Are there other Bible passages or stories this message reminds you of? How do they expand or confirm this teaching?
  • Gratitude: What aspect of God’s character stood out to you in today’s message? How does it inspire praise or gratitude?
  • Pray the Scripture: After hearing the message, is there a specific area where you feel led to pray? How can we pray for one another in light of today’s teaching?

Transcript

The Advent season runs four Sundays leading up to Christmas, and of course Christmas Eve, we always have this service. Through Advent season this year, we have taken an approach to four different themes on the Sundays. We had Advent Foreshadowed in Genesis. Advent Promised in Isaiah. Advent Fulfilled in Matthew. Advent Fully Realized as we look forward in time to all that the Lord will do in His second Advent, and we looked at that in the Book of Revelation just this past Sunday. Tonight, we’ll be looking at Advent Proclaimed from Luke’s Gospel, which Pastor Matt read earlier.

And for me, three words jump out of that chapter, and those words are wonder, worship and witness. I’m taken first with the chapter because it begins with history. It’s set in space-time history. “It came about in those days when the decree went out from Caesar Augustus.” This is the first Roman emperor. He ruled from 27 BC to 14 AD. So, this is a guy who lived in space-time history in a very specific place, very specific time. And the story of Jesus is couched right into the middle of that historical opening of Luke 2. Jesus’ birth comes to us right there.

Bethlehem is two Hebrew words “Beth-lechem” and it means house of bread. And so, it’s a specific city. It’s a tiny little town. If you were going to be a king and come into the world and start a big world movement, why would you pick a little village like that instead of Rome? Some place where even maybe… if you were going to be in Israel, maybe Jerusalem. No, Bethlehem was where He came. And we’ve been singing about that a little bit, haven’t we?

And so, I think of wonder when I read this. Wonder that God would do that. Why would He do that? Why would He do it that way? Why would He come to a peasant couple who are engaged or betrothed to be married but aren’t married yet? And they’re living in the middle of a social scandal. They’re pregnant and not married yet. And it’s been probably several months since she heard from the angel, or Joseph heard from the angel. Either one of them. An angel appeared to both of them. But it’s been a few months and maybe now after a few months, they’re starting to wonder, “Is this thing really happening? Is it really of God?” as they go off to the census, that’s going to be taken.

Because Joseph is from the line of David, which Messiah was promised to come from. And so, he had to go to the City of David, which is this little town called House of Bread, Beth-lechem, Bethlehem. And so, they go there, and wonder of wonders, that’s where the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Lords, the Savior of the world chooses to appear into this world. Without any pomp and circumstance of a military band or a marching parade, without any kind of large, wealthy, very well-educated group of people standing around. No, just some simple shepherds and that peasant couple that couldn’t even get a room in the hotel. Wonder why God did that.

Wonder is one of those things that I think is missing in the world in which we live right now. And yet I think it’s something that we desperately need. Little children maybe have an edge on all of us adults, don’t they, because they still have a sense of wonder. There’s a knock at the door, “Who’s that?” Most of us just go, “It’s somebody trying to sell us something, or some Jehovah’s Witnesses coming around or something.” The kids are still, “Who’s that?” And you go open the door and it’s like, “Who is it?” And it’s your crazy Uncle Eddie. He’s coming for Christmas dinner and he’s bringing all the things that are going to break your house apart.

And wonder why God chose the way He did to come into this world. It could have been so different. It could have been so much more of a splash. It could have been so much bigger, so much brighter, so much more well-produced. And yet it wasn’t that. In July I think it was, I sent my first photo from the Costco aisle that had the first Christmas ornaments. Anybody been there? You see what I’m talking about? Yeah. I sent that photo home, partly in shock. I have what we call “shock and joy.” Not shock and awe, but shock and joy about that whole feeling. I love Christmas. I love lights. I love ornaments. I love Christmas trees. I’m looking to see what’s going to be the best new light system I can get. Sadly disappointed this year myself, but that’s another story. But I’m always into all of the signs and the symbols of the holiday that humanity has sort of put together and that I know is all sort of a sort of commercialized. I get that.

But I’m happy to enjoy the lights. I think twinkling lights remind me that I need darkness to be dispelled. I think carols, even songs that are just with giddy up and “grandma got run over by a reindeer” – all that stuff. I still enjoy all the festivities and the fun of Christmas, the secular holiday, but I get to do it with the deeper meaning of what we read about in Luke Chapter 2. The wonder that God would come at all into space-time. Why the first century? Why not this year?

