Christmas Chaos with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medichurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Hello, all right, MetaCurch.

How's everybody doing today?

Awesome.

Man, before I forget, Merry Christmas, Meta.

Awesome.

Thank you, man.

I love hearing it every Sunday.

And I'm so glad to see everyone here today.

If you're new to Meta, my name is Noel.

I'm the worship pastor here, and I'm so excited to be continuing this series that we started last week that we're calling Christmas Chaos.

This Christmas season, we've been taking time to acknowledge that holidays are often the messiest time of the year.

From broken expectations, like Pastor Tony talked to us yesterday or last week, to acknowledging painful change that has happened in our life, all the way to the tension that creeps into our lives from being around our extended families.

By admitting the messiness, we can look at the original Christmas narrative and really find hope for the season.

Now, we all know this, that Christmas time can be quite polarizing, right?

There's some people who really love Christmas time.

Who loves Christmas time in here?

Okay, not very many guys.

Uh-oh.

How many people struggle with Christmas time in here?

Okay, some of you are just completely indifferent.

Now, it may surprise you to know with a name like Noel, I actually fall somewhere in between those two.

I really do love the Christmas season.

I love making new memories, and this Christmas, especially, is very special to me.

It's the first Christmas me and Elizabeth and Jack are spending together as a family, and we get to make all these new traditions together.

And I also love honoring all the traditions I had with my family when I was growing up.

But it's also a time that I tend to struggle with.

With all the good things that come with Christmas, there's a whole list of things for me personally that I struggle with.

Let me give you an example.

I struggle with the reality of the passage of time.

And that may seem weird because we all know that time passes by, right?

Time is always moving forward, it never moves backwards.

But it's one of the hardest things that I deal with during the Christmas time.

I struggle with feeling so happy about years past and sad that those things at some level will never exist the way they do again in my memories.

I also struggle with the present in somewhat of the same way.

I do embrace the moment, but I also understand that that moment is fleeting.

It's going by quickly.

Pastor Clayton said it best a few years ago when we were talking.

He said, the problem with the present is that leading up to the present, it's the future, right?

And as soon as you get to the present, it almost simultaneously becomes the past.

It's always changing.

And that can make it hard to deal with.

And we won't even get started on the future, right?

We don't know what's gonna happen in the next year.

We don't know what's gonna happen in the next month.

We don't even know what will happen for the rest of today.

And while we can plan and while we can try and prepare for things that are coming our way, we have to acknowledge that there's a whole set of forces that are outside of our control that can mess up our plans and they can mess up our preparations.

The real problem, the real problem is that things are always changing, and change can be hard to deal with.

This Christmas season, this has been on my mind maybe more than ever.

And so, as I tend to do, I jumped into scripture to see if I could find any wisdom, any advice in the Christmas story to help me deal with a change in my life.

And my hope is that if you're struggling with change today in your own life, that you will get a fresh perspective on the role it plays in your life.

Today, our message is simply called change.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we love you.

We want to learn everything we can about you and what you want for our lives.

And so, Holy Spirit, we ask you to speak to us today.

Help us understand uh a new truth that we can apply to our lives so that we can live right in the middle of the purpose that you have for us.

God, we love you, Jesus, we worship you, and we pray all things in your name.

And everyone said together.

Amen.

Well, we're officially one week away from Christmas Eve.

It's kind of crazy.

It seems like this happens every year, right?

It's like the Christmas season comes and it goes by so quickly.

And by now, I expect that most of you have done some pretty Christmasy things.

Maybe you've decorated your house or you've gone through a drive-thru light display in San Antonio.

And if you haven't done anything and you don't really know where to start, which may be the case because not many of you raise your hand about liking Christmas, you can come and find me because I have lots of ideas.

I love experiencing Christmas.

And I do think that it's really important that we engage with all the good things that Christmas has to offer us.

At the same time, I realize that Christmas is hectic.

It's tiring.

