Christmas 2024 (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

Well, Merry Christmas.

It's great to uh be together.

I want to say a special uh welcome and thank you to those of you in the chapel and the lobby.

I know the uh experience isn't exactly the same, but thanks for your flexibility.

Hopefully the truth that's expressed will bring just as much hope.

Let's pray together.

God, as we're gathered here today, I just ask that you would speak to each of us, that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, I remember the first time I ever went to a Christmas Eve service, and at least as far as I remember, if I had gone as a little kid, I it didn't register.

And my family was largely unchurched when I was growing up.

And then when I got to high school, I embraced faith and I embraced the church community, but the church that I got involved in didn't really do Christmas.

And so I had never been to a Christmas Eve service.

And even after I went to college, there was still nothing until the girl I was dating, who's now my wife, invited me to her family's home for Christmas, and I went, and we went to a Christmas Eve service.

It was 11 o'clock on a Christmas Eve night.

I was um probably 21 at the time.

And what I remember about that service is this.

I wanted it to end.

Now I believed in Jesus and and had uh a faith, and so it wasn't like I was was irritated with the message, but what I really wanted was I wanted to go back and have some good food, open some good presents, and I was kind of interested in a little sofa time with my girlfriend.

If I'm just being completely, you know, forthright about what I was looking for.

But but even those things weren't really the things that uh spoke to my deepest longings.

What I really wanted was I wanted to be known, I wanted to be loved, I wanted to be celebrated, I wanted to find some security.

And it didn't seem to me that Christmas or a Christmas Eve service really addressed those things.

It seemed like faith was about something in the future, not something here and now.

But what if Christmas really does address our deepest needs?

What if Christmas isn't just an ancient story that speaks to future hope?

And what I'd like to do today is just spend a few minutes pointing us to some phrases that are in the Bible around the event of Jesus coming and his work in our lives that maybe we can hold on to as we think about our needs this year.

And the first is a typical phrase that we find in the Christmas narratives.

It's in Matthew chapter 1, verse 23.

Matthew 1:23

Here's what we see.

It says this the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.

And that's the phrase, God with us.

You see, the people of Israel who longed for this Savior, this Messiah, felt like in many ways God had left them on their own.

And I and in Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14, there's this prophecy that Emmanuel will come, that God will dwell with his people.

Isaiah 7:14

And it was the statement of saying, you're not alone.

There is hope in this world.

And I don't know how you come here today.

Some of us come here probably feeling very alone.

Maybe there's an empty chair this year at the table that hadn't been there before.

Maybe there's a broken relationship, or maybe you've been longing for a relationship that hasn't developed, or maybe you're surrounded by people, but you identify with that little sentence in Proverbs chapter 14 that says that many of us don't, or that nobody else knows our joys and our sorrows.

Proverbs 14 · chapter mention

That's Proverbs 14, 10.

In other words, you can be surrounded by people and still feel like nobody really gets you or knows you, but Christmas tells us that God knows and sees where you are.

You're not alone.

And what that also means, Hebrews tells us that that Jesus experienced life on this earth, that he suffered, that he was tempted.

Meaning that even if your life is is in ways that you didn't envision it or think that it would ever be, that there's a sense in which you can say, Jesus knows where I am.

Dorothy Sayers wrote about this a generation ago.

Here's how she put it said, the incarnation means that for whatever reason, God chose to allow us to fall into suffering and be subject to sorrows and death.

He nonetheless had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine.

He himself has gone through the whole human experience from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat and despair and death.

He was born in poverty and suffered infinite pain for all of us, and thought it well worth his while.

In other words, Jesus has suffered.

And so if you find your life today not to your liking, rather than living with a sense of resentment that says, God, why have you let this happen to me?

You can instead say, God has been with us.

He's experienced a lot of the same things that I'm experiencing.

And Jesus coming, being with us is also one of the great life-affirming statements in the Bible that this life is a gift, that it's something that you get to treasure and experience for an extended season, and it's something to be cherished because it is a gift from God.

