Surprising News

Christmas surprises! That's the name for our series in the month of December. This is the Christmas story as told in the Gospel of Matthew. My name is René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Thanks so much for joining us this morning. And to help you follow along with the message, I'd love to invite you to grab the message notes that looked like this, that you were handed as you came in. And if you're joining us on the live stream, you can download these at TLC.org/notes.

Now while you're getting those out, I really really want to thank a bunch of people who made yesterday a very special day here at Twin Lakes Church. There is always something going on at this place. It's not just open like this hour. There is something going on every single day of the week with our school and all kinds of other really super cool stuff. Like we had three big things happening here yesterday. We had the Christmas toy drive that our car club here at Twin Lakes Church put on, the Kingsman car club. It was amazing. They collected hundreds of toys for Jacob's Heart, which is a cancer support group for little kids. And they had their classic cars out. They had a barbecue. I even brought my grandsons out to check it out. They loved it at the same time.

Also here on the campus, we had a big Red Cross blood drive at the same time that we had a huge sold-out Christmas jamboree that Twin Lakes kids put on. And so let's put our hands together. Let's thank all the people who made yesterday such a hugely cool day. Not to mention the fact that today we're having people bring in angel tree gifts for the South Asian Army Prison Fellowship, Bridge of Hope Nursing Home Care Ministries. And if you missed it last weekend, we announced over half a million dollars raised for the food bank. I love you Twin Lakes Church. Your generosity is a reflection of the Spirit of Christ. That is absolutely for sure.

Well I want to show you a picture of Jonathan Stanley and his family because over the years they have been sending out Christmas cards that evoke what they call the Christmas chaos of family life around this time of year. Now this all started when they tried to send out just kind of a standard Christmas photo when they had one little baby and they said the baby kept crying, the camera kept falling over, it was windy, their hair looked crazy, and they thought those photos were so funny they sent them out anyway and people loved it. So ever since then, every single year as their family grows bigger, they've been sending out Christmas photos that are posed and they are examples of just the Christmas chaos that has its family this time of year.

And I love how as their family increases, the chaos level on these photographs just goes up and up. Like one year the kids were using a chainsaw to cut down trees in their front yard. The next year the kids are on the roof of the house. The next year they're trying to put the new baby on the Christmas tree. The next year all three of the kids are driving the car away going to the North Pole and the next year they have tied helium balloons to their wagons and they're floating away to the North Pole. Chaos, right? Exaggerated? Maybe. But still, Christmas chaos, in our lives today we kind of expect that everybody kind of jokes about it, but when we think of the first Christmas, Mary and Joseph and the baby, we don't think of Christmas chaos, we just think of peace on earth.

I snapped some pictures of some vintage Christmas cards that I saw the other day. Like in this one, all the sheep are very very clean. The shepherd is a nice eight-year-old boy. You got your rich friends visiting from out of town. They're very polite. It's beautiful. Or in this one there's happy angels and there's a creepily happy baby and you've got the happy cows. Or in this one everybody's so overjoyed. Joseph is so proud but you can't tell whether he's proud of the baby or how white that sheep got. But it's all so beautiful. But if we rush to just, man it was his peace on earth, it was perfect. We really do overlook how it started for Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus with pure chaos.

If you jump to this, you really miss the whole point of what Joseph and Mary had to learn and it's this, to trust God with your life even in the chaos. That's an important lesson. Let's say this out loud together. Ready? Trust God with your life even in the chaos. Can I ask for a show of hands? How many of you need to learn that lesson in your life? Well then let's dig into the scripture this morning. You heard Elwin and Vani read it but what I want to do right now is to dive into those verses, kind of examine them more closely and look at some application points.

Let's start in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 1 verse 18. He says this is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about. Now that word Messiah, that is the Hebrew form of a word that has a Greek equivalent which is Christ. Christ is not the last name of Jesus and his middle initial is not H. Christ means the same as Messiah, they both mean the anointed one, the chosen one. The Jewish people of the time were expecting God to send a chosen one to deliver them from the Romans, from the foreign oppressors. So how did the birth of Jesus the Messiah come about? Well it was a scandal. It was chaos because his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph.

