Last Christmas

Of the incarnation, I pray that you would break that barrier in their mind and in their spirit and reveal to them who you truly are. God, we pray these things in Jesus's name. And God's people said, "Amen." You may be seated. On your way to your seat, won't you say, "Merry Christmas" to your neighbor? I don't think I need to give the clarifier of excitedly, but you should do it excitedly.

Christmas is a time where many of us, we find ourselves struggling, dysfunctional, as me. I feel like every Christmas I get sick. Anyone get sick around Christmas time? I do. I didn't get sick around Christmas time until I moved out here.

I think it was a Buckeye thing. It's crazy. It's crazy. We feeling good this Christmas? I feel like when I start like that, it's like I'm starting a standup bit, and it's just not the case.

It's not a standup bit. We haven't really been in the series. I think around the second or third week of every month, or every December, I just, I know it's time for Christmas. And if I didn't preach on Christmas, some traditionalist would walk up to me and say, "Hey, you didn't preach on Christmas today?" And I'd say, "Well, I preached the Bible today." And they'd be like, "Yeah, but not good enough." That's usually how that works. So I just preach on Christmas every single year.

It's a good opportunity for me to go through passages that I've read through a million times and ask God, invite God into my life, to communicate something fresh. And by God's grace, he continues to do so. The way we've been titling sermons this week has been song titles. But before I introduce all of that, I want to kind of introduce the concept in general. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but I kind of feel like the way that we treat God, it's a little flaky.

If you're with me, just say, "Yeah."

It's a little flaky. I don't want you to feel like a flake, but let's be real, most of us kind of are. The beauty of the Gospel is that he died for us in the midst of our hostility to him. So while we were flakes, he was faithful. That's the beauty of the Gospel.

That's why we preach every single week. That's why I get to stand up here in front of you guys and talk about the goodness of God. But it never fails. There's certain times of the year where—everybody look at your neighbor and say, "Everybody gets all excited about Jesus." And there, too—can you guess what they are? Easter.

Easter and Christmas. Back in the day, in like this church culture—I never said it, it was them—they would call them CEOs. Christmas Easter Only. Yeah, they were the chiefs, the chiefs of Easter Only. I don't know, I was trying to think of something funny, it didn't work.

Last week I had some stuff, but not this week. We call Christmas Easter Only people, and it's something that doesn't quite make sense. Now, I get why it happens. Like, when I say it doesn't make sense, I'm not saying there's no rationale to it. I'm not saying that I can't see the reasoning that it happens.

I can see the logistics from point A to point B that gets people into these certain places. So when I say it doesn't make sense, I'm not saying that I don't see how it happens. When I say it doesn't make sense, what I'm saying is it is not a logical deduction that we make every single year. And I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad. If this is the first time you've been to church since Easter, I'm super grateful that you're here.

But I found that beyond even Christmas and Easter, there are people who come to church frequently. What happens is they come and they maybe hear the word of God, and by Monday it's non-existent in their lives. It is crazy to me what people can receive from the Lord, feel convicted about, and then the next day—

The next day, God, it's just—it's a little, little flaky. It's like God offered you a gift, something very powerful and beautiful, handed it straight to you, and then you tossed it the very next day. And I feel like sometimes, if God's in heaven seeing all this—like, think about it, like, I'm not God.

But what he did was he planned long ago. Everybody say, "Long ago." So long ago. Like, creation happened. Adam and Eve sinned. And then right outside of the garden, he clothed them with animal skins, which is like a prefiguration of the Gospel that we would see in Jesus.

So from the beginning, he put in place a plan where he would develop us into people of God the way that we're supposed to be. From Adam and Eve, you have this lineage to where we get to Abram, who God called Abraham, cuz he was a person of calling. Then from Abraham, God saw him as righteous. He made a covenant with him where he would love them, and that we, or Abraham's people, would love God. This covenant was a two-sided promise that we're going to be faithful to one another.

And even in the midst of their lack of faithfulness—all the way down to the fact that they go to Egypt, and several years later, they're continuing to, you like, follow God, but they're not as faithful as they could be—they end up in slavery, and then God redeems them from that because he loves them so much. This is part of his salvation process. He delivered them over the Red Sea into the promised land. And then you got this guy that we say is a man after God's own heart, David. We got the Davidic covenant where God makes a promise with him.

