A MetaChurch Christmas: O Come All Ye Faithful with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the Medicurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medicurch.

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.

Awesome, man.

We are so glad that you could join us for one of today's service.

Just in case nobody said it to you yet, let me be the first to say Merry Christmas, MetaCurch.

All right, listen, we need some of y'all at the 945 because those guys didn't say Merry Christmas at all to me.

And my feelings were a little bit hurt, but y'all did such a good job.

Thank you so much.

It's hard to believe that we are so firmly in the Christmas season already, December 11th.

I hope you've had time to engage in some Christmas festivities.

Maybe you've decorated your house or your Christmas tree, done some Christmas shopping, whatever it is.

I hope you've had a great Christmas season so far.

I love Christmas.

This is no surprise to most of you.

There is one thing that I have a little bit of trouble with each year, and it gets worse as I get older because more and more people want me to give my name as a part of whatever I'm ordering, right?

And so they'll ask me to tell them my name so they can write it down for the order, and I tell them my name, and they just look at me kind of like blank stared, slow blinking, like trying to decide if I'm a comedian or making some kind of joke.

Well, I'm not.

And in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, my name is Noel, spelled N-O-E-L, which is also how you spell Noel, that's right.

And I'm gonna make you guys a deal I make every single year, MetaCurch, for December.

You may call me Noel.

I will answer to it.

You may not sing it to me.

That's for Celeste only.

She can sing my name.

The rest of you, there she is, I heard her right there.

She can sing Noel to me, but the rest of you, y'all just call me Noel.

I'm kidding, of course.

Y'all can call me Noelle any time of the year.

Honestly, it reminds me of a season that I am so fond of.

It reminds me of all the memories I've made in my life, the traditions I have with my son, but mostly it reminds me of the great hope that we celebrate at this time of year.

The time when Jesus came to earth in the form of a child.

You know, before Jesus was born, there really wasn't just a whole lot of hope in the world.

We heard this last week with Pastor Lee.

He was talking about the Israelite people, which were God's chosen people.

And we heard how they were living in the struggle of being dominated by enemy nations all around.

And this was happening because of their disobedience to God.

He had removed his hand of protection from them.

And they were crying out for a Messiah.

We heard the song, O come, O come, Emmanuel, and we know that Emmanuel means God with us.

And so when Jesus came, he is Emmanuel.

He was Emmanuel, he was God with us.

And when you put your faith in Jesus, you will always be with him, and he will always be with you.

Well, this week we're moving into week two of our Christmas series.

Today I'm hoping to answer this question.

What should my response be to the Christmas story?

Now, every sermon in this Christmas series is going to be centered around a popular Christmas song and to help lead us to the proper response to that question.

My message today is called, O come all ye faithful.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for this time.

We're grateful for what it represents.

When hope came into the world, when God and sinners were truly reconciled through the life and sacrifice of Jesus.

Father, I pray that you would give us a new perspective to uh perspective today, that we would be able to understand something new, that we would leave being able to share something with the world that's hurting around us.

Father, we love you.

Jesus, we praise you, and it's in your name that we pray these things.

And everyone said together, Amen.

All right, now at the risk of sounding like the Goldbergs, the year was 1980 something.

Actually, the year was 1987.

I remember because I was about to turn five years old.

Now, before I lose you all trying to figure out how old I am, let me just tell you, I'm about to turn 40, like next week.

I'm about to, yeah, thank you.

Man, y'all are a live wire service.

Yeah, I'm pretty excited to turn 40.

I've always looked at getting older, kind of like Tom Petty did.

I heard in an interview one time.

Uh, this guy said, Tom, you're turning 60.

Does that bother you?

And he said, You know, getting older doesn't bother me.

It's when you stop that you gotta be worried.

And I've always kind of adopted that into my own life.

And so while I'm almost 40 now in 1987, I was almost five.

And let me tell you why I remember this year so well.

My dad had taken a random day off of work.

This wasn't normal for him.

He was gonna go to the church that we attended to help them build this project for an event that we were putting on for the community.

