Advent: Christmas Eve

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  I’d love for you to open to Matthew chapter 1. That’s where we’re going to be today. Throughout the world today, people are hearing about the birth of Jesus.

And it’s likely from either the Gospel of Luke, or the Gospel of Matthew. Mark just jumps right into Jesus earthly, uh, public ministry. John goes more theological, but we don’t see how he was born. But in Matthew and Luke’s account, we see a lot more details. Luke, for example, he loves details because he is a doctor.

And so uh, we actually talked about Luke a few weeks ago. We learned about the birth of John the Baptist and his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth. And then Luke shifts to Mary. And really focuses on her faithful response, um, as God calls her to be the mother of God, of Jesus. And so then you learn in that story in Luke that they have to go into a manger because there’s no room for them in the inn.

And then you hear the shepherds are the ones who see the angel of the Lord declare the birth of Jesus, which shepherds is the lowest class of people during that time. That is one version that we can share this morning. It’s the only version I act like there’s okay, but we’re going to also share Matthew’s perspective today.

Matthew, he’s writing for a Jewish audience who knows their old Testament. And that’s a little bit hard because most of us don’t know our old Testament. And his big emphasis is on names. This is Matthew one, January 1st, you’re probably going to be excited. Read your Bible in a year. You’re going to open up to Matthew.

Let’s start in the new Testament. And then you’re going to want to quit because right away, it’s just a bunch of names. What are these names for? He begat this, begat that, begat this, and it’s kind of overwhelming. What it is is a family tree that means a lot if you are a part of the Jewish nation. And then the rest of Matthew, we see the genealogy until verse 17.

Verse 18, now an angel appears to Joseph, the father, the earthly father of Jesus, says, hey, Mary’s going to have a baby, and let me tell you about his name. So for Matthew, names are very important. Names say a lot about you. They say a lot about your parents. If you are a person who we probably can’t spell or pronounce your name, it probably means your parent is a millennial, right?

I can know a lot about you by just hearing your name. Names are valuable. Names, especially in these Biblical times, are important. My full name is VanCamp III. I had to put it on the screen because that’s a lot. To take in growing up. I hated my name. I despised my name It was like in elementary school when the sub would come and they didn’t know I’m not you’re not supposed to call me William So the sub literally one day the sub yelled William and I didn’t answer because I don’t think that’s my name I like to tell people my first name’s William Trey is just that the William is silent And so she said the silent part out loud I literally was counted as absent that day.

Called my mom. Why wasn’t your son at school? She freaked out. I thought he was at school. I dropped him off. I was there the whole day. I just didn’t stay here because I never heard the word Trey. And so this was kind of a thing. People would make fun of me. What’s your name? And then they would, I’m not going to tell you the things they.

Because you’re gonna start using that. So I’m not gonna give you that ammo. You’re gonna have to be creative on your own. Um, and then the worst part was in high school. Ames testing anybody? Or SATs? Remember when you take the SATs and it’s these little boxes? And you have to put one letter per box? You know the stress?

People stress about the first question. I stress about the name. Like, I’m gonna fail this test because William quotes Trey doesn’t fit in the first name box. And so I’m like So immediately I’m gonna have an identity crisis. Do they know I’m William? Do they know I go by Trey? It is a real thing, and so I very much did not like it growing up at all.

And then to make matters worse, uh, Van Camp, half of my family spells it two words, the other half is one word. So I just am constantly confused, and to be honest with you, first half of my life it was two words, now I’ve decided it’s one word. Pray for me and pray for my wife, uh, especially. But after, uh, college, I began to love my name.

It’s unique. Actually, graduating, it was wonderful because when they announced my name, they were expecting five people to walk up the aisle, but it’s just me. And so they just kept saying my name and I was just getting a lot of attention. But then, again, loving my name now, realizing I can be several things to several people.

If I want to be an author, I can be WTL, Van Camp, I can, anyways, I can go on. But then I did a genealogy 23, it wasn’t 23andMe, I hear they’re like, they got hacked this week, so that wasn’t them, I hope. I, I looked through the genealogy of my family, and I went, of course, went William, VanCamp, learning about my tradition.

And all of a sudden, I get an email saying, showing a picture of my grandpa’s birth certificate, the one I’m named after. This was troubling, because literally, Jordan knows what I’m talking about, it says William Bill. LeClaire VanCamp Sr. And so I go to my grandpa, I go, Grandpa! I got an email saying you’re a bo Were you born here?

Yeah, that’s where I was born. Is Are these the name of your parents? Yeah, that’s the name of my parents. Your middle name’s LeClaire! He goes, Oh really? I’m like, Oh my gosh! So you named your son Lamar, did you think your middle name was Lamar? He goes, I thought it, but LeClaire kind of sounds right. I’m like, Oh my gosh.