And I don't need to tell you this if you've read your Bible, but David's super cool, but also kind of flaky. And then his son's even worse. He's super wise, asked God for wisdom and discernment, but then married a thousand women. It's the crazy thing. And there's nothing wrong with women, but a thousand of them, it's just crazy.

And all of them served other gods. So he wasn't faithful. But then after Solomon, it only goes downhill from there, to the point where the northern kingdom is taken over by the Assyrians, no longer existing. Then eventually the southern kingdom, or Judah, is conquered by the Babylonians. Then they go away for 70 years, and they're brought back.

And then they reinstate this law, and they're excited about all the truths of God. But even then, eventually they become what Jesus calls whitewashed tombs, where they heard the word, they saw the stuff, they performed some of the ritualistic acts, but they had no connection with their creator. They were not faithful to him. God put in place a plan to ultimately send his son Jesus. He came in the form of a baby, which was a long-awaited-for prophecy at the time.

We have historical data to prove it. This baby grew up, lived a perfect life, died a death he didn't deserve. Then he was resurrected. Paul says 500 people saw this stuff. Then the church is born.

The entire Roman Empire has changed. And then for the last 2,000 years, the church has been the main beacon of potential hope. Yet the church struggles a little bit with faithfulness to God. It does not make logical sense to me that God would give us such a gift, so vibrant a gift, and we would throw it away. If I'm God—and I'm not God—but if I were sitting up in heaven, I would be singing myself some breakup songs once in a while.

And so I want to give you—you want to hear my sermon title here? Here it is. Do you have it? I walked through this whole thing with you guys. That's all it was.

But you didn't hear the first part. Y'all sing it with me. "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. The very next day."

That's what we do. It's like—it's like God gave us his whole heart as son, and the very next day we're like, "I'm good." And I'm not saying that Jesus is like sitting up in heaven, like, "Last Christmas I gave you my heart, I'm going to give it to someone special next time." That's not what he's sitting up there doing.

But I just kept thinking about that, cuz that's our posture toward God. How is it that we receive such a great love, such a great forgiveness, yet we turn around and live our lives the exact way that we wanted to in the first place and fail to think about God? I don't want you to feel guilty, cuz guilt doesn't take you closer to God. But here's the truth: God has given you something powerful, helpful, life-giving. And when we receive it, the Bible says, "How can one have tasted and seen how good the Lord is, yet the very next day walk away?" How can you do that?

And I don't want you to do that. I want this to be the last Christmas where any hint of flakiness lands in your life. Not pursuing perfection, but I want you to pursue faithfulness. Without further ado, I'm going to get in there into the text. We're going to be in Matthew chapter 1:18-25.

Speaking of "last Christmas I gave you my heart, " I'm going to tell you the story of Mary and Joseph. You know what happened there. It actually worked out really well, but initially it was rough. So starting in verse 18, it should be on the screen. Verse 18: "This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about.

His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph." Other words might say "betrothed." Betrothed—in the ancient world, this meant that they were already married. It was contracted already. They just hadn't consummated the marriage. These days we have an engagement period, which half the people be consummating it before that anyways. But like, back in the day, it was—you get engaged to a contract, you continue to get to know one another, you get the dowry in place.

If they got a bunch of sheep, you're going to get the sheep. You know what I'm talking about? It's a real good situation. It's a new phrase—like, if you get a girl with a great, dowry, like, you got yourself a baddie. You know what I'm saying?

I just had to do another bad joke. It just came to my mind, but I don't think it was that funny. Anyways, second half of verse 18: "But before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit." And I know you've heard preachers talk about this, but I just want to enunciate this for a moment. She became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. And I think most of this talks about the conversation that Joseph has with God.

And I think if anyone needed a conversation with God, it was Joseph. I love my wife—she's sitting right here, she's beautiful, never kissed a guy before me. But if you came to me and you told me that you got pregnant by the Holy Spirit, wouldn't you need God to talk to you? I would. Y'all don't give Joseph enough credit for his faithfulness to Mary.

He was probably back there singing, "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. The very next day you got pregnant by the Holy Spirit. What in the world?" That's crazy stuff. Verse 19: "Because Joseph, her husband, was faithful to the law." So he knew the word of God. He knew the law, God's attributes, his character.