In those days they had arranged marriages and to be pledged to be married meant you were promised to somebody. It was an unbreakable engagement but you lived apart for a year and part of the whole purpose of that was to determine whether or not the woman was going to be pregnant with somebody else's child. That was the whole point of the pledge. So it was a scandal when this happened but before they came together she was found to be pregnant. Now Matthew adds through the Holy Spirit we the readers know that but nobody besides Mary knew that. Certainly Joseph did not know that. Imagine how Joseph must have found out about it, right? She's pregnant and we haven't been together. Put yourself in Joseph's place emotionally. He did not find out about this through an angel like Mary did. He found out about it probably because Mary came to him and said something like this. Well I got good news and bad news. Let's take the bad news first. I'm pregnant, we're not married, it's not your child. Good news I haven't been with anybody else. This is completely a miracle baby. I know it's never happened before but there's a first time for everything, right?

How would you have felt as Joseph? I mean honestly shout out some of the feelings you might have felt. What was you what's anger? Sure what else? What's that? Betrayed? Confused? He felt all of those things. Shock, betrayal. How could she have done this to me? And we're not projecting onto Joseph because we know that that's exactly how it felt because he wanted a divorce. That's in the Bible. I love the way real life chaos intrudes into the Christmas story from the very first verse. There's divorce. There's apparent betrayal. There's an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. It says because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and this term righteous man in those days that didn't just mean like he was a good guy. That was an idea that had a lot of currency in those. It meant something very very specific.

Now this was originally written in Greek but the Hebrew word in the Jewish culture was tzadik and to be a righteous man was to be a tzadik and what this meant was uncompromising obedience to the Torah, the law of Moses. In other words whatever Torah said Joseph did. You say what are you talking about? Well he ate only kosher food. He wore only kosher clothing. He even probably had a kosher beard. He kept Sabbath rigorously. He kept away from all the unclean people and much much much more. You can go today to Los Angeles, New York, Jerusalem and you can see the modern-day Jewish religious equivalent of this and they're probably going to be wearing black clothing and old-fashioned hats and have long beards and ties. This is the modern-day equivalent of the tzadik. This is in his culture who Joseph was and in those days in that religious subculture all the men wanted to be this because becoming a tzadik in your community meant that you were admired. You were looked up to. You were somebody. That's Joseph.

But as John Ortberg puts it, "Joseph was a tzadik with a problem." Matthew says he was this kind of a righteous religious guy and yet he did not want to expose her to public disgrace. Now public disgrace is a euphemism there for something horrific really because here's what the Torah which Joseph followed rigorously said to do in precisely this case. It's in Deuteronomy 22 which deals with all this sort of thing and it says, "If this happens, if somebody you are betrothed to becomes pregnant before you are together she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death." She's done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house. "You must purge this evil from among you." Now by the time Mary and Joseph lived this was no longer practiced in fact the Romans had made this illegal but we know from history and from Scripture that religiously motivated mob violence still took over at times.

I mean you have the story later on of the Gospels where a religious mob catches a woman in the act of adultery, drags her out and throws her at the feet of Jesus and they want to stone her to death, right? So that could have happened to Mary too. Joseph does not want to subject her to that public disgrace and so he has a plan B. He had in mind to divorce her quietly. In other words, end it but quietly. Don't risk what a mob might do to her. Let's try to sweep this under the rug somehow. Let's get her out of town. Let's keep her safe. I love her but obviously I can't marry her because she's been unfaithful to me. So that's the plan but after he had considered this, that tentative plan, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife." And I want to get back to that verse in just a second but he says, "because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit." Her baby is God. He's going to be the Son of God.

Now we're gonna dive into everything that that means next weekend but for this weekend I want to stay with Joseph for a second. Again quoting John Ortberg. He's got a question I never really thought about before. Why didn't Joseph get the angel ahead of time like Mary to remove all of this stress? I mean think about the timing. Mary gets an angel visitation too before any of this happens and the angel says, "Hey you know what? This is what's going to happen and you are going to have a baby and you are going to conceive." So she has a chance to kind of get her head in the right place. So why did God make Joseph wait for the angel until after he was surprised, after he was shocked, after he was stressed out? Well is it possible that total stress removal is not God's number one priority? Not for Joseph and not for you and not for me.

