Broken Gifts

So I believe that it would be a very safe guess to say that on Christmas Day

this year in America alone,

there were probably more than 200 million toys given away.

Just a guess, but probably true.

I also believe that it would be safe to say that by New Year's Day, or even by today,

the Sunday after Christmas, that those same 200 million toys will have multiplied

into way more than 200 million pieces of toys.

Broken gifts. I'm sure you are aware of what I'm talking about.

We can all remember toys that were broken too soon after we received them.

The Barbie doll whose arm popped off, or that G.I.

Joe that was broken because it was used in a way that it wasn't supposed to,

or that brand new pocket knife that was broken because we used it as a pry bar. Anybody ever done that?

Yeah, it happens. Or that bicycle that mysteriously had broken wheel spokes

just a few days after Christmas because the recipient of that gift as a bicycle

decided to ride that bike down the road to the end of the road in the culvert and crash it into the,

ditch on the other side. I don't know who that would be.

Toys get broken in so many ways, don't they?

As in the case of Humpty Dumpty in the little nursery rhyme,

I don't believe that his makers intended for him to be sitting on a wall, especially not so high.

Clearly, this was a case of misuse or unintended use, and I don't think anybody

has any idea what prompted that egg to sit on a wall in the first place,

nor do I understand that anybody would have any sense to know that the egg has brains.

And actually, after Humpty Dumpty fell, his brains were a little scrambled.

Whatever was going on in his mind, we don't know.

Oftentimes, like our pocket knife, gifts are used in unintended ways.

Sometimes they're also broken by overuse.

There are times when they simply wear out.

And oftentimes, you know, we get those brand new batteries for the toys at Christmas

time, put them in, and by a week after, the batteries are already worn out, right?

Because somebody uses them so much that they simply die.

My dad and mom have told me of an experience when I was about two years old

and we were living in Barron, Wisconsin.

Much to my dad's displeasure, my mom gave me a doll as a gift.

Soft-bodied, kind of the hard plastic face with hair.

Dad thought no way was any son of his ever going to play with a doll.

But mom won out, and I was allowed to keep that soft-skinned, lovable doll.

And dad and mom have since told me that I must have really loved that doll,

and that she and I were absolutely inseparable.

I took that doll everywhere I went, That is, everywhere in the house,

my dad would not let me take it out of the house, nor would he let me take it

to the store, nor would he let me take it to the church, but everywhere in the

house, I played with that doll.

I even played with her outside in the dirt in the backyard, hidden by trees

and bushes so no neighbors could see me.

And I'm told that I loved her so much that I wore her out and even hugged the stuffing out of her.

She became a limp rag of a doll. But even more than that, in fact,

my mom had to stuff, restuff her and sew her back multiple times.

But the real example of overuse was that I loved that little doll and played

with her so much that I caused her to go bald.

I literally wore her hair off with so much love and use.

Maybe that's why I have a head full of hair and some of you other men don't.

It's because I just haven't been loved as much as you have.

Well, the real story in that is I loved her so much that I don't remember.

She got a crack in her head, and I stuck something in high inside,

probably a coin or something.

And so my dad pulled the head off of the doll to find that coin,

and inside was all that hair that had been pushed back through the head of the doll inside there.

He showed that to me, and I never played with the doll again. in my life.

But I had loved that doll in an overuse. Another way we can do this is,

of course, oftentimes toys are broken, gifts are broken by abuse.

How many times have we seen those nice brand new leather basketballs getting kicked around?

Or how many of us men can remember taking our trucks and cars and toys and propelling

them off of walls and tables just to watch how they crash and burn.

And maybe it's not just boys, maybe girls did this too, but how many of us have

watched as kids have ridden their bikes as far as fast as they can and then

slide them into the skid, jumping off of them as they do, as they crash into a tree or a wall?

It happens. Kids do that, right?

But I guess that I can't be too hard on the kids because they're just doing

what most of us have already done,

and some of us still are crashing our cars into trees and walls just a thought that happens,

one thing i know is that when we would get older we just get bigger toys right,

and i'm told that when we lived as i told

you in steven's point i was about three or four and i rode my tricycle so hard

i tried to ride it off of the front steps do you remember that television show

Laugh-In when we would watch Artie Johnson dressed in a long overcoat slowly

riding a tricycle and then while mumbling to himself.

How many of you watch Laugh-In? Okay, you will remember these scenes.

And he would ride his tricycle to a stop and slowly just tip over on his side.

Well, I did the same thing on my tricycle, only not so slowly.

Mom began to frantically look for me when she didn't hear me.

