Immanuel

Good morning. Grab your Bible if you have it

with you. We're going to be in Matthew

chapter one. There you go.

You can use that. I don't for those who have

joined us or those who have, you know, been doing church like

usual once every month we're in a new series called God with Us

and we get it out of Matthew chapter 1.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

If you don't have your Bible here because you're new to

church and you're, you know, exploring Christianity, then

we'll have it up on the screen for you.

Verse 18 says this is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came

about. His mother Mary was pledged to

be married to Joseph. But before they came together,

she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit because

Joseph, her husband, was faithful to the law and yet did

not want to expose her to public disgrace.

He hadn't mind, excuse me, he hadn't mind to divorce her

quietly. But after he had considered

this, an Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and

said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home

as your wife, because what is conceived in hers from the Holy

Spirit, she'll give birth to a son, and you ought to give him

the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through

the prophet. The virgin will conceive and

give birth to a son. We've been singing it all

morning and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with

us. Emmanuel, God with us.

There's power in the name. I don't know if you realize that

not just for the Israelites and the Jews, but for you and I My,

my family speaks French. Well, actually on cats side.

And so I don't know if you know this, but you know, you don't

call French grandparents Oman OPA.

You call the grandfather Bon Papa and the grandmother is

Bobon. Now, this was a little tricky

for our kids when they were young because they instead of

calling my grandmother Baban, they called her Bilton, which is

not far wrong since she turns 101 soon alive and kicking.

But we had to change that because there's power in her

name, even the wrong name. I mean, you look at the street

signs, hey, that they've taken down and the name changes.

Now you're going like, oh, what a waste of money.

Clearly, you haven't been to the Apartheid Museum because if you

had, you would realize there's power in the name, both the good

and the bad. But how much more the name

Emmanuel, God with us. I mean, there's so much wrapped

up in this one name that I realized what I have to do today

because, you know, I read that and I'm not in the Isles dancing

and singing like you and I should be.

So what I want to do today is I want to do what the optometrist

did to me a few weeks ago when I had my eyes tested.

You know, he's going through that little thing on the wall

there and it's like, OK, read from the top and it's EFPTOZ.

You can memorize it actually L And then he said no, no, to go

down to line number six. And it's like, is that an E or

is it 3? And then what he does is he

takes that little lens, it's an E.

So I want to do that over this verse, this name Emmanuel.

I want to take a couple lenses from Scripture so that you and I

can see something of the depth and the immensity and the

weightiness and the power of the name Emmanuel, God with us.

So here's the first lens. If you have your Bible, you can

page across to Philippians chapter 2.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

Or if you're just taking notes, you can jot that down.

I'm going to read from verse 5 so that the context is a little

outer whack. Paul's writing to the church in

Philippi telling them about how they need to relate with one

another, but he's mentioned something about Jesus, this

Emmanuel, this God with us that I want you to see the lens I

want to use. So verse five in Philippians 2

says in your relationships with one another have the same

mindset as Christ Jesus, who being in the very nature of God

did not consider equality with God something to be used to his

own advantage. Rather, his lens.

He made himself nothing, He emptied himself.

Some translation say, but taking the very nature of a servant

being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a

man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death.

Even death on the cross says there that he emptied himself,

He made himself nothing. This is the first lens that I

want to put over this verse. Emmanuel, in order to be God

with us, he had to empty himself.

He had to become vulnerable. He had to have nappies changed

and they didn't have Huggies back in those days.

And then maybe they wrapped them in leaves, who knows?

An honor. Leaves had to be burped, had to

be protected, incredibly vulnerable.

But also he went through absolutely everything that you

and our face from birth all the way to death, not just death,

execution. He went through humiliation,

rejection, persecution. He went through it all as he

emptied himself so that he could be Emmanuel, not just God for

us, but God with us. Now we miss that.

But I want to extrapolate just a little bit on a comment that I

heard recently, someone said, oh, I just love the Christmas

spirit because I was involved in getting a radio station

established many years ago. And we got the license in April.

We decided we're going to start broadcasting on the 1st of

September. So we had some time, We did DJ

training, built the studio in booths and everything like that.

