Advent Week 3: Redemption

This is where I normally say we study through books of the Bible here at the village chapel, but we're in the Advent season taking a look at some of the themes that run throughout the entire scripture.

Genesis to Revelation, showing how the Christmas story actually intersects and is fully integrated really into the message, the grand narrative of the Bible, which can be summarized in these four words, as we've said in the previous two Advent Sundays.

Creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

Talked about creation already in the fall, shown how they intersect the story of Christmas or the incarnation of Christ.

We've seen that the Father, the Spirit, and the Son, all present and engaged at the creation event.

Saw that from Genesis 1 and John chapter 1 in the New Testament.

John 1 · chapter mention

We've seen that the core problem in this world began with the fall described in Genesis chapter 3 and 4.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

We've seen that the Father and the Spirit and the Son, all part of that plan of creation, all responding as well to the problem that we have, this fall, as in Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, the promise of a one who would come and bruise the serpent on his head begins the story of redemption, which is what will be our study for today.

Genesis 3:15

And so we'll take a look at that in just a moment after hearing the kids sing and hearing our prayers and hearing Susan read these scriptures.

All of that queuing up so beautifully to me to the great uh rejoicing of the of the work that God has done on our behalf to redeem us, to rescue us, to and it's such a beautiful word.

Um what does it mean?

I think these are some great questions to ask.

I'll throw them like I've done every week.

The big questions that sort of revolve around creation fall and now redemption.

What does redemption mean?

Uh I don't know if you're old enough to remember.

There's about four of you in the room that probably remember S and H green stamps.

Raise your hand if that's you.

Whoa! Okay.

This church is getting a little older.

Okay, that's good.

That's wonderful.

So we used to get these, didn't we?

We used to get these in uh from it was like 1930 to 1960 that they were real popular.

And I they may still be around, I don't know.

But when you would buy things in stores, you would get these string of stamps, and you could, if you got enough of those stamps, you'd get their catalog, and then you'd redeem your stamps for something that you desired that they offered in their catalog.

And so redemption, is that what that means?

Well, certainly the word, the etymology of the word means to buy back, um, to to gain or regain something, and that's all important.

So when we think about what does redemption mean, uh there's a lot of different f ideas, and it certainly applies to a lot of uh different aspects of life.

Sometimes uh around the holiday season, people will see redemption in a movie or a TV show, uh like one of those, uh like with the Hallmark movies.

Is anybody willing to admit and that they watch the Hallmark movies?

Raise your hand.

Okay, that's good.

That's a few of you, yeah.

And it seems like with those, you know, and I'm not saying it's a template, but it just seems like it's always somebody in their 30s who's still pretty good looking and is is wearing is wearing their Christmas sweater, but they're kind of lonely and broken and lost, and they're they've gone back to their snowy hometowns, and and somehow or another they're standing around the fireplace in the lodge that they meet somebody else, and then they discovered that the lodge owner is about to be foreclosed upon by the evil bank.

And and somehow or another the story of redemption cuts through all of this, and and the two find each other, and off somehow or another the hotel is saved too.

I don't I don't know how that happens, but but it's just it's just interesting to watch what redemption runs throughout.

Some people think of it as as sort of a uh a correction in their their path of their life.

Um people think redemption is uh making amends for something that they have done.

So there are a lot of different ways that we think about redemption, and my job as a pastor really is to just uh refocus our attention on what was accomplished around Christmas time.

This beachhead of God's war against darkness.

You know, this this where he came himself, the light of the world came into the world, this world that was covered in darkness.

And he didn't just come to turn on the light.

My older brother and I used to turn on the light and try to bother each other when we were kids late at night.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

And then one of us would flick it, you know, real fast.

We just had this sort of using light in a way to brutalize our brother, you know, our sibling or something.

No, the Lord came back to push back the darkness and to push it back once and for all.

And it's a very specific kind of darkness that has separated us from God, and separate us from each other, and even separate us from our true selves, the the true selves that God designed us to be, that God desires for us to be, uh, because we belong to Him and not to ourselves, as the world around us might try to get you to believe.

