Messiah

Well, unwrapping the names of Christmas is our Advent series. Hello and good morning. Good morning balcony. Thank you. My name is Mark. I'm one of the pastors and I am so glad that you are here. Here in our auditorium? Our auditorium. And those of you on the live stream. We are so glad that you are with us today and I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

And now as we turn our focus towards Christmas, I want to start with just a little church Christmas poll if you will. We've had a lot of political polls. This is a Christmas poll. And so here we go. First question is this, when do you start decorating for the holidays? Okay, show of hands. Like mine have been up for a week. Some of you couldn't wait. All right. How about this? I patiently wait until the day after Thanksgiving. All the rule followers here today. And how about I'm lucky if they're up by New Year's. Any of those of you? Like it's kind of like the why bother crowd.

All right. The next question. When do you shop for your presents? Let me see your hand if you like. I'm mostly done. Yeah, you're the same people that did the decorations last week. Okay. I get them done a few days ahead of time. Okay. Many of us. Or how about this guys? This one's for you. I get them in the St. Nick of time. Yeah, it's all the men that raised their hand. Okay. Finally, how do you open your presents? For instance, let me see your hands if it's a slow unwrapping, you know, taking turns, enjoying each gift. So thoughtful. So much so you're still opening gifts from last Christmas.

Or how about the rest of you? All at once in chaos of flying wrapping paper together, you're done with your gifts in like 10 minutes. And those people? No, none of them day or day. At least we're not going to admit it. Well, this Christmas season, we are going to be about the slow unwrapping of God's greatest gift to all of us, which is Jesus Christ. Unwrapping the names of Christmas. And here's what we want to do. We want to kind of facilitate for all of us kind of a slow savoring of Christmas.

And because let's face it, it can all happen so quickly, especially this year with the late Thanksgiving. I know it's like the, what, the same Thursday, fourth Thursday of the month, but it came late this year. And so it's going to be a short, we're going to be at our Cadillac services in three weeks. And so we would just want to kind of slow down and just savor it.

And in the gospel of Matthew, as he begins to tell the story, he drops five names, titles of Jesus, and kind of rapid succession in their Messiah, Jesus, King, Shepherd, Emmanuel. And so each week, we just want to take one of these names at a time. And we want to unwrap their meaning. Because listen, could any of you use just maybe a little bit more of a sense of wonder in your life? Yeah. How about an abiding sense of joy or deep seated peace? Well, as we unwrap the meaning of these five different names, I think that's what it's going to help do for us.

I think it's going to change our focus from all the things that we think we need to do for Christmas and shift it to the amazing things that God has already done for us at Christmas. Amen? All right. Let's start by unwrapping the first name. I want to invite you to grab your message notes and open your Bibles if you have them to the beginning of Matthew's gospel. Today, we're going to be in Matthew 1:1–18.

And before we unpack what Matthew has to say about Christmas, I just want to give you kind of Matthew in a sentence, the whole gospel. Here it is, Matthew in a nutshell, God keeps His promises. God keeps His promises. I mean, how many of us need to hear that today? That God keeps His promises. I mean, maybe frankly, there's a situation in your life right now and it looks rather bleak to you. God keeps His promises. Promises like, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." Promises like, "I will strengthen you and uphold you." Promises like, "I will give you peace."

And especially promises like, "I will send my anointed one to lead my people into peace, the promise of a Messiah." And as the Bible puts it, it kind of summarizing the central theme of Matthew. It says, "God promises in the Hebrew Scriptures to bring salvation to His people Israel and to the whole world are being fulfilled with the coming of Jesus the Messiah." This is Matthew in a nutshell. And so the first thing that Matthew would want us to know about the birth of Jesus, not surprisingly, is that it's about the Messiah and His arrival.