As the music manager had the privilege of loading all the

music. And then we went live and there

was a few hiccups, but we sort of made it through the first

week. And right at the very end of the

first week, it suddenly dawned on me first week of September

that Christmas is coming. And as the music manager, I

calculated that I had to load between 4 and 500 Christmas

songs to populate a playlist through December and all the

competitions and all the amounts of Silent Nights and Jingle

Bells. And this was back in the 1900s,

you know, just after Colour was invented.

MP3's weren't a thing yet. We had two massive non gig hard

drives. And I had to sit and listen to

every one of these songs as I recorded it onto the hard drive

and edited top and tail. So when they said, you know, the

whole the spirit of Christmas, I was just like, whoa, yeah.

It's like, at least that's what I used to think until I read

this quote by Jr. Packer, which fits in so

beautifully with Philippians 2. It says the true spirit of

Christmas is not rampant, gaudy commercialism.

Rather, it is the spirit of those who, like their master

Philippians 2, live their whole lives on the principle of making

themselves nothing, spending and being spent for the benefit of

others. And then he says this Christmas

introduces us to a God like this.

What a statement Spending and being spent for others, because

here's the thing. I don't know if you've noticed

how amazingly generous poor people are to other poor people.

I don't know if you've ever had this out of the while back we

had a knock on the door and the guy wanted to paint, you know

that they paint your numbers on the on the side of the street.

And I could see he was living in the car looked like maybe a

girlfriend and or a friend and another oak allness skedunk and

he wasn't dressed too well. And we're like, OK, how much?

And I was like 200 grain to do this.

I said, OK, cool. You do mine, do my tenants and

you do my neighbors. I went in to get money and I

paid him like three times as much.

Then I walked inside. He's standing, he goes walking

up to the car and we got to the CCTV camera on the driver and

you just see him. He's darling at the money to

everybody because there's something about experiencing

hunger or poverty to have compassion on someone else who's

hungry and destitute. There's something about going

through divorce and aching for someone else who's going through

the same thing. There's compassion.

There's something about emptying yourself and going through

everything that you and I have gone through so that God is not

just for you. He's with you.

He's with you in that valley. He knows what it's like to be

rejected, to suffer, to be persecuted, to be an outcast, to

be abandoned. He knows what it is.

And the Bible shows us through Philippians 2, the Christmas

introduces us to a God like this, Emmanuel, God with us.

So maybe it's an E, maybe it's a three.

But let's put another lens on there.

This is what I call the most quoted verse in the Bible by the

Bible. This is from Exodus 34.

We're going to go right back to the very beginning here.

So in Exodus 34, what's happened here is Moses has asked God to

show him his glory. And God says, OK, I'm going to

put my hand over you, and then I'm going to proclaim my name to

you. So this is a moment.

This is what I call like a Ground Zero of God's character.

If you want to know what God is truly like, if you want to get

that lens to bring everything into focus, and this is a great

place to start. And so it says here, then the

Lord. This is verse 5 of Exodus 34.

Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him

and proclaimed his name, and he passed in front of Moses

proclaiming the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious

God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness,

maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness,

rebellion and sin. We could put like 15 lenses on

your eyes to give you 2020 vision there, but there's this

one that I want to pick up and that's the very first one.

Leave it up there. It says the Lord, the Lord, the

compassionate and gracious God. That's one lens I want to pop

up. Why compassionate?

What's, what's the big deal here?

Well, a couple things to know. Firstly, according to rabbinic

tradition, the words of Scripture are important, but so

are the order of the words in Scripture.

So that when you look at that, the fact that compassion is

first means it is first in importance.

It is the first thing God wants you to know about him, that he's

compassionate. OK.

He's not putting together a Tinder profile saying I'm kind

of compassionate, like to travel, have money enough to buy

planets. You know, he's not doing that.

He's intentionally putting it there because this is first and

foremost. I wonder if you know this God,

Maybe you know a God who's judgmental or or angry or

condescending or condemning, but that's not the God of Scripture.

The God of Scripture says to you, and I want you to know

first and foremost that I'm a God who's compassionate.

Now, the crazy thing about compassion is it's a feeling

word. And actually it comes from the

root word that it refers to a lady's womb.

So this is the picture of compassion.

This is a mother and all her feels for a newborn baby.

