The Many Gifts of God in Christ

Before we get to Christmas Day and open far less important gifts, let’s celebrate this morning by unwrapping the many gifts of God to us in Christ.

[00:00:00] There’s something that keeps happening at my house. And perhaps it’s been happening at your house, too. The boxes just keep showing up. Every time I look out the front door. Oh, there’s another one. Got to go get the box off the porch. Not all technology is great, but this is one of my favorites. One advancement in technology I love is how I no longer have to go to any stores to buy any Christmas presents. It is fantastic. Call me lazy if you want, I don’t care. Call me a Scrooge for not enjoying the festive holiday spirit of a decorated mall and all the hustle and bustle. That’s fine. If that’s your thing, you go right ahead and do it. I have never understood Black Friday, I do not understand that phenomenon where people get out there for all those doorbuster deals. That doesn’t appeal to me at all. I did it one time in my life. One time, many years ago, I got up and stood in line at 4 a.m. to buy a digital camera. And that tells you how long ago this was that I was going to buy this digital camera. And when the doors opened, the line surged forward and a woman hit me in the back with her cart. There’s no discount worth that. Technology has solved this. Okay, I can complete all of my Christmas shopping and never leave my robe.

[00:01:22] It’s fantastic. But now the result of that is there’s this endless stream of boxes that just keep coming to the front door. Most of them are blank, which is great. Some of them have what’s in there written on the box, which is very awkward if the wrong person goes to the door first. But I will take that problem over assault with a shopping cart. I want you to think of that constant stream, okay? That constant stream of boxes that just keeps showing up on the porch, coming to you. I want you to think of that stream when you think of Jesus. That visual reminds me of how the Bible describes Jesus coming into the world. When you get really familiar with the gospel, you find that there are so many aspects to the gift of Jesus. Every time you think that you fully understand Jesus, another gift shows up on the porch. Another aspect of Jesus’ identity or his ministry gives you new confidence in your faith. And I want to unwrap this morning a bunch of those gifts. We have a large concentration of these gifts in the birth narratives in Luke chapters one and two. And there are a number of passages we could go to to look at them this morning. But we’re going to look just at Zechariah’s prophecy found in Luke chapter one. Zechariah was the father of John the Baptist, whose ministry paved the way for Jesus.

[00:02:58] Zechariah here is going to talk first about Jesus, and then he’s going to talk about his own son, John. But even that part where he’s talking about John shows us the gifts that we have in Jesus, and his prophecy is chock full of gifts. It is an overflowing stocking full of gifts for us today. And before we get to Christmas Day and open far less important gifts, let’s celebrate this morning by unwrapping the many gifts of God that we have in Christ. If you’re here with us this morning because it’s Christmas and you go to church on Christmas, but you really don’t understand the significance of why we celebrate Jesus. If that is you, you are going to get a lot of information this morning. You’re going to have a lot of information coming at you. And I don’t expect you to remember everything that you hear, but I would encourage you not to worry too much about the details and just get a sense this morning for the height and breadth and depth of the importance of Christ. Listen to Zechariah extol the glory of God. Listen to how many problems are solved in our world, in Christ. Get a sense for how Jesus transforms all of creation. Listen to how Jesus addresses the deepest hurts with the greatest hope.

[00:04:28] Okay, so we’re going to unwrap 15 gifts this morning. This is going to be a seven hour sermon. I’m just kidding. Note takers though, I know who you are. I can almost see your pens moving right now. Note takers, I love that you take notes, but maybe don’t worry about that so much this morning, because I’m going to move pretty quickly through this passage, and I don’t want you to become frustrated with me. Why is he going so fast? I just want you to sit back this morning, and I want you to be washed over with the enormous bounty of God’s goodness to us when Jesus came into the world. Okay, so here’s the first gift and the first gift is simply presence. Presence. Not presents. You understand what I’m saying, right? It’s the most obvious part of Christmas, but it’s also one of the most profound that the God who created this world would enter into it. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. Or as Zachariah puts it here, the Lord God has visited. That’s the word he uses. Visited. Think about the awe-inspiring profundity of that statement. You know, it’s not mandatory that God get involved in our world at all. It’s not mandatory. In the face of a sinful, broken, fallen world filled with God-rejecting evil and humanity that has no interest in him at all,

