Go ahead and grab your Bibles and open to Luke chapter 2. Open your Bibles and open to Luke chapter 2. And we will look at today what is arguably the most popular, famous telling of the birth of Jesus Christ in the world.
But as you’re turning there, I want you to think about a time in your life when you had kind of a major event happen, a major thing happen in your life and you needed to make an announcement to some people. Who were on the announcement list? And who were the people you told the good news, the big news to?
You know, I was thinking immediately this week of when I got engaged to my wife Nicole. And it was in June. in the first service I said it was August, but I found out it was June. In June of 2006 we got engaged. And so I had this master plan. It was like a four month plan. I went and asked her dad if he would ever let some punk like me marry his oldest daughter. And he said yes, praise God.
And then I started looking at rings and I bought a ring. And I remember convincing her several times leading up to that month why we couldn’t get engaged before I went to college. And I wrote it all down and kind of journaled out the four month journey so she could read it on the back end.
The day finally came. I had this grand plan. And I was going to take her back to this camp where we had worked the summer before and we were going to go just be reacquainted with the kids and some of the counselors and all of that. And so I said, “I’ll pick you up.” In the morning we drove up toward Pittsburgh.
And right before we got to the camp I pulled over at this place where I knew there was a path that led up to a waterfall. And I popped the trunk and there was a picnic basket and flowers in there. And so we hiked up the hill and laid out a blanket and we had a great picnic lunch together. And it was super romantic (patting myself on the back for that still). And so we had the lunch.
She didn’t know it was coming, so she turned around and she was looking at the waterfall. And while she did, I grabbed the ring from the basket, I got on my knee. She turned around and I said, “Will you marry me?” Praise God she said yes.
What do you think we did right after that? We talked and we laughed and I told the stories. But right after that I said, “Do you want to still go check out the camp or do you want to go back and tell people that we just got engaged?” What do you think we did? We rushed home to make the announcement that we are finally engaged.
And our announcement list started with our parents and our siblings and our church friends and our family friends. And so the announcement went out. Here’s a picture of us the day we got engaged. They put the date on it back then, which I think is just really helpful. If our cameras could get back to that, that would be great. I guess we have Facebook and all of that now.
I was also thinking about birth announcements. And you know, whenever you announce that you’re pregnant that’s a big deal. Now we have these gender reveal parties, which are just getting out of hand, people. I mean they’re all over. The other day I saw a cold tub gender reveal. How many of you are on the cold tub train? Anybody around the room? A couple of you. You would probably stand up and flex if I asked you to.
But this fit couple clearly pregnant, they chip away at the ice and they get down in the 30 degree water and they submerged themselves. And then they turned on a pump and out came pink water, filling the cold tub with pink. And everyone was freaking out. It was just absolutely ridiculous, and you’re all thinking the same thing as this shredded couple gets in this cold water and gives their unborn baby girl frostbite before she even gets to earth.
My sister Lydia who is over here and her husband Seth on the front row, my sister works here, my blood sister if you didn’t know that. Lydia. She works in Gospel City Kids. And she’s due with a baby any day now, literally wishing it would happen right now. But they decided to do a gender reveal. My niece and nephew, their first two kids, they waited until they were born to make the announcement of what they had. But this year they decided to do a gender reveal. So that’s fun.
And they decided they were going to do it via fireworks, which sounds really awesome. If you’re going to make a statement, an announcement, then go in a big way. And so here’s the picture of the gender reveal, and it’s really appropriate for Luke chapter 2. Because as you can see, the sky is proclaiming they are having a baby girl. And their eyes are lit up and they are looking at wonder as they tell their little kids Cora and Ezra, my niece and nephew, that they’re having a baby sister.
Everything was picture perfect except for the couple who got the fireworks, who will remain unnamed, they got the wrong color firework. So there they are as the sky is proclaiming they’re having a baby girl and the other couple is running around freaking out trying to figure out how are we going to tell them it’s actually a boy?