I don't know if you knew this about the law—the law is not a list of commands that you need to follow, though those are incorporated. The law is a list of character traits of the creator that we follow. And so he knew God, so he knew God's character. So he said, "You know, I know what prophecy says, I know what the law and the prophets say about this." So, "This could—maybe she's right." And so he's holding off for a second, but God didn't leave him alone. "Because Joseph, her husband, was faithful to the law and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly." What a good guy.

Everybody else is loud on Facebook or on TikTok. They're on TikTok, they're catching each other cheating. It's the craziest stuff I've ever seen in my life, but also entertaining. Verse 20: "But after he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived of her is from the Holy Spirit.'" It's good validation. "She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means 'God with us.'"

When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.

But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name of Jesus. Now, I'm going to Is letting this be like that last Christmas, where, where you don't flake anymore after this. You find yourself faithful. And when we look at this story, we see a group of people who are, before we knew about what happened, fairly normal people.

It's Mary got betrothed to Joseph. Joseph, just a dude. This is really all we hear about Joseph in the go, in the rest of the gospels. You don't hear much about Joseph. You know, he was Jesus's earthly father.

That's about all we know about him. And he probably has some other kids and stuff like that, but you don't know much. So, these are just kind of normal people who God decided to use. And because of their faithfulness in the midst of a difficult scenario, not their flakiness, God was able to use them. I wonder often how many of us have been called by God to do something great in this world.

But because we flaked a little bit — and I don't want you to feel bad, but I want you to step forward in faith — and because of our flakiness, we have not stepped through doors of faith that, on the other side, we would have seen God and success in areas that, that we've yet to see it. We would see maybe some ministry done. We would see some people connected with. We would see joy and peace that we haven't currently experienced. And when I look at Mary and Joseph, I see faith, guys.

I look at them as normal people. I, if you woke up one morning — I hope you do it tomorrow, definitely on Christmas day — you woke up and you, you said, "You know what? God's called me to something. I know it." How would that enable you to live your life differently? Rather, we wake up and we're like, "Let me just do what I was planning on doing." Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's just a lower level than I think God wants for us.

So let's walk through this text a little bit more slowly. [sighs]

Verse 18a, if you want to go back to the text, you can. This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married. I've learned this about the Lord, that often he deposits a calling in our lives before everybody else knows about it. Now, some, some of you, someone told you what your calling was.

I remember growing up, there were a lot of preachers that I knew. I was in the South. So, they just, like, it's just something their mama calls them to when they're about 6 years old, and they get up there and preach in their little suit and tie with the, the Prince William or Prince Albert knot. You know what I'm talking about? Those guys.

There were kids that I grew up around and their mom or dad called them to something. But I'm, I'm talking about something different. When God discloses something to you, often it's covered up to other people and they don't realize it. And what happened with Mary is God deposited something into her — literally deposited, like, his son into Mary — and he disclosed it to her. I think he had to disclose it to her, otherwise she'd been like, "How did this happen?" God disclosed this to Mary and she's supposed to feel blessed, but I would imagine, if I'm married and I'm not — I'm not even a woman, I don't know what this experience is like at all — to be pregnant, especially when I've never been with a dude.

Like, I don't have no clue what that would be like for Mary. The women in this room who have had kids, you can experience a little bit of this, but even you can't experience what she's dealing with. If this happened to you, you'd be like, "Woo! No, I don't, I don't know what to do about this."

But Mary, like, she's like, "Okay, okay, Lord, I don't know what to do with this, but I'm going to ponder these things in my heart." Luke tells us that she ponders these things. Mary's a ponderer of ponderers.

She's just trying to figure out what this means. And here's what's cool about the word ponder: she doesn't know. And many of you, you might sit here in church on a Sunday, and God starts to deposit something into your spirit, and sometimes we're like, "shouting from the rooftop, God told me this, God told me this." And I'm just going to be real with you, sometimes you don't know. Like, my calling to come out here and start this church, it took me a minute. In fact, it took me years and years of ministry experience to start to understand the type of church God would even call me to lead.

It wasn't until I received a vision from the Lord when I was in Iceland that I even started to think about the church that I would lead. And I thought I was just going to go lead some other random church that was already established. Cuz who wants to come out in the middle of nowhere and start something from scratch? Not me. But God had to disclose it.

But it was covered up initially. It was covered up. And for you, the calling God's given you, it's going to be covered up initially. But what you have to do is you got to give God a little time. Look at your neighbor.

Look at your neighbor. Say, "Give him some time."