It's why we made a whole series called Christmas Chaos.

If you're anything like me, then as soon as Thanksgiving passed, it's like your calendar magically populated with a lot of events that you're expected to go to.

You have Christmas programs at your kids' school, you have church programs that are happening, you have gatherings with friends, you have office parties at your work, and then you have the wild card.

Get togethers with your family.

Who even knows how that's gonna turn out, right?

It's either gonna be really good or it's gonna be really bad.

Either way, memories are definitely gonna be made at Christmas time.

Now, I didn't really grow up around my extended family.

My parents are originally from East Texas, and before I was born, they moved to far west Texas.

So when I was growing up, we were usually about eight hours away from my extended family.

Eight hours is a long distance.

You can't just pick up and go see the grandparents whenever you want to.

And so it was usually once a year that we would get to see my extended family, and that was usually right around Christmas time.

Most years we would do our family Christmas in Uvaldi, and then we'd load up our car and make the drive to Dallas where we'd spend a night or two with my grandma.

Then we'd leave her house, we'd go over to Longview, and we would see my aunt and uncle and cousins.

Then we'd go back home.

And that was about it for the entire year.

Now, some of you completely understand what I'm talking about.

Maybe you were raised in a military family, or maybe you're in the military now.

So being far away from your family is like not that uncommon for you.

But there's a whole group of people in here right now that have no idea what I'm talking about.

Like you guys see your extended family every single week, if not most days.

And those people are called San Antonians.

You guys have family all over the place.

I'm telling you, there is not one single neighborhood that I have driven through with Celeste where she didn't have a cousin that lived over there or an aunt that had worked over there, right?

She has family everywhere.

You guys absolutely know what's going on in the life of your family, but when I was growing up, I didn't know what was going on in my family.

We always had a really good time when we would visit, but because of our lack of proximity to them throughout the year, we usually spent that first night just catching up, letting each other know everything that had changed throughout the year.

And it was important that we do that.

We had to catch up on those changes, the good and the bad, because those changes would give us context that would be useful in our relationship and in our time together.

We've all had this experience, this experience at one level or another.

Maybe you've caught up with a friend before that you haven't seen in num in a number of years.

You're having coffee, or maybe you grabbed lunch with them, and the first thing you guys talk about are all the highlights of your life that have occurred since the last time you saw them.

Those highlights that you share, those are the changes that have happened in your life.

It's what you went through, or maybe what you're still going through.

So just think about it for a second.

Just think about this year alone.

How many changes have you been through?

How many changes have you experienced in your own life?

I think when you really start to consider how much change has been a part of your life, you'll be surprised at how often it has occurred just this year.

I used to have a coworker in a former ministry, she led our all-staff meetings, and every once in a while she would stand up and she would put her fingers in the air and she would smile and she'd say, The only constant in life who can finish it, I'll give you a hint, it's a sermon title, is change.

And right then I knew that we were about to learn something new about our organization.

Maybe somebody was leaving the organization, or maybe we're gonna have a new vision for the ministry altogether.

Whatever it was, I knew it was gonna take some getting used to.

Because change can be difficult.

We all have heard this saying before: the only constant in life is change.

It's not a new one.

In fact, the first time it was recorded as being said was by a philosopher that lived 500 years before Jesus.

So humans have known that the constant in life is change for a while.

So while it's not a new statement, and while it is a true statement, I can't help but wonder, is it a helpful statement?

Like, really, is it helpful to know that the constant in life that we all share in common is change?

Does that help us?

Like if you came up to me and you said, Noel, I lost my job.

I don't know how I'm gonna make ends meet, I don't know where to go, I don't know where to look for a new job.

If I just looked at you and said, Yeah, well, you know, that makes sense.

The only constant in life is change and then patted you on the back and sent you on your way, would that be helpful to you?

No, that would not be helpful.

Knowing that change is constant does not help us when we lose a relationship that we really wanted to keep.