[00:06:01] God could simply have done nothing. He’d be perfectly welcome to do that. He could have done nothing. Or he could have just given us direction. He could have given us a list of moral instructions and told us to work it out on our own. But the biblical narrative and specifically the Christmas account, is that God interceded by physically entering into our history, that God wrote himself into time and space. The first gift is that God, the God who created you, loves you enough to visit you. God is not passively sitting back waiting to see if you’re going to be able to work out your problems and pick yourself up on your own. He’s not doing that. He came to us, and the specific reason he came to us is the content of all these other gifts. The second gift is redemption. He has visited and redeemed. That’s how Zechariah put it, visited and redeemed his people. Now, to redeem something is to buy it out of captivity and to give it freedom. And we don’t really redeem things in our culture. The closest thing we have to redeeming anything is a coupon. We redeem coupons. It’s not a very strong picture. Um, you get the flyer in the mail, and you take the coupon for half off Christmas ham down to the store, and you exchange the coupon for the ham. So you have redeemed the ham from the clutches of Hy-Vee.

[00:07:34] I told you it was not a strong picture, all right? But it is redemption, that is redeeming. That is what it is. If you picture that that is what redeeming is. It’s breaking open doors. It’s setting prisoners free. It’s breaking chains and releasing people from bondage. That’s redemption. So why does God visit? Well, when God looks at us and he looks at all humanity, he sees his people chained down and captive to sin and evil. Now we’re responsible for that. We’re responsible for those chains. We chose to deny God and to live for false gods. But now that we’re in this mess, it’s a problem that we can’t solve. We can get into the mess. We can’t get out of the mess on our own. So, God became one of us to buy us back. To redeem us, to release us from the clutches of evil and the captivity of our own sin. And he did this by becoming sin on the cross for us. See, he releases us from our sin by taking it into his own human body and paying for that sin on the cross. And this is why Zechariah calls Jesus’ salvation, which is our third gift. Specifically, he calls him a horn of salvation. Now, when you think of a horn here, don’t think of a musical instrument horn like you saw here on the stage this morning. When ancient Israel thought of God as their Savior,

[00:09:15] they were waiting on a Redeemer who would come and who would overthrow their enemies with greater strength. So, think of the sharp horn of a bull. That’s the strength that this horn represents. It’s like a bull in a fight. They pictured God fighting like this. He would come and he would save his weaker people with his power, with his strength. That’s the horn of salvation. And that’s what we have in Jesus. I know that when we think of Christmas, we think of a precious little baby in a manger. And that’s good. We should. Jesus was a little baby. He needed to be protected. When Herod comes to Bethlehem and kills all the little boys, he needed protection. He needed his parents to scoop him up and take him to Egypt to save him. It’s a beautiful picture of God the Father saving God the Son, using Jesus’ earthly parents. But when Zachariah considered the not yet born baby Jesus, he knew what this would mean ultimately. See, he saw past that baby to what it would mean for everyone. God had sent the one who would eventually save all of God’s people from their enemies. Now, in a minute, we’re going to look at those enemies. But let me say right now that the gift of a horn of salvation means that it is God who has the power to save.

[00:10:52] You can’t save yourself. You can’t save yourself from your own sins. You can’t release yourself. You can’t redeem yourself from the evil in your own heart. Do you remember the Old Testament story of David who killed the Philistine Goliath? It’s a pretty famous story from the Old Testament. Most people know this one. You know what the point of that story is? The point of that historical moment was not that you too, can overcome the giants in your life. The point of that was that God would raise up an unlikely Savior who would battle on your behalf, the way David battled on behalf of all those cowering Israelites. In Jesus, we have the God who saves us. He’s the one who came to save us from the captivity, to save us out of our sins. We are entirely reliant on the powerful grace of God. And speaking of David, our fourth gift is a king. This redeeming horn of salvation comes from the house or the lineage of David. And he was the king. He was the servant of the Lord, who was the king that God appointed. Zechariah doesn’t mention David’s kingship explicitly here, but by saying that the Savior comes from David’s house, he’s tying Jesus to the promise that was made to David back in the Old Testament.

