Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / December 6, 2015 | Home For Christmas - Jesus Left His Home

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December 6, 2015 | Home For Christmas - Jesus Left His Home · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that beautiful?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Just humor me for a moment and imagine that was me singing that.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: How much how much different the experience would be.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: My wife actually has a wonderful voice.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I, however, just kind of heck along.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a great time of year, isn't it?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it wonderful?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I love Christmas time.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as we're talking about the connections between home and Christmas, I love the idea of being home for Christmas.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I love the nostalgia of the season.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I have many great, very warm memories about growing up and celebrating Christmas.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you do as well.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: What I'd like to do is to give you a snapshot, quite literally, several snapshots on the screen of pictures that are for me significant and important because of the memories that they conjure up when I look at these pictures.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I see there a mailbox.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, that's a mailbox.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: What is the deal with a mailbox?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that is the mailbox at my parents' house in Connecticut, where I grew up.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: The picture next to that is the actual house itself.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And for you, you say that means nothing to me.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, that means a lot because I think of countless memories, uh, things that happened that were good and that were bad, but associated especially at Christmas time, wonderful memories.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I remember the tree that's kind of close to the mailbox in that picture, when my father each year would string up lights on that tree.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was a nice big fir tree.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that tree kept getting taller and taller, and so every year he'd take the lights off, he'd string them back up, and it got so tall that one year he said, You know what?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Forget about it.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna leave these up all year round.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Which seemed to make perfect sense to me and to him, but not to my mom.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was concerned what the neighbors would think, but uh but I remember that.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: The next set of pictures shows uh a dock at the end of a pond, a frozen pond.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was the pond in our backyard that when it was cold enough, we would go out and ice skate on that pond.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Usually have fun doing that even on Christmas Day sometimes.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then you'll see a picture of a tree.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's the Christmas tree in my parents' living room in the house that they used to live in, that we spent many Christmases with eager anticipation, waiting just to go downstairs and see what was under that tree.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember the one year that my dad had set the tree up.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: We left to go run some errands as a family, and we came back home, and the tree had fallen down.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So my dad said, Well, I'm a strategic guy, I know how to fix this.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he ended up getting some fishing twine and he put two eye hooks in one of the one of the beams in the ceiling and two eye hooks in the other, so he had four corners of stabilization for that tree.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the result when he first did it was that the bottom of the tree actually swung because it was.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's like wonderful memories of Christmas.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: The final set of pictures shows the uh the stockings that were hung by our fireplace, and we were a family of four, but we had a dog who was the most spoiled dog in the world, so yes, she had her own stocking.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then a picture of my wife and I with my family in the final Christmas that my parents were in that home.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew that uh that that was going to be the last Christmas in that home.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we grew up about an hour from New York City, and we would love going into the city and seeing the different sites in New York, uh, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, and I recommend anybody doing that at some point if they can.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: But as much as we loved doing that and I enjoyed that, I really loved the idea of getting on that train and coming back home.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was something about just being at home at Christmas that I absolutely loved.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We love the idea of being home at Christmas, but the idea of being away from home at Christmas can be a little saddening.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I remember the first year that I was not able to be home at Christmas.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: My wife and I had gotten married, and like many married couples who have parents that live geographically distant from one another, we had to make the decision that we were gonna spend Thanksgiving at my parents' house and Christmas at her parents' house.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that was tough in some ways because I was not home for Christmas.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the final year that my parents were gonna be in this house that we spent so many happy years in.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was taking pictures left and right because I knew it was gonna be the last Christmas ever.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the thought of not being able to come back there was was difficult for me.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think the idea of being away from home at Christmas is strange.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Coming home for Christmas is natural.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Being away from home at Christmas is strange, but leaving home at Christmas?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's just plain weird.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't sound right.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, ironically, leaving home at Christmas is what happened to make the first Christmas even possible.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're talking about this morning is the reality of Jesus leaving his home at Christmas in order to establish this wonderful holiday that we now celebrate each and every year.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to study a passage from the Bible in the book of Philippians, chapter 2.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I would encourage you to turn there or fire up your smartphone or your tablet and flip there, and we are going to be looking at Philippians 2, verses 5 through 8.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is a portion of what some scholars say is the most important section of Scripture in the book of Philippians, because of what it entails and what it uh signifies.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's also uh somewhat of a hymn.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some believers think that early on when this when the church was being established, that this was a Christian hymn that the Apostle Paul actually took and inserted here into the book of Philippians.