Christmas Eve Service – December 24 @ 4 p.m.
I want to begin this morning by asking you a question. It’s kind of a simple one: Do you have any plans for today? Or this week, while the kids are out of school, do you have some plans? Or maybe for next year? You could have some big goals, things you are looking forward to doing.
I want to ask you a related question: What is Jesus planning to do today? What is he doing right now? What will he be doing this week, and what will he be doing next year, and what is the intersection between what you and I are thinking and planning and what Jesus is planning?
For the last several weeks, we’ve been thinking about why the humanity of Jesus matters so much. If you go back to virtually all of the ancient creeds, this is a big part of it. The Westminster Confession includes this:
“Jesus Christ…the eternal Son of God, became man, and so was, and continues to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, forever.”
The 39 Articles says,
“The very and eternal God, took man’s nature…so that two whole and perfect natures…were joined together in one person, never to be divided.”
Martin Luther said that,
“This [the eternal union of deity and humanity] is the rock on which our eternal salvation is built. On this…we live and die.”
The reality is that God is perfect, and we are not. There is an infinite and insurmountable gap between God, who is perfect and eternal, and we who are sinful and finite. The problem with all earthly solutions for bridging that gap is identified in the passage that Titus just read.
“Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins” (Hebrews 10:11).
Day after day, all the priests of all the religions in all the world, the sum total of their sacrifices is never enough. The “again and again” is shouting to our world that no earthly priest or system can ever fix this gap between us and God. But the passage says,
“…when this priest [Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down…by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:12, 14).
Here’s the contrast between all human systems and what Jesus did: Human systems are “day after day,” and what Jesus did is “for all time.” Human systems have “the same sacrifices,” but Jesus offered “one sacrifice.” They sacrifice “again and again.” Across the earth today, in every tongue and language and culture and custom, people are trying to find their way back to God, but it’s never enough. But Jesus’ sacrifice was “once and for all.”
Then the passage that was read adds this interesting detail:
“But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool” (Hebrews 10:12-13).
When Jesus had finished his earthly work, as man and God, he ascended to heaven, and then he sat down on a throne.
When you read the words, “he sat down,” maybe it evokes in your mind the image of something like I would do after I’ve worked in the yard for a few hours: I come in the house, and I sit down. My sitting down clearly means I’m not doing any more work. But when a sovereign sits down on a throne, it doesn’t mean their work is over. It means their work is just beginning.
When Queen Elizabeth was in her coronation, she sat down on the throne. That didn’t mean from then on she’s not going to do anything. For 70 years and 200-some days, she ruled from that throne. She became the supreme ruler in the sense of Great Britain.
When Jesus sat down, he sat down at the right hand of the Father, becoming the supreme ruler of heaven and earth. This is a major theme in the book of Hebrews, Jesus sitting on a throne. It actually appears more than 10 times. Here are some examples.
“…he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven” (Hebrews 1:3).
“But about the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever…’” (Hebrews 1:8a).
“Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Hebrews 1:13b).
What is Jesus doing right now? While we’re sitting here in this place, or standing, what is he doing? He’s sitting on a throne from which he is finishing and extending the dimensions of his kingly reign and his victory over his enemies. Which leads us to ask the question, who are these enemies? In Hebrews 2:14, it says,
“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).
So who are the enemies? Who are the enemies? Are they Democrats, Republicans? Are they Chinese? Are they Russians? No, the enemies in view here are Satan, and death, and fear. Those are the enemies that Jesus is putting under his feet.
Then the question is, how does Jesus destroy those enemies? How does Jesus make war against Satan and fear? Hebrews 2:14 says,
“By embracing death, taking it into himself, he destroyed the Devil’s hold on death and freed all who cower through life, scared to death of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15) (MSG).
Just stop for a minute and think about this. How is Jesus the one who is seated on the throne? How did Jesus come into the world to destroy his enemies? By suffering and dying, he destroys his enemies. Whoever heard of an empire like that, of a kingdom like that? 1 Corinthians 15:21 says (this is in The Message version),
“There is a nice symmetry in this: Death initially came by a man, and resurrection from death came by man. Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ… after crushing the opposition”
How did he crush the opposition? By dying.
“…he hands over his kingdom to God the Father. He won’t let up until the last enemy is down—and the very last enemy is death! As the psalmist said, ‘He laid them low, one and all; he walked all over them” (1 Corinthians 15:21-25) (MSG).
Amen? By dying. This is why the humanity of Jesus is all-important: God cannot suffer, God cannot die. This is the miracle of the incarnation. As John Calvin explains,
“…since neither as God alone could he feel death, nor as man alone overcome it, he coupled human nature with divine that…he might submit the weakness of the one to death; and that, wrestling with death by the power of the other nature, he might win victory for us. …clothed with our flesh he vanquished death and sin together that the victory and triumph might be ours.”
The good news is that by suffering and dying as a man, Jesus guaranteed the defeat of suffering and even death for mankind. That’s why he had to be a man.