I don't know if you saw in the news recently, there was a lady

in Canada who rugby tackled the polar bear.

Talk about compassion. She hears this thing bearing

down on his children. That's what happens in Iceland,

I suppose. You know, come out the igloo and

no, Don, there's a polar bear going down the street at her

children playing with their bicycles and she rugby tackles

this polar bear nearly lost her life because then the polar bear

turned on her, but the children were saved and that's all she

cared about. That's compassion.

That is what God feels when he looks at you, when he sees your

sin and your decisions and your guilt and your shame when he

sees how you were abandoned by your father at four years old.

He rugby tackles the daylights out of that thing, nails it to

the cross and delivers you compassion.

You know, there's something to the guys here.

If you're married and you got children, you probably noticed

what I noticed. You know, it's one thing for

your girlfriend to change into your fiance.

That's nice. It's amazing when she goes from

a fiance to a wife. But there's something

unprecedented when she goes from a wife to a mother.

It's a change that blows you away, takes your breath away.

I remember when my first born was crying in the middle of the

night. My wife is down the passage.

She has changed the nappy and is already starting to feed on.

So like it's OK babe, I got this looking across the beds empty.

And I remember when my daughter this time last year ended up in

the ICU. I messaged my wife.

I said how how many days were you with Jim in ICU?

And essentially she was there until we were kicked out.

So we were having what was it? There was a Carol's evening here

and Kath had taken Jim to the see the doctor because there was

something terribly wrong. And I get this message.

It's serious. Come now.

So I rush my wife, wheels her into ICU and there she stays.

I had to take change of clothes, I had to take food, I had to

take shampoo. And she was there every minute

of the day, feeding her, changing her, helping her

shower. I remember, I think she's had

157 blood tests. Every time they drew a vial of

blood, my wife would take this. So sorry, just hold on a second.

She would pray over that blood before it went for tests, every

single one of them, because that's compassion.

They literally kicked us out. We were transferred.

She went in the ambulance. Of course, I had to go ahead and

swap my credit card, but she was in the ambulance.

And then she walked into the ICU again.

And eventually we got to when she was in in the isolation

ward, they said, listen, you cannot stay here later than I

think it was 10:00 at night. So he stepped out.

She stepped out into the corridor for the first time and

just broke down weeping. I want to be there for my

girlie. God wants to be there for his

girlie. He wants to be there in your

trenches. And this moves his heart so much

that he says, I will be Emmanuel to you.

God with you, not God. Now, I bet Midler got it

properly wrong. It's not that God is watching

us. God is with us, Emmanuel, God

with us. The third lens, and this is the

most important one, Best for last, but the hardest for last.

Because in order for this lens to turn that E or a three into

an F, you need to take a lens off, see?

Because you and I have the lens of Jonah in the place where we

need the lens of Jesus. And this is something I

discovered about myself when we went through the Jonah series

this year, because in the book of Jonah, there's these guys

known as the Ninevites. Nineveh was the capital of

Assyria, and the Ninevites were the arch enemies of the people

of God. They invented terrorism and

guerrilla warfare. They were wicked beyond measure.

And what happened was the Bible says in the book of Jonah that

their wickedness had come up to God.

And God says to Jonah, I want you to go not to destroy them,

but to deliver them from their sin.

See the Jonah lenses destroy the Jesus lenses deliver.

So here's they've discovered recently, actually prior to just

after we did the Jonah series, there was this archaeological

dig that uncovered a whole bunch of of books and part of a

library of one of the kings. And here are some of the things

that the king spoke of. Now I know we've got young ears

here. So I've done this down to PG13.

So if you look going like, Oh my gosh, that's terrible.

Just, you know, take off some of those lenses because one king

said, having defeated his enemy, he said, a pyramid of heads I

built in front of the city. The youths and their maidens are

burnt up in the flames. Another king said, I crushed

them like lambs. I cut off their precious lives

like 1 cut string, like the many waters of a storm.

I cut them open and made their lives pour out on the thirsty

ground. I flayed him.

I pierced his chin with my dagger.

This is the king. Through his jaw.

I passed a rope. I put a dog chain on him and

made him occupy a kennel. Now read those just to make it

clear that this is not the kind of place where you want to plant

a church. Most definitely not the place

where you want to be sent. Yeah.