Now, my dad was and still is, even in his retirement, a very hard worker.

And he always worked like far away from where we lived.

I don't know why, but he would always commute 30 miles there, 30 miles back.

So for me to see my dad during the day, during the week, was highly unusual.

It stuck out to me.

Not only had he taken the day off of work, but he was letting me stay home from daycare so I could work with him, right?

Work with him.

If you have a five-year-old, you know that five-year-olds don't work with you.

But he wanted me to be with him, and I was very excited to do that.

We ate breakfast and we went up to the church that we attended so we could begin our work day.

I remember this church being fairly large, at least in my recollection as a five-year-old, I remember it being large, and there was a big parking lot.

We had several buildings, and one of those buildings was an indoor gymnasium.

This is where we were gonna be doing our work, and so me and my dad walk into this gymnasium, and my eyes are immediately filled with images of the Christmas story.

There was Ralphie, and there was Red Rider BB guns, and there was Santa Claus, and there was, no, not that Christmas story, right?

I was testing y'all the Christmas story, which we call in the church the birth of Jesus, and we call that the Christmas story.

My eyes were immediately drawn to all these huge wooden panels that were intricately painted with scenes from another time in history and from another place that I had ever seen.

The event that we were putting on was a live drive-thru nativity.

Who remembers drive-thru nativities?

Anybody?

Okay, we got like a few of y'all, right?

It used to be really popular.

Apparently in the 80s it was.

And let me tell you what this looked like.

So you would be in your car, you would follow a predetermined path, as you listened to the reading of a Christmas story, either on your radio or on a speaker that hooked onto your window, and as you were hearing the story, you were actually driving by images that told you about that piece of the story.

What made it a live nativity scene is that we actually had real life people acting out the different roles.

And so, if I remember correctly, the very first scene in ours was of the angel visiting Mary, and so you would be in your car, the radio or the speaker would be telling you about the angel visiting Mary, and Mary and the angel would be outside of your car in the scene, and they'd be acting like they were talking.

It was a huge event.

We had Mary and Joseph, innkeepers, shepherds, wiseman, the whole shebang.

And yours truly got to be a shepherd boy.

Even at five years old, it was the highest acclaim I've ever reached in my life.

I was a shepherd boy in the manger scene.

And my only direction was to look lovingly on at Jesus.

And that seemed easy enough, right?

But what I've learned as an adult is that I am a terrible, terrible actor.

Like we do videos.

I've seen him here at the church, and it's like, I just ask Marco a video guy, please just don't put me in this video.

I'm not a good actor.

If you say, hey, you're gonna be mad in the scene when they call action, I just like furl my eyebrows, I'm like, I'm mad, or whatever.

I'm really bad.

I know my limitations.

What I didn't remember until I was writing this talk is that I've always been a bad actor.

And let me tell you how I know that I'm a bad actor, even as a child.

One of the cars that went through this live drive-thru nativity was a news crew.

Like the word had spread, and they are doing a story on our drive-thru nativity scene.

We knew the news crew was there, so my family was very happy after that evening was over.

We're gonna go watch the story on TV.

And sure enough, there, the church was live on TV.

They're telling this story about our nativity scene, and the last thing you see is the manger scene, which is what I was acting in.

You see an older shepherd boy, and he's holding his staff.

You see Mary and Joseph, and they're like looking lovingly at Jesus, adoring him.

And the last image you see as a car driving by is five-year-old Noel, handful of hay, stroking baby Jesus across the face with the hey, it was not my best acting, I'll admit that.

This nativity scene became very popular in our area of Texas.

The word had spread.

People came and saw him when they left, they would go tell other people about it, and then those people would come see it.

They were looking at the Christmas story, so let's just say what the Christmas story is very quickly.

We're not gonna read it straight out of scripture.

Instead, we're gonna go with the NLT version, that's the Noel Loss translation.

Hopefully, it'll be a little bit quicker.

See how fast I can say this.

There is a young woman named Mary.