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to think that this is original through the Spirit's inspiration to Paul on the pages of Philippians, but it has a lot to say to us.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're gonna do as we read through is we're gonna make some observations about the text.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna make observations specifically about Jesus leaving home, and then after that, we're gonna celebrate the Lord's table together and show the connections between communion and Christmas.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm excited.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: But let's dive into Philippians chapter 2, and we'll look at verses 5 through 8.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: What the Apostle Paul is writing to the Philippians about is he's telling them you need to be a people of humility.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: You need to put others before yourselves.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: In order to demonstrate what this looks like, I want you to look at Jesus.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we find ourselves, starting in verse 5.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: As Paul says, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though, or because he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as a thing to be grasped.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: But he made himself nothing.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Some translations say he emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant, by being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death, on a cross.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Father, these uh words are profound, but yet they're simple and they're clear about who your son Jesus was.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh my prayer is that uh I will successfully tie the connections of this passage to Christmas.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's not traditionally thought of as a Christmas passage, but the the connections are really so there.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that as a result of our time together, you will uh quicken our hearts to love you more deeply and to think of ways that we can be a more faithful people as we go throughout this Christmas season drawing close to you.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're so grateful for your Son Jesus Christ, and we pray these things in his name and through the power of your Holy Spirit.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I begin before we jump into the text with a little word about the importance of theology.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Theology is a fancy word that simply means thinking about God, study of God.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's the thoughts that come to mind when we think about who God is.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And really, we are all theologians, because at any point in time we all have beliefs that we hold to about who God is and what the scriptures say, or maybe what scriptures don't say, but what we still believe about God.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to let you know that what you think about God, and specifically this morning about Jesus Christ, is so crucial because it informs everything that you will do and everything that you will become.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so we take a little uh side trip before we start jumping into our text to talk about the importance of doctrine, especially the doctrine and beliefs about Jesus Christ.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: A wise friend pointed out to me several months ago that every major cult and false system of teaching to a degree has started because of an inaccurate understanding about who Jesus really is.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's as if the Bible lays this clear foundation, but false religion builds on another foundation.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine when you build on another foundation, the building will look quite different.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's why the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, the Muslims, and many others have an inaccurate understanding of who Jesus is that's not fully based off of the Bible.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but I don't want to be about false teaching.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be about truth.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we find our truth in the scriptures.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when we look at the scriptures, we don't have to look very far and deep before we realize that the scriptures are so clear about who Jesus is, the true Jesus of the Bible and the true Jesus of history.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the church throughout its ages has just called this practice doctrine, the doctrine or the teachings of the church.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And today we talk about the doctrine of the incarnation.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a long word, kind of a fancy word, but it means simply the enfleshment, the enfleshment of God.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: God in all of his nature taking on a human nature in the person of Jesus Christ.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: We have to understand that Jesus was fully divine, that is, he was fully God, but that he was also fully man and fully human.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So while he had Mary as his biological mother, and he had a human nature like ours, but without sin, he also had a divine nature, being one with his heavenly father.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we call this uh the hypostatic union, which is just a fancy word for two natures, the two natures, both divine and human, in one person, being unified in one person, that is Jesus Christ.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go home and you know, go this week, tell your friends, hey, I learned hypostatic union, and they look at you like, what is that?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Be like, two natures, one God, it's Christmas.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll talk about that.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: But this is an essential teaching of the church.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you deny this teaching of God, of Jesus Christ being fully God and fully man, then you are classified in a category that the church has over its centuries called heretic.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Last time I checked, I don't want to be in that category.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why we look to the Bible.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: We find proof of this teaching of the incarnation from Philippians chapter 2.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: We read in verse 6 that Jesus existed in the form of God.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: The word form there is morphe in the Greek, where we get our English words metamorphosis and morphology.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this talks about an external appearance of an inner nature.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus, even though in his deity before Christmas, he was invisible with God the Father in heaven, we find that he had the very same form as God, meaning the very same nature as God.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: He shared the attributes and the characteristics and the nature of God because he was God.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: What Philippians 2 is simply telling us is that Jesus was God.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't take very long to see that.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yet we also find that he had a human nature.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: He had a very real physical body.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: As verse 7 says, he was born in the likeness of men, and he was found in human form in verse 8.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we see that whereas Jesus' divine nature as the preincarnate Son of God has always existed, even before creation, that Jesus' human nature had a starting point.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that starting point was that first Christmas almost 2,000 years ago.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a technical aside, because if you study biology, you know that there's a baby, but before the baby, there's a nine-month gestational period, right?