You want to be a missionary journal.

There's a great place. Stop there.

You know in planet church that you have no heart for these

people. Actually what you want is they

need to get what they deserve. Jonah, you know the person that

had a heart for Nineveh was God. He says to Jonah, you go to

them. I want to rescue them.

I want to deliver them. Their sinners come up to me and

that requires judgment, and I want to rescue them and deliver

them and redeem them from the coming judgment.

And Jonah's going. Have you lost your morphals?

Go and destroy them. Because if you don't destroy

them, they're going to destroy Israel.

And God says God. And so he goes, and lo and

behold, they repent. And just as Jonah expected, God

relents. And this made Jonah angry.

I read to you from Jonah chapter 4 it says.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

But to Jonah this seemed very wrong and he became angry.

He prayed to the Lord. Isn't this what I said, Lord,

when I said, when I tried to stay at home, that is what I

tried to forestall. I tried.

I thought if I hang back a little bit you can destroy them

and go. Oh well, I was going to go, but

now they're all burnt to cinders.

That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarsus.

Why? Because I knew that you are a

gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in

love, A God who relents from sending calamity.

I wonder what lens you have. I wonder what lens has been used

against you, The lens of Jonah or the lens of Jesus?

Yeah, maybe the lens of Jonah was used against you by a family

member or a spouse or work colleague.

You know, you came into work and they just, oh, you're just

reeking of sin. And they jammed themselves in

between your issues and the compassionate, gracious,

merciful God. And they looked at you through

their Jonah lens and I said, no mercy for you.

Fire and brimstone on that. Maybe it was a pastor.

Oh, please forgive us, pastors. Maybe your life was falling

apart and some Jonah pastor stepped in between the

forgiveness of God and your issue and made the Jonah

announcements. That won't be forgiven.

You have to sort your entire life out.

And that lens worst of all is over our eyes and our life and

we forget that. He is firstly compassionate.

He has emptied himself. He goes through that thing to

deliver you, to be with you. I was walking a road with a

young girl a few years back and he was having a complete

meltdown. So the back story was there.

They lost their him and his sister lost their parents many

years back. And so they sort of grew up

depending on one another. And he got radically saved.

She got like nominally saved and he just was giving her stick.

And so he wanted to sit with me because he just discovered that

she was sleeping with her boyfriend and he needed the

pastor to tell her what for. And I hate Bud.

All I'm hearing is Jonah. I don't hear much Jesus here.

And I'm thinking, this is what I'm thinking.

Imagine if with her sleeping with her boyfriend ends up in

her falling pregnant. Who's she going to run to with

that shame and this brother, this Jonah looking down like

burn her to the ground. And I said to him, listen,

something like that happens. It's more likely that she runs

to an abortion clinic than she runs to her brother because she

will get more mercy there than her brother.

And I said to him, you've got to realize something and you've got

to realize something. I've got to realize something.

The people, the only people that felt uncomfortable around Jesus

were the jonotypes, the Pharisees, the religious, the

I've got it all together. You're failing, you're a

disappointment. People.

They were the only ones who felt uncomfortable around Jesus.

Those who felt most comfortable around Jesus were prostitutes,

tax collectors, criminals, Land Rover owners, Lewis Hamilton

fans. You know they do.

You see, because we're, if we don't have this lens, if we have

the Jonah lens, not the Jesus lens, we'll fail to see one of

the biggest things that stands above this eye test that asks

this question, what does God want of you?

See, if it's the Jonah lens, God wants of you performance and

perfection and try harder and do better.

But if it's the Jesus lens, what God wants of you is he wants

you. He wants to be Immanuel and it

moves Him so deeply that He was willing to pay whatever it cost

to have you, and it cost him His Son who died on the cross, so He

could take all your sin, everything that separates you

from him. Yes, even with sleeping with

your girlfriend, Yes, even getting pregnant out of wedlock.

Yes, He paid for all of that sin so He could take it on himself

so that He could forgive you and deliver you from that, but most

importantly deliver you to Himself because He is God who

longs to be with you. And you know this is the

narrative of the entire gospel from the very first page of

Scripture to the very last. Every epoch we find God

reminding us don't forget I want to be with you Genesis right at

the very beginning. Adam and Eve was it say says he

was with them in the garden in the cool of the day ended every

day walking with them in the cool of the day through the

garden with and when Adam sinned for those of you who still have

a Jonah lens when Adam sinned, you know the first thing God

said to them wasn't what have you done said where are you.