And then here was the follow up picture. Thankfully they got like this little blue smoke, and they found out they’re actually having a baby boy. So one miserable gender reveal party later and two little kids confused out of their mind later and a really confusing text thread to my family later. My mom is just now figuring out ok, it’s a baby boy. It’s a grandson coming any day now. The news had been out. The announcement had been made.
And it was a lot of fun. I’m sure you have stories like that. It’s fun to be creative, right? And it’s fun to make announcements when big things happen in our lives. It’s even more fun to tell those on our announcement list who will be excited and who will believe what we say and who will jump for joy and cry and praise because they’ve been waiting for this as long as we’ve been waiting for this.
And that brings us today to Luke chapter 2, which is arguably the greatest birth announcement in the history of the world. I mean God had generations upon generations to plan the birth announcement of Jesus. He planned it. He had it in His mind’s eye before the foundation of the world. He could’ve done it any way. He could’ve announced it to kings and kingdoms. God could’ve let the world know through any kind of announcement He wanted, but His birth announcement involved some lowly, hard-working lower class shepherds in a small, non-spectacular, non-dazzling city called Bethlehem. Let’s read about it in Luke chapter 2 this morning.
Luke 2:1. Hear the Word of the Lord. 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, 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 cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!
When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. (Luke 1:1-20)`
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You for this Christmas Eve of 2023 where we’ve gathered as the people of God. Lord, we have come to exalt You and worship You as we’ve done. Now we pay close attention to Your holy powerful, mighty Word that is inerrant, that never returns void.
And Lord, while we’ve heard the story of Luke 2 over and over again, would it be impressed upon our hearts in a fresh and new way today? Would it cause us like Mary to ponder these things, to treasure these things in our hearts? And would it lead us to make haste and run to Jesus just as the shepherds did? We thank You for their example of faithfulness. May it speak to us today as we look at Your Word. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
The big idea that I want to spend some time on with you is this. The shepherds show us that Jeus is good news for everyone. The shepherds show us that Jesus is good news for everyone. Now whether you’ve grown up in church or not, you’re probably very familiar with the reading that I just read from Luke chapter 2. Our kids recite these in our Christmas plays. You hear it every year when you go to a Christmas Eve service at some point.
When you’re doing the light drive around the neighborhoods. Any of you do the light drives with your families? When you’re driving you sometimes see pieces of Luke 2 displayed in people’s front yards with a Nativity set. My family gives those people extra bonus points whenever we’re going around rating the houses. And then of course we have our beloved Charlie Brown Christmas where Linus brilliantly tells Charlie Brown what Christmas is actually all about.
But have you thought much about the truer details about baby Jesus and the events surrounding the evening of His birth? Is your understanding of the Christmas story more influenced by our European peaceful Nativity sets where snow is falling and it’s accompanied by the smell of peppermint and cinnamon or have you thought deeper about the culture and the context in which Jesus was actually born into?
See, the more I thought about it this week I was struck by these shepherds. And there are pieces of the story that make total sense, ok? Like if God is going to send His Son into the world who is the long-awaited Messiah, angels, I totally get it. An angelic gaggle of celestial beings in the sky singing and glorying and making songs that Jesus has come? I totally get it. Give me all the angels. Give me all the fireworks.
But there are certain pieces in the story that are a little harder to grasp. Yes, small Bethlehem was sort of unlikely. Yes, the virgin teenager Mary, very unlikely. But the shepherds being on God’s first to know announcement list? Pretty peculiar when you start to think about these shepherds. See, shepherds were not society’s finest. In this day and age they were more like outcasts to society. Even today, no one in this room would actually care much about shepherds if they didn’t accompany our Nativity sets that we put in our house or if they didn’t accompany God’s grand story.
If you were trying out for a Christmas play, you probably wouldn’t try out to be a shepherd. Even my siblings would fight over who got to be the donkey before we got to be the shepherd in the Christmas play.
So as far as shepherds go, 2,000 years ago, no one cared about shepherds. They were one step above lepers on the totem pole in ancient society. They were marginalized. They were outcasts to society. Even in the Old Testament we read that Egyptians hated shepherds. Genesis 46 says, “For shepherds were an abomination to the Egyptians.”