Uh we don't belong to our careers, we don't belong to uh any passion or pleasure that we might uh pursue in life.

We belong to God, and that changes everything when you really think about it.

Where can we find true redemption is a great question.

Um it seems like some of it's fleeting because I don't know, have you guys noticed January keeps coming around?

Yeah, we go through all this lights, trees, carols, presents, you know, and just think, this is the best Christmas of the year! Yeah! Boom, January 5.

You know, I mean, January 1 is still kind of an echo of goodness and wonderful, you know, football, all this stuff.

But January 5 comes around, and then you're back at work, and it's the same old thing, you know?

And you are wondering, was that just a temporary anesthetic that sort of made it tolerable for me to live on this dark planet?

And now here I am, back with these people again, and they're they're having to put up with each other, and of course I'm having to put up with all of them, and they still drive bad, and they still smell bad, and they still talk too close, and they still there's so many ways in which we get annoyed, and and yet the world, you know, somehow or another, has not been completely redeemed in January, on January 5.

It keeps coming back around.

Can sinful human beings ever be reconciled to a holy and righteous God?

Now we're in the realm of religion and the kinds of things that religion deals with.

And and I would say the burden of every religion, I agree with John Stott on this, the burden of every religion is to answer at least two questions, and this last question up here is the second one.

The first one is, who is God?

Some religions say you are God.

Some religions say there is no personal God, it's just a battery the universe runs on, kind of random chance co-location of atoms and chemicals somehow or another.

And some religions suggest there's a personal God who's the troll under the bridge waiting to smash you when you have a good time.

Uh some religions suggest uh that that there that God is in some way to be uh satisfied appeased by you balancing out the moral scales.

The Christian faith, on the other hand, uh, as we've seen with our study of the creation of fall and its integration into the Christmas story, is that there's a God who created humanity in his image.

And with the story of the fall, what we have is that we've we've turned away from God.

We've gone our own way.

We've decided that we'd like to be God ourselves.

And so what we need is to be some in some way redeemed or bought back to him in some way.

And that's what our focus will be today is redemption.

How can sinful human beings be reconciled to a holy and righteous God?

Redemption.

It's a transactional term, it refers to buying back, gaining, re-regaining, or securing the freedom of something or someone.

And I'm just going to make a few comments about some aspects of it today, and I'm so grateful for the scriptures that have been read.

We'll make sure that those get posted online as well with the message slides.

But with redemption, I think what we see in almost every form of it is that there is some kind of a plight, some kind of a uh price, and someone who is a benefactor who pays that price.

And so with the biblical narrative and the idea of Christ having come, is that there was an inescapable plight, a predicament that we were in, that we couldn't help, we couldn't get out of ourselves.

We literally were just trapped in this thing on our own.

I uh I had an opportunity to talk to the guy that uh used to own this building that uh that sold us the building five years ago, and uh his name's Charles Jones.

I love this guy.

He's he's about 87.

I said, Hey Charles, I'm gonna talk on redemption on Sunday.

You got any good stories for me?

He said, Yeah.

It's almost like he didn't skip a bit.

I mean, he just hears that opportunity and goes for it, you know.

He goes, Yeah, the story of Hazel Matthews.

I said, tell me about Hazel Matthews.

He says, Well, nobody knows who she is except me and uh this other fella that was from his church at the time.

They used to do visitation in hospitals.

They'd put on their, they put on their uh coat and their Christmas sweaters, and they'd carry their big old Bibles, and they'd they'd just go from room to room in the hospital and go in and read uh Chris uh some kind of Christmas passage or some kind of Bible passage to the people that were in the hospital and then pray with them, that sort of thing.

And uh and they were doing that one day, and he and his buddy, and they and they uh they got to Hazel Matthews' room.

Hazel Matthews was an older person, uh a bit cantankerous and uh and and uh evidently pretty sick and and looking at the possibility of the end of her life.

