We’re Not Alone - God Is With Us

yeah thanks so much daniel daniel could probably like take up a second career in reading the symptom lists at the end of like pharmaceutical commercials you guys seen those just speed reading through things uh thanks man thanks for uh leading us in that time and friends we'd love for you to connect in whatever way makes sense in this season for you in a way to love and serve your neighbors that's what this is about it's it's remembering the gift of christ into our world and lives and giving ourselves away so good to see you guys glad you're here thanks for joining us tis the season christmas trees are being raised and decorated list making and gift shopping underway but most importantly eggnog is flying off the shelves fellow eggnog fans in the room come on put them up no shame yeah see these are my people right here the rest of you are fine the eggnog people those are my people they get it and i'm not just talking like store brand eggnog i'm talking about the store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand store brand dan zeisen right those if you know you know southern comfort come on yes i see some nods there's people in here i know we're a small minority but we're a strong minority as margaret mead once said only a minority of people have ever changed the world so you're with me eggnog people

december among many of those things it also means it's nativity season everyone's putting up their reenactments of the bible's christmas story and there's a few that have been making the rounds that i want to share with you guys because i thought they were particularly clever and insightful so the first one here, want to put up. This is one I call Bark the Herald Angels Sing. Just terrific stuff. Terrific stuff. Simple, but profound. It's a little rough around the edges, but I think it works. Next one up. This is one that was actually sitting out in front of a person's house, and a cat just decided they were going to be away in a manger, at least for a second on that day.

Another one. This is actually, I think, a beautiful work of postmodern art. You may not be able to see it from where you're sitting. These are customizable Coke cans that you can put names on. And so you've got baby Jesus in the middle. You've got Jose and Maria and Angel looking over the proceedings. Great stuff here. This is another one that I shared with you guys, and I think this is the creme de la creme, so to speak, the eggnog of nativity scenes, if you will. This is the millennial nativity.

Some of you may have seen this before. So just kind of an overview. You've got the magi here on the side. They've got their segues and antics. Amazon boxes. You've got the shepherd over here. He's on his iPad with his headphones. You can tell it's a little dated, right? He doesn't have AirPods. He has a corded headphone. But he's there with his 100 % organic cow and his Christmas -sweatered lamb. He's also, it's subtle there, but the cow is eating gluten -free feed, in case you were curious. And then Joseph and Mary are sitting underneath a solar -powered roof taking a selfie with Jesus.

Tis the season, friends. And all these things, they're a lot of fun. They're nostalgic. They can be heartwarming. But I also think they represent maybe the biggest challenge we face every December. It's our familiarity with the Christmas story. Whether we've been raised in the church or not, the carols we sing, the story of Jesus being born, with the magi and the star and the manger, it's all very familiar to us. Which means it can often become background music.

We turn this season into a sentimental, comfortable time where really the problem is that we're not wearing sweaters and eating twelve Rhesus Christmas trees every day or something like that. Maybe that's just me. But here's the problem, you guys. Sentimental comfort is nothing like what people experienced the day Jesus was born. On that night, here are some of the reactions of the folks who were around. Some of them, not even followers of God, just pagan astrologists. They traveled more than 800 miles on foot to get to Jesus as quickly as they could because they knew this was earth -changing news.

They Others, the shepherds, threw themselves at his feet and praised and worshiped God and then left Jesus to proclaim this good news to everyone they interacted with. Others, specifically those in power, responded with hatred. They did everything they could to kill this Jesus. And just look at Mary herself. She gave birth, with no epidural, in a damp dark basement, and then placed her child in a feeding trough for animals. Ladies in the room, I'm sure you have lots of words to describe that experience, but comfort, would not be one of them.

According to the accounts we have of that night, no one walked away thinking, ah, what a sweet, sentimental, spiritual story, and then moved on to their meal and their 40 -second rewatch of Elf or whatever. That Christmas night caused everyone who experienced it to respond radically, not just comfortably. Everyone who witnessed it saw their lives utterly change because of it, because they were brought face -to -face with a life -altering question. Who is Jesus? Who is Jesus? See, the truth is, that's the only question that really matters.

Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, Christian or otherwise, whatever questions or reservations or hesitations you might have about the church or Bible or life of faith, none of those things really matter until you figure out who Jesus is. That's why Jesus, in the middle of his ministry, put this question directly to his disciples. He said, who do you say that I am? And to be clear, they didn't have it all figured out at that moment when they responded to him. It took them years to wrap their minds and their lives around who Jesus really was.

That's important to remember for us. You don't need to have it all figured out right away. The call of life of faith is simply slow growth into knowing, knowing Jesus by walking with him over time, because there's something so remarkably singular and unique and powerful about Jesus. That's why Peter responded to him. He said, where else could we go, Jesus? But slowly, as these disciples walked with him more, it really did completely change them. It made them rethink all of their categories for the world. Love and justice and rest changed for them. They changed the way that they saw and used their money and their time. It turned the most grievous and heinous humans into saints. And maybe most of all, it made the most weary of them rejoice.

And like those disciples then, I think we are weary people in need of rejoicing. What's the weariness that you bear with you this morning? The weariness you carry in here today. Are you emotionally and mentally weary? Demands of work or school or parenting or that constant barrage of social media or regular media? Are you relationally weary? Ideological differences or miscommunications maybe around a table over a holiday the last few days?

You feeling powerless to change things? Discontent with the state of our culture? Are you physically weary? Persistent helplessness? Health issues from overwork? Losing sleep, coasting through your days? Are you spiritually weary? Are you longing in your soul for some deep and abiding sense of meaning and purpose and transcendence?

We've all got some sort of weariness, friends. And the truth is that all the events and consumerism and general busyness of December often only adds to our weariness. It doesn't take it away. Who's hosting this event? How are we gonna get the kids to school and then to practice and then this event and then to that party? And why does my work think that I need another? Another Christmas party, right? When am I gonna find time to buy this thing? And what am I gonna do when they run out of eggnog at the store? These are all important questions for us.

But what if it wasn't just that busyness and weariness? What if this story that we think we're so familiar with could speak to us anew the same way it has spoken to people and changed their lives for centuries? What if here and now our weary world could rejoice because of Jesus' arrival? That's actually what this Advent season is all about. As Justin and Keith walked us through earlier, for thousands of years, Christians have used this season, the darkest in the calendar, to look directly into the pain and weariness and brokenness and darkness of our world, to face it head on, not to avoid it, not to sentimentalize it, but to look right at it, to grieve it, to mourn it, and then to remember the good, good news that God does not stand far off, that God draws near to us in the midst of it and transforms it and brings light in the midst of the darkness.

That's what the season is all about. And so for the next four weeks, we're going to do that same thing alongside Christians around the world and for thousands of years. We will name different aspects of our weariness today and the ways that Christ's arrival speaks directly to them. And our hope is to encounter Jesus anew, afresh for us. We're borrowing from the classic hymn, O Holy Night. We're calling this series, The Weary World Rejoices. And today, we're going to start with a passage right at the beginning of Matthew's biography of the life of Jesus. Matthew chapter one. It's the first book and first page of your New Testament, if you're flipping there in your Bibles.

So I invite you, friends, to open up your Bibles to Matthew chapter one. We're going to read starting in verse 18. If you don't have a Bible, by the way, that's okay. The words are going to be behind me on the screen here, so you can follow along. Matthew one, starting in verse 18.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother, Mary, had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be widowed, with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband, Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do 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 as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus. For he will save his people from their sins.

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet. Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us. When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had born a son. And he named him Jesus.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. A couple of years back, I shared this remarkable story, but I want to reshare it again because I think it's particularly helpful for us and poignant in our time. There was a guy who was elected Surgeon General of the U .S., named Surgeon General of the U .S. back in 2014. His name is Vivek Murthy. For those of you who don't know what the Surgeon General does, they're basically America's doctor. So they oversee 6 ,000 officials scattered around the country and are the official kind of voice on major health issues.

And we're not just talking about the Surgeon General, we're talking like eat your vegetables and sneeze into your sleeves sort of stuff. Surgeon Generals have been responsible for helping navigate things like the Spanish flu or yellow fever, HIV and AIDS epidemics, even hurricane responses at times. So he has real, real power and authority. But when Vivek became Surgeon General, he decided that he didn't want to just look at data from a distance about what was going on in America. He wanted to actually travel around and hear people's stories. And so he went on a multi -month journey around the U .S. He went all over the place. It's been the largest survey, the largest survey of American health conducted in history.

