Tonight’s a Wrap
Notes
Transcript
Tonight’s a Wrap
Tonight’s a Wrap
I am the world’s worst gift wrapper. My struggle begins w/ cutting the wrapping paper in a straight line. I appreciate the dotted grid on the underside, it helps. But, making the scissors go straight is nearly impossible for me. Jagged edges all up the cut.
And, a roll of tape may not be enough. That pesky paper has a mind of its own.
In my defense, I learned from my mother. Her philosophy was always if a little tape is good. Then the whole roll is best.
Square cuts. Smooth corners. How do you wrap the ends of the box? Do you work from the sides and fold them in. Or do you work from the bottom and top?
Do you make sure the bottom of the box has the paper taped on so the top is smooth? And do the sides match the top and bottom?
And how often is there just a hint of the box showing thru b/c I didn’t cut the wrapping paper big enough?
Ribbons and bows? Forget it.
And, why do we wrap gifts? We want them hidden until it’s time. We want the anticipation to build until it’s the right time to reveal what we’ve been given.
Except, there are always clues. Size. Weight. Rattle. Feel. Just by looking at it you can make a guess as to what’s inside.
Maybe even there was a list you made that this gift appeared on at some point. unless you asked for a basketball and are getting globe. Cruel.
Clues. Hints. Descriptors.
I hope you’re all done wrapping all your gifts tonight. It’s almost too late. Everything needs t/b done now, b/c tomorrow is going t/b a massacre. There will no sheet of wrapping paper left that has not been shredded. It may be hanging from your ceiling fan when all is said and done.
But, that’s tomorrow when we focus on the wrapped gifts under the tree.
Tonight, we focus on the gift God wrapped and gave us a reason to wrap gifts and put them under our tree.
To get us focused on the right things tonight, I want to take you to one of my favorite Xmas verses.
My Favorite Xmas Verse
My Favorite Xmas Verse
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
This verse is not found in the Xmas story anywhere nor in any of our Xmas cards. Maybe it should be. It describes the gift God has given us by saying the gift is indescribable.
Paul, who wrote this verse, was well-educated and very bright. He had a vast vocabulary. He was a master of the Greek language and was a capable communicator.
More of his writings appear in the NT than anyone else, and w/ the exception of Jesus Himself, he had the greatest theological mind of anyone probably since the original Xmas.
And yet he paused when he came to this simple four letter word, ‘gift’ and said he is unable to describe it.
He can’t put it into words.
Actually, he coined a new term in this verse. The word is not used anywhere else in the NT. Indescribable.
It means inexpressible, unspeakable, too wonderful for words.
The gift was a baby. Human beings are complex. But babies are the simplest form. They are all wonderful. But, how is this baby indescribable?
Well, if he was a normal infant, he wouldn’t be. If he had come to be in the normal way, there would many words to describe Him. But, He didn’t.
B/C of His uniqueness this brilliant man had no words.
Luke, a doctor, was a matter-of-fact writer. No flowery language or extra and unnecessary words.
While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
If we were setting this situation, it would include length, weight, and how cute the baby boy is. Not the doctor. He’s seen a lot of these wrinkled, prune-like children w/ odd-shaped heads.
Jesus was perfect. But how many newborns have perfect shapes?
He wrote, when it was time, it happened.
There they were in a stable, surrounded by the animals, and for the first time in all of time Mary looked directly into God’s face.
Standing nearby was a bewildered man who had nothing to do w/ the conception.
His wife just delivered a son, and up to that point they had not been intimate.
Joseph believed the word of the angel that spoke to him 9 months earlier. But there is a difference between cognitive knowledge and experiential knowledge.
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 her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
At first, he heard these words and believed them. Cognitively, they sunk in. But until he had experienced it, there is no way he had put it all together. His brainiac computer had limited processing power.
This simple-minded carpenter, stood back in amazement.
She gave birth and she placed Him in a feeding trough.
But notice, first she wrapped Him. She wrapped Him in cloths.
We don’t know where the cloths came from. Did they bring them? They were poor, but maybe prepared. Or, possibly, they came from the owner of the stable who knew the time was near.
