This morning our scripture reading is from Luke's Gospel chapter 2, and we're going to read verses 1 through 20. I have to read from the King James Version this morning, because I'm so familiar with it from my youth, and when I try to read the Christmas story in another translation, I keep messing up. and moving back and forth between them. So I'm just going to clear out all the other translations, and we're going to concentrate here on Luke, chapter 2, beginning at verse 1. Listen to this. This is the Word of God. And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed, with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child, And so it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord, and this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe, lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. And that is the reading of the Word of God. You'll notice that the title this morning that I gave to this message is From Glory to Suffering. And if you've been with us in the last couple of weeks, you'll notice that this is the flip-flop of what we have been looking at in the Advent season. We have been taking that theme that Jesus gave some of his followers, when he was walking on the road to Emmaus after the resurrection, and he opened up the Scriptures to them, and he said, was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things and then enter into His glory? And we said, well, that theme of from suffering to glory, why, that theme will gather together all of these scattered prophecies about the Christ in the Old Testament. It will explain The life of certain individuals who have gone through great suffering, like Joseph, like the whole nation of Israel, for instance. How they go from suffering into glory. The Apostle Paul uses it to talk about our lives, so does Peter. And now we come to why it's possible for us to go from suffering to glory. It is because the Holy One Himself went from glory to suffering. So I'm going to proclaim this morning that Jesus Christ came from the realms of glory. He came from glory to suffer. And because He came from glory to suffer, you and I are able to go from the sufferings of this life into the glories which shall be revealed. Those three stages are what we're proclaiming this morning. And the first is the Christ. came from the realms of glory. You remember what Jesus said? It's recorded in John's Gospel in chapter 17 when he was in the upper room with his disciples. He was praying and he said to his father, may I have that glory which I had with you before the world began. He came from the realms of glory. The book of Hebrews opens up by saying, this Jesus Christ is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His image. Now, you don't find Luke talking about Jesus coming from the realms of glory, but Luke does two things in this Nativity story. which point to the fact that Jesus comes from the realms of glory. The first is he lets it be known for us that Jesus is God, and then he lets it be known that to be God is to dwell in glory, and so we'll be able to combine those things. I say Luke tells us Jesus is God. We sometimes miss this. But do you remember when the father of John the Baptist, Zechariah, was prophesying and praying because he's just been told, you know, the baby has been born and now the baby is going to go before the Christ? He said, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel. And then he said that that baby, John the Baptist, would grow up and would go before the Lord and announce him to Israel. And there only is one Lord mentioned. It is the Lord God of Israel. And so this John the Baptist is going to be announcing the coming of the Lord God of Israel. And Jesus is the one who shows up. Now, Luke means us to draw that conclusion. Because when you read in the rest of Luke's Gospel, he will use this title, Lord, interchangeably for God the Father and for the Son of God. We're supposed to draw the conclusion, Jesus is Lord, He is God. But I say we're also supposed to draw the conclusion that He dwells in glory. God dwells in glory. Do you remember what we just read here about how the angel appeared to the shepherds, and it says, "...and the glory of the Lord shone round about them." Not the glory of the angel! The glory of God! The glory of the Lord! The only reason that there is glory associated with the angel is because those songwriters were right. He comes from the realm of glory. He comes from the realm of God. And so this Jesus Christ, This Savior has come into this world. He has come from the realms of glory. Now, why does He come? Well, that's our second point. He comes to suffer. God identifies, from the very beginning, with our suffering. Here is the awful truth about our fallen human condition. We all have in common suffering. We do not all necessarily have in common happiness. That's one reason why people keep complaining about God and saying, well, how could a good God do this or do that? Because they know they've got the ear of the sufferers. God comes in Jesus Christ into the world, identifying with our suffering, and that is basically what the Christmas account is all about. It does not open with Jesus being born with a silver spoon in His mouth. And then He decides that sometime in His life He wants to step forth, from this human palace of comfort and find out what the peasants are like. And so he's going to put on the garb of a peasant and he's going to kind of pass through the people. He's going to try shopping at Ingles and finding out what people are paying for things nowadays. That's not the way it is. He starts out in the very beginning in a situation which is worse than the average poor person of his day. He starts out at the bottom and will be identifying with the hardship of his people. I say, anyone in the nativity story who becomes associated with this Christ ends up getting caught in the wake of his suffering. So Mary, who is pregnant by the Holy Spirit, must endure that consternation of her future husband, and she must endure a public shame. Luke depicts the hardship of the journey as they're going from Nazareth down to Bethlehem. Their homelessness, their use of an animal feeding trough, to hold their new baby. When the baby is circumcised on the eighth day, Simeon in the temple immediately starts speaking about the sorrow that is going to come into Mary's heart when this son grows up to be offered up as a sacrifice for sins. And you know Matthew's account. Matthew