You know, moms do that. They have this sense that if they do not hear something

coming for their child, they need to go look like, well, I won't even go there.

She began to look at me and she found out where I was and she thankfully stopped

me because I was living by the motto in those days, no brains, no pain.

Oftentimes, gifts can also be broken by lack of use or lack of proper care, lack of use or neglect.

A few years ago, while at a Salvation Army store in Brighton,

Michigan, I noticed several bicycles outside the store that were for sale.

There were many different types and sizes and different colors,

some boys' bikes, some girls' bikes.

None of them did I find were gender neutral at that time.

Anyway, some of them But the one thing they all had in common is they were in

some state of disrepair.

Something needed to be fixed on them. They had been neglected and left unused.

Their chains were rusty.

The bikes were rusty. The brakes didn't work.

Oftentimes, things like that. While some of those bikes only had a few parts

missing, some of them were missing complete parts.

And all this because they had been neglected and uncared for and unused.

Oftentimes this is the case with many of our guests. Since we have not had to

work to pay for them ourselves, we fail to appreciate their value and don't properly use them.

We seem to think that if the gift was free to us, it can't possibly have any

value. We find that out with camps and things like that.

When a student gets a free camp, oftentimes they don't appreciate it as much

as a student has to work to get a little bit to go.

Same thing happens with adults. And when this is the mindset,

toys break, cars stop running,

and houses disintegrate, and gifts that were given to us out of the love of

our friends and family become of no value at all,

and all because of a lack of appreciation and care.

But there was one gift that was broken by design. Most of the gifts that we

got were not broken by design. They were not made to be destroyed.

They were made to be played with and enjoyed, not mistreated and destroyed.

These gifts may not last long, as long as they would like that we would like

them to, but they've been designed to take the use and abuse,

and they were expected to live for a certain while.

Not one of them was designed to be broken. Remember the Rock'em Sock'em robots?

Remember that? You know, you'd have those, and they'd be punching each other.

All of a sudden, one of the heads would pop up.

Well, it never really broke off, right? You just pushed it back down and started again.

You know, that's kind of why people think that you can beat everybody around

and they'll just come right back, right?

So they were designed to pop up, but they never were really broken.

They were never designed for that. We're going to read in Scripture Isaiah 53.

Isaiah 53. Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance

that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished

by God, stricken by him and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to our own way,

and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers

is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away, yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people he was punished.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer.

And though the Lord makes his life and offering for sin, he will see his offspring

and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied.

By his knowledge my righteous servants will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the

spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death,

and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many and made

intercession for the transgressors.

In this season of the calendar year, we celebrate a very special time in the Christian faith.

It is a Christmas time, even up until Epiphany on the 6th of January.

We celebrate Epiphany Sunday on the 5th of January because it's the Sunday closest

to the January 6th. About 2,000 years ago, God gave us a gift—.

In a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, God the Son was born as a little human baby.

The king of the ages was not wrapped in gold foil and given to royalty in the

king's castle with regal fanfare.

He was wrapped in simple cloth like muslin cloth and presented by the angels

to the filthiest, most ceremonially unclean people of the day,

the farmers, the shepherds.

And as such, the gift was given to all people, not just to the haves, but to the have-nots.

He was not broken when he was a baby because of neglect or lack of attention.

No, he had the most attentive and carrying mother and father that God could ever have provided.

His mother loved him dearly and humbly acknowledged her place in history as

being the virgin girl to mother the Messiah, the son of the living God,

the savior of all mankind.

His father took him and cared for him and protected him as though he were his

own flesh and blood, knowing that he really belonged to someone else, to God.

The only brokenness that Jesus knew as a baby was having his sleep broken by

all the spectators that must have come to see this thing that had happened that

the shepherds were shouting about.

And the quiet and peacefulness of the night was broken with all of those newly

adopted aunts and uncles who wanted to hold the baby and to feel the warm,

soft skin, to smell the fresh baby smell and to make him smile by caressing

him and making faces at him and by making baby sounds. Now, you never thought of that, did you?

That Jesus, the Son of God, was coddled by aunts and uncles,

by friends and neighbors.

Everyone wanted to hold him. And you do that with a newborn baby.

I don't know if Joseph did what most men do, but take the baby and hold him up in the air.

I don't know if he did that or not, but it seems like that's one of the things

that happens throughout history, and oftentimes we don't picture that.

That Jesus was a baby just like we were.

And there were people that coddled him. You see, it was not in God's design

for the son of man to be broken when he was still an infant.