And they walk in the front door and start to go hi, and she goes, I don't want anybody reading the Bible to me.

Get out of here, you can't come in here.

I don't want anybody praying for me.

And without skipping a beat, Charles Jones says, Oh, that's music to our ears.

I'm so tired of reading the Bible and praying for people today.

And with that, she allowed them to come into the room.

And they got to know her and they listened to her story.

And her story was one of where her uh father on his deathbed, after he'd been just a mean old cuss all his life to her and to everybody else, but on his deathbed, he he he had a conversion experience, and she was kind of mad about it.

You know, kind of like the older son in the story of the prodigal son, you know?

Kind of like the one thief on the cross that did not repent, did not receive grace, just was angry.

And sometimes we religious folk can be like that.

Sometimes even non-religious folk can be like that as well.

God, in his attempt to love us, and we, like the two-year-old arching our back and saying, Let me do it myself.

You know, and that's the way we are sometimes.

Redemption is about at least the beginning of recognizing there's a darkness, a great darkness in the land.

The great news of that story, by the way, Charles called me back to tell me, he said, uh, what was really cool is that um they befriended her in a way that opened the door for them to talk with her, and she prayed to receive Christ.

So that was pretty cool.

She had two more years in her life, and uh and she came to be a part of their church and their church community, and it was really beautiful the way everybody in the community uh gathered around her and loved Hazel Matthews.

And there's a story of redemption right there, you know?

Beautiful.

Um, didn't want to receive because she had seen somebody else at the last minute, uh sort of redeemed by God, and so she herself didn't want that, you know.

And and yet when somebody expressed love to her, somebody was willing to hear her story, when somebody was willing to show her that the love of God is even for the people who are fighting and resisting it, uh what a beautiful story of redemption that is.

An inescapable plight, we can't get it out, get out of it ourselves.

And that's the way the world is, that's the way sin is for us.

If you're ever here at the village chapel on a regular basis, that's what you hear about.

That none of us are perfect, that every single one of us needs redemption, that's right.

And we can't do this ourselves.

We cannot save ourselves, and we need the intervention of a loving and a gracious God to uh even begin to get there to recognize our need.

It's global and and it's huge that humanity needs redemption.

We can see it everywhere.

From the threat of terrorism to the scourge of human trafficking, the plague of racism, the uncertainties of political unrest, the growing menace of religious persecution around the world.

We see on a global level that something's gone wrong with humanity and something needs to be fixed.

We need to be redeemed in some way, but we see it on a personal level as well in the mirror every day when we look at ourselves, because there lies there inside of our hearts, lurking there, a darkness that sometimes takes over.

And we become angry, greedy, lustful, selfish, um, or just unbelieving, untrusting of this God who's broken through the darkness and come on a rescue mission for us.

And so we find ourselves arching our back and saying, I don't know, I want to do it myself.

I don't like the way you've been running things, God.

I don't like the circumstances as they are, and I resist.

And yet we see in stories like Hazel and stories that we read about in the Bible, the story of Ruth, so many of the stories we read, we see how God takes those things that we can't understand what's going on.

And even in our own world, in our own time today, we don't know what's going on.

We don't see everything he sees, we don't know everything he knows.

We don't know that at the end of her life she's gonna become a believer, and her story is gonna resonate into the hearts and minds of other people later, and it's gonna bring the idea, the hope of redemption to us as well in our inescapable plight.

There's also an immeasurable price that we see.

And here's the God of all coming, uh, not uh and the coming of God is not always glad tidings.

The first of all, frightening news for everyone who's come had a who has a conscience, that's right.

So if you if you're aware of the fact that you're in a plight, you need this, what God has to offer.

But only when we have felt the terror of the matter can we recognize the incomparable kindness of the matter.

And so God comes ready to pay an immeasurable price.

How kind of God we say around here often He didn't owe it to us.

It's not like we had a claim on God, hey, fix this.

You owe it to us.