He interviewed people in rural towns and urban centers. He talked with blue collar folks and white collar folks. He talked with young adults and the elderly. And what they found was remarkable. They said that the most pressing health issue in our culture today, a dark thread running underneath everything, wasn't obesity, it wasn't cancer diagnoses, it wasn't opioid use or addiction. It was loneliness, loneliness. Loneliness is the disease most ravaging our nation, they said. And in the years since his study, the data actually backs this up. Fifty percent of all Americans say they feel persistent feelings of loneliness. The data even gets worse for younger folks. Eight, people 18 to 24 years of age, 75 percent of them report feeling persistent feelings of loneliness.

And those experiences drastically influence our health and well -being. Murthy talks about this in his book, Together, that he wrote in 2020. He says that the, the health effects of loneliness are brutal. Chronic, chronic loneliness increases risk of heart disease by 30 percent, stroke by 32 percent, and dementia by 50 percent in older folks. And life expectancy also decreases. Murthy compares chronic loneliness to well, being like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We are living through an epidemic of loneliness. And if we're being honest, amongst ourselves, many of us feel the effects. Despite our lives, we're not alone. We're just feeling more crowded than ever. We often feel deserted, or misunderstood, or isolated, forgotten, and it's making us utterly weary.

And in this passage, in Matthew 1, we find God's response, not just to our personal loneliness, but to the loneliness of our world. This is not a God who stands at a distance, cold and indifferent. This is God with us. That's what the word Emmanuel means in this passage. And that's a claim that is utterly radical and utterly unique to Christianity. That truth that God is with us throughout history has not transformed people into comfortable and sentimental folks. It's caused them to completely upend their lives, to change everything about themselves.

As an example, I was reading this week about an Indian man. His name is Sundar Singh. He grew up Sikh, which is a faith, for those that don't know, that brings together the way of Dharma, which we in the West call Hinduism, and Islam. It's kind of a fusion of different faith practices in each of those religions. And he was steadfastly opposed to Christianity growing up. At the age of 15, he publicly burned the Gospels in front of everyone, because he could never believe that a God would stoop so low, that the God of the universe would become human and go this low. Not a chance God would be like that. That's beneath.

And then three days after he burned the Gospels, he had a vision of Jesus, and he completely changed his life. And in his biography, later on in his life, he started lecturing around the Gospels. He started lecturing around India about Christianity. And he mentions a story where he traveled to a university to teach, and he got challenged by a student there, a student who just kind of saw all religions as functionally being or doing the same sorts of things. He asked him, hey, what do you have in Christianity that's so different than what you had before? Like, what's changed for you? And Sundar simply replied, I have Jesus. I have Jesus.

And the student kept pressing him. He said, OK, sure, but like doctrine, idea, ideology, what philosophy have you gained? He said, it's never been about a philosophy. I have Jesus. I have God with me.

The famous English minister John Wesley died with these words on his lips. In his final moments, he said, the best of all is God with us.

You guys, if God with us is enough to transform Sundar, burning Gospels to become on fire for Jesus, if it's enough for John Wesley to die with it on our lips, I submit that it's enough for us to live with on our hearts. And so I want to explore what this phrase really means by just looking at those three words together. We're going to look at God, God with, and God with us. First, let's look at God. This story that we just read, if it were a reality show, it'd definitely be called something like up to no good in Nazareth, something along those lines.

Joseph, at this point, is about 19 or 20, more than likely, in the passage. He's engaged to be married to Mary, who's likely in her mid -teens at the time, which sounds weird to us, but the truth is, back then, when life expectancy in first century Rome was about 35, they're kind of middle -aged right here, which is wild to think about. So this is just kind of how things went back then. And engagement back then was also different than how we anticipate or experience. You had the engagement itself, which was actually put forth well before the kids were of marrying age. It was usually put forth by the families, and then as the kids grew older, they moved into a second stage called betrothal.