And so let's start to unwrap this. Matthew 1:1, it says, "This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham." And then Matthew gives us a long string of names of many of the ancestors of Jesus, just over 40 names. And then arriving at verse 16, it says, "And Mary was the mother of Jesus, who is called the Messiah." Next verse, "Thus there were 14 generations and all from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the exile to Babylon, and 14 from the exile to the Messiah." Next verse, "This is how the birth of the Messiah came about." There's a word repeated there four times, and it is, let me hear you say it, "Messiah." It is about the Messiah.

Okay, what's a Messiah? Before we get to that, the reason Matthew wants us to see this repetition in Scripture is off to the author's way of kind of circling, underlining, highlighting something that he wants us to pay attention to. And again, it's the Messiah. Now again, what does that mean? It means anointed one, anointed one. Way back in the ancient days, the Israelites would pour oil on someone's head in order to kind of commission them or coronate them, if you will, to serve in a place of leadership.

And this oil wasn't like your average kitchen cabinet olive oil. Back in Exodus 30, the actual recipe for this oil is actually, it's preserved till this day. You can go home and try to make it yourself. This is what it had in it. Try to imagine, in fact, what this would smell like. It was a little bit of olive oil blended with a lot of cinnamon plus a plant that's related to ginger root plus myrrh, which happens to smell a bit like root beer. And so when you mix this all together and anoint someone on their head, what kind of made them smell like, well, like Christmas cookies, right?

Now, why did they do this? Again, it was like being knighted or coronated in order to be set apart in order to lead God's people. And by the way, in Greek, anointed one is the word Christos from which we get the word Christ. So to be clear, Jesus was not born to Joseph and Mary Christ. He is the Christ, the anointed one.

Now, this may surprise or maybe even scandalize some of you, but Jesus is not the only one who was anointed in Scripture. In the Old Testament, all sorts of people were anointed, again, to set them apart. And who were they? They were namely the priests and the kings, Israel's leaders. It started with the priests. They anointed them. And then you may know that at some point in their history, the Israelites were like, "We want a king like everybody else has a king. We feel a little bit deprived." And so Samuel anoints Saul, Israel's first king, and then David, and then all of David's successors are anointed until Jerusalem is conquered by Babylon.

And then for nearly 600 years, there is no true successor to David's throne. There's no real king. And then during this time, there's like this growing expectation, this burgeoning hope that God would send an ultimate anointed one, a Messiah that would rescue, deliver, redeem God's people. He would be in Himself kind of a combination priest and king, sum up kind of all of those hopes in a person.

Now, with that established, let's circle back to what Matthew says, chapter 1, verse 1. He says, "This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham." And I want to say, "Okay, time out, Matthew. You begin with a genealogy? I mean, really? Doesn't Matthew know that genealogies are like the most boring parts in the entire Bible? I mean, why not start? You're going to start the story of Christmas. Why not start with, you know, something like, I don't know, like once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, you know? That's kind of an opening line, right?

But here's the thing. Matthew's original audience meant they get what he's doing here because in his day, everyone knew the stories attached to all these names. And so they're riveting, riveted. They're like, "Well, yeah, those are such great stories." Like when Matthew says that Jesus is the son of Abraham. And if you know anything about Abraham, God used him to really give birth to the Jewish nation. And yet when God decides that he is going to create a people, a nation for himself, who does he select to begin that work, the forefather and mother of these people? Oh, how about a couple who cannot have children? We're off to a great start, right?

Abraham and Sarah, year after year of their lives, there is pain and longing. Meanwhile, God keeps saying, "You know, I'm going to raise a nation out of you two. Man, it's going to be awesome." And they're like, "Okay, really?" Not only that, but God kind of doubles down on this promise. He comes to Abraham some years into this. They're still waiting for it to happen. And God says, "You know, guess what, Abraham? I'm not only going to make you the father of a nation. I'm going to make you the father of many nations." That's what the name Abraham means, "father of many nations."