Is it possible that somehow in Joseph's case God knew that he had to take Joseph to a place of growth that he could never have reached without first getting to the chaos? Somebody once said here's how spiritual growth works. Orientation, disorientation, reorientation. Right? You're oriented. Your life is going a certain way. You feel comfortable but then there's disorientation. There's some news that surprises you. Some people are being horrible to you. Somebody has wounded you. You experience some kind of a disease. You have a sudden addiction. You're disoriented and then God redirects you in a way that maybe you never would have reached without the struggle. And this means hope for you because this morning if you walked in the door and you're feeling disoriented or confused or uncertain about something right now in your life, maybe you're about to grow like Joseph. Maybe God has something new for you. Maybe God is leading you somewhere.

So that's great but how do I get there? Well the main thing is you've got to overcome your fear. Let me go back to the angels words. Do not be afraid. See those four words? Say them out loud with me. Do not be afraid. That's the concept I want to look at for the rest of our time together. If the angel knew Joseph needed to hear this, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife. Do not be afraid. Say it again. Do not be afraid. If Joseph needed to hear this then what was he afraid of? Just think about what could Joseph have been afraid of? Well I think he had three fears that you and I also have to overcome if we want God's best for our life, if we want to follow God, if we want to grow past the chaos. And I'm gonna spend most of my time on the first fear because I think this was Joseph's main worry.

Number one, do not be afraid of social rejection, right? Joseph was very likely afraid of being marginalized, ostracized, criticized. Why? Well they've done new archaeology on Nazareth. In fact they just released a big major report scientists did in 2020 and they found all kinds of new stuff about it through digs and through x-rays and stuff that they did on the ground like they do these big ultrasounds of the ground so that there's stuff they can discover even without digging destructively. It's amazing what they can do now. So they have determined that at the time of Jesus Nazareth had about a thousand people judging by the homes and so on that they found and they discovered that it was a very strictly religious little village.

Now how in the world could archaeologists know that 2,000 years later? Well there's a few things just I'll just tell you three of them. Number one, rather than finding just clay jars and pots and cups they found a huge percentage of stone implements and in the ancient Jewish culture stone was considered to be religiously pure as opposed to clay. Secondly they didn't find any imagery, you know because in those days the really religious Jews believed that any graven images of people or animals was strictly forbidden because it was a form of idolatry and they didn't find any pork bones. Pork of course was strictly forbidden to Jewish people because it wasn't kosher. You say well what's the big deal? Wasn't every Jewish community like that? No. Just about four miles away at the same exact time there was a town named Sephorus and it was a much more lavish, a richer, a more sophisticated, a larger city and you can go visit the archaeological site today it's spectacular and what they found there was pork bones. What they found there was a lot of clay jars. What they found there was a lot of imagery of people and animals.

In fact here's the floor of the synagogue in Sephorus which had imagery of animals and people. In fact the center of the floor of the synagogue in Sephorus at some point somebody paid to have the zodiac symbols from pagan Greek religion put into the floor of the Jewish synagogue with the Greek gods of the zodiac in the Jewish synagogue at Sephorus not in Nazareth. So what does that tell you? These two cities being so close to each other, Nazareth which was much smaller was where the ultra-religious people came to get away from the secularists in Sephorus. That's where they went to be pure. You can think of it kind of like Amish culture in America. That was Joseph's culture. That was the culture he lived in when he hears take Mary home as your wife.

So what do you think he was afraid of? Remember the people in his village they don't get an explanation from an angel. They only know what their eyes tell them is true. Mary is pregnant before marriage and they're thinking what she did was wrong Joseph. The Torah says it's a disgrace Joseph. So by just accepting her are you approving this baby? Are you going soft on sin? That's not what a tzadik would do or maybe it was you after all and you're denying it. That's also a disgrace. Either way his status as tzadik was over. This meant scandal. This meant rejection. Do not fear that Joseph. And you know what? God still calls you and me to not fear social rejection. And one of the reasons I bring this up is one of the main things as a pastor that I hear people express when they hesitate to follow Jesus is the thought my cool friends are gonna laugh at me. They're gonna think I've lost my mind. They won't believe it when I tell them I'm following Jesus.