Look at your other neighbor. Cuz y'all are loud enough. I need you to be louder. Say, "Ponder a little bit.

Ponder a little bit."

Ponder a little bit. If you don't know what ponder means, it's like going out to a pond and, ingring a little bit, you know? Just ponder. I didn't plan that, Joe. It's just part of the game.

But it wasn't, it wasn't fully disclosed to her, but this is happening to her. And, and I bet Mary wished God would have gone on a PR campaign before this happened and told everybody else, but he didn't. I don't know if you've ever sat and pondered what Mary was dealing with in this moment, when she has to disclose to Joseph that she's pregnant. He's, he's probably thinking, like, "Who, who you been with? I know who it was.

It was that person down the, down the pebble, pebble pathway." [sighs] "This person, I know who it was, cuz it was your third cousin. Cuz sometimes they did that back in the day. I know who it was." That's what Joseph's probably thinking. He said, "I've been through this before. I dated this girl named, Judith." Just taking an extra, extra biblical literature that's not really — anyways.

And, and I bet Joseph, not only is he struggling, but Mary is struggling. "How do I, how do I talk about this? God, can you just go before me and, and talk about this? Can you just give me more clarity? Can you put some signs up for me so that I'll see it?

Can you just make it abundantly clear to everybody else immediately?"

But he doesn't tell Joseph until after she tells Joseph. So God allowed her to walk a little bit in faithfulness before he disclosed to other people what was actually happening. And I think many of us, we, we receive something small from God, and as soon as we go back to our families and try to disclose it, and they don't hear or understand what we're trying to talk about, we're like, "I guess God wasn't saying it."

And what I want you to know, that if God calls you to faithfulness, like, there is no doubt that he's called you to faithfulness. If he's called you to do the things that his word has said — THERE IS NO DOUBT that he's calling you to do the things his word has already said. And so when you go back, and just because someone didn't hear it from God already, just because someone doesn't connect with God at the level you're currently connecting with God, it doesn't mean that you're not called in that direction.

There's some of you, you want to make a radical life change because you feel God calling you to do it, but everybody in your life is like, "He didn't tell me that. I ain't seen that yet. I've been a Christian for a long time and he never told me to do it." Man, the world is so jacked up because of PEOPLE WHO CLAIM Christ BUT don't love Christ, and we go out to them and we expect them to give us disclosure. But sometimes God deposits something in you. He wants you to step in faithfulness.

And on the other end of that waiting period, he's going to bless you. But you got to take a step. Blessings are on the other side of doors that you have yet to walk through, on occasion. But it would be nice if God just went forward with a PR plan. But he doesn't do it.

He's okay with the mess once in a while. I've learned that when I follow Jesus, sometimes my life gets more messy. Mary follows Jesus and it got messy. I followed Jesus into emotional intelligence, cuz I, I grew up in, in various places over the years. I moved around a lot, and so I didn't develop any long-lasting relationships.

This is one of my testimonial facts, and it's very difficult for me to talk about in front of people, but I guess I do it all the time. And, and what God did was he called me on a journey to know him, him, and in knowing him, he puts up a mirror to the things that are deficient in me. And so, as I start fixing the things that are deficient in me, guess what? It gets messy. You ever been to a counselor's office and you're like, "They didn't help"?

And, and then, and then you're like, "I went once and it didn't work out for me." Like, when you go once, that's not enough. And so God deposits this in Mary. She goes and discloses it to Joseph. Can you imagine the rest of her family? They're like, "We told you, Mary." "You told me what?

I wasn't with anybody." "Mary, you should have been hanging out with so-and-so. We know it was so-and-so." But she continues to follow God in the midst of whatever the gossip might have been. And I find it interesting that God didn't just, like, show up. He decided to use the messy process of childbirth to make it happen. God uses messy situations to bring out miraculous occurrences.

Amen. And if you can understand that in your life, you won't be stressed out by the mess. Just show up here at 5:00 in the morning, you go look at a mess. But God puts it together every single week. Or people put it together.

It's both, you know, it's both. Verse 18, second half: "But before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit." I don't know if you ever thought about that. She was found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit. It was like she woke up one morning. I don't think, I think Mary, however old she was, 15, 20, I don't know how old she was exactly, but she was younger for sure, she didn't wake up one morning and just realize it all of a sudden.