And it was a year -long period, where the male, the husband, would go and prepare a home for he and his wife over the next year that they would move into together. That year -long betrothal period was also

a way to make sure that there was no funny business going on in advance. And then finally, the third stage was the actual marriage. And so when we arrive to this story, they're engaged already, and they're in their betrothal period. And everything is looking great, and then we find out she's pregnant.

Oops, things didn't go quite as planned. Now imagine how that news is gonna go over. Place yourself in Joseph's shoes here. You've known Mary for years. You've been preparing a place for your future marriage together. And then she texts you out of the blue and says, hey, we need to talk. Never a good text. Nobody ever wants to get that text. And then you go to Mary and you say, hey, what's up? And she says, I'm pregnant. And you're like, oh, it's worse than I thought, right? And naturally, the response of Joseph would be like, who and when? Because he knows where babies come from. And then she rips out the real zinger. The Holy Spirit?

Somehow? The Holy Spirit is creating a child inside of me. What's your response if you're Joseph? This woman has lost her mind, without a doubt. Does she think anyone is really going to believe this? And notice, does Joseph believe it right away? No. Joseph responds the way many of us would today, which is an important note. When we hear about these miraculous stories in the Bible, we so often treat them with sort of intellectual superiority. Like, well, those people believed in miracles back then. But we don't. I mean, we're scientific and enlightened people now. Joseph didn't believe it. He knew where babies come from. He knew that this wasn't a thing that ordinarily happens. He knew if Mary was pregnant, she had done a thing with another man, because that's how babies get made. He knew that Mary had been up to no good in Nazareth.

So what's he to do? What's Joseph to do in this situation? On the one hand, he could stay with Mary. But remember, they live in Nazareth. It's a town of about 500 people. This engagement was known by everyone. In fact, Mary and Joseph. Joseph were known by everyone in this part of the world at this time. And so if he does that, it's going to bring tremendous shame on both of them. Good to go, Robert. Nice. Thanks, man. On the one hand, if he stays with Mary, it would bring tremendous shame onto both of them. Because soon, she's going to start to show. And if she starts to show, it's going to break the internet in Nazareth. They would instantly become a taboo. Her pregnancy would either communicate that either they were getting busy during the betrothal, which would bring shame. Or that she had cheated on Joseph. Either way, it's tremendous taboo and shame at the time. And then on top of that, if he chose to marry Mary, could he really parent this child when he knew, likely, where this child came from? So that's one option, right? He could choose to marry Mary and bring tremendous shame and basically lose his life, lose both of their lives. On the other hand, he could divorce her on the grounds of adultery. But that would mean immense shame for Mary. Normally, that would mean a public trial back in the day. And Mary's whole family would be dragged through the mud. Mary would never be able to marry anyone again. And so Joseph decides here that the best move is to divorce her quietly. Remember, he still feels like she's cheated on him. But he doesn't want Mary to get dragged through the mud. He doesn't want to ruin her life as well. He's trying his best to navigate a really hard situation. And so he goes to sleep one night with that decision set in his mind. But then he wakes up and completely changes his choice because of a remarkable vision he receives. And he returns to Mary, and he chooses to marry her. That is an insane choice for Joseph. He is taking on all the shame of an unmarried pregnancy in his culture. He'll be ostracized. He'll be gossiped about. His reputation will be utterly ruined. In many ways, this will kill his life. And yet Joseph is willing to die to everything else for the sake of this child, which would make us ask, why in the world would he do that? It's going to cost him everything. What sort of truth about a child like that is so powerful to say, I'll put everything else on the line for them? It's the same truth that transformed Soomthar Singh, the same truth that John Wesley had on his lips. This child is God.

And that's the primary meaning of Christmas, friends. It is the good news that the creator of all things, the one who has shaped and molded you, who knows you better than you know you, has stepped into the world. Everything else in this Christmas season is secondary. All the talk about self -respect and community and peace among people. It's all important. But they all extend from this truth that it's God with us. That God's become one of us to do the thing that we on our own couldn't. You guys, the story of history is a long and muddled story of humanity's inability to bring true and lasting peace and life by our own willpower and effort. It is the story of a world where we have been driven further and further into loneliness and isolation and division from one another, even on our best days. I was reminded of this. This is a story that happened back in 1914 on Christmas Day. Some of you may have heard this story. During World War I, on the Western Front, British and German troops decided on an unofficial cease fire for the 24 hours of Christmas Day. They chose to stop their fighting. And they gathered together between their trenches in no man's land. They exchanged food, tobacco, drinks. They sung carols. They even played football together. Football means soccer for those of us that are uncultured Americans in Europe.

