This week we start our Advent Sermon Series titled, The Gifts of Christmas. This is the time of the year when we spend a lot of time thinking about what gifts we might want, and what gifts we might want to give others, so we’re taking some time on Sunday mornings to think about what gifts God wants to give to us. The reading this morning was from Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44
Have you done any Christmas shopping yet? Did you fight the crowds at the stores on Friday? Sandy did a little on Friday, that’s one day of the year I avoid shopping for anything. I know how hectic things can get. It seems every year, somewhere there is some ordeal over some little thing, pushing and shoving to get the last of a super deal. I think it was last year in Tennessee there was a three way fistfight over a Barbie doll. No thank you. My sister is a bit of a riot, very funny. She has a very sound observation about Christmas shopping in general: UPS delivers. Her work schedule is a bit hectic, and her nerves are usually pretty frazzled when she gets out of work, the last thing in the world she wants to do is be around people. And, it’s been her observation that a crowd in a store is probably the worst kind of people, so she buys everything on-line and lets UPS do what they do best – they deliver! I can understand why tempers get a little short, especially on Black Friday, getting up hours before the sun to stand in line for hours more, waiting for the stores to open, being one of the first ten or fifteen people in the store, and still not getting that item that you wanted. Some stores advertise heavily for great deals that they only have a couple of, it’s little wonder that people get frustrated and a little angry when they miss out something they wanted, and waited so long for in the cold and the dark. Like it or not, a lot of people participate in this yearly ritual. Pushing and shoving for the years most popular gifts, stocked in very limited quantities. This is what the Christmas Holiday has become, for a lot of people, at least. A lot of people see Christmas as just a retail holiday, rather than the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior. I hope that we, as believers, have not lost track of that true meaning of Christmas. I hope that we don’t get sucked into that game. I hope that our faith makes a difference in the way that we live our lives, and I hope that difference shows in the way we approach our gift giving this time of year. This is, as you know, the first week of Advent, and while the retail world has been preparing their store displays for Christmas for several weeks now, pretty much since Halloween, and they saw it begin with earnest on Friday, we see the Christmas Season as officially beginning today. And as they see it as a chance to dramatically increase sales before the year-end, we see it as a chance to prepare ourselves again for the second coming of our Messiah. I love Advent. It is a holy time of year for me. A chance to reflect on God Himself becoming human, being born in the most unholy of circumstances. Truly becoming one of us, even one of the least of us. Yet inside, He was still fully God. Living on the outside just as you or I might have, yet, pure and holy. Our divine Lord. And, as Christmas is one of the two biggest Christian celebrations of the year, it gives us a chance to make sure we’re ready to celebrate. It gives us a chance to reflect on ourselves, to make sure we’re making progress on the road to holiness. We’ve started a new series for Advent, titled The Gifts of Christmas. This week we see the gift of anticipation, next week the gift of patience, then the gift of hope, the gift of revelation, and then finally, on Christmas Day, the gift of joy. So in the season of advent, we remember His coming, and we anticipate His coming again. And that anticipation is a gift, because it gives us time to make sure we’re ready. Emotionally and spiritually ready. Does the knowledge that when the time is right, Christ will come again, change your outlook? I hope it brings you an inner peace the world can’t know. I hope that it not only affects who you are, but that it actually defines who you are. That you are one that lives for the day He will come back, just as He said he would. Our reading in Isaiah gives us a glimpse of what it will be like when He gets here. The mountain of the Lord’s temple, which is Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, will be established as the chief among mountains, all nations will stream to it – they will look to it as the center of power in all the world. Revelation 21 talks about the New Jerusalem, God himself will live there and will rule the nations. And as we heard in our reading in Isaiah, swords will be beat into plow shares and spears into pruning hooks, because swords and spears won’t be needed anymore. The world will be at peace. My friends, I don’t believe the world will ever truly be at peace until this day comes. But rest assured, this day will come! In fact, I think that that day will come soon. If not in my lifetime, then at least in the lifetime of our kids. I have a couple of reasons for believing that, maybe someday I’ll share them with you. But we can certainly echo the idea that Paul wrote to the Romans, that the time is nearer now than when we first believed. Surely the day is almost here, the hour has come for us to wake up from our slumber. They felt the time was close 2000 years ago, it’s 2000 years closer now. He talked about the night being almost over, that refers to the evil times they lived in. Those evil times aren’t gone yet, are they? We live in evil times today, don’t we? If you watch the news, you know that. The news provides an endless supply of proof of the evil around us. But the Bible tells us that daylight is coming. The day is almost here. The time to behave decently is here. The time to clothe yourselves with our Lord Jesus Christ has come. Three quick ways to do this: first, we identify with Christ by getting baptized and becoming a member of his church. This shows that we are a part of His body, the church family. Rick Warren, in the Purpose Driven Life, wrote about the benefits of church membership, and one of the reasons was that a church family identifies you as a genuine believer. I can’t claim to be following Christ if I’m not connected to any specific group of disciples. This really is important – if you’re here today and you’re not yet a member, you need to seriously pray about that. We need to commit to him, and to his family. Second, we live by the qualities Jesus lived by while he was here on earth; these are love, humility, truth, and service to others. The Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:20 are a few additional qualities the Spirit filled person will possess. In other words, we sort of role-play what Jesus would do if He were in our situation. It’s funny, we saw a film clip from Finding Nemo last week, Sandy and Sarah and I watched that movie again last week, then we saw the new one, Finding Dory. There’s a line in Finding Dory where Nemo and his dad were trying to find Dory, and they didn’t know what to do next, and they realized that if Dory were here she would know just what to do, she always seemed to know just what to do. So they asked themselves, what would Dory do? A far better question for us would be to go back to Charles Sheldon’s classic book, In His Steps, when he first challenged us to ask What Would Jesus Do? We try to become imitators of Christ by regularly asking ourselves, “What Would Jesus Do?” In other words, we follow 1 John 2:6: “Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.” And thirdly, we watch ourselves carefully, so we don’t fall into any sin. We work on our discipline, we become more self-controlled, stand up to sin – don’t give in to it. We need to monitor this carefully, because sin starts with a tiny temptation. We need to make sure we avoid any little thing that might open the door to sin. When we work on these three things, we will be ready for his return. Our final reading in Matthew reminds us that while the time is near, we won’t know the exact time of his return. Therefore, we need to be ready all the time. I guess it’s probably good that we don’t know the exact time of his return. If we did, we would be tempted to live for ourselves right up to the last minute, being lazy in our faith, not doing the work Christ would have us do. But we must live our lives of faith here on earth. We have work to do here. Christ put us where we are for a reason; He has work for us to do. And we must keep doing it, working on, until He determines the time is ready. One final thought, the way that Matthew words this, “the Son of Man will come at an hour when you don’t expect him.” This sounds to me like there won’t be any chance for last minute confessions, no opportunities for last minute repentance or bargaining. We must be ready before that time comes. For there will be a day when it’s too late. William Coffin once said, “We have learned to soar through the air like birds, to swim through the seas like fish, to soar through space like comets. Now it is high time we learned to walk the earth as the children of our God.” This advent season, make sure you’re ready for his return. Make sure you’re walking as one of his children.
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