And now here we are all these years later and in Judaism your job as a shepherd made you ceremonially unclean. So not only as a shepherd were you just dirty because you were out in the field and you didn’t have access to a shower and you were rubbing up against animals all the time and sleeping out in the dirt. But you were also considered ceremonially unclean because the Pharisees and the leaders and the Mosaic law said that you needed to keep the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.
But as a shepherd you were working 24/7 and you didn’t have the opportunity to stop like everybody else and to worship and to get out among the clean religious people. And you know the Pharisees, do you know what they did to shepherds? They put them on Rabbinic ban. They were unable to come to the festivals, unable to be seen among the clean, religious folks.
And so they were a very unloved bunch all throughout the Bible. They were also considered untrustworthy. Couldn’t serve as a witness in a court case. They were uneducated, especially in the Mosaic law. So they had no business being among the ordinary people, the regular people, the religious people, the people who were seeking God.
Certainly weren’t depicted and displayed in people’s homes like they are today at Christmastime. Yet the all-powerful, all-creating, ever-gracious God of the universe seems to think highly of those whom society casts down. And in the Bible we see shepherds always having a place of respect in God’s economy. God called Abraham, who was a shepherd. Moses was a shepherd. King David was a shepherd. The prophet Amos was a shepherd. And Jesus, who we just read was born in Bethlehem that evening would eventually be known as the good what? Shepherd.
And one verse after reading that Mary gave birth and wrapped Jesus in swaddling clothes, God’s divinely inspired Word moves us directly to the shepherds doing their blue collar job in a field nearby.
Look at verse 8. “And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them.” Why them? Why would God’s angel appear to these outcasts of society? Why didn’t God’s angel appear to some kings? Why didn’t God’s angel appear to the religious leaders? Why didn’t God’s angel appear to the affluential and the influential?
God’s angel appeared to these lowly shepherds in a field nearby. And the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were filled with great fear. The glory of God is like talking about the weightiness of God. I think it’s bright as well. So the sky lights up with the weightiness of God. If you saw these angels appear, no doubt you felt it. No doubt you experienced something epic. And no doubt we all would have been fearful.
See the angels, they’re not probably like what you display in your home. They weren’t like these feminine looking beings we put on the top of our Nativity set or like the eight pound chubby baby angel. That’s not what’s going on here. Angels in the Bible, like lots of wings, lots of heads, lots of eyes, beings of fire, men of war showing up in the sky announcing to you something. We would all probably pee our pants.
So here the angels are. In verse 10 the angel said to them, “Fear not,” ok, “for behold” (that means check this out) “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”
These angels, these men of warriors, these warriors in the sky, they declare, “I have good news for you.” They bring good news to these lowly shepherds in the field. And it’s accompanied by great joy and it will be for all people.
The shepherds show us that Jesus is good news for everyone. Look at verse 11. “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
Now what the angels proclaimed is of massive importance. And I want to give you point number one this morning. It’s this. The shepherds heard the good news. The shepherds heard the good news. That’s the first step in the process of coming to Jesus Christ and understanding who He is and what He can do for your life. The shepherds heard the good news as the angels proclaimed from the sky, “For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.”
So three names. A Savior is someone who comes to save. And that’s a really great name for Jesus if you know that you need saved. See a lot of the world lives their lives thinking, “I’m doing pretty good. I go to church every year on Christmas Eve and I put the Nativity set up in my house. And I think about God, so I’m doing good. What do I need saved from?”
See, the shepherds, they would have been very familiar with this idea of saving and this idea of sin because they spent their lives keeping lambs spotless and accounted for so that the Jews could sacrifice 1,800 lambs per year. Eighteen hundred lambs per year were slaughtered to atone for the sin of the people. And these angels proclaim here comes a Savior, someone who would come to save people from their sins.
