Pastor Bryan Grant | God Didn't Wait | December 21st, 2025

Let's give the team uh a hand this morning.

How many of you are really excited for Christmas?

You can always tell where the Christmas people are because they're the first ones up.

And if you show them pictures of their house, it's like an elf vomited in their house.

It says lights and tinsel and all the other things.

And you know, it was interesting as I was thinking about Christmas and preparing the message for Christmas.

I I don't want to start as a downer, but I'm gonna start with a little do you know what you're gonna hear in a second.

When I was growing up, for me, uh my parents split when I was like 12 or 13, and so Christmas was really hard.

If you've come from a separated family, you know that Christmas can be a really challenging time.

I mean, it's challenging even when that isn't a thing.

Like sometimes, you know, this the expectations and the pressure and the things you have to do right, and this gift and that gift, and all those things are all going on, and all that's happening, but when I was growing up, the the pressure was I was going back from one place to the other, back and forth, and so there was this constant, there was in the middle of a separation.

And so when I was thinking about Christmas this year, I realized uh that in one house it was peaceful, in the other house it was a little bit stressful.

So when I got married, I was the Christmas Grinch.

You can laugh, it's okay.

I can look back and be like, I don't know, my brother-in-law always says to me, says, Oh, Brian, you got the uh heart that's two sizes too small.

Right?

Like, I really was Grinchy.

And if you want to hear more stories, you can tax Natalie and she'll happily tell you.

Um but when we moved here, uh after being married for uh around almost 15 years, we moved and we ended up coming to Kelowna, and when we left Prince George, which was where we're from, we left Prince George, there was just five of us.

It was just me, Natalie, the kids, there was just five of us at Christmas time, so it was pretty chill.

It was like low-key.

We had some friends there that were like really close and they were like family.

Um, but they were they were low low-key and chill as well, so our Christmases weren't super intense.

And then we come here, it didn't start that intense, but then we come here, and I end up building this amazing relationship with my sister and my brother-in-law, and they had two kids when we first moved here, I think that's right.

But then they kept on having kids.

So now they're at four, and I think that's where they're gonna stop.

But then when you put their family and our family together, that was a lot.

And then my mom was here, my grandmother was here.

So Christmases needed a little bit more, now it's a little bit more intense, and then as the kids grow older, uh, it gets louder and louder and louder and louder and louder.

And then my nephews came in with her mom and her mom's mom, and now there's more.

And the volume goes louder and louder and louder, and then my nephew is here, my older nephew, and he's got a girlfriend.

Now they're so every Sunday night we have family dinner, and there's like 20 of us.

Yeah, no, it's it's impressive what these ladies can pull off for dinner.

Like, but we all pitch in, we all have this thing, but when we came here, it wasn't just our family anymore.

Now the chaos was there.

Now you can walk into our house.

Oh boy, every single Sunday you can walk into the house, and I'll tell you, our family dinners are not calm.

It is just straight controlled chaos.

And I want to tell you that I'm not part of the problem, but I definitely am.

So, this is what it looks like.

And it's gonna give you like a little snapshot as to what Sunday nights look like every Sunday night that we get together.

Kids are playing video games in one room.

There might be board games in another room, there could be sports outside with badminton, volleyball, pool, depending on how competitive they are that day or the amount of anger they have for whatever reason.

The volume just goes like this and this and this, just stacks.

Parents are in the kitchen, we're making dinner, we're talking, we're drinking coffee, we're having a great time.

There's movement everywhere in this house.

There's not a place that has no movement.

Oftentimes there's yelling, sometimes there's laughing, many times there's crying.

And as long as it doesn't come near us, the crying is okay.

Right?

It's fine.

And this is what me and my sister say all the time it's fine, it's fine, everything is fine, it's fine.

Whenever we hear the crying.

So whenever we invite people over to our families for dinner on Sunday nights, I always feel like I need to warn them.

And if you've ever been to this house and you're an introvert, I am so sorry.