Some gifts you can get a good idea of what they are even though they are wrapped.
A couple of years ago I gave Sara a Blackstone, 4-burner flattop grill. I wrapped it. It’s about 5’ wide by 4’ tall and 2’ deep. It was pretty obvious.
Other gifts, there’s no way to know until you have completely unwrapped and out of the box.
But, a wrapped baby. It would seem rather obvious. But, this baby is indescribable. How do you wrap an indescribable gift? How do you unwrap it? The cloths can come off. But his physical presence isn’t half His story.
Mary wasn’t the only one who wrapped this gift. His Father did, too.
God didn’t just drop this baby onto the earth out of the blue.
Just like the clues we have to the gifts that are wrapped and under our tree, God gave us clues to the indescribable gift He was planning to give us at Xmas in the ways He wrapped Him.
He wrapped Him in 3 ways: He wrapped Him in prophecy, He wrapped Him in history, and He wrapped Him in mystery. And each of these wrappings gives us clues for what was to come.
There are more than 300 prophecies, predictions about Jesus in the OT that He has already fulfilled. Some of them are about Xmas. Here are a few.
This is how God wrapped Him in Prophecy.
Wrapped in Prophecy
Wrapped in Prophecy
600 years before these events, Isaiah wrote this:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
There was no IVF, so when a teenage girl, who was pledged t/b married but had not been intimate w/ any man turned up pregnant, the clue phone would be ringing.
“Hello?”
It’s a clue about who this is. It’s for you.
She had an almost unbelievable story to tell. Gabriel, an angel spoke to her and she had to tell her parents and fiance.
If this verse had not been written by Isaiah, what was almost unbelievable would have been completely unbelievable.
But, it was predicted. And one piece of wrapping paper around this gift was a mother who had never been intimate w/ a man.
This girl was in Nazareth. But when the Magi showed up to find the baby King of the Jews, they were told He was t/b born in Bethlehem.
King Heron consulted his mystics, who knew of the OT prophecy, but hesitated believing it. They told the Magi what they knew had been predicted in the OT.
“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times.”
Bethlehem, not Nazareth nor Jerusalem. Nobody would have made this story up b/c nobody would believe it.
If somebody important to God was going show up on the scene, you’d think it would happen in Jerusalem.
And who were these Magi?
They were astrologers, experts in the stars. They found messages from God in the organization of the night sky.
They came from west of Israel. What’s west of Israel? Babylon and Persia; modern day Iraq and Iran.
The prophet Daniel, he wrote one of our OT books, was kidnapped as a child when Babylon invaded Israel.
Persia conquered Babylon and took control of the area. The Persian king put Daniel and his friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; in charge of all the wisemen, mystics, astrologers in the land.
500 Years before the Magi visited the toddler Jesus, Daniel, a believer in God, was no doubt teaching these predecessors of the Magi to watch out for the gift God was going to send to bless and save the world.
He also predicted in 9:26
After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.
He prophecied the anointed One, sent from God, would be put to death.
So, again, the message the Magi was watch out for the birth of anointed one and then expect Him to be executed.
Isaiah understood, as unbelievable as Micah’s, Daniel’s, Mary’s and Joseph’s story was, as he wrote this he wondered who would believe it.
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
Isaiah was at a loss. He was honestly asking who would believe this? Who would believe these predictions would actually come to be? So many skeptics. Faithful ppl were few and far between.
He was living at at time when a vast majority of the world’s population did not believe. And for a long time, few anticipated His arrival.
But then, when He did arrive, there was nothing spectacular about his appearance. He was way average.
He looked like any other man of his day. He was a poor carpenter’s son. He was not the kind of person others clambered to follow.
People question it today. They have attempted to removed God’s gift from the holiday and make it more about the gifts under their tree.
They questioned it then. They question it now.
But, when what was predicted, when prophecy met history things began to happen just has they had been predicted.
The predecessors of the Magi got the prophecy from Daniel. Then, the Magi themselves were part of the history.