It was this amazing day. This amazing show of peace and repair and healing. And then a day later, they went back to murdering each other. day later, they went back to killing each other. That day was the perfect encapsulation of humanity's profound capacity and our prominent flaw, that we are people whose souls long for peace and love and justice, who know deep down that that's what we're made for. And yet we have some condition, something that causes us to malfunction in us. And so we're left at this. This impasse. We know the humans were made to be, but we don't have the capacity in and of ourselves to become those sorts of humans. And so we need something to save us from that malfunctioning, to redeem and restore our humanity and make us and our world into the things that were made always to be. And that is what God does in Jesus. He enters the world to be the humans we were made to be. He dies the death that us and our world are hurtling towards. And he rises above that death to open a doorway, to know, to be a new creation, to a new kingdom, to the life that we're longing for. That's what makes Christianity utterly unique and transformative. Because every other world religion in some way says that their leader or founder is some great moral teacher, and that morality or religious activity or the right amount of spiritual enlightenment will get you the peace and harmony and life you're looking for. But that's never what Jesus says. That's never what the gospels say. The Christ of the gospels from the very beginning is clear. Human morality on its own can never bring true, lasting, life to our world. And even the strongest of us can only bring it for about a day. We aren't strong enough to heal the world on our own. Our situation is so dire, so in need of rescue, that nothing short of the God of the universe stepping in to repair it can actually heal us. We need God with us. And that's something our culture doesn't want to admit. That's something my heart often doesn't want to admit. Guys, I'm an achiever. I love to think I can do it. I don't know about you. Our culture trains us to think that we can be self -sufficient, inherently capable, that we don't need anything beyond ourself to really bring about life and goodness and flourishing. And then beyond that, when Christians make a claim that you need to be saved like this, that we really need God with us, we make a claim like it's narrow -minded, that that's a little too exclusive. But I don't think that's actually what's going on here. I don't think Christ is too exclusive for anyone. In fact, the primary critique of Jesus in the first century was that he was too inclusive back then. think what Jesus has done is given us a diagnosis that forces a decision. And we don't like that that much. Now, think of it this way. Imagine you're feeling sick. And so you decide to get a few different medical options. You go to the first doctor. And they say, rest and fluids, and you'll be just fine. And then you go to the second doctor. And they say, rest and fluids, and you'll be just fine. But just to make sure, you get a third opinion. You go to that third doctor. And he says, no, you have a terminal illness. And unless you take this medication, it'll kill you. How would you respond to that third doctor? Would you say? Well, you're just too narrow -minded. You're being too exclusive to exclude what these other doctors have to say, right? None of us would say that. It's not that he's being narrow -minded or exclusive. You have to find out if he's telling the truth or not. It has nothing to do with exclusivity. He's either right or he's wrong. But this diagnosis changes your life either way. It forces you to respond.

That is what God with us means, friends. It's a diagnosis that prompts a decision in us. It's not a comfortable, sentimental idea. That we isolate amongst hipster nativity scenes. And that is why Joseph decides to put his life on the line for this child. He sees the ramifications. He has wrestled with this truth. And he has chosen to believe. Have you wrestled with it in the way he did? Are you willing to put your life on the line for this child like he did?

Or maybe to put it another way, haven't you lived long enough to see that all of your efforts to be a good person and fix yourself in the world just aren't working? Aren't you spent and weary and tired of that?

Haven't you seen enough of the world around you to know that we need something more than just human ingenuity or an election or a social program or whatever else?

