Advent: Week 3

Well, I'm going to start out today with a quote,

and a quote simply goes like this, Fear is the

oldest and strongest emotion of mankind. Fear is the oldest

and strongest emotion of mankind, and and every one of

us we deal with fear on a certain level. We

don't like to talk about our fear so much, but

we all live in fear. If one word, because some

of our culture, a good word would be fear. We're

constantly in fear of another terrorism attack, an economic crash.

I know, I was tuned into the news, is listening

to the fed chair and trying to figure out what

our future looks like economically this week. You know, there's

always a threat of war with Venezuela or China or Russia.

And since the pandemic, anytime I see a news article

about an outbreak somewhere in the world, I'm really concerned

and I'm like, stay there. But because you know, the

fear that the pandemic put into me. Fear is a

part of our culture. And according to one article, you know,

America's we have our top fears for sort of the

normal ones, like public speaking, being in type places, But

the number one fear in the American culture today is

service interruption. We're scared to death of not being able

to use our phone or the internet. We are absolutely

terrified of not having access to everything in the world.

And so that's now the number one fear. Time magazine

did a cover story years ago and they listed the

top fears in American culture, and they had a few

fears that I never heard of. One of them was

a blueto phobia. A blueto phobia which is the fear

of taking a bath and maybe you're sitting next to

someone this morning who has that same fear. Another one

is electro phobia, which is the fear of chickens. And

so these are the people that break out in the

sweat anytime they drive by KFC or Chick fil A.

Now I don't have a fear of bathing. I don't

have a fear of chickens. But I do have one

major fear. And I know some people they don't agree

with this fear. This is not bothering them all. But

for me, this is by far my biggest fear. As

a matter of fact, whenever I see the thing that

brings me fear on Facebook, I quickly scroll through it,

or if I see it on TV, I will pause,

fast forward, or just turn the program off. And let

me tell you what that is. I have a huge

fear of snakes. Can't stand them, can't even stand to

look at them. I don't even like thinking about them. Well,

the problem is for me is that I love to

hunt and fish. And so guess what I run into

all the time? Snakes? I run into them all the time.

And at one time, when I was a young you've

passed her and I just got to Pittsburgh, got the

new church, and I went out fishing for trout in

the streams with a father and his junior high son,

And like I said, I didn't know them well. And

so we're out fishing and I get to this spot

where I'm right under this overpass and the water's up

to probably my mid thighs, and all of a sudden,

I feel a big thump on the side of my

leg and I look down. I guess what it is

is a snake. Well, at that moment, I yelled out

a word that I can't say from the pulpit, one

of those words that my grandma used to say, if

you're gonna talk like that, you got to go behind

the barn. And I always had this image of people

going behind the barn and say these non angelic phrases.

But anyways, so that's my first problem is that I

yell at this word. But my second problem, like I said, well,

this overpass made out cement is only about six feet

taller me, So guess what happens between the overpass and

the water, and echo happens. So that word that I

can't mention right now echoed over and over and over

and over again, and the junior high kid looks at

me like and the father just looks at me like, oh,

it was not one of my better moments. But our

fears they can bring out significant reactions in our lives.

Many of us, even though we're at home today and

maybe we're cuddled up on our couch or on our

favorite chair, we deal with fear. Maybe it's a you know,

you might lose your job, you're worried about economic collapse,

or maybe your marriage will collapse. Some of us have

that bully, not not just at school, but there's those

bullies that we work with, or bullies in our family.

There's that fear of losing our savings or that fear

of being alone. See year again, it's not a twenty

first century invention. It's been around since the beginning. Like

I said earlier, fear is the oldest and strongest emotion

of mankind. So here's what we're gonna do today. We're

gonna look at a story that began with fear but

ended in fearlessness. Let's look at this famous Christmas story

for some of us we have cherished since we were

little children. Let's read this together. And in the same region,

there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over

their flock by night. And an Angel of the Lord

appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone

around them, and they were filled with great fear. And

the Angel said to them, fear not. And I pay

attention to that. The Angel had to tell them fear not.

Why because they were filled with great fear. He says,

fear not. For behold, I bring you good news of

great joy that will be for all the people. For

untie you, he was born this day in the City

of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And

this will be a sign for you. You will find

a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, a lion in a manger,

and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of

heavenly hosts, praising God and saying glory to God in

the highest and on earth, peace among those with whom

He is pleased. Now that's quite a big birth announcement.

