The best and most successful innovations happen at just the right time. Consider the iPhone. It came along at a time when cell phone service was really starting to hit its stride. Much earlier, and the service required to unlock its full potential wouldn’t have been widely enough available to see it succeed so spectacularly as it has. Much later, and the market would have become so saturated by competitors that it never would have gotten very far off the ground. As it stands, I suspect nearly everyone in the room has one in their pocket or purse. For the rest who have an Android device, I just want you to know that this is a judgment-free environment, and we love all people, even if they make choices clear thinking people find questionable. I kid…mostly. Indeed, though, when things come at just the right time, everything seems to go like clockwork. It all falls together, and the results can be nothing less than world-changing.
This morning, we are in the final part of our Advent series, Playing the Long Game. Throughout this special season we have been talking about how God’s plans for our salvation in Christ were not some last-minute, panicked trip to the store to pick out something because He put it off until it was too late to plan properly. That’s what we do, not God. (And, I’ll add, guys, if you are planning on doing that, you’ve got two and a half shopping days left…get busy.) God started planning for our being shepherded back into the relationship with Him we were created to have in the beginning before the reality of our decision to leave that relationship behind had even finished settling. It was going to be a long, painful, and often ugly process to get things just right, but God was committed to it. He was committed to playing the long game.
Trying to trace out the entire wonderful history documented for us in the Scriptures over which God’s commitment is played out to and through its consummation in Christ would take far longer than the few weeks of the Advent season. Instead, we’ve hit the high notes. And what high notes they have been. Way back on the first Sunday of Advent, Pastor Mike walked us through how when the dust of the Fall was still settling, God responded to sin by announcing His plans to set things right by declaring to the serpent that one day a child born of woman would crush its head. Two weeks ago, then, we leapt forward to see how Isaiah’s prophecy of both encouragement but also judgment to King Ahaz of Judah offered us the reminder that God advances His work in even our messiest situations. You can’t make a mess so big that God can’t still redeem it and make something wonderful in and out of it through your faithfulness to His path.
This morning, we are going to take one last giant leap forward to marvel together at how things finally fell into place as Jesus was born of a virgin just like Isaiah had prophesied so many centuries before. But before we land there, we are going to race past that point to something the apostle Paul wrote to the churches in modern Turkey, a region known then as Galatia. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way to Matthew 1, stick a finger there, and flip a little further to about the middle of the New Testament in Galatians 4.
Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia is all about the incredible freedom we have in Christ to be fully who God made us to be. It is the freedom to pursue the character of our Creator, unencumbered by any of the brokenness of sin that otherwise holds us down. It is the freedom to live by faith and not with the restrictive restraints of having to earn our right standing before God. One of the questions that naturally comes up in this kind of a conversation is about the purpose of the Law. If this kind of freedom was always God’s long game plan (and it is Paul’s rather emphatic argument that it was), why give the Law in the first place?
Paul’s answer is fully consistent with the theme of our series. God was playing the long game. He put the Law in place, Paul argues, so that we could come to understand our desperate need for grace that comes only by faith. From Galatians 3:24: “The law, then, was our guardian until Christ, so that we could be justified by faith. But since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for through faith you are all sons [and daughters] of God in Christ Jesus.” Until Christ came, then, the Law was the mediator of our relationship with God, but “when the time came to completion, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons [and daughters]. And because you are a son [and daughter], God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a son [and daughter], and if a son [and daughter], then God has made you an heir.”
Got all that? God had been playing the long game for a very long time indeed, but eventually the time was just right—other translations phrase Paul’s expression there as “the fullness of time”—for God to put all of His carefully laid plans into motion. Jumping back to Matthew’s Gospel, we see a quick summary of the territory through which those tracks ran. “Abraham fathered Isaac, Isaac fathered Jacob, Jacob fathered Judah and his brothers, Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar [there’s a scandalous story in Genesis 38 if there ever was one], Perez fathered Hezron, Hezron fathered Aram, Aram fathered Amminadab, Amminadab fathered Nahshon, Nahshon fathered Salmon, Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab [another scandalous story], Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth [which is yet another scandalous story], Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered King David.”