But again, nobody is seeing this potential in Abraham. Not Abraham, not Sarah, only God. And then it gets even better because when Sarah is 89 years old and Abraham is 99 years old, it's kind of May, December, but now she's caught up with him, right? 89, 99, God comes to Abraham and says, "Okay, here it is. Within a year, Sarah is going to bear you a son." And when Sarah overhears this, she's like, "Yeah, right." She laughs. And God turns to her and says, "Is anything too hard for God? Anything impossible for me?"

Or sure enough, within a year's time, Sarah bears a baby boy, and they name him Isaac, which many of you know means laughter. And there, as she's cradling this little boy in her arms, she says this in Genesis 21, "Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have born him a son in his old age." I mean, what a story. And it goes on because in the first verse, very first, first verse of Matthew, not only is Jesus the son of Abraham, but he's the son of David, Israel's greatest king who lived about a thousand years before Jesus was born.

But just like Abraham, nobody saw any potential in David. David was just an anonymous shepherd boy. And so when God sends the prophet Samuel to a guy named Jesse, that's David's dad, and Samuel says, "Well, God has sent me here to anoint one of your sons as the next king." So Jesse lines all his sons up from oldest to youngest. Samuel goes to the first one. God says, "No, not him." Okay. Goes to the next one. "Nope, not him either." Goes to sons three, four, five, six, seven. "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope." Samuel's kind of scratching his head like, "Are you sure your name is Jesse? Any chance you have any more sons?"

Well, yeah, I mean, there's David, but he's the runt. I didn't want to waste your time. He's out tending the sheep, and the rest is history. Not only does David become Israel's greatest monarch, but in addition to that and a lot of other things, he also, he writes the longest book in the Bible, the book of Psalms. He is a wordsmith on par with Shakespeare, and that's being kind to Shakespeare. I mean, he is this major figure in history and Scripture, and yet initially no one saw any potential, any promise in him except God did, like he did with Abraham.

In fact, all the people that Matthew chooses to name in the genealogy of Jesus, beyond Abraham and David, to Jacob, Judah, Judah, Tamar, Rahab, then if we could travel back in time, you know what we would see? The vast majority of time, we would see ordinary people leading very ordinary lives and not just that very dysfunctional ones. We would see prostitutes and liars and traitors and adulterers and criminals. We would see infertile women become matriarchs and rejected shepherds become kings. In other words, that's the exact kind of people that Jesus hung out with, didn't he? I mean, these are his people. This is his flock, his flock of lost sheep that nobody thinks God could ever do anything with, and yet that's exactly what he does.

And so now that we've kind of unwrapped the paper, let's look inside at the present, the gift that Matthew has for us. I just want to share with you two takeaways from this section in Matthew right here at the beginning of his gospel. Two takeaways, and the first one is this, and let me tell you something. This will change your life if you truly receive and own this, and the first one is this, is that God uses unlikely people in impossible situations to achieve his incredible plans. Do you believe that today? That God can use unlikely people in impossible situations to achieve his incredible plans.

Matthew's basically been saying this all along. He's like, "Remember these people?" As if to remind his first audience and us that God is faithful in every single generation, including this one right here and now. And really, these stories from verses 1 to 17, it kind of sets up what Matthew says next, verse 18. He says, "This is how the birth of the Messiah came about. His mother, mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit." Here we go. Mary fits right in to the stream of all these stories.

I mean, could you be more unlikely than this? An anonymous virgin who lives in Nazareth, this tiny out-of-the-way village that is so poor, in fact, she's so poor that she will end up giving birth to the Messiah, not in a house, but in a feeding stall. Unlikely, unlikely, unlikely. And just as God worked through David and through Abraham and through Sarah and through Mary, God will work and can work through you and through me, you say, "Well, man, my circumstances are really, really tough. Well, so are theirs." And you know, people don't believe in me. People actually put me down all the time. Same was true for them.