It doesn't help us when we finally start that new job that we wanted so bad and now we're kind of afraid that we aren't actually qualified for that job.

It doesn't help us when the anxiety sets in over an upcoming marriage or maybe an impending divorce.

It doesn't help us when the kids leave for college and suddenly our house gets just a little bit quieter.

Knowing that change is constant doesn't help us deal with the changes that occur in our life because while it is constant, change is rarely consistent.

Each day brings a whole new load of possibilities that we could face.

And so if change is constant in our life, I think we have to answer this question today on how to deal with it.

How do we deal with the inconsistency of change in our lives?

Change is so often a source of chaos in our life, and it's been true for all of time.

And we're gonna look at the very beginning of the Christmas narrative to see how a major change really affected one of the key characters in the Christmas story.

Last week, Pastor Tony talked to us about Elizabeth and Mary.

Today we're just gonna focus on Mary, and we're gonna be looking in the Gospel of Luke to see what was going on in the Christmas story for Mary.

Now, just a quick Bible reading tip.

Luke's gospel is what we call a synoptic gospel.

It means it gives a synopsis of the life of Jesus.

And the reason we look at the Christmas story in Luke is because not only was Luke a disciple, Luke was actually a historian as well, which means he recorded the life of Jesus with as much precision and accuracy as humanly possible.

So we're gonna jump right into the story, right at Luke 128.

Here's what it says The angel of the Lord came to her, Mary, and said, Greetings, favored woman, the Lord is with you.

Now, isn't this how change usually starts in our life?

Like we're kind of going about our day, minding our own business, and then boom, there's change right in front of us.

We didn't ask for it, we weren't looking for it, and yet change has inserted itself into our lives.

This is what the angel did in Mary's life.

She wasn't expecting an angel to come, and we don't really know how he appeared.

We don't know if he just materialized or maybe he like walked around the corner.

All we know for sure is that something that was not there suddenly and without warning was there and it was alarming.

The angel greets her, he calls her a favored woman.

He was trying to make sure she knew everything was okay.

Like, Mary, don't worry, everything's all right.

But really, I mean, if you saw an angel appear in front of you and they called you a favored person, right, man or woman, would you feel at ease in that moment?

I wouldn't.

I've been in that situation at work where something's about to change and they start off saying something very positively.

It doesn't matter how many times my boss comes to me and says, Hey, we're about to experience a change, it's gonna be great.

Immediately I start to fill in all the blanks with every terrible thing that could be coming next, right?

They're all negative.

And I think Mary must have been doing somewhat of the same thing because the Bible says that Mary was deeply troubled by the statement, wondering what kind of greeting this could be.

The problem we have so often when it comes to change in our lives is that we rarely have context to why this change is happening.

The angel's greeting to Mary was a kind greeting, taken at face value.

It should have made her feel perfectly comfortable, and yet Mary was troubled.

And she was troubled because she had no context for the greeting.

She didn't know why the angel was there.

And that's the first thing we have to process through when it comes to change.

Why?

Why is this happening?

Why can't things just stay the way they are?

When I was 17 or so, I played a gig here in San Antonio.

We're just a couple of small town guys, a no-name band playing at a very, very sketchy venue, like in a very shady place in San Antonio.

We definitely shouldn't have been there, but we wanted to play, so we came and we played.

We got done playing.

It was about midnight or so, and we were standing on the curb that was right in front of the parking lot, and we were talking before we went back home to Uvaldi.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this car pulls into the far side of the parking lot.

And I'm telling you, this car was acting crazy.

It was flashing its lights, honking, it was like fish tailing everywhere.

It was really alarming to see this happening, but not as alarming as what happened next.

It's like the driver of the car saw us.

He suddenly became aware that we were there, and he like beelined it straight towards us.

I mean, driving way too fast in this parking lot.

He pulls up next to us, screeches to a halt, and then the window rolls down.