Guys, there is good news. We have God with us. You're not alone. That's the first part of this amazing statement. And that's maybe the hardest part because it forces us to make a decision. The second part is maybe the softer part, the easier part. This is God with us. The Apostle Paul, when he wrote in Philippians, too, about this profound work that God does in Jesus, he put it this way. He said, Christ did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself. Taking the form of a servant and being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. That's the second part of this miraculous truth, that while Jesus is God, transcendent and powerful and elevated, he chose to go low in order to save us. God did not stand at a distance, tapping his foot, making us come to him. He didn't go around or above us. He saw our need and became us, that we might truly, deeply, personally know him. And I know, at least for me, in this season of familiarity, I can often overlook the significance of that. We all often do. I know a lot of folks who have chosen to walk away from faith in God or Jesus over the last few years. And they've got lots of reasons, many of them really, really hard questions, why they've chosen to leave this thing behind. They're valid and painful. But oftentimes, in the middle of those descriptions, I usually try to ask them. Like, how do you see God? Or what vision of God are you walking away from? And regularly, not always, but regularly, they articulate a vision of God that is distant, cold, authoritarian, legalistic, patriarchal, and harsh, ready to dish out punishment at any time. That's the God that they're walking away from. And my response is always the same. I don't believe in that God. I've walked away from that God a long time ago. Because that's not the God as he shows himself to us in Jesus. Friends, when God wanted to make himself known, he became God with us. When God wanted to communicate beyond a shadow of a doubt who he was and how he functions in relation to us, he became Jesus. He is the image of the invisible God, as the author of Colossians puts it. Any time you doubt who God is, look at Jesus. Spend time with Jesus. It's utterly confounding and beautiful that God would do something like this. Why do you think Jesus showed up as a baby for us? It's been something I've been thinking about about this week. I think it's because there's nothing so intimate as a baby. In the last few years, Emily and I have gotten to walk along our nieces and our nephews as they've grown older, and it's been such a joy. But it's interesting. There's a distinct difference that happens, usually around like two or three, where suddenly they get like a will of their own. They're becoming like their own little human, and no longer you can just like scoop them up when you want. You can't just play with it. They have an agenda. Sometimes it's like a dangerous agenda. Sometimes it's a really beautiful agenda, but they have an agenda. just welcomed a new baby into our family, Lucy, who's, let's see, eight days old now. And it's different with a newborn, because they are completely intimate, completely vulnerable. You can scoop them up, look into their eyes when they crack them open a little bit. It's a different experience of intimacy. It's the most familiar and closest we can be to another human. Babies are completely open, completely accessible, completely vulnerable, completely knowable. That's what Jesus becomes. That's how the God of the universe showed up for Joseph and Mary and how he shows up for you and me. Any barrier, any confusion, he's made himself completely knowable to us. He's torn those down. He said, without hesitation, you are not alone. I am your brother. I've laughed and I've cried and I've wept. I've danced, I've sung, I've slept. I am with you.

Friends, God does not want any of us to be alone. That's actually one of the first things he notices about humanity when he creates them. He says, it's not good that they are alone. And then just in case we forget over the course of the Hebrew scriptures, we often do forget, God reminds his people, scholars estimate somewhere around 114 times God says, I am with you in the Old Testament. And then he becomes God with us in Jesus. And then Jesus' last words at the end of this gospel are, I am with you always to the end of the age.

Christianity has never been about intellectual ascent to a doctrine or morality or whatever else. It is at its core relationship with God. It is about God with us. Us and us with God. Sublime and divine unity with the maker of our lives.

It's one thing to have an experience of God, friends. It's one thing to have this remarkable experience in a storm or on a mountain of nature. It's one thing to have this encounter with beauty and art. It's another thing to look face to face with God. It's another thing to know him in the most intimate parts of who you are. That's what the season is about. There's a story that the theologian Martin Luther tells in his writings. For decades, he grew up in the church. And he read his Bible. He showed up to church. He prayed and fasted for decades. But over those years, he became exhausted. He got burnt out on religion. He was weary from his attempts to earn love or worth or dignity or whatever else. And he was lonely in all of his striving that left him to be a shell of himself. And then one day in church, he was reading Romans 1. And he realized he had never truly, honestly met God. He had been chasing an idea of God through all of his thinking and all of his earning and all of his righteousness. He had never heard the grace of Jesus speak to his heart. He had never just read it. He rested in the loving embrace of God with him. And that day, he knew God in an entirely different way. He saw who God was and who God has always been, God with him. And it changed his life.