You know we're in the middle of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights. And the other day I was remembering I was inspired by a true story that I first saw in Israel at Yad Vashem. That's the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. And they had on display there this photograph. This was taken in Germany in the 1930s. Signs were springing up everywhere. Jews forbidden. The Nazis were in control. And Rabbi Akiva Posner wakes up one morning. It was New Year's Eve and he sees across the street a huge Nazi flag hanging right outside his window. Clearly it had been deliberately put. Everybody knew the town's rabbi lived there. And it was like in your face. And so he immediately decides he's going to place the family menorah. Hanukkah had just ended in the window. Kind of like you know you're putting a Nazi flag in my face. I'm putting the menorah in yours saying you will not extinguish what I stand for.

And his wife Rachel took this now famous photograph. She was an amateur photographer and after she developed it she turned it over and wrote on the back a little rhyme. "Yude Fereke Difaneshpricht. Yude Lippte Eivig Elvidalt das Licht." And that means Jews perish, says the flag. Jews forever says the light. Amazing. How about that courage? We think that's awesome but my question is do you have the same kind of courage for your own faith to not fear social rejection? Jesus said you are the light of the world. Let your light shine before others so that they may see, not so that they may see your arrogance, not so that they may see your brashness, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

But even when you think about doing good things in the name of Jesus it can be a little bit like, "Oh should I say that out loud? People might make fun of me." You might remember January this past year, Monday night football between the Bills and the Bengals. It was a game I'll never forget. A player named DeMar Hamlin gets up after what appears to be a routine play and then falls to the ground motionless. His heart stopped. He was having a cardiac arrest right on the field. The crowd goes silent. The players pray. Slowly an ambulance drives onto the field. Everybody is rattled and DeMar survives but is still in critical condition the next day when Dan Orlovsky, who is a former NFL quarterback, a current host on ESPN and a Christian, looks at the camera and says many people are tweeting prayers for DeMar but, and maybe this isn't the right thing to do, but I want to pray for DeMar right now.

And then he explains to the camera, "Here's what's gonna happen. I'm going to do this out loud. I'm gonna close my eyes and bow my head and I'm just going to pray for him and you can join with me and pray with me if you'd like." And then he says this, "God, we come to you in these moments because we don't understand. Moments that are hard. We're sad. We're angry. We want answers but some things are unanswerable and so we want to pray. Truly come to you and pray. Pray for strength for DeMar. Pray for healing for DeMar. Pray for comfort for DeMar. Be with his family. Give him peace. Amen." And his co-hosts say, "Amen." And he says he thought to himself, "I am just gonna be roasted for doing this." So I was curious how people would react and I went onto the website awful announcing. That's kind of a humorous website but they make fun of sportscasters for their gaffes.

By the way, I cannot recommend this without reservations. Not always safe for work, right? It's not a Christian website. They can be very harshly critical. They can be merciless, sarcastic. Well here's what they said the next day, "At some point we become immune to just hearing thoughts and prayers and the sentiment becomes empty. Watching somebody actually pray on ESPN was different and surprising. Kudos to Orlowski for being open enough with the audience to speak about something that was important to him. And kudos to ESPN for giving Orlowski the on-air freedom to not stick to sports." And this kind of angle on the situation was almost universal. And I bring this up to say, you know, sometimes we shut up because we fear social rejection when people would actually respect authenticity.

If we do it in a loving and respectful and gracious non-combative manner, just as Jesus told us to do. Don't be afraid of social rejection. And second, don't be afraid of God's direction. And this is the second obstacle I see as a pastor to people deciding whether or not to follow Jesus. The first one is, "But people will laugh at me!" And the second one is, "What will I have to give up? How will my life change? Will I still be able to have fun? If I do this, what direction will my life take?" Did you notice the angel doesn't tell Joseph everything? There's zero mention of the long inconvenient trip to Bethlehem. Zero mention of the no vacancy sign on every end there. Zero mention of the midnight escape to Egypt. Zero mention of the soldiers that are going to try to kill your baby, all happening in the next few months. But he does say what to do next.