She was visited by an angel.

The angel said, Hey, you're gonna have a baby.

Mary said, Yeah, that's impossible.

I've never been with a man.

The angel said, Don't worry about it.

God's gonna take care of that.

Oh, also, angel, I'm promised a marriage to Joseph.

Don't worry, I'll go talk to Joseph.

The angel talks to Joseph.

Joseph says, Okay, I'm fine with this.

He could have walked away.

He didn't.

He stayed with Mary.

He saw the marriage through, he saw the pregnancy through.

There was a lot of complications that came with his pregnancy.

Anyone who's been pregnant knows that there's a lot of things that you have to deal with.

Least of all for them, was the b the things that were occurring in her body as she was carrying this child.

She was also having to deal with the whispers and the talking behind their back about how she became pregnant, right?

It's like Barry says he's never been with a man, but look at her, she's very pregnant, right?

And at the same time, the Roman Empire, who was ruling over the Israelite people, had issued a decree that all Jewish men had to go back to their town where they were born so they could take part in a census.

This Roman Empire was trying to get a feel on how many people they were ruling over.

And so Mary and Joseph take a long trip by donkey to Bethlehem.

Once they get there, they're trying to find a place to stay.

There's no room for them anywhere in the city.

On top of that, Mary goes into labor, an innkeeper says, Hey, I don't have any rooms, but I do have a manger in the back that you can stay in.

She ends up giving birth in what, for lack of a better word, was a small barn.

And that's the story of Jesus.

All right, we can go home.

That's it.

I told you it's gonna be quick.

No, we're gonna move past that.

There's a lot more to the story, but we're gonna focus on the next little section with some characters that I think oftentimes get overlooked.

We're gonna be looking in the gospel of Luke, chapter two.

You guys can follow on the screen as we verse eight says, in the same region, shepherds were staying out in the fields and keeping watch at night over their flock.

So here we are.

God has finally come to earth in the form of a defenseless baby.

He's born in a barn, and the next people that we hear about are shepherds.

We're not hearing about kings, we're not hearing about nobility or the religious elite, we're hearing about shepherds.

Now, I'm sure this isn't too far of a leap for you to make, but shepherds weren't necessarily like high-class people.

They were kind of low class people that lived outside of society.

Their only job was to tend to their flocks to keep them safe.

It was a source of their livelihood.

But to only see these shepherds as kind of lower class would be a mistake.

Shepherds were brave.

It took courage to do what they did.

There were real dangers to be considered.

In fact, some of the bravest heroes in scripture started out as shepherds.

Take King David.

Before he was King David, he was Shepherd Boy David.

And shepherd boy David was sent by his father to check on his brothers who are in the uh Israel army fighting the Philistines.

When David gets there, he sees a giant named Goliath, and Goliath is just like really like making fun of the Israelite armies, and David's like, This can't stand.

I'm gonna kill this fool.

And so he goes to Saul and Saul's like, You're just a boy, you can't kill this giant.

And David said, I am a shepherd.

I have tracked down lions, and I've tracked down bears and I have killed them.

I will kill this giant.

And he did.

He actually did it.

And all of this before he was a teenager.

Now, parents in the room that has teen have teenage boys, y'all know you can't even win the battle of getting them to clean their room or do their homework, right?

Like this is pretty incredible that David did all these things.

So while shepherds may not have been the spiritual or intellectual elite, they were very brave men, which further highlights what happens next.

Verse 90, it says, Then an angel of the Lord stood before them.

And I think this is one of those verses that we can just look right over, right?

Okay, then an angel of the Lord appeared before them.

Now, I don't know if you've ever been by yourself, out in the wild, like in the dark, but I used to live on a ranch, and so I'd be out by a fire, and I was always just unsettled by how dark it was.

And here are these shepherds in the middle of nowhere, on guard from predators that are gonna try and kill their sheep, and all of a sudden, an angel appears in front of them.

Like, this is a big deal.

It was probably pretty scary.

In fact, a number of years ago at another church that I worked for, there was a story of a funeral that was taking place in one of our buildings.

