Christmas Series | When Jesus is King (Dec 19) Paul Little

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the Spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

And it is uh a blessing to be with you.

These last three weeks have been um an encouragement to me, and I've been honored to be able to come and just preach the word of God to you and get to know a few of you and be blessed by your fellowship.

And just I want to just thank you for the privilege of uh of these last couple of weeks and um being able to preach and share God's word.

Let me just begin with a um with a moment of prayer and ask God's grace upon us.

Father, your son, when he went to his hometown, stood up in the synagogue and said, The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to preach.

He was the greatest, most powerful, most persuasive, most anointed preacher that has ever lived.

And so I would pray, Spirit of God, that you would give me uh a portion of that anointing.

Just a little bit, I pray.

That I may take the word of God, the living word of God, and preach it well to your your kids, Lord.

I pray, Father, that you would use these next few moments as we interact together around this passage of scripture to change us and to challenge us and to grow us and to comfort us and do what needs to be done in our heart and our lives, I pray.

And so we just commit this time to you now and ask that you would use it for your glory and our sanctification, I pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So if you have your Bibles, turn to Matthew chapter two.

And this morning we're going to look at the story of the wise men.

And I'm going to read it for you, and um uh just we'll try to exegete it together.

The story takes place about a year to two years after the birth of Jesus.

So, in some senses, it's really not a Christmas story.

This is a year and a half, two years after the Christmas story.

And you'll notice that Matthew leaves a whole swath of information out.

So you read Luke's account of the birth of Jesus, there's all kinds of detail that Matthew doesn't include.

And he does that very intentionally, very deliberately, because Matthew wants to get to the theme of his book right away.

And the theme of Matthew's book is that Jesus is the king.

That's the overarching theme of what Matthew's book is all about.

From beginning to end, it is the sovereign kingship, the lordship of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so he wants to focus in on that right away, and that's why he skips a year and a half of Jesus' life and stops at this event.

So let me read it for you.

Matthew chapter 2, verse 1.

Matthew 2:1

Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, Where is is he who has been born king of the Jews?

For we saw his star when it rose, and have come to worship him.

When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all of Jerusalem with him.

And assembling all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.

They told him in Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet, and this is a quote from Micah chapter two, chapter five, verse two, and you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people, Israel.

Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared, and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word that I may come and worship him too.

After listening to the king, they went on their way, and behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was.

When they saw the star they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.

And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him.

Then opening their treasures, they offered him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, and being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.

So let me begin by asking you this question.

Does it seem strange to you that Matthew doesn't take any time to introduce the wise men?

He doesn't give us any preamble, he doesn't say, let me tell you about where these guys came from, let me tell you a little bit about their origin or history.

He just jumps into the story of the wise men without any introduction.

Now, I've asked myself that question, and I've often wondered why.

And so I want to give you my theory.

This isn't gospel, this is just my theory as to why Matthew doesn't introduce the wise men.

I think Matthew had every confidence that his Jewish readers, and Matthew has written to a Jewish audience, as I've said, Matthew had every confidence that his Jewish readers would know exactly who these wise men were.

They didn't need any introduction.

600 years before this, a young man by the name of Daniel had been taken from Jerusalem to Babylon by the King Nebuchadnezzar.

And Daniel chapter 2, verse 48 tells us that Daniel was made chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon.

Daniel 2:48

Every kid growing up had heard the story of Daniel.

Everybody knew about Daniel.

Everybody knew how he became the chief of the wise men of Babylon.

And I believe, and I think Matthew understood that his readers would know that these wise men were part of that group of wise men that Daniel had led previously, many years before.

They had his prophecies, they had his writings, and they were expecting the Messiah to be born.

Why was Daniel made chief prefect of all the wise men in Babylon?

I think you probably know the story if you've read the book of Daniel.

Daniel is taken to Babylon.

Nebuchadnezzar has a dream.

And Daniel is able to tell Nebuchadnezzar not only what he dreamt, but what his dream meant.

So Nebuchadnezzar has a dream one night, and he sees this magnificent statue with a head of gold, a chest of silver, a waste of what was it, brass, and then the legs and the feet made out of iron and clay.

And then from nowhere, this rock that is cut out without hands, not of human origin, in other words, comes flying into the scene, hits the statue, and destroys the statue.

And the rock that destroyed the statue begins to grow and grow and becomes this mountain that fills the entire earth.

