SUMMARY KEYWORDS

christmas, jesus, fairy tales, world, god, life, eyewitnesses, write, luke, hope, birth, celebrate, mystery, details, song, thought, caesar augustus, wrapped, bethlehem, mary.

SPEAKER

Phil EuBank

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Well, Good Afternoon, Menlo Church. So glad to be with you. Merry Christmas here in Menlo Park, to our campuses in Saratoga, Mountain View, up in San Mateo, those of you joining us online. We are so thankful that you chose to spend part of your Christmas celebration with us. I know that for many of you, celebrating Christmas like this individually, with your community, maybe with your family, maybe as a requirement for the meal that you're about to eat that you were told attending this was contingent upon. Regardless, whatever got you here, we're glad that you're here. And we know that this time of the year can carry unique pressures and weight, even in the best of circumstances. So thank you for trusting us with a few minutes of this time of the year for you.

Christmas really does provide such a special chance to experience wonder and memories with people, and it can often trigger some memories that we had even decades ago when we experienced Christmas again and again. But I also know that for many of you, Christmas Eve services are just sort of an annual duty; it's a requirement that you have to fulfill. And so for you, there is no doubt in your mind that you have left faith behind, never to consider it again. And my hope is that even if it's just for the next few minutes, you might consider the depths that God has extended His love to you, especially as we remember it most on days like today, uniquely at Christmas, in a way that God has designed exclusively with you in mind.

In a second, I'm gonna pray for us. And if you've never been here before, never heard me speak, I pray kneeling. And the reason that I do that is because I know the weight of the words that I'm sharing with you. I know that for some of you, you're hoping that I don't say something silly or stupid that will embarrass you with your friends, or with your family member, somebody that you risked by inviting, and really, to be honest, I've probably already messed that up. So glad we got it out of the way.

For others, you know that maybe this is the only shot that your loved one will get to hear the gospel, the good news of Jesus from someone like me for a long time. But I want to ask God, that with you and me, ultimately, what we're asking God is, would you make sure that those people in our life that need to hear that good news here it way louder from you than they do from me or in our time together.

And for some of you, nobody knows it. But in your head and in your heart, this is God's last shot for you. So I want to pray that he'd meet you right here, right now. Would you pray with me?

God, thank you so much. Thank you that no matter where we've been, no matter what we've done, no matter the circumstances that we arrive at this Christmas with, you are waiting, your love is available. And God, no matter the circumstances on the other side of a service like this, or what requirements are staring down the face of our next week or next year, we can trust you. And I pray that some would, God, maybe even for the very first time today. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.

So I'm not sure what this time of the year looks like for you. I know that for some of you, this actually is like the end of your push. And so even the 60 minutes are kind of a sacrifice for you because you're sort of waiting to get back to the thing that you know, you need to get done over the next few days. For others of you, you're on vacation, and you're not exactly sure how that final went. But it's done. So that's great.

For some of you, you turned in the assignment; you haven't thought about it since. For others of you, HR or HR named, your spouse has told you you have more vacation time left this year than days of the year. And so you should probably take that. And so for a lot of us, maybe the next few days really do represent kind of a downshift, a chance to be able to rest, maybe relax a little bit. I don't know what you do when that happens, for me on days like that, I actually tend to play a video game. And for some of you, you're like Phil, I didn't respect you a lot, and now I respect you even less. It's fair, to be honest, totally fair. But it reminds me of when I was young and I could just relax for a few hours and play a game, and my style of playing a video game is I play it like an interactive movie. And so I play through the game, but I just want to experience the story, and then once I'm done, I will never play that game again. Like I finished it.

Now I have a 14-year-old son who is the exact opposite, and when he plays a game after I have played that game, he will send it to the most difficult level possible; he will complete every mission, every side mission, get every achievement to the point that the little save screen, if it gives you a percentage you have completed of the game, he will not stop until it says 100%. I'm not kidding you. I don't even think I knew that that was possible in the video game. Like I thought that was just a numeric value they had to put in. We play the game way different.

Now I think for some of you, I think you treat Christmas like I treat video games. See, you know the routine, you can zoom through the required steps that will make your family happy. You can juggle the schedule to survive family gatherings or to minimize the impact on your finances, at least till January, and boom, you get the 2023 Christmas survival badge in the game of life. Great job, ran them out of the door. But you know, there is more to Christmas than surviving it. When we go deeper into celebrating it, we discover that Christmas offers us mystery wrapped in history. Like a nesting doll of nostalgia, you can find more if you dig deeper into the discussion you have discarded.

