Our Hope in Christ–Before and After Christmas (Guest Speaker Mike Fendley)

Do we have a special guest speaker, Pastor Mike?

Not special, just old and part of the furniture, actually.

But well, I feel like a friend I had back when Janice and I were

in our 20s. We attended the same church, and

this guy was an undertaker and he worked in a Funeral Home.

And one day the pastor asked him to come and share his testimony,

and he was really excited about that.

So he stood before everybody and he was just so excited.

And he says, you know, it's not often that I get to speak before

live audiences. So thank you, Pastor Drew, for

letting me get up here and share the gospel today.

Well, in just a few days we're going to start a new year, 2026,

and this past month we've sung many Christmas carols, some that

speak of peace on earth, goodwill towards men.

Yet if we're brutally honest, we see both in short supply and our

world. Thomas Jefferson once said peace

is that brief, glorious moment in history when everybody stands

around reloading. Jesus didn't come so that we

might live in sin and do it in a peaceful world.

Jesus came to deliver us from our sin and give us personal

peace to live in a world that is cursed because of sin.

Our hope comes not from what we do or don't do, but from what

Christ has done and continues to do in our lives.

We are all familiar with the Christmas narratives in Matthew

and Luke, but the apostle John gives us a uniquely different

Christmas story. And in so doing, he gives us our

hope in Christ before and after Christmas.

Let's pray as we begin. Father, we are so grateful that

indeed You sent your Son Jesus Christ to die and to remove the

curse of sin and death from this world.

Lord, we are so grateful that you saw fit to do this because

we certainly didn't deserve it, and yet You saw fit to pay the

price through Your Son. Guide us now as we look into

Your Word. Open our minds and hearts to

what you have to say to each of us, for we ask these things in

Jesus name, Amen. John 1.

Excuse me, In the beginning was the Word.

John's Christmas story starts like the first verse in Genesis.

In the beginning God. Well, that was not a coincidence

on John's part. The Greek word logos is used in

place of the word God, but meaning the same.

Therefore, in English the capitalized word means the same

thing as God. Say wait a minute Pastor Mike, I

I thought this was a Christmas story.

Well, it is, but the Christmas story always pictured the cradle

in the shadow of the cross. John would later write in

Revelation the Lamb who was slain before the creation of the

world. From the very beginning was the

Word, and from the very beginning the Christmas story

involved the cross. Matthew and Luke give us a micro

version of the Christmas story, neither giving us all the

details. John on the other hand, gives us

the macro version. The big picture of Christmas and

the Word was with God. This unique phrase takes place

before God had created anything and yet there was something else

pre existent with God. Once again John calls his

something the Word. Now we're beginning to see a

picture just slightly out of focus, and the Word was God.

Now the picture John is painting is coming into very sharp focus.

This something, the Word was at the very beginning of anything

and everything. The Word was with God and was

God, making God at least two distinct persons, although one

God. The beginning of the doctrine of

the Trinity is now emerging in John's opening of his Gospel.

Now John's focus shifts to the creation of the universe itself.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made.

Without him, nothing was made that has been made.

In God the Father's design. He speaks the universe into

existence and details that existence in six literal

creative days. However, His creative power is

executed through this being called the Word.

Without the Word, nothing gets made in summing up this concept.

This Word through whom God created everything is one with

God and is God, and this is something we can hardly begin to

comprehend. But Scripture is not asking us

to understand how it's true, but only to believe that it is true.

In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has

not overcome it. Now, John uses several motifs as

he writes, and he says, what's a motif, you might ask?

Well, wives know all about this, OK?

It's where her husband takes over one room in the house, and

he decorates it with his favorite team posters, pennants

and memorabilia. I didn't say it was pretty, but

it is a motif. OK Matthew used the book of

Exodus as a motif to explain Jesus to Jews, showing how Moses

was a type of Christ. Now John uses the Genesis motif

to explain the word to Gentiles. Listen to verses 2 through 4 of

Genesis. Now the earth was formless and

empty. Darkness was over the surface of

the deep, and God said, let there be light, and there was

light. God saw that the light was good,

and he separated the light from the darkness.