It is so sometimes I'll I'll either talk to him beforehand, just so you know, the level is gonna be here, and you're always here.

And so you're about to experience a new level of happiness and joy and crying and pain and tears and sports and games and whatever else happens to be going on.

I don't feel like I need to apologize to them because I love my family, I love what we do, and it's so great that we get to be connected that way.

But when they walk into the house as soon as they get to the door, I can imagine them thinking, What did I step into?

As they hear the noise before they even get to the door.

So I know the pressure of this season.

I would say that for many of us there is a type of pressure.

And so today I want this message and everything that I talk about to point us back to Jesus because that's the reason for the season.

I love that cliche.

It's the most cliched thing we can say around Christmas, but it's the most true.

He is the reason for the season.

This is what I love about this, and the shock of Christmas can be this.

Just like when people come to our house and they come in for the first time, they're standing at the door.

I looked at it like this God looked into the chaos of our world, didn't stand at the door waiting for it to calm in.

Calm down.

He stepped into it.

Amen.

So I want to start with John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

And we're gonna go from 10 to 14.

Then I'll tell you this, I'm gonna go from 14 backwards, because I like to do that sometimes.

This is what it says, he was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.

What I love about this Christmas story and the wonder of Christmas and the theme that we're in is I have a title here that says, God didn't wait.

It reveals this really interesting truth, the startling truth, maybe in some cases, God did not wait for the world.

He didn't wait for the culture to be neat and clean, didn't wait for anything that had to be right to step in.

He didn't wait for peace treaties, for moral reform, for the government to make the decisions, for the humanity to get its act together.

God chose to enter chaos at its worst, at our worst, at our hardest times in our biggest struggles, our deepest brokenness, not because chaos was acceptable, but because love could not stay distant.

That's the heart of Christmas.

Whenever you hear the word Emmanuel, that means God with us.

Not after we are fixed, but while we're falling apart.

I remember my conversion back to serving the Lord when I was like 18 on a missions trip.

It wasn't because everything was going perfectly in my life, it was because I was broken and I was hurting and I had pain and I had stuff that was going on, and I went back to the Lord because I'm like, God, you gotta do something.

This is terrible.

He met me at a terrible at a time that was really hard.

That's the heart of Christmas.

And sometimes these things get a little bit uncomfortable when we talk about this because the moment that we hear that God comes into our chaos, instinctively, sometimes our desire, maybe it's just me, you don't have to put up your hand if you agree with me, we hear God with us and we think, okay, now I gotta get my stuff together.

Well, God is here, so now I gotta get it already.

But if God came close before anything was cleaned up, then holiness cannot be the door God walked through.

I'm gonna explain this.

Holiness is what begins after we have already responded to Him.

God did not come because we were holy.

We learn what holiness is because He came into our life.

Because when He was born, something shifted in the whole world.

Holiness is not the condition of God's present presence, holiness is the result of God's presence.

Do you know why this matters?

It's where our focus is at Christmas time, what the pressure is, where those things are.

We turn Christmas into pressure instead of wonder when our wonder isn't attached to who Jesus is.

Christmas is not saying, fix it and I'll come.

I always think of field of dreams.

Build it and he will come.

Only some of you got that one.

But it's God saying, I'm going to come anyway.

So often our instinct is to clean up.

You know what?

What happens when people come over to your house?

What's the first thing that you do?

How many of you have seen that friends episode where people are coming over, and I think Monica shoved everything into the closet, and then Joey opened it and it all fell down, or we've seen that in cartoons growing up?

That's what we do.

When we hear a Christmas message about God coming close, we don't expect the word holiness to show up.

I know I didn't when I was preparing for this.

Holiness isn't a shift away from God's grace.

Holiness is what grace produces.

Like I said, when God moves in.

If Christmas is about Emmanuel God with us, the real question isn't, did God come?

The real question is what happens when he does?

Like I said, what do we do when we expect company?

