God With Us // Why Christmas Matters

We're going to be in Matthew, chapter one, this morning and I just want to wish a Merry Christmas to each of you.

We've been in a series entitled God with Us and today's message is very personal to me.

Sometimes what can happen during this Christmas time is we enjoy the festivities, we enjoy the Christmas songs, we enjoy the cookies.

How many enjoyed the cookies?

Yeah, okay, they were good.

How many got more than one cookie this morning?

Yes, how many got more than two cookies this morning?

How many got more than five?

No, don't admit it.

Don't admit it.

Okay, we enjoy the festivities, we enjoy these different things about Christmas and sometimes we can forget what Christmas really is all about and I just want it to all amount all about.

But sometimes we can lean back into the traditions of Christmas and forget, like, how mind blowing the truth that God came to this earth actually is.

It's mind blowing if you think about it, and some of us, you know we've heard these stories, the Christmas story, a thousand times.

Some of us are here this morning because it's Christmas time, so I got to check that church attendance box, or maybe some of you were like dragged here.

In fact, if you look out in the parking lot.

Your heel marks can be seen in the parking lot.

Well, whatever you're here, I just want to say you're welcomed here and we're glad you're here, no matter where you identify on the faith spectrum or where you are, and I want you to know this that God being with us deeply, deeply matters, Like the story of Christmas deeply deeply matters, in fact.

It's life changing, it's life altering and, maybe most importantly, what some of us really need right now is that it's hope giving, because God being with us shows us something that you may not realize.

It shows us that God loves you, that God gets you and that God's in control, that God loves you, that God gets you and that God's in control.

What I really want to invite you to do this morning, for just a few minutes that we have, is for you to lean in, because I want you to experience hope this Christmas and I want you to experience the hope that God loves you, that God gets you and that God's in control.

We're going to be in Matthew, chapter one, and we're going to look at this Christmas story and we're going to see how, in the Christmas story, we see these three life changing realities.

If you're ready for the word this morning, would you say amen, amen.

And Matthew one, verse 18,.

It says this the what's that next word?

The birth, the birth of Jesus Christ came about this way.

So here's the story.

Here's how it happened.

Right here it is right here.

This is what happened the events that surrounded the birth of Jesus.

After his mother, mary, had been engaged to Joseph, it was discovered before they came together that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit.

So here it is Mary's pregnant, but it happened before they hooked up, before they got it on, before they had sex.

She's pregnant.

Now it says here she's engaged to Joseph.

But engagement here is so much more than we understand it today.

We have a picture in our minds of engagement, but engagement in this time period was something called a betrothal.

Everybody say the word betrothal ready A betrothal.

It's a big word.

What's a betrothal?

This was a first century tradition that honestly, I think it was kind of a dumb thing that they would do right here in the first century.

This is what a betrothal was.

A betrothal was is two people would get legally married but they had to wait a year before they were allowed to live together or sleep together.

Dumbest tradition ever.

This is what it was.

Mary and Joseph were betrothed and they were legally married.

They were legally married and for them to end the marriage they would have to get an official divorce and they were considered being married without any of the physical benefits.

And during the betrothal period, mary shows up pregnant.

You ever consider what Mary must have been thinking?

And betrothed to the love of my life?

I've already legally married him, but we haven't had sex yet.

But now I'm pregnant.

How am I gonna tell him?

Can you imagine like Mary Like she must've been, like keeping herself up at night thinking how am I gonna tell him this story?

Like what?

Now?

Can you imagine Joseph, his fiancee, comes to him and is like I'm pregnant, but don't worry, it was from the Holy Ghost.

Imagine what Joseph must've been thinking.

I mean Joseph's probably like, yeah, did the Holy Ghost give you a pet unicorn too?

Think about it, mary, tough place Joseph.

So what's Joseph gonna do?

Well, he makes a decision, what he's gonna do in the next verse 19.

Here's been Joseph being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her publicly.

So, joseph, he's a pretty good dude, right?

He's a good dude, didn't want to disgrace her publicly, he's not gonna make a big scene out of this.

He decides to divorce her secretly.

Guys, can you blame him?

Can you blame him?

Man?

He's like I'm just gonna keep this on the down low, I'm not gonna make a big scene about it, I'm just gonna kind of do this and go along.

But after he'd considered these things, joseph has been thinking about these things.

You would be thinking about these things too.

Joseph is thinking about all these things.

He's made his decision.

An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

So God is communicating.

God is communicating with Joseph through a dream and telling him this is actually from the Holy Spirit.

And verse 21 tells us what this baby came to do.

It says she will give birth to a son and you are to name him Jesus.

So in the dream, god tells Joseph hey, this is the name that you are going to name him.