No, he's our creator.

See, we're creatures.

He's our creator, he's the one that's in charge, not us.

And if he sees something and knows something that we don't see and that we don't know, and we can't figure out what's going on at this particular moment, what he calls us to do is to trust him.

And I wrestling, I differ up my back and I try to wriggle out of his arms, and I don't want him to be in charge.

I don't want him to be God.

I want to be the one who's determining when I do what I do and what happens in my life.

And yet he comes and proves his love for me, to for me and for you by paying this immeasurable price.

And by the way, the wonder of Christmas is yes, that God came himself.

He didn't send an angel, he didn't send another prophet, although he'd sent many prophets with his message.

Uh uh, you know, many of the Old Testament prophets were pointing out sin and calling the people to repentance.

The Isaiah passage.

I'm reminded of the prophet Isaiah, how he came with the warnings and the calls to repentance, and the warnings about what would happen.

And then the the Babylonian exile comes not much longer.

And for 70 years, the children of Israel are once again in an inescapable predicament, an inescapable plight, and God has to intervene to bring them out, to redeem them.

And he does, and that's the beautiful thing about this God.

He's willing to pay the price, he's willing to go to the trouble and do that.

Not only did Christ come to earth as a sweet little baby in a manger, but Christ came to take on our human condition.

Then Jesus grew up to be a man, and Jesus knew what it was like to be poor, to be hungry, to be misunderstood, to be rejected by others.

Christ knew what it was like to be despised.

Christ knew what it was like to be hated and abused by the socially powerful.

And when Jesus Christ went to the cross and died the public death of an innocent but accused criminal, before God, Christ took all of our human sin upon himself and he paid the price, immeasurable price.

He paid that price in full once and for all.

So in the person and work of Jesus Christ, in the incarnation of God, God literally got down in the gutter with us and for us to save and redeem us.

And that's a really stunning thing.

The Apostle Paul wrote about it himself in Philippians chapter 2 to the church of Philippi.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

He said, Who, talking about Christ existing in the form of God before he came, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped or held on to, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, and he became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

And we heard this read earlier as well, written by the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth, riddled by its own sins of pleasure and intellectual confusion, moral bankruptcy, all of that.

And Paul writes to them that Christ who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might have the righteousness of God in him.

I don't know if you noticed that those two words in him in a couple of the past a couple of the verses that Susan read earlier, but it's such an important aspect of the Christian faith.

Our redemption is not in us pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.

Our redemption is not in us just making a course correction.

Our redemption is in him.

What we need is him.

Not just what's in his hand, but him.

Not just what he can point us to.

We need him.

See?

And that's the difference between the Christian faith and the good news gospel.

This immeasurable price, Christ gave up heaven, became one of us, took our sin on himself, was forsaken by God on the cross, bore the cross, and died and paid the immeasurable price once and for all, in full for you and for me, so that I can and so that you can rest.

This is a redemption that isn't temporary, that isn't gonna show, that isn't gonna show itself to have faded away on January 5.

This is a redemption that is permanent because it has been accomplished.

See, in the atonement that Christ Himself accomplished on the cross.

And redemption is a beautiful word that sort of covers a lot of different ground in terms of forgiveness and atonement, all those kinds of things wrapped up in it.

Let's not forget again, God didn't owe it to us.

We didn't have a claim on him, and he came anyway.

Isn't that the kind of Savior you want?

Isn't that the kind of God you could worship?

The one who loves you enough, even in your messiness and brokenness and selfishness, and even in the stuff that's happened to you as a result of other people's brokenness, all of that.

He still loves you, see?

And he still would come for you.

Lastly and finally, most redemption stories talk about a plight and a price, and then they, in the in the biblical sense of it, we have uh not only the inescapable plight, we can't get out of our sin, we can't, we can't get away from ourselves.

And that's what the problem is, see?

Nobody lies to me more than me.

I lie in both directions to myself.

Have you ever noticed this about yourself?

I go, you're not that bad.