[00:12:23] And that promise was called the Davidic Covenant. A thousand years before Jesus was born, God made a promise to King David that someone from his family would always sit on the throne over God’s people. Now, I don’t have time this morning to fully unpack all of what that means. We have 11 more gifts here to unwrap, but suffice it to say, Israel had been waiting on a Davidic king. They’d been waiting for this king. They’d been waiting over 500 years for God to give them the ruler that would save them, lead them, bring them back to the heart of the Lord like David had done. In Jesus we have that Davidic king. We have the fulfillment of God’s promise to give his people the human king, who would always and perfectly lead God’s people back to showing them how to live for the glory of God. Now you might be saying, you know what? I don’t want a king. I don’t want a king, because kings rule, Kings reign, and I want to reign. I want to be the one who rules over my life. And if that’s you, let me tell you, that’s the sin talking. That’s the sin talking. That’s rebellion against God and choosing to be in captivity talking inside of you. What’s happened is you have fallen in love with your captor because you were made by a good God to find all of your purpose and hope and fulfillment in this life by glorifying God and enjoying him forever.

[00:14:04] That’s how you were designed by the one who made you. And you can have that, but only in the Kingdom of God and under the reign of King Jesus. That’s what Zechariah and the rest of God’s people were waiting for. That’s what they’ve been longing for. The fifth gift is fulfilled prophecy. Do you see there where Zechariah says he’s getting all of this. He’s getting it all, he says, from God who spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old. What that means is Zechariah is not making this stuff up. He didn’t just hear about Jesus and get excited and start to make up some spiritual, fun things about what Jesus might be. He knows who Jesus is because he is a student of the prophetic words of God that were delivered and recorded by God’s prophets. So, for example, when we read in the prophet Isaiah, which was recorded 700 years before Jesus was born, when we read that God will send his servant, who will be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, Jewish people knew to look for a Savior who would come and die for them. When God told David, someone would always sit on his throne. The Jewish people knew to be looking for a king.

[00:15:31] When Isaiah is told to name his own son Emmanuel as a picture of the future (Emmanuel means God with us) and this would be a picture of God’s redemption, the Jewish people had a sense that God would in some way be with them. They didn’t know how or when these prophecies would be fulfilled, but they trusted that they would be fulfilled because they trusted in the Lord. And the fact that Jesus fulfills these and many other prophecies from the Old Testament so perfectly is an incredible gift to us. It’s also, by the way, a compelling reason for those of you who are skeptical to do a little digging into Jesus, do a little digging into him. I recently watched a video where a Jewish Christian, so a Jewish background Christian believer, was on a university campus in Jerusalem, walking up to and talking to Jewish students who were there. And he would read them a portion of Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, and he’d ask the students whether that passage came from the Old Testament or the New Testament. And the passages were so overwhelmingly Christ centered that the students were convinced that it had to come from the New Testament and were shocked to find out that it came from their own Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus’ advent has been foretold for millennia, millennia before he arrived. That’s a gift of confidence to us.

[00:17:07] Here’s another one. Zechariah knew that when the Messiah comes that he would bring victory over enemies. Now it’s hard to know exactly what Zechariah was thinking when he said this. In the Old Testament, when Israel turned as a nation away from God, he would allow a foreign enemy to rise up and to come and have victory over them so that they would turn their hearts back to the Lord, so that they would cry out to the Lord. And then when they cried out to the Lord, God would raise up a Savior type, a military hero or a king, sometimes called a judge, who would turn the people back to the Lord and give people victory over that enemy. Those were pictures meant to show us Jesus Christ who comes and finally and completely overthrows the enemy. Saving God’s people. Israel, at the time when Jesus was born, was occupied by the Roman Empire. And so some saw Jesus as the one who would set them free from Rome. It’s hard to know exactly if that’s what Zechariah was thinking when he wrote this and said this, but Jesus didn’t come to overthrow the enemy Rome. He came to overthrow the enemy Satan. He came to undo the powers of evil and sin and even death itself. As he told Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who crucified him, Jesus’ kingdom is a spiritual kingdom where our enemy, Satan is vanquished forever.