If I'm Joseph, I'm like, can I like have a part in, like, picking the name?

Maybe, like, can I have a little say in this?

God says his name is Jesus.

This is why?

Because he's gonna save his people from their sin.

The name Jesus actually means to deliver, to save.

So the reason why Jesus was named when he was named was because of what he was sent to do.

He was sent to deliver us, to save us from our sin by eventually coming and dying on the cross for us.

And when we put our faith and trust in him and we turn away from our sin, we are saved, we are delivered.

This is actually what his name means.

Now, the reason why all of this happened the way it did is because hundreds of years before, there was a guy named Isaiah and he was a prophet, and he prophesied that all of this is gonna happen in the future.

In fact, it's referenced in verse 22.

It says this all took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet.

What did the prophet say?

Verse 23, see, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which is translated.

Let's say it together it's translated God is with us Christmas.

God is with us.

God is with us.

Now, if you're looking at this, this might be kind of confusing because you're like hold on, he was just named Jesus.

And now it says that his name is Emmanuel.

Like which one is, which you know?

Is it like Jesus' first name?

But his buddies call him Emmanuel.

His last name is Christ.

You know?

Like what is it all about?

Okay, jesus, the name Jesus indicates what he does.

His second name, the second Emmanuel who he was, if we can get the next slide up on the screen.

The first name Jesus indicates what he does.

He saves us from our sin.

The second Emmanuel who he was, he was God with us.

Now, if you think about all this that's happening right here, this is a lot for Joseph and Mary to take in.

So you're going to have the savior of the world, jesus.

He's the deliverer.

He's Emmanuel, he's God with us.

This is crazy.

This is mind blowing.

This is what's happening.

And when Joseph woke up, he heard as the Lord's angel had commanded him.

He did as the Lord's angel had commanded him.

He married her, but did not have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.

Jesus, god coming down to this earth.

Why does this matter?

Why is this?

How is this life changing?

How is this life altering?

And not just for a church service on Christmas Eve, like we're gathered in right now, but in our everyday life, like when life is hard and life is difficult and we experience things.

Why does this matter that he came to this earth?

It matters because it shows that God loves you, that God loves you.

We live in a world where we like following celebrities and iconic people.

I could like, say, a musician or athlete, and no doubt they would have like a bunch of fans in this room.

Let's just give a little test right here how many of you in this room for my sports people?

How many of you you like Steph Curry?

Steph Curry yep, okay, that's right.

How many of my music people?

How many of you You're Swifty?

You like Taylor Swift?

Some of you are lying.

Some of you guys are like you like her.

You're just too embarrassed to admit it.

Taylor Swift's got some good songs.

Alright, might be a closet Swifty right here, but you know.

Anyways, we like iconic people, we like famous people.

We follow them on social media, we're interested in their lives.

We have posters of them in different places and the interesting thing about iconic, famous people is there's like a gap between those people and all of us over here that are normal.

It's us over here that are normal, and then it's like these people over here.

So, like if I went to the Chase Center to watch a Warriors game and if I were to go to security, I would say, hey, I'm just going to go hang out with Steph tonight.

Like Steph Curry, it's his lucky day.

I'm going to spend some time with Steph tonight.

If Steph is lucky, he might get a selfie with me maybe, if he wants.

They're going to be like nah, bro, like nah, he's like it ain't happening.

Like your short little, stubby self is not going to meet Steph tonight.

There's a gap between me and Steph A lot of times.

Like famous people, obviously, they live in like gated communities and big mansions with big walls around them to keep themselves separate from all of us.

Understandably, because some of us are kind of crazy and would, yeah, they want to create distance between them and us.

They understand it.

It's like the world we live in.

You know God?

He calls the gap of distance between him and us by coming to this earth.

You think about that.

He didn't separate himself from us.

He came to us.

And why would he do that?

He would do that because he loves us, and he loves us with an all-knowing love.

Hey, with me with an all-knowing love.

You ever been to like an event or maybe a job interview, and you wanted to put your best foot forward and you wanted to make a good impression on somebody and you wanted them to like you.

So what did you do?

You took a shower.

Good start.

You took a shower, you combed your hair, you maybe fixed up some things in your face, you wore your nice clothes, you put on your good shoes.

You did all these things because you wanna make a good impression on them and then, maybe after the job interview, they said we like you, you're getting the job.

I'm like, yes, or maybe we were in that event, that party or whatever, and those people we were talking to, they were like yeah, I like you, you're a pretty cool person.

They're like oh, yeah, they like me.

It's great.

But the person they like is only that person that they saw for 15 minutes or for a couple hours that night.

It's a small piece of you Like.

It's not all of you.