So Nebuchadnezzar is blown away that Daniel is able to tell him what he had dreamt.

But what even is more astounding is Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar what the dream means.

Daniel says that the dream means this, Nebuchadnezzar, that in the history of the world there are going to be four great empires before God does something magnificent.

He says, You are the head of gold, and following you, there is coming three other empires.

And history tells us that there were three other empires after the Babylonian Empire.

There was the Medo-Persian Empire, there was the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, and then of course there was the Roman Empire.

And if you have your Bibles, I'd like you to flip back to Daniel chapter 2 to see what Daniel says in verse 44.

Daniel 2 · chapter mention

In verse 44 of Daniel chapter 2, here is the essence of the dream.

Daniel 2 · chapter mention

And in the days of those kings, so in the days of the Roman Empire, which was a confederation of kings, Herod, king of the Jews, was one of those kings, in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people.

It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms, and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.

Just as you saw that a stone was cut out from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, and the silver and the gold, a great God has made known to the king what shall be after this.

The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure.

Sixty years later, Daniel had another vision.

We talked about that during my first message here in Matthew chapter one.

Sixty years later, Daniel lived a long, long, long time in Babylon.

Near the end of his life, God gave him a timeline, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail again about that, but he was told that about 490 years after the decree given by Artaxerxes, who was a king that was going to follow later on, about 150 years later, after that decree would be given, the clock would begin, and that 490-ish years later, the Messiah would establish the kingdom that Daniel had foresawn.

He knew was coming.

So these wise men, these were guys who knew Daniel's prophecies, they read what he had written, and they were expecting something to happen.

All through the ancient world at this time, there was a palpable sense of hope and excitement because the prophets said something powerful was going to happen.

And that powerful thing was the birth of the Messiah, the king who would set up this eternal, everlasting, unshakable, indestructible kingdom that we call the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ or the kingdom of God.

The wise men did the math.

The wise men of the East did the math.

When they saw the star in the east, they knew that it was an indication that this king had been born.

So they jumped on their camels or whatever they rode and they followed the star, and it brought them to Jerusalem, where they anticipated that the king would be born.

Jerusalem is about five kilometers from Bethlehem.

It's basically just downhill from Jerusalem.

And so they get to Jerusalem expecting to find the king that David said would sit on his throne forever.

The king that Micah said would come from outside of time, from eternity to shepherd Israel.

The king who would be born of a virgin, as Isaiah said, who would be God with us.

And where else would this king be born other than in the palace in Jerusalem?

And so they get to the palace in Jerusalem and they meet King Herod, the king of the Jews.

And they're confused.

You see, what Matthew does in his book is he introduces us to the principle, to the idea, to the value, to the truth that Jesus Christ is King.

Now, obviously Herod didn't like this idea.

And what Matthew does for us in this passage of Scripture is he shows us the response to King Jesus.

King Herod responds to King Jesus.

The scribes and the teachers of the law respond to King Jesus, as do the wise men.

And so this morning what I want to do is look at five responses.

Five responses to this reality that Jesus is king.

It's easy for us to say Jesus is king, right?

It's so easy for us in 21st century evangelicalism to say, oh yeah, Jesus is my king.

But I want to challenge you this morning with that thought, that there are certain implications, certain consequences, certain results that must follow if Jesus is really your king and my king.

And the first is this when Jesus is king, I'm not.

When Jesus is king, I can't be.

When Jesus is king, I'm not.

By the time that Jesus was born, Herod the Great had been king of the Jews for about 30 years.

He had been given that title and that role by Caesar Augustus, no less.

And he had held that position for 30 years and he had held it ruthlessly.

He had absolutely destroyed anyone who tried to take his authority or usurp his place as the king of the Jews.

He killed his wife because he thought she was plotting against him.

He killed two of his own sons because he thought that they were plotting against him.

The older he got, the more paranoid and maniacal he became.

So that at the end of his life, not only did he kill all of the children in Bethlehem who were under two years old, he ordered that on his deathbed, he ordered that all of the leading citizens of Jerusalem should be arrested, and that when he finally died, they should be executed so that there would be mourning in Jerusalem.

That's the kind of man that this king Herod was.

He was barbaric, he was cruel, he was maniacal, he was irrational, and he was cruel.

So when these wise men showed up in Jerusalem looking for the one born king of the Jews, Matthew tells us that Herod was troubled, understatement of the year.

