Please rise as you are able for the proclamation of God's word. Luke 2, 1 through 7. In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee from a town of Nazareth to Judea to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. A couple of months ago, Mark Krieg recommended a book to me, and the title of that book is Your Only Human. It was written by Dr. Kelly Capik, who is one of the Bible professors at Covenant College, and it's a very interesting thought and idea, and it's a great read that just simply talks about the finitude, or the finiteness, the limitedness of us as people. And one of the things he gets into at the opening chapter of that book, or the opening couple of chapters of that book, is he asks a couple of interesting questions. The first question he asks, or one of the questions he asks is, does God love you? Now, as good, reformed, Bible-believing, scripture-based Christians, we all would sit back and go, well, yeah, of course God loves me. But then he asks a more interesting question that makes me pause and think. And his second question is, does God like you? And that's a wholly different question. Because in my heart and mind, I can look back and go, well, yeah, God loves me. He sent Jesus for me. But does God like me? And all of a sudden that brings back these thoughts of how sinful I am, of how judgmental I can become, of how short-tempered I can be with my family, of how sharp-tongued I can be with people around me, of thoughts that I entertain in my head that I ought not. be entertaining in my head. I can go through the thoughtlessness of people who share things with me that I need to remember those things, but I'm so unbelievably self-absorbed I forget those details. And I could go on and on and on about all these ways that I recognize that God should not like me because of my sinfulness, because I'm a mess, because I am absolutely broken, And what's happening in those moments when I question whether God likes me, when I'm just kind of waiting for that moment for God to say, all right, that's it, Matt. I'm done. You've sinned enough. You've done enough wickedness. You've done enough evil. I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore. In my lostness and in my sinfulness, those thoughts that begin to go through my mind take place. because I believe what's at the heart of this passage is that I lose sight of the promises that God has given to us. What promises do you have in your life? What promises of God do you struggle to hold onto? Do you struggle to believe and realize and understand? Do you struggle to believe that you are truly loved by God? That it's an unconditional love, that there's nothing you can do to make him love you more or love you less? Do you struggle to believe that you have been given a purpose, that you've been given meaning, that God has you in this exact place, in this exact time, in your exact family, in your exact life situation, because this is exactly where he wants you, and not only is this where he wants you, he's using you, and he's growing you, and he's working in you, and he's using you to impact other people, that he has a purpose for you. Do you struggle to believe that God will actually provide for you? Perhaps it's relationally, or it's financially, or it's mentally, or emotionally, or it's physically, or some other aspect of provision that you sit back and go, God, I'm struggling to believe that you're actually gonna come through in this. Or do you doubt and struggle with an assurance of salvation, assurance that you are saved now and forevermore, that God is never gonna leave you, God is never going to forsake you. All of those questions, all of those doubts, all of those ways in which we are unsure, all of those ways in which we struggle to trust and we struggle to believe, are all wrapped up in the incarnation. In the passage that we come to today, what we begin to see, what Luke is pointing out to us, is that our God is a God who fulfills his promises, yet he does it in unexpected ways. Our God always fulfills his promises, but it is not always done in the way that we expect or the way that we anticipate. See, what Luke is doing, what I see Luke doing here is, in chapter 1, Luke has started to build up anticipation and an excitement among his readers. He starts off and he talks about the prophecy that Malachi has that Elijah is gonna return before the Messiah comes, and he helps us connect the dots that this prophecy is being fulfilled, and there's a miraculous birth in John the Baptist, and it's all starting to come together, and hey, he's kind of whispering to us, hey, the Messiah's coming. And then we have Mary's miraculous conception that has taken place. And you have this virgin who was born, and his original audience would have been brought back to Isaiah chapter 7. And they would have begun to connect it that a virgin is going to give birth to this coming Messiah. And so Luke has taken this opening chapter and says, hey, God is fulfilling his promises. He's building expectation. He's building anticipation. And then he starts off in chapter two in these first three verses. And he says, look, Luke, remember Luke is a historian. Luke wants us to know that there is no myth here, that there is no question. This is a real time. These are events that are happening in real time, in a real place, in a real city. He talks about the, he talks about the, the census that is being taken, and who's taking it, and when he's taking it, and he points to real life facts, and then he begins to point to a place, a real live place in Bethlehem. And then as we come to verse four, we see God continuing to fulfill his promises. In verse four, Luke tells us, And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem. As Luke's original readers are