And it wasn't God's design for him to be broken through misuse or unintended

use when at about a month and a half old he was presented in the temple for

his official naming and consecration to the Lord as the firstborn male in Joseph's

new family and the firstborn child to open the womb of Mary.

It was at this time while he was being presented and officially named Jesus

that Simeon and the prophetess Anna acknowledged and declared to all present

in the Jerusalem, in the tabernacle, and the temple,

what was the true life purpose of this child?

As they said, that he was to be the Christ, the Messiah, the salvation for Israel

and for the Gentiles that God had promised more than 400 years before.

And it wasn't in God's plan for him to be broken when he was still under the

age of two, when the Magi came from the east looking for the new king,

or when in a fit of jealous rage,

King Herod ordered that all male children under the age of two should be killed.

God designed to hide out this baby Jesus in Egypt.

God knew that if left unchecked, the perverted King Herod would break this gift by abuse.

And it wasn't time yet for this gift to be broken.

Another 10 years or so passed by before the next recorded encounter with Jesus in Scripture.

During those unrecorded years, we know that Jesus probably grew up like any

other boy in Nazareth, playing games, running, laughing, eating, sleeping.

Doing chores, falling, skinning his knees, whatever little kids do.

I don't think he had a tricycle to ride off the front steps, but we don't know.

But boys do what boys will do, and we know that he probably learned Joseph's

trade by working in a builder's shop.

We know that he was taught the things of his heavenly father as well,

because scripture says that he was filled with wisdom and with the grace of God.

In the next scriptural encounter with Jesus, we see the 12-year-old Jesus in

Jerusalem with his family in keeping with the tradition of the feast of the Passover.

This is an age when A Jewish boy now would receive the bar mitzvah,

becoming an adult in the Jewish faith, but he was being brought to the temple

to begin to do what Jewish boys begin to do in the Jewish faith.

His mother and father brought him there, as well as his earthly brothers and sisters.

It's evident from this passage that those around him were not fully aware of God's purpose in Jesus.

They were not fully aware of his purpose and his design as the Christ,

the Messiah, because they were astonished when he stayed behind to ask questions

and to counsel with the teachers of the law.

A 12-year-old counseling the pastors.

And God was equally astonished to think that they didn't know,

the people didn't know, that Jesus was to remain to do what his heavenly Father wanted.

We know that his brothers and sisters had not yet come to understand or accept

his purpose as God's son because we also know from New Testament history that

they didn't accept him as the Messiah until later on in life.

My brother, the Messiah? How many of you have brothers?

Well, would you think if somebody said your brother's the gift of God,

the son of God? Hmm, not him.

I know him too well. So how could this 12-year-old boy from Nazareth,

who was their brother and whom they had wrestled with and teased and played

in the dirt with possibly be the Messiah that was to come and deliver Israel.

But Jesus wasn't broken at 12, not by unintended use, not by neglect, not by abuse.

He was just now starting to become a man.

And Luke tells us that he continued to grow in wisdom and in stature and in

favor with God and man. That's biblical.

Again, there was a gap in biblical record of Jesus's life, a gap of about 18 years.

And most cultures have traditions, many cultures have traditions telling about

encounters during this time with a man fitting Jesus's description.

There are encounters of some where he has maybe traveled around the world known at that time.

There are stories of a man raising a bird to life. There are stories of encounters

of Jesus during these 18 years.

We don't have actual physical, historical evidence of that, but we know something

took place. He wasn't just sitting at home in his dad's builder's shop making chairs.

He was doing something for 18 years. But of this,

we can be sure there was no biblical counts of this missing 18 years,

and the historical records are just too inclusive to be absolutely sure that

this wandering man was Jesus.

What we do know is that it says he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor of

God and man. He was well-liked among men.

People seemed to be drawn to this guy named Jesus, and we can be sure that he

displayed God's love in everything that he did.

Next time anything is recorded in the Bible about Jesus. He's about 30 years old.

We see him coming to the Jordan River to see a man named John who was his relative.

Jesus had heard all kinds of things about the peculiarity of this John,

and he knows from what he has been told that John is preaching that someone

else is to come who is greater than he.

Jesus knows that it's time for him to enter in the public phase of his ministry,

of his life as the Son of God.

And so he comes to John to be baptized by him, even though he really didn't

need to be baptized because he was without sin.

So he came to John to be baptized in fulfillment of the law and the requirements of that time.

And then he begins his three and a half years of ministry by calling people

to God, by teaching, by preaching, and by healing all kinds of illnesses.

Initially, he is greatly loved for what he does, for what he does, but the truth hurts.

