Advent: Celebrating Christmas by Facing Your Own Darkness

Well, Merry Christmas.

I hope everyone is decorated for Christmas.

Are you decorated for Christmas?

Did I stress you out?

You want to leave?

Maybe you have a to-do list.

We put up our tree a couple weeks ago.

Fake pre-lit.

Other fake pre-lit people?

Live tree people.

What come come on over to the side?

Come to the dark side.

The fake, pre-lit, dark side people.

We will welcome you anytime.

Maybe you remember this tree from Home Alone.

Do you remember Kevin goes into the backyard?

He cuts off the top of the tree.

This is a little polite, sweet little, you know, controllable tree.

And it's nothing like the guy we read about in Luke 3.

The sermon, I'm getting to a sermon illustration about Christmas trees.

John the Baptist, if he was a Christmas tree, work with me, he would be more like this tree.

Do you remember where this is from?

Right?

Christmas vacation, the Griswold family tree.

And here it is in the living room.

It can't be contained.

It's too big.

It's wild.

That's John the Baptist.

John the Baptist is wild.

He's kind of out of control.

He he runs up against established thought.

He's eating bugs.

He's wild.

He dresses strangely.

He just doesn't fit in.

So we're in our second week of Advent, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas.

And this is a time of preparation, preparing our hearts to celebrate the coming of Jesus.

Today in Luke 3 is this John the Baptist, this wild man, he was some sort of cousin to Jesus.

And he has something to say to us.

Luke 3, 3 through 6.

And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight, every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

So Luke quotes these words of Isaiah 40.

When these words were originally spoken by Isaiah back in the Old Testament, Isaiah 40, these were words spoken to a devastated people.

These people had been taken out of their land, out of their homeland.

They were in exile in Babylon.

Life was dark, they were broken, taken from their land.

They were wondering, could this ever get better?

How can we be an everlasting kingdom if we're slaves?

How can we be a blessing when everything seems like a curse?

Desiring God editor Scott Hubbard, he writes this about this Luke 3 and Isaiah 40 connection.

We can ask similar questions when we remember God's promises from the wreckage of our circumstances.

We can look back at a devastating failure and ask, how can God forgive me?

We can look up from the crater of some loss and ask, how can God comfort me?

In those moments, we need God to do for us what he did for Israel.

We need him to come alongside us, remind us of his promises, and then say, Behold your God.

So Luke here, when he's talking about John the Baptist writing about it, he's tapping into these people's traditional hopes for Israel's restoration.

These people in Isaiah 40, they would have been desiring their land back.

I want to go home.

I want to go back to my home.

And so Luke and John the Baptist, they're tapping into that.

But the text says something even more profound, and that is that this is about more than land.

This is about forgiveness of a heart that is an exile to sin.

The land and the exile is used as a metaphor to teach us about our hearts.

Last week Pastor Matt said this, and this is our point number one, stealing a point from Pastor Matt.

Those who are most prepared to celebrate Christmas are those who have taken inventory of their own darkness.

Do you remember when he said that last week?

Just ruined my happy escapist Christmas.

I was having a great Christmas.

Having a great time.

He said that.

I was like, I wrote that down.

I was like, that's amazing.

It's difficult, but it's amazing.

When I say darkness, I do mean sin.

Here's how Pastor Matt Chandler describes sin.

Every one of us by our birth are born with a sinful iniquity in our hearts that would have us believe that we really are the center of the universe.

And everyone around us and everything around us should serve us and make us happy and do what we want it to do.

We are born with that on in our hearts, right?

You try to discipline your kids out of it, but even adults still operate by this default that the world really is about us.

It's why we get frustrated like we do.

It's why we lose patience like we do, because we believe it really is about us.

And we wish that our spouse and kids could just get that wish.

Our coworkers would understand that wish.

That guy driving so slow in front of us could comprehend that wish and on and on I could go.

So that's a default position of the human heart.

That's all humans everywhere.

Anybody else?

You're like, oh, that's what I do.

Okay.

That explains me, right?

Sin explains us.

What John the Baptist is teaching us is we cannot celebrate the light for us if we don't face and feel and name the darkness in us.

That's what Matt presented to us last week in Advent Week One.

The Advent begins in the dark and leads us to the light.

I connected with Matt last week when he talked about having a day where you just feel overwhelmed.

Just one of those days.

I was having one of those days, work schedule, people needing stuff, somebody's life fell apart, all that stuff's kind of, you know, my kids' schedule, sermon stress, and then there's just like a gnawing anxiety underneath busyness.

Like you're getting stuff done, you're productive, checking it off.

But underneath, there's just like this anxious spirit.

But then I also, like Matt, saw the Marietta Square Christmas lights.

I mean, it's like a Hallmart movie.

It's amazing.

If you're feeling depressed or sad or stressed, just go drive down to the Marietta Square and walk around.

You feel like you're in a Hallmark movie, and I was like, I will sign on to this also.

I will escape into Christmas.