That’s very in line with what the angel told Joseph in Matthew 1:21. Look at it on the screen. “Mary will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
So the angel proclaimed that a Savior had come. The second thing that the angels proclaimed is that He is Christ. And this isn’t Jesus’ last name. Jesus doesn’t send out a card that says, “Merry Christmas from the Christs.” All right? Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Mashiach in the Hebrew. This is the long-awaited Messiah who the Jewish people waited for. It held so much weight. The word Christ held so much weight to anyone in Judaism because it was the one that they were waiting for to come and right all the wrongs, to crush the head of the serpent.
If you’ve been here for the last several months, we’ve been studying the book of Genesis, Genesis 1-11. And each week we are left disappointed with God’s people who He puts in charge. Yeah, they do some pretty cool things. Yeah, God brings them through some massive storms and things in this life and He preserves Noah from the wrath of God. But all of these individuals continue to fail. They continue to miss the mark.
The same is true for you and me. We always are missing the mark because of sin in our lives. And so at the end of Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel we’re like, “Where is this Messiah? Where is this perfect king who was going to come and right all of the wrongs and free us from our captivity and change us from our sinfulness?
Genesis 3:15. The seed of the woman would eventually come to crush the head of the serpent. And here we are Luke chapter 2, the angels declaring the seed of the woman has finally come and He will be the Messiah. He will be the perfect one. He will go to the cross and crush the head of the serpent. We are here. The Savior is a different Adam. He’s better than Noah, better than Shem, better than Abraham, better than David. This is the Christ that the Jewish world had been waiting for, and yet honestly, they had lost hope in. four hundred years of silence. Where is God? Could this be true?
And it’s a testimony to us not to grow weary in the waiting, but to remember that Jesus Chtist will come again. He promises to come again. And so we wait patiently knowing that He is our Savior and our Lord. That’s the third name that the angels proclaimed. Not only is He a Savior. Not only is He the Christ. But He is the Lord. it is a declaration that this is God Himself. He is Emmanuel, God with us.
It was a title declaring that this baby born in an unimpressive feeding trough is actually the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation. By this baby were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or authorities or rulers or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him and He, this baby, was before all things. And in Him all things will hold together. And in Him all the fullness of God would be pleased to dwell.
So we spend our lives trying to get to God, trying to understand God. This announcement that this baby is the Lord is a proclamation that all the fullness of God, everything you need to know about God almighty, has shown up in this little baby who’s been born in Bethlehem. And through Him He would reconcile to Himself all things, making peace by His blood on a future cross.
So man, what’s in a name? So much is packed into the name of Jesus. So much is packed into the birth announcement that He is the Savior, the Christ the Lord.
Look in verse 13. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host.” Sorry, look at 12. “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” That sounds unimpressive.
So the shepherds are blown away. I’ve got good news of great joy, a Savior, the Christ, the Lord is born. But you’re going to go find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths lying in a feeding trough. They would have been very familiar with that as shepherds. But in the middle of that, after that, suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
So even if the shepherds were like, “”What is he talking about with a baby?” their minds are blown as the sky is filled with angels now declaring there is peace with God for whom He is pleased, on whom His favor rests. There’s going to be peace on earth with man and God, finally, because of this Savior who has come. It should lead you to ask this Christmas, “Am I pleasing to God? Do I please God? Do I have favor with God? Does God look at my life and is He pleased with me?”
Because the only way to true peace with the God of the universe is to seek Him through the means that He has provided. It’s the good news that the Savior, the Christ, the Lord was born in Bethlehem all these years ago. It leads to point number two. The shepherds believed the good news. The shepherds heard the good news but then they believed the good news.
Look at verse 15. “When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Dude, can you believe what we just saw? Did you see it or did I just see it? Are we just dreaming? Like was that like…? Let’s build a fire. Let’s pass the hookah thing around, and let’s just talk about what we saw tonight.”
I think a lot of us do that. A lot of us look for some kind of experience and then we run and we just kind of like deliberate on these types of things. That’s not what these shepherds did. They didn’t just take the experience and go and sit on it and go discuss it and go to sleep that night. When the angels went away from heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.”
Listen. The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of the gospel of Jesus had come, moved these lowly shepherds to immediate action. I love the line “which the Lord had made known to them.” In an act of sovereign grace, Yahweh moved toward these lowly shepherds with the good news and they believed. They knew they didn’t deserve it. They knew they weren’t some upstanding citizen who had kept the moral law. They certainly were not society’s best or model citizens.