Herod was troubled and all of Jerusalem with him.

It's kind of like, you know, that old phrase they say, when mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

That's how it was in Jerusalem.

When Herod ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

Because they knew what kind of man he was.

He was troubled because he knew a new king meant a threat to his power, his position, his absolute autonomy.

So, right at the beginning of the book, Matthew is drawing a contrast between King Jesus and King Herod.

And he is showing us in Herod's example how some of us respond to the claims that Jesus is King.

He was unwilling to relinquish his sovereignty, his comfort, his control, and to submit to another king.

And Christmas forces us, and this story forces us to ask the question: Have we honestly bowed the knee to King Jesus?

Have we honestly come to that place in our lives where we are willing to give up our sovereignty and our freedom and our autonomy and follow Christ, the Lord, the King, the sovereign one?

Who is in control of your life?

Who has the final word?

Who decides what you do with your money?

Who decides do you marry that non-Christian guy or that non-Christian gal?

Who decides what you do with your career choices?

Who decides whether you go back to work or you stay and care for your children at home?

Who makes these decisions?

Is it our culture?

Is it what society thinks is the best?

Or is it Christ and his word and his truth and his teachings?

Like these are critical questions.

Absolutely critical questions.

Many of us in our culture are, we've just been through Remembrance Day, and that's a great, we should celebrate Remembrance Day.

We should remember the people who laid down their lives so that we could live in freedom.

But we've got to understand freedom properly.

The freedom that we have in this country, or the freedom that Christians should celebrate, is not personal autonomy so that I can do whatever I want to do.

We interpret this freedom to mean that we have untrammeled freedom, absolute autonomy, freedom that allows me to do whatever I want to do.

Well, if you're a Christian, you don't have any of that.

As followers of Jesus Christ, we don't have the freedom to do whatever I want to do.

I don't have autonomy.

I don't have the liberty to live my life without constraints, because I am constrained by the one who is my king, my lord, my sovereign, my master.

It's very possible that Daniel had in mind, Daniel, or I'm sorry, Matthew had in mind Daniel chapter 2, verse 44, where he says this that this new king, this new Messiah will establish a kingdom that will never be destroyed, and it will crush and put an end to all other kingdoms.

Daniel 2:44

Not only Herod's kingdom, but my little kingdom.

My little fiefdom.

My control, my power, my autonomy, my freedom.

You see, Christmas forces us to come to the realization that if Jesus is king, then I can't be.

If Jesus is king, then I'm not in control.

I'm a steward of my money, I don't own it.

It's his.

I don't get to do things that the scriptures tell me I can't do.

I am constrained by the premise that everything that I do should be for his glory and honor and praise.

It's not about my comfort, my retirement plans.

See, lots of people think that they can be Christians.

And Jesus can be my savior, and I can go to heaven, and I can pray the prayer and I can have, you know, hope of eternal life, but but don't ask me to recognize the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Folks, that is a pernicious lie of the devil.

Because if Jesus isn't Lord, if he is not king, he can't be savior.

Jesus is the King.

And because he is King, I cannot be King.

I gotta get on my knees before the cradle.

I gotta get on my knees before the cross, and I've got to say, Lord, Master, God, King.

We just sang it this morning.

I give myself to you.

I'm yours.

I exist for your glory, to fulfill your will, to accomplish your purposes for my life.

I want to serve you.

I don't know if you've heard of George Mueller.

He was the guy who ran orphanages in Great Britain.

He was an amazing man of God.

You can look him up, read his read about his life.

It's one of the most amazing stories.

He was born in 1805.

Died almost in the 1900s, died in 18, I think it was 96 or something like that.

In his life, he took care of over 10,000 orphan kids.

He opened 117 schools.

He taught over 10,000, I'm sorry, 120,000 children in those schools over the course of his life.

At 71 years of age, his first wife died, and he remarried and he began a 17-year missionary career, traveling 200,000 miles around the world, all over the world, preaching the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And this is what he said at the end of his life.

He says, There was a day when I died.

A day when I died to self, to my preferences, my tastes, and my will.

I died to this world, its approval or censure.

I died to the approval or blame even of my brothers and sisters in Christ, my friends, and since then I have studied only to show myself approved unto God.

See, there's a guy who understands.

That Jesus Christ is the King of kings and the Lord of Lords.

And this passage forces us to deal with that reality.