[00:18:45] And when you’re part of Jesus’ kingdom and the ultimate enemy holds no power over your life, there’s nothing in this world to fear ultimately. Not really. Not ultimately. The more you learn about the victory of Jesus, the less afraid you become of everything else. Well, here’s gift number seven. Fulfilled promise. You know, sometimes you’ll hear people say that the God of the Old Testament was a wrathful, judgmental, punishing, hateful God. But the God of the New Testament, Jesus, he’s meek and mild and kind and gentle and loving. And every time I hear this, every time I hear anybody critique the Bible like this, all I can think to myself is, tell me you don’t read the Bible without telling me you don’t read the Bible. The entire testimony of Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament is that God expresses his love both in his justice and in his mercy. So yes, God is holy and just. He is set apart from sin. He is unwilling to compromise with sin. Jesus himself told us this, but the constant refrain of the Old Testament is that God loves his people. He sets up a whole system so that sinful people can still be in his presence. He gives them the sacrificial system because he wants to be in relationship with his people.

[00:20:21] He wants them to be able to stand before a just and holy God. Throughout the entire Bible you find very undeserving people receiving very undeserved mercy. Zechariah saw the coming of Jesus as the culmination of all of that promised mercy, that God had promised the people of the Old Testament, his people. That’s how Zechariah read his Bible. He knew the grace of God was coming from a merciful God, and he read that primarily in our eighth gift, the covenants of the Old Testament specifically the covenant that was made with Abraham. Now, a covenant is a relational contract. It’s where both people have to uphold their end. But it’s about relationships. Think of marriage. Marriage is a covenant in our culture. And God made a relational contract, a covenant with Abraham, where he said he would make Abraham’s family into a great nation, and people from all the other nations of the world would be blessed by this one nation that God would make through Abraham. Zechariah sees in Jesus that God has sent the leader of that nation. He sent the leader, and he hasn’t forgotten that promise. He hasn’t forgotten that promise to Abraham to make that incredible nation. And friends, look what has happened over the last 2000 years. If you’re a student of history, just look at what has happened over the last 2000 years for 2000 years, people from all the nations and all the people groups of the world have been blessed to find hope and joy and peace in Jesus.

[00:22:10] So no matter who you are or where you live or what language you speak, Jesus is for you. He’s a blessing for every tribe, tongue, and nation. Well, how about this gift? How about service without fear? You know, there’s a whole lot to be afraid of it seems like in this world, isn’t there? There’s a whole lot of things out there that we’re told to be afraid of. Every time you open up your phone, you get another dose of raging wars and domestic abuse or threats of oppressive legislation. And then if you look at the other sources, the ones that aren’t widely reported, and you look even a little bit closer, you can see that there’s violence all over the world directed at Christian communities simply for openly following Jesus. So how can Zechariah, as he thinks about Jesus coming into the world? How can he be so naive to think that now that Jesus is here, we would be able to serve the Lord without fear? Well, when you know Jesus, when you really know him, when you walk in the wake of Jesus and you know the Word of God and you are attuned to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, you know that nothing in this world can really cause you fear, that there’s really nothing here that can really hurt you.

[00:23:31] Not ultimately. When your hope rests confidently in a God who conquered death, you can relax into the prelude of eternity. Which is what this is. That’s what all this is. It’s just what comes before eternity. You can serve God without any fear of the consequences, because there’s no enemy that can take what God has given to you in Christ. Nobody can take that. And you can do so with permanent holiness and righteousness, which is our 10th gift. Because of Jesus your sins before God are washed away. You’ve been made clean to stand before a holy God in holiness. You can stand before a righteous God in righteousness, and you can actually please the God who made you with your service. Without Christ, you can’t do that. Without trusting in the grace of Christ, we are in an unacceptable state of being sinners and all the service we do then when we don’t have Christ, all the service we do is in hope of earning something. We try to earn something from God or earn something from other people, earn something for ourselves. But it all flips around when you have Jesus. When you have trust in Christ, and he bears all of your sin and he redeems you completely and he saves you entirely from your sin, you are restored to a state where you can happily serve the Lord from the overflow of grace that’s pouring out of you.