She was found to be — you ever wonder, Andre's, who found it? Do y'all ever wonder that, like, who found it? It wasn't Joseph, cuz they were betrothed and they had not consummated the — yes, or he didn't know, none of that. It, it was somebody else. Maybe there was a midwife in, in the space, or maybe it was her mom who was looking, and, "Mary, are you good?" And she's like, "Yes, the Holy Spirit's in me." I don't know.

But she was found to be pregnant. The passive voice here shows that she was found out by other people. I, I, I just don't know what happened. Was she 13 weeks? Was she 26 weeks?

She probably waited more than 13 weeks to tell everybody. I, I would have waited if I were married, but I'm not married. She's more faithful than me. Who knows? Was it, was it her walking around the village, like, your belly showing?

"What's up? Hey, are you pregnant?" That's something you should never ask somebody. I've done it too many times in my life to do it again. You don't ask somebody that. But she was walking around the village and they said, like, HOW SHAMEFUL WOULD THAT HAVE been for her?

And what happens is, when we hear the word of God in our own lives, when he deposits something into us, the Bible says that the word is sharper than any two-edged sword. It pierces through to divide rightly soul and spirit. It helps us understand more about who we are and more about who God is. AND SO WHEN God DEPOSITS something into us, it is like a piercing moment where we feel convicted of our sin and compelled to change our lives. And when we go change our lives, it shows.

And many of us feel like Mary probably did. When our friends come up to us and say, "Why don't you do this anymore? Why you celebrate Christmas differently than you used to?" Maybe your family's like, "You remember when we used to do this? You remember all the parties we used to have? Remember all the things we used to do?

Why don't you do that anymore?" And you, you want to say, "God's calling me to do something different." But you feel like they just called you out. Even in the midst of that, God is enabling you to have a period of faithfulness before he reveals the true extent of the blessing he has for you. This is the faith. And I just wish I could communicate to you, like, in a way that connects All we have to do is step in faith. And when we step in faith, though it gets messy, God is on the other side of it, beckoning, beckoning us forward, helping us, like, drawing us to himself, and getting us to the place where he's like, "I know it was messy at first, but in order to get my miracle across, I had, I had to make a little bit of a mess because what you had constructed was not beneficial.

I had to break something down in order to build it up. I had to demolish it in order to dispense something different in your life. I had to. That mess needed to happen. And it looked like your belly was showing, but that's just because the people you were spending time around weren't, they didn't understand what I was doing."

I don't know about you, but as I've grown closer to God, I feel exposed all the time.

When I'm standing up here and I'm walking through something, I mean, can you imagine what it was like for Mary? She's walking around supposed to be awesome, but then she's looked at by people who definitely don't, definitely don't believe her. And she's trying to communicate, "It was the Holy Spirit, guys. It was the Holy Spirit." They didn't listen. Now, I didn't tell us they didn't listen.

I just know people. I communicate to you guys stuff all the time. God performs miracles in your life, and then the next week we'd give it away. [sighs] For me, like, I, I will, I preach pretty vulnerably up here. I've decided there are two ways I can live.

I can act like the preacher we all grew up around who it didn't seem like anything was wrong with, but then privately there were weird things happening that you find out with when you're 21 years old, and then you leave the church. I've seen too much of that. And then the other option is, I could just be authentic but also still in the mess that I'm in and just trust that God's going to work a miraculous occurrence, and whether it's now or 20 years from now, then people will look and say, "Okay, he was legit.", but in the vulnerability mode, I don't feel very legit, Hannah. Like, someone will look at the way that I parent my kids, or don't, because I'm not very good at it half the time. Or, or they'll look at the way that I husband my wife.

They'll look at the way that I talk about the Scripture, or they'll look at all these different things and they're like, belly showing. And I'm trying to say that not to make you feel bad for me, but to indicate to you how important it is that we continue in faith even when the people around us don't understand. Verse 19: "Because Joseph, her husband, was faithful to law and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce, divorce her quietly." This isn't part of my message, but you definitely got to surround yourself with people who aren't cool with you being subjected to public disgrace. You know, Joseph was going to do the wrong thing because he hadn't heard from God. And the logical train was, "Yeah, you cheated on me." Like, that was what he thought.

But he was such a good dude, that he paused long enough to do the right thing even in a hard situation. And because of his faithfulness to the law in that moment, guess what God did? He waited long enough for God to disclose himself. Because what he had in mind wasn't effective, but it was the logical thing to do. And so we waited on God.