I came across an anecdote from the life of all people, Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m not 1,000% sure that this is historical. Some people say it is, and some people say it’s apocryphal, but it’s a good illustration, so I’m going to use it.
In this situation, Napoleon had been defeated, his empire had been deconstructed, he was in exile, and he asked his right-hand man, “What’s the difference between my empire and the empire of Jesus?”
His right-hand man was afraid to answer because if you give the wrong answer to Napoleon, you never know what’s going to happen.
Napoleon is quoted as saying,
“Well then, I’ll tell you: Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself have founded great empires. But upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded his empire upon love. And to this very day, millions will die for him.”
Jesus is ruling from his throne and will rule all nations and will renew the earth itself. He decisively dealt with the sins of his enemies by becoming what we are (human) and suffering what we deserve. Hebrews says,
“We see Jesus…through the experience of death, crowned…with a glory ‘bright with Eden’s dawn light.’ In that death, by God’s grace, he fully experienced death in every person’s place… the Salvation Pioneer…leads all these people to glory” (Hebrews 2:9-10) (MSG).
So what is Jesus doing as King right now? If we are his people, he’s leading us to glory. Isn’t that great? He has glory, but he’s leading us to glory. Romans 8 says that creation itself is waiting for the revelation of our glory. The revelation of the glory of the sons of God.
But just as with Jesus, our Pioneer, our path to glory is often a path of sacrificial love and suffering. Paul said God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, and he’s committed to us the ministry of reconciliation.
Jesus says, “All authority has been given…” Not “will be” given. Before he left the earth, after his resurrection, he said, “All authority has been given to me.” Therefore, you go, and you make war on evil, and darkness, and Satan, and death, and sin, but you make war using the weapons and strategy that I used: a strategy grounded in love and sacrifice. And he said, “I will be with you.”
This is such a powerful and significant teaching for the moment that we’re in. When you come to the end of the book of Hebrews, when you come to the end of chapter 12, which is kind of the culmination of the book, he says that we are receiving an unshakable kingdom. Did you know that? It’s not just some day. The writer of Hebrews said we are receiving an unshakable kingdom. And our God is a consuming fire.
But then it’s so interesting that, when you turn to Hebrews 13, what does it look like to receive a kingdom as the people of God? What does it look like to walk into glory with Jesus? Here are the commands that he gives:
Keep loving other believers. Keep opening your heart to strangers. Have compassion with those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them. Identify with those who are suffering injustice. Keep marriage sacred, and don’t be obsessed with money.
For us, that’s what it looks like to walk into the glory of the eternal kingdom of Jesus Christ.
A couple of centuries after Jesus died, there was a man named Justin Martyr who wrote what he called his apology (that is, his defense of Christianity) to the Roman Empire. You know what his apology or his defense, or his proof of Christianity was? It was exactly those things.
He said, when plagues come, and you vacate the city, we stay, and we bury your dead, and we care for your sick. He said, look at our marriages. We have only one wife, and we’re faithful to her. He said, you hate and conquer everyone, but we love even those who oppress us. By this, he said, not by apologetics and polemics (though we have that too), but he said this is the proof that we serve a different King! And we’re part of a different strategy to fix the evil of the world.
It was by that that the Roman Empire was brought to its knees. No shot was fired. It was by the Christ-like life—loving the stranger, identifying with those who are the lowest and the least, loving one another, being faithful in marriage—that the Roman Empire fell to its knees, but not as prisoners of war, as worshipers. No, not the emperors perhaps, but all throughout the Roman Empire, in dozens of languages and cultures, people fell to their knees to worship Jesus Christ. He’s walking us into glory.
When I feel the utter brokenness of the world, when I become so discouraged that I just want to give up or get angry or yell at somebody, I look up, and I see Jesus is sitting on the throne, and it changes everything. Even when the darkness seems to hold all the cards, it can and will never overcome the light because the light of Jesus is shining in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.
On Friday, because of your giving, I’ll be going back to my second home, Ethiopia, and I will be with three of my very dearest friends in the world. The two men on the left, Eshete and Michael, I’ve known for upwards of 20 years. Muga is a newer friend.
As I was thinking about going back to this country, it’s had four completely different governments in my lifetime. It’s had millions of people killed in political violence. But when I’m with them, they’re not full of bitterness and hatred; they are full of love and joy.
I was talking about this with the Lord, and he reminded me that in 1981, I was traveling across Eastern Europe with my best friend Dave in a van. We were able to take Bibles to nine different communist countries. We met dozens of people who were suffering under Soviet communism.
At that very moment, in Ethiopia, which was under a communist regime, my friend Michael (who had never heard the gospel), he’s a brilliant communicator, and the communist government said, “We’re going to make you a propaganda officer.” He was part of a communist regime.
They sent him to Russia to see how great communism was, and while he was there, it made him sick. Coming back from Russia, he formed a plot with five other army officers to overthrow the communist government. The plot was found out, and the other five officers were killed within the hour. But Michael escaped and walked hundreds of miles to become a refugee in Kenya.