And so God is with us, and Christmas shows us this, but this isn't all that Christmas shows us.

Christmas shows us that God is also for us.

And we see this in Romans chapter 8, verse 31 and following.

Romans 8:31

Here's what it says What then shall we say in response to all these things?

If God is for us, who can be against us?

And there's the phrase, God is for us.

Verse 33, he who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?

It is God who justifies.

And the context in Romans 8 is the way the chapter starts, is it says, There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

And then you get this great statement toward the end that says, if God is for us, who can be against us?

And it goes on to basically say that there's nothing in this world or universe that can stand against God's love for his people.

But notice how right there it says, if he who sent his son.

In other words, Christmas shows us that God is for us.

There's a scholar named John Barclay who wrote a book a few years ago called Paul and the Gift, and in it he argues that we use the word grace in our modern kind of culture in a way that it wasn't used biblically.

And he says that grace is really a word that would be better read and rendered most of the time as gift.

And then he goes on and he says that what we do with the idea of a gift is we often kind of take our cultural idea of a gift and put it into the biblical culture.

And here's what that means.

If you're exchanging gifts at all this year, do you know how you try to like balance the gift giving?

Any of you know how this works?

It's like if somebody gives you a gift of a certain level, then you try to match that level.

And sometimes you might even, after you get a gift, go and adjust the gift that you give?

Anybody?

Come on.

I know some of you do this, because that is the moment where what you're doing is you're saying, I need for gift, this gift to be reciprocal.

But in the Bible, the idea of the grace of God, the gift of God, God being for us is one way.

In fact, what we see is that it's this idea of God being for us in such a way that nothing can come against us.

And John Barclay uses a few different words to talk about this.

He uses uh some adjectives.

He talks about the grace or the gift of God being incongruous.

It's not in any way proportional, it's prior, it's before we do anything, it's excessive, it's more than what we can count on, it's non-contingent, and it's also a relief.

Meaning it's the end of project religion when we understand that God is for us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Now, some of us are here, and that's really good news because we know how much we need God's grace.

Because some of the choices we've made, whether it's been recent or in the past or ongoing, we say, I need that word.

But some of us hear that and we're like, well, I don't know if that's good news, really.

I mean, God kind of likes me and wants me on his team.

And what I mean when I say that is some of us think that we don't really need that kind of grace because we see ourselves as being able to reciprocate in some way.

But there's a story in the New Testament where Jesus was traveling around and this woman came and anointed his feet with oil and washed them with her hair, which was a wildly inappropriate gesture in that culture.

And the religious leaders got all kind of irritated.

And do you know what Jesus said?

He said, basically, don't come down on this woman because the person who's been forgiven much loves much.

In other words, if you don't sense or feel the love of God in your life, then there's a real good chance that what is true for you is you haven't been moved by the forgiveness of God, but you think it's your effort, your performance, your goodness that somehow commends you to God.

But but the account of Jesus coming is he did for people what we can't do.

And what scripture says is that all of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

That is precisely why we need a Savior.

And some of us might be here, and you might say, Well, I can kind of get that, but because of the way my life has gone, I'm I'm feeling a little suspicious about how God will give me anything good in the future.

And you might be in a dark season, but it reminds me of this story of that comes from the Native American culture, where evidently when boys would come of age years ago, what would happen is they would be asked to go spend a night in the woods alone.

And one of the ways that they would become men was to sit through the night and make it through the night without running back to camp.

And if a boy could do that, then he was considered a man.

But what would happen is when daylight came and he had made it through the night, and he would look around, he would see that his dad was sitting just a few yards away with his bow and arrow and had him covered the entire dark night that he sat there.

You may feel like you're in the darkest night, but Jesus Christ's coming is evidence that God is for you and He's never let you alone.

Now, we can talk about God being with us and for us, but here's the truth: you you can affirm that intellectually, but not have it make a difference in your experience.

You can say, well, what does this have to do with my desire to really be loved and known and have security and to experience life?

And the truth of that is that you can can affirm something intellectually, but not experientially.

