City Sidewalks, Busy Sidewalks

Well, the popular Christmas song, Silver Bells, one of the lines,

the lead lines in the song Silver Bells is, city sidewalks, busy sidewalks.

You remember that song, right?

I don't think any other four words could paint a more accurate picture of Christmastime in America.

The city sidewalks are busy sidewalks filled with holiday shoppers.

The parking lots are full, the stores are crowded.

Every year my sisters and nieces, when we gather together for Thanksgiving meal,

every year my sisters and nieces would leave their homes at 2.30 in the morning

on the day after Thanksgiving to be some of the first ones in line when the

doors open for Black Friday at the stores.

I don't understand it. But they do.

There are only—just so you know, there are only seven more days until Christmas,

seven more shopping days, counting today.

And so if you want to get those Queen Anne chocolate-covered cherries for your

wife, or your kids, or your grandmother, or whatever it might be,

you better hurry, because they may be gone Christmas Eve.

Nancy and I try to stay away from the malls and shopping centers at this time of year.

She usually gets all of our Christmas shopping done months before Christmas.

But I've heard that it's still busy out there this time of year.

People, people, and more people.

Each one is on a mission. Many of them are in a hurry.

Some are bumping into one another, and few are without holiday stress.

City sidewalks. Busy sidewalks.

The picture is also accurate globally. Cities are growing larger and larger.

According to research done by John Hopkins University in 1950,

only one-third of the world's population lived in city centers.

Today more than one half of the world's 8.2 billion people live in cities,

and I've been told by the same research by the year 2030 they figure the urban population will be,

over 5 billion, at least 60 percent of the whole world's population.

So the sidewalks of the world are busier than ever before, with people going

everywhere, and oftentimes not even paying attention to anybody else.

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks.

I wonder though, to play off the title of Shel Silverstein's book,

Where Does the Sidewalk End?

If the sidewalks are busy, where is everyone going? City sidewalks, busy sidewalks.

The Some want the sidewalk to end at success, others want it to accumulate along

the way, some are out just to see the sights, others just love being in a crowd.

Still others are hoping the sidewalk will take them home. City sidewalks. Busy sidewalks.

Everyone in the human race is on the way to their individual destinations,

sometimes though they don't know where that destination is.

Busy, industrious, active, technologically savvy, overloaded with information,

and still searching for significance.

The city of Jerusalem could have been said to have the same busy walkways around the year 735 BC.

It was a thriving city, well populated, the capital of the nation of Judah,

and led by a king from the family line of the great King David.

He was a king by the name of Ahaz.

And when people who are in the church and know the Old Testament scripture,

when they hear the name Ahaz, they kind of do this little boo hiss type thing

because Ahaz was not a good man.

The book of 2 Kings says that he worshipped idols going so far as to sacrifice

his own son in the fire in worship to Molech the god.

If the kings from the line of David were to produce the perfect king or usher

in the golden age, they had failed miserably and Ahaz was a prime example of their failure.

Looking at the story in Isaiah chapter 7, we find that the political situation

Isaiah 7 · chapter mention

surrounding Jerusalem was becoming very volatile.

The nearby countries of Syria and Israel had formed an alliance and sought to conquer Jerusalem.

So God sent the prophet Isaiah to speak to Ahaz. So what's God's message?

Don't be afraid, you will not be defeated.

Then in rather uncharacteristic fashion, God spoke through Isaiah and told Ahaz

to ask him for a sign, similar to when Gideon asked God for a sign,

so he could make sure he was walking in God's will.

You see, Ahaz was considering making a treaty of his own with Assyria,

which God did not want him to do.

So the opportunity remained open for Ahaz to affirm his faith and act like a

believer, and basically God said, ask me any sign you wish so that you will

believe that I am protecting you.

But Ahab said in verse 7, or verse 12 of chapter 7, he says,

no, I will not put God to the test.

Pious sounding, though it may seem, what he was really saying is,

no, I'm gonna do things my own way.

And so what he did is he tried to seek out a backroom alliance with the most

vicious army of all the time, hoping that they would together destroy their enemy.

He said, I'll keep up my practices as an idol worshiper and aspire to become

more powerful and pretend that I'm a God worshiper.

Does that sound familiar?

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks filled with scheming, striving,

and scurrying, but in the midst of the busyness of humanity and their journey

to nowhere, God makes an astounding promise.

In the words first given through Isaiah to Ahaz, when Ahaz finally asked God

for a promise, this is what God said.

These words were spoken more than 700 years before the birth of Christ,

and this is what God said to Ahaz, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.