And as he speaks the truth and points out sin, people begin to get angry with

him. Do you ever notice that?

Especially the religious leaders who are jealous of him because he's taking

away some of their following and condemning them for getting rich and fat by

abusing the privileges of God.

Jesus spoke about a personal relationship we can have with the living God,

which did away with the Old Testament priesthood, making us each priests and ministers.

We don't need a priest to be our mediator to God, we have Jesus, the Son of God.

And as such, we can go directly to the Father with our needs and our praises through Jesus Christ.

I'm the way and the truth and the life, he said, and no one comes to the Father except through me.

And he told them that the reason God sent him was to provide the way for all

of mankind, Jews and Gentiles, to be restored in their relationship with God.

This also made the leaders mad, the religious leaders, because no longer did

the people have to come to the religious leaders and pay their sacrifices and

all this kind of stuff and make the leaders wealthy.

They could come directly to the Father.

You know, it's said in the Catholic Church that many, many years ago when everything

was done in Latin, and still some churches do this,

people were not encouraged or were actually discouraged to own their own Bible,

because they were told that the priest will tell you what the Bible says and what you're to believe.

Now, people in the Catholic Church do have their own Bibles,

and they are seeing some of that, but it was like this day that the religious

leaders didn't want anybody else to tell them what their job was,

and they would tell you what to believe and what you were to pay and all of that.

During this three and a half years, Jesus was not broken. Even though he was

ridiculed and he was scorned, he still was not broken.

We know that on at least one occasion, the religious leaders attempted to stone

him to death, but he wasn't broken by their abuse. He wasn't broken by overuse.

He was even used, often used by people just for the purpose of being healed

or fed with no intent on their parts to follow him or to listen to him.

Do you know of anybody anytime who would like all of the grace and benefits

of Jesus without turning to him in obedience.

Often this is the case today. People come to God and the church for their daily

handouts or their weekly fix on Sunday morning.

Many times Jesus had to get away from the crowds and from his own disciples

to rest and be alone with the Father.

Next we see Jesus on the hill of Golgotha, which means a place of the skull,

because oftentimes it looks or it does looks like a skull.

And because of the horrors that took place on that hill, Jesus has spent a night

being betrayed by one of his closest friends.

He has been wrongly and dishonestly accused of blasphemy and treason.

He had been convicted in a mockery of a trial with absolutely no justice and no evidence.

He has been beaten by barbarians, spit upon, flogged with whips that contained

metal fragments, bone, and rock pieces.

He's had a crown of thorns rammed down onto his head, and he was mocked all night long.

And yet Jesus didn't talk back as a sheep is silent before its shearer.

He didn't plead his own case. He didn't fight back. He didn't call upon his

father to send angels to rescue him. And you see, Jesus knew his purpose in

life was going to be fulfilled, but he wasn't broken yet.

Watch him on the cross as he compassionately asks his Father to forgive us because

we don't know, we don't have any idea what we're doing to him.

We watch as he receives the punishment for our sin because the payment of sin

is death, the wages of sin is death.

We grimace in pain as the nails are driven into his wrists and feet while realizing

that if he hadn't been there for our sin and failure to live a godly life.

Jesus would have been able to go on through life without all of this, but he took it for us.

We watch as he takes upon himself the sin of the world of all generations who

have ever been and will ever confess the name of the Lord.

He begins to look grotesque as we see the nail prints in his hands and feet,

the thorn wounds in his scalp, the blood running down his body,

the whiplash marks on his back and his body, The bruises on his cheek and his

ribs and his legs, the blackened eyes where he has been pulverized for us,

the spit that has dried on his face.

People now turn away from him because of the horror of the look of his condition. Jesus looks awful.

And even his own father turns away from him, and he cries out,

my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

But he's not broken yet. That's one last thing he must do.

There's one last thing he must do before he's broken. Suddenly the sky grows

dark, even though it has been a relentlessly sunny day.

And as Jesus completes his task, he cries out, it is finished.

He has received all of our sins unto himself, and now he must take those sins

to the grave where they will be buried forever. Hallelujah.

Earth rumbles and shakes. The temple curtain is torn in two.

The most holy of holies that only the high priest could enter once a year has

now been opened for any of us and all of us to go into the presence of the living God.

The free gift that God has given us has been broken.

But Jesus was not broken by neglect.

Jesus was not broken by unintended use. Jesus was not broken by abuse.

Jesus was not broken by everyone and everywhere.

Isaiah chapter 53 tells us that he was bruised, wounded, and crushed for us.