And during this build uh this funeral, the man who had passed away, his culendetta had come by, and she started freaking out, like right in the middle of the service, and she was like pointing above the stage, and she was saying all these things in Spanish, and nobody knew what she was saying.

And the pastor that was officiating said, How can I help?

What's going on?

And the ladies around her said, She just keeps on saying, Tell the angel to leave me alone, that I'll leave, tell the angel to leave me alone.

That's scary.

And I had the unfortunate job of opening this building up every Sunday morning by myself in the dark.

And I have my routine down up until that point.

Unlock the door, turn off the alarm, walk all the way across the building to turn on the lights.

Why were the lights on the opposite side of the entrance?

I don't know.

Somebody made that decision, it wasn't me.

But after hearing the story, I had to add something to my routine.

It was unlock the door, turn off the alarm, stand in front of the auditorium doors, and say in a very loud voice, okay, angel, I'm coming in.

So I know you're pretty cool and we work for the same guy, but I do not want to see you.

So I'm gonna count to three, and then I'm gonna come in, so just disappear yourself or something.

And so I count to three.

I swear on everything, if you could find this time and you could find the security camera footage, you would see me doing this every Sunday morning.

And then once I said that, I'd count to three and I'd beeline it over to the lights and I'd turn them on, and then I'd feel better because the dark is scary and light is not as scary.

It was scary.

In fact, the scripture tells us it was.

Says, the then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

I don't think we often think of the glory of the Lord as being terrified when we hear these like near-death experiences, right?

It's like I saw warm light and I felt love.

But I do think that's true in certain contexts, but in the context of where we are now, in comparison to who God is, I think it would be scary.

Like complete righteousness and holiness surrounding you, you would finally understand how bad your sin actually was.

I think it would be terrifying.

In fact, one of Jesus' disciples, John, who wrote the Gospel of John in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, a man who was very close to Jesus, who Jesus called his beloved, wrote this about Jesus in his revelation account.

He said, Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me.

When I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was one like the Son of Man, dressed in a robe and with a golden sash wrapped around his chest.

The hair of his head was white as wool, white as snow, and his eyes like a fiery flame.

His feet were like fine bronze, as if it's fired in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of cascading waters.

He had seven stars in his right hand, his sharp double-edged sword came from his mouth, and his face was shining like the sun at full strength.

And here's how I know that the glory of the Lord is terrifying, because John says this next, when I saw him, I fell at his feet like a dead man.

Like this was terrifying to John when he saw Jesus in this context.

Now, this is somewhat similar to what the shepherds were seeing right in front of them and all around them.

These brave men, ready at attention to fight off wolves and bears, were brought to the ground in terror.

But listen to what the angel says next.

The angel says, Don't be afraid.

For look, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.

Today in the city of David, a savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

This will be a sign for you.

You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger.

God knew that this situation was gonna seriously freak these shepherds out, right?

And so the first thing the angel says is, Don't be afraid.

I have great news for you.

And it really was great news for you because for centuries upon centuries, uh Israelite people have been crying out for a Messiah, and this angel is saying, Guess what?

That Messiah is here.

And here's something that we can't miss about this story is that the 400 years leading up to Jesus' birth, God had been silent towards his people.

He hadn't said anything.

There were no prophets, there were no judges, there was nobody who was the traditional mouthpiece of God to his people, giving them any kind of messages.

And now these lowly shepherds are one of very few people who are hearing about the coming of the Messiah.

And not only was the Messiah here, but the Messiah was nearby.

The angel's like, you can find him, and here's how you find him.

He'll be in a manger wrapped tightly in cloth.

This was great news.

And as soon as the message ends, all these other angels appear and they start singing, glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to the people he favors.

You know what that is, right?

That's a worship song.

They're worshiping God, they're turning the credit back to God, they're putting the focus on him and saying, God has done this great thing.

Angels have a different perspective than us.

I don't think that's a leap, right?

They see the spiritual and the physical, we just see the physical.