The virgin will be with child, and will give birth to a son and will call him

Emmanuel." So 700 and some years before the birth of Christ,

God is prophesying that he's going to be the redemption of the world through his son Jesus.

We see in this one verse and all the corresponding fulfillment of prophecy,

we see God's promise, we see his provision in fulfilling his promise,

and we see the peace that comes from God's provision.

This promise, this prophecy, is one of the messianic prophecies which we read

through Isaiah and many other passages, but primarily Isaiah,

pointing to the coming of Christ who would deliver the people from their oppression.

The promise here is called a sign, and as I point out a few things about this

sign, you'll understand in

your mind how the Christ child, born some 700 years after this prophecy,

fulfills this prophecy and provides for it.

It is said that for some one person to fulfill all of the prophecies written

about the Messiah would be the end.

Equivalent, or the probability of taking a quarter and marking on it a red X

on one side of it and throwing it in the sea of quarters covering the state

of Texas about a foot deep,

and then asking somebody to dive into that pile of quarters covering the state

of Texas and pull out that one quarter with the red X on it.

That's the probability of one person of all of history fulfilling the prophecy

that was written about the Christ.

Not very possible, is it? And yet we understand that Jesus was the one that fulfilled all of those.

So let's see about this sign. First of all, we understand that God was the one

that was going to give this sign.

Ahaz wouldn't ask God for a sign, he displayed unbelief.

But regardless of what Ahaz said or did, the Lord was going to give him a sign.

God was going to intervene in human history because his chosen people were not

fulfilling their part of the covenant and were being disobedient.

In the covenant with Abraham, God said that his people, the chosen people,

would be blessed and would be a blessing to all the nations,

and yet God's chosen people were now divided and disobedient.

There was the nation of Israel and the nation of Judah, and they were split

up and neither of them were following God.

And so God was going to interview in human history, as he has so many times

before and so many times since then, it was going to be a time where everyone

was going to be expected to expecting the significance of the sign.

The sign is all God's doing.

God broke through, and And through his actions, he says, I see the busyness

of humanity, striving, striving everywhere.

I alone will give them a sign. I will do something so miraculous that they will have to stand up.

Take notice. So Titus chapter 1 verses 2 and 3 tells us that God had a plan

Titus 1:2

all along from the very creation of the world when man was created and mankind

was created in God's own image.

God gave them the heart of God and God intended for them to be in character,

us to be in character with God.

But man walked away from that in the disobedience of our own mind.

God gave us the free will that we had, so we walked away, and God from the very

beginning of time knew this was going to happen.

That man was going to walk away from him, but he also provided from the very

beginning for a way for man to come back into fellowship with him as his children.

So before the stars were placed in heaven, before the earth took form,

before life existed on planet, long before that, God knew and had a plan for

what was going to happen, and that plan included you and me.

If God sang a song, the words might sound a little bit like a Willie Nelson

song, and I'll try to do my best interpretation.

You're always on my mind.

No, I can't sing like him. He was thinking about you before the very beginning

of time, and now God was ready to give a sign, an actual occurrence that will

prove he is acting out his singular plan.

It was a plan that culminated in the coming of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas.

Matthew 9 says Jesus went through all the towns and villages,

teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing

every disease and sickness. city sidewalks, busy sidewalks.

God walked those busy city sidewalks filled with harassed and helpless people.

The plan was going, all along, was to send a Savior and a Shepherd.

I wonder how many people today we know that feel harassed and helpless.

I wonder if we look around our city streets, our city sidewalks,

our sidewalks, if we will see people who are harassed and helpless,

and even hopeless, I dare say we could look at all around us and see that.

In an interview shortly before his death, ex-Beatle George Harrison said,

everything else in life can wait, but the search for God cannot wait.

Now, Christians might not subscribe to what George Harrison's idea of God are,

we can still have to admit that he was right about one thing,

and that is the importance of searching for God.

That supersedes everything else we have and do in our life.

If we believe in an eternity and we believe there is something for us in the

hereafter, we must understand that there needs to be a search for God in all

things, and the good news is this, God doesn't make himself hard to find.

He himself gave a sign and then he sent Jesus to be the provision of that promise.

The second thing I want to point out about the sign is this,

the sign would be for all people everywhere.

Catch that? It's for all people.

Some believe that God decided who was going to be saved and who was not,

and so the salvation was only for a certain amount of people,

but God gave the sign for all people everywhere. The sign was going to be a promise of a gift.

How exactly does someone go about giving a gift to everyone, all people everywhere?

