I invite you to turn in your Bible this morning to the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of Luke. We're going to begin a very short series on the Christmas story, particularly looking at Zachariah, and then Mary, and then Simeon. And so we're in Luke chapter 1. Be reading the first 25 verses. This is God's Word. It is true. Let's give our attention to it. Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statues of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and they both were advanced in years. Now, while he was serving as priest before God, when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, He was chosen by Lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared. And Zechariah said to the angel, how shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years. And the angel answered him, I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God. And I was sent to speak to you and bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time. And the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they were wondering at his delay in the temple. And when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple. And he kept making signs to them and remained mute. And when his time of service was ended, he went to his home." After these days, his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when He looked on me, to take away my reproach among people." Let's ask the Lord to bless His word. God, our Father in heaven, we thank You that You've given this word for our edification, for our encouragement. Lord, for our teaching and training in righteousness, and so, Lord, give us ears to hear now. May Your Spirit accompany this message that it would impact us and transform us according to Your will. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, as Luke begins his gospel here in chapter 1, the issue on the table is belief. certain belief, convicted belief. He starts his gospel by letting Theophilus know that he's not speaking about some fairy tale or myth story that he's heard he's picked up along the way in his travels, but he's going to communicate something to Theophilus that is rooted in Luke's own study. He's carefully examined these things. And he's writing to Theophilus because he wants Theophilus to believe these things. Do you believe the story of Christmas? Do you really believe the story of Christmas? Does the fact that God has invaded this world in the person of Jesus Christ, really have an impact in your life? Does it change the way you see yourself, the way you read the newspaper, or look at the events around you? Does it change the way you think of God himself? It's meant to transform us. The theme of Luke's letter in general, this gospel, but also particularly of these Christmas stories, is this theme of believing. Do we believe? And so in Zechariah, we have this story of an older man, a priest, a godly man, very godly man, known for his piety, and yet a man who struggles to believe the improbable and is rebuked for it. And then we have Mary, a simple peasant girl, who when she's told news of the impossible, readily receives it, believes it, and is commended for it. And then Simeon, the old man who's been waiting for years and praying for years, and it's been told to him by God that he would not taste death until he had seen the Messiah. And he believed. And he saw the Messiah. And Luke wants us to have that same faith. And with the eyes of faith, to see what God has done for this world and what God has promised to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Luke wants us to believe it in a way that provides us hope and joy and peace, even in the midst of trial, even through maybe tears. To believe the gospel not as an idea, to receive these stories not as sort of warm, sentimental, you know, well-told stories that we like to hear about at Christmastimes, but realities that have direct, immediate impact upon how we live. Well, Luke begins by telling us about an old godly couple, Zachariah and Elizabeth. Zachariah was a priest of the division of Abijah. David, back when he was king, had divided the priesthood into 24 divisions, and so every priest would be assigned to serve twice a year. Every division, and Zacharias from the division of Abijah. Elizabeth is also a Levite in the family of Aaron, and maybe that helps explain the exemplary piety, but Luke wants us to see it. Verse 6, they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. It's not that they were without sin. It's just that their faith was serious, sincere. They believed in God. They believed in the Word of God. They trusted the promises of God. And their piety, as they submitted to God and His Word, their piety is noteworthy in light of the fact that they are living in very dark days, spiritually speaking. Israel's a mess. Their king, Herod, is a wicked man. He's a professing Jew, but a profoundly evil, evil man. Their spiritual leaders are not much better. They're either just caught up in the politics of the day, everyone pursuing their own position and wealth, and Jesus will rebuke them roundly, or they're like the Pharisees. committed to a self-righteous, God-denying, legalistic religion. And so Israel is in very, very dark times, and in these dark days, you have this beautiful elderly couple. Sincere believers, lovers of God. But they're known not just for their piety, but they're known also for their grief, their sorrow. Verse 7, they had no child. because Elizabeth was barren and both were advanced in years. They are this lovely old couple that, it's not just that they weren't able to have children, as a Jewish person it would be much more than that. They're a lovely old couple who for some reason have come under the judgment of God. For some reason God is punishing them. Barrenness