Advent: The Hope of the Incarnation | Guest Speaker: Sam Rapp

Tell you a little bit more about myself.

I got married back in August, and if you know me, this was a super long-awaited day.

This was like the longest time coming in my life.

My my wife Grace and I started dating when we were 16 and 17 years old, juniors and sophomores in high school, and we're like the 1% that actually survived through long distance and through college.

And we muscled through all four years of college in different schools, different states, different time zones.

And then I made the mistake of proposing over a year before we got married, which just made the waiting process even longer.

And it was it was a mistake to be engaged for that long for a few reasons, but one of the most difficult parts was every weekend seeing her crying with her because we had to say goodbye one more time.

We had to say goodbye again and again and again.

And for these reasons, August 29th, our wedding day, was a day that I put all the pressure of the world on.

I was thinking, man, if I can just make it to that day, if I can make it to August 29th, all my problems will be fixed, all my sadness will go away, and then my life will magically become a fairy tale like every Julia Roberts rom-com promises me that it will be.

So finally, we make it to August 29th, the wedding day, and I honestly woke up feeling super weird.

I was expecting to wake up feeling like Christmas morning, but I woke up feeling really weird.

I was excited, I was anxious.

I had chicken and French toast the night before, so it might have been that coming up, I don't know, but I felt weird.

And all I remember is that I was just in such a weird spot emotionally that day.

I kind of felt like a ghost just like floating through the day until all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I'm at the altar, and then my soon-to-be wife is walking down and I'm crying.

That's kind of what the day felt like.

Uh and then, you know, we we get married, we danced, we laughed, we cried.

Grace threw cake at my face, and all of a sudden, we walked through the sparkler shower.

I'm not in a great mood because my blood sugar was dangerously too low at that point.

I already kind of got salty at the DJ at this point.

And then we get in the car and Grace and I look at each other and we're like, what?

It's over?

Every day for that entire year before I was putting all of this pressure and hope and anticipation for that one day.

And hear me, being excited about a wedding day or an exciting event or a marriage, obviously that that is a good thing, but the wedding day in Grace and I's marriage could never be Jesus for me.

The wedding, my wife, my honeymoon were all great things.

And again, hear me, these are wonderful gifts from God, but they make terrible gods.

My wife is the most incredible, godly woman I could have ever dreamed of.

She's the most amazing image of the gospel that I could have prayed for.

However, no matter how incredible she is, she cannot be my God.

And to put my hope and my anticipation and trust in her to be that will leave me very unsatisfied.

And with that being said, we as humans are naturally moved by anticipation.

It's what gets us out of bed in the morning, it's what keeps us working hard, it's what keeps us driven and excited for the next thing.

We're always thinking of the next thing.

The next trip, the next vacation, the next weekend off, the next weekend where we finally have nothing planned.

See, we're entering into the season of Advent, as Sam mentioned.

And Advent literally means the arrival of a notable person or thing.

And we're in what's known as the holidays, where the next like 28 days or so will be filled with excitement, stress, anxiety, Michael Bublé, endlessly until December 25th, when all of a sudden it's all over.

And so today, as we begin this Advent season, as we sit under God's word, as we anticipate the arrival, the advent of Jesus' birth, I've just been praying that the Lord would stir up our affections for him and that our anticipation would be ultimately in his presence in our life.

And so, with that being said, let's jump into God's word together.

This is 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 3 through 9.

1 Corinthians 1:3–9

So y'all hear this with me.

Grace to you in peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you until the end guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

This is God's word.

Father, thank you for your word that it has uh, Lord, sustained through thousands of years to be sitting in our laps right now, sitting on our smartphones, Lord, we have access to it at every moment.

And so, Father, I just pray that as we sit under it this morning, that you uh would speak, that you would get me out of the way, uh, so that Lord, you and your word would uh resonate in our hearts.

Uh so I pray, Father, that you prepare all of us to hear what you have for us.

Um, that for those of us who are hurting, that you would comfort us, for those of us who are hungry, that you would fill us.

Um please, Lord, help us look more like Jesus through uh your word.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

I want to start by giving us a little context about this passage, about what's going on.

So, Paul, the writer of this, basically received word from some of his faithful friends, uh, members of this congregation, members of the Corinthian church, that there were divisions, sin issues, and an overall spiritual immaturity going on in this church, which seemed like it was faithful and going well for a while.