It's like the story about the person who let time slip away before she realized

that she had been so busy at work that she wasn't able to get to the store to

purchase Christmas cards for the long list of people she had to send Christmas greetings to.

Time was slipping away, so not too many days before Christmas,

she went to the local store and hurriedly purchased the very last book box of

cards on the shelf, looking only at the beautiful picture on the outside of the cards,

and she signed them all with my love and mailed them out hastily.

As New Year's came and she had time to go back, she decided to look at a couple

of those cards that she hadn't sent out.

She was shocked to read the message inside that said, this Christmas card is

just to say a little gift is on its way.

God sent a message to all people, you're getting a little gift.

If God had wanted Isaiah to rhyme, he might have said this prophecy is just

to say, the greatest gift of all is on its way.

Friends, when God goes Christmas shopping, he doesn't mess around.

Do you remember what the angel said to the shepherds who were watching their flocks by night?

In announcing the birth of Jesus, Luke 2.10, it says, the angel said to them,

do not be afraid, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for only a

certain amount of the people.

That will be for all the people. The prophecy through Isaiah to Ahaz had worldwide

implications for all of history, and that includes us.

People everywhere, for all time, would be affected by this sign.

Jesus is for all the people, and most importantly today Jesus as a gift for you.

John 1 tells us that He came to walk in our streets.

He is one of us. And do you realize why you were included in God's gift list?

It is because God loves the world and everyone in it.

Have you accepted the gift of God? If you haven't, I would urge you to do so,

to understand and acknowledge that you are helpless and hopeless without the

grace of God that comes to us in Christ, and to turn to Him in faith and ask

Him to be your Savior and your Lord.

We simply need to acknowledge who we are without Christ and say,

God, you are the only thing I can depend on.

And so the third thing we see about this sign is that the sign would be miraculous.

How much more miraculous than this? A virgin will be with child.

Some have tried, how would you like to get attention of a large crowd?

Well, some have tried holding signs up, being loud, sitting at the football

games with a sign at the end of the stadium that says John 3 16,

as if that really means anything to anybody that doesn't know scripture.

Skywriting from planes, full-page ads in the newspaper, jamming the highways

and bridges and protesting not allowing traffic to be—you know,

that's really a good way to get attention to everybody, of everybody.

Some have even tried terrorism to capture the attention of the world.

There's an old ad advertisement that says, it's popularized by a perfume commercial

that says, if you want to capture someone's attention, just whisper.

Do you remember that commercial? Now I know what's going to happen is this is human psyche.

You're gonna not even listen to anything else that I have to say for the rest

of this message, because your mind is going to go back to that commercial and

say, okay, what was that for?

So just so you will pay attention to the rest of the message,

it was a perfume called Nuance by Cody.

Okay, so now you've got that out of the way, you don't have to think about that, you can pay attention.

So God speaks to us in a still small voice, and that still small voice would

be astronomical in its announcement, that still small voice,

even though it was announced by loud angels, was carried out in the plan with a little baby.

Sign was miraculous. A virgin would conceive.

A young woman, a young lady who had never been intimate with a man would become pregnant.

Go figure. That would be pretty miraculous, don't you think?

And I think it would catch people's attention.

But did it? Was it a shout or a whisper?

King Ahaz ignored Isaiah's prophecy. The sign didn't get his attention.

Many scholars believe that a young lady during Isaiah's time did become pregnant

and name her son Immanuel, but she was not a virgin.

And even more clear, the Bible uses this as a time to serve as a type and forecast

for Mary the mother of Jesus.

Matthew chapter 1 verse 22 and 23 says this, all this took place to fulfill

Matthew 1:22

what the Lord had said through the prophet, the virgin will be with child and

will give birth to a son and she will call him Emmanuel.

What you read in the New Testament it is exact quote from Isaiah chapter 7.

Isaiah 7 · chapter mention

What the angel said to Mary and to the others was an exact quote of that prophecy.

Did the world sit up and take notice that the virgin with child,

was all the focus on Joseph and Mary the night Jesus was born,

and was everybody going around doing their own thing, their business and their

busyness, as the case may be.

I didn't think it was any coincidence that there was no room for Joseph and

Mary in the inn, but the fact is, there was no room for Joseph and Mary and

the baby in anybody's plans.

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, sidewalks filled with the lonely,

the hurting, the ones with misplaced priorities.

Wonder, have you ever seen sidewalks filled with lonely and hurting people,

ones with misplaced priorities?

In the church we often talk about the down-and-outers, the ones who don't have

anything to say, but we don't understand even those who are affluent in the

world's scene without Christ are extremely needy.