See, the real issue of this season isn't some distant God. It's not on God's end. We know God wants to be with us. He's always said he wants to be with us. He always has and he always will be in Christ. The issue is on our end. Do we want to be with God? Do we really? At first, our answer may be obvious. We want to say yes right away. But the truth is, when Jesus was here, there were many people who didn't want to be with him. Some of those people were just too busy. They had lots going on in their lives, the hustle and bustle of work and family and the rest, and they just missed Jesus. It wasn't that they were intentionally avoidant. They were just accidentally so. Are you too busy to be with God right now in life? Is your schedule so packed that you can't even imagine space to pray and sit in his presence? Are your obligations so overwhelming that you can't even think about God being near to you? In every moment?

Friends, if we're going to know the true satisfaction our souls are looking for, if we're going to have a cure for our weariness, it has to mean that we set aside time to be with Jesus. And that will cost us. It'll cost us time. It'll cost us energy. It'll cost us priorities. It won't cost us anything near what not being with him will cost us.

Missing God's life -giving presence is not something, well, that's not something you want to pay the cost of, friends. Some people miss Jesus because they were too busy. Some people miss Jesus because they had a picture of God that was a box that they weren't willing to break open. It was true for a lot of religious people back in the day. They felt that they already knew what God was like and that God, like Sundar Singh believed, would never do something like this. They had their doctrine and their views nailed down. And so when God actually showed up in Jesus and broke open their paradigms, they didn't know what to do.

Have you already put God in a box? Have you wrapped him up with a bow? Have you already determined that God can or can't show up in your life in a certain way? Have you already defined God on your terms?

You guys, Christmas is the ultimate reminder. God has come to break open our boxes to all of our expectations. Keep reading through the Gospels. Jesus constantly breaks open the boxes people had for him. And so will you let him this month over the next few weeks break your box open in a new way? Will you let him change you in a new way? That's what this season is all about. It's God with us. It's about us saying, what am I doing to be with God in response? It's God, it's God with, and then finally, friends, it's God with us. One question that should arise in our minds when we read this story and read these instances of the birth narrative in the Gospels, we should start to ask, what are the traits that enabled people to receive Jesus? What was different about them that others like Herod and Caesar missed? And the clue, actually, I think is in that word, us. The us in that passage is a limited term. Notice it didn't say God with all, it says God with us. So the question should be, who's the us? Well, spoiler, it's not some exclusive, especially moral group of people. It's not the ones in power who use their power to get ahead for their own sake. And it's not the highly religious self -righteous people who believe they're near to God because of all the religious stuff they do. It's Mary, a pregnant teen outcast in her culture. And it's Joseph, a man who, by the way, never says a word in the Gospels. Joseph is silent, utterly silent, kind of off to the side in the narrative, from this point forward. But he gives up any semblance of a respectable life from a worldly perspective in order to love his vulnerable wife and this new child. It's the shepherds, the day laborers, who were not well esteemed in that culture. And it's the magi, these outcasts of the religious establishment who were just spiritually curious people and knew something remarkable when they saw it. It's always the outsiders. That's the us. Isn't it interesting that the outsiders are the ones who follow God's word, and the insiders are the ones who completely miss him, and who sit complacently and watch? Why is that? Why is God revealed to the outsiders? Why are the outsiders able to receive him? I think two things, two traits that I want to point out, that I hope we ourselves can learn to embody. The first trait is humility. They come to God without any references. They come to God simply knowing that they are in need, and that without God they are without hope and life and peace and joy and the rest. They acknowledge their need, and because of that, God shows up to them. God meets them in their need because it's only those who know they are sick that will get the care of the physician.

There's a great theologian named Robert Farrar Capon who wrote this amazing book on Jesus' parables. But he's got a quote in there on the sorts of people who can receive God in their lives. It's amazing. I want to share it with you guys. With Jesus, he says, there are only forgiven sinners. There are no good guys, no upright successful types, who by dint of their own integrity have been accepted into the great country club in the sky. There are only failures. Only those who have accepted their deaths and their sins and who have been raised up by the king himself who died that they might live. But in hell, too, there are only forgiven sinners. He forgives the badness of even the worst of us willy -nilly, and he never takes back that forgiveness. The sole difference, therefore, between hell and heaven is that in heaven the forgiveness is accepted and passed along, while in hell it's rejected and blocked. In heaven, the death of the king is welcomed and becomes the doorway to new life in the resurrection. In hell, the old life of the bookkeeping world is insisted on and becomes forever the pointless torture it always was.