And when we choose to follow Jesus, he does not tell us everything that's going to happen in our lives. We just see the next step. Don't be scared of the adventure of following Jesus. When Jesus is your Lord, he's gonna lead you all kinds of different places. Like just for example, let's say that you decide you're gonna volunteer at People's Pantry, our food free grocery giveaway on Wednesday afternoons. And at People's Pantry you meet somebody who attends a small home group. You've never gone to a small home group Bible study before. So you go in at the small group, you meet somebody who goes to our recovery group. And you've been drinking too much. And so you go there. And after two years of sobriety, they ask you to be a leader of one of the small groups at the recovery group. And after leading that for more than a year, you decide you're gonna go to seminary to get more informed about the Bible. And after going to seminary, you decide you're gonna become a pastor. I'm just making that up. But the point is if God reveals to you, if God says, "Except Jesus and thou shalt become a pastor," you'd go, "What are those weirdos like Mark and René and you know Jared and Adrian Valor?" No way. God never tells you all the things. But usually you already know the next thing.

I feel like I want to accept Jesus into my heart. But who knows what God's gonna ask me to do to give up, to be right? Who knows? You just start following day by day, step by step on the adventure. Don't be afraid of social rejection. Don't be afraid of God's lordship, God's direction. And then finally, don't be afraid of honest admission. Honest admission. And here's what I mean by this. Watch this. The angel tells Joseph, "She will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus." Now Jesus in those days, that's just kind of the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua or Joshua, which meant Jehovah saves or the Lord saves. What a great meaning. God saves is what Jesus means. And that was the name originally in the Bible of a great warrior hero 1,400 years before Jesus named Joshua.

Here's a picture of Joshua that I got from a modern Bible comic book. But I think they basically capture the spirit of it. He is a warrior who leads the Israelites into the promised land and drives out, conquers their enemies. Well in Jesus' day, many many centuries later, Israel is occupied by different enemies, the Romans. And the people are hoping for a new Joshua to drive the Romans out. He's gonna save his people from the Romans. And this is exactly how they thought of him. Sort of like Captain America, only Captain Israel, right? The Messiah is gonna be Captain Israel. He's gonna come. And so when the angel says your name him Jesus, Joshua, Joseph was probably like, "Alright, I'm tracking with you." Because he's gonna save his people and he probably thought, "Gosh, this is gonna be the Messiah. You don't even have to finish the sentence, angel. I know how this ends. He's gonna save his people from the foreigners. He's gonna save his people from the Romans. He's gonna save his people from foreign domination."

Angel finishes the sentence, "He will save his people from their sins." And Joseph's probably like, "What now? That's not really a felt need for us right now, angel. We got a very sophisticated sin-saving mechanism already set up at the temple in Jerusalem. Have you seen that? That's like a big organized thing. We got that part covered. We need a Savior with a sword. We don't need saving from sins. We need saving from Rome." So why did God send Jesus to save his people from their sins? Because sin is the ultimate oppressor. Sin puts you in chains. No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter where you live, sin brings shame and broken relationships, separates you from what God wants to do in your life. And to begin to be free of it, you know, the very first step is an honest admission. You have to admit you need deliverance. And only God can set you right. You have to be unafraid of saying, "I cannot save myself. I need God."

Now this is hard and I think sometimes even Christians misunderstand what the Christian life is about. And I have a little pet theory. I trace it back to the word commit. Growing up in church I kept hearing, "You got to commit your life to the Lord. You got to recommit your life to the Lord. Are you committed enough to the Lord?" And the word commit made me get the Christian life all wrong. Why? Because in English at least commit has two different meanings that are almost opposite. What does commit mean? I mean one example is the Raiders motto "Commitment to excellence," right? Which apparently isn't their motto anymore, but no just kidding. Did I say that out loud? Sorry Raider fans. Sorry Vegas fans, not the twist of the knife. But so commitment to excellence. What does this kind of commitment mean? It means try harder to get better. Do everything you can. Nose to the, you know, grindstone. Shoulder to the wheel. And for most of my youth growing up this is what I thought it meant when you talked about commitment to Jesus Christ. Try harder to be a better person. That's not working. Well get more committed.