Well, that's not true.

And then I lie in the other direction to myself.

You are horrible.

Dude, you shouldn't have thought that.

I can't believe you let that thought race across your mind.

And I'm lying to myself all the time, and I need the Lord Himself to say, Jesus paid it all.

The price has been paid.

You can flee, you can run to, you can throw yourself at the foot of the cross because you have an incomparable redeemer.

There's nobody like him.

He didn't just unroll a scroll with rules to follow.

He came himself, he lived the life I couldn't live, and he died the death that I couldn't die.

He paid the price in full for my sins and for yours.

And that's why we give thanks for this incomparable redeemer.

If I were to summarize all of this on one slide, here's what I'd say.

In this Christmas story, in the incarnation where God becomes one of us, the story of redemption that's accomplished through him becoming one of us.

And it's sort of the beginning, like I say, of his battle to push back the darkness.

It's it's and it is it's a progression.

See, we've been redeemed, we're being renewed, and we're going to be restored, but I'm getting ahead of myself because restoration is next week.

But we're

Currently being redeemed.

You're sitting next to somebody.

If they've trusted Christ, who's being redeemed.

You yourself, if you've trusted Christ, you're being renewed in Christ because you've been redeemed.

Okay?

So let me get that right.

It's redeemed, renewed, restored.

Some of us need to be uh need to realize that this is a process.

We need to realize it sometimes for ourselves, we need to realize it sometimes for our spouse, or sometimes for our friends or our co-workers or family members, that this thing is a process.

But it is a recognition, an honest recognition of humanity's predicament.

It is a demonstration that Christ has come to redeem us.

It's a demonstration of God's love.

What drove him to come?

He didn't owe it to us.

But he looked at a world of lost sinners that belonged to him by right of creation.

And he said, I want my family back.

And he came for us, you see.

And what motivated him is his great love for us, sinners though we are.

It also demonstrates in his redemption the fact that he paid the price.

It demonstrates that God loves justice.

God doesn't love just sweeping it under the rug, as my friend Joyce says, sweep it under the rug long enough, all you got's a lumpy rug.

And then you just trip over it over and over again.

No, he paid the price in full.

Settled the account between us and God, see?

Once and for all.

So he loves justice.

A reflection of Christ's victory over sin and evil.

That's great too.

Why?

Well, if you stop and think about it, wouldn't you like the world to be set to rights?

Wouldn't you like all that is evil and dark in this world to go away?

I think even somebody who's a non-believer, somebody who doesn't even believe in God, might admit to that and agree with that.

Although the redemption that God has accomplished in Christ Jesus, to me, is a sign of the fact that Christ has actually been victorious over evil itself, including death, our last and greatest enemy, as he rose up from the dead.

And then it's a satisfaction of the holiness of God.

Again, even people that aren't believers might think to themselves, well, somehow or another in the great karma of the world, I've got to balance out the scales.

Why?

Why would you have to balance out the scales if you're not accountable to something or somebody?

And if you think you're going to be accountable to something or somebody, that's because you think there's an authority higher than you somehow.

Well, if that's the case, isn't it great that you can look at this story, the good news of Jesus having come and paid the price in full, once for all, for all your sin, to know that the wrath of God has been satisfied.

His wrath against sin and evil and darkness.

It's been satisfied.

His holiness has been honored and respected in the work of Christ.

And that there's an atonement from sin and freedom for sinners.

And it doesn't fade in January.

See?

It's permanent.

And then there is this great confirmation that you know what?

The God of the Bible is trustworthy.

And I would seek to persuade you, no matter who you are, no matter where you're at in your spiritual walk or your spiritual journey, that you can trust the God of the Bible.

Because He is that kind of God that would come on the run for you.

He is that kind of God that has been haunting you with your longing to belong to Him.

And if that's not Him calling you by name, I don't know what is.

That's Him saying, you're never going to be satisfied with anything else until you find your rest in me.

That's what God's saying to us.