It's the you that you presented.

It's the you that took a shower and combed your hair and wore perfume and did all that.

That's the you that they liked.

They didn't see all of you, they just saw part of you.

Now, get this, get this, get this, get this.

God knows you with an all-knowing love where he knows all of you and he still loves you.

God fully knows you and fully loves you.

He doesn't just love the postured version of you that you're like I'm going to.

No, he loves you in your brokenness.

He loves you in your mistakes.

He loves you with your issues.

He loves you in your shortcomings.

He loves every part of you as an individual inside of you.

He loves the good, the bad and the ugly.

And he doesn't just tell us that he loves us, but he demonstrated that he loved us by coming down to this earth.

And he didn't say okay, I will start loving you when you stop being such a knucklehead.

He didn't say, like, I'm going to start loving you when you stop doing that, because you know you shouldn't be doing that.

He didn't say I'm going to start loving you when you get rid of your anger, because you got some anger issues.

God didn't do that.

God loves us with an all-knowing love, an all-knowing love.

And can I just tell some of you something that you've been wanting to hear for a long time and maybe you've been trying to perform to hear this and you've been trying to do certain things to earn this.

But you don't need to.

This is what I want to tell you you are loved.

You are loved.

It doesn't matter what that person said, it doesn't matter that you got fired, it doesn't matter what you did.

You are loved.

And some of us have spent our entire lives striving to be loved by somebody.

And this is what Christmas declares God with us, shows us that he came here because he loves us.

He loves us and, number two, he gets us.

You think about this that God gets us.

He came down to this earth.

If we can get the next slide up there, god gets us.

He came down to this earth.

Now, y'all think this earth is pretty big.

It's pretty jacked up.

A lot of things happen around here that probably aren't the best.

You know.

You look around.

You're like the first century was actually worse.

I mean, the amount of just evil things that were happening in the Roman Empire is crazy.

Like you guys have seen those war movies and things like that.

It's pretty crazy stuff.

And Jesus came down to this earth.

So this means that he's experienced what we have experienced.

I don't know if this has ever occurred to you, but Jesus had dysfunction in His family.

He knows what that's like Jesus was poor.

He knows what that's like Jesus was rejected.

He knows what that's like.

He knows what that's like.

He was a victim of injustice.

He was falsely accused.

He knew what it was like to experience pain and grief and loss and stare evil directly in the face.

He knew what that's.

He experienced that.

It's easy to be in this world and think nobody gets me, nobody understands me.

Can I say Jesus does.

Nobody gets how this happened?

Jesus does.

In Hebrews 4, it reminds us of this.

It says we don't have a high priest, jesus, who's unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.

The word weaknesses literally means the human condition.

No, he's able to sympathize.

Some translations say empathize.

Why?

Because he experienced it.

He's not disconnected from reality.

You have a God that understands and the reason why Christmas matters is because it shows that God loves you.

It shows that God gets you and it shows, number three, that God's in control.

Can I say this is kind of hard for me to believe.

Sometimes I look around and I'm like I don't know if he's really in control.

I did a fun little pull on my social media this past week and I asked people I was like which one of these is the hardest to believe?

They got loves you, they got gets you, that God's in control.

And what people said the highest thing that was rated was that God is in control.

Sometimes we wonder is he really in control?

And I think, if you're like me and sometimes we wonder this, I think we can take comfort in the Christmas story, because in the Christmas story it didn't seem like he was in control at all.

Jesus wasn't born with any fanfare.

Jesus was born to a barn, to a teenage girl.

At that time, rome was in power, they had all the power, they were elite, they had all this.

And you have a little baby that was born in Bethlehem, out in the middle of nowhere, and some random shepherds came and saw him and he was born in a feeding trough.

Like God's not in control of that or Rome is in control, so it looked like.

But what was happening?

People didn't even realize this at the time.

But God, the Father, was moving the pieces and he was going to have the final move.

He was moving the pieces to put things how he wanted them to be.

Let me think about this.

In Luke, chapter two, it tells us that Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem because there was this worldwide taxation that the Roman Empire gave Caesar.

Gustaf says Roman Empire, everybody's got to be taxed.

So Mary and Joseph had to go to the city where they were from Bethlehem to be taxed.

That's what Rome had said.

Luke explains in Luke two that God's purposes in this was so the prophecy about Jesus being born in Bethlehem would be fulfilled.

There was a prophecy that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem.

So what God did this is crazy.

God had a worldwide taxation happen so two people could travel 90 miles from here to there.

So Jesus could be born right there in that place, as it was prophesied about years ago.

God was in control, god was moving pieces and nobody even realized it.

Back in day, when I was in eighth grade, I entered a competition, a competition I had no business being in at all.