And today our culture, we love to watch all these

birth announcements on social media, and a lot of people

love to do these gender reveals, you know, and if

you're having a girl, there's a pink chemical that appears

in the air, or a blue chemical that comes out

of a balloon if it's a boy. And so we've

gotten caught up. A lot of people even do the

cakes where you cut past the frosting and you can

see whether the cake is pink or the cake is blue.

One story that I ran across recently, told as if

it was true, was a family did a classic cut

the cake for a gender reveal, and everyone lean in

as a mom cut through and made the first slice,

and instead of blue or pink, the cake was green. Well,

everybody's confused, like, why on earth is a green And

finally Grandma said, I guess we're having Shrek. Turned out

that the bakery mixed up their orders and what was

supposed to go to some place where Saint Patrick's day

accidentally went to them. But people are having a great

time with these birth announcements today, but nothing appeares to

this birth announcement. Think about it, angels, choirs, the glory

of God shining down on these shepherds in the field.

This was a spectacular sight, one worthy of the announcement

that the King, the savior of the world, is coming

to live among his people. But we have to understand something.

In the midst of this super natural moment. We see

what comes so naturally to us. What is that fear?

And it wasn't the cake and ice cream from the

celebration that was given the shepherd's a stomach ache that

even though it was our good old friend, fear, And

that reminds us today that fear, by the way, it's

a natural emotion. First of all, it's a natural emotion.

You want to have that emotion of fear when you're

walking out the woods and you hear the growl of

a bear gonna save your life. Fear, this emotion can

be very helpful. Sometimes sometimes it's not helpful. But the

very first thing that jumps out to us in this

text today is this is shepherds were in great fear.

This phrase great fear, it actually translates to phobia. And

what's interesting here is the text says that they experienced

phobia phobia. Okay, so great fear translated here is phobia

phobia and it's the same root us back to back.

And basically Luke is saying they've experienced fear times too. Now,

what's the point that Luke the author is trying to make.

He's say that these shepherds were scared out of their

mind and had every reason to be. These shepherds and

all of Israel were certainly living in fearful times. First

of all, they were living under the tyranny of Herod.

This guy was a psycho, absolute psycho, and he had

this fear that was so deep in him that it

made him paranoid that somebody might try to claim his room.

And so we do know that Herod had all the

babies at one point two years and younger killed in

his kingdom because he was scared one of them might

be the Messiah. We also know that he murdered his wife,

he murdered his mother in law, he murdered his uncle,

and then guess what, three of his sons were murdered.

Caesar Augustus one time joked and said this, He said,

it's safer to be Herod's pig than to be his son.

So Herod rules with this terror. So naturally God gives

these shepherds this announcement that a new king has come,

and they're like, oh, Herod finds out might be our

head on a platter next. And plus the Jews just

lived in fear during that time. They were under Roman

occupation as well, and so you were always getting shoulder

bumped in public or harassed by the soldiers. And then

all of a sudden, there comes this message. And this

message came, this announcement came with deep fear. Why because basically,

by God saying that the Messiah is coming, he's basically

saying a battle is coming. Now. The shepherds at this

time they didn't fully understand that it was going to

be a battle over the souls. But all throughout the

Old Testament they had understood that when a Messiah came,

it meant that there was going to be a war

to rescue the Jewish people out of this oppression. And

so the shepherds would have naturally had this fear, like,

what am I supposed to do with this news? They

heard the great stories of the Old Testament too, whenever

an angel appeared to someone, it meant that whoever the

angel appeared to they're going to have some great trials

ahead of them. So it's logical for them to have

all this fear because they're scared of hair, they're scared

of the Romans, and they also know that this announcement

needs angels mean all right, something big is coming and

things are not going to be the same, And let's

just talk about the reality of their surprise. The shepherds

did not expect that they, being shepherds, would be the

ones who would receive this huge, world changing, history changing

announcement that a savior come. Why. Well, the shepherd were

the last people on the minds of people in that

society during a day. You have to understand, we have

this image of these shepherds from all these Christmas cards.

That's not the image that people had of shepherds back then.

Shepherds were on the lowest rung in society. They slept

with the sheep, they lived out in the fields because

of that they didn't go to temple. Because they didn't

go to temple, they were never you know, clean before God.

They did not repent of their sins, and so they

got a reputation of people who well had bad moral character.

They were considered liars and thieves and cheeks. They had

such a bad reputation that the corps would not even

allow them to testify because of their character. Think about this,

Jesus when he came and says, I the good shepherd,

he had to make sure that the people understood, yeah,

I'm your shepherd, but I'm a good shepherd. Even Jesus

had to make the point that he's a good shepherd.