And I'm like, at this point, I'm like, boys, we're gonna die.

That's all that can happen from this point forward.

It will, it's the end, right?

The driver proceeds to hang out the window.

He's only like six feet away from us, and he goes, God's coming back, you better be ready.

And then I was certain we were gonna die.

Like, this is the end.

Somebody tell my parents I was a hero, right?

But we lived, obviously.

He drove away, he didn't really give us any more than that.

Now, let me tell you why I'm telling you this.

I've told you many, many times that I have always, to my recollection, believed in Jesus.

Being with God one day is something that I very much looking forward to.

But when this random guy who is acting so abnormally, drove up to us, yelled that Jesus was coming back, and that we should be ready, it was troubling.

I didn't know why he was yelling this at me.

And even more than that, I didn't know what was gonna come next.

And neither did Mary.

It's why she was troubled.

And then the angel gives her context.

He says, Don't be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

Now listen, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.

He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.

And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.

He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.

Now Mary knows why this angel has suddenly appeared in front of her.

He has a message for her, and this message that he gives her is gonna uh bring great change to her life.

Not only does she know why he's there, she actually knows what the message is now.

And that's the second part of what we deal with when it comes to change.

First, we learn why the change is here, then we learn what the change is going to be.

For Mary, everything the angel says sounds like it would be great.

I mean, I know as a father, what I would love to know about my son's life in the future is that he's healthy, happy, and well taken care of, right?

And this angel's kind of telling her all of those those things.

He tells her that his name is gonna be great, that he's gonna sit on a throne, and that his kingdom will last forever.

He even tells her what to name her him.

It's a great gig, right?

Like this is all good news.

And yet Mary sees a problem with it.

Verse 34 says, Mary asked the angel, How can this be since I have not had sexual relations with a man?

We know that Mary was engaged to a man named Joseph, but they weren't married yet.

They hadn't engaged in any kind of activity that would produce a child.

And this was a real problem.

And listen, I know I'm a pastor, I'm a musician, I'm certainly not a science teacher.

However, my wife actually is a science teacher, and I have that on good authority that if you don't have sex, you can't get pregnant.

Let's just pause for a second and really appreciate all this information that Mary's gotten in very short order.

She's having to process through a lot of things very quickly.

She knows why the angels appeared in front of her, she knows what the angel says will happen, but Mary has no idea how this is going to happen.

And that's the third thing that we have to process through when change comes our way.

Once you know that change is here, you want to know how is it gonna happen?

And maybe even more importantly than that, how is this gonna affect my life?

The angel answers Mary's question.

He says, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Therefore, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.

And consider your real relative, Elizabeth.

Even she has conceived a son in her old age, and this is a sixth month for her who is called childless, for nothing will be impossible with God.

Well, there's the how.

How is she gonna become pregnant?

Well, God's gonna do it.

It's gonna be the act of a miracle.

And just in case you don't believe me, Mary, look at Elizabeth.

Everybody thought she was barren, everybody thought that she couldn't have a kid, and even she is pregnant in the sixth month.

Nothing is impossible with God.

Interestingly enough, Elizabeth would go on to have John the Baptist, and scripture says that John the Baptist really laid out the path for Jesus to begin his ministry in much the same way.

God used Elizabeth to lay out a plan so uh Mary could believe in the miracle that was going to happen that the angel was telling her about.

So now Mary knows why and she knows what and she knows how, but she still doesn't know how this is going to affect her life.

And I believe ultimately that's where the difficulty of change exists for our lives.

Like, how is this change gonna help me, or how is this change gonna hurt me?

There's a lot Mary had to consider.

I mean, surely there would be consequences to this.

She lived under the Judaic law, which was very strict.

There were consequences for an unwed woman who was pregnant, even more severe consequences if you were promised a marriage to a man already.

And speaking of that man, would Joseph believe any of this?

And even if he did believe any of what she said, would he stick around through what would be a difficult situation?