[00:25:07] The grace that God has poured into you pours out of you, and your whole life becomes a giant thank you note to the Lord. The whole thing just becomes a big thank you card. Thank you, Lord. As you strive to walk in holiness and righteousness for the rest of your life. How do we do that? How do we do that kind of life? Well, for that, God gives us guidance. Now, this one is a little bit strange, and you might feel I have stretched what’s here to fit my 15-gift framework. And you’re not wrong. But it’s because Zachariah shifts here in the prophecy from talking about Jesus to talking about his own son, John, who is the one who begins his ministry before Jesus to prepare the people to understand and receive Jesus. But he’s still talking about the blessings that God has brought us in Christ. So, John is part of the Jesus gift package, if you will. He’s sort of an accessory to the gift that we have in Jesus. He’s more of a stocking gift than a tree gift. You know what I’m saying? Not as good, but still pretty good. So, look at this wonderful gift that God gives. Ahead of Jesus

[00:26:25] he sends a tutorial. He sends an instruction manual. Someone to help the rest of Israel prepare their hearts and minds to understand and receive Jesus in all the ways that we’ve been talking about this morning. And that’s very much like the guides that God gives us today. You know, God is still giving us guides. People who can help us to understand, to point the way to Jesus. God is still giving John-like gifts. And look how God prepares the people to receive Jesus. He gives the gift of forgiveness. John is going to tell people that Jesus is God’s salvation, but he’s going to focus specifically on the forgiveness of sins. Jesus brings God’s forgiveness to you. In fact, Jesus is the embodiment of God’s forgiveness. But to receive that forgiving grace. To get that forgiveness from God, you have to repent. The only way to receive God’s forgiveness is to acknowledge that you need it. That’s what John kept telling everybody. You’ve got to acknowledge that you need God’s forgiveness. It may not feel good when somebody points out your sin to you. That may not feel good. Nobody likes that. It might not feel good to you, but it is a gift when someone does that. Because if you will listen and turn from your sin, then you can take hold of the forgiveness that we have in Jesus.

[00:27:58] God forgives this way because of his tender mercy, which is our 13th gift. Christmas is an act of tender mercy. You may feel that you are at odds with God because you don’t regard him or listen to him or trust him. And if you don’t trust in Jesus, you are. You are at odds with the Lord. And that’s a fearful place to be. Hebrews chapter ten tells us it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But while you are right now enemies with God, you’ll be very glad to hear what God does with his enemies. You will be happy to learn that God is very merciful with his enemies. Romans 5:8 says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus is an extension of mercy to those actively waging war against God. If you lay down those weapons against God, if you will stop running from him, if you will stop battling him, if you will stop making excuses for yourself, if you will turn and repent of your sins and give your life to serve the Lord in holiness and righteousness, you’ll receive God’s mercy, and he never turns anybody away. He never turns anybody away. Listen to this picture of God’s mercy. It’s our 14th gift. Whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

[00:29:44] So Jesus advent is like a sunrise. Picture a sunrise. Sun is coming up. It’s dark outside. The sun comes up, casts out all of that darkness. And Zechariah says, you know where that darkness comes from? It’s the shadow of death. You know when you’re in something’s shadow, that thing is very near to you. Our world is basically billions of people stumbling around in darkness, trying to find meaning, trying to find purpose, trying to find meaning, trying to find the way forward with death lurking just over its shoulder. It’s right there. God and his mercy and grace sent Jesus as a light into our darkness so that we can see the truth and never fear death again. And if you have that gift, you get to unwrap the final gift, which is peace. Now, I’m not going to unwrap this gift this morning, just like when I was a kid looking under the tree. We’re going to have to wait for Christmas on this one. Or in our case, more specifically, Christmas Eve. We’ll get to unwrap this on Christmas Eve. We’re going to spend some time in our peaceful Christmas Eve service talking about the peace in this world that we can only have through Jesus. So many gifts. So many gifts coming to our porch this morning when we consider Jesus. Is it any wonder it’s the biggest birthday party the world throws every year? Let’s pray.