And I watched a Lindsey Lohan movie on Netflix about Christmas.

I forget what it was called.

I think I watched it twice.

I was that stressed that I needed that.

I started listening to Mariah Carey.

Anybody else listen to Mariah Carey's Christmas album?

Started that.

Watched Christmas Vacation.

I watched Die Hard, John McClain, Entering the Mess of Humanity.

Right?

I mean, it's a Christmas illustration.

And then last week comes along, and Matt comes into all my very happily escapism into Christmas.

And he comes into that and he says that the people most prepared to celebrate Christmas have to do inventory of their darkness.

Which is just a welcoming of us into honesty.

Right?

I have to know, you have to know that God's grace pursues us in what's actually real about our hearts and our lives.

And that what we discover there is we won't be destroyed.

You won't be destroyed when you face your own darkness.

You actually discover that God's light, his one-way love to you in Jesus, is there and is sufficient.

And verses one through three of Luke 3, we didn't read those, but Luke gives us a list of rulers.

A little bit of a historical context, which biblical writers do, but as well, what it does for us is it sets up a contrast of verses one through three, these rulers, and then verses four through six, John the Baptist, and what he's saying.

So at the time Tiberius was emperor.

Tiberius was cruel, he was perverse, he was self-indulgent.

Tiberius' rule was in stark contrast to the rule of Jesus that was coming.

Jesus' rule being truthful, loving, kind, good.

So these rulers represent our desire, our sinful desire for power and influence and greed and lust, and you can fill in the blank.

Every way that we think we need something to be whole or fulfilled or justified or forgiven outside of Jesus.

And John says to that darkness, you need to turn your allegiance from your worldly desires and turn to the Lord.

John says, repent.

The questions that helped me this week to face my own darkness, we could call these growth and grace questions.

Where am I finding validation more than Jesus is enough for my weary heart?

Where am I not as free, whole, and joyful as Jesus intends for me?

Now the answer to that will be your darkness.

Your sin, the ways in which you're relying on something other than Jesus for your forgiveness, wholeness, justification, validation.

And that's not to say condemnation on you or guilt on you, that's to say grace on you.

In that darkness, Jesus' love meets you, forgives you, and wants to heal and grow you.

In verse 3, the word repentance is the word metanoia, meaning a change of mind, entering a better course of life.

Two weeks ago, our family went to the Georgia, Georgia Tech game.

Last night went to a game as well.

Go Dogs.

Anybody else?

Go Dogs?

I even see some of y'all wore Georgia Red.

I saw Auburn Famer in Georgia Red.

It might be Christmas.

I don't think it's Christmas.

I think it's celebration of Georgia last night.

Which is, by the way, congratulations to all of you for living in the state of Georgia because my Georgia Dogs brought the SEC championship back to the state of Georgia for all of us to celebrate.

It doesn't just have to be Georgia fans.

Anyways, two weeks ago, we went to the Georgia-Georgia Tech game, which is an incredible game.

Georgia Tech's legit.

Georgia Tech's on the rise, by the way.

They're eventually gonna beat us.

It's coming, it will come.

They're good.

Brent Keys is amazing.

Eight overtimes.

Anyways, the most heart attacks occurred than any football game ever.

I made that up.

I have no idea.

It felt like it could be it could be true.

I don't know.

Could be.

We left the stadium, hoofed it to the car, opened up Waze, hit home, and we turn out of this neighborhood in Waze.

She says to turn left on Lumpkin, which was back toward the stadium.

But I'm an obedient child.

And it's like, yes, ma'am.

I turn left back toward the stadium against traffic, and I'm driving freely, which feels amazing, but apparently I'm also kind of mentally going, like, this doesn't feel right.

Like, oh, she wants me to take a right on the road that runs by the Coliseum, but that road's blocked off.

And then I'm like, oh, she doesn't know.

She does not know that there's a game.

She does not know what's going on.

The next road's closed, and I'm like, it's getting worse.

And like I can see the minutes stacking up because I'm like, I'm gonna have to get in that line.

And eventually the moment has that comes, the moment has to come.

We're going the wrong way.

Like we have to turn around.

It's only gonna get worse.

There's just sometimes the only way forward is just to humble yourself and say, I'm going the wrong way.

This thing that I'm doing, this action, this behavior, this addiction, this thought, this practice, this will only lead to more destruction.

It's time for me to turn around.

And that's a great image of repentance.

You hit the end of yourself, you have your breakdown, and you repent.

Point number two is repenting is a turning into Jesus' sufficiency.

Pastor Jack Miller always said it's a collapsing into Jesus' love for you.

So you're going backward, you're turning, but it's not a turning into nothing.

Jesus' love waits for us.

The text says that we need a baptism of repentance, which is loaded language at the time.

At the time in the Jewish religion, you had to cleanse yourself before you went to the Temple Mount to worship.

So before you went to the presence of God, you had to cleanse yourself.

You needed to do something.

And so all around the Temple Mount were mikvas, baptism pools.

Here's a picture of one.

