Immanuel

Boy, having the kids in our services this weekend was sure great, wasn't it? I just, I was grinning from ear to ear the entire time. But it reminded me of something that I read this week. Some teachers, Sunday school teachers and school teachers, sharing how they've heard kids sing Christmas carols. And sometimes get the lyrics maybe just a little bit skewed in funny ways. And by the way, two of my grandsons were in the Christmas pageant, so that was really fun. That probably had something to do with the fact that I was blocking your view with my camera, taking pictures the entire time.

But I asked Freddie, one of my grandchildren, I said, "Hey, I need a slide background. I'm going to commission your art." And he drew this for me, for this little opening illustration. So thank you to Freddie for that. But how kids sometimes sing Christmas carols, for example, while shepherds wash their socks by night, which kind of makes some sense. They had to do that. For that third verse of Joy to the World, "He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prudes," which is the way some people look at our faith. How about a way in a manger, "The cattle are glowing, the baby awakes." It is impossible to sleep when your cow is glowing. Let's just admit that.

This is one of my favorite holly jolly Christmas, "Oh ho, the missing toe hung where you can't see." That's just gross. And you know the Mariah Carey song, "All I Want for Christmas," you hear it everywhere, right? It's ubiquitous. How about this, "All I Want for Christmas is stew," which I kind of do want, actually. That's a good one. In the Christmas story, as told in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is given five names or titles. And in this Advent series, what we're doing here is kind of unwrapping the deeper meaning of those names, one a week. And it's been rich.

So far in the series, we've looked at Messiah and Jesus and this week, Immanuel. Say that with me. Immanuel. If you walked in today feeling a little anxious, stressed, joyless, you're looking around, Christmas is supposed to be festive, you're not feeling it, maybe even a little bit angry. This is a powerful word for you, as you'll see when we unwrap it. So watch as we peel back the layers of its meaning.

This one verse that's found for us in the Gospel of Matthew, verse 23, it says, "All this took place," all the whole nativity, "to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet," and here's the quotation, here's the prophecy, "The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel," that's a Hebrew word, which means God with us. Say that with me. God with us. If you had to wrap up the wonder of Christmas into three words, it would be those words. You could meditate on that every single one of the 12 days of Christmas and never get to the bottom of it. Say it again, God with us. God with us.

But let's really do a deep dive here, because Matthew gives us a clue that this doesn't actually start 2,000 years ago with the birth of Christ. He says it was foretold through a prophet. Now Matthew loves to talk about the prophets. He was writing when the New Testament was written, that's 2,000 years ago for us. But for him, what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, they were ancient even to him. I mean, the Old Testament was written that the most recent ones to him were seven centuries before, right? So he loves to quote these Old Testament prophets 53 times. He quotes them in the Gospels to show that Jesus really fulfills the whole plot line of the Bible.

Everything in the Hebrew Scriptures is sort of pointing to him, and this is one example. Now he says specifically, "A prophet foretold this sentence." So he's pointing us back to a story. What prophet had this sentence in his prophecy? Well let me tell you the story. Seven centuries earlier, this happened, and I want to illustrate this literally with some amazing engravings that I found in this book. This is a very, very old Bible. In fact, it's so old that the front and back cover are made out of wood. And this old leather-bound wooden-covered Bible is an old German Gothic Bible, which was given to my parents, Fred and Rosemary Schlepfer, on their wedding day. And I know they treasured it.

My dad wrote their names in it and the date. And I know he loved it because he was an artist himself, and I'm sure he loved the illustrations here. And there's great illustrations of the story I'm about to tell. And it starts with this character, King Ahaz. Now the Bible says King Ahaz was a very wicked, evil king. In fact, if I told you some of the things that he did, you wouldn't be able to sleep for a week. So I won't tell you the details. But when this story opens, he's also very frightened. Why? Well, he opens the window of his palace in Jerusalem, and he sees that Jerusalem is surrounded by armies, not just one army, but two armies, the armies of two different nations.