I entered a chess competition.

Let me say it, guys, I'm not a chess master.

I'm not a chess.

I don't really know much about chess.

Now, the reason why I entered this competition in eighth grade is because my school did this thing, where they had something called Fine Arts.

Any of you guys school ever do Fine Arts?

Now they did Fine Arts six hours away at a different school and the way that we could get out of going to school is by going to the Fine Arts competition.

So you get out of school for two days.

You got to go to the Fine Arts competition.

I'm like, yes, I'm going.

You had me get out of school for two days.

I'm done, I'm out.

What do I have to do?

They said oh, here's a list of all these things that you can pick from to compete in and you have to pick two or three of them.

You know the overachievers were picking like seven or eight, somebody like me.

I'm picking the bare minimum.

Just get me out of school for a couple days and I thought what's the easiest thing I can compete in?

It's like chess.

I can do this.

Hold on.

I barely even knew what the chess pieces were.

I knew what a king was, I knew what a queen was.

They were like hey, what is the rook do?

I'm like what's a rook?

Like a rookie.

So we get down to this competition and the chess competitions.

It's in a classroom.

I walk in the classroom and all these tables are laid out, got the whiteboard there.

It's kind of quiet.

You know all these guys are they're real serious about about their chess.

Now I'm coming in.

I'm just like, whatever I didn't know this at the time, but they have these like little timers, so every time you move you're on a certain timer and I was like what's that about man?

He was like, oh yeah, well, this is what this about.

Every time you move, you hit this.

I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool, yeah.

So I go there and I sit down and I'm competing against this other guy and really early on in the game I got two pawns.

I got like two of us, like I had two pieces.

This guy had no pieces.

I'm like it's a wrap, I'm in control of this game.

I didn't even I didn't hardly prepare for this and I'm about to beat this guy.

I gotta tell you about this guy I was going against.

He was a real chess player.

He walked in with a chess book, like like an actual book in the eighth grade.

I was like you're actually what's a book?

Yeah, this guy came in.

He and I say this respectfully, but he was like the nerdy guy.

You know what I'm saying.

I came in, had the book, a little bit of a nerdy guy and he had this focus walking up to this table.

I mean this focus that like rivaled Michael Jordan in the glory days.

This guy was like locked in so he sits down, doesn't even like look at me hardly.

He's just like I'm sitting here and I got his pawn and I got his other pawn.

I'm like I'm about to beat this chump.

He thinks he's cool because he's got like fancy glasses on, he's got a chess book.

I'm about to beat him.

And then it started happening.

Why didn't I realize Is he was actually letting me take his pieces so I would make my king available, so he could give me a checkmate In like two and a half minutes.

That's not good, not good.

And I'm sitting here thinking like I got this, I'm in control, I have two pieces.

You don't have any pieces, you're in trouble, you're in a bad place.

Buddy, here it is.

But really he knew exactly what was happening and really he moved the pieces.

He had me move my pieces in such a way so he could go right here checkmate.

And he had the final move and I left that table thinking he was in control the entire time and I didn't even realize it, and he had the final move.

Can I say this morning, guys, that God has the final move.

God has the final move.

Doctors don't have the final move, your pain does not have the final move, lawyers don't have the final move, your ex does not have the final move, your job situation does not have the final move.

And because God, because God has the final move in the end, you can be sure that God has a plan in the present.

Can we get that slide up there, guys?

Because God has the final move in the end, you can be sure that God has a plan in the present.

And if God is in control of the present, then you can have hope in the present, no matter how hopeless your situation feels, no matter where you are in your life and you're just like this is the worst Christmas ever, or how am I going to be able to do this?

Or people are looking forward to the new year and you're just like I don't want another year where you can have hope in the present because God is in control.

Now here's where we wrap this up.

I don't want us to leave this message, this truth of God being with us right here in this room.

Here's what I want to ask you which one of these three realities do you need to embrace right now in your life that God loves you, that God gets you or that God's in control?

You might be in a situation or a season that nobody else knows about.

You might be experiencing it and nobody else knows about it, and you need to embrace one of these things that God loves you, that God gets you and that God's in control.

The message of Christmas is a message of hope, because it shows that God is with us and that God that's with us came to die on the cross for us and by trusting in Him to be our Lord and Savior, we can have an eternity in heaven.

Maybe that's what somebody you need to do this morning.

Maybe you came because somebody invited you and you're just like here.

Maybe today can be the day of what the scripture says is your salvation, where you truly put your faith in Jesus to be your Lord and Savior.

I don't know where you are, but I do know this that Christmas is good news, because God loves you, because God gets you and God's in control.

Let's have a word of prayer together.