These angels knew that if there was any hope to be had on this earth, it was going to come through this baby that was to be named Jesus and who is the Messiah.

As quickly as the angels appeared, they were gone.

And this left the shepherds with a slight problem.

What should they do about what they've just heard?

Should they stay with their flocks, their livelihood, the thing that they had been tasked to manage and take care of?

Or should they go and see what these angels were talking about?

Verse 15 says the shepherds looked at each other and they said, Let's go straight to Bethlehem and see what has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.

They have been called out, they've been called out of their normal life, out of the life that they were comfortable with.

Sure, there was like dangers that they had to face, but it was the dangers they knew.

This was something completely new, and they answer the call.

They go to find Jesus.

It says in 16, they say, or it says they hurried off and found both Mary and Joseph and the baby who was lying in the manger.

And after seeing them, they reported the message they were told about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.

They used the calling card that the angel gave them.

He said that the baby would be wrapped tightly in cloth and be in a manger.

Now, I know there were no hospitals back then, but I do have to imagine that it was a little bit strange that there was a baby born in a manger and they were able to locate this child.

Everything was confirmed that the angel had said, and so they went and they reported it to everyone they came into contact with.

This is the role of the shepherds in the Christmas story.

They heard something, they saw something, they told everybody about it.

And this is really where the big idea of our message is going to come from today.

The thing I really want you to remember when you leave is that what you bear witness to is what you testify about.

We can say that more simply.

We can say what you see is what you share, right?

That's what happened in my little town in West Texas of Big Spring with this live nativity.

People came and saw this nativity and it grew and grew and grew.

They saw something and they shared something.

It's not a new concept.

When you see a good movie, something you really like, what do you do?

You tell people about it, right?

You want other people to see the thing that you have seen and experience what you've experienced.

If you find a new song that you like, what do you do?

You tell people about it.

You see it and you share it.

Now, that would be your testimony, and we kind of know what a testimony is, right?

If you've ever watched TV past 8 p.m.

in the last two decades or so, you've seen any one of a million different crime shows.

They're all the same, different actors, different characters, but the storyline usually looks like this: a crime's committed, they start investigating in the crime, they find a suspect.

Once they find a suspect, they need a witness to testify against that suspect, and then hopefully justice is served.

A testimony is an eyewitness account of something that you have seen firsthand.

We see this every Sunday in our worship service.

When we're singing these worship songs, you see hands go up in worship.

That's a testimony.

These people are testifying to what the song is saying.

We when we say there's no shadow you won't light up, no mountain you won't climb up, and hands are going up.

People are saying, Yes, I've been in some dark places, I've been in some faraway places, and God has always come after me.

It's a testimony.

And all the people around them again say, Okay, I may not have seen that yet in my own life, but I know it's happened because they're saying it's happened.

And I believe that testimony.

Testimonies are important.

They're powerful.

Testimonies are powerful.

All of our lives are testifying to something that we may not even be aware of it, but the way that you live testifies to what you have experienced.

We heard about the Israelites blasphemy crying out to God for a Messiah.

That's a right response for the situation they were in.

But what got them in the situation in the first place was the wrong response.

The tension of life, whatever it was for them, got too real.

And instead of turning to their God, they turned to many other gods.

They disobeyed God by turning to these pagan gods.

And it's the same thing that we do so often in our life.

The tension of life hits us.

And instead of going to our Savior, instead of going to Jesus, we go to all these other things that we think will bring us relief right now.

They're false saviors.

Sometimes those false saviors can be found in relationships, or sometimes they can be found in our addictions.

Sometimes those saviors look like our need to try and control a situation.

The problem with going to these things is that none of them were designed to bear the weight of your hope or expectation.

In fact, there's only been one thing ever in the world in all of history that was ever meant to bear the weight of your hope and expectation.

And he was born in a manger in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago.

And when we bear witness to these false saviors, what we end up doing is testifying to their ends.

If we're going to relationships, then our lives will testify about our codependency.