We clean, we hide the mess, we lift up the bed, we shove everything underneath, or open up the closet, and we try and close the door.

Hopefully, not a bowling ball at top.

No?

Just Hollywood thing.

We shove it under the bed.

We present the version of the house that we wish was normal.

If you're honest with yourself, that happens three times a year.

And one of them may not be Christmas, but I'm saying it happens three times a year.

This is what I want to get to is that God didn't wait for the house to be clean.

He moved in when the mess was still on the floor.

Is trusting God enough to stop hiding all of our stuff?

And when we do that, we sometimes think, we get to this place where we can sometimes think if I stop doing all those bad things, God's gonna be impressed with me.

And I love what Josh said this morning.

It has nothing to do with how good you are, how smart you are, how charismatic you are, what you've done, your actions, any of that.

God gave his son for you free of charge.

So what do we do?

We sometimes manage symptoms instead of surrendering what our motives are.

This is the heart of Christmas.

Jesus is the heart of Christmas.

Matthew 23, 25, 6 says this, and he Jesus speaks very clearly to this.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees.

I promise this will go where I need it to go.

It says, Teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites, you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indul indulgence.

Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and dish, then the outside will also be clean.

Jesus isn't against holiness, he's against performance.

This is where people start getting Christmas wrong, church.

We start thinking that the gifts and the tree and all those things matter more than Jesus.

And quickly and easily, I will tell you, because I've been sucked into it as well, our attention wavers from the reason for the season.

This is what Jesus is saying in this moment is that we see that the Pharisees they didn't lack discipline.

They had lots of discipline.

But what they did have is they lacked surrender.

They lacked a willingness to go to Christ first, they lacked a willingness to submit their way over God's way.

They cleaned what people can see and ignored what God could see.

This is why Jesus always says to us, we have to start on the inside.

Because real holiness doesn't start with behavior, it starts with his presence.

So I want to give you what I believe is a full definition of what holiness is, and this will tie into Christmas.

I love the wonder of Christmas on this.

It means to be set apart for God.

This is what holiness means, to be set apart for God, to be stink, to be distinct from sin and world, to be rooted in the Christ, Christ's nature.

Holiness doesn't mean perfection, it means alignment.

If you're trying to be perfect, you've missed the point.

Holiness is choosing God when no one is watching.

Sitting on your phone late at night, what are you reading?

What are you watching?

It's when your private life begins to match your public voice and your public faith.

Holiness is honesty with God.

Bringing the real mess, not the curated Instagram version.

Because God cannot heal what we keep covered.

Holiness is saying yes and no on purpose with purpose, saying yes to what pulls us closer to God and no, what's distracting and dulling our conscience.

Those things that actually dull when sin comes in.

This is what happens because sin always costs more than it promises.

Holiness is not being better than others, it's being more available to God.

If sin, in our sin, we heard this phrase that we say here, it's living distant or divided from God, then holiness is living whole before him with restored heart, restored life.

God, you probably have heard this before, God does his best work when we're out of brokenness.

God doesn't do his best work because of the chaos and because of the brokenness, he does his saving work in spite of our struggle.

Is this okay?

See, this is the thing, is the contrast between these two things is big.

We try and tidy up, we try and have righteousness our own way, we make a mess of it.

But then God comes in right into the middle, like a soldier, like a storming in.

Sometimes we're unprepared for what God is bringing.

But that tension that we have between his ways and our ways is part of what makes this Christmas story so filled with wonder.

There's two scriptures that we see that help us see what God is really doing in this moment.

I want to be start with John 1.14.

The word became flesh and dealt among us.

John, in this moment, is writing to Jews that were shaped by the scripture and to Greeks in this time that were shaped by philosophy.

And in this passage, he confronts two things.

One of the things that they were saying, the word became flesh, he's pushing it back, pushing back against two really bad ideas.

One is that Jesus was just a good teacher, that he wasn't God, he was nothing, he was just a really good teacher.