Not only did God wrap His gift in prophecy, He wrapped it in History.
Wrapped in History
Wrapped in History
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
Prophecy. Predictions. They are not worth the paper they are written on until they come true.
When the set time arrived. It was the perfect time.
History dove-tailed to this moment.
In order for the message to get out about what happened in that stable, there had to be a language that could be used to convey it.
Up to this point, there was no one language that could be written that a majority of ppl around the populated world could study and understand.
Around 330 bc, Alexander the Great conquered the region for Greece and developed what became a common language called, koine Greek. Greece was known for its education system and governmental civilization.
They taught ppl to read and write in this new language. They spoke Aramaic. But wrote in Greek.
200 years later, the Romans conquered the Greeks.
The Romans are known for their infrastructure development. They build roads, cities, ships and shipping lanes in the Sea. They built up their military to defend their territory and keep the peace.
These are the roads that Jesus, Paul, and the missionaries traveled to spread the message about the indescribable gift God has given us. They ships that sailed and sunk taking the truth w/ them.
And, the military that at first protected them, but then executed Him.
Few times in history did Rome call for a census to to reform their tax system. They only had to do it once to get Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
But, this is when prophecy met history and two of God’s wrapping jobs came together to give us the best gift ever.
It was exactly the right time. Any earlier and the supporting pieces would not be in place.
God also wrapped his gift in mystery.
Wrapped in Mystery
Wrapped in Mystery
Prophecy was coming true. Words written by Isaiah, Micah, Daniel, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Malachi, and others were become truth right before their eyes.
History was unfolding before them. Even then, this is describable. I’ve done some describing already.
What makes Jesus indescribable is the mystery.
Where’s the mystery?
First, God became a man, well, a baby first.
God, the HS, conceived w/ a human woman. We explain the biology to a point. This has never happened except this one time.
Fully God as His Father. Fully human as His mother.
There is mystery in the trinity that participated in His birth.
As Charles Wesley wrote:
“X, by highest heavens adored. X the everlasting Lord. Late in time behold Him come, offspring of the virgin’s womb. Veiled in flesh the godhead see; hail the incarnate deity, pleased as man w/ men to dwell; Jesus, our Emmanuel.”
Second, He chose uneducated outcasts to be the foundation of this new organization. Did He not have access to the best head-hunters, placements services, and HR dept of the day?
It’s not that they were unintelligent. Just uneducated. But, maybe that was a plus. He didn’t have to do as much re-education.
But the foundation of this organization was men no one would choose for their board.
Yet, here we are today.
Jesus chose ppl who could not take credit b/c they obviously did not have the stuff to pull this off. They needed Him.
He didn’t need them. He used them so we could relate to the process that we continue today.
Please explain how this group of outcasts created this multi-national, multi-generational, organization that was established 2000 years ago and is still growing and going strong today.
Third, He died. What God dies? What good is a God who cannot save Himself? If He cannot save himself, how can He save us?
They buried Him. He was gone. But then, He wasn’t. No, he hadn’t just fainted. His body wasn’t stolen. He died. He was buried. He rose again.
Explain that one. How does a human body stop just short of decomposition, come back to life, ascend to Heaven to return another day.
We don’t have the vocabulary to cross all those t’s and dot all those i’s.
This is how God put it together. It started w/ a baby in a manger. Not a grown man. Not a man who dominated and intimidated to control ppl to get what He wanted. He did it w/ a baby.
He gives us the choice of whether or not we want to believe this.
Most, don’t.
But the truth of the prophecy met the facts of history. Still, they don’t answer all questions generated by the mystery.
That’s by design. That’s where faith words.
And by faith, we unwrap this gift that God gave us to save us.
We only have to do it once. But then for every day, the rest of our lives we enjoy the hope, love, joy, peace that comes w/ Him.
And, we look forward to His return.
Just like the shepherds anticipating his arrival the first time, we anticipate His return.
That’s why we’re here tonight. Enjoy the destruction of all the wrapping paper tomorrow. But tonight, enjoy the wrapped but indescribable gift God gave you to save you and look forward to His return.