is difficult enough to bear simply because of the God-given desire for children. But it's particularly difficult if you're a believer, when you know that God is the giver of life. He is sovereign over the womb, and God, for whatever reason, has closed Elizabeth's womb. Their pain is not just a biological problem, it's a God problem. It's a hard providence to swallow, and it's difficult, particularly for a Jewish person, in light of the promises that God had made throughout the Old Testament, that if His people would love Him, and obey Him, and serve Him, He would bless them with children. Let me give you an example from Deuteronomy 7, verse 13. He will love you, and bless you, and increase your numbers. You will be more blessed than any other people. None of your men or women will be childless, nor any of your livestock without young." That's what the Bible says. And certainly in the early days of their trial, Zechariah and Elizabeth would have been encouraged. This would be a verse that they would remind each other of. God has promised that He will give us children. Surely he will not close the womb forever. There was always hope, but as the years slowly, slowly went by, finally even hope died, because now they were well along in years. That door had been closed, and that chapter was done. There was no undoing what time and divine providence had decreed. And so that is their burden. That's their sorrow. They don't understand why God has done this, but they know that He has, and yet they believe. A beautiful couple. Well, in that context, what a magnificent and glorious announcement Zachariah receives, verses 8 through 17. Zachariah was on duty. One of the two times a year he would be required to go to the temple and serve there. and he was chosen by Lot to offer the incense. One of the most important things that the priest would do was to go in and offer the incense. This would be done every day, where you'd go into the holy place, not the most holy place, but the holy place, and there was the altar of incense there, and someone would lay, there would be hot coals there, and a bowl of incense would be prepared, and at the appropriate moment, the appointed priest, and they would choose that man by Lot, would go in and pour that fragrant ointment or the incense over those hot coals and the smoke would rise. It was considered such a sacred thing, you were only allowed to do it once in your lifetime. And this was Zacharias once. He had been chosen by Lot. It was the high point of his priestly career. And so you can imagine this godly older man with fear and trembling going into the holy place and engaging in this holy act. And as he's doing so, and he's all alone in there, right? No one else is with him. You weren't allowed to have anyone else. And so he's alone there in the presence of God. He had to be nervous already. And suddenly, there's an angel. It would be startling if it was just a mere mortal. It's terrifying when you suddenly find yourself in the presence of a being from heaven, this glorious angel Gabriel. And Zechariah, we're told, was troubled and fear fell upon him. And then the angel spoke, which would be easy for us to lose the significance of this. It has been 400 years since an angel spoke, since God has come and addressed Israel. 400 long, dry years of silence. And now suddenly, the silence is broken. And the angel of God speaks with a wonderful announcement. Do not be afraid, Zachariah, your prayer has been heard. So immediately comfort Zachariah. You don't need to fear judgment. I'm not here to punish you. I'm here to shower the grace of God upon you. Your prayers have been heard. The question, of course, is which prayer is the angel referring to? Because Zechariah, as he pours the incense, which symbolizes the prayers of the people of Israel, they're out in the courtyard. They're all praying. The incense signifies those prayers, but Zechariah would also be praying for the salvation of Israel. He would be praying for the Messiah, that God would remember his promises, and so which prayer Being answered and of course the answer is both of them this is on the one hand a Baby announcement verse 13 your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name John Just as God had come to Abraham and Sarah in their old age and barrenness and promised this miracle of a birth of Isaac God has now come to Zechariah and and Sarah, and promising, Elizabeth, excuse me, and promising the same thing. Their prayers have been answered. Again, you can only imagine the ecstasy that this should have brought. This incredible, miraculous announcement, you're gonna have a baby. And verse 14, you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord. That's a great announcement if you're Zachariah. That's astonishing. That's just incredible. That's just one of those moments, it just explodes sort of your world. It makes you want to sing and dance and shout. But that's just a part of the announcement. It gets better. It's not just a baby announcement, it's a Messiah announcement. Because the angel goes on to say that this son, John, is going to prepare the way for the Lord, verse 16 and 17. He's going to make ready for the Lord a people prepared. Gabriel is quoting the prophet Malachi. Malachi had promised exactly this, that God would send someone before the Messiah who would prepare the way for the Messiah, who would prepare the way for the Lord. Old Zachariah knows these scriptures. He knows the prophecy, the promise. And now the angel is telling him that his son is going to be that man. In other words, the Messiah is coming. The Messiah is coming. The Savior of Israel is coming. The one who's going to make all things right and all things new is coming. That's the promise. It's the most magnificent thing the