Sermon Tone Analysis

If you’ve been journeying with us the past four weeks, you know that we’ve been celebrating and observing Advent, and now here we are on Christmas Eve, on the verge of the celebration of the arrival of Jesus, our Savior, the light of the world, Immanuel, God with Us.

The Christmas story is a powerful story, filled with wonder and miracles and very real life.

It is the story of God with Us, Jesus come to earth as the most wonderful gift of all eternity.

As we have walked through various parts of the Christmas story these past four weeks, we have explored the intersection of God with Us in the lives of real people who played a role in His arrival.

And we have seen that as He brought hope, love, joy, and peace into their lives in very real ways, He will do the same for us today.

In our time together now, let’s briefly trace our way through portions of this Christmas story again, highlighting all that it means that God is with us.

God with Us Brings Hope

Luke began his story of Jesus’s life with Zechariah and Elizabeth, a priest and his wife, an old childless couple, who receive an angelic message that they will have a son who will be the promised prophet to prepare the way for the coming Messiah.

We know him as John the Baptist.

This message to Zechariah was a bright spark of hope—to the couple who had longed for a child for most of their lives but even more to the people of Israel.

You see, the promise of the Messiah had given the Jews their deepest hope throughout their entire history.

Ever since the fall of Adam and Eve, God had been caring for His people and making a way to restore them—and us—to Himself.

He had formed a covenant with Abraham, promising the blessing of Christ to all people through Abraham’s family.

He had affirmed the same covenant through the leaders of ancient Israel, and He had foretold the arrival of the Messiah through many prophets, perhaps none more so than Isaiah.

Isaiah fanned the flames of hope with his messages of the coming king, such as these in Isaiah 9: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.

And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.

He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.

The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this” (Isaiah 9:6–7).

How is your hope today?

Whether your heart is light or your spirit is deep in despair, let me encourage you that God with Us brings us hope that sparks like a fire.

It flows like water.

It grows like a seed.

Hope grows and spreads like a living thing.

It can dwindle and wane and, yes, even die.

But with nurture and care, it can revive and flourish and multiply.

Focusing on gratitude can renew and grow our hope.

Recognizing and appreciating the good that God has shown us in the past can increase our hope for all He will do in the future.

Collectively we can all be thankful for the gift of God’s Son, and individually we can remember and pay attention to ways and times that God has shown up in our lives—from the many daily gifts and blessings to the bigger acts of guidance or provision or protection in whatever ways He knew exactly what we needed.

This is my prayer for us all in this season: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

God with Us Brings Love

When we talked about love, we talked about Mary and Joseph.

In many ways, theirs was a typical love story for its day: a young couple of humble means enters into the multistep process of marriage in ancient Israel.

They think they know where their lives are headed—and then an angel shows up, announcing a miraculous pregnancy of the Son of God.

Their world is rocked.

Their once quiet lives will never be the same.

Will their relationship survive the perceived betrayal?

Mary and Joseph’s was a love story and a life story being written by God Himself, and He is love itself.

He knew just how to deliver tangible love to Mary and Joseph in exactly the ways they both needed.

For Mary, this was the support of someone who could fully understand what she was going through.

Elizabeth was just the person as she was experiencing her own miracle pregnancy.

And her reception of Mary was like the biggest, warmest hug she could receive.

Elizabeth’s understanding and acceptance served as the tangible arms of God to confirm and reassure Mary that she was not alone.

For Joseph, a supernatural expression of love was needed.

In his pain, he had decided to divorce Mary, but God lovingly met his needs by sending an angel to assure Joseph that miraculous events were indeed taking place.

In just the right ways, God lovingly provided what Mary and Joseph needed—and God does the same for us.

God is love.

God gives His love to us freely.

And when we open ourselves to it, God’s love flows through us to others.

And it is the love that entered the world as a helpless human baby—to identify with and be one of us and to willingly lay down His life and be killed under the unimaginable burden of the sins of the world—so that we can be restored in love and relationship with God for eternity.

God with Us is love for and within and through us.

The love of God is a miraculous, transformative force that changes us and sweeps us into a miraculous story.

As we respond to God’s love, we find our own capacity to love expanding.

It’s a little like that scene in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

when the Grinch’s heart keeps growing bigger and bigger—“three sizes that day”—until it bursts the measuring frame.

Perhaps like that transformed Grinch, we too can be bringers and bearers of love in this Christmas season and beyond.

Let’s start with those closest to us—our spouses, our kids, our relatives, the ones we’ve been impatient with in the busyness of the season.

Let’s continue with our friends in this room, in our neighborhoods, at our jobs.

And, yes, let’s include the strangers, the people who seem different from us, the enemies, and even the ones who are just plain hard to love.

Love has come into our world in the person of Immanuel, God with Us.

Let’s live and spread His love in every way we can.

God with Us Brings Joy

Elizabeth personifies Christmas joy.

Mary’s aunt, the mother of John the Baptist, was the first, after all, to receive and experience joy in the arrival of Jesus on earth.

But first there was joy in the miraculous gift of her own son, John the Baptist.

And it was all the more joyous because of the pain and shame she had endured.

You remember that Elizabeth and her husband, Zechariah, had never been able to have children, and now they were old, too old.

Their dreams of having kids, or even a single kid, were dead.

This was a great loss they would have grieved deeply, especially Elizabeth.

In her culture, she would have borne the blame for this.

And then an angel appeared to her husband, telling him the couple would have a son—not just any son, but one who had been prophesied to prepare the way for the Messiah.

Zechariah was in disbelief of the news initially.

Elizabeth must have felt joy when she heard—or certainly when she became pregnant soon after.

When Mary came to visit shortly after Mary’s own encounter with an angel, joy erupted from Elizabeth.

She proclaimed to Mary, “As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy...” (Luke 1:44–45).

Elizabeth’s joy was contagious, filling Mary and setting her free to overflow with gratitude and praise with her own song.

Joy is like that.

It spreads, and it often is present in circumstances that don’t seem all that joyous—especially when its source is Jesus, God with Us.

Peter described that kind of joy as inexpressible and glorious.

“Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8–9).

Christmas is a season characterized by joy—because Jesus has come.

Let’s look for and choose joy no matter what troubles may be swirling around us or what pains may be troubling us inside.

Let’s rejoice together for the arrival of our Lord and in the knowledge that He is with us, always working to provide and heal in our hearts and lives.

God with Us Brings Peace

We like to think of it as a peaceful night in Bethlehem on that first Christmas.

But it wasn’t for Mary and Joseph.

Mary was giving birth . . . in a stable . . .

after a frantic search for lodging of any sort in a city that was so crowded there wasn’t a place for a pregnant woman to stay.

It might not have been peaceful for the shepherds either.

We tend to picture a calm, still night and a pastoral scene with shepherds resting around a campfire and sheep nestled in for the night beneath clear skies and twinkling stars.

But those sheep might have been restless and trying to wander off.

There might have been coyotes howling menacingly nearby—or leopards prowling.

Storms might have threatened overhead, and the men who wandered the hills might have been grumbling about eating the same bland food for the sixth night in a row.

What we do know for sure is that those shepherds were not feeling peace when the angel first showed up.

They were terrified.

They probably thought they were seeing some kind of ghost—or losing their minds.

It was a common reaction from everyone who ever came face-to-face with an angel in the Bible.

But these guys weren’t even necessarily particularly religious.

They undoubtedly believed in God and did their best to follow the laws, but in the social and spiritual order of the day, these guys were at or near the bottom—and they knew it.

They were nowhere near the holiness of those Pharisees.