But there's another meaning of the word commit which is like the opposite. And it's kind of like this. Years ago my wife went into the hospital. It was an emergency. She had to have her gallbladder removed and she committed herself into the hands of the surgeon and his team. Now my wife wasn't trying harder to get her gallbladder out. Laying there, you know, "There you go doc!" She wasn't even conscious. There was nothing she could do. She had committed her life into the hands of that surgeon. Surrendered, yielded to the care of the doctor because the doctor was the expert and there was nothing my wife could do about it. That kind of commit means totally surrender. Say surrender. Surrender.

Now don't miss this. It's this second kind of commitment that the Bible means when it says commit your life to God. You just let go and let God. Because now don't miss this. Watch this. The thing is people don't really mind the first one. Try hard to get better. Everybody could get behind that because it means really I'm not so bad. This means I'm still in control. You know, this means that I keep my pride. But the second one means my only hope is in God. Can you commit your life to his care? You know one of my favorite people here at TLC is Yolanda Miller and she had to overcome these exact fears too. Listen to her talk about it.

I think I had faith as a child but throughout my life things happen that were very painful. Many tragedies in my family. My little brother died. My father's behavior. Homelessness in our family constantly. I started to believe that God didn't have good things for me in my life. I went through a period of my life where all of these negative thoughts caught up with me and I developed a condition that is incurable and progressive alcoholism. I tried many things to heal myself and to get well but none of them helped and I came to realize that God was the only one that could heal me. It wasn't easy. It was a process that took time. I think God sent me to places where I could learn how to translate from the Bible to the actual doing of things. The 12 steps. And through those 12 steps I learned that the only way that God could help me was if I completely surrendered my life to God. That I completely gave over control of my life. I admitted that I was powerless over my condition and that was the only way that God could come in.

Although the simple steps surrender your life, come to believe, give your life over to the care of God. They were very hard to do because I had a very big ego. I still do. Ever since the recovery program started here at Twin Lakes I started to come and this friend of mine invited me. She said I'm gonna take you to the craziest meeting but you're gonna love it. And I did. And I kept coming no matter how I was struggling and relapsing. I kept coming and I kept hearing more and learning more and hearing more from God. And my relationship with my God is the thing that I'm most grateful for because of my seemingly hopeless condition. Most importantly what keeps me whole and builds me up is my relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I could never have that without my struggle and my surrender.

What a powerful testimony right? I appreciate her sharing that. But you know for Yolanda it was her struggle specifically with alcoholism but maybe that's your struggle too but maybe you're facing something else. A disease or a wound or a life change. What struggle are you in? What chaotic life experience are you facing right now? You thought your life story was going one direction and there has been a wild car spinning, tires squealing U-turn in the exact opposite direction. Hear the voice of the angel, "Do not be afraid. Take the next step today and trust God in the chaos." Now the angel isn't done. In fact the next thing he says to Joseph is truly awesome, mind-blowing, history altering and we will get to that next weekend. But for now let's pray.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes with me? With all of our heads bowed I just would love to talk to you, to you, to every single person in this room one-on-one because maybe you know what the next step is for you but you're a little afraid of social rejection, of God's direction and what that might be, or of just honest admission and surrender. Can I encourage you be brave today? Don't fear. Take that next step in following Jesus. Now for some of you the next step is having the courage to say, "I want to receive Jesus. I want to be a follower of Jesus." And you can take that step right now. It's just between you and God. But in your heart you can silently say to the Lord, "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner. I need you. I want whatever you want for my life, Lord. I commit my life to you. I surrender my life into your care, Jesus. I don't understand it all but I want to grow in that direction." And we thank you Lord that in our chaos we can always trust you. Lead us through the disorientation into reorientation and we pray this in the beautiful name of Jesus. Amen.