And the second, that Jesus only seemed human.

There's a reason why this is so important.

Some people believed that spirit was good and flesh was bad, so that God would never take on a body.

John says that's wrong.

God didn't avoid flesh, he entered it.

So this is why this scripture matters to everything that we're talking about.

The word dwelt that we see in here when it says the word became flesh and dwelt among us, literally means Jesus threw up a tent among us.

He wasn't looking from heaven, Jesus came in close to where we were.

He came close to you in the person of Jesus Christ.

We don't have to struggle to find him.

He came to you.

Sometimes we think that we have to go from place to place, church to church, prayer meeting to prayer meeting, Bible study to Bible study to find God, and worship night to worship night just to find him when really we just have to sit still.

How many of you have ever been lost?

I like how 99% of the room didn't want to admit that they've been lost.

What is the number one thing you're supposed to do when you get lost?

Those of you who didn't say it out loud are the ones that got lost and then they couldn't find you.

The number one you're supposed to think you're supposed to do is stay put.

Things that kids never do when they get lost.

My sister had Walmart shut down to find one of her kids because they couldn't find him to find out he was outside.

We lost one of our kids in the middle of Walmart, and he thought it was funny, right?

And he kept on going from rack to rack to rack while we literally had security looking around the place for it.

I'm saying mine out loud, you don't have to tell me, but I know what happened to some of y'all.

Right?

This is what happens is we we need to sit still when we get lost.

And if we're going from place to place, thing to thing, Bible study to Bible study, thought to thought, music to music, all that stuff, and we don't stop, we won't find him.

Because you're looking for everything except for the wonder of Christ.

That's why that word dwelt matters so incredibly much.

He moved in.

He showed up.

He took on flesh to be with us, not to be distant, not to be that God that sits way up there and we can't ever access him.

He lived in our world.

He walked with people.

He would have had to sleep, he would have had to eat, he would have had to do all the things that we as humans have to go through.

That's the wonder of Jesus.

Then he says something just uh earlier in John chapter 1 it's the light shines in the darkness, and darkness does not overcome it.

John 1 · chapter mention

He was born into a really challenging time.

Pastor Brody and Pastor Malachi both in their messages, and Pastor Brody has touched on aspects of this.

Jesus was born into chaos.

Not comfort.

There was no fancy hospital room for his birth.

It was messy, loud, exhausting.

Pastor Malachi gave us a great picture last week of what happened with him and his uh first baby birth.

The setting was humble and it was unclean.

It was a stable, it was a manger, there were straw, the animals, and all the smells that come with it.

At that time, there was a social scandal.

Mary was unmarried and pregnant.

Jesus assumed Joseph assumed unfaithfulness.

And that was an honor-shame type of culture at that time.

That meant gossip and disgrace, and it could have been real danger for them.

Rome ruled with violence.

A census forced travel.

Herod responder responded with Jesus' birth with fear and murder.

He ordered the killing of babies under two because he was so nervous about the king, about the prophet, the prophetic that was coming.

The first Christmas was messy in all different ways, physically, socially, emotionally, spiritually.

It wasn't your Hallmark idyllic Christmas scene that you see everywhere.

I'm gonna try not to pick on Hallmark today.

I want to, but I'm resisting the urge.

And God showed up anyway.

Not after the chaos was resolved, because nothing was resolved when he was born, other than we have the Savior of the world now as born.

And this wasn't a surprise.

Just want to give you a little background on this.

This wasn't a surprise.

Isaiah had seen it coming earlier.

We see in Isaiah 9 the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.

And on those living in the land of deep darkness, a light had dawned.

And this is where we start to see the we see the two stories come together.

Because Christmas is not just about God entering chaos, it's about what happens when we recognize Him.

Isaiah isn't talking about.

Just a bad week or a bad season.

He's talking about darkness, oppression, fear, violence, hopelessness, all that was normal for Israel.

And when Jesus was born, not much had changed.