And the people before they went to worship, they would walk down those steps and they would dump themselves under the water and they would have a baptism.

They would purify themselves by the ritual act.

And if you do that, then you're clean and you can enter the presence of God.

So that's the context when John says, you need a baptism of repentance.

That's what they would be thinking about.

Like, oh, to enter the presence of God, to be one with God.

Like it's not about me continually doing some religious ritual act.

It's about me facing my own darkness and naming it and surrendering to God.

It's an immersion of repentance.

We need a breakdown, we need an end of ourselves.

Now, your conversion moment of becoming Christian, that is a one-and-done moment of repentance.

But then what we realize in a gospel of grace, in the secure relationship we have with God, that our relationship with Him is not based on our work, but His work.

What we realize is that repentance is not this bad word we avoid, and Christian growth is not repenting less and less.

Christian growth actually becomes repenting more and more and quicker and quicker.

Listen to how Paul presents repentance.

Listen to this insight.

It's at the end of verse 4, but I'll read verses uh Romans 2, 3, and 4.

Do you suppose, O man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God?

Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

What a truth.

We get the image of like the guy outside the football game holding the repent sign, and he's yelling, like fiery, condemning, like the tone, and you're like, I want nothing to do with that.

That tone, I want nothing to do with that.

But Paul has a different tone with repentance.

And it's gonna be filled with conviction and sorrow, but it's God's kindness wooing us.

It's not void of God's kindness.

Point number three is this religious repentance begins in fear.

Gospel repentance begins in love.

I didn't make that up.

That's Tim Keller's distinguishment.

Very good.

Religious repentance out of fear says, you better or else.

You aren't loved until gospel repentance says you are so loved by the Heavenly Father through Jesus' work for you that he loves you in your sin, in your brokenness, in your messed upness, and your turning around is God's kindness to you.

And you can fall into him and you can start anew.

Christmas tells us that God is with us in our darkest of places.

Do you remember the dark place that the prodigal son was in in Luke 15?

This family, two sons, you remember the story.

The younger one asks for his inheritance early, which was embarrassing to the father, would have been offensive, crushing.

The younger son takes his inheritance, runs off to the foreign country.

Remember, he spends it, he parties, he's lavishly partying, wasting the money away, and then the money's gone, and then the friends are gone, he's by himself, he's starving, he has nothing left.

He's at the end of himself.

He's broken.

And there in that darkness, he remembers his father.

He remembers his home.

He belongs somewhere else.

And what's needed is a turnaround, a repentance.

So he thinks, perhaps, just maybe my father will take me back.

He forms a little speech.

He's going to say to his father, I've sinned against you in heaven.

See, there's that repentant turn.

Not worthy as your son, just make me a hired man on your land.

Like, just will you take me back?

So the boy runs home, he starts his speech.

And here's what the boys met with Luke 15, verse 22.

Luke 15:22

But the father said to his servants, Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him.

Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet.

And bring the fat and calf and kill it and let us eat and celebrate.

For this my son was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found, and they began to celebrate.

Now his older son was in the field, and as he came near and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing.

The New Living Translation says, and the party began.

Is that what your Christian faith feels like?

A party began.

Like a party of joy and freedom and forgiveness and wholeness.

Not that all of life's gonna work out perfectly, not that there won't be suffering or sorrow.

But that you and your darkness and in the darkness you will face in the future, that God is loving you and for you.

Our repentance, our coming home is a party of welcome and grace.

Years ago I showed you this Rembrandt painting, Return of the Prodigal.

We just moved it from my office out to this back lobby.

If you notice it's in the back lobby now.

The boy's so exhausted and beaten down.

I noticed this week he only had one shoe on.

I don't know.

I missed that somewhere.

Lost a shoe somewhere along the way.

You ever feel like that?

You ever like, I can't even keep up with my shoes, right?

You just can't keep it all together.

We've all been this child.

Or we are, or we will be again.

And Luke 15, the visual of this painting, gives us the gospel.

It's where John the Baptist is driving us, that the Father is greater than the child's condition.

That the light's greater than the darkness, grace is greater than sin.

This woo of the Father forgives and it begins to reorient our lives.

This brings us back to our first point.

Those who are most prepared to celebrate Christmas are those who have taken inventory of their own darkness.

And what you find there is not your destruction, but when you face and name and feel your own sin and confess it to God, you don't find destruction, you actually find healing.

Because God's one-way love to you in Jesus is enough.

Perhaps you're here, you have a question about some of that.

Or you have another spiritual question.

And I'll be down front afterwards, and I would love to speak with you.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that Jesus is enough for our sin, that we celebrate this morning your incarnation, that you come into the mess of humanity, and that you meet us in our own sin and mistakes and suffering.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that it is your kindness that leads us to repentance, that your regard toward us is welcome.

And that there is a party of grace, there is a party of forgiveness and a party of joy awaiting us as we turn and look to you.

Would you help us all the more to not trust in the things of this world, but to look to you that our lives might honor you.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.