I mean, these stories, if you think about it, these stories, they force us to ask this really important question, and I really hope you will ask this to yourself today, and here it is, "What have I decided is too hard for God?" Not just in general, but specifically. What is it in your life that right now, you've decided is too hard? It's a grief. It's a wound that you think could never heal. It's a habit that you think will enslave you to your dying day. You just can't see how you could live any differently. It's a behavior that you've prayed you'd been able to change over and over again, and yet at some point, we are tempted to give up as if to say, "God, you can have a virgin become pregnant. You can have a 99-hundred-year-old woman bear child, but I just don't know that you could do this in my life."

What is it that you've tried or you've decided is too hard for God? Because I want to remind you here today, church, as I remind myself, it's not. And of course, there are times often when God says, "That's not my will for you. That's not the answer that you've been asking for that I'm going to give you, but my grace will be sufficient. My power will be perfected in your weakness." And that will be the miracle. God uses unlikely people in impossible situations to achieve His incredible plans.

Second takeaway, Matthew wants us to see that in Jesus, all the promises of God are fulfilled. All the promises are yes in Jesus. The ones given to David and Abraham and the rest, because first of all, as the son of David, Jesus is the ultimate king. The ultimate king. Because Jesus is part of David's royal line. And this is significant because there was a day that God came to David and He makes a very important promise. And we see this in 2 Samuel 7:16, where God says, "Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before Me. And your throne shall be established for," what? "Forever." And in the Hebrew, that meant forever.

So as heir to David's throne, it should come as no surprise that Jesus talked about his kingdom a lot. In fact, the word kingdom comes up in the four gospels 114 times, 54 times in Matthew's gospel alone. That's roughly two times in every chapter. And so as heir, again, this is huge from start to finish. Matthew's kind of saying again, "How many ways can I say this?" Even all the way to the end of his gospel, chapter 28, with only three verses to go, it says this. You think Jesus knows He's the ultimate king? Watch this. "Jesus came to them, His disciples, and said, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.'" You can't really make a bigger claim than that, can you? My goodness. Jesus is king.

And He's not just the king, the ultimate king. He's our king. He's your king. That means that your future is in His hands. That your challenges are things that He knows about, that He cares about. And not only that, but He can actually handle it. He's up for the job. I mean, talk about having friends in high places. We have Jesus. So whatever you're facing today, whatever has you worried, whatever has you scared or sad, again, your king can handle it.

People say, "Well, God will never give you more than you can handle." And I say, "You know what? I don't know that that's true. I think life can deal to you blows that are more than you can handle, but they will never, ever give you something. Life will never give you something that God cannot handle, that your king Jesus cannot handle." Now again, when you believe this, it just transforms your whole perspective on life. And not only is Jesus the ultimate king, but finally, as the son of Abraham, Jesus offers the ultimate blessing.

Look at what God promised Abraham in Genesis 12. He says, "I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed." And so through Abraham's offspring, God is saying, "I'm going to bless the whole world. I'm going to kind of reverse the curse of sin and death through the offspring of Abraham." And then now, let's jump right back again to the end of Matthew, chapter 28, in verse 18. Jesus makes this amazing claim, "All authority in heaven and earth has been granted to me." And then verse 19, He continues, "Therefore, go and make disciples of what? All nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, go out to the whole world and tell people about me. Invite them to follow me so that they might experience and receive the innumerable blessings that come with being a part of God's household." That is the blessing that is ours in the Messiah. And one day, as Jesus continues to fulfill all of the promises that are part of His person and His coming, one day He is going to usher in a whole new era where heaven and earth come together and are made new. And there will be no more pain, dying, crying, death, violence. The old order of things shall pass away as God takes His place with His people.

Now, do you see what the unwrapping of the Messiah can mean to our lives? It can literally change your life just as it changed the life of a man named George. And I'll close with his story. George moved to London to pursue a career in music. At the time, London was the biggest city in the world. And if you wanted to make it in the music industry back then, probably like today, you know, you had to write really kind of big songs. And George, he was this big, bombastic guy and he just had a way of writing hit after hit after hit.