Rome was in charge, injustice was common.

Herod was paranoid and murderous.

Tough guy to take go after children.

Darkness wasn't an exception.

It was the environment that they lived in.

And in that world, this is what I love, we're coming back to the wonder.

God didn't send an army.

He didn't launch a political movement.

He didn't start a revolt.

He sent a baby.

Again, the wonder of Christmas.

He sent a fragile, vulnerable, couldn't take care of himself, child, light of the world wrapped in flesh in that moment.

Light that brought hope.

Like I said before, would cry with us, bleed with us, walk with us.

And all of these stories tell the same thing from different angles.

This is the wonder of Christmas.

This is how God saves.

He shows up when we're not ready.

That usually means that we're getting close to being ready.

God turned the lights on.

Emmanuel, God with us, stepped into our messy reality and everything shifted in a minute.

So here's the part that we don't oftentimes sit with very long when we're talking about the wonder of Christmas.

This is what he says in that scripture that we had read at the beginning.

He was in the world.

The world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

This tells us something really important.

God wasn't absent, he wasn't distant, he wasn't hiding, he wasn't avoiding us.

He was present and still he was missed.

God was present and they didn't recognize him.

The problem was that God didn't arrive late.

I mean, we could put into like, Lord, you could have come at a better time.

Like send Jesus to be born at a time when it's like peaceful and loving.

There's festivals and there's food and there's parties and all that kind of stuff.

He didn't do any of that.

The problem was that he arrived wrong.

And I want to say this, I'm not saying God arrived, I'm disagreeing with the Bible.

He arrived wrong because of human expectation.

Jesus arrived exactly as God promised.

He arrived on time, fulfilled scripture.

God's plan wasn't wrong.

Human expectation is what was wrong.

They had an expectation of a different kind of Messiah.

We saw in John 6.

They thought they wanted to make him come and take everything by force.

And so Jesus is like, no, and he went up on a mountain.

It's like I don't want the king that way, so I'm going to go up on the mountain.

So they had expectations of him, the king to overthrow Rome.

He was going to be the one that redeemed Israel.

And this is the thing is that their hope wasn't sinful.

We still good?

It just wasn't the full picture.

Their expectations of Jesus were power, victory, and political freedom.

That's what they wanted.

And instead, they got humility, suffering, and the cross.

People do not reject Jesus because he is unclear.

They reject him because he disrupts control.

He rejects their or he disrupts their comfort.

He disrupts what they want to do.

This was God's design.

Right from the beginning, when Jesus was born as a baby, this was God's design.

Jesus did not fail to meet expectations, he exposed false expectations.

And again, this is where we go back to holiness and it begins to show itself even more.

The people that recognize Jesus, not that their lives are better or cleaner, they've surrendered lives to Christ.

Holiness, we go back to that whole thing, it's alignment.

That's not, that's not, wasn't their entrance requirement for being a Christian.

It was evidence that God had moved in.

I would ask, how many of you remember what your life was life before Christ?

Right?

Remember BB and the Grinch?

I believe I'm considerably less grinchy.

She said yes, begrudgingly.

But what happens is that when we allow the Lord to work into our life, and we allow an availability to his spirit into who we are and into how we think and in how we process and in how we pray and in how we live our life, inevitably, those edges, those things that are hard, those things that are super challenging may not get easier, but you're walking with a pay a peace and a faithfulness that eventually you get to this place you realize, boy, I can take on so much more with the Lord's help than I ever thought was possible.

That my the way I respond or the way that I think about a thing is much more the way God would respond and not how Brian would respond.

We begin to align with what the Word of God says, not with what we want to do.

We align with who He is and His character and His nature and who those those edges that are just literally want to like I always go back to driving.

I don't want you to put up your hands for this.

Some of you need prayer for your driving.

But that's one of those areas where maybe there's some other areas where you're driving and all of the unholiness comes out.