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we look back to the passage in Luke where Mary, the Virgin Mary, is impregnated through the Holy Spirit with baby Jesus as a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little fetus.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that over the nine months that happens, Jesus in the womb began to grow and develop just as a human child would grow and develop, okay?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a little bit technical here, but I just wanted for all you contrarians out there who might be tempted to come up after the service and say, Well, you know, actually the incarnation kind of happened nine months before Christmas.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to let you all know you don't have to go there.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to come up to me after the service.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: We understand, we understand biology.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Technically speaking, yes, nine months before Christmas, the incarnation happened, but we move forward through and see that the fullness of that incarnation was realized that first Christmas evening when Jesus Christ was born.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when the new story of God's redemption began to be written through his life.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I just kind of want to get that out there to talk about the incarnation of Christ, fully God, fully man.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: We find this reality written about in John chapter 1, verses 1 and 2 and verse 14, which reads as follows: In the beginning, that is, before time, before history, before creation, was the word.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: The word, by the way, is Jesus.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's just another way to refer to it as Jesus.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the word was with God, and the word was God.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we find that clearly Jesus had a divine nature.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Son of God was fully God.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he was with God in the beginning.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 14 fast forwards to that moment, say that Christmas moment, when the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: That shows about the human nature, the human side of Jesus.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that happened on that first Christmas.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So this passage in John 1 runs parallel with Philippians 2, 5 through 8.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you can see that.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole incarnation, it really is a great mystery.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's really a miracle to think of God in human flesh walking around our planet and all of its brokenness and all of its pain.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis refers to Christmas as the greatest miracle of all because of all that it entailed.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, while it is a great miracle and a great mystery, Christmas just makes sense.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: When you think about the infinite problem of our sin and our rebellion and how God was going to solve that problem.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, many centuries ago, towards the tail end of the 12th century, a man who's much smarter than you and me, named Anselm of Canterbury, he was an archbishop in the Catholic Church, and he was ruminating on this reality of God and man and the person of Jesus Christ.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he was wondering why.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why did that have to happen?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why did God have to choose that way to solve the problem of sin?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And his conclusion, after writing many pages, was really a simple and yet profound one.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes like this the debt that we owed for our sin in rebellion against a holy God, an infinitely holy God, was an infinite debt that we could never pay.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: God was the only one who could pay that debt.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, human beings on the other side were the only ones that had offended a holy God, so human beings were the only ones that should have to pay that debt.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: What was to be done?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: God was the only one that could, human beings were the only one that should.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: The great solution to the infinite problem, Jesus Christ, the God man, having both natures accomplishing the purpose for why he came.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's why the incarnation is so important.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why Christmas just makes sense.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And makes more sense of all of what we see around us.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you can at least appreciate that.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we have to reject some of the heresies from the early church.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: The heresy specifically that said Jesus only appeared to be a human being.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Back then they believed, some people, not everybody, some people believed that the human body was filthy and evil, and there's no way that God would ever enflesh himself in something evil like us.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so a heresy called docetism arose that said Jesus only appeared or seemed to be human.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how they got around that.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's actually eating.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: They just claim, well, it just looked like he was eating.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: But that we have to reject that heresy.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And while we have to reject the heresy that says Jesus only seemed human, we also have to reject the heresies that continue today that say that Jesus was merely human.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: That he didn't have a divine nature.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was just a good man, a good moral teacher.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've heard that said of him before.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: The scripture is clear.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was not just man, and Jesus was not just God.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was God and man in one person.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Blows me away to think about that.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: But we must believe this to be true about Jesus.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: If we do not believe this to be true about Jesus, as one seminary professor once said, that may be something, but it's not Christian.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but I want to be within the sphere of orthodox Christian teaching.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what the Bible claims.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that lays out the foundation for what Christmas really is all about, the incarnation of Jesus.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that helps you gain a deeper appreciation, understanding, and reverence for God.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: What we're going to do now is walk through three different observations that we make from the text here in Philippians 2 that help us to unpack a little bit more about the how and the why of Jesus leaving that first Christmas and leaving his home.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the first observation is this: that Jesus left his home that first Christmas by choice.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: He did it by choice.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: He was not simply wandering aimlessly around the cosmos saying, I'm gonna land on this third rock from the sun.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna kind of uh sit here and figure this thing out.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: He did so by deliberate choice to come and visit our planet that first Christmas.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: We find this in the language here of Philippians chapter 2.