And these two different nations are led by two different kings, and they formed an alliance, and they send him a message. And here's their message. Their message is, "Hey, listen, it's the baby Jesus. I hear him now." That's a nice thing. But when babies are crying during Christmas services, and you feel yourself perhaps starting to get a little bit, there's a baby crying. Just tell yourself, "No, wait a minute. That's the baby Jesus, and we're celebrating his birth. It'll calm you right down." See, you can't even hear him anymore.

So King Ahaz, the city of Jerusalem is surrounded by two warring armies, and they're in league, and they send him a message. They say, "If you don't join us and become the third member of our team to go against the king of Assyria, we're going to attack you. Join us or we'll attack." So he's like, "Well, I don't really want to join them, but they're going to attack me if I don't." Meanwhile, the king of Assyria hears about it, and he's not happy either. And his emissary sent a message to King Ahaz, and they say, "If you join those two kings, I will attack you." So now if King Ahaz doesn't join anybody who's going to get attacked, if he joins those two guys he's going to be attacked, if he joins the king of Assyria, he's going to be attacked. It is a no-win situation.

And the Bible says in Isaiah 7:2, "So the hearts of the king and his people trembled with fear like trees of the forest shaking in the wind." And those of you who live in Scotts Valley saw some of this happening yesterday. But God, even though King Ahaz is wicked, God wants to encourage the people of Jerusalem. And so God finds a prophet, and he tells the prophet, the prophet Isaiah, this. He says, "Tell the king to stop worrying. Tell him he doesn't need to fear the fierce anger of those two burned-out embers." But then God also adds this. God says to tell the king, "Unless your faith is firm, I cannot make you stand firm." Would you say this verse out loud with me? Because this is important. Here we go. "Unless your faith is firm, I cannot make you stand firm."

God is saying you and I always have two choices as we move forward in life, fear or faith. And these two are a choice. They're very similar. Both fear and faith anticipate the future, right? Neither fear nor faith knows what's going to happen in the future. So they both fill in the blanks, anticipate something's going to happen in my future. The big difference is fear anticipates with dread. The worst is going to happen. It's all going downhill from now. This bad thing happened. It's all going to be terrible. My city's going to be attacked and ransacked. Faith anticipates with hope. No, God's in control. I know somehow God's going to bring good out of this.

So they're very similar. They're just basically, what are you anticipating? What's the engine of your anticipation? So God is telling Ahaz, listen. You can operate in faith or you can operate in fear. How are you going to fill in the blank? Well, King Ahaz says, I don't believe a word of what this prophet Isaiah is saying. We're doomed. So he chooses fear. And Isaiah says to him, but Ahaz, God wants to encourage you. And he says this, what an offer. Ask the Lord your God for a sign of confirmation, Ahaz. Make it as difficult as you want, as high as the heaven or as deep as the grave. He's saying God wants to prove to you that this is true, that you can have hope.

So whatever you want in your wildest imagination, what sign do you want God to give to you that you can have faith? You can make it as high as heaven, as deep as the grave, anything you want. But the King refused. He says, no, I will not test the Lord like that. Now you might think that this sounds spiritual, but actually the Bible says this comes from a place of stubborn fear. He did not want to have hope. He's convinced that they are doomed. Now I'm not even going to ask for a sign. So what does Isaiah say? Here's where that prophecy starts. That's the context for Isaiah 7:14, where Isaiah says to the King, all right, if you're not going to ask for a sign, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look, the virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son and she will call him Immanuel, which means God is with us.