Matthew walks readers through two more parallel rounds of names that all have their own stories and scandals; their own paths and pitfalls; their own tales and troubles. God waited patiently through each and every one of them and more. But eventually the day arrived. When the time came to completion, “The birth of Jesus Christ came about this way.”
Friends, don’t let what comes next pass you by. This is not just some story that gets repeated every year at this time. This is the story of the grand beginning of the culmination of God’s long laid plans for you to be able to be in a right relationship with Him. This is how God pulled out all the stops after waiting and wading through untold centuries of human history to be able to permanently bridge the gap between Him and the rest of the world. The bridging was going to happen not because one of us finally got our act sufficiently together to get the job done, but because God did the work Himself on our behalf when we weren’t even looking to be right with Him again. We were mired and miserable in our sin, but because God loves us so much, “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.” Don’t miss the scandal there. We’re pretty relaxed about the idea of an unmarried woman being pregnant, but even in our very morally gray culture, if a woman turns up pregnant before her wedding, and the baby doesn’t—indeed, can’t—belong to her future husband, we’re not going to go all in on that one. In the culture of first century Judea, such a discovery was assigned a punishment of death by stoning. That is, Joseph would have been fully within his rights to both divorce Mary and have her put to death.
God had been playing the long game for far too long to think that something like this was going to derail His plans. He had chosen this couple very specifically for the task He was calling them to complete. We give a great deal of attention to Mary and her remarkable faith, but without Joseph’s commitment to righteousness, her faithfulness wouldn’t have made much difference. “So her husband Joseph, being a righteous man, and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly.”
Let that one sit on you for just a second. If someone were to be badly betrayed by a loved one nowadays, a public disgracing on social media is pretty much par for the course. We live in a culture in which people dish out public scorn and disgrace for every imaginable slight and even some that are fairly unimaginable until they happen. By all appearances, Joseph’s fiance had rather brazenly and likely repeatedly cheated on him. Surely that kind of a betrayal warranted at least a bit of public shaming. But Joseph was a righteous man. He was right with people and right with God. Now, he was hurt to the point that maintaining the relationship wasn’t going to be possible. Any one of us would have been right there with him. But he didn’t want to bring her any more hardship or her family any more shame than they were already going to experience because of all of this. That’s God’s righteousness and graciousness lived out.
It is surely because of Joseph’s close connection with God, though, that his plans were derailed and God’s were kept on track. Just as Joseph was about to pull the trigger, God gave him the assurance he needed to keep things on their originally scheduled track. “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.’”
Then, Matthew steps in with a narrator’s voice and gives us some scriptural context for what we are seeing. Like we talked about a couple of weeks ago, all of this bore echoes of the prophecy God had given through Isaiah to King Ahaz. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. ‘See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Immanuel.’ which is translated ‘God is with us.’”
And because Joseph was a righteous man, when he got a word from the Lord, he obeyed it. “When Joseph woke up, he did as the Lord’s angel had commanded him. He married her but did not have sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son. And he named him Jesus.” That last part matters more than it seems. Matthew doesn’t tell us simply that Jesus’ parents decided on a name to give Him. No, Matthew says very specifically that Joseph gave Jesus His name. This implied to Matthew’s original audience that Joseph was claiming Jesus as his own son. That is, he was fully on board with what God was doing. He didn’t understand it all, but he trusted in the one He knew was doing it. He didn’t know everything, but he knew what he was going to do about it. He was going to follow. Because of that, Jesus was born, and the world has never been the same.
And that, my friends, brings us to the question that each one of us has to answer: What are you going to do about it? If God has done all of this for you, how are you going to respond to it? Because the truth here is that God did all of this so that He could have a relationship with you and with me and with every other person who has, does, or will ever draw breath on this planet. And He did it all at just the right time. God stepped into history at just the right time to have a relationship with you and me. What are you going to do about it? More than anything else I want for you this morning, I want you to walk out of here with a clear answer to that question sitting right at the front of your mind.