goes on and says that Herod is going to slaughter all of the babies of Bethlehem, sending Mary and Joseph out again on another hard road, down into Egypt to save the life of the boy. The whole thing is about hardship. And it's about suffering. And the thread which is going to run all through Luke and into his sequel, the book of Acts, is going to be that anyone, any family member, Anybody who is kin, anyone who follows this Christ will be caught in that wake of suffering. Whoever would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. See what I mean? It all begins at Christmas. You say, well, Christmas, I thought Christmas was about celebration and it's about gifts and it's about the Savior is coming and joy to the world. But will you hear carefully what that angel said to the shepherds? I bring you good news of a great joy which will be for all the people. It's not now. The great joy Will be But now let's take that that expression of hope And let's put it into this context of this miserable hardship situation and let us understand something of the Proclamation of joy that God is giving to us The joy will come surely it is it is going to come to pass but the joy is going to be now something like holding a baby in the midst of the most miserable conditions you can think of. So in my mind, a stable, now I understand it doesn't say stable here, but it says manger. I don't know where you keep mangers if it's not in a stable, so we use the word stable to describe this situation now where they are lodging for the night. And in my mind, this is a microcosm. This is a summary of what our fallen world is all about. It represents hard work. It represents refuse. It represents discomfort. It is cold or it's hot. It's being in isolation from others. And I would assume that somewhere you describe your life as being in something like a stable. You could pick out one of those descriptions that I've just given you, and you could say, here I am. That hard work, that discomfort, that odor, that sounds like my life. Well, now when you listen again to what we read in this account, Luke does not put his emphasis on the description of the hardship of the stable. It says that Mary pondered these things in her heart, and we assume that Luke probably interviewed Mary about the details of that occasion. But when Mary looks back upon the stable days, she doesn't say, and there were those smelly, stinking animals that were hanging all around us. She didn't say anything about that. And the need to constantly be changing that straw was cold there, or depending on the season of the year. Maybe it was just humid or hot. You don't find any description of that. You know why? Because her attention was on the baby. Now, if you and I were writing the story of Christmas, and we were seeing the stable as some kind of an imitation of our lives, a summary of our lives, Don't you think that you and I would spend all of our time talking about how miserable the conditions are? Don't we do that now? Talk to each other about the great miseries of our stable-like existence. But hear what the angel is saying. Something is coming in the future that is going to be great joy. And the joy has burst into this stable-like existence right now. And it's like holding a baby. You know what happens when you take a baby into a hospital room? You know what happens when my brother brought his new granddaughter to visit my mother in the memory care unit? It was like a distraction from the environment around. And it's joy breaking into the sadness. Great joy will be! But the message of the gospel is that joy comes even now into our lives. Get your attention onto the baby-like joy, and not on the miserable surroundings, because the miserable surroundings will go, but the baby will be triumphant. As we heard preached last night, He ends up being King of Kings and Lord of Lords. So as He comes from the realm of glory, He comes down into the realm of suffering in order to take hold of us and to bring us up into glory. So Luke, as he unfolds the story of the Christ and His gospel, and then in the book of Acts, he begins by talking about the sufferings of the Christ, as the evidence that the people are rejecting Him, and they are abusing Him, and the religious leaders are turning their backs on Him. But then in that second volume, Luke lifts up the cross of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of that Old Testament prediction that said anybody who hangs on a tree is cursed. And the apostles begin to describe the crucifixion of Jesus as the hanging on the tree. He comes into this world to suffer, not just to become an example, to help you have a stiff upper lip to get through suffering. He comes into this world to suffer the curse of condemnation. The curse of being separated from God on the cross. He comes to suffer the curse that you and I shouldn't have had to carry by ourselves. He comes to do for us what we are not able to do for ourselves. This is what the angels were talking about when they said, Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior. Someone who will suffer so that you don't have to in the presence of God. But then that's not the end of the story, because He takes us into glory. And the Apostle Paul will be quoted by Luke later on in the book of Acts. And Paul will use this expression, that familiar expression about He suffers and He enters into glory. But this is the way Paul's going to put it. Jesus Christ suffered and was the first to rise from the dead. And if the Christ is the first to rise, the whole point is He's taking His people with Him. It's because the curse has been settled through the sufferings of the Christ and His atoning death, that as He rose again from the dead, so He's going to take His people with Him into resurrection glory. So what do you think? Are you going to rise from the dead? And are you going to enter into glory? Well, you will if you believe. And that is one reason why we call this good news. Do you believe that? Amen. Come, let's believe this together. And now our Father God, we thank you again for doing for us what we are not able to do for ourselves. We're thankful for the triumph that you give. that is everlasting in your Son. And now, together, we lay hold upon Him in faith. And we ask you, work with us now, in the times of distress, to put our eyes on the joy of your Son. This is what we ask. And we dare to ask this now with confidence, Because we're praying in Jesus' name. Amen.