Now let's keep unwrapping the meaning of this. It's fascinating. The word translated most often in our English Bible's virgin, that is the Hebrew word alma, say alma with me, alma. So this is similar to, many languages have words like this, like in Spanish, tonser, in German, youngfrau, in old usage of English, maiden. All of these words could mean a young unmarried woman and they could also specifically mean a virgin. The range of meaning covers all of those words. So what does it mean in this particular case? Well, as the story unfolds, we see that it means that a young single mom there in the besieged city of Jerusalem, so you can imagine she's probably living in poverty, she probably already doesn't have a lot of hope in her life. And the city's besieged, so the hope's even worse.

But she is about to give birth, it's almost like Isaiah's saying, do you hear that? Do you hear the baby crying? Well, here's what's interesting, and I'll tell you what she's going to name the child. She's going to name him Emmanuel, which means God with us. Now, here's the sign, Emmanuel was not a child's name. There's no record of any child, boy or girl, before this moment being named Emmanuel. So she's first of all giving the child a unique name, and secondly, if you're a single mom, you're impoverished, you're having a baby, you don't have a lot of support, and your city's surrounded by two armies and your king is evil, you might name your kid God help us, but you're probably not going to name him God is with us.

And what Isaiah's saying is that young woman's faith in God is going to be an example and a sign to you, Ahaz, and to you, elites that surround Ahaz. This woman has faith in God that you don't have yet, right? But that's going to be a sign that God's with us. And before the child is very old, the surrounding armies, their threat dissipates because it dissolves into just civil war without the Jewish people having to lift a finger, the threat has vanished. And so the prophecy comes true. But subsequently, more armies attacked Jerusalem in the centuries following until eventually the Jewish people were captured and almost all of them were hauled away as slaves to Babylon.

And in those days, they look back to this prophecy in the book of Isaiah and they read it century after century and Isaiah 7:14 became a prophecy for them about the future Messiah, that one day that prophecy would be literally fulfilled when a virgin would miraculously give birth to the Messiah. So fast forward for seven centuries, they've been reading this prophecy with hope. And now in the sleepy little town of Nazareth, a man named Joseph gets a message first from his fiance Mary. She says, I'm pregnant, but I haven't known a man. I'm a virgin, it's of the Holy Spirit. And Joseph wants to divorce her at first. We're no, no, no. But then an angel appears to him in a dream and says, don't be afraid, take Mary home as your wife, because this is taking place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son. They will call him Emmanuel and this time I won't just be an unusual name. This time the baby will be God with us. Say God with us again. God with us.

And that's not just a theological truth, that's an encouragement. Those same three words that encouraged King Ahaz that encouraged Joseph can encourage you right now, God with us. Listen to this. I read a couple of paragraphs that somebody wrote about this. This is so good. Here is the wonder of Christmas. God, the creator of the cosmos, warmly wrapped in humanity. He came to us, to our stable, to our cross. God with us. For the man who is no longer independent and must now rely on the care of others, God is with you. To the young mother feeling anxious, God is with you. For the person guilty over something he can't seem to conquer, God is with you. For the widowed grandmother now taking care of grandchildren, God is with you. For the lonely person longing for love, God with you. And for the one seeking truth and looking at Jesus as a possibility, God is with you.

Immanuel means whoever you are. You are not alone in the universe. You never have been. Because God in Christ wrapped himself in human flesh and chose a cave in Bethlehem and a cross in Jerusalem to communicate one simple abiding truth. God is with us. That truth has the beauty to change every single waking moment. Isn't that good? So it does have the power to change every single waking moment, but how? How does this truth change your life? Let me just speak personally. In my life and even now in my life as I meditated on this this week, I've realized that this truth specifically means three things to me. And I have a feeling I'm not too different from you, so maybe you can relate to this.

This is backed up by scripture over and over again. Jesus is God with us in three specific key ways. Number one, Jesus is with me in my sin. Jesus is even with me in my sin when I try to run away from him. It's kind of like King David wrote in Psalm 139, "Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you're there. If I make my bed in the depths, you're there too. I can't run from you. You're everywhere." Now this idea used to not comfort me. I've told some of you when I was a teenager, my Swiss mom did not have me as a teenager on any curfew. She did not have me on super strict rules. She did when I was younger, very strict, but when I became a teenager, she really released me from almost all of that. Now that sounds good, but looking back, this was genius.