It's a little bit like this.

One of the great benefits that we have of living in our culture is we have water that comes to us through these these pipes, and it's generally clean and usable and good, and you can know that there's water, but you don't get water unless you actually go over to the spigot, put something underneath, and turn the spigot.

And that is the moment of basically saying, I am going to not just believe that there's water, but I'm going to go and get the water.

And the way that you go from just saying, There is a God, there's a Jesus, Jesus came, Jesus went to the cross, Jesus died for people, and and and kind of intellectually affirming it to it being part of you is in your faith journey by saying, I do believe.

And this leads us to this last phrase.

This is in Colossians chapter 1, verse 27.

Colossians 1:27

Here's what it says To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So God is with us, God is for us, but Christ can be in you, which is the hope of glory.

And this comes when we experience Jesus, and the hope of Jesus is experienced inside of us, where we begin to say that my deepest longings are actually met in God and in Jesus.

And that is when we'll begin to experience Christmas.

There's a book that a woman named Carrie Libowitz wrote a few years ago where she had gone to the northern parts of Norway and Finland to spend a winter.

And her desire was to say, how do these people survive and deal with winter who have 22 hours of darkness and extreme cold, and yet statistically they seem to be happier than people who live in other climates.

At least that's was her premise.

So I didn't read the book, but I heard her on a podcast.

And she was talking all about all of her ideas about how to winter, but there was one idea that stuck out to me, and that was this idea of what she called hooga.

It's a Norse word.

Don't you just want to say that?

Hooga.

Thank you.

Yeah, hooga.

It's a Norse word that means cozy.

And her idea was to say one of the ways these people thrive in the winter is that they embrace hooga.

And so they say, we're going to embrace cozy.

We're going to light fires, candles, be warm.

We're going to do things in the darkness that we don't do when it's light outside, in order to enjoy and lean into what seems negative.

Now, spiritually, to lean into Christ, I don't think there's a negative that you have to embrace, but there is darkness in our world.

And to lean into faith is a way to say, I want Christ in me, the hope of glory.

Now, I would assume that today here there are some of us who gather who say, I don't know about this, I don't know about Jesus, I'm not sure.

And maybe for you, the step of leaning in is just to say, I'm going to explore what faith would look like.

I'd love to invite you to any of our campuses, locations, where starting in January, we're going to do a new series called Ascent.

We're going to look at the Psalms of Ascent.

There's 15 of them, and we're going to consider what a spiritual journey looks like.

Maybe that would be a great place to start.

Maybe you're somebody who says, I've had faith, but there's a lot of days that my real desire is to say I want the presence, the food, or the deeper things that go with it, more than the things of Jesus.

And maybe for you, just beginning to say, are those things really going to bring me the lasting satisfaction that I think they promise?

You know, they're good things to say, I have people who know me and love me, I have some security, I have some things in my life that I've done that that I feel good about, but those things are all something that are that are fragile compared to being able to say, Christ is with me, he's for me, and he can be in me, the hope of glory.

So what if this year you just said, I'm going to name those things for what they are, and I'm going to prioritize spiritual life?

Maybe for some of us, we're just so busy with so many things that we think I don't have time for this.

But the truth about all of our lives is one day after 70, 80, 90, 100 years, our lives will come to an end, and the things that we've built on this earth will be reduced to things that our kids just take and very quickly discard.

And we'll say, I wish I had spent more on things that outlived me in this world.

And Christmas is like a reminder that says this world isn't everything.

But God has come to make a way.

And so today I just want to say, what if Christmas really does provide the deepest answers?

How would it change how you live?

And I want to invite you to lean in and take a step toward that faith.

Let's pray.

God, I ask today that for some of us, maybe even in this moment, we would acknowledge our sinfulness before you and our need for you as our Savior.

For some of us, I pray that our leaning in would be acknowledging that where we've been putting our energy, our effort, our hopes is fragile.

And God, for some of us, I pray that there would just be a settledness to saying, we know that we have you as our hope of glory, and it would be sweet to us.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.