A lot of you are out there wondering if God would just show up, I’d believe in Him. He did show up. He chose to do that in the first century in a pass-through country called Israel. Occupied and oppressed, taxed real heavily, threatened with violence all the time by the Roman government. And it’s into that where, wonder of wonders, Jesus came. I’m stunned by the wonder of it all.

Albert Einstein once said this, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It’s the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” And I haven’t got a clue what the status of Einstein’s theology was. I just know that when I read The World as I See It, this essay that is taken from 1930, I thought, he’s onto something there at least. Human beings need wonder. We need a wonder that can push back the darkness around us. We need a wonder that’s so thrilling, so amazing we can’t figure it out because we need mystery. We need transcendence. We don’t need stuff that we can figure out and control. That’s what we crave, what we lust. We’ve craved and lusted that since the Garden of Eden. That’s how we got fooled, see. “You can be as smart as God. You can be like God. You can have the last word yourself.” And what we need, though, is wonder.

And we were built and designed by God. He put eternity in our hearts so that we would wonder and be in rapturous wonder over Him; that He came, that He loves us, that He would set His love on us at all. So, I seek to persuade you that the birth of Christ restores wonder to a disenchanted world. And perhaps you are disenchanted. We live in a world that is turned away from transcendence. Curiosity has been eclipsed by cynicism. I think that’s one of the… If a town has sin, I think that’s one of our great sins in Nashville, cynicism. It’s in the top 10 or 20 of our great sins in this town, cynicism. Well, the list is longer than that. What are y’all talking about? Curiosity has been eclipsed by cynicism. Please, this year, will you get curious again? [Congregation: Yes.]

Do yourself a favor, become curious. You do not know it all, said the man pointing his finger at all of you. I don’t know it all either. And we are here, we are the fellowship of the wondering fools. Fools for Christ because we trust and believe in Him. The one who would choose a little church like this in a hundred-year-old convent building to plant a church and have a bunch of people gather once a week to worship and to wonder.

And that leads me to that second word I wanted to talk about, which is worship. The birth of Christ not only restores wonder to us, our disenchanted world, but the birth of Christ redirects our worship to the God who came near here. The angels are singing. The shepherds are just out there on an average night, probably just one guy awake. The other guys are sleeping, the sheep are snoring. I mean, you can just kind of picture the whole thing. These guys were not sort of any kind of elite social class at all. They weren’t well-educated. They were probably despised and looked down on by everybody. They probably just couldn’t get a different job.

And maybe that’s tonight. Maybe you feel like your career is like that. I don’t know. But that’s who Jesus sent… And God, the Father, sent the angels. Go sing to those dudes. You mean don’t go sing to Carnegie Hall with a big… And there’s nothing wrong with singing at Carnegie Hall, by the way. I was there last week. It’s awesome. It’s amazing. Wonderful. But when God, the Father, told Gabriel and Michael and all the little angelic choir to get ready, “We’re doing a road trip,” And they got all excited and rehearsed it all up.

And, “Where are we going? Where are we going? Where are we going?”

It’s, “We’re going to a field.”

“Are we singing for thousands?”

“No. We’re singing for a handful. Guys that’ll go without names in the Bible. I don’t even know their names. I can’t wait to get home and meet them. But I mean…”

And that’s wonder of wonders. The guys that got inspired to run to Bethlehem, as the passage tells us, begin to worship this one who the angels sang about. Pretty amazing.

Eugene Peterson says, “Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.” Can we do that some more? I need more of that. I don’t need more of just attending a building with a pointy steeple on it. I don’t need more religious rules to follow. Maybe you’re like me in that regard. I do need some behavior modification, but that’s not going to save me. What I really need is to come to know the living God and have my relationship with Him set right. And there’s only one person that can do that for me. There’s only one person that can reconcile me to God. And that’s God Himself and the personal work of Jesus Christ, His Son. So, the proper response for me is to, like these shepherds, run! Go and see is it true. And then run – go and tell everybody you can find to tell.

And that’s where my third word, witness, comes. And the birth of Christ restores wonder to a disenchanted world. It redirects our worship to the God who came near, and the birth of Christ compels us to witness about the good news of great joy to all people. You know how it happens. You go, you find a great deal on something. You immediately text a few friends, “Hey, look at… They’re selling those for… They’re giving those away.” Whatever. You’re just always excited to tell somebody about something awesome that you’ve found.

