This message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. At the end, we will give information about how to contact us to receive a copy of this or other messages. If you have your Bibles, would you open to the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2? The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2. Isn't it fantastic to sing those songs? What's weird is we take some of the absolute best songs that have ever been written for our hymns, and we say, we're only going to sing you in December. Man, they are fantastic. I love getting to sing those songs. And if you're wondering, you're going to find out why we are singing those songs right now. The Gospel of Luke chapter 2, picking up in verse 1, and we'll actually only be making it to verse 7. I thought I could do all 20, but no, no. This is the reading of God's Word. 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 the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of 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. This is the reading of God's word. Please have a seat. So we are in the gospel of Luke, chapter two, and today we get to cover the story of the birth of Christ. This story is among, if not the most famous stories of all the scriptures, is it not? If you had to ask a random stranger on the street what was the one story they knew out of the Bible, it probably has something to do with Jesus being born. Whether it's true or not, I don't know, but that's the one they would think of. And what I want to encourage you with as we start this morning is that, so this is a story, if you have been a Christian for any length of time, you have read this dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds of times. You have heard this preached, likewise, a whole bunch of times. However many Christmases you've been through at the church, there's a good chance Luke 2 came up a few times. And there's this temptation. There's this temptation to come to it and think, all right, we're going to talk about Jesus being born. I want to encourage you, banish that unbelief, that unexpected attitude from your hearts, because this is the word of God. And the story of the birth of Christ is deep enough for the most mature Christian to swim in. Truly it is. That's why, like I said, I thought I could do 20 verses this week. I was delightfully proven wrong after I tried to just do seven. I was thinking there's no way I'm getting to the shepherds this week. There's just too much here to talk about. Another encouragement to you is that the birth of Christ It is different than the greeting cards that we often familiarize ourselves with. It is different than the popular versions that maybe even we have come to believe in our circles. The story of the birth of Christ, it is a story of humanity, but it's a story of wonder. It is a story of God's providence over the largest events and of the smallest And it's a story of what simple, everyday faith looks like. And like all of the Bible, it is worthwhile even outside of December. So we're going to begin our story in a place that I am actually not sure if all of you will be familiar with, and it's regarding the history surrounding this story. So, Luke will make a point in verse 2 to say that this was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And we read that, and we read it like we do a lot of political details and names of rulers and whatever, and we say, okay, great, that was happening at the time. Well, Luke is intending to connect to a broader history. Luke's gospel is always making the point that it's not just our history, as if it doesn't matter where it happened and when it happened. Luke is a historian, and he is making a point to say this happened in a broader context. And so when he says that, you will have commentators who have a lot of issue with just that verse, just that verse that we wanted to go right by. So far as one commentator says, Luke simply has the facts wrong. Luke simply has the facts wrong. And for a church that has sola scriptura emblazoned on a banner on the wall, Dems fighting words, right? You said what? Luke simply has the facts wrong. Why would Luke receive such an accusation? So like I said, Luke wants this to be in broader history. And so he mentions Quirinius. And he says, at this time that the Lord Jesus Christ was being born, this was the broader political thing going on, situation going on. Well, let me give you a helpful timeline of notable people here, OK? Quirinius. We have record of him being governor in Syria in 6 AD. Alright? 6 AD. Anno Domini, right? Well, it was around that time we also have some understanding that he did conduct a census and actually people hated it. They rebelled violently because of the census he conducted. However he did it or whatever they thought it was, they thought it was repugnant and they rebelled. Okay, so there's Quirinius, right? We have some record of him being in 6 AD. Well, then you take another notable figure and that would be Herod the Great. Herod the Great is used as a way of sort of marking where Jesus and all these events came on the timeline because we know Herod actually tried to kill Jesus. Herod was active at the time of Jesus. Well, Herod dies, like at the latest, around 4 BC. So you have like a 10 year gap. Before Herod must be Jesus and the census Luke talks about. And he's also talking about this census in light of Quirinius being governor. Okay? But on the other side, Herod and Quirinius were not overlapping. There's a problem here. This time of their lives was not overlapping. So the argument goes, Quirinius could not have been governor and conducting this census when Luke says he did. Therefore, Luke is in error. They follow all that well enough. It's actually something you can read just a ton about. But the point is, the timeline is very difficult to sync up with what Luke is saying here. And so people are going to use that. And they're going to say, Christians, your whole idea about the Bible, you've got a hole right here. You say it's inerrant. But we've got history that doesn't seem to line up with one of your authors. So how can you believe your Bible? How can you trust what Luke is saying here? How can you trust his history if he can't even get things like this right? So, there's an attitude we should bring to this. There really is. As Christians, we should acknowledge when things are more difficult about the scriptures. There really are times when it's not just a piece of cake. And the more you study, the more you run into these things. And if you're going to be intellectually honest, if you're going to be humble, you need to sort of acknowledge this isn't as easy as other things. And unfortunately, Christians, because of various convictions or whatever it is, we have a reputation for being the people when someone brings us an objection, we're like, I don't hear you. I don't hear you. I know I'm right. I know you're wrong. Well, we may know we're right and we may know they're wrong, but that's really not the attitude to bring to the discussion. There's an attitude of humility that would really behoove us when we are interacting with people who raise, I mean, not mean-spirited, these are sort of real objections. How can your gospel happen the way it says it happened if we've got all this history that seems to say it could not have happened in that way? We should have some humility here, okay? That's just something I think that would be a good witness if you ever get into a discussion about this. Now, that said, we don't have to go running for the hills. We don't have to be fearful. Oh, no, the Bible unraveled. There's all kinds of solutions that have been proposed. And if you want to study up on this, you will just be able to study to your heart's delight or until you fall asleep on the book you're reading. There's a lot of details and there's a lot of things people have proposed. So grammatically, Commentators have said Luke actually might be referring to a census that was conducted before Quirinius was governor. A lot of your footnotes will reflect something like that in verse 2, saying that it's not when Quirinius was governor of Syria, it was before Quirinius was governor of Syria. Yeah, that could be. It's a less common translation of the Greek, and that's why you're going to find almost all of your Bibles. Read it when, but it really is possible. You have a number of grammatical solutions like that. Historically, you also have some ideas where people are trying to get in the shoes of the people of the time and say, OK, what could have been going on to explain why Luke would say this? So Quirinius was governor in 6 AD, but he might have actually been serving in some administrative capacity before he was ever governor. So Caesar declares, I'm going to have a massive empire-wide census. That needs someone to run it, doesn't it? Needs a whole lot of people to run it for an empire the size of Rome. You can imagine Quirinius, he's kind of climbing the ranks still. And he's a man of note, and Caesar might say, OK, you're going to be over the census over there in Syria. You have solutions proposed. Quirinius might well have been governor more than once. So in that case, we know of politicians who have been elected to the same office more than once. And you could imagine referring to different parts of their tenure. I want to be clear, though. There's lots of very reasonable proposed solutions to this problem, but you're going to find all the