Tonight is Christmas in our church. We are beginning our study of the harmonized New Testament, reading through the NT chronologically for about 7 or 8 months. We are harmonizing the Synoptics which will take us 8 and a half weeks. Tonight we begin.
I preached a message entitled, Unto You is Born This Day. The message encompasses the whole of the Christmas story. By my calculations, this is 5.66% of the Gospels. (That would be just over 1/20th, for the fractionally minded.) There is really no way to adequately deal with the content of the Incarnation in one message.
I remember Michael Barrett teaching us about the ‘Immanuel concept’ a quarter of a century ago. There really is no greater story. Every other religious guru of history has told us the way to find enlightenment and escape sin is “be like me”. This Messiah became us. He became sin for us. He humiliated himself for the purpose of enabling our escape from ourselves. What grace.
We had no planned songs tonight, I just had our folks pick favorites, with this stipulation, they had to be Christmas songs. The Christian worship of the Incarnation is precious to me. We sang Joy to the World first, picked by one of our dear old saints. She is usually first on favorites, unless we cheat and don’t tell her we’re asking for favorites until after the first pick is in. “Let earth receiver her King!” What a hymn! We sang O Holy Night; Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne; The Birthday of a King; O Come, O Come, Emmanuel; Infant Holy, Infant Lowly; and closed with O Little Town of Bethlehem.
The proposition for the message was this: Only one kind of Saviour can make you better than what you are, the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
He is the One all men need to follow.
The notes are posted here.
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
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