Advent 2013

Alright, maybe seated.

So these magi, uh so these magi were they were Babylonian wise men and they were into astrology and astronomy.

I mean, at the end of the day, they were they were smart dudes, these guys.

I mean, they were the they were the scientists of the day.

And what they believed is they believed that an alignment of planets signified the birth of a great leader.

So this is what got these wise men moving was that they see the alignment of the planets, bright star, you know, and they understand this to be the birth of a great leader.

So this star, there's lots of theories about this star, and did a bunch of reading this week about this star, and there's theories by astronomers and astrophysicists, and some people believe it's legend, some people believe it's raw miracle, just pure God miracle in the sky, and some people believe that God was working within his creation.

Um, whatever they saw, it was great.

It was great enough that it was abnormal, it was different, and they understood it to be different.

So, even back to the guy in 1604, Johannes Kepler, he he started this theory, and what he believed was that the star was an alignment of planets.

Most people think it was probably Jupiter and Venus together, which is kind of cool because Jupiter is named after the Greek god Jupiter.

Venus is the mother planet, so you have father and mother coming together for the birth of the sun.

And so all this, it's all theory.

I mean, people aren't quite and you go on to websites and did a lot of reading this week, and you go on to websites and this astronomer is debating this, and here are his points and his models, and this astronomer's debating this, and here are his points and his models.

A friend of mine passed me at some point along the line this DVD called the Star of Bethlehem, which is a lawyer started to look into this about the stars, and and then he presented all this material on the DVD.

And I'll I'm gonna go over just a little bit.

It's interesting.

Is it true?

I don't know.

It's a theory.

I mean, you if you when you talk to astronomers, they're all debating on what exactly this was.

What we do know is it was a great star that led wise men from a long way away to make a journey.

So what this guy presents in Star of Bethlehem is is exactly this that Jupiter is moving across the star field, and that it actually crosses this star named Regulus, which is named is means king in Greek and in Babylonian.

And then it crosses it and it causes a conjunction, which is an alignment.

And so they see this, and this is not really abnormal.

He says it happens about every 12 years, and then because of the Orth's orbit, it comes back across, and then there's this kind of very abnormal happening that there's a third conjunction.

Aren't you very excited about the third conjunction?

Well, they were apparently excited about third conjunction if this is the model or the theory that's true.

Now, then this guy presents it says a height, so then it crosses back across the star field and eventually lines up with Venus, the planetary alignment.

This would have been the bright star.

And this would have been what the wise men would have seen and say, oh, well, a great leader's been born.

Let's go.

So they make their journey.

Now we pick up the story in verse 11.

Now, whether whatever you want to whatever you want to believe about the astronomies, that's up to you.

We get verse 11.

Here's what's clear from the rest of the way out.

They get there and they bow and they worship.

Now, do you understand Jesus is still a baby at this point.

If you've been around a baby, there's not a lot of bowing going on to babies.

Usually there's a lot of other stuff going around babies, but usually there's not a lot of bowing.

Uh you know, I you think you've been on a long journey, you get somewhere, usually you get there, you prop your feet up, you talk about the journey, you know, you know, your camel, you know, the rest stops, there are no Hampton ends, the rough journey, you want to rest, you want to break, and they get there and they worship.

They bow down.

So in humility, they come, they see a great leader's been born, and and he's been born into humility, mind you, and they, in their humility, they bow down and they worship.

So the question becomes not why did they come?

We know why they came.

Because they came because they saw this star, they had beliefs about planetary alignment, and whatever you believe happened up there.

Something happened, got them moving, they get there.

Why did they come?

That's why they came.

A great leader was born.

But why these gifts?

Why gold?

Why frankincense?

Why myrrh?

And what we see is as we look into these gifts, is we see that these gifts are saying a lot.

They're saying a lot to us.

So the first gift is gold.

Gold was just like now, unbelievably high value.

And it's presented, it was the most often gift that was presented from a subject to a king.

So for them to come and bring gold, and think about this, they're bringing gold to a king.

He's born in a stable with farm animals, and he's a baby, and they're bringing gold to him.

Now, here's the interesting thing about kings.

We love them and we hate them.

I mean, right, I mean, you look at historically, look at kings, rarely do you get good ones.

And most of the time you get really bad ones.

But we're still fascinated with them.

We are fascinated with kings.

I can remember a trip to London, I was in just out of college and over there and spent some time in London.

Some friends were there studying, and went to Buckingham Palace, and I can I remember it so clearly because I remembered this scene was very different than the scene a couple years before.