If we call ourselves Christians, then Jesus is Lord.

Now, I don't know how that unpacks in your life.

I don't know what it means about sin in your life.

I don't know what it means about priorities.

The most recent example for me is that I ended my ministry after 32 years in Georgetown, and I thought, man, this is freedom, you know, 63.

Right?

It's Miller time.

It's Paul's time.

And I'm just going to kick back and I'm just going to, and the Lord had to deal with me.

Because it's not my life.

I don't get to make those decisions.

And that rotten Paul Whittingstahl calls me up one day and he says, I want you to do this.

And I had to go, oh gosh, I don't want to do that, but yes, I'll do it, Lord, because that's what you want me to do.

And I'm thrilled to do it.

Because if I follow my own plans, I'd be miserable.

Miserable.

So the first thing is this: that when Jesus is king, I'm not.

Secondly, when Jesus is king, I pursue a relationship with him.

So Herod calls the chief priests and the wise, the scribes, and all of the religious teachers of Israel, and he says to them, look, tell me where the Messiah, this ruler, this king is supposed to be born.

So they go back and they get out their scrolls and they study and they come back and they say, Well, it's right there.

Micah chapter 5, verse 2.

Micah 5:2

The prophet says that he's going to be born in Bethlehem of Judea.

And Herod wants to find out where this baby's going to be born so that he can kind of go and worship him too.

That's what he says, ostensibly.

So the wise men came back and they tell Herod where the baby's going to be born.

Wise men sends off, Herod sends off the wise men.

And one of the things that just is startling about this passage of scripture is that these religious leaders didn't go with them.

The religious leaders who knew that the prophecy had been filled, who had the same prophetic teaching from Daniel as these wise men had, these religious leaders who began to see that all of Israel's prophetic history was being fulfilled in the birth of this child, couldn't get themselves motivated to go to Bethlehem.

Now, if you've ever been to Israel, Bethlehem, if you just sort of fall, you will roll down to Bethlehem.

You don't even need to walk to get to Bethlehem.

It's just downhill.

They couldn't even motivate themselves to walk to Bethlehem.

And so you've got to ask yourself the question again: why is that?

Why were they so dispassionate?

Why were they so careless?

Why were they so uncaring that the Messiah potentially had been born in Jerusalem in Bethlehem?

As you read the rest of the book of Matthew, Matthew answers the question over and over and over again.

These people, these religious leaders, weren't looking for a Messiah.

They weren't looking for a savior because they had their religion.

They had their temple and they had their sacrificial system and they had their rituals and they had their tradition and they had their law built on the law of God and their rules and their regulations.

They had religion.

They weren't looking for a relationship.

They had religion.

They weren't looking for Jesus.

What becomes obvious as you read the book is that you realize they were content with the symbols of religion rather than the substance.

So no pursuing of a relationship was necessary.

They had the symbols, they had the temple, they had the sacrificial system, they had it all.

Why do we need a relationship?

I've got religion.

And folks, if you're a Christian, ostensibly, supposedly, and have no relationship, no appetite for a relationship with Jesus, I've got to tell you gently and lovingly as I can, you've got religion.

You've got religion.

If you can't be bothered with a relationship, if the Bible sits on your shelf, if prayer doesn't mark your life, if you're not in communion in some respect with the living, resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, you've got religion.

And it may be evangelical religion.

You go to church and you sing the songs and you give your tithe and you live a moral life.

You try to be a good person.

You go on mission trips, you do all of this stuff.

Folks, it's religion.

Because God calls us into relationship.

That's the foundational thought of the incarnation.

God became a man so that we could relate to him personally.

That's why Jesus, at the end of his life, at the end of his ministry in John 17, he says to the Father as he's praying, and this is eternal life, that they, speaking of the disciples, might know you, the only true God and me, Jesus Christ, whom you sent.

And that word knowledge there, that word know doesn't mean to intellectually comprehend or understand.

It means to live in relationship with.

Sometimes I think the most dangerous place to be is sitting in an evangelical church.

Because you've got your religion right.

Because it is right.

It's theologically correct.

But if that theological correctness, if that theological precision hasn't traveled from our brains to our hearts, if it hasn't sparked a passion for a relationship with the living God and the person of Jesus Christ, we've got religion.

And we need to repent of it.

Religion's safe, it's comfortable, it's like an old pair of slippers.

We just do it.