What she did do was this. The last thing she used to tell me when I would leave the house to go hang out with my buddies or when I would leave the house on a date when I was a teenager, she would say, "Bye-bye René. Always remember René. The Holy Spirit is right there with you all the time. Isn't that wonderful? So much fun. Bye-bye. Have fun." Thanks, Mom. It works. But here's the thing. Jesus is not with me just to spy on me all the time, right? Jesus said, "The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, even when I'm at my worst." He's right there. "To help me out." It's kind of like this.

I watched a TED talk by a man named Jose Miguel Sokoloff. He is from Colombia, a beautiful country, but they had a problem about 17,000 rebel soldiers lived in the jungle. There had been a civil war. It was over, but thousands of these rebels were still in spots in the rainforest. So the question became, how do we get them to lay down their arms and come home? Well they interviewed several former rebels and asked them, "Well, why didn't you come home sooner?" And they said, "Well, we were afraid to come home." Afraid of what? Well, two things, execution and rejection. Afraid we'd be executed by the government and afraid we'd be rejected by our loved ones.

So the government decided to grant total unconditional amnesty to all 17,000. No questions asked. Just it was a get out of jail free card. It was a complete do over, a total life mulligan, legal forgiveness. Because they wanted them to come back and be productive members of society. But how do you get that message out in an effective way? They're living in the jungle. Well they tried loudspeakers blaring from military helicopters saying, "We forgive you, lay down your arms and proceed to camp." Now how much success do you think they had with that? Very very little. And they made TV commercials with actors saying, "We've saved a spot for you. All is forgiven. Come home." Almost no response because, you know, TV reception in the jungle is very bad.

And then they realized, listen, the rebels used jungle high, jungle rivers as kind of their highways. They're there on the river all the time. So they sent gifts downstream inside little lit up plastic balls that they filled with presents and they loaded up barges with these things and they lit them up and they floated the balls down the rivers and each one inside had a gift and a message, "All is forgiven. Come home." Very little response. Finally they realized they needed to go where the rebels lived into the dense forest. And they knew they lived in nine general locations. So they, at great personal risk, honestly, they didn't know what kind of reception they'd get. They went to those nine spots. They found the biggest trees in those spots and they decorated them with Christmas lights because this happened right around Christmas week.

And then they hung banners on each of these trees that said in Spanish, "If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home." And finally at that, hundreds of rebels walked out of the jungle, gave up their weapons, including the commanders of the rebel forces because they finally knew actual people actually cared. What a great summary of God with us and what happened at Christmas. Spiritually, the Bible says, we're all rebels against God. And it says that God spoke in various ways at various times through the prophets, a little bit like shouting from the helicopters. And it says He floated gifts to us of life and of grace and beauty. And finally He dove into the jungle Himself and put Himself, the light of the world, on a tree, on a cross to accomplish and demonstrate the truth. All is forgiven. Come home. That's the invitation of Christmas. All is forgiven. Come home.

And so the question is, how will you respond? God is with me in my sin and He is with me in my sorrow, in my sorrow. I've been clinging to this promise a lot lately. Promises like Hebrews 13. This is a good one. And I'd love for you to read this out loud with me. Hebrews 13 starting in verse 5. Let me hear you. He Himself has said, "Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you." So we say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?" Even when it doesn't feel like it, He is with you. He says, "Never will I leave you. Never, never."

You know, the Bible never promises if you become a Christian, you won't have sorrow. But it does promise something. Here's the promise. "Fear not, for I am with you. Be not afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." You are not alone in your sorrow. That doesn't mean there aren't challenging things in life. What it means is you and I have the same choice A has had and Joseph had, fear or faith. How will you choose to anticipate the future? You know, dread paralyzes. Hope energizes. So I choose hope. That has to be a very deliberate, conscious choice every day for me. Otherwise I lapse into this. But I choose hope. Why? Because he is with me in my sin, he is with me in my sorrow, and he is with me in my struggle.