But the Lord made known to them the good news of Jesus and they responded in immediate faith and immediate action. It changed their life. It changed their trajectory. We’re going to leave our sheep and job behind and go and find this baby in a manger.
Verse 16. “And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.”
The last couple of days I’ve been praying that for us, for everyone in this room. I’ve been praying that we might make haste and run to Jesus like the shepherds did, that the message of the gospel would not bounce off of our eardrums like they do every year at Christmas and Easter, but that it would move us into action, that it would cause us to abandon everything to seek Jesus Christ.
Later when Jesus starts His earthly ministry, He says in Matthew 7, “Ask and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you.”
Do you notice the angels, or sorry, the shepherds’ response and progression? They heard the good news, they made haste to seek the good news and they found the good news to be true. That same progression needs to happen in every person’s life. Everyone in this room today, the same progression needs to happen. You are hearing the good news. You need to make haste to believe the good news, to go and find out if this is true. And you need to respond accordingly.
Do you understand the scope of what the good news is? Let me remind you. It’s the truth that God is holy, that God is a perfect loving Creator God who created you in His image so that you could walk with Him and be in a relationship with Him and live your life to the fullest because your face is fully turned toward God.
But the bad news of the gospel is that every person in this room falls short of that kind of glory and perfection. You are a sinner. You are broken. Sin has marred your life. And therefore on your best day, you still miss the mark. You still fall short of the glory of God. And no degree of religiosity can save you. You can come to church till you’re blue in the face. That will not get you into heaven, standing before the God of glory.
So the good news. We desperately need some good news if that’s the bad news about each of us. But the good news is what the angels proclaimed. The Christ, the Lord, Jesus the Savior, came into the world. You don’t have to earn your way to God. You don’t have to push God off because you’ve done too many wrong things in your life to get back to God. you don’t have to try to earn your way back up to God. You could never do that.
So the gospel is a proclamation that God came to you, that Jesus came to live a perfect life, to always glorify God, to never disobey, to always worship because His face was always turned toward His Father. And you know what happened to Him? In His perfection He died on a cross in your place as a substitute for your sin. He was buried with the wicked. And yet on the third day He rose again from the dead, being the only hope, the only way to salvation, the only way to a life and peace with God our Father.
But the last part of the gospel is something that’s so important. There has to be a response to the good news. It can’t just be something that you hear, something that you see in the sky, something that you hear at a service as a pastor talks. It’s got to be something that causes you to make haste and turn to the Lord. You’ve got to stop everything and confess your sins.
The Bible says to confess with your mouth and to believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord and God raised Him from the dead. If you do these things, you will be saved. And a testimony of whether or not you are actually saved is if Jesus is Lord of your life and it moves you to immediate action, it moves you to immediately live your life differently than everyone else is living on the face of the planet.
But I can promise you, if you seek Him you will find Him. Make haste and run to the Lord and you will find that Jesus is the Son of God and He will change your life forever. There are those of you here today who haven’t been in church for a long time, you have loved ones who are praying for you and desiring for you to surrender and talk about spiritual matters, talk about the Lord.
Jesus brought you here today in His sovereignty so that you could hear the truth of His Word. What will you do with it? Will you make haste? Will you have more conversation? Will you think about these things? Will you surrender to the lordship of Christ? Or will you just set it aside amongst all the other great Christmas things you’ve got to do and check it off the list and move on with your holiday season? My encouragement to you is to believe, to trust in the Lord. The Spirit of God is drawing and pulling, and I pray that He opening your heart to respond to the gospel.
Thankfully the shepherds believed. But then the third thing we see the shepherds do, the shepherds proclaimed the good news. The shepherds proclaimed the good news. Look at verse 17. “When they saw it.” So they found Jesus. “They made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.”
So I’ve been thinking about this part. And you know, the innkeeper and some others in that small community, they must have heard the chaos that was going on as Mary is having this baby in a barn. Poor Mary. And they must have been there. They ran out. They’re seeing this. They’re probably trying to help.