I'd been to the White House, and these two scenes were very different.

At the White House, it seemed so operational.

You you you you went to kind of view and walk around and see how things worked, and it was kind of interesting.

And at Buckingham Palace, there's this like fascination and awe and adoration, and people bringing flowers, and it's a different level.

And this is all because British people, just like us, we are enamored with William and Kate and Charles and Harry.

And is Harry gonna get married?

And you know, we think he's a little wild, and the Queen, we are fascinated with them.

And then in countries like ours that we don't have royalty, either we just stay fascinated with royalty somewhere else, or we just create our own royalty.

Right?

I mean, you know, if if only Obama gets elected, the whole country will be different.

If only Chris Christie gets elected, everything's gonna be different.

My life is gonna be changed.

You know, or or or we crown Oprah or Bono or Jay-Z or JT or whoever.

We crown them and we adore them.

What are they doing?

Where do they live?

What do they like?

Who do they hang out with?

What do they think?

Like what does Bill Gates think about?

Whatever.

See, we crown people, we adore them.

And this isn't American, this is human nature.

The question is why is there this need in us to create and to crown kings?

That even when we don't have a king, we want to create one.

Why is there this constant need to admire someone and to adore them?

See, there's a memory in your soul and in my soul of a true king, a good king, that will rule over us perfectly.

And in the absence of that king, we go and get fascination with other kings.

And maybe you'd say, Well, I don't do that, I don't give myself over anybody, you know, I'm a pretty independent guy, I don't do that.

No, you find someone or something to crown.

I mean, this I'm talking metaphorical, right?

I mean, a few weeks ago we were talking about wells.

Right?

And we all have different wells we go to.

Now we're talking about kings.

That's all idolatry.

What do we go to for our satisfaction?

What do we go to for our validation?

What do we go to?

And if we don't go to God, if we don't see Him as our king, we will create other kings.

And whether it be a person, the possibility of a person, the possibility of a relationship, the possibility of a family, the possibility of like an ideal family that's not working out, or a job or an achievement, or a level to get to, all these things can be kings, and we do this because there's a memory in our soul of a true king.

That we actually want to be ruled over by a true king that is good for us.

See, we need King Jesus.

But what's interesting is we actually hate him.

Let me explain it this way.

My friend Jim Ryman passed this week.

I talked about him last week, I've talked about him the last couple weeks.

So eight years ago, I'm in church, Christianity church.

I can I remember it so clearly.

We're over on the left side of the church, and we're about eight rows back, and finished church service, and somebody pokes me on the back, and I turn around and he says, Hi, my name's Jim Ryman, and I introduced myself and I was new at the church.

And that was it, and I went home, and the next morning I'm having my devotion, and I'm in our little office in our little house in Grant Park.

I'm in my little office nook and finished my devotion.

I closed the book and I look down on the front of the book, it says James Ryman.

It says edited by James Ryman.

Like, that guy, what was it?

You know, and I quick Google, and I was like, oh, that's the same guy.

I'm like, I just met him, I'm reading his devotion, and so we we I email him, and before long we start having lunches, and we start having lunches all the time.

We would have lunches every few weeks, and we wouldn't have an hour lunch.

We have like a three-hour lunch.

We just camp out, and we talk about church, and we talk about theology, we talk about family, and we talk about books, and we talk about writing.

And for me, it was it was the first time someone had no reason to invest in me.

And he did.

No reason.

No advantage to him.

And just and and not like, yeah, I'll grab a lunch with you.

But time over and it is it is so strange to think that we won't have another lunch.

That when Brad asks me a tough theological question, I can't call Jim and say, hey, I got this question, you know, can we get together and taunt us through?

So he helped me with my first book proposal, and that one got turned down, but he he he ushered me into a relationship with some great people who helped me with the eventual book that I did get published.

And so it gets under a contract, and I think I mentioned this last week, and and so I get this the manuscript, and I want to make sure like I don't have some massive theological blunder in it that I'm not seeing, and so I send it to Jim and I said I don't have a lot of time, they want it really quick.

Can you just read through it?

You don't have to edit it.

Don't edit it, Jim.

Just read through it and see, you know, did I is there anything big in here that just needs to be fixed?

And and he calls back three days later and he says, Okay, Russ, I've um I've read it.

Um, you know, basically I've worked like mad for the last two days, um, stayed up really late, worked all night, worked all day, two days, and I I couldn't just read it.

I just fixed, I just went ahead and fixed everything.

He's I'm gonna send it to you, and what I want to let you know is it's really marked up.