That’s kind of a broad field to play in, though, so let me offer some options on ways to respond. It could be that you have never actually made the conscious decision to follow Jesus. You’ve perhaps toyed with it. You’ve thought about it. You almost did it one time, but didn’t quite pull the trigger. Can I offer you today as your option? I know there are perhaps a ton of reasons why you can’t do it. What are people going to think? What will they say? How will they react? Will they think less of me? Am I going to have to stop doing something I really enjoy doing? Will I have to rearrange my whole schedule? The answers are that they are going to be thrilled, and you can work out the rest between you and Jesus. He’s not looking for you to get yourself together first. If you have convinced yourself that needs to happen, you’ll never get around to actually doing it. And maybe that’s your last remaining excuse. It’s a bad one, though. Jesus welcomes all of us just as we are. God stepped into history at just the right time to have a relationship with you and me. Don’t let this moment pass you by. Jesus came for you. He was God’s greatest gift. Don’t leave here this morning without being sure that you have received it…that you have received Him.
But maybe that’s not you. Maybe you have long since received Jesus and the life He offers, but you haven’t been living in a way that honestly reflects that decision. There are all kinds of reasons for that. Neglect. Busyness. Brokenness. Maybe you never meant to drift away from your faith, but now your life has become such a mess that you don’t really feel like you’re in any kind of shape to come back to it again. You can’t imagine God could really be interested in you anymore. And yet Jesus came right in the midst of a mess in order to redeem all of our messes…yours included. God stepped into history at just the right time to have a relationship with you and me. Let today be the day when you decide to start following again in earnest. Let Him redeem your messy life by the grace He freely and gladly gives everyone who comes to receive it by faith. Let His perfect love cast out all your fear, restore you from your brokenness, and arrive on the grand celebration of Christmas with a renewed focus on Christ and the joy that comes by no other means.
Or perhaps you are one who has been walking in faithfulness to this great story for a very long time. You started down that path, and although you have lived through some ups and downs, you’ve never really left it. I have two challenges for you. The first is to make sure you are receiving this story and engaging with the world around you through a lens of gratitude. It is frighteningly easy for something like duty to take over our vision. We see all that needs to be done, and just put our heads down and plow forward. In giving so much attention to serving the Lord, though, we forget to actually worship Him with joy and gratitude. Let today be an invitation for you back into a posture of perpetual gratitude. God stepped into history at just the right time in order to have a relationship with you and me. That fact should give rise to more gratitude in our hearts and minds than anything else.
If not duty, it may be that your vision of gratitude has been taken over by something else—bitterness, exhaustion, resentment, hurt, depression, anxiety—even as you have kept serving Him with faithfulness. Let that lens of gratitude refresh your vision once again. Find fresh delight in the wonder of this incredible story. God stepped into history at just the right time to have a relationship with you and me. And He did it in the most humble way imaginable: He came as a baby. He came as the son of a poor couple who had nothing but a manger as His bed. If He loved you so much He was willing to take on those trappings instead of the glory of God’s throne room, that’s a love you can rely on. It is a love that should inspire you to receive His love with gratitude, and to do with it what is really the only appropriate thing that can be done with it: love Him back by loving the people around you.
That brings us to that second challenge: Make sure you are sharing the hope you have with someone else. There are a lot of folks around you who don’t have the hope you enjoy. They can’t even imagine it, in fact. When you have access to such good news as this, though, how can you not share it? Such a posture reveals one of two things is true, both of which are problematic. The first is that you don’t really understand just how good the news of the Gospel is. If that’s the case, we need to have a conversation, because you are missing out on the fullest expression possible of the faith you claim. God stepped into history at just the right time to have a relationship with you and me. That is the best news possible. The second thing is that you don’t want anyone else to enjoy what you have. But if that’s the case, then you don’t really understand the nature of the God you claim to serve. He is a missionary God who is constantly inviting more people into a relationship with Him through Jesus—inviting that just might be accomplished through you and your faithfulness. Following His lead in this only makes sense.
God stepped into history at just the right time to have a relationship with you and me. There are many ways you can respond to this. The one thing you cannot do is to ignore it. As God is moving through His Spirit’s speaking to your heart and mind, move today as He is directing. He’s played the long game for just this moment. Step into it and experience the life that is truly life this Christmas.