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus, it says in verse 6, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you may say, well, well, he was already equal with God.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: You just told me that he was equal with God because he was fully God, so what does that mean?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's talking, remember, the context here is that Paul is encouraging the Philippian believers towards humility.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: That is, not taking advantage of their rights, but giving up their rights for another.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what he's saying is here is that Jesus, by choice, gave up all privileges that he had to exist forever and ever, amen, in the comforts of the heavenly host with God the Father and God the Spirit.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: To come down here to our broken, messy, sinful planet.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't think it's broken, messy, and sinful, just check the news.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Even though they didn't have the same media we did back then, the world was just as broken, sinful, and messy.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, by choice, the pre-incarnate Son of God came down to our world, forsaking all that he was entitled to.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: He came down here because he's God.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And because he's God, he's gracious.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And because he's gracious, he's good, and he made the choice to come.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, in the opening message of the series, our pastor, lead pastor Jim Congden, talked about how leaving home is often associated with pain and sin.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we could have added shame and guilt to that as well, especially in the Bible.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: People leave home because of something they've done wrong.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: The amazing thing as we think about Christmas is that Jesus left his home for pain and sin and guilt and shame.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't his, it was yours and mine.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he still made that choice.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because God is gracious and God is good.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: The deliberate choice to leave the glorious comforts of heaven to come here.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: I am blown away by that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is amazing.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: He did so out of obedience to the Father.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was a choice to obey, and a choice to come to this world that he had created that now was in desperate need of his help.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that tells us just the fact that Jesus left home.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: He left by choice.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now we kind of understand in our second observation the how, the manner in which he left, and that is that Jesus left his home that first Christmas in humility.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to some of the phrases that are used to describe Jesus coming that first Christmas.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: He made himself nothing, or some translations say he emptied himself.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: He took on the form of a servant.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: He humbled himself, verse 8 tells us.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: As we go back and we unpack each of these phrases a little bit, we see that the picture that's being painted here is Jesus doing everything he can to give of himself in order that others might be blessed.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's humility.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is painting a picture for us of what our lives could look like if we lived lives in true humility.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, he made himself nothing, or he humbled himself.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: The word in the Greek here is kana'o, which means to empty oneself.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: The idea really of just pouring oneself out for another.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of ink has been spilled as scholars have analyzed this text.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: They call it the kenosis text from the verb to empty here found in the Greek.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of scholars debate about exactly what Jesus emptied himself of.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Did he empty himself of his divine nature?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Did he empty himself of his divine attributes?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not really sure he did that either.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Did he empty himself of his divine glory?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's hard to say.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Did he simply empty himself of his uh his you know his what he wanted to do in service of others?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing is, and a lot of books have been written on this, and different theories and levels to which Jesus emptied himself of something, the text doesn't actually say Jesus emptied himself of anything.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: It simply says he emptied himself.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when we begin looking at the context, and this is a pretty key observation in any Bible study, you need to look at the context in every verse in the context of a larger paragraph and so on and so forth.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what we begin to see as we look at the context is that in many ways, saying that Jesus made himself nothing or emptied himself is simply another way of saying that he humbled himself when he came down here to earth and lived a life of self-sacrifice and giving of himself for others.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, not to make too light of this, but I don't want us to get too hung up on exactly what Jesus emptying himself meant in the light of what this passage clearly says is that he just gave of himself.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: He poured himself out.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's how we should understand this idea of Jesus emptying himself.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: It also says that he took on the form of a servant.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: What's fascinating to me, you don't normally think of emptying yourself by taking something on, but that's exactly what the Bible says.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of a strange subtraction by addition thing.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus emptied himself by taking on human form, and it says here the form of a servant.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus was about his entire life: was serving, serving his people, serving the people around him.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: The word servant here is also bondservant, which in ancient times was a role in society that an individual chose to enter into in order that they might serve the needs of someone under authority, or that they were under authority of.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that Jesus again made that choice to become that bondservant for all humanity in order that he might serve the entire human race by how he lived.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's an amazing act of obedience and love and humility displayed by Jesus.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he did it throughout his entire life.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: As commentator Gerald F.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hawthorne, who wrote a commentary on Philippians, has said that he said, Christ entered the stream of human life as a slave.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is, as a person without advantage, with no rights or privileges of his own, for the express purpose of placing himself completely at the service of all mankind.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Friends, that is humility par excellence, demonstrated through the God man Jesus Christ.