How many of you know what you have in your mind isn't always right? I don't think I got enough amens. That was a flaky amen if I've ever heard it. How many of you know you got some jacked up stuff in your life and your thought processes half the time aren't as good as they should be? Just say amen.

I'm so jacked up. I'm so glad that God uses donkeys to do his will, cuz if he can use donkeys, he can use all my screwed up bad decisions and work them into miracle things. But all of us got jacked up thought processes. And I need you to know what you have in mind isn't always right. Even when you're faithful like Joseph, what you have in mind isn't always right.

So what you have to do is you got to give God time. And if you don't give God time, what's in your mind is going to remain. What God wants is going to stay away, and you're going to step forward in the direction and call it God. But it was really just your own thoughts. I've seen people do it all the time.

We got to stop doing that. That's why you flaked. I'm not trying to be mean, but that's why you flaked, right? Like, I was like, "Okay, cool. I went to church this one time.

I felt good, and then I, I, you know, but then the next day it didn't, it didn't feel as good." And so maybe church didn't work for me. You got to give God a little time, cuz what's in your mind, God's got to transform, right? You got to give God a little time because what you feel isn't always good. And so Joseph, he gave God a little time and he listened to what God spoke through. Verse 20: "But after he had considered this, " he considered it, he thought about it, "an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.'" And so he gave God a little time.

God spoke to him. But here's the next step. How many of you God spoke to, but then you ignored it? He disclosed himself to you, but then we ignored it. This is me all the time.

I, I screw it up because I'd rather watch a TikTok video than I would open the word of God. I'd rather focus on decorating for Christmas than I would actually thinking about the son of God. It's just part of the life. It's part of the life that I live and that we all live. But when God speaks to us directly, whether it's through his word or through a crazy circumstance or even a dream — I still think God uses dreams once in a while — but what God's trying to do is speak to you so that what you have in your mind begins to align with what his thoughts are.

And so Joseph actually listened to what God said in a dream. If it were me in the bad place, I would not listen even to the dream. I'd wake up back in the morning, still feel just as hurt. I'd be playing myself some Rascal Flatts to feel bad about the breakup that's about to occur. And then I'd look again.

I said, "That was just a dream. That was just chemical imbalances in my brain and a bunch of things I was thinking about coming together to make me have that dream." But God spoke to Joseph in a dream. And had he not listened, he would have divorced Mary, put her into public shame, and then Jesus's life would have looked way different than it did. But he was faithful. He was faithful.

Verse 21: "You will give birth to a son, and you were to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." This is where it gets cool, because Joseph was faithful to the law. And when [snorts] you read the law — now for the Jews back in the day, they read the law and the prophets, but they call it all the law depending on which Jewish sect you are a part of — and so he's reading Isaiah, he's reading Jeremiah, he's reading all of these prophecies that spoke about the one that would be born and the one that would be named Yeshua, salvation, Jesus. And so when he hears this, this is probably the first part in this entire situation where Joseph is like, "Oh, okay, this is cool." And I know you want to get to that place in your walk with God where you're at the, the peak of your calling, and, and you're kind of in this, this runner's high in your faith where everything seems to be doing what it should be doing, but it starts out in this mess. And many of us, we flake, and we don't give God enough time through our own faithfulness to get us to the place where we are operating on all cylinders. It, it takes a little time.

And, and when we hear the word of God and then walk away from it the very next day, we miss that opportunity. Someone told me recently, this is how hopping starts for churches. I didn't say — I didn't make it up. This is what they said. They said, they said, what happens is somebody has something in their mind.

They don't tell anybody, or they do tell people, but sometimes it's the wrong people, or it's just a preference. It's really not that big of a deal in the long run, but they, they keep it within their mind. They never give God time to cause redemption in that situation. And then they just jet. And then the same thing happens at the next church and the next church with the next husband or wife and the next husband or wife.

And then what ends up happening is you keep repeating this cycle over and over and over again. But the solution to that: hear the word of God and stay, stay in this calling that God has given you. Give him some time. He says, "The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph awoke, he did." Everybody say, "Do it." I like you guys.

He like, "Do what God tells you to do." There's so many layers to this, is I got to listen for God. I got to stick around long enough for him to disclose himself to me. Then when he discloses himself, I actually got to trust that it comes from God. And then when God tells me to do something, I have to — say it again — do it. This is part of the process.