I remember when we were pastoring in Michigan when there was a whole subdivision

of new homes that were at that time half a million and more to build,

and I remember driving out into the neighborhood and looking at it, the yards were dirt.

You could look in the windows of the houses and see that they had only furniture,

sparse furniture, in the living room and nothing else in the house.

They were simply places for these executives to go and have parties to show

off their wealth, but they were not homes.

Everyone today, without Christ, is lonely and hurting and helpless and hopeless. We need a Savior.

We need a Christ. This long-awaited sign was largely overlooked and ignored

by the crowds of the city.

It was miraculous. A virgin conception, a virgin birth, as unbelievable as that

may be, was overlooked. And so, who did God bring the sign to?

Who did God bring the announcement to?

Some stupid, stinky shepherds out in a field.

Oh, wait a minute. As Liz said, maybe we're all like shepherds.

And God brought that message to each one of us that we should be the ones who

make the announcement of who Christ is.

So God brought a sign that would be miraculous, and then finally God brought

a sign that That would be a baby boy, a baby boy given the name Immanuel, which means God with us.

Not apart from us, not distant from us, but God with us.

While this was not Jesus' proper name, it was a name that belonged to him as an attribute.

Immanuel, God with us.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And God came to dwell on our streets and among us.

From the point of this miraculous birth, God would himself be present among people.

God would himself come and dwell with us and live like us, and it's said that

Jesus is the only one who is fully human and fully God, and yet did not sin, had no sin within him.

John 1.14 says, so the Word became human and lived on earth with us.

He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness, and we have seen his glory,

the glory of his Father, the one and only Father.

New York Yankees announcer, former New York Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto,

once suggested to manager Joe Torrey that managing the players on the field

would be done better from high above the field up in the boxes,

where he could look down upon them and see every play and announce down to them

what they were supposed to be doing.

Thoughtfully, Joe Torrey replied, sorry but thanks.

Upstairs, you can't look in their eyes.

Friends, in Jesus Christ, God has not only come down to our playing field,

but he's looking in our eyes.

He knows us, he loves us.

Did King Ahaz understand all this? Not in a lifetime.

Was a prophecy focusing on the future. Jeremiah 31, verses 31 and 33 says this,

Jeremiah 31:31

"'The day will come,' says the Lord, "'when I will make a new covenant "'with

the people of Israel and Judah.

"'This covenant will not be like the one "'I made with their ancestors when

I took them by the hand "'and brought them out of the land of Egypt.

"'They broke that covenant, though I loved them "'as a husband loves his wife,'

says the Lord, "'but I will put my laws in their minds "'and I will write them

on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

They'll be my people, the ones in the cities, the busy ones on the sidewalks

of life, and I will be their God." The sign given by God for all people, miraculously,

was a baby boy.

Do you want to know what's amazing about that? Nothing changes life like a baby.

If you haven't noticed, our church family has recently experienced church growth

through the birth of a child, and I'm certain if you were to ask the young parents around us.

They would tell you exactly how their lives have changed with a new baby.

Question is, has your life changed because of this baby, this Jesus,

this God who was given to all people? Has your life been transformed by the renewing of your mind?

Has this baby affected your work, your schedule, your life?

Has this baby influenced your attitude, your mindset, your love,

your giving, your service?

Or are you so busy walking the city sidewalks to nowhere that you haven't even noticed this baby?

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, the entire human population on the way to their

individual destinations,

but a sign, a promise, changes everything for every traveler among us.

For the busy and directionless, there's now direction.

For the busy and striving, there is grace. For the busy and tired, there is rest.

For the busy and battle-scarred, there's peace.

For all of us, a baby who would change the world, and And all you need to do

is simply look at the baby in the manger.

Take the time to be focused on the quietness of that blessed birth of a child

by the name of Emmanuel, God with us,

and you will grasp the unbelievable meaning of the miraculous statement about this miraculous event.

And God came and made his dwelling among us.

This same Jesus who is born, who we celebrate being born on Christmas,

is God who came to our city streets and our busy streets to live among us.

I would pray that you would let those city sidewalks and busy sidewalks lead

you to a Savior in a little manger who can change your world.

And if you don't know, and if you're listening online, if you have questions about this, call us.

We'd love to visit with you and share this Christ, this child who came at Christmas.

To be our Redeemer and our Master.

Heavenly Father, as we close this time, in a week before Christmas,

we ask that you would take this week in the busyness of choir concerts and school

and work and all of that that's going on,

the last-minute shopping and things like that, that you would take this time

to quiet us and help us to focus on the fact that you came miraculously to live

in our world so that we might someday live in yours. In Jesus' name, amen.