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All that Jesus is for all that we need

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over
their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of
the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel
said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be
for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who
is Christ, the Lord.” Luke 2:8-11

Several years ago I was teaching in Seattle. Afterward I received this message
from a woman in the class:

I just wanted you tell you how much our conversation about the work I do was a
game-changer for me. It took about two weeks, but I kept hearing you say in my
head, “Thank you for being where you are,” and “Go back and tell those girls how
much they are loved.” I am working the strip clubs, doing makeup on my girls,
and I do talk with them about their concerns, about Jesus, but I noticed in hearing
your voice on repeat in my head how much of me I was not letting God have in
that environment, because I want out, not further in. So I have begun taking
prayer requests from my girls. And I am putting together an Italian-style
Christmas dinner for my girls and their children (and hope to have “Jesus
Storybook Bibles” for each family). I have no clue what I’m doing or how I will
do it, but God does and he is in control over this, and for that I am grateful. I may
put the dinner off until January due to timing, but that will be a good thing,
because by then they will have broken their New Years’ resolutions and will take
note of the emptiness still there post-holiday, so that will be an excellent place
from which to engage them.

I love how she says, “My girls.” Not “Those girls” but “My girls.” It’s how Jesus
thinks when he looks at us. What have we just read here? “Unto you is born this day in
the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Jesus looks at us and says, “What I
am, I am for you, for your sake. What I do, I do for you, for your sake. I am yours, if
you will be mine.” Jesus cooks Italian dinners for strippers and for us, because unto us
was born that day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.

Luke tells the Christmas story in three scenes: the setting of his birth (verses 1-7),
the meaning of his birth (verses 8-14), the response to his birth (verses 15-20).

The setting of his birth (verses 1-7)

It’s obvious from verses 1-2 that Luke is presenting the birth of Jesus not as
legend but as history. Throughout the Bible we see God getting involved in our world.
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The first four words of the Bible are not “Once upon a time” but “In the beginning God.”
The beginning of what? This world we live in. We matter to God.

So what did God do? He started over in Rome. Caesar ordered a census of the
empire. One powerful man disrupted the lives of millions. If I’d been Joseph, I would
have thought, “Great. Mary’s pregnant, I have deadlines at work, and that moron in
Rome orders us out of town!” But God is shrewd.

700 years before, God had predicted through the prophet Micah where the
Messiah would be born:

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, from
you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel. Micah 5:2

How did God get Mary and Joseph from Nazareth down to Bethlehem? A decree
went out from God that a decree would go out from Caesar that all the world would be
rearranged for a while. God has a plan, and God is working his plan – through powerful
people who don’t have a clue. We don’t understand how God does that. But it sure helps
to know that human history is the stage where God is telling his story, whether or not
people intend to cooperate.

God is not only wise; he is also humble. Jesus could have been born in a classy
place like Rome, if God cared about that sort of thing. But he doesn’t. Christ was born
in a dumpy village few people in the world knew about. And for Mary and Joseph, there
was no privacy, no comfort. The fact that Mary put her baby down for his nap in a
feeding trough tells us he was born in a stable. Tradition says it was a cave. But it may
have been in the open air, out in the courtyard of the inn where the caravans parked their
camels and donkeys. Everything points to obscurity and poverty and hardship. We can
only imagine what Mary went through and how Joseph endured it with her. That’s the
world we live in, isn’t it?

In the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen goes back in his memory to
his boyhood and sees his atheist aunt at the dinner table ridiculing his uncle for believing
in God here in this brutal world. And his uncle answers, “If I have to choose between
truth and God, I’ll choose God every time.” That way of thinking allows for two kinds of
truth – hard truth in the facts, leaving us cold, and soft truth in religion, warming our
hearts. But that relegates God to sentimentality we invent. The gospel never calls us to
“a leap of faith.” It was the Son of God who took the leap – down into a smelly stall in a
third world village. We don’t have to stoop to wishful thinking. The gospel is reality-
based. We see that in the setting of Jesus’ birth – this real world.

The meaning of his birth (verses 8-14)

Verse 11 says, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is
Christ the Lord.” That is the heart of Christmas. What does it mean that Jesus is Savior,
Christ and Lord?
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First, Savior. In the first century that was not exclusively a religious word. It was
used for politicians, for heroic public figures, for the god Asclepius, the god of healing,
for Zeus, who gave people safe voyage at sea, and so forth. “Savior” meant someone
who preserves life, who holds society together, who prevents disaster. That’s why the
angel chose that word. It was a perfect fit. Jesus is the only real hero this world will ever
see. We aren’t the heroes, are we? Thank God for Jesus, who alone guarantees the future
we’ll never experience on our own.