And we live distant and in a cold, dispassionate relationship with Christ.

And that's why I said to the Church of Laodicea, right?

In Revelation, behold, I stand at the door knocked.

That's not about non-Christians.

Don't ever use that, by the way, as a invitation to come to Christ, that Christ is standing in the door, knocking at the sinner's heart.

He's not.

He's knocking at the door of the hearts of Christians.

He wants a relationship.

That's the heart, that's the essence of what we celebrate at Christmas.

God became like us.

Now he wants to relate to us personally and intimately.

Thirdly, I have real joy.

If Christ is king, I have real joy.

Not superficial happiness, real, down deep, absolute, foundational joy.

Joy that can't be taken from me, regardless of what happens in my life.

These guys went, the wise men went down to Bethlehem.

They followed the star, and the star came and stopped over this stable.

They went in and they found the baby.

And verse 10 says, When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.

And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary's mother, and they fell down in worship.

Part and parcel of knowing Jesus as King and living in relationship with him is a joy that Peter calls unspeakable and filled with glory.

It's a joy that almost doesn't have any earthly, any temporal foundation.

It's based in our relationship with God, the fact that we are forgiven, the fact that we are in Christ.

And this these men knew joy because they knew that they were about to meet the Savior.

The one that God had sent.

The one that they knew, according to the prophecy is of Daniel, was going to do six things.

And again, we talked about those last week, Daniel chapter 9.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

In that same passage that I referred to at the beginning of the message that was written about 60 years after the one that we started with.

Daniel said that when the Messiah would come, six things were going to happen.

And here are these six things that these wise men, I believe, were cognizant of.

They were going to finish, he was going to finish the transgression.

He was going to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place or a most holy one.

See, these men knew that although they didn't know about the cross, and although they didn't know all the details that we know in hindsight, they knew that this Messiah was going to bring an end to transgression.

He was going to finish sin.

He was going to bring in everlasting righteousness.

And on that basis, they rejoiced.

Their hearts were filled with joy, exceeding joy, inexpressible joy, filled with glory, because they knew that Messiah was going to deal with the greatest problem that mankind has ever faced, the problem of sin.

Now, from our side of the cross, looking back 2,000 years, we know so much more.

And so it could be argued that our joy should be so much greater than theirs.

We know about the cross.

We know about the perfect life of Christ.

We know about a substitutionary atonement for our sins.

We know that he took our place, he gave us his righteousness.

He died and buried our sins.

He rose again from the dead.

He is alive forevermore.

He sits in heaven today, interceding for us.

He is moving history towards its conclusion.

Someday He will come again.

We will spend eternity with him in paradise, in his presence.

Like we know all that.

And so we should have a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, as Peter says.

So I want to ask you the question: do you?

Do you have a joy this Christmas?

And I don't mean just like, hey, it's great.

You know, Christmas is awesome.

I'm getting presents.

I'm talking about a deep down, a joy that's inexpressible, filled with glory, an amazing joy.

A lot of us as Christians don't, and I and I think the reason that we don't is because we have a little residual religion still haunting us.

I don't know if you've seen this book or heard about this book.

It's called Gentle and Lowly.

Have you read it?

One of the best books I read this year.

I like I recommend it to everybody.

A little residual religion.

That idea that, you know what?

I'm going to do my thing at church and I'm going to please God.

And I'm going to work hard not to sin because when I sin, he's mad at me and he turns his back on me.

He's disgusted and he kind of looks askance at me.

Religion sort of is that idea that I work hard and God loves me.

And I work a bit more harder and God loves me more.

And I really work hard to not sin and he accepts me.

And when I sort of do things I shouldn't do, he kind of disapproves and sort of gives me the cold shoulder for a while.

And I kind of run from him and sort of fix myself up and make myself more presentable again.

And then I go back kind of guiltily into his presence.

That's religion, right?

Listen to what this guy says in page 71.

If you're part of Christ's body, your sin evokes his deepest heart, his compassion, and his pity.

He takes part with you.

That is, he's on your side.

He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.

He hates sin, but he loves you.

We understand this when we consider the hatred a father has against a terrible disease afflicting his child.

The father hates the disease while loving the child.

Indeed, at some level, the presence of the disease draws out his heart to his child all the more.

You see, that's who Christ is for us.

When Daniel said that the Messiah was coming to deal with sin, to bring in everlasting righteousness, what he was speaking about is the fact that when Christ died in our place, when he took our sin upon himself, he gave us his righteousness.