angel could have said. It's what all of Israel has been waiting for, what all of creation has been waiting for. And Zechariah completely fumbles it. And Zachariah said to the angel, how shall I know this? For I am an old man and my wife is advanced in years. That is not, have you ever had those moments where you have a conversation and then after the conversation you're back and you think, oh man, I wish I would have said that instead of what I did say. Zachariah, I'm sure, had that conversation in his mind, of course, quietly, because he couldn't talk for nine months. This is not the thing you want to say. Zachariah is a godly man. He knows he's in the presence of an angel of God who's come directly from the throne of God with a message from God. He knows that God does not lie, and yet when he hears the message, he basically says, His faith can't handle it. You see, the circumstances of his age, the circumstances of Elizabeth's barrenness stand here, and they're greater than the words of God. It's ironic. This is exactly what he's been praying for, for years. Yet, when the angel says, okay, here it is, Zachariah can't believe it. You see, his functioning Reality is the barrenness of Elizabeth and his old age. Those are the functioning realities of his life, not a mighty God who's able to do the impossible. His story is, in truth, defined by his circumstances, not by his theology. If you would ask Zachariah, do you believe God can do anything? Absolutely. Do you believe that God could give you and Elizabeth a child even now? Well, of course he can. He did it for Abraham and Sarah. And yet when the angel says that's what's going to happen, Zechariah doesn't believe it. What he thought he believed and what he actually believed are two separate things. And it's clear that Gabriel is not happy. Gabriel is frustrated by Zechariah's unbelief. Look at verse 19. You can just imagine the angel saying this. The angel answered, I am Gabriel. Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent by God to speak to you and to tell you this good news. Gabriel is not amused. He's not happy with Zechariah's unbelief. Most of us would have thought it a very small thing that Zechariah doesn't believe. He's been dealing with this for a long time. It's a big thing that Gabriel has said. It's not an easy thing to believe when you've been living in the face of that barrenness and the sense of God's punishment for all those years, and now suddenly is an old man and your barren wife. We would just say, cut the old guy a break. Give him some time. That is not how Gabriel sees it. Zechariah's unbelief is not reasonable. It's not understandable. God, the living God, has spoken. And God's speech defines reality. God's speech creates reality. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the Word of the Lord endures forever. And so the angel Gabriel, in the full knowledge and conviction of the reality of God and His Word, admonishes Zachariah's unbelief. There's no excuse for it. Not when God has spoken. And verse 20 then, and now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time. J.C. Ryle writes this, he says, we see in this passage how exceeding sinful is the sin of unbelief in the sight of God. Few sins appear to be so peculiarly provoking to God as the sin of unbelief. None certainly have called down such heavy judgments on men. It is a practical denial of God's almighty power to doubt whether He can do a thing when He undertakes to do it. It is giving the lie to God to doubt whether He means to do a thing when He has plainly promised that it shall be done. Boys and girls, do you remember why the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years? Why did God condemn a whole generation to die in the wilderness, never able to see the promised land? Do you remember? Was it the golden calf? No, it wasn't the golden calf. As awful a sin as that was. That wasn't what kept them out of the promised land. It was unbelief. God said, I'm going to give you the land. of Canaan. And the spies went, and they spied it out. And two of them came back and said, let's go. And ten of them came back and said, there's no way we can do this. And they doubted God. And the people believed the ten and rebelled. And it was their unbelief that killed them. It was their unbelief that raised God's wrath and judgment upon them. Unbelief, you see, the book of Hebrews says it in Hebrews chapter 3. They were not able to enter because of their unbelief. They doubted and God let them die in the wilderness. I just think that's a good reminder to us. There are professing Christians today who celebrate doubt. who suggests that there's something laudable and honorable about questioning what God has said, what God has promised, what God is like. It's a noble thing. Well, no, it's not a noble thing. It's rebellion. It is sin, and it's a sin that God takes very, very seriously. Zacharias should have received this message the way Mary received the message. Mary said, how will this be since I've not been with a man, and when the angel told her this is how it's going to be, she's not like, well, that's impossible. Give me some evidence. Give me some proof. She receives it. That's how Zachariah should have received it. With immediate joy, expectancy, delight, praise. Why? Because God said it. God said it, and since he didn't believe When God spoke, he was unable to speak until it came true. And the word of the Lord did come true, as it always comes true. After this, his wife Elizabeth became pregnant, and for five months remained in seclusion. The Lord has done this for me, she said, and these days he's shown his favor in taking away my disgrace among the people. And of course, God was moving not just to take away Elizabeth's disgrace, but the disgrace of all of