Would her family let her stay in their house?

Would the community accept her?

You know, we don't talk about it often, but Mary did have a choice.

We read the story and it's like, yeah, the angel talked to Mary and she said, Okay, but Mary actually did have a choice.

She could have said no.

Free will is a gift that God has given every single person.

She could have said thanks, but no, thanks.

This is just too much.

And I don't think many people in the same position would have blamed her.

But instead of saying no, Mary says this, see, I'm the Lord's servant.

May it happen to me as you have said.

Such a simple answer filled with humility, a strong response to what was undoubtedly a complicated situation.

And Mary would be put in these types of situations of change for the rest of her pregnancy.

She would have to travel to Bethlehem on a donkey, she would have to give birth in a manger, and more change would come for her all throughout the life of her son Jesus.

The change she experienced would be constant, but it was never consistent.

Knowing the why, the what, and the how is how we can understand change, but it doesn't help us deal with that change, which brings us back to the question that we need to answer.

How do we deal with the inconsistency of change in our lives?

You know, the Christmas story didn't start in the gospels.

That's certainly where we start to read the Christmas story, but the Christmas story actually started all the way back in Genesis with a man named Abraham.

In much of the same way that God called Mary to believe and trust him in a difficult situation, God had also called Abraham to do the very same thing.

We read about it in Genesis 12.

It says the Lord said to Abram, Go from your land, your relatives, and your father's house to the land that I will show you.

I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

This last part God reiterates in Genesis twenty two.

He says, And all the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring because you have obeyed my command.

This is a change that God was introducing into Abraham's life.

And just like Mary, he had a choice to make, he could choose.

To not obey God, or he could choose to obey God.

He had to process the change that was being offered to him.

He had to go through the why, the what, and the how of the situation.

Why was this happening?

Why was God introducing this change into his life?

Well, that started even before Abraham, when sin entered into this world, it separated us from God.

And God wasn't okay with this.

He wanted a redemption plan.

And Abraham's family was how he was going to bring that redemption plan to the entire world.

How was this gonna happen?

He was gonna do it through Abraham's family.

Abraham, who, by the way, was 70 years old when this started and was childless.

And what was he asking Abraham to do?

Specifically in this scripture, he was asking Abraham to leave his land, his relatives, and his father's house.

In other words, he was asking him to leave what was comfortable and put himself in a place of discomfort.

And if he would do this, God would bless his family line and ultimately all the people of the world.

You've heard us talk about this story quite often, and it's really important that we bring it up often because it has a lot to do with what we believe today.

But you may be wondering, what the heck does this story have to do with the Christmas story?

Well, the Gospel of Matthew gives us a thorough genealogy of Jesus' family line.

This is a part of the Bible that most people skip because there's a lot of names in there that we can't pronounce, and you can kind of get tangled up in all the family line.

But if you'll read all the way through, what you'll find through Jesus' family is that Jesus is a direct descendant of Abraham.

That helps the whole Christmas story come to focus.

This is how God was going to bless all nations.

He's going to bless them through Abraham's family, which would be Jesus.

And Mary would have known about all of this.

Abraham was her ancestor, but that wasn't all Mary knew.

She knew more than that.

Mary was aware of how faithful God had been to the Israelite people.

She had learned about how God had miraculously freed them from captivity when they were in Egypt.

She had learned about how God split a sea into two so they could escape those same Egyptians.

She knew that God was with David when David killed Goliath, and she knew that God was with Jonah when he sat in the belly of a big fish.

And she knew that there was a lot of prophecy that foretold of the Messiah that would rescue her people and the entire world.

How did Mary deal with and accept the change that was being asked of her?

She took the uncertainty of what would be temporary and placed it in the certainty of what was eternal.

And the change that you go through today, even if it lasts for the rest of your life, is temporary.

It won't follow you into eternity.

You can take the uncertainty of something temporary and put your faith in the certainty of the eternal.