Amen, brother! Depending on how it was in the parking lot today, some of you may need to forgive each other and but it it it's it's those things where you realize over time that all of a sudden the Lord's response comes out of you, and how he has an expectation of your response, and you're expected to behave a certain way because you have a calling on your life as a believer, and he's gonna move you in a certain way, and the only way he's gonna do that is if you stop doing the things that you think is right and move to the things that he says is right.

Because his presence in us is what made me not want to end my children when they were younger.

It's only by God's great hand that I still have three children.

Maybe I'm the only one that would say it out loud.

I love my kids.

But you know what is when there's there's parts of you that are just so quick to anger and so quick to frustration and so quick to respond that as the Holy Spirit comes into you, he shows you a different way.

Soft answer turns away wrath.

We need to adopt that while driving and raising children.

Are we okay?

This is the wonder of God's plan and Christmas.

Think about this.

As he didn't stay in the manger, he didn't remain a baby, he didn't leave people as he found them, when Christ stepped into your life, movement followed.

Something changed.

In some cases, that change was big right away.

Man, there is obvious changes, and other times it takes time.

Both are valid.

What was that movement?

Sometimes we experience healing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, repentance, restoration.

We've been forgiven.

We realize that we're being transformed from the inside out.

God meets us where we are, but he loves us too much to leave us there.

It's here where the wonder of Christmas leads us back to where holiness lives.

We're not pretending we are clean, but we are saying yes to when God comes.

Holiness is not perfection, it's in a willingness to participate with God and saying, God, can you come into my mess?

You have authority here.

And do you know what I love about this message?

It's for everyone.

There's not one of us in this room at all that could walk away from something like this in Scripture and say, I'm gonna keep doing my own thing.

I'm hoping.

Sir Norm says this to me all the time.

He says, we don't want, when I come up here, wanting to be challenged, that's great, but we want to see change.

Because change leads you towards God's nature.

To the Holy Spirit.

No matter where you are in this season, He is here.

No matter where you are in the chaos, you don't need to have it all together before He comes and helps you.

The question isn't whether God is willing to enter into your world, to my world, and to this world.

The question is whether or not we're willing to see it and respond to Him.

If Christmas tells us anything, and I love this, it's not, it's for everyone in this room.

We can at Christmas focus on much of the event of Christmas and miss the heart of it, miss the wonder of it, the power of Christmas.

That he was born in 33 years later.

And in all of that time, we have miracles.

Jesus performing miracles.

Jesus seeing people, we watch people set free, people that were next to, that were lepers, that were healed, that were emotionally here, spiritually healed, physically healed because of what he did.

Now we have this track and we get access to that spirit in our own little walk.

Jesus came when everything wasn't ready.

I had this written down and I just can't have the worship team come up.

Can you just close your eyes with me?

I just feel like I want to say this.

This isn't like a uh put your hand up and respond, mom, but I when I was praying this morning, I just felt like if there's people in this room, that are struggling with shame, with guilt.

Just those two for right now.

If you're struggling with those things, I want to tell you, and you're kind of in your in your space and you're saying, I'm just gonna wait until it gets better.

Then I'm gonna come to God, then I'm gonna talk to God.

Doesn't matter if you've been a Christian in this place for 50 years or you've been a believer for two months or a week, if there is a struggle with shame and fear, especially just something about Christmas that just brings things up to people.

I want you to hear this.

He wants your heart.

He wants to set you free.

Because that is not a chaos that's too big for there's no chaos that's going on in your life, no struggle, no issue, no financial struggle, no emotional, spiritual thing that he can't work through with you.

Can you stand to your feet?

Just keep your eyes closed for a minute.

If this is you, I'm not gonna call anyone up, but if this is you, in your heart right now, we're just gonna sit for a minute or two, let the band play.

And you feel like I want you to say these words just between you and God.

God, I need you.

You have the authority to help me.

That's you, and you're struggling in this Christmas season for any reason, to say, God, I need you.

I want more of you.

Take a minute or two and just respond to him.