So that today there is nothing, nothing on earth, nothing in heaven, nothing under the earth that can ever, ever, ever separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

Your sin can't, your unfaithfulness can't.

Nothing can.

And that is the foundation of joy, inexpressible joy that is filled with glory.

You see, what Jesus did in coming and living and dying and rising again is make us absolutely, completely, and totally acceptable to the Father, regardless of how we mess up this week.

We are loved.

You are loved with a joy, with a depth that brings us joy.

An unconditional love rooted in the finished work of the cross.

Sometimes we don't know that.

And we don't rest there.

But I want you to rest there this morning.

I want you to rest there.

And I want out of that truth there to bubble up in your soul.

A joy.

I want you to rejoice this morning because you're loved.

And the thing that I often think robs us of that joy is our religion.

Our idea that somehow we've got to please God and we've got to make ourselves acceptable and we've got to clean ourselves up before we go into his presence.

Folks, that's just not true.

You're loved.

One of the reasons that I love the way we end our services now that we're part of the GCC is we say, you are loved.

And I know that we intend that to sort of communicate that this is a place where you're loved.

And it's true.

Unconditionally, absolutely accepted by a God who will never let you go.

Fourthly, and quickly, we worship enthusiastically.

As I just read for you, they went into the thing, they saw Mary with the child, and they worshiped.

They bowed themselves to the ground before the king.

They prostrated themselves and they gave him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrah.

It was costly.

It was costly.

These wise men force us to ask ourselves the question: what sacrifice, what cost does my worship of Christ require of me?

And I think the answer is that we're that we are called to bow down as living sacrifices and give ourselves unstintingly and unhesitatingly to Him.

That's what worship is.

It's not just singing songs, it's not just coming to church, it's not just listening to a sermon.

It is living a life on our face before God.

And lastly, I don't want to spend some time in this one.

Lastly and fifthly, we defy the state if and when it's necessary.

These guys were in Herod's jurisdiction.

Herod was the king, he was the legal authority in that jurisdiction.

But they had a higher authority, and that higher authority was God.

So Herod had given them instructions, and they were following Herod's instructions.

But at some point, God intervened and told them to go home by a different route.

After they had worshiped, after they had presented their gifts, after they had acknowledged the king, they heard from God in a dream and defied Herod in order to go home a different way.

They defied Herod in order not to betray the king.

Their allegiance to Jesus trumped their commitment and their allegiance to any earthly authority.

One of the things you see in the early church, read Acts chapter 4, Acts chapter 5, repeatedly, the apostles say, We've got to obey God rather than men.

Acts 4 · chapter mention Acts 5 · chapter mention

Our priority is not the authority of the state.

Our priority is the authority of God.

Now that doesn't mean that we have the right to defy the authority of the state.

But when the authority of the state impinges upon the authority of God, the only choice that a Christian has is to defy the state in order to obey God.

And I'm not talking about wearing a mask and this kind of stuff.

But we've got to ask ourselves the question very seriously now in Canada.

Who is ultimate authority in my life, the state or Christ?

I grew up in a time, and I lived in the sort of the afterglow of that time in history, that about 200-year period, when the in the West at least, the state and the church sort of shared very similar values.

I grew up in sort of that era when the laws that were passed by our government and the laws of God were in some sense in symmetry.

There was a correlation to a certain extent, to a great extent.

And so I was in some senses lulled into a state of security, thinking that the state was going to do the right thing.

But in the last 60 years, particularly in the last 10 years, what's happened in the West is that the government, at least in Canada, has chosen to move away from the Judeo-Christian foundations upon which this country was built.

And just recently there was a law passed called Bill C4.

I'm sure you've heard about it.

And I don't know if I'm going to break the law by saying what I'm going to say now, but I'm going to say it because it's biblical.

Bill C4 is a law that bans conversion therapy, so it prevents me as a pastor from sitting down with somebody who is struggling with homosexual attraction or somebody who is struggling with gender dysphoria, trying to figure out whether they're male or female.

It prevents me from sitting down, even though they want me to counsel them.

And I know pastors all over this country who are going to now wrestle with this.

Because a lot of us find it very comforting to run to Romans 14 or Romans 13 and say, Well, Paul says obey the state.

Paul says do what Nero says.

Nero is a bad guy, so we should do what Nero says, even though the government may not be good.