And by the way, this negative view of the shepherds,

you know, it still goes on even into American history.

If you think back to the late eighteen hundreds, we

had what you call the Great Sheep Wars out west

and there was over one hundred and twenty armed conflicts

between the cattlemen out west and the shepherds out west.

The cattleman hated the shepherds. One person even said it's

better to be a cattleman's dog than to be a shepherd,

and they would slaughter the sheep. They would burn their

camps down, and they would tack the shepherds. Even in

our own current history of America, there's a lot of

conflict with shepherds. So for God to choose the birth

of Jesus to come not to kings, not the priests,

not to wealthy or influential, but to shepherds, it was shocking.

Here's what I want you on. Our God intentionally went

to the people that everyone else overlooks, the ones who

did not feel worthy, the ones who've been pushed aside

by society. They were the first people to witness the

arrival of the Savior. And let me tell you something

that tells us something really big about God's heart. Here's

what I want you to understand today, that our God

comes for the humble, the broken, the unclean, the overlook

the outcast. And he says this I want you first see,

God loves to reach every who everyone else overlooks. He

loves to reach those people that everyone else overlooks. And

guess what he does. He uses those people to go

out and reach other people that no one else would

be able to reach. I had an opportunity a few

years back to have a couple of meals with a

guy named Michael Franzis, And Michael Franzis was a pretty

notorious mob member back in the day. Matter of fact,

he grew up in a mob family. By the age

of thirty, he was a captain in the mob and

for over fifteen years he held that position as a

capo regime or a captain in the mob. He actually

ran one of the most lucrative scams in American history.

It was the gas tax scam, and there was a

point that he was making eight million dollars a week.

Matter of fact, Fortune magazine one time put out an

article saying that he was one of the top fifty

mobsters in the world. Now, Mike Frenzies likes to point

that out and say, you have to understand how precarious

their life was, because he says, out of that list

of fifty, forty seven are now dead, two are serving

a life sentence, and then there's him. Well, the life

of crime finally caught up with him and he went

off to jail for five years, and the problem got

even worse because La Times or excuse me in Life

magazine ran a big story and it made it look

like Michael Franzis was an informant. So now once he

gets out of prison, he's scared to death that they're

gonna come and kill him at any moment. Maybe his

old life will catch up to him. Well, he violates

his parole game goes back into prison for four years,

but for three of those years he lived in isolation.

Let me read to you his words. He says, I

was desperate. I turned to the Lord and looked for

what for that relationship, and I was challenging God at

that point. I wanted to know if he was real.

And so in reading the Bible, I started to read

it as if I was preparing for my trial. And

he goes on to say, I came out of there

believing with all my heart that the Bible is God's

word and that Jesus was my risen savior. He came

out of that prison believing that Jesus was the Savior,

the Son of God. Nowt here's the thing. He comes

out of prison, and at every moment as he goes

out there, he starts preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

He has to look over his shoulder because he never

knows when they were gonna come after him, and he

has lived like that for the last twenty years. And

let me tell you, he has went all over the

world preaching the gospel over and every time he preaches

a lot of people come to Christ. But every time

he travels, every time he gets into a car, he

has to face that fear. But it's because of his

love for Jesus and that he's convinced that Jesus is

a savior. He goes forward in that fear. Let me

tell you something. He's quite intimidating. He's still intimidating. And

when we were recording his service at our old church

and he spoke for close to an hour on Saturday

night instead of a half hour because we videotaped it

and we needed to send it out to all the

other campuses. Well after the service, we realized he's went

over and someone needs to go ask him to re

record the message that night so that we can have

a half hour video to send out to the campuses. Well,

guess what, all these men, these pastors start arguing, because

he's so intimidated. You tell him, you tell him, you

tell him, you tell him. None of us wanted to

tell him. And finally we saw the situation. I think

we sent an intern to go tell him or something

like that. In many ways, the shepherds were faced with

the same dilemma and fear Michael Frenzies faces every day

as he towards the country sharing Christ. The shepherds had

to decide are they going to step out of their

comfort zones and tell people about the Messiah King or

are they going to allow fear to rule their life

as it has been their whole life, as I've been

an oppressed people. So what do they do. Let's look

at this next passage, because we're gonna see that they

shift from being fearful to fearless. Let's look at this,

he says. When the angels went away from them into heaven,

the shepherd said to one another, let us go over

to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which

the Lord has made known to us. And they went

with haste. In other words, they took off and found

Mary and Joseph in the baby lying in a manger.