If you're not a Christian, I wonder, would you just give me a few minutes to show you why this is not a fairy tale, or an opiate for the masses but something that God has used to bring unparalleled hope into a world that desperately needs it, and inexpressible, inexhaustible love to you. And I know what you're thinking, you're like, "Phil, I can't really say no, you're wearing a microphone." And that's a really good point, right? Now, the first reason that I think the Christmas story is mystery wrapped in history is because fairy tales don't share factual details.

Seriously, take a look at the fairy tales we read; they take place in worlds that are unverifiable. Even the details that they're describing come from worlds no one lives in. So of course, they can read that way. Contrast that with the way that Luke, a biographer of Jesus' life, shares about his birth. He says, "In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, [to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem”] to Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn."

Now, there are a lot of words in there that seem like more factual details than fairy tales, right? Here's one of the reasons why; a lot of what we read of Jesus's life was written down by eyewitnesses. In the Bible, the New Testament has four different accounts or biographies of Jesus' life. Three of them are written by people with significant eyewitness testimony; they experienced it. Luke was different. Luke's approach was different too. For Luke, he was a physician by trade, he was not an eyewitness, but he had been impacted by Jesus' teaching and ministry. And so he went and began interviewing scores of eyewitnesses to create the account that we have under his name that is Jesus' life. And unlike the others, it's not that they're contradictory. It's that his is more comprehensive. It has more details because he takes in more voices.

He even tells us why he did that. He says, "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent [Theophilus] Menlo Church, that you may have certainty concerning the things that you have been taught." It doesn't sound like he was trying to write a fairy tale to me. He spent countless hours poring over details of an event that he had heard about, of an experience that he had found power within, and he had seen a growing number of people give their lives for the subject. If you wanted to write something that couldn't be fact-checked, you didn't write it the way that Luke writes this.

Caesar Augustus really existed. Cornelius was really the governor of the region. Galilee, Nazareth, Judea, and Bethlehem all existed. Not only that, Luke is writing during the time that eyewitnesses were still alive. Look, if you were making all of this up, we would have piles of accounts from people at the time refuting even the premise of his claims.

Instead, even thousands of years later, we have ancient non-Christian historians describing the literal life and impact of Jesus like Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus. This is unprecedented. So if this is historically plausible, perhaps this is more history than you thought.

But what about the mystery? The census that was called would have required them to go to Bethlehem, a location where the Messiah, the Savior of the world that the Jews were anticipating for centuries, would be born. But the problem was that there were no smartphones, there were no apps, no websites, no phones of any kind. And so it was either you had family that lived in the area that would let them let you stay with them, or it was a first-come, first-serve kind of thing. Now I'm married, and Alyssa has given birth to our four children, and I can assure you that none of Mary's experience giving birth to Jesus was on any of my wife's birth plans for any of our four kids. There was not one playlist that asks for farm animals outside. That was not in any of the lists, even the white noise sections, right? This was really difficult, imagine the journey that they had traveled; Mary at 9 months pregnant, moving at roughly 2 and 1/2 miles an hour for 8 hours a day, for 90 miles. I doubt that there were a lot of convenient rest stops with clean bathrooms and Starbucks available. When they finally arrived, it just got worse.

To put it in our terms, the hotels were full, no Airbnbs had any space left. The ADU’s even had people in them. All that was left was a manger or to put it in our terms like a really nice pergola on the outside of an ADU, right? Where the Savior of the world would enter the place He created. He came with no home, to bring us all home. And there's the mystery.

As real as all of those references are to you, that's as real as all those references that Luke is making were to his original readers. He wrote them so that they could be confident in his account so that they would know he meant what he was saying. And it was only the beginning of the ministry that he was documenting in his biography of Jesus. This Christmas, it offers a mystery wrapped in history for you to this wasn't just 2,000 years ago, it's for right now.

The other thing that we discover in the Christmas story flies in the face of fantasy. We see Jesus' ministry impact thousands of years later, even to today. And fairy tales will always fail. They're not designed to be applied to your life. The book closes, they live happily ever after; there's a the end. You might have grown out of your faith, and you had a the end to your faith, but you didn't have to. Lots of people grew into it, not out of it. Now I want to be fair if I'd had the life experiences that you've had, I may have arrived at some of the decisions you've arrived at. But Christmas is this regular reminder that you can still change your mind, and that God has not changed his mind about you. He still loves you unconditionally.