How do we deal with the inconsistency of change in our lives?

Knowing the why, the what, and the how will help us process the change in our lives.

But if we want to get through change, if we want to deal with it in healthy ways, to thrive through it, then we need to add a who.

The reason Mary could respond so humbly and with such certainty to the change that the angel was speaking of was because of her belief in a transcendent God.

It wasn't some unknown entity, it was someone that she was intimately aware of, someone who had proven himself to be both constant and consistent.

And what Mary believed about God then is still true today.

God has never changed.

God is perfectly holy, He's perfect in love and perfect in nature.

From one breath to the next, God goes unchanged.

So when the inconsistency of change throws your life off course, you can find hope and peace in the constant consistency of the God who loves you.

If you're gonna tap into that source of hope this season that will allow you to get through change in healthy ways, and you're going to get to know, going to need to get to know the one who is both constant and consistent.

If you've believed in Jesus and you have, for a fact, received eternal life.

That's your relationship with God.

But if you want to thrive in life, then you have to engage in consistent fellowship with our consistent God.

And I have three ways that you can do that today.

And I've given you these three ways before, but let me tell you, if you will implement these into your lives, you can start today, you will see a change in your life.

I promise you.

The first thing you can do is be in his word.

You can read the Bible.

Most current statistic is that people who call themselves believers, 20% are daily Bible readers.

That's not a high number.

We need more people reading their Bibles.

We need more people to be praying.

Praying isn't something that you just do at meals.

It's not how you start the day or end the day.

Prayer is a discipline, it's something that follows you all throughout your day.

And you need to be in fellowship with your faith community.

Let me tell you what will happen when you do these things.

When you are reading the Bible, when you are consistently in the Word of God, you will be ingesting the truths about God.

And so when the different things in your life come about, when change comes about in your life, you'll be able to process it and filter it through actual truths of God.

You're also gonna learn the nature and the character of God.

And this is important because when you start to pray consistently, you're gonna start hearing from God.

And you will know it's Him because you'll understand His voice because you've been in His word.

You know, one of the things I see people dealing with so often, something I deal with myself from time to time, is anxiety.

And nothing will excite your anxiety more than change in your life.

You know, anxiety is just a fear of the unknown.

Paul says that we should be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition, we should bring our concerns to God, our God who knows everything, our God who is constant and consistent and in all places, all times.

We need to be in fellowship with our faith community.

When you do that, you're gonna realize that while change may be constant, while it may be hard, you realize that you don't have to go through it alone.

If you're not in one of our life teams, which is how we provide community here at Mediturge, then I would strongly encourage you to stop by our connect area and learn about our life teams.

I promise you that you will find it life-giving to be in a loving community like our life teams provide.

Being centered by your fellowship with God will help you align with the purpose that He has for your life.

And no matter what change comes your way, you will be able to get through it and thrive through it.

Because change is coming for you, it's coming for all of us.

But just like the angel told Mary, nothing is impossible with God, which means we are capable of dealing with whatever it is that life throws at us.

But we have to trust in the eternal, constant, and consistent God who loves us.

With hope and trust in God, we can really be grateful for change because change is a part of this life.

It really is, just like Benjamin Franklin said, when you are finished changing, you are finished.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we thank you for change in our lives, even the heart change, God.

We ask that you would help us understand what it means for our life, how to move forward when change comes our way, whether that's good or bad, God, how to know to take the next right step.

Father, I do believe it comes from being in fellowship with you, that we can know what steps to take.

And so, Father, I pray for everyone here at Metachurch, God, I pray for my own life that we would all be in consistent fellowship with you, God.

That we would look in your word and see how constant you are and see how consistent you are and see that you really can work all things for the good of those who love you, for those who are called according to your purpose.

Father, we uh need your help in all things, and Holy Spirit, we trust you to help us in that.

Jesus, we love you, we worship you, and we pray all things in your name, and everyone sit together.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.