And when they saw it and I checked this out,

they made known the saying that had been told to

them concerning this child. And then check out this word

here all who heard it they did not keep their

mouths shut. They did not live in fear. After they

experienced the power and the presence of God in their life.

What happened. They went around and they could not keep

the good news to themselves. And it says all who

heard it wondered of what the shepherds told them. And

here we see this change moment. They went from being

fearful to fearless. You know, the series That Chosen captures

this in this wonderful scene. And so let's look at

this scene where the shepherds encounter Joseph and Mary and

baby Jesus.

M h hey, hey, fay ay mum mm hmmmm.

Mm hmm. Let's say okay, so before he must tell someone,

everybody must tell everyone, what do you want? Thank you,

thank you, thank you, thank you. I didn't for this

was all so kah, he's on. It's okay. H mm

hmmm h h what will your name him? Jesus? We

were to name him Jesus. We must go. People must know.

People must know people listening, wow, people must know. People

must know. They went from phobia phobia, which means they

were fearful out of their minds, to all of a

sudden because they experienced the presence of God and the

power of God in their life. They went out and

they were fearless. And you saw at the beginning of

that seeing Joseph was kind of alarmed by the shepherds.

But by the end we see this beautiful moment where

he says, they must know. And so what causes change

in disposition? The power in the presence of God in

your life. And let me tell you something. Those guys

went from being fearful to fearless. And then they traveled

to Bethlehem. They confirmed that Jesus is the Son of God,

the Savior sent from the Lord. And then what did

they do. They put Herod on notice, they put Caesar

on notice, and they speak fearlessly about this coming Messiah.

And trust me, if they don't have been caught, if

they would have been caught sharing this news, their life

would have been over. But they risked it all because

they experienced the power in the presence of the Lord.

This story reminds us that God empowers us to face

our fears. He empowers us to face our fears. And

here's what I want to do the last few moments today.

I want to talk about maybe some of these fears

that we naturally have, that God might be calling us

to ship from being fearful to fearless. Let's look at

some of those. Maybe God's calling you right now into

a new direction in your life, and you've been following Jesus,

But sometimes God calls us to take a new path,

and that might be a new career path, a new employer,

the branch out on your own. Maybe it's the result

of the lass. You didn't plan it, but now you've

got a new direction in your life. And one thing

that we don't like about new directions is because it

feels like we don't have the sys of control, because

we like to plan things out and be in control.

But when God calls us a step out in a

new direction, it could be challenging and it can come

with some stomach aches. Let me tell you when I

decided to leave my old church, and I was introduced

to the Church of the Crossing through a packet that

told me all about the church, and I was able

to ask a whole bunch of questions to the headhunter

that the church had hired to find a pastor. And

let me tell you something that was very fascinating. I

found out about this opportunity six months before I became

the pastor here, and something crazy happened after I read

through it and looked at all the things about this church.

I had never even met one person from church to

the crossing, but all of a sudden, I felt a calling,

and I felt for certain that God had called me

to become the pastor here. But here's the problem. I

had the calling, and still no one had called me yet.

And over six months I had this calling, and I

would get this interview or that interview, and I would

go from great fear to anxiety. And I just lived

in this state where I kept exchanging fear for anxiety.

And let me tell you something. I want to throw

this out again, that the in between can be a

fearful place, but it's also a place that forces you

to draw near to God and trust Him unlike you

ever have before in your life. And I remember going

to one of my first in person interviews here when

we were at a restaurant, and I even thought to myself, well,

my wife's answering the questions better than me. They might

want to switch candidates. New directions can fill ups with fear,

But I want to encourage you today. If God is

calling you into a new direction, he's also going to

empower you and you're going to experience his presence trust

in him. Maybe today, a second fear that God might

be calling you to encounter is a new conversation. Maybe

it's a spiritual conversation with a new person you met here.

Maybe you've known this person for a while, but now

it's time to have a deeper spiritual conversation. Maybe God

has called you to share your story. Maybe it's time

to invite them to church. Maybe the conversation is one

about reconciliation, where you've had this relationship that's been flailing

out there and you know that there's something wrong in

between you two, but you need to reconcile. You need

to receive forgiveness or ask for forgiveness. And see, often

we don't get into these conversations with others because we

have this great fear of failure. And here's the thing

that it's true almost for everyone that we are consumed

with the fear of failure. And I want to tell

you something right now, it's okay to fail. We all

have this fear of failure, but it's okay to fail.