You know, the songs that we've been singing together today? Some of them are very old. We have a tradition of singing older songs at Christmas in church. And honestly, it's really fun because as a pastor, it's the one month out of the year where people don't complain about the music. It's like an annual Christmas gift to me, which I really appreciate. But they are nothing compared to the song that we see quoted in the pages of Scripture. As the Apostle Paul, a church planter and leader in the first century of the church is writing to the church at Ephesus, he surfaces a song that it seems like they were singing just a few years after Jesus' life, death, and resurrection on our behalf.

And the song went like this. He said, “He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.” These aren't just random ideas from a fairy tale. They are reminders for the first-century followers of Jesus that He really is who He claimed to be, and that the promises and predictions, hundreds of them from hundreds of years before His birth, were fulfilled in Him too.

Jesus' birth was far from comfortable for Mary and Joseph. But the signs and wonders that happened and that continued to follow, they offered Him a picture. I'm sure they offered Mary and Joseph hope of what was to come. If you have kids, even if right now they're being a little squirrely, I'm sure you've looked at their faces from time to time and hoped that they can make a difference in the world. Can you imagine Mary holding Jesus as a baby, looking into His eyes, and knowing that she was holding God in her arms? That He had come to a cradle but would end up on a cross on His way to an eternal crown for you and me? That's what Christmas reminds us of.

And the mystery of this moment that we celebrate at Christmas is so special because it begs the question that honestly I have no emotionally satisfying answer to. As I look around the world at war and hate, conflict and division, I regularly ask this question: Why does God love us? Now I know the correct answer; you're like, you should know that you have a microphone. I know the theologically correct answer that out of God's supreme character is an overflow of love that sacrificially solves the problem of our sinful rebellion in light of His holiness, for the sake of His glory. I get it. But like, look around, not this room, you guys look great, but like the world, you know? Does it feel like we deserve that love? Sure, we aren't doing all those horrible things ourselves, but we also aren't perfect. We know that we know at our heart that if this is up to us to deserve it, we don't get it. And that's why it took God. God offers us Christmas, a reminder of His forever love for us, a reminder that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes would not perish, but have everlasting life.”

As we get older, the mystery of Christmas can fade, sorry, kids. Somebody has to make it all happen. Somebody gets to pay for it. Somebody has to plan for it. And when that somebody is you, the mystery can turn to misery very quickly. It can become something where the trappings and traditions overshadow the point of what it's all about. See, the mystery was wrapped in the history of Christmas 2,000 years ago, and it still is today. We celebrate Christmas because even though Jesus was not born on December 25, He was born, He actually existed and still lives today. He was born as a child, He lived a perfect life on your in my behalf, He died in our place. And He came back from the grave so that we, the guilty ones, could go free. So go deeper than the Christmas survival achievement for 2023.

No matter what challenges you have faced, no matter what obstacles are in front of you, and I know that for some of you, that is a very real thing. For some of you, you don't have a job right now, and you're not sure what the next few weeks look like. For some of you, there are people that were in your life last year that you thought those relationships were unalterable, and it turns out, they altered a lot. For some of you, you're facing a diagnosis or health scare, and you're not sure what the other side of it is yet. And for some of you, this Christmas is a reminder of who is not with you as you celebrate this Christmas.

This last year, I lost my mom. And then less than 90 days later, I lost my brother. And this is the first Christmas that I celebrate the joy and hope of heaven because of Jesus at the same time as I grieve the loss of family members. And here's the thing, God can sit in that tension with you. God has so much more for you and me than just the routine. Christmas can still be a time of rich and meaningful celebration for the work that has been done on your and my behalf, before we were ever even born. So let's pray that this Christmas spreads hope in us and through us for the year to come. Can I pray for you?

God, there are so many people from those online to those joining us on a campus somewhere today that need hope. They're running on fumes right now, God. Would you remind us all of the divine mystery wrapped in the history of this moment that we still celebrate thousands of years later? Would you help each and every one of us, God, to come back to the foot of the cross, come back to the moment of the cradle to be reminded of the eternal ground that the infinite became an infant so that we might have a relationship? And God, for those that maybe have never trusted you, and this moment represents their last moment to turn to you, at least in their own mind and heart, would you draw them to yourself? That they might just slip up a hand in their heart and say, "God, I'm in. Whatever it looks like, I'm not sure of the details, but I want to follow you.

I'm committed to trying.” Thanks for the love that makes it possible. God, as we celebrate this Christmas, we celebrate it with a greater confidence than ever that you are who you say you are, that your love really is true and can change everything. It's in Jesus' name. Amen."

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