At the same time Michael was in Russia and I was across the river from Russia in Romania, Eshete was suffering, being tortured for weeks on end by that same communist government.
That same communist government said to the missionaries, “You have one month to get out of Ethiopia.” The missionaries responded to that by saying, “We have one month to do everything we can to spread the gospel.” They went to all their strongest converts and said, “We have to leave, it’s your job now.”
Those people who they deputized to carry the gospel to Ethiopia went to where Muga’s father lives in one of the remotest parts of the world, and Muga’s father became the first convert in his tribe.
When the communist government fell in the ’90s, Evangelical Christianity was less than 2%. Since that time, it has grown 1,000% to more than 20%. Millions and millions of people have been swept into the kingdom of God.
I was thinking about that: There was never a greater darkness than the darkness of Ethiopian communism. Michael emigrated to Canada, where he became the executive vice president of a $700 million corporation. But then he went on his own dime and started an organization in Ethiopia that has reached out to more than 250,000 disabled and poor people and seen tens— perhaps hundreds of thousands come to the gospel.
Eshete became our primary training partner in Ethiopia, who has trained more than 20,000 Christian leaders to preach and teach the Bible faithfully. Muga has become a tremendous transformational leader. I could go on and on, like Michael and Eshete working together.
The former communist soldier and the former communist detainee have organized an effort to bring more than one million Bibles into Ethiopia. Michael and Eshete, working together, organized a church planting program that said, “We will go to the hardest places in Ethiopia.” The people they trained planted 1,700 churches.
We can look at the world, and if I were an Ethiopian, I would say, “There is no darkness that could be greater than what has come upon my country.” But even when the darkness comes, the light cannot be extinguished. They never knew that this is what God would do. We don’t know what God is doing.
I recently heard an illustration by the theologian, N.T. Wright, who said, what Jesus is doing right now, reminds us of someone building this glorious cathedral, this soaring cathedral.
You have the stone cutters, and the stone cutters probably are illiterate. They could never understand this thing that some brilliant mind designed. But the designer says to the stone cutter, “You just cut this stone, okay?”
There were probably some days he probably smashed his hand, and he had to start over. But he just cuts the stone that the designer asked him to cut day after day, week after week, month after month. Then one day, the great stonemason comes, and he takes all those stones that have been cut, and he assembles them into something that is soaring— all the bits, piece on piece.
Then the stone cutters could come out blinking into the light of day and look up at something they could never have understood. They say, “That’s my little bit right there. I cut that stone.” Everyone joined with the work of others, even those they had never met, even those who are now dead. Patterns and formations, an engineering genius they could never have imagined, meaning something far more than they could possibly have known.
That is what will happen when Jesus, who is ruling from his throne, finishes this great work. He’ll assemble it all, and we’ll all just look at it and say, “That’s my little bit.” I’m not responsible for building the whole thing. If I were, I’d make it round. That’s an inside joke.
We are building and planning and suffering and weeping and groaning and, yes, failing and dying and feeling like we’re losing and holding on and keeping at it because he’s worth it. One day, we’ll emerge into the blinking light of God’s new day dawning, and we’ll realize that our little bit of work—even the pieces that didn’t seem like they were going very well—are all part of what Jesus is doing in history, writing a new story while he sits on the throne as our exalted King. That’s pretty good.
So what are you planning to do? And what is Jesus planning to do? The book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus, as God and man eternally, is now seated on a throne as our Prophet, our Priest, and our King.
As our Prophet Jesus is always speaking to his people. He’s not silent. First and preeminently through the Word of God, he speaks to us every day if we’re listening to his voice. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I call them by name.”
As our Priest, Jesus is always representing us before God. Do you know, there is not one single moment when God thinks of me apart from Jesus?
As our King, Jesus is rewriting the story of the world and giving the only real meaning to our story as his people. And because he is on the throne, I am never powerless and alone. “Lo, I am with you always.”
So, brothers and sisters, as I look to this next year, for me, there are two ways to live: (1) I can live by my own thoughts and my own ideas and my own opinions, or (2) I can lock in with the voice of my Prophet who is always speaking to me through his Word, but with the guidelines and guardrails of the Word, I can hear him speaking everywhere.
I can live this coming year with that vain hope that maybe one day I’ll finally do one day right, and when I do that one day right, that God will be pleased with me. Or I can look away to the one who’s done it all right, already, and made an end of all my sin and failure, and made me a child of God. In that I can rest.
I can live the coming year frustrated and angry and bitter and feeling helpless. Or I can live the coming year knowing no matter what it may look like in front of me, Jesus is still the King who’s ruling over all things and bringing all things to this glorious cathedral, which he calls his Church.
Father, help us to live in the good of what you are doing in and through Jesus every moment of every day of our lives. God, help those two circles to become coextensive more and more, that we live every moment and every hour listening to you, and we don’t let anything get in the way of us hearing your voice, where we live by your good and your merit and your righteousness and your enough-ness, and where we realize that our labor is not in vain in the Lord, because Jesus is weaving it all together. Thank you for that, in Jesus’s name, amen.