his people. to remove all the vestiges of the curse and all the remnants of sin. That's what God was doing in Jesus Christ. Well, how do we apply this story, this gospel story, this very, very true story? Two things. First, this story gives us a proper view of hard providences. If you are suffering today, or if you're not suffering today when you do suffer, You might be tempted to question God's goodness and His love for you. It's so easy for us to think that God is punishing us, or God is abandoning us, God is not being faithful. Zachariah and Elizabeth undoubtedly wrestled with those thoughts, and their neighbors, assumed those things, right? When Elizabeth says, God has taken away my disgrace, the disgrace was the disgrace heaped on her by her neighbors, the other ladies in the village who just assumed that God is punishing Elizabeth. And they were all wrong. Her barrenness was not God's punishment. It was God preparing her for a deeper joy and a greater honor than she had ever imagined possible. That's what God was doing. And we have the promise that our suffering will produce precisely the same effect. Even when we suffer for our sin, even when God disciplines us for our sin, our suffering is not the sign of His faithlessness, but His faithfulness, His commitment to save us, His commitment to rescue us from ourselves and the judgment we deserve. And so let Christmas sort of be a pair of glasses that you put on so that you see your trials in a different light, that you recognize that no matter how hard this is and the fact you don't understand it, Zachariah and Elizabeth could not understand why would God do this. Here you have Deuteronomy 7 and here you have their barrenness and the two do not seem to go together. And maybe that's where you are today. But let Christmas remind you that God is telling a story and writing a story behind the scenes. And when he reveals it, you will find that it was all for your blessing because he said so. He said so. As the hymn says, judge not the Lord by human sense, but trust Him for His grace. Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face. And we can believe that because God has said so. And then secondly, then, the story teaches us to have a believing grasp of God's promises. You see, friends, Zachariah believed in God in truth, loved the Lord, and yet, He believed God was holy and God was good and God was sovereign, but he could not believe in the moment that God was as gracious and loving and caring as Gabriel presented God to be. When Gabriel says, God has answered your prayer and you're going to have a son, the goodness of it, the pure love and kindness and grace of God in that was too much. And Zachariah, living in his circumstances and allowing his life to be defined by his circumstances, simply couldn't receive it. And I think that's true for many of us. We live by our circumstances. We define ourselves by our circumstances. We read our story by our circumstances. But friends, Jesus Christ was born into this world so that the story of our life could be written not according to our sin, not according to our failure, but according to God's infinite love and faithfulness. We just have to believe it. We have to believe it when God promises that He will not deal with us according to our sins, or reward us according to our iniquities, but according to His steadfast love and abounding mercy in Jesus Christ. We need to believe that, because the devil will tell you something different. We need to believe it when God promises to care for us, and promises to be near to us, and promises to give us an eternal inheritance in glory. We need to believe it in truth. Let God be true and every man a liar. And we need to believe it in a way that overcomes our sinful tendency to read the story of our life in terms of our circumstances instead of according to the terms of God's word and God's promise and God's power and what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ. Because something has happened that makes all the difference. On a night in Bethlehem, a little boy was born, the child of Mary and the eternal son of God. and it changes everything. The irrefutable evidence of God's grace and love for you is in that birth. And the fact that God actually has engaged this world and actually will make it all new. We just need to believe it. I'd like to ask you to ask yourself, where are you doubting God in your life? Where do you doubt God, even though the scriptures Clear, God has spoken. Where do you doubt His goodness? Where do you doubt His love? Where do you doubt His faithfulness? So that bitterness and resentment, cynicism, skepticism has crept into your life, robbed you of joy, robbed you of peace, robbed you of hope. God intends for you and I to live with those things, with abounding joy and deep, lasting peace and steadfast hope. And it's all rooted in our faith, our belief in the gospel. May the God of all hope fill you with joy and peace in believing, in believing. And so ask yourself, where do I doubt the Lord? Where do I let the circumstances of my life define me rather than the promises and the acts of God? Confess it and come and believe. Amen. God in heaven, you know our unbelief and we confess it, Lord. Help. We do believe. Help our unbelief. We thank you, Jesus, that you give us reasons to believe, and one reason, Lord, is before us now in the table of the Lord. I pray, Lord, that we would receive this sign and seal as a word from you, as tangible evidence that these things are true, and that you would call us, Lord, to live our life according to your promises and what you've accomplished for us. so that we are filled with joy and hope and peace. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. I'd like to ask the elders to come forward at this time.