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: We find Jesus' own words from Mark 10, 45 describing what he was all about, as he says, just as the Son of Man has not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus' life was all about displaying this humility.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: From start at Christmas, the humble manger to finish on the cross as he accomplished the work of God.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I remain convinced that humility is one of the most important, if not the most important, virtue of the Christian life, but sadly, as I look at my life as well, one of the least practiced virtues of the Christian life because of what it requires.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: And yet I am so thankful that Jesus practiced it to perfection through his incarnation and through his whole life.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what he desires for us to be as well.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's his intentional choice as well as his humility that lead us to our third and final observation about why Jesus left that first Christmas.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that is that Jesus left his home at Christmas with a purpose.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: With a purpose.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Again, not wandering aimlessly about what should I do.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: But he left home that first Christmas with the express purpose of becoming obedient, as verse 8 tells us, unto death, even death on a cross.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's why Jesus was born, so that he might die.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of profound, it's kind of simple, but yet we oftentimes miss that when we get to this time of Christmas.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: We forget that that is why he came.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: He came here with the express purpose to die.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he knew exactly why he was coming.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: A friend was sharing with me last uh over the last few weeks about a book he's reading called Fox's Book of Martyrs.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a book that records over the centuries of the church the many, many, countless men and women who have died as martyrs for the cause of Christ, taking the gospel of Christ to different parts of the world and being killed because of their testimony in the gospel.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he says it's quite gruesome, but it is quite moving to read through a lot of these accounts.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he he talks about men and women who would be preparing to be missionaries, whether leaving Europe or leaving home in the United States.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And these missionaries would be trained and then prepare to go to these unreached nations with the gospel of Christ, and they would pack all of their belongings, but they wouldn't pack their belongings in luggage.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: They'd pack their belongings in a coffin.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because they knew that when they left, they would not return home.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Except in that coffin, if they returned at all.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't help but see the parallels to Jesus, who left with a similar mission.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus, the very first cross-cultural missionary, who came here in order that he would die.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this was no mistake, men and women.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: This was the plan before even the foundations of creation.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Before Christmas, before creation, Jesus Christ has always been the Lamb of God who would be slain before the foundations of the world, and God's sovereign and beautiful foreknowledge of all that would happen, and his omniscient plan.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And he would be slain in order that he might take away the sins of the world, so that all that would believe in him would have eternal life and the forgiveness of their sins.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's why Jesus left his heavenly home that first Christmas.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: In his classic work, Knowing God, the scholar J.I.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Packer writes these words about that first Christmas.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: As he writes, the Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity, hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory, because at the Father's will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable so that 30 years later he might hang on a cross.
• 28:28
  unknown: Wow.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: We sometimes call, and oftentimes call this season of Christmas, Advent, from the Latin word to come.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you may have Advent wreaths in your home.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you may be shocked to find out that this is actually the second Sunday of Advent.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: We don't talk a lot about that here at Topeka Bible Church, but last Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if you're upset, oh I missed it.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: I got my candles.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't light the candle on my wreath.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so upset.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, don't get mad at us.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can Google it just like me, and you can figure out that this is the second Sunday of Advent.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Go home, light the candle, everything's alright.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be okay.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea behind Advent, traditionally throughout the history of the church, is a season where we prepare ourselves to celebrate the first coming of Jesus as well as the second coming of Jesus.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because we know that he has come to earth, he's ascended to be with the Father, and He's coming again.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what we actually look at as we think even about the whole history of the Bible, is that the Old Testament was really one long advent, playing itself out, as we see the reality of the human story of brokenness and sin and the fall, and God beginning a great work of redemption and writing an incredible story that would find its fulfillment in special ways that first Christmas with the birth of Jesus the Son.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: We find that all throughout the Old Testament, even God's people desperately longing for this day when God would show up and when God would help bring hope and healing and redemption to fallen creation.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we find the struggle of God's people off and on to wonder where is God in the midst of this trial?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Where is God in the midst of this exile?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where is God?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: All the while, God knowing the perfect time in history that he would act.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Even after the conclusion of the Old Testament, and 400 years of silence, of no word, of no indication of what God was doing, people clinging to the hope that God would still show up.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: And on that first Christmas evening in Bethlehem, God showed up in one of the most unexpected ways possible, through the Son Jesus Christ.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because God understood which we slowly begin to understand, which is that, as the Bible clearly tells us, as much as we might try, through our best efforts and our strongest days of being good, as we try to reach up to grasp heaven and salvation, we realize that that is infinitely out of touch for us.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we could never obtain it by ourselves.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why God had to reach the other way through time and history and space to come down in the person of the newborn King Jesus.