And so he sends it to me, and I can remember sitting at our kitchen table when I opened it, and I opened the document, and it's track changes in Microsoft Word.

So everything shows up in red that's been changed.

You either accept it or you reject the fix.

And it's just it's just it's just red, like page after page.

And so I start going, it's all grammar.

It's not the theological, I was safe on.

He's like, You're good on the theological, your grammar's horrible, which I knew.

And because even when we'd have lunch, he said, You're a smart guy, you should speak like you're a smart guy.

And so he would correct me when I spoke incorrectly, and it drove me nuts.

It drove me nuts.

But but it was good for me, right?

Like, isn't that the interesting thing?

Like, like he was doing something good for me, but I hated it.

Right?

It just gnaw on me.

He's like, You're a smart guy, we've got to get your grammar together.

All right, so I opened this document, and it is just it's just read.

And so for the first few pages, I'm I'm reading each one and seeing what he did, and go, okay, I accept that.

And the next one I accept that.

I get it, it's about a 200-page manuscript.

I I'm maybe I'm maybe 20 pages in, and it's been like an hour and a half, and I and I realize something.

There's this other button, accept all, and I just go, accept all, and it's done.

I just accept all, changes all of it.

And so he calls about a week later and he says, Um, I think we I think we should get together.

I kept I kept a list of all of your writing tendencies that are that are bad.

And we need, and I need this, right?

I mean, I want I want to be a good writer, I want to be an eloquent guy, and so I I need this.

And I've I've asked him for this, right?

Like, hey, please help me.

And we and what's amazing about this, again, is that he's doing this out of goodwill for me and out of love, and there's other writers that are paying him for this, and he's calling me and saying, hey, uh, and uh, and he's like, I don't want to do over lunch, I want you to come to my house because it's gonna take a while.

And so I get to his house and we sit at his kitchen table and he has his list, and it's maybe 20 or 30 like tendencies that are just patterns, basically, just bad patterns within writing.

And so we go through them, we work through them, and I'll just be honest, I hated it.

Right?

I mean, being told how you do something wrong over and over and over again, just you know, but I but I but but I needed it.

I needed it and I hated it.

Right?

So like the the standard of the king of grammar, which I would call Jim, my friend Jim Ryman, the standard of the king of grammar was both good for me and at the same time it produced a certain amount of hate in me.

See, we've never been good at receiving authority and facing our failure.

And this is what's going on with us and God is this standard that is good for us, this authority that's good for us, and at the same time, this rejection.

I mean, Romans 8 says that in our natural mind we're at enmity with God.

We want to be at enemies with God, that there's a true king and we hate him.

Because he has authority over us, he's a standard of a righteousness over us.

And we don't live up to it.

See, what God says is he says to us, you don't get to decide how you handle your money.

You don't get to decide who you have sex with, you don't get to decide how much you eat and drink, you don't even get to decide timetables on a lot of things that you really want or want to control.

I mean, God says to us, be holy.

Have no other gods.

He says to us, you bel you belong to me.

Kind of makes us squirm a little, right?

I mean, he doesn't say to us, let's sort of have a relationship, let's meet halfway, like I'll meet you halfway with my grace, you meet me halfway with all the good things you do, we'll come together, you can keep some dominion over some stuff in your life, and then other stuff, like maybe you can invite me into, and we'll have a good relationship that way.

No, God comes to us and he says, I own you.

I own you.

And in our natural self, we go, I don't know if I want to be owned.

I mean, I don't mind like some sort of like partnership.

See, we we need a true king at the same time we hate him.

And it doesn't matter if we're religious or if we're like flailing pagan lifestyle, either way, we can rebel.

We can rebel in our own self-sufficiency.

I will, by my own self, be my own God, and either produce my own righteous acts to fulfill, feel validated before God, or I'll seek my own pleasure and feel validated as a person over here.

Either way, we can still be in the position of saying to God, I hate you.

We can be religious and say to God, I hate you.

That's the first gift, gold.

The news gets better.

All right, that was that's bad news.

Good news.

The good news is that the second gift and the third gift, the second gift is frankincense.

And the NIV is this generic term, incense.

So frankincense is this fragrant gum that's distilled from a tree.

It's a white resin.

It's very sweet when it's burned.

And so priests would use this in sacrificial burnings.

Priests still use it today in very high church.

They'll use this to burn.

You see, the guys with like the long kind of gold chain and they're kind of waving that.

A lot of times it might be frankincense in there.

So in Leviticus 6, 16, we see, in Leviticus 16, we see a high priest must enter once a year into a holy place with the blood of rams to make offering, a former reconciliation between man and God.