Isaiah 53 · chapter mention

He was wounded emotionally by his own countrymen who called for his death.

He was bruised physically by the punishment for our sins.

He was crushed emotionally and spiritually by the separation from his own father

because of the evil in us.

But my friends, at the end of those six hours on that Friday,

God's son was broken willingly and on purpose by God's design.

From the beginning of time, God planned this for us.

When we were created in God's own image, we walked away from the fellowship

and the love we have of God by our disobedience.

And God designed that his son would come and be broken for us.

He was not broken by hatred.

He was broken by love. He was not broken by despair. there he was broken by hope.

He was not broken by us, he was broken for us.

It was God's design for his son, and it was God's design for us,

and God's design is perfect and flawless.

I submit to you that about 2,000 years ago, God gave us a very special and a

very first Christmas gift that was designed to be broken.

As the song says, broken and spilled out.

It speaks of the woman's flask of oil and fragrance that she broke and poured

onto Jesus' head and feet.

But it speaks of the brokenness that Jesus gave for us. He was broken and spilled out for us.

I don't know about you, but I want to be that be a testimony of my life that

when I come to the end of my days, it will be said,

everything was poured out for Christ.

And what all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put back together

again, God could, and God did.

When most gifts get broken, they are either not worth anything,

they're not worth being fixed, they're worth being thrown away.

Never the same as the original. But when Jesus was broken, God restored him,

and he made him better than the original because the humanity was gone.

And when God puts us back together, we too can be better than the original.

God was the origin of the phrase, build back better.

Really, when you think about it, 2 Corinthians 5, verse 17 says that if anyone

2 Corinthians 5:17

is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come.

We can take on a life of Christ, which is much better than the original.

And oftentimes we sing songs about this, and we remember what Christ has done,

but we look forward to what Christ is doing.

So I want to ask you some questions in closing.

And these are questions as you go from here into the new year.

I want you to ask these questions of yourself continually.

In fact, if you want to take a picture of that so you can ask that,

that's fine. get your smartphones out and just shoot a picture of that,

or I can send you that on email if you want that.

But first of all, are you sure that the chain reaction of your own sinfulness has been broken?

Sin has a way of being a chain reaction. I mean, nobody intends to start out lying, right?

But you say something that's just not totally correct, and then you have to

follow it up with something else that's a little bit bigger to cover what you

said first, and then got to follow up with a little bit more and a little bit

more and a little bit more.

And sooner or later, it becomes a chain reaction of our sinfulness.

But Jesus Christ came to break the chain.

I often tell people who have come out of a life of addiction.

Maybe have had parents who have been addicts, alcoholics, or anything like that,

and they have acquired that taste themselves.

But there comes a point in time, if there comes a point in time when they are

redeemed and have those addictions removed from them, I tell them that you have stopped that chain,

for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren because they will

never see a father, grandfather,

great-grandfather drinking or using drugs.

They will not have that in their makeup.

The second thing we need to ask is, are you sure that you are living up to the

full potential of what God intends for you in a loving relationship with him.

Look at your calendar for 2025, and you say, God, I want you to fill this in

the way you want it to be filled in.

I remember a Nazarene general superintendent who was at one of our churches

in Oklahoma when we were attending the Nazarene church, and he said,

sanctification is like taking a blank sheet of paper,

writing my life at the top, signing your name at the bottom and just say,

God, I want you to fill in the rest of it.

You would do through me to glorify yourself, that's what I want.

And third, are you broken in need of being put back together?

If the Holy Spirit is directing you that all is not right because between you

and God, I'm going to ask you to spend some time with the Lord.

If you want to come forward and kneel at one of the chairs or come talk with

me or pray with me after the close of the service, you may do so.

If you're watching online and listening by Facebook or web page,

you may give me a call at the church office, 608-647-4141, or on my cell phone, 618-900-1500.

Give me a call. Let's talk. Let's pray.

Let's seek God's face. What better Christmas gift is there to give the Lord

than to give ourselves back to him in complete brokenness?

For Christ renew and remake.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we close this year of 2024, and we look forward

to a brand new year, so many of us have lived so many years,

and we have closed out so many years, and so oftentimes we remember things that

have happened so many times ago, but Father, we don't want to—we want to learn

from them, but Father, we want to look forward to what you would have for us this next year.

So Father, I pray that you would fill our calendar you would transform us into

your animates you would break the chain of sinfulness within us you would renew a right spirit within us.

And you would create something new in us behold the old is gone the new ways

have come so father make us new again and again and again and again in Jesus name amen.