You guys, to receive Jesus, all you need is nothing. We don't come to God with our arguments. We don't come to God and say, well, I'm a decent enough person, so God should accept me. Or, I've had a really hard life. Surely God should answer my prayers. We come to God simply as Joseph and Mary do, in humility.

There's a church in the city of Jerusalem. It's called the Church of the Nativity. For many years, it's been thought and talked about that this might be the exact space where Jesus was born. We can't confirm that sort of thing. But when you go there, you go into a cave below the church, and you open a door that forces you to kneel and go into this small little alcove where you'll find Joseph and Mary. To get to Jesus, you've got to kneel. What a perfect representation of this life of following Jesus for us. In order to get to him, you've got to kneel. Where in your life do you need to kneel to Jesus? Where do you need to humbly bring your needs to him? Because it's precisely there in your weariness and weakness that you will find him, that he will meet you. So that's the first trait, humility. That's what enables people to receive this Jesus. Second trait, attentiveness. Notice that Joseph, in this story, is attentive to God. He had his mind set, but he has his eyes and ears and heart open. He went to sleep. Dead set on his choice, but he was willing to have his mind changed by God. He was open enough and attentive enough to what God was doing to actually allow himself to change. And if you read through the rest of the birth narratives, the people who receive him are all the ones who are most attentive, who aren't caught up in other focuses. And that sort of attentiveness, it takes real effort. I've been trying to work on this for myself. So often, I'm someone who just wants to get things done, who wants to get into action, and I can lose attentiveness. I can fail to listen to those well around me. I can fail to see the ways that God has been at work in my ordinary day. I can get self -consumed if I'm not careful. And so I'm trying to get better with this. I'm blocking off different parts of my day to pray, to slow down, to listen. I'm trying to block off the end of the day, to reflect on where God was at that I maybe missed. I'm trying to build up attentiveness. I hear it from people often that it feels like God is very distant, that they feel very alone, and I get that experience. I've felt it in many ways. Christians throughout history have. God can often feel distant, but it's interesting. I often want to ask more questions to follow up on that. Like, I'm sorry to hear that God feels distant. Where have you been attentive to God and felt like God hasn't responded or been near to you? What does prayer look like for you right now? What's community look like? Are you spending time in community with people who are going through the same sorts of things and who can actually maybe be the body of Christ to you? And consistently, again, not every time, but consistently, people are like, well, yeah, God feels distant, and I'm doing nothing to be near to him or be attentive to him. I'm not praying. I'm not in community. God's just distant. We wouldn't do that with any other relationship. How absurd would it be for me to say, my wife is so distant from me while I'm scrolling on my phone or watching TV? It'd be absurd.

And so what does it look like maybe in this season for you to be attentive? What are some practices you can embrace to increase your attentiveness to where God is at work? We're sending out an Advent devotional. You may have gotten it in the email. If you didn't get it, let me know. We'll make sure to get it to you. It's a daily devotional that walks through this whole season and helps increase attentiveness. Maybe that's what you take on. Maybe you focus on just waking up, 20 minutes earlier, 30 minutes earlier, praying to start your day, reading a Psalm. Maybe you say, you know what, I'm going to get together with a couple other people in Midtown and we're just going to talk about what God is doing in our weeks, once a week, over the phone, over Zoom, in person. I'm just going to try to be attentive to people around me and listen to them. Whatever it is for you, friends, if you want to experience nearness to God, if you want to be healed from weariness, you've got to practice attentiveness.

You guys, in a lonely world, Matthew 1 gives us a resounding response. We have God here to heal and restore. We have God with, here as our brother and our friend and our companion, intimately close to us. And we have God with us when we're humble enough to acknowledge we need him, when we're attentive enough to keep our eyes and ears open. It's God with us. Some people die with those words on their lips. I submit that we live with it on our hearts. Let's pray, friends.