And at the time, classical music was happening, but it wasn't the music of the elite. It was kind of like pop music is today. And so, spectators at these classical concerts, I mean, they would wander around and, you know, they'd go like cracking sunfire seeds and spitting them on the floor. They would spit. They would boo. Sometimes they would even riot. So, it was much like our junior high group here at two lengths. Again, imagine going to a rock concert or a baseball game. That's the scene. And George, I mean, he thrived in this environment. Again, because he has a big personality. He liked big music, in particular, big Italian operas. He was very good at writing them.

There was big costumes, big sets. And for 25 years, I mean, he was just, you know, on a roll until suddenly that style of music just fell out of fashion. Nobody was interested. And so, George's career stalls out. He declares bankruptcy. He loses a lot of friends. He suffers a stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed. He's depressed. He's discouraged. He's disabled, feeling like, "Hey, man, my best years are behind me." And it was at this low ebb in his life that a friend of his, Charles Jennings, sent him a letter filled with Bible verses, references about the Messiah.

Now, there's no indication that George was a particularly religious man. And so, at first, that letter just sat and collected dust until the day he opened it and started reading verse after verse after verse about the Messiah. And these verses started to inspire and stir him. And so, he locks himself in his room for 24 consecutive days, taking, you know, hardly eating, hardly drinking. In fact, the original manuscript that he created in that time right here on screen, you can see this in the British Museum, and it was clearly hastily written. It's got, you know, ink blotches all over it. Also stains from George's very own tears.

It's been said that after he wrote all this, his music about the Messiah, his assistant hears crying coming from the room. And he's so worried he forces open the door to see tears streaming down George's face, saying, "I did think I saw all heaven before me." And the great God himself, because reading those verses, Jesus had a personal encounter, or excuse me, George had a personal encounter with Jesus, the Messiah that left him changed for the rest of his life.

And so, when the premiere for this music that he wrote, when he goes to roll it out to the public, it's not in some, you know, London concert hall. It's in a dingy music hall up in Dublin, Ireland that was quite impoverished at the time. And George decided in advance the proceeds from these concerts would be dedicated to two hospitals and to a debtors prison, similar to this one right here in Dublin. Because in those days, if you were in debt, you couldn't pay your bills, you went to prison and you stayed there. And yet, through the proceeds of these concerts, 147 men were released, set free from prison. George did this because he said, "Well, the Messiah set us free from our debt to sin."

Now, of course, most of you may have figured out by now that this is the story of George Frederick Hundell and his classic Christmas score. The Messiah. The Messiah made Hundell a legend to this day. And in fact, the Messiah left him better off in the latter part of his life than in all the years that came before that. But his story would fit right in to that string of names in the genealogy, wouldn't it? Yet another unlikely person that faced impossible situations and yet God did something amazing. But God would use to do great things, this washed up old guy. And I love how it amused it. It just shouts the truth of the gospel that Matthew begins with right out of the gate, "The Messiah is here and He shall reign forever and ever at King of Kings, forever and ever, Lord of Lords, as ever and ever." Hallelujah, hallelujah. Let me hear you say it. Hallelujah. Amen.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for you and I thank you that you would send your Son, Jesus the Messiah, not just to the world but to our world, to each of us, that we would be so precious to you that you would call us the sons and daughters of God. And so Lord, I pray that maybe there's someone here or they're watching on the live stream and this has got news to them and yet they're intrigued. Lord, would you just continue to draw them in? And may that person right now who's listening to my voice, may they say, "Jesus, I don't really understand a lot but I want to understand more." And I pray that they would just lean into what you have for them.

And for the rest of us, Lord, who call you our Savior, our Messiah, our King, Lord, I pray that you would spare us from just the routine of yet another Christmas season, spare us from the realization at the end of this month that, "Wow, that...what was that?" But rather, Lord, we would just drink in every moment and we'd savor the significance of who you are like we've seen today, the significance of being our Messiah. It is in your name, Lord Jesus, that we pray. And all God's people said, "Amen." Amen. Amen.