You were with me, but now you're not with me.

Something needs to be changed because you're not with me

anymore. Every epoch from page one we

find God wants to be with you. When the patriarchs Abraham,

Isaac and Jacob are established, he says I will be with you and I

will protect you. And when David becomes king, it

says while Saul is trying to slaughter him and all the

enemies of surrounding, he said God gave David favor because he

was with him. And when the nation of Israel

decided they wanted nothing to do with this God and turned

their back on him and faced all the consequences that they were

facing, he said to the prophet Isaiah, I'll be with you even

when you go through those deep waters.

And when Ezra was finally released to go back to Jerusalem

and rebuild the city, and the king was showing him favor and

giving him supplies, the king said, do you also want

protection while you take these supplies back to Jerusalem?

He said, no, no, no, I don't need your protection.

My God is with me and his hand is upon me.

And then we changed to the new epoch of the New Testament to

Matthew chapter 1. And it says he will be called

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

the Son of God, will be called the Emmanuel, God with you.

And when he chooses his disciples, it says this, it says

he chose 12 disciples because he wanted to be with them.

And when he had to do apart after being crucified and

resurrected, he says, don't you worry, I'm going to leave you

the Holy Spirit who will be your comforter and who will be with

you forever. And when they fast forwarded all

the way to the very last page of the Bible just before you

reached the maps, it says, I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

And this heaven came down to be among the people because God

would be with us. It is the meta narrative of

scripture, this God who wants to be with you.

And so to the students here who might still be here, maybe you

came up to Pretoria beginning of 2024.

And when you were packing your suitcase, you slipped your Bible

in first thing and and you were dreaming of something of what it

would be like to be in in the capital city and campus ministry

and life group. And you've heard about 3 CR, but

you arrived in the city and you realized, oh, OK, varsity is a

whole different kettle of fish. You know, I'm going to have to

push pause on, on going to laugh group and, and campus ministry

and everything. Just sort of find my feet here.

And then one thing led to another.

And you started dating a guy who wasn't a Christian.

And I mean, you know, you respected your faith, but he

didn't believe what you believed.

And then you started skipping Sundays because you were

sleeping off Saturday nights. And then you started with you

muting those Bible reminder apps to eventually deleting them

because they were making feel awkward.

And you look back at 2024 and you're going, I don't know when

last I was with God. What does God want of you?

He wants to be with you. Or maybe that couple everyone

spoke about because you had so much potential and, you know,

you got involved in Life Group and you're eventually leading

life group and you're just doing well in the workplace and just

the demands and everything. And you phoned Eugene.

You said, hey, listen, we're just going to take a bit of a

break. We're going to step back from

leadership. We're still going to be in Life

Group. But actually, that didn't really

work because the rhythms weren't there.

And then, you know, all those late nights on your cell phone

in bed, the intimacy between the two of you disappeared, let

alone the intimacy and those last minutes of a cooling day

between you and your heavenly Father.

And then you sent that text and she found out about it.

Or he found out about now your marriage is on the rocks.

What does God want of you? He just wants to be with you.

Or maybe you're that big hitter, the corner office guy lady

that's seasoned professional who's thrown yourself into work

for years and with every promotion they've increased your

portfolio and that has meant that you spend more time at the

office and let's less time at the dinner table.

And maybe your marriage has now gotten to that place where it's

running on fumes and your faith is fizzled out.

Your Bible lies untouched on the side of your bed while you're

checking those investment apps every hour religiously.

And your corner office has become a coffin for your

relationship with God. What does he want to view?

He wants to be with you. From the very first pages of

Scripture to the very last, He wants to be with you.

From the very first page of your life when He knit you together

in your mother's womb, till the day you and I breathe our last,

He wants to be with you. So much so that He said to Mary,

this is one thing you'll notice about me.

I will be Emmanuel, God with you.

That is the statement. This is the invitation.

What are you going to do with the God who wants to be with

you? What are you going to do?

The God who wants to be with you?