My whole life is a lie. I don’t even know who I am anymore. Am I a third? Is that a lie to tell you I’m the third? Because I’m really the second? It has been a thing. And my grandpa just didn’t care. But for me, identity crisis. And, and honestly, in this time, if you lived in biblical times, you would agree.

This is an identity crisis. You don’t know your name. Names are very important. Today, it’s just silly. For them, it was your whole identity. In biblical times, a name indicated authority, identity, and destiny. Authority. It was really important who named you. So parents named their children showing they have authority over their life.

Notice here in the text what Lexi just read, Joseph doesn’t get to name Jesus. How come? Joseph doesn’t have authority over the creator of the world. Joseph just has to manage this son, but doesn’t have authority. How can you have authority over God? So the authority was given from God himself. God named Jesus, told the, the angel told Joseph and Mary what to name him.

Identity indicates who you are. We’re going to learn, uh, just in a moment what Jesus actually means and that is how he fulfills his destiny. Your name should chart the trajectory of your life. That’s why we sat around and thought and prayed a lot about the name of our children, thinking what kind of destiny do we want them?

There’s something about blessing and naming and declaring their future. And so I want us to see what was the destiny, the identity, the authority of Jesus the baby. Verse 18 again says the birth of Jesus Christ came about this way after his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph It was discovered before they came together That she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit.

So her husband, Joseph, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly. We do engagements different. In this time, you were engaged for a year, but it also meant you were married. So to get out of it meant an actual divorce. Uh, verse 20, but after he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will give birth to a son and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. So what does the angel tell Joseph to call him? Jesus. What does Jesus mean? At its basic root, Jesus means Savior of our sins. It’s actually likely the angel here spoke to Joseph in, in Joseph’s native tongue, which would have been Hebrew.

And so Matthew records this in Greek because that’s how people read, but you would talk in Hebrew. It’s confusing for us as Americans when we don’t even know our one language. But for some people they know like four or five, right? And so here the angel likely said you are to name him Yahushua. Yehoshua, which means Jesus, as we say today, Yehoshua is, uh, now actually people shorten it to Yeshua.

Anybody ever heard of Yeshua before? That’s the Hebrew name for Jesus. Yeh means Yahweh, not Kanye West. Yeh means Yahweh, which is the Lord. And then Shua means saves. So literally what’s his identity? He is God who saves. That is his name. Uh, but Matthew wants to reach people of every tribe, tongue, and nation, and so he takes this Hebrew name and now translates it to the Greek, which is Yeshu.

So, when you read this in the Greek, it’s Yesu, where maybe, you know, now the Spanish dialect, we take Jesus, and we, because we ruin language all the time, we added a J, and now it’s Jesus, okay? I think Yesu sounds a little bit more, you know what I’m saying? But Jesus is his name. He is the one who saves. Why does God the one who needs to save us?

Well, the Old Testament, this whole half of the Bible. It’s story after story of man trying to save himself and guess how it goes. It only gets worse. It only leads to more pain, more death, more destruction and division. And so we need saving, but what do we need saving from? We need saving from sin. It’s sin done by us, it’s sin done to us, and it’s sin done around us.

At its most basic definition, sin just means failure. Failure to trust God’s love for us. What did Adam and Eve do in the garden, if you’re familiar with the Bible? Don’t eat from that tree. Did Adam and Eve trust God? No. They ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s a failure to love God.

It’s a failure to love your neighbor. And as a result, that doesn’t sound that bad. Like, oh, we just failed. No, but it leads to enormous pain. Disease. Destruction. Death. And ultimately, eternal separation from God, who we were created to be with. St. Ignatius describes sin as the unwillingness to trust that what God wants is our deepest happiness.

Again, this doesn’t sound so severe, but you need to know sinning, failing God, equals again hell for eternity. Why would it be that way? If you think about it, if I go up to a rock and I punch a rock, do I need to serve any jail time for punching a rock? No, because it’s a rock. There’s no val I mean, it’s valuable, but not to where I need to serve prison time.

If I punch a family member in the face, now, I’m gonna get in trouble. My dad’s not gonna be happy with me, even though I’m a grown man. He’ll still probably find a way to Anyways, you know, so, there is a punishment, but what if I go and punch the President of the United States? Now we’re talking jail time, right?

So, I want you to see, when we fail, when we Offend God, the one who is holy and deserving of all glory. It’s not the equivalent of just doing something bad against a rock. It is against the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and friends to honor him. That does deserve punishment that deserves some sort of payment.

And so we have his family tree, a bunch of people who sinned against God who failed. Think about it. This is the line of Jesus. You think these are the best of the best of the people. And let me just show you three names here in Matthew 1. We don’t have to read the genealogy today, but I would encourage you to read it and maybe think it through a little bit deeper.