Blood was life.

Blood is life.

The shedding of blood over death is what gave us and still gives us right relationship with God.

And so the fact that Jesus is getting frankincense, he's getting the very thing that's burned by priests, is basically coming to Jesus as baby and saying, You're you're the priest.

Here, Hebrews 7, 23 through 28, it's better than I could explain it.

I can't explain it this well.

I'll just read it.

It's a bit of reading, but it explains it much better than I could.

Now, there have been many of those priests since death prevented them from continuing in office, but because Jesus lives forever, he has permanent priesthood.

Therefore, he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.

Such a high priest truly meets our need, one who is holy and blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens.

Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the other people.

That's how the other priests are having to operate.

Continual sacrifices.

He, Jesus sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.

So this is the picture here that Jesus is the high priest.

And he would go and he would make the final sacrifice.

But it's not of a goat, it's not of a rain, it's himself.

He is enough.

What this means for us is it means that he is righteous and we are made right with God by what he did for us.

Which brings us to the third gift.

Myrrh.

So this is this gum that's produced by a thornbush that a very good smell.

It hardens and becomes very deep red in color, used mainly to embalm people.

Alright, so just let's let's pretend you're Mary.

You get pregnant, not by a man, you become pregnant.

Um, so that'll throw you off a little bit, right?

Uh so you you become pregnant without having had sex, you become pregnant with God's child, and then Joseph sticks with you as a good man.

God comes to Joseph to sticks with her, sticks with her, they go to Bethlehem for the census, they get there, nowhere to go, homeless, shack up in a stable, have a baby around farm animals, wise men show up, and they give them gold.

I really like that.

That's great.

Frankincense, I'm feeling pretty good about that.

I mean, it's kind of like you know, priest Jesus, maybe he's gonna be a godly priest.

And then and then myrrh.

You just gave me something that is used to embalm people.

You know, thanks, appreciate that.

But this gift is saying he he was born to die.

He was born to be the sacrifice.

And what this means for us is it means that that the deal has been done.

It's over.

God made the deal.

He handled it.

What needed to be paid was handled in Jesus.

And what it means we don't have to keep making deals.

We don't have to score keep, you know, how righteous I've been today, and I've got to be a little bit better tomorrow.

We don't have to score keep on all of this.

We don't have to make our own sacrifices.

We don't have to feel horrible one day because we did something, and oh well, I'll pay it back and I'll get back tomorrow.

We don't have to go through that.

We can rest in Jesus and feel sufficient, validated, accepted in him and what he did for us.

We don't have to barter with God anymore.

We don't have to make deals.

We are made righteous, though we are unrighteous because of what Jesus did for us.

See, if you don't receive this king.

This is what the gifts are saying to us.

If you don't receive this king, you will form a false king.

And submission to Jesus is actually freedom because what it does is it frees us from going to form other kings.

It frees us from the toilsome search.

And then if we find or form another king, the adoration of a king that doesn't really give to us what we need.

Most of us need to let him be king over some things in our lives we're holding on to.

You know, we're staying king over our regret, or we're staying king over our victimization, or we're staying king over our finances, or we're staying king over some relationship stuff, or some idealism we have about what our life should look like, our career, or family, and a lot of us need to let go of that and let him be king over that.

Our timetables, our desire for control, what does all of this create when we remain king?

What does all this create?

Worry and fear.

And that's not how children of the king can live.

Here's what's so good.

Uh because we're not good at receiving him as king, right?

Never, not always.

The king became a servant, that became a sacrifice.

Right?

Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the king became a servant, that became a sacrifice.

So that we who did not want to accept a king and his authority, that we can through this grace be wooed to accept him as king.

Rather than him just as king demanded of us.

This is what the Christmas story is about.

This is about the humble king.

And it's about gold being willing to be made frankincense and myrrh.

And this is the good news to us.

Let's pray together.

God, we thank you that you are more than gold.

You are fully gold, but you are more than gold.

You are also frankincense and myrrh, and through that we find rescue.

Through your grace and love to us, we find rescue.

God, would you help us confess the areas of our lives that we have not received you as king?

We don't let you reign over.

We're trying to do it ourselves.

Would you help us open our tight grip of independence and control that produces all this fear and worry in our hearts to receive you as king?

God, we thank you that in your grace to us, you you saw us rejecting you and you didn't just cast us aside, but you came after us.

We thank you that this Christmas story is about remembering that.

Remembering that you came to us while we were rejecting you.

And for that we are so grateful.

Pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.