As darkness can never overcome the light, since God separated

them, neither can the darkness of sin overcome the Word who

gives light to all men. Luke wrote sort of a prelude to

the Christmas story in Luke chapter one.

But the Angel said to him, Do not be afraid Zachariah, your

prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear

you a son, and you are to call him John.

Now the apostle John writes A prelude to the purpose of why

Christ came that we celebrate at Christmas.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that

through him all might believe he himself was not the light.

He came only as a witness to the light.

The Apostle John makes it very clear that John the Baptist was

not the light, but merely testified concerning this light

to all mankind. In Matthew, a light testifies to

the one being born in Bethlehem, the star that wise men followed.

But that light, they would call it a wandering star.

Today we might call it a planet had to be set precisely in

motion at the moment of creation so that its timing, its arrival

in Bethlehem, would signify the birth of someone who would give

light to the world and indeed, save the world.

One of the interesting things. And Banu, I'm wandering off the

reservation here. OK, one of the interesting

things about that light, why was it given?

The Bible's very clear Day 4 What's created the sun, moon and

stars. And they're there for a reason.

This is for signs, seasons, days and years.

OK, well, how do we get a day? The earth revolves once we see

the sunrise fall, but it's actually the earth revolving.

OK, but that gives us a day. And then it says seasons.

How do we get seasons? Believe it or not, it's via the

moon. OK, The phases of the moon truly

determine the seasons. Sign, season, days, years.

Oh, how do we get years? Oh, well, that's just the Earth

revolving around the sun. Well, what about the very first

part of that verse for signs? And what's amazing is we're not

talking about astrology. Astrology believes that the

stars affect us. That's hogwash.

OK, astronomy is the glories of God set in space tuned to such

precision. There are actually formulas

we've discovered and we can clock back time to hundreds and

even thousands of years of what the stars look like.

And that's what a guy did. I would highly encourage you if

you've never seen it. The star of Bethlehem, first one

up here gets to borrowed from us.

OK, the star of Bethlehem. And here a man went back and he

looked through the stars using computer software and he

explains what God was telling us in the skies at that star.

It will blow your mind in what He shares.

And so I would encourage you. And that's the end of the

commercial. Now back to your regularly

scheduled sermon. Verse 9, the true light that

gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

He was in the world and through the world.

Excuse me? And though the world was made

through him, the world did not recognize him.

There used to be ATV show called Undercover Boss and it ran for

some 11 years and Janice and I think we saw it a couple of

times and it was an interesting show.

Well, in the show, the CEO of some major company disguises

themselves and then works with a common worker on the on the

factory line or flipping hamburgers or or whatever.

The revelation at the end of the show is twofold.

First, the boss sees what his workers really have to go

through and put up with, and secondly, the workers discover

what their boss is really like. Well, unlike the show, Jesus is

the real boss of everything, since he is the Creator.

Jesus also knows what people go through, having been born a

human being. But to erase all doubt, Jesus

came into the world just like any human being born of a woman,

born under the law. The difference is that although

Jesus is revealed to the people in a variety of ways and

numerous times, they still did not recognize him.

John goes on to say he came to that which was his own, but his

own did not receive him. The Jews and even his own family

failed to recognize him as God Incarnate.

Incarnate just being a fancy word to describe God becoming a

man. Listen to how Mark describes

what Jesus own family thought of Jesus.

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered so that

he and his disciples were not even able to eat.

When his family heard about this, they went out to take

charge of him, for they said He's out of his mind.

That's what his own family thought about Jesus.

Then with all the negative and all the impossibilities and all

the heartache and all the disappointment and all the

despair, John says this. Yet to all who did receive him,

to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to

become children of God. Children not born not of natural

descent, nor of human decision or of a husband's will, but born

of God. John is essentially saying this

is a new kind of birth. It is a rebirth, not physically

that a husband and wife experience with a new little

one, but a rebirth of yourself by God himself.

God gives us the right to this rebirth if we would just believe

in his name. And that sounds simple enough.

We hear people say all the time, Jesus, Oh yeah, I believe in

him. But that is not what believing

in His name means. Believing in His name means

believing everything his name stands for.

It means believing that Jesus is God.