I think that's way too strong.

Simplistic.

Listen to what the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 9.

1 Corinthians 6:9

This is God's word.

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolater, nor adulterer, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

But such were some of you.

That's who you used to be: a thief, a liar, a homosexual, an idolater, an immoral man.

Or woman.

That's who you used to be.

And such were some of you.

You Corinthians, that's who you were.

But you were washed.

You were sanctified, set apart to be holy unto the Lord.

You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So that's the gospel.

That's the truth.

That's what the apostle wrote.

That homosexuals and thieves and liars and adulterers and immoral men and women and alcoholics can be converted by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and transformed and changed into his likeness and sanctified and made holy.

And if that's against the law to say that, I don't know what I like.

But that's the gospel.

That's the gospel we have preached for 2,000 years.

It's the gospel that the immoral man or woman needs to hear.

It's the gospel that the adulterer or the adulteress needs to hear.

It is the gospel that the homosexual needs to hear.

It is the gospel that the gender-confused kid needs to hear.

It's the gospel of freedom.

It's the gospel of Christ, the great liberator, who came to set the captives free.

And folks, we are on a collision course with our government, with our culture.

And it's imperative that if Jesus is king, and he is, that we are prepared to take a stand lovingly and graciously and not obnoxiously, but to take a stand for the truth of the scriptures, for the truth of the gospel, for the truth of the ethic that he came to teach.

If we really love the liar and the alcoholic and the homosexual and the and the gender-confused, if we really love them, we've got to tell them that there is freedom in Christ.

Remember, the people who were hiding Anne Frank, the people who hid Jews during the Second World War were breaking the law, and the people who were arresting them were following the law, right?

We have a long tradition from the early church, the covenanters in Scotland, the Puritans in England.

So many, John Bunyan.

John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress.

He was in jail for 12 years when his wife was poverty stricken.

He was in jail for 12 years because he refused to stop preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So we've got to be willing, I think.

I don't think, I know, we've got to be willing to take a stand.

And I'm not talking about wearing masks, I'm not talking about things that are essentially trivial.

I'm talking about things that are a matter of life and death, heaven and hell.

So if Jesus is king, what are the implications?

If Jesus is king, I'm not.

He is Lord and Savior and King.

If he is king, I pursue a relationship with him.

It's not about religion, it's not about do's and don'ts, it's not about going to church.

All those things are important.

But at the heart of it is a living, vital, personal, intimate relationship with the living God.

I have real joy rooted in the fact that I am forgiven.

I'm loved.

My sin has been dealt with.

God's arms are like this to me all the time, even when I mess up big time.

His disposition, his heart attitude never changes.

He loves me.

And that brings joy.

I worship him.

And at some point in time, that has to be a costly thing.

There has to be sacrifice.

And lastly, if necessary, and when necessary, I've got to stand up and say to the state, no, thus far and no further, I will not compromise on the gospel.

Because it brings people freedom and liberty and life as God changes and converts and transforms and heals what's broken.

Let me pray with you and we'll be dismissed.

Father, I thank you for your word.

I thank you for how it speaks to our hearts and how it transforms and changes us.

Lord, there are five simple little points here that may have touched each of us in different ways.

But my prayer this morning, Lord, is that you would take your word and I pray that it would continue to bounce around in our thinking, in our hearts, that it would change the way that we live, that it would reorder our priorities, that it would control us and subdue us.

That it would, in some senses, bring us to heal.

Because we know that you are the king.

You are the king of kings and the Lord of lords.

You are sovereign God.

And so we bow before you this morning and we tell you that we love you.

We love you with every fiber of our being because of what you did for us on the cross, because of who you are to us.

And this Christmas, I pray that you would just allow joy to fill our homes, fill our hearts, our families, and this church family.

As we remember again what it is that you have done for us and who it is that you have made us.

We're your people and you're our God.

And we love you.

And we say thank you for coming.

Thank you for living, dying, rising again.

And I thank you that right now you're alive, interceding for us.

So receive our worship this morning.

Receive our thanks and our praise.

We glorify you.

And we say again, we love you.

Amen.

Let me just say as I close, it's been a blessing to be here.

I thank you for allowing me to come and minister.

Two things.

Merry Christmas.

May God bless you this Christmas.

May it be a truly joy filled Merry Christmas.

And know this you are loved.

Amen.

God bless you.