And at Christmas time, especially with the birth of Christ, we start to really see this in a more tangible kind of way.

The more we understand why Christ came and how his appearing was for the sake of our redemption, I think this should inspire humility and gratitude on our part.

And guess what follows gratitude, you guys?

We sing about it all the time.

Joy.

See?

It's never the other way around.

It's not, let me have some joy and then I'll be grateful.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Joy follows gratitude.

Gratitude first.

Humility before that.

Before a God who has come in pursuit of a people he can call his own.

And he will do everything necessary for us to be reconciled to him.

And he's done that in the person and work of Christ.

We sing the old 18th century, the beautiful hymn all the time.

And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood?

In other words, could that be effective for me?

Died he for me who caused his pain?

In other words, that's really weird.

The cause of him having to be with the cross is me.

Why would he die for me?

I'm a sinner.

For me who him to death pursued?

Wow.

He's pursued me all the way to dying for me.

That's how much he loves me.

Amazing love.

How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Charles Wesley knew it, and that's why we continue to sing it.

In the 18th and the turn into the ninth, or the 19th and into the turn of the 20th century, there was an English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator of uh uh uh of some of the Victorian era literature, and she, her name is really Marianne Evans, wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot because she wanted to be published.

It was more difficult for women to be published in that time.

She said, Redeemed.

It means a slave set free, the exiled, restored to citizenship, the convict pardoned, the bankrupt released, the ransom paid.

God visits earth, but he does not come empty-handed.

He brings the price of souls in hands that are pierced along the way.

Wow.

Well said, well summarized.

That's the good news.

The gospel, the season of Advent begins in the darkness.

Creation began in the darkness and void and nothingness.

And God spoke and said, Let there be light.

When Jesus came, he came into the spiritual darkness of a world that had been mired in sin.

And he brought with him the possibility, not only of creation the first time, but recreation, new life in him.

The Apostle John even writes this way, I've written these things that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that you might believe in him, and as you believe in him, that you might have life in his name.

See?

That's the intent, the purpose of the Bible.

That's the intent, the purpose of this church.

We want to continue to remind ourselves of this good news, this gospel, that Christ has come, and he has come to bring us redemption that leads us to life in his name.

Scotty Smith is a good friend to many of us here in the church, and he's been here to preach before.

He's preached at our men's retreat before as well.

And uh Scotty's the guy that got me into seminary and came into seminary, and uh um she's over there at the East Campus today, doing this exact same message uh for them.

And and uh Scotty's just had a real indelible uh impact upon us.

But he said that this life between Jesus' two advents, one deepens our sadness over the brokenness in God's world and in ourselves, two, fuels our humility and joy in response to what God's done about it in Jesus, and three, intensifies our hope and commitment to missional living until the day of all things new.

And that's a great way as we think on that.

There's a great way for us to be leaning into next week, where we'll talk about that fourth category, that fourth theme that really covers and summarizes the entire message of the Bible: creation, fall, redemption, restoration.

All wrapped up in the person and work of Jesus Christ, in whose name you and I can find redemption and life.

Amen?

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for this season, uh, all that it leads us to come and to understand.

Thank you for Jesus.

Uh Holy Spirit, I pray that you'd move on our hearts and minds to see this the way you see it.

Um I pray that you'd soften our hearts that we might receive and believe, not arch our back and try to resist your loving us.

I pray, Lord, that that as we receive your love, that we might be able to walk in the freedom of the light of the gospel of grace.

And that we might be able to go out into this world as well and to be agents of your grace, mercy, and kindness.

To be able to have the gospel fall freely from our lips and to be visible in our lives, in our relationships with one another, in the way that we treat even those uh that we may not get along with very well, Lord, but that we might uh by your grace be agents of grace in their lives as well.

Um, Lord, we pray for the world in which we live.

We pray that actually your light would continue to push back the darkness that is here.

Use us in any way you see fit.

Thank you for this church and this community to be a part of, and thank you for your word.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen and amen.