Or conversely, it will testify to our ability to have multiple meaningless relationships.

If you're going to your addiction, bearing witness to your addiction, your addiction, then your life is testifying about your pursuit of the things that have gotten a hold of you that you're losing the battle to.

If you're going to the false savior and witnessing your need to control things, then your life is testifying about your ability to manipulate situations, to put yourself in areas that you never belonged in, to be selfish.

Our life testified to so many things.

Things that we believe identify as like our work ethic, our interest.

Your life is only testifying to your favorite thing, right?

Your life isn't testifying to something.

But if we're being honest with ourselves today, how often are our lives testifying to the faith that we have placed in Jesus' name?

And I'd be willing to wager that there's more people in this room that could tell me in great detail the last three shows you watched on Netflix and can tell me the last three times they were intentional about being in the Word of God.

I believe that there's more people in here right now that could tell me the game plan or the strategy of their favorite sports scene, that can tell me their game plan or their strategy for staying in fellowship with Jesus.

And let me tell you, I definitely understand how harsh this sounds, but let me tell you why I say it so openly.

Because I am the same way.

I do these things, I get it wrong so often.

There is no difference between the people on the stage and the people in the scenes.

There's only us.

I wish I could tell you how much time in my life I've wasted testifying to things that aren't indicative of what God has done for me in my life.

My life has testified to my anger.

It's testified to my wants and my addictions.

I really have gotten it wrong so many times, and I get it wrong still to this day.

But by the grace of God and a loving community around me, I've been able to incrementally shift my perspective away from a worldly testimony and into a heavenly testimony.

Little by little, I could testify to my joy instead of my anger, to my gratitude instead of my wants, to my freedom instead of addictions, to my peace instead of my anxiety.

The world came to know Jesus because everyone who would see him would go and share him with everyone they came into contact with.

That's what the song will come, all ye faithful, is all about.

It's a call out of your normal life to witness the Savior of the world just like the shepherds did.

And we don't have to go to Bethlehem to witness Jesus today.

We can start right where we're at.

And I want to give you a couple of examples of how you can bear witness to Jesus today.

One is that you can read the Bible.

At Metachurch, we believe that the Bible is the inerrant, inspired word of God, that every word in it is true, and that when you develop a discipline of reading it daily, that your worldly perspective will shift into a heavenly perspective.

That the way you process this world and filter your thoughts will change from a worldly filter to a godly filter.

Another way we believe that you can witness Jesus today is by praying to him.

I can't even tell you how many verses there are that are asking you, pray to me.

Cast your fears, anxieties, and problems on me.

Yet so often we stay silent to him.

You can bear witness to him through praying.

You can bear witness to Jesus by being in community with other believers, no matter where you are on your faith journey.

We try and help you guys with that with life teams.

Now there are some life teams that have staff members running them, but let me tell you, the majority of our life teams are run by the people who are sitting in the seats next to you.

And they want you to be a part, they want to walk with you, they want to try and tackle the hard questions.

We don't always have the right answers, but we're gonna work hard together to find them.

If you can begin bearing witness to Jesus in these ways, I believe you can start to combat your worldly testimony.

To bear witness to him and let your testimony be joyful and triumphant.

The question is Will you answer that call?

We're gonna sing O come all you faithful, and I want to encourage you, if you're willing to answer the call, to bear witness to Jesus and to let your life be a testimony to that end, to stand with us as we worship.

Joyful and triumph then, oh calmy, oh calmy to bed on the king.

A time when you bridged the gap between your holiness and our sin, when you sent your son so that he could live a perfect life, to die a death he didn't deserve, all so that we could have relationships and fellowship with you when we put our faith in Jesus.

Holy Spirit, I do I do pray that you would be with us as we leave this place.

That you would prompt us to bear witness to Jesus more, that we would be in your word more, that we would be in conversation with you more, that we would be in community with others who have put their faith in you more.

And God, that we would see the times when we can testify about you to the world around us.

We love you, Jesus.

We pray all these things in your precious and in your holy name.

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.