Life is hard sometimes. Ministry is hard. When Jesus commissioned his disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel, I'm sure they got pretty afraid. So how did he comfort them? He says, "I am with you always." He's with us. He's with us to the very end of the age. I want to show you a house. Do you know whose house this was? This was the home of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was pastor for several years at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. And you can actually take a tour of this house and they refurbished it exactly how it would have been when he was a pastor there.

And as part of the tour, they'll take you into the kitchen. That's this right here. And they will play a tape of Martin Luther King Jr. describing in a sermon something that happened right at that kitchen table. But first the tour guide sets it up. Middle of winter 1957, middle of the night, the phone rings. Dr. King picks it up and a snarling voice on the other's end says, "If you don't leave your church and leave town now, I will kill you and your wife and your baby daughter by bombing your house. I give you three days." Hangs up. He says he got up, made himself a strong pot of coffee, and sat down at that kitchen table.

And when he tells the story, now remember he was already a pastor, but when he tells the story he says, "This was actually the moment of my personal conversion." So if you're on the tour at this moment is when you hear this. "I grew up in the church and the church meant something very real to me, but it was a kind of inherited religion and I had never felt an experience with God in the way that you must have it if you're going to walk the lonely paths of this life. I got to the point that I couldn't take it any longer. I was weak. And he said to me, "You can't call on daddy now. He's up in Atlanta, 175 miles away." "You can't even call on mama now. You got to call on that something and that person that your daddy used to tell you about. That power that can make a way out of nowhere."

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to know God for myself. I bow down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it. Oh yes, I prayed a prayer and I prayed out loud that night. I say, "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right." The Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. It seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Lord, I will be with you even until the end of the world." I tell you, I've seen the lightning flash. I've heard the thunder roll. I felt sin breakers dancing, trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying, "Steal to fight on." He promised never to lead me, never to leave me alone. No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.

You know, I get discouraged too. In ministry I get discouraged, but I stake my life on the fact that Jesus is God with us and Jesus said, "I will be with you always to the very end of the earth." And so that's why I consciously choose faith over fear, knowing Jesus is with me when I sin, with me when I sorrow, with me when I struggle. That is the message of Christmas, Emmanuel, God with us. Make it a prayer to God. Say, "You are with me." Say that with me. "You are with me." Say it again. "You are with me." I want to suggest that this week when times get tough, when you get distressed, discouraged because of your sins, sorrow, struggle, say that out loud. Say it in your car. Say it in the middle of the night. In your bed when you wake up in the middle of the night. Say it when you come home from work and you're exhausted. God with me. Jesus, you are with me right now. You are with me. Say that with me one more time. "You are with me now and forever." That's what you discover when you unwrap Emmanuel.

Would you bow your head with me as we close the service in prayer? With our heads bowed, maybe like Martin Luther King Jr., you were raised in church too and it means something real to you. But as he put it, it's kind of an inherited religion for you. Maybe like him that belief has never led to a moment of personal surrender. And now in some ways like him you're reaching the end of your strength. In this moment I just want to invite you to say his prayer quietly in your own soul. "Lord, I'm weak now. Lord I need you. I need to call on that person who can make a way when there is no way. I need your salvation." And so I choose faith over fear. I choose to believe that Jesus, you are God with us, Emmanuel. I don't understand it all but I choose to believe it. And so come and fill my life today.

Now for those who've already made that commitment, I want to suggest that you pray, "Lord, help me to proactively each day make the choice over and over again to choose faith over fear, to anticipate with hope and not dread because I know you are with me." We thank you for this gift of Christmas we've unwrapped today together. In your name we pray. Amen.