And then here comes the low class shepherds up on the barn. And they’re not even supposed to be seen with people, ceremonially unclean right? And they’re dirty and they’re smelly. They show up to the barn. They had no reason to open their mouths and trust that anyone would believe what they had to say. I mean, they had no reason for anybody to think, “Oh yeah, I’m sure they did see angels in the sky. Oh yeah, I’m sure that this baby is the long-awaited Messiah.”
And yet the shepherds abandoning their reputation, abandoning what other people thought of them, they opened their mouths saying all that had been told to them concerning this baby. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. Not everybody believed. Not everybody took it to heart. Not everybody worshiped this baby Jesus in a manger. They wondered. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if those shepherds actually did see angels in the sky. I wonder why they’re even here. They’re not supposed to be here.
Matthew Henry, a commentator, says this. I thought it was interesting. Can you put that quote up, KJ? Matthew Henry said, “They wondered but never inquired any further about the Savior, their duty to him or advantages by him, but let the thing drop as a nine days wonder. Oh, the amazing stupidity of the men of that generation. Justly were the things that belonged to their peace, hid from their eyes when they thus willfully shut their eyes against them.”
When the message of Jesus goes out, often our eyes are so blinded by the things of this world that we don’t want some baby and some guy who got murdered on a cross to be king of our lives. Many of us don’t want to be interrupted by that sort of thing. Yeah, I like the story and I like the Nativity set and the idea at Christmastime. It gives me warm feelings. But I don’t want to surrender to the lordship of Jesus. I don’t want Him to be king of my life. I don’t want to give up everything to follow this Lord, because that means I can’t live my life the way I want to live my life. And our eyes are often blinded by the things of this world.
But we can take note of what Mary did. Verse 19. “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”
She thought about every word and she internalized it. And she took every word to heart. And she looked at her baby boy in that feeding trough and she thought, “Could he be the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah?” And she knew full well that God would reveal all of these things as she obeyed God and walked with God and prayed to God and trusted that God had a divine, sovereign plan. Who is she? “Who am I,” she must have been thinking, “to be used by the God of glory?” And she made it a matter of private meditation as she looked to the Lord.
Verse 20. “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.”
You get that. After such an epic night, these lowly shepherds returned to the field, returned to the sheep herd. I was thinking about it. It’s a testimony that you can return to the mundane things of life when you have experienced the majesty of Jesus Christ. You can do anything in this life, anything that’s on your plate. You can go through anything if you have experienced the majesty and the hope and the peace that comes through the person of Jesus Christ. And they returned to their blue collar job, glorifying and praising God.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a garbage man, a sewage man, a construction worker, a high school student, a grocery bagger, a salesman, a plumber, a janitor, a CEO, a business owner, a lawyer or a financial advisor. You fill in the blank. With Christ you have something to proclaim, and you have a reason to worship Jesus.
Without Him, man, we’re all the outcasts. Without Christ, without recognizing who this Jesus is, Savior, Christ and Lord, we’ve got absolutely nothing. We are as lowly as the shepherds were to society. But with God, man, you can get moved to the top of His announcement list. And He will praise and worship when you stand before Him some day and we will join in that song forever.
Look at verse 21. “And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”
I told you a few weeks ago; I mentioned I’m reading a book that has excerpts and some poetic writings from an old writer, G.K. Chesterton. Let me just give you a couple quotes that have ministered to me as I’ve been thinking about the Christmas story. He wrote this in 1901 in the Daily News.
“The exciting quality of Christmas rests on an ancient and admitted paradox. It rests upon the paradox that the power and center of the whole universe may be found in some seemingly small matter, that the stars in their courses may move like a moving wheel around the neglected outhouse of an inn.”
You know, for a few days, the sky and all of its host, it hinged and is centered around that barn and that manger where Jesus lay. Some thirty years later the star and all of its host, all of creation, would center and hinge around the Roman tool of execution that we have lovingly looked at now as the cross.