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: That same baby that would reach up his arms to his mother for sustenance, and then in the presence of that same mother, reach out those arms some 30 years later upon a cross and take on the penalty for our sin.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we have Christmas.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it is the great miracle.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we should be thanking God for the gospel that we can celebrate at Christmas time.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Another verse in the Bible that talks to us about this reality and is really a parallel verse to Philippians 2, 5 through 8.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's 2 Corinthians 8, 9.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this is just one verse.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I probably could have just preached out of this verse, and it would have been a shorter sermon, and you guys would have been more happy.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: But here we have some very parallel ideas.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: As we read in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, as the Apostle Paul writes, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: We see these observations in this verse as well.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was a choice that Jesus made to leave Christmas, to leave home that first Christmas, to come and to become poor.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's the humility.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: He became human, he became poor, and lived his whole life serving others.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Serving them by going to a cross.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the why he came, the purpose for which he came.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that he might, through his poverty, make us rich when we believe in his name and have salvation.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: My wife pointed out to me that while Jesus came that first Christmas, by choice, in humility, with a purpose, he also went to the cross in the same way.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: By choice, in humility, with a purpose, the purpose of accomplishing salvation.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I love when we sing the wonderful hymns that we sing about Jesus at Christmas time, but I always love singing them in the context of the broader story that's being written.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: The story that continues on to Good Friday, and then of course to the resurrection on Easter after that.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: But what Christmas shows us is that God is not a distant, uncaring deity, but that he is actively present in the lives of his people.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that includes us even today.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: A former professor at Dallas Seminary named Larry Waters has written these words saying that Jesus' incarnation shattered myths about God.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: He shattered the myth that God is distant and detached.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus exploded the myth that God is uncaring and unconnected.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: He nullified the myth that God is unmerciful, some kind of tyrant.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: He came to reveal the love of God to all of us.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: If nothing else, this Christmas time, I want you to remember something, okay?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: I know that this time of year it may be very difficult for you.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: It may be a significant time of depression, of maybe health concerns, maybe financial concerns, maybe family concerns, and wondering will your kids even come home for Christmas?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it may be a very difficult time for you.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: You may look out into the broader media of what we see in our country and our world, and you see the bloodshed and the injustice.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: But no matter what your circumstances and the circumstances of the world are, please resist the temptation to believe the lie that God does not love you.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And God does not love our broken world.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because Christmas proves that He does.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: How do we apply it?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one thing I would admonish you to do is that in the midst of the hustle and the bustle of the season and all of our busy lives, that we remember that at the center of Christmas, say literally at the beginning of Christmas, is Christ, right?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's about Him.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Take some time, even when you just hear the word Christmas, to say, wait a minute, what that means is God with us.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: God in human flesh is a baby.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: A baby who came to die.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you'll consider this season of sharing this great good news with people that need to hear it desperately.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: After all, we are bombarded with messages promising us 40% off here, 50% off here.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Trust me, I was at the mall in Toys R Us yesterday, and it's all around.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the world doesn't need a promise of 40% off, 50% off.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: The world needs a promise of free.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the promise of the free gift that comes through Jesus Christ.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we have that message, the most important message to impart to other people.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you consider this Christmas inviting somebody to come to the light show this weekend.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you consider inviting somebody to come into your home.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you consider simply inviting somebody into your life.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it is, but whatever you do, be an example of the humility that Christ displayed that first Christmas and throughout his life.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think those are the things that God would want us to do.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Christ left his home that first Christmas by choice, in humility, but for a purpose.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: He desires for us to be people that live a life just like he did.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Father, it's simple, but yet it's profound to think about the reality of God with us, Jesus Christ being fully God, fully man.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's unlike uh anything that we ever could have scripted.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because in your infinite wisdom and your infinite goodness, you wrote this story.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we are grateful for that.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, maybe some folks here are distant from you and still skeptical about what uh this Jesus thing is all about.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: If that's the case, Lord, I pray that they will have a deeper glimpse and understanding of you and your truth, not just from words shared this morning or from songs sung, but even you working in their hearts, just as we pray you will work in our hearts too, to be people that model our lives off of the life of Jesus.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for his life.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, as we turn to celebrate communion, we thank you too for his death.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is through his death that salvation was accomplished.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: We praise you for the mystery and the wonder of the incarnation.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: We praise you for your good news that you give us this Christmas time.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: In Christ's name we pray.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.