And many people say that they lost their faith because they never really started the process. And I'm not trying to be a preacher who makes you feel bad about yourself. I'm trying to be a preacher that discloses to you the honest facts about this faith that we hold, that God has sent his son first as a baby, but then he died on the cross to offer us forgiveness of sins. All we have to do is believe that. But, but once we believe it, it says he gives us a calling, an assignment, a task.

And so when we believe something but don't go through this process of continued faithfulness, we never experience the thing that God calls us to. [sighs] I don't think that George Michael's that big of a deal. Is that the one who sang it? The band was Wham. You remember Wham?

I don't. I wasn't born at that point. I was born in 1988. This song was in 1984. I was going to show the video.

It's stupid. Like, it's so dumb. They're just on a ski hill and there's no talk. Like, they're not even singing in the middle of it. Just — there's this girl, I think it's a girl, from — doesn't matter.

And then I, I like, George Michael is not a big deal. This is not a relationship sermon. This is not about that song. But I think the words are still so evident: stop, stop hearing the words of life that will change everything and the very next day throwing them away. Let them speak to your soul.

Let them pierce through and adjust every facet of your life. Let it change the way you do Easter. Let it change the way you do Christmas. Let it change the way you parent. Let it change the way you do your spouse stuff.

Let it change everything about you. And when you do that, it takes time, because your spouse didn't hear it. Joseph didn't hear it. Mary heard it first. And she had to be patient and ponder and sit and process so that God would give more disclosure.

And she had to patiently wait for God to reveal it to Joseph. And the whole risk of that scenario was that Joseph wouldn't hear it. Praise God that he did. But picture the world where Mary had changed her level of faithfulness to God, decided that, "I'm not going to tell people that. I'm going to hide it, " or worse.

Picture that world. That, that's in so many ways what we do. God gives us a calling, we, we throw it away. And, and I, I, I want to keep preaching. My deepest struggle with this whole job that I have is being able to see what God can do and then see daily — this is daily — see people reject it, or almost worse, accept it, act like they accepted it, and then throw it.

It's a big idea. I've said it through the entire thing, but we don't have to do it that way. Make this Christmas the last Christmas. Will you treat God like an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend? Make this the last Christmas that we're not faithful, where, where we're missing components about who God is and being fine with that.

Make this the last Christmas where it's a tradition, a tradition that doesn't bless us or encourage us. Make this the last Christmas, where it's stressful for no good reason. Make this the last Christmas where we look more into superficialities, than we do into the depths of his Holy Spirit. Make this the last Christmas that he discloses his heart to us and we just reject it. And I know there are people in this room, you've been to Christmas, you've been to Easter, you may have been to Mother's Day, you've been to Father's Day, you've been to anniversary, you've been— To these different places, but there's something in you that prefers the world over what he has done.

And if that's you, and you maybe not rejected Jesus, but you've put him to the side and acting like he can be a good sidepiece for you, that is not who he is. He is the King of the universe, the Son of God, the Creator of the world, the sustainer of it. In him and through him all things were made and have their existence and being. It is in him that we have our new creation. It is in him that we have peace.

It is in him that everything can shift on its head, because God can take your mess and radically turn it into a miracle. But when he provides you the gift, you still got to accept it. But you don't just take it and put it to the side. You actually unwrap it. You don't just unwrap it, you take it out the box, and you look at all the pieces, and you put it together, because you know you've got the Lord's help to put this stuff together.

And while you don't understand forgiveness right now, Jesus does. So you accept that forgiveness and ask him to change every aspect of who you are and bring you into connection with him at a deeper level. So God, I pray for everyone in this room. They're celebrating Christmas and they're excited about it. I'm glad they're excited about it, because your Son Jesus is the entire meaning of Christmas.

But I pray that when we receive that gift, we take it and we exhaust all of its capacity. No more side piece. And Lord, I commit my whole life to you. And for anyone in this room, you've never trusted in Jesus because you struggle with the idea — the Bible doesn't say you have to understand everything. It says, what you see in Mary and Joseph, just have faith, and God will disclose to you what you need.

So God, I pray for those. I pray that they would receive you today. I pray that they would confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that God raised him from the dead. Father, be with them. Transform their minds.

Align their thoughts to your thoughts. And make this the last Christmas where we set aside the very gift you've given us. We pray these things in Jesus's name. And all God's people said, "Amen."

Y'all stand with me. If that was you and you trusted in Jesus,