But I want us to show Jesus is from a bunch of humans. That really have failed. The first one I want you to see in verse 3 in Matthew 1 is Tamar. If you know the story of Tamar, she actually tricked her father in law Judah to sleep with her. I’ll say no more than that, but that is not necessarily like, oh, this, of course, through her is going to come Jesus.

Verse five, you learn about Rahab. Not only was she not an Israelite, she was actually a Canaanite, but we also learned that Rahab was a prostitute. And yet God in his grace allowed Rahab to be a part of the story of the eventual birth of King Jesus. Verse six is fascinating because Matthew doesn’t say Bathsheba, instead he says Uriah’s wife.

Why wouldn’t Matthew write Bathsheba’s name? It’s not to shame Bathsheba. It’s actually to show you and remind you David was this great king, but he had many sins as well. It reminds you of David committing adultery, seeing Bathsheba up on his roof and having adultery with her, and then trying to covering up by killing Uriah.

You know the story? This is not exactly the greatest man to ever live. This is a man full of sin and shame and guilt. But it’s through David. That Jesus comes. See this shows us moral failures and rejects can still be a part of God’s family. Jesus is not ashamed of them. He is not ashamed of being from Rahab, um, Herod, who was also during this time.

If you read Matthew two, you’ll learn his story. He actually was so adamant to show that he was so great. Herod literally means son of the great. He goes back into his genealogy and erases anybody who had that kind of a shady past. And yet Jesus says, no. I’ll show you all my past, and I’ll show you all the stories of my family line.

He had no shame, and friends, He’s not ashamed of you. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Doesn’t matter your past, your present, where you think your future’s gonna go. He saves you from your filth and from your sin and redeems us. Write this down. We are all equally sinful and lost, and yet, in Christ, we are all equally accepted and loved.

This is the good news. This is why we talk about Jesus every Christmas. He was sent into the world to do what you and I always failed to do. He pays the debt of our sin and he creates in us a new heart filled with new desires where we can love God and we can begin to love others in the here and now and especially in eternity.

But what about the next title? Look at Matthew 1 18 again. The birth of Jesus Christ. Christ is not his last name. It’s more of a title pointing to his authority and his destiny. Write this down. What does Christ mean? Christ means the promised one. Or if you, uh, know your Hebrew, it would be the Messiah.

Christ, Christo. This whole story of the Old Testament is pointing that one day there will be a Christ. A Messiah to make all things right. Genesis 3, Adam and Eve. Again, they sinned and now they are cursed. Banished from God’s presence. Banished from the garden. Filled with pain and suffering and division.

But even in the curse where God declares, here’s your new reality because you failed to trust in my love. Even in that he gives a promise and says one day there will come a Messiah who will crush the head of Satan and will bring back victory where death will no longer have its sting. You see that in Genesis three 15 and Genesis 12, you learn about Abraham, Abraham is in verse two of this genealogy.

Abraham is promised in Genesis 12 that through his descendants, one day the whole world, every tribe, tongue and nation will be blessed. It’s called the Abrahamic covenant. So when the reader is reading about Abraham and then points it to Jesus, the Christ, this should get you excited. This is the one the old Testament keeps waiting for.

Then you have in 2 Samuel 7 we learn about David who is also promised through you a king will sit on his throne and he will be on the throne forever. It wasn’t David, it was his descendant who is Jesus, the Christ. What we have to see, Adam and Eve were promised a Messiah will come. Abraham was promised the Messiah will come through his line.

David was promised the Messiah, a ruling king, would come through his line. And now Matthew here is to tell you we serve a God who keeps his promises. This was the promised one, and now he is here, Jesus Christ the Lord. Despite our failures, despite our sin, our rejection of him, breaking promises on our end, God is, quote, a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger.

And abounding and steadfast love and truth. This is who God is. And at Christmas, we’re supposed to celebrate that. Even though you and I never keep our promises, God always does. He’s the promised one. Last one. Let’s look at his, the last name that we see in Matthew one, verse 22. She will give birth to a son and you were to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins, right?

Oh, sorry now all this now verse 22 now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet Here it is. See the virgin. He’s quoting Isaiah here The virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son and they will name him Emmanuel Which is translated God is with us Matthew here is quoting Isaiah 714.

Again, a piece of scripture the Jewish people were very familiar with. They believed this Messiah would come, but they believed that this was a metaphor. How could God, like, be actually with us? God is in heaven. He is not a man. So Matthew is saying, no, this isn’t a metaphor. Like, literally, Jesus is God, and Jesus is with us.