Second, Christ, that is, the promised Messiah of the Old Testament. He came to
fulfill all the promises of the Bible we misunderstand and all the laws of Moses we
disobey. The title Christ or Messiah means the anointed one. Jesus has the greatest
anointing of the Holy Spirit in all of human history. He has the Spirit without limit. So
he is fully qualified to be the perfect second Adam for a whole new human race. And he
invites us into his fullness, into his anointing, so that we are no longer limited to
ourselves. We have the Spirit now. Our future is now measured not by our potential but
by his miracles.

Third, Jesus is Lord. And for anyone who had read the Old Testament, that was
the name of God himself. Over 40 times in the book of Acts the early Christians referred
to Jesus as “Lord.” They couldn’t think of him any other way. One of the early Christian
creeds was simply, “Jesus is Lord” (1 Corinthians 12:3). If you believe that, you have
Jesus as your Lord leading you, providing for you, defending you, present with you in all
his power and authority, no matter what you’re facing. The Bible calls Jesus “the Lord of
lords.” There is none higher. The Bible says every knee will bow and every tongue
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:9-11).

But how did our true Lord come to us? “You will find a baby wrapped in
swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (verse 12). He was easily identified. The
shepherds just had to look for a baby wrapped in rags and lying in a feeding trough. Only
God would humble himself that low. We never would have done that.

Jesus is our only Savior, Messiah, Lord. But I wonder if those words sound like
clichés. And we hate clichés. So let’s press further into these words. “Savior, Messiah,
Lord” tell us Jesus is God’s healing for all the ways we are injured and sad. Make a
mental list of everything you hate about your life – your regrets over the past, your
anguish in the present, your fears for the future, every way in which we feel we’re
missing out. Add to that list everything you hate about this world – the injustice and
foolishness and sheer boredom and exhaustion. And when we make these mental lists,
what we’re really doing is listing out all the ways Jesus is relevant to us as our Savior,
Messiah and Lord. It was for these very things that weigh us down that Jesus came – to
lift us up. And he’s good at it. He’s successful. He’s winning. Our Savior, Christ and
Lord is as massive as the full extent of our need. He lived the perfect life we’ve never
lived and died the guilty death we don’t want to die. Then on the third day he rose up
from it all, and he’s coming again to eradicate all evil and renew this world forever for all
who have received him as Savior, Messiah and Lord. Let’s get all small thoughts of
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Jesus out of our minds, and let’s be cheered on this Christmas Eve by the magnitude of
who he is at the level of everything that tears us apart. He is the complete Friend for the
trapped, the angry, the fearful – for us.

The responses to his birth (verses 15-20)

We see two responses to the birth of Jesus: the shepherds, on the one hand, and
Mary, on the other. Two very different responses.

Here’s one response. The shepherds, to their credit, hurried to Bethlehem: “Let us
go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened” (verse 15). In their way, they
believed – like so many in Nashville today. And the shepherds found that God had told
them the truth. So they returned to their flocks, “glorifying and praising God” (verse 20).
That’s a good response, as far as it goes.

But have you ever noticed that, after the Lord’s birth, with angels and the glory of
God and everyone being astounded by it all, they forgot about him? 30 years later, when
Jesus went public with his adult ministry, people didn’t say, “We’ve been waiting for
you.” They wondered who he was. What happened?

It’s one thing to get caught up in a dramatic event, with chills going up our spines;
it’s another thing to take that reality into our hearts, to redefine the hope we’re living for.
The shepherds were right to glorify and praise God. But Monday morning they went
back to work and the magic in the air and the sense that something amazing was
happening – it was like the lights and sounds of Christmas fading into drab January. One
ordinary day began stacking on top of another, and their sense of God wore off.
Everyday life can be so crushing. We get excited about God, but then we have to go to
work on Monday. Plus, we sin, and that’s a drag. It doesn’t mean we stop going to
church. It does mean we stop hoping.

There is another response. “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering
them in her heart” (verse 19). That word translated “treasure” means “to protect,
defend.” Mary defended within her thought world the truth about Jesus. She prized it.
She refused to let daily life beat it out of her. She said to herself, “I must never forget
what God has done. Jesus as my Savior, my Messiah, my Lord is now the treasure of my
life. What else is there for me?”

Mary also “pondered” these things in her heart. Not even Mary understood Jesus
fully. She had to think. This word “pondering” is what we mean by “connecting the
dots.” Mary began to put together a growing understanding of Jesus from the Bible. And
she grew, she went deeper, while others just lost interest.

You and I don’t need to see an angel. Angels come and go. Spectacular
experiences come and go. What we need is something that can work all the time. What
is that? This good news of great joy about our Savior, our Messiah, our Lord. All that he
is is for us in all that we need. He is saying today, “I am yours. Will you be mine?”