For the next three days all of the universe would hinge and center around a grave where Jesus was laid along with other dead people. And without the context of who Jesus is, His story is rather unimpressive. Jesus’ story is one of meekness, humility and misfortune. He was poor. He was lower class. He worked for what He had. His life was stamped out at a young age. He wasn’t seen as a Savior, but a blasphemer. He wasn’t treated as a human but like a criminal and a murderer. He wasn’t someone you’d put at the top of your announcement list, but probably someone that you would leave off. And He probably seemed like more of a shepherd to His culture and society than a religious leader, prophet, and king.
And yet Jesus is good news for everyone today because Jesus turns societies and cultures upside down. In Jesus (hear me this morning) the first will be last. And in Jesus the meek will inherit the earth. And the mourning will find comfort. And the merciful will receive mercy. And the pure in heart, they will see God. in Jesus the hungry and thirsty for righteousness will be satisfied and the persecuted for righteousness will enter the kingdom of heaven.
And in Jesus, the lowly, sweaty, outcast shepherds moved to the top of the guest list when Jesus came to their field, when they heard the good news, when they believed the good news, and when they proclaimed the good news.
G.K. Chesterton writes in a poem “The New Jerusalem,” “Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous, but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”
The truth of the gospel this Christmas is that Christ came that all might have life. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished. I want you to hear this today. It doesn’t matter how immoral you have been. Jesus can fix that. Jesus can forgive you for your sins, past, present, future, if you would just come to Him. It doesn’t matter how prideful and hard you may have gotten in this life through your circumstances. Jesus can soften you and humble you and show you that He is truly the way, the truth and the life. He can give you a joy that is unspeakable if you would just open your hands and your heart to Him.
Christ came that you might have life and have it to the fullest. And perhaps the less we have of this world, the more apt we will be to believe that God came into the world to save sinners. Perhaps the less encumbered we are by the comforts of this earth, the more hopeful we will be in a world or for a heaven that is actually our home. Perhaps the more childlike we become regarding our faith, the quicker we will be to run to Jesus like the shepherds did and to believe all that we have heard about Jesus like the shepherds did and to leave to today glorifying and praising God for all that we’ve heard and seen like the shepherds did.
I never want you to lose the wonder. Just like Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in your heart, would you do that this Chrstmas? Would you leave this place pondering these things for the rest of the day? Would it cause you to glorify God? Would it cause you to extol Jesus Christ, the author of your salvation?
If you don’t know Him, don’t just set this aside, but ponder these things, think about these things. Ask somebody in your family or a pastor or somebody that you came with. And let this be the Christmas where you didn’t just make Jesus one piece of all the good things, but let this be the Christmas where you made haste and ran to the Lord and found out that He truly is the Christ, He truly is the Lord, He truly is the Savior of the world.
Let’s bow our heads together. Just take a moment to ponder and worship Him. thank Him for His faithfulness to you. Thank Him for His kindness to you. If you’ve been walking with the Lord for many years, thank Him for revealing Himself to you just as He did the shepherds that night. If you’re here today and you don’t know the Lord in the personal way, if you’ve wondered a lot about the Lord like the people in the town did, ask the Spirit to open your heart. Ask the Spirit to reveal Himself to you more today. Ask the Spirit to give you someone to talk to so that you couldn’t just, so that you wouldn’t just hear the news today but so that you would believe it and be transformed so that you can proclaim it.
Let’s pray together. Father, we come and Lord we give you glory and we give You honor and we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for Your holiness. We thank You for Your everlasting kindness and love that would send Jesus to live the life that we could never live, to die the death that we deserve and to raise to walk in newness of life so that we could join You one day after we leave this planet. Lord, would You help the Christmas story to hold new weight in our hearts after today? Would we just simply be inspired to praise You? Inspired to think about You? In the midst of all the hustle and bustle and the plans that we have later this evening and the trips that we have to make and the dinners that we have to prepare and the presents that we have to wrap tonight, Lord, would You help Jesus to be our greatest concern? And would it be Christ exalted over all in our lives? In Jesus’ mighty name we pray, amen.”