He is God, and He is with us. He became human. Emmanuel means God with us. Every other religion, hear me, you can test this. Every single other religion, other than Christianity, is all about moral teachings to get you back to God. And the Christmas message, the Christian message, is the only message that says, no, no, no, you can’t do that.

You’ll fail. But God came down to you because you and I, we can’t get up to God, but God came down to us, not just to us, but to be with us. Eugene Peterson and John one says he summarizes it by saying the word became flesh and lived in the neighborhood. God came down to be with us to bring back what you and I had in the Garden of Eden.

Now, when you read the rest of Matthew, it’s all about how God is with us. Jesus comes down and He is with us in experiencing pain. Read Matthew 2. They are running away from somebody trying to kill Him right at birth. He knows. He is with you. When you think about your pain of rejection, He is with you.

Read Matthew 4. He has been tempted as you are, and yet, without sin. Read the rest of Matthew. Jesus, we see, He suffers. He goes through betrayal. He’s persecuted. He’s run off. He’s ultimately crucified, and He dies. You’re not even alone in your death. God is with us. God had a taste of our own medicine. He went through that pain.

And so just know, God is with you. Because of Christmas, I can say without a doubt, He is with you in your hardest times, in your lowest times, in your sickest times, in your loneliest times. God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, is with you. And despite all that pain, temptation, persecution, Jesus never sins.

Jesus never failed. When He was hung up on the cross, He forgave those who were crucifying Him. He received the punishment of your and I’s sins. He received it all entirely for those who believe. And offers forgiveness. And he rose again on the third day to show he really is the Christ, the Messiah, the coming one.

He really has saved us from our sin. He has defeated death itself. This is real. That tomb is empty. There is no other story that gives hope like this story. And I want you to see how Matthew ends. Remember, he’s beginning this major theme is that God is with us, Emmanuel. Now Jesus has died, rose again. He’s with his disciples for a short period of time before ascending to the right hand of the Father.

And look at verse 18 through 20 with me in Matthew 28. Jesus came near and said to them, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Teaching them to observe everything I’ve command you and remember.

Look at this last line. Matthew is a brilliant writer. I am with you always to the end of the age.  How does Matthew start? God is with us. He came down. How does Matthew end? God is with you. Forever. For those who are willing to receive him. What a beautiful message. God keeps his word. And because he conquered.

Sin, Satan, and death. The grave itself. We know He is with us. He is right now seated at the right hand of the Father. He is praying for us. He’s never going to leave us nor forsake us. The scripture says when we pray, He is there. We’re about to sing Silent Night together. The scripture says when we sing to Him, guess what?

He is here. God is among us in the here and now. But the question is, is God with you personally? What I love about Christmas is there’s presents around the tree. And the reality is, is your present might even have your name on it. But it’s not really your gift until you grab it, right? It’s not really yours until you open it.

So the Christmas message is that God has come. He has taken away the sins of the world. He has removed any need of guilt or shame or suffering. He is there for you, but have you received that gift? That’s the whole purpose. Why we do gifts this time of year. And so I want us to contemplate this Christmas Eve.

This Jesus who forgives you of all of your past, all of your present, and even your future. This Jesus who is the same God who kept his promise to Abraham, to David, is the same God who keeps his promises to you and to me. And this Jesus is the God who will never leave us nor forsake us. In fact. His last words, before He comes again, is that He is with you.

But He’s only with those who believe. God, in a sense, He’s not an intrusive God. He leaves it up to you to take the invitation. And so, look around. This world is trying to deal with sin. It’s getting really creative, but it’s always failing. There’s no other solution. But, it is the Son who sets us free, and when we receive Him, we are free indeed.

Will you receive that gift today? It’s simply saying, Jesus, nothing in my hands I bring. Simply to you, I cling. I bring no other argument. I bring no other plea but that Jesus, you died, and you died for me. Will you walk in his victory today? Let’s pray. Father, Thank you for this gift. Thank you, God, for your love.

God, thank you that even since the beginning, you promised a Messiah would come. To crush the head of Satan. To defeat where, where death no longer has the last word. And God, we just bring you those emotions. I think some of us, we are hopeless and in despair because we don’t know what to do with our own sin or we’ve been hurt by the sins of others.

God, we’ve been trying so hard to be good and yet we always fail. God, what we need is not to get better. We need to be made alive and that only comes through you. And so Jesus, I pray that today those who have never received that new love, that new life, may they receive it in you. You alone are the only way.

Amen. And God, for those who have already opened that gift, I pray that today we’d meditate on that reality, that you are a God who keeps your promises, that you have forgiven us completely, and that we have a hope and a future in the here and now. Thank you, Jesus, for we could never come up to you. But thank you, you came down to us, in Jesus name I pray, everybody says, Amen, Amen.