And Paul is writing this letter, 1 Corinthians, Corinthians, to essentially challenge this church.

However, Paul does something that I think we see Jesus all throughout the gospel doing to the people that he meets.

Before Paul gets into the ugly parts of this letter, he reminds the Corinthians of the massive hope they have in Jesus.

Before he gets into the ugly parts of the Corinthian church, he reminds them of the riches that Jesus has offered them.

Before he confronts them in their sin, he begins with grace.

And that brings me to my first point for us this morning.

It says this our hope and anticipation of Christ's coming rest entirely upon the riches of grace he has given us.

That might be the most important thing that I say all morning.

Our salvation, sanctification, and effort towards godliness begins and is sustained only by God's grace.

When I was growing up, I was terrified of God and of hell.

I was terrified to not believe hard enough or like God enough or like going to church enough.

So by my own willpower growing up, I went to church, I did what I needed to do.

Um, but this willpower was not driven by true faith and grace.

This was driven by Sam trying harder.

And so, because of that, when I faced high school and faced temptations, I fell.

I seemed to be growing up in my faith in my youth group because I had a leadership role.

I seemed like a good kid on the outside, but I grew among thorns with no real roots.

And then these thorns, the temptations of high school, choked me until the Lord came and truly gave me an experience of his grace my junior year.

See, before that, my motivation for godliness, my motivation for going to church was so that I would just escape hell rather than because of the sweet experience of grace I had with Jesus.

I sometimes like to think about it this way.

Let's say I had a jar of honey, right?

And I got a couple of y'all to come up here or in your seats to describe this honey.

You know, one of you who's a realist might just say it's honey, it's sticky, it's brown, it's messy, it goes pretty well on toast, right?

That's number one.

Number two, who, one of you who might be a little bit more creative, more artistic, might describe the honey's color and its thickness and how it could be sculpted to make a beautiful work of art, right?

Then one of you who is more analytical might look at the honey and describe its chemical properties, its viscosity, its rate of acceleration as it falls from the sky, right?

The thing is, we could sit here and describe this honey all day.

We could know every detail about it all the way down to its anatomical structure, right?

And we could literally know everything on paper that there is to know about this honey.

But then, let's say my nephew, John Henry, who's three and a half, comes up, gets his gross little finger, sticks it in the honey, gets a huge, delicious, sweet, amazing taste of that honey.

And then all of a sudden, John Henry knows more about honey than any of us did.

Why?

Because a personal experience with something trumps every speculative description of it.

And that brings me to point number two this morning.

A true and personal experience with the grace of Jesus will propel us towards a godly anticipation of Christmas.

A true and personal experience will propel us towards this.

Paul begins this letter, this challenging letter with a reminder of the grace that was given to them in Christ.

I want you all to hear verses four and five one more time.

Paul says, I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus.

That in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and knowledge.

Paul doesn't say here that he's thankful for how good the Corinthians are, or how amazing Christians they are, or all the work that they've done.

He wants to remind them of the beautiful and glorious riches of grace first.

So, you know, we can sit here this morning and talk about how, you know, we need to be better Christians, how we need to be more thankful, more loving, how we need to get our hearts right for this Christmas season, right?

But before we can start talking about godliness and those things, we have to begin with this idea of grace.

It has to begin and move out of that.

When we think about this idea of anticipation or hope or looking forward to things, it begins with our experience or remembrance of a previous time, right?

We're excited to go on a beach trip, to go to Hilton Head, to go to St.

Simon's because we've been there before, because we've been on that beautiful beach.

We had a great vacation.

We we're excited to go on a trip to Disney World because we know that Disney is the most magical place on earth, right?

We're not excited or anticipating something that we are neutral towards.

And that's the thing about anticipation, about Advent, about hope, is that it crushes apathy.

This season of Advent, when God's people come together to remember and pray and worship this idea of Christ's birth.

We remember how incredible the truth of the gospel actually is when we really think about what the gospel of Christ has actually done, that we were dead in our sin, living in our slavery, enslaved to our flesh.

But then Jesus came and didn't give us a bunch of rules to follow, but he offered himself for us so that we wouldn't have to sustain ourselves.

He is the one that is promising to deliver us and offer us these things.

This Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, came and crushed every speculation of religion, politics, power, meekness, and humility that the world had.

Saying you no longer have to live in accordance with a law talking to these Jewish people, but hey, listen, I came, I fulfilled it, and here it is for you, fully in myself freedom.

And this brings me to my last point for us this morning.

Point number three.

It is only by the grace of Jesus Christ that we will be sustained through this life and into the next.

I find the church at Corinth to be really similar to us in certain ways.

They're financially stable, they're successful, they're in a location of a lot of strong commerce, and they're safe.

See, I don't know about y'all, but Jesus can often be a really uh intense afterthought for me, especially during Christmas.

And the lie that the Corinthians were believing is that they themselves, in their wealth and their knowledge about God, could be their own sustainers through this life.

That the Corinthians could keep God at arm's length because they knew about him and because of their financial success, they were drawn to unbelief.

And this unbelief for the Corinthians didn't look like an angry, yelling, screaming atheist.

It looked like a very complacent and apathetic church, the Corinthians.

And that's the thing about unbelief that's really challenging.

Jackie LePerry talks about unbelief in this way.

He says this unbelief doesn't see God as the ultimate good, so it can't see sin as the ultimate evil.

It instead sees sin as a good thing, and thus God's commands as a stumbling block to joy.

In believing the devil, I didn't need a pentagram pendant to wear, neither did I need to memorize a hex or two.

All I had to do was trust myself more than God's word.

I had to believe that my thoughts, my affections, my rights, my wishes were worthy of absolute obedience.

And that in laying prostrate before the flimsy throne I'd made for myself, that I'd be doing a good thing.

See, I could sit here and through this verse try to challenge us to go out and do more, to go out and be the Christians that we know that we should be, to try to get our spirits right for this Christmas season, right?

But that is the opposite of what the gospel promises.

Let's look at verses 7 through 9 one more time.

Paul says this so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

You are sustained in your faith, not because of how strong you believe, not because of how much you like God or how much you go to church, but you are sustained only because of what God in Christ has done for you.

And that he is holding on to you tight so that even if you let go a little bit, he's not dropping you.

Not because of how hard you hold on to him.

As we mentioned, today is the beginning of Advent, of this anticipation for what has already happened, but what we're anticipating to come.

And this is the Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, where we focus specifically on the hope of the incarnation, of the birth of Jesus.

The hope of our lives, the hope of this season can and will only be sustained by the grace of Jesus.

Not by how hard you believe, not on your efforts, not on any of your own earnings, but only on the fact that if you are in Christ, your faith, your joy, your peace, your satisfaction, and your life are found only in Jesus.

I want to leave us with a quote from my personal faith hero, this 19th-century British guy.

His name's Charles Spurgeon.

He says this hope may arise out of our joy, but we must remind that we do not fix our confidence in it, or we shall have a sandy foundation.

The solid grace of hope which abides and remains in the soul is born of faith through the word.

It is only the abounding of hope which comes out of our joy and peace.

If you believe in the Christ of God, you obtain joy and peace.

But these are the results, not the causes.

You must not begin with your own joy and peace and say, My hope of salvation is built upon the happiness I have felt of late.

This will never do.

Begin first of all with the scriptures, not with your feelings or fancies, nor with your impressions and excitements.

These will fail as a foundation.

Begin with God, revealed in Christ Jesus as the God of hope, and let your joy and peace come from your believing in Him.

Beloved, go forward, keeping close to the groundwork of faith, and you will feel joy and peace in your hearts.

Let's pray together.

Father, thank you for uh, Lord, your word.

Thank you for the fact that you sent Jesus to be a man who took on flesh in its entirety.

Not just this idea that we have on paper, but Lord, uh, you sent Jesus to come be in our shoes for us.

So that Lord, we don't have to hold on tight to the law anymore.

We don't have to hold on tight to you in fear that we'll fall off.

But Lord, you have offered yourself to us so that we no longer have to try for our salvation anymore.

So, Father, thank you for the gospel, for what it has done in our lives, what it offers us.

Thank you for your word.

I pray, Lord, that um even one of us had uh and will have an encounter with you here this morning that we would get a deeper, uh more glorious, beautiful taste of your presence.

Please, uh Lord, help us and sustain us in Jesus' name.

Amen.