It means believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the long-awaited

promised one who came at Christmas time to eventually die

for our sins. It means believing that Jesus

died to save me from my sin and from God's wrath.

It means that Jesus rose from the dead to prove He had the

power to forgive my sins. It means that Jesus becomes the

Lord of my life. He is the one that calls the

shots in my life, not me. Now, many people can handle most

of those beliefs, except the last one.

Oh, sure, they want forgiveness of sins and they want eternal

life, but they also want to reserve the right to live the

way they please and make all the decisions in their life to the

excluding of God's directions and God's commands.

The problem is, God doesn't give us that option.

The old saying that if He is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at

all still rings true. That is what it means to believe

in His name. It is a whole life commitment,

not just an intellectual ascent that Jesus was an historical

figure. Finally, John removes all the

mystery surrounding the Word. The Word became flesh and made

His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the

glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full

of grace and truth. You know our problem with grace

and truth? We're usually one or the other.

If we're all truth, we usually don't have an audience.

If we're all grace, we got an audience.

We just don't have a message. But Jesus came full of both

grace and truth. John identifies the Word, the

one that was with God is God and was with God from the beginning.

He identifies him as Jesus, God's son, who became a man at

Christmas. Through this gift from God, his

Son becoming a man and dwelling with us and his subsequent death

and resurrection, we have hope for a new year, or for any year

for that matter. Brennan Manning tells the story

of Fiorello LaGuardia. We got his name up.

There he is. He was the mayor of New York

City during the worst days of the Great Depression and all of

World War 21. Bitterly cold night in January

of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the

poorest ward of the city. LaGuardia dismissed the judge

for the evening and took over the bench himself.

Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before

him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread.

She told La Guardia that her daughter's husband had deserted

her, her daughter was sick and her two grandchildren were

starving. But the shopkeeper from whom the

bread was stolen refused to drop the charges.

It's a real bad neighborhood, your honor, the man told the

mayor. She's got to be punished to

teach other people around here a lesson.

LaGuardia side. He turned to the woman and said,

I've got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions, $10

or 10 days in jail and $10 in 1935 was a whale of a lot of

money. But even as he pronounced

sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket.

He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous sombrero that

he wore, saying, here is the $10 fine, which I now remit.

And furthermore, I'm going to find everyone in this courtroom

$0.50 for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so

that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines

and give them to the defendant. So the following day, the New

York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a

bewildered old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed

her starving grandchildren. $0.50 of that amount being

contributed by the very red faced grocery store owner, while

some 70 petty criminals and 24 New York City policeman chipped

in the rest. And just like that old lady,

each of us have been caught red handed and nothing to say for

ourselves. Unlike that old lady, we have no

excuse for our sin. God demands justice for the sin

we've committed. Our sin is not just an oopsie,

it is cosmic treason against the Creator of the universe.

A just God knew that this penalty had to be paid.

But the Lord loved us so much that he gave His most precious

treasure, his beloved Son, at Christmas so that Jesus could

pay the penalty for our sin. But Jesus just didn't redeem us

from the curse of sin and death. He also showered us with

blessings, giving us life more abundantly, life in the Spirit,

and the ability to trust God as opposed to appeasing some Ugly

God by doing awful stuff. The ability to trust in God.

That, my friends, is true. Hope for any new year.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you

saw fit to send your son. We're thankful, Lord, that John

wrote about that. John, the much beloved, much

beloved disciple that was by Jesus side constantly.

John knew of that great sacrifice that Jesus was going

to make. Lord, because of his sacrifice,

we indeed can have eternal life. And Lord, I'm excited that that

eternal life is not some by and by in the clouds of harps and

violins and Halos. You said that you're going to

come and live with us on this earth.

You're going to recreate this earth and the heavens.

We get to watch, and then we get to live with you for all

eternity on this earth, the one we're so familiar with.

And yet you said I will be their God, they will be my people, and

I will dwell in the midst of them.

We are so grateful for that future promise you give us.

Help each of us to know Jesus and how He has forgiven us of

our sins. He's taken away God's wrath from

us and has given us eternal life.

Help us to know Him, to trust in Him, and be excited about this

year and every year of our lives because we're yours.

We thank you and we praise your name in Jesus.