reading this, and as we read this, we should hear ringings of the prophecy that is given to us in Micah. that the Messiah is going to come from the town of Bethlehem. God is building his, or Luke is building anticipation. God is fulfilling his promises for the Messiah to come. And then in the last part of verse four, he takes it even a step further. And he begins to emphasize, it continues to emphasize that God is fulfilling His promises. And he says, because, why did they go to Bethlehem? Because he was of the house and lineage of David. And so Joseph is of the line of David in 2 Samuel, in Isaiah, in Psalms. It's repeated over and over that the Messiah is gonna come from the line of David. And so Luke continues to build this anticipation, to build this expectation. He's pointing us to the reality that God is fulfilling His promises. God is fulfilling His promises to care for, to save His people, to bring the Christ, to bring the Messiah. And then He goes even one more step further to remind us yet again in verse five, that Joseph has gone to Bethlehem because he's of the line of David, as we not only read, we read in Matthew as well, we discover that both Joseph and Mary are of the line of David, so he is leaving no doubt in our hearts and minds that this is the Messiah who has come, who has been promised. from 2 Samuel and beyond, and then in verse five, he reminds us once again, Joseph is going to the city of David, of the line of David, in verse five, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child, so Mary's betrothed, and Mary's with child. And so you see this connection of betrothed and with child, because the reality is if Mary and Joseph are together, and if Mary is found pregnant, one of two things would have happened at this point in time. Either Joseph and Mary would have been married, because she's already pregnant, and they did things not in the order God called them to, so they would have gotten married, or Mary would have been stoned to death. And so when Luke points out that they're betrothed and yet she's with child, Luke is reminding us this is the fulfillment of Isaiah 7. This is the virgin birth. This is the coming of the Messiah. And then in verses six and in the beginning of verse seven, he builds it up even more. I'm sorry, it all kind of begins to come together. God is fulfilling his promises and when they were there, The time came for her to give birth, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. You have this great and amazing building that is taken to this point. The baby has come, the Messiah is here. But then in this very moment, the scene starts to change. Take a look at the beginning of verse, or halfway through verse seven. She gave birth to her firstborn son and she wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger. because there was no place for them in the inn. Now the picture that is painted here brought my mind, in all of my messed up psychology here, to Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. So, In that movie, you have Clark who has decorated his entire house. He's got 25,000 twinkling lights spewed all over his house. He's gathered his family in the front yard and everybody's out there and everybody's sitting there with great anticipation and great excitement. You hear joy to the world playing in the background and Clark takes the extension cords and goes to plug them together and nothing happens. His family mocks and makes fun of him, rolls his eyes, says, this is absolutely ridiculous, and they turn and they walk inside with no realization of, or no appearance of what has just taken place. There's this little picture, there's a little picture in that of what is taking place here, of the kind of anticipation, the kind of excitement, the kind of buildup that has taken place. only to find out that, wait a minute. This baby is wrapped in swaddling cloths by his mother. So that's not normally something that the mother does. That's something that people who are helping the child be born does. So you get this idea and this picture from this that Mary and Joseph are alone. There's no fanfare, there's no parade, there's no great celebration, there's no amazing announcement. This baby is just born to Mary and Joseph But not only is she wrapping the baby herself, the baby's in a manger. The baby is in a manger, the baby is in a feeding trough, and why is that baby in a feeding trough? Because there was no room for them in the inn. Now, what kind of environment are they in? Scripture is unclear. This could be one of those, but we know that it's in a place of animals. And so this could be one of those place of animals where it's like an additional room on a house where all the animals are hanging out. This could be an outbuilding like a barn. This could be open air, or it could even be down inside of a cave. The reality is we don't know what the actual, quote unquote, stable actually looks like. But we know, and it's clear from scripture, that they are, it seems to be that they are alone. They are in a place of animals. They are in no amazing spot that this Messiah, this Christ has come into the world. Arkent Hughes, a commentator, says he describes the scene this way. There was sweat and pain and blood and cries as Mary reached up to the heavens for help. The earth was cold and hard. The smell of birth mixed with the stench of manure and acrid straw made a contemptible bouquet. Trembling carpenter's hands, clumsy with fear, grasped God's Son, slippery with blood. The baby's limbs waving helplessly as if falling through space, his face grimacing as he grasped in the cold, and his cry pierced the night. When we think about this picture, when we think about this image of what Luke is painting of the world in which the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior has come into, it's a very unexpected scene. God is fulfilling his promises. The Messiah has come, the Christ is here. But Luke is painting this picture, and as you go from here to the shepherds, and then you begin to unfold these next chapters and these many, many chapters ahead in the book of Luke, Luke is painting this beautiful picture that the kingdom of God has come. but it's not at all what you expected. The Jews expected an earthly kingdom, an army that would take over, that would conquer and destroy the Roman Empire, that would make Israel a great earthly nation once again. We oftentimes in our lives expect some great buildup that because we're in Christ or because we follow God, therefore life should be easy and nice and perfect and everything should work out exactly the way that we want it to work out, that we have this great expectation that it happens the way we want it to happen. And Luke reminds us, first and foremost, God always fulfills his promises. But God does it in unexpected ways, ways that we can never anticipate, ways that we can never see, ways that we can never understand. But God does fulfill his promises. And his ultimate promise is that Jesus has come, the Messiah, the Savior, The Christ, he has come, he has come and humiliated himself as God to be made into a man. He has been made into the perfect God-man who lives a perfectly righteous, sinless life. He comes to die, to be sacrificed upon the cross, so that you and I could have our sin forgiven, so that all could be made right with the world, so that we could be brought back to unity with our creator, that everything that is wrong is being made new. He came. to rise from the dead, to give us His righteousness, to give us a life eternal with Him, and He ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty, where we will be with Him now and for all of eternity. This is the story that ends all stories. The King The Savior has come. He has come and He has made us alive. He has made us righteous. He has forgiven us of our sin. All of God's promises have been fulfilled. And so what is simply our response but to respond and trust and belief in God. We respond and trust to God and trust in His promises. And in the incarnation, it answers all of life's questions. All of life's biggest questions are answered in this one moment. Am I loved? Absolutely, more than anything we could ever dare imagine, because God has sent his son, and he is alive, and he is reconciling us to himself. He loves us more than we could ever imagine. We trust God because not only does he love us, but he has given us a purpose. As we look at passages like Jeremiah 29 and Matthew 28, we see that God has absolutely given us a purpose in Jeremiah 29. It paints this beautiful picture of what it looks like to live in a very pagan world and a very pagan land at some point in time. In the next couple of days, go back and read Jeremiah 29, one through 11. Take a look at that, and you begin to see God called us to be married, and to have children, and to build homes, and to build houses, and to work for the good of our city, or work for human flourishing. He's called us for that purpose, for His honor and glory, and then He's called us in Matthew 28 to go and to make disciples, to proclaim His gospel. to bring people into his church, to come alongside them and teach them what it looks like, and for us to learn what it looks like to walk with God, he has given us a very clear and beautiful and wonderful purpose. God has also promised to provide everything we could ever ask or imagine, and he'll provide our needs at exactly that right moment and that right time, and we might not see it and we might not understand it. but He provides for us in all of our relational, in all of our emotional, in all of our mental needs. He provides for us in our finances. He provides for us in our physical needs. He provides for us exactly what we need. through, sometimes it's directly, sometimes it's through other people, but God comes along and helps us and provides for us and he promises to always care for us. And then we can have assurance that we will be with him now and forevermore for he has come and he has died and he has rose again. And in 1 John, we are given kind of three tests, so to speak, of what it looks like and how, We can know whether we're really believers or not. And the first one is, do you acknowledge yourself and recognize that you are a sinner? Jesus is the son of God and that Jesus came from God to this earth. And then as a result of that, the fruit of the spirit at work in our hearts and lives, not by our own strength, but by Christ and by Christ alone. We are then motivated to love one another, we are then called to obey and follow his commands, and when we recognize we're not loving people, and when we recognize that we're not following God's commands, we come to quick repentance and belief, and we return to God, throwing ourselves at the foot of the cross, knowing that we are loved, we have a purpose, our God provides for us, and we will be with him now and forevermore. So how do we remember those promises? spend time with God and spend time with Him in His words, spend time with Him in prayer, and watch how that begins to fill our hearts and shape our minds and remind us of the beauty and the wonder of the promises of God. And we spend time with God's people as we gather in worship, as we study the Bible together, as we come alongside one another. And as we do these things, we are reminded of the promises of God that we are loved, that we are called with a purpose, that he provides and that we will be with him now and forevermore. God fulfills his promises. Though it be in unexpected ways, he is the God of the unexpected kingdom. Let's pray.