Why are we so timid about the Gospel? Don’t you know that your friends at work, that your friends and your family are disenchanted? They’re wondering, “Is there really anything more to this world, to this life? Is there something transcendent at all?” They’re wondering that. And we’re sitting around here just being quiet. We need to not be so timid about this great news we have because I’m not going to go tell my friends they need to follow these rules; I’m going to go tell my friends the good news about Jesus who came and paid the price for my sins and their sins, as well. And by hoping and trusting and believing in Him, we can find life in His name. That’s really good news. We’re not going to step out on the line, yell at everybody and scream at everybody. That’s not why the Lord Jesus saved us, not to do all of that.

We have a whole lot of people in our world that are refugees, as C.S. Lewis calls them in this next quote, and they need to be told the good news, he says, “As we meet the incoming tide of refugees from the meaning crisis,” what does that mean? That means they don’t have any meaning or purpose for their lives. They have no idea why they ought to get out of bed tomorrow. And there’s a lot of them, and maybe you’re one of them. I feel like that from time to time myself. Maybe you do too.

But, “As we meet the incoming tide of refugees from the meaning crisis, the church needs both apologists,” those who will seek to persuade others, “in the academy and storytellers in the arts. We need people in the mold of C.S. Lewis showing not only that the story is true, but why we have wanted to believe it all along.” And this is from Justin Brierley’s as I misquoted it earlier, but it’s Justin Brierley’s book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Great book. Put it under somebody’s Christmas tree or under your own tree if you’re yet to buy yourself something that somebody gave you a gift card for. This is a really, really excellent book. And he makes a great point there.

There are people longing for wonder. Perhaps you’re one of them. There are people longing to find out, “Where should I direct my worship? I’ve tried money, sex and power, or some variation of those things, and it’s just not doing it for me. I still find life meaningless. I’m still wanting something else.” And if that’s you here tonight, great news. I think the something else you’re looking for actually has come here for you. He, 2000 years ago, came to a very humble setting so that all of us, no matter who we are, no matter what our status in life might know, He came for us too. Not just for them, but for us as well.

Tim Keller in Hidden Christmas says, “The Gospel narratives are telling you not what you should do, but what God has done. The birth of the Son of God into the world is a gospel, a good news,” that’s what gospel means, “an announcement. You don’t save yourself. God has come to save you.”

Let’s pray: Lord, this year, flood our hearts with wonder. So much so that we have to turn our worship to You, and so much so that we have to tell somebody. We have to, in word and deed, live out the Gospel. Lord, we recognize that You took the ordinary and turned it into a stage for the extraordinary when You came to a field, or sent Your angels to a field, with shepherds in it. And when You came, Yourself, to Israel, to that couple, to that day and time.

We need the salvation that You have brought. We need You, Lord, to fill us with wonder. Re-enchant our dry hearts, our desperate souls, and may the breath of Christ draw us back into wonder, worship and to go out and proclaim that good news of great joy, like the angels sang that night. Help us, Lord, to sing “glory to God in the highest” in the way we live, in the way that we are in our family relationships, in the way that we do our work. May Your glory be our passion in life. We pray in Jesus’ name, for His sake, amen and amen.

Songs, Readings & Prayer

Songs

“Angels We Have Heard On High” by Text: Trad. French carol Music: GLORIA
“Sing We the Song of Emmanuel” by Matt Boswell, Matt Papa, Stuart Townend, and Keith Getty
“Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus” by Music: Stralsund Gesangbuch (1 665) Words by Charles Wesley, Arranged by Keith Getty, orch. by Paul Campbell and John Langley
“The First Noel” by Davies Gilbert and William Sandys
“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” by Gerard Moultrie
“O Little Town Of Bethlehem” by Phillips Brooks and Lewis Henry Redner
“O Come All Ye Faithful” by C. Frederick Oakeley and John Francis Wade
“Go Tell It On The Mountain” by John W. Work
“Doxology” by Thomas Ken and Louis Bourgeois

All songs are used by Permission. CCLI License #200369

Call To Worship

Leader: Glory be to God on high, and on earth, peace, goodwill towards men.
People: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people.

Leader: Through the tender mercy of our God, The Dayspring from on high has visited us;
People: To shine on us in our darkness, to guide our feet into the path of peace.

Leader: Our eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all people;
All: Holy, holy, holy, are you Lord God, Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Your glory! Amen!