Let me tell you about I came across this story

this last week. See in the early nineteen hundreds, two

bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. They dare to dream a dream,

and it calls people to laugh at them, the dream

of human flight. Now Orville and wilber Right, who almost

I'm sure everybody's heard of. They were not scientists, They

were not trained at elite institutions. They were not wealthy,

they were not connected to powerful people. They were just

ordinary men with a calling in their heart. And what

most people don't know is how many times they actually

fell before they actually made their first flight in nineteen

oh three. Historians estimate that the Right brothers crashed their

planes seven hundred times. That seven hundred crash us, seven

hundred broken wings, and seven hundred reminders that well gravity exist.

Newspapers made fun of them. Engineers dismissed them. They were

called foolish dreamers. And after every single failure they had

to push back that fear. Why because they had a calling.

And let me tell you something. Wilbur wrote this once

in his journal. He said, if we wait for all

fear to be removed, we would never leave the ground.

You're never going to experience what God is calling you

to experience if you don't push past the fear. And

let me tell you something. On that cold December morning

in Kitty Hawk, they did not wait for fear to disappear.

They simply stepped into the fear in spite of it.

And let me tell you something. Courage isn't the absence

of fear. Courage is moving in the direction of God's

calling while fear still whispers in your ear. If the

right brothers would have waited for there to be no fear,

guess what we would still be riding bicycles today. If

if shepherds had waited until they felt fearless, they would

have stayed in the fields. But the greatest moments in

your life are not gonna be moments where you have

no fear. There are gonna be those moments where your

knees are shaking. But despite the fear, you trust in

the Lord, and you follow the Lord with that courage,

and you experience the power in the presence of God.

So don't wait for fear to subside it won't. Courage

means you push past that fear. Lastly, today, maybe the

last thing that God is asking you to push past. Well,

maybe it's time for you to confront that fear of

moving to a new level of spiritual health, a new

level of spiritual health. Christmas time it's always a time

of the year where we kind of look at our

life and maybe some of you have habits, hang ups

and addictive behaviors, and if you do, I want to

encourage you to go and join our Celebrate Recovery ministry.

Lives are being changed. But maybe in your life you've

been having these addictions and you're afraid of giving it

up because you don't know what you will do without

those comforts, those things that you've come to depending on

to distract you from the pain of your life. And

whether it's an addiction that comes from a bottle or

from a screen, addictions become this place of comfort. Well,

they comfort us until they control us, and then when

we think about giving them up, we wonder can I

do it? How do I even begin in And then

we start to rationalize maybe it's not that bad. My friend,

is God calling you to lay something down so that

you can go to a new level of spiritual health.

As I close today, I know that new means something

that's changing. And that can bring fear into our lives.

But I came across the story and I just want

to share this as an encouragement to you. Growing up,

I always heard that unique phrase, you know, she's a

wise old bird or he's a wise old bird, and

that phrase always confound at me until I came across

a possible explanation for that phrase. See in the gardens.

In the fields back in the day, people used to

put up a scarecrow, and it would bring fear to birds,

and so they would not partake in the fruit of

the land. Yet a wise bird sees the scarecrow as

an invitation, an advertisement. A wise bird knows that the

scarecrow means that there's some goodies behind her, there's some

food fo there's a harvest on the other side. A

wise bird knows that there's a reward on the other

side of the scarecrow, and so they push past their

fear to the other side where the reward is. Many times,

the reward in our life is on the other side

of fear. And I don't know what God is calling

you to do in your life right now. A new direction,

a new conversation, a new level of spiritual health. I

don't know. It could be anything, but what is that

thing that well keeps you up at night or brings

fear to you when you think about confronting it? And

let me tell you something, that fear is not going

to subside. Ask God to enter into that fear with you.

Ask Him to empower you to step forward into this

new day and you will experience the reward that God

has for you. Let me pray for you. God. I

love you, and I love the people the church and

the crossing. Love on them today. Encourage them today. So

what we're gonna do here is we're gonna have a

blank screen and we're just gonna have some music for

about a minute and a half. It's going to allow

you some time to pray. And if it's awkward in

that living room with other people, I just encourage you

to just pray where you're at and ask God to

enter into that fear with you to help you overcome

so that you will receive that reward on the other

side and you'll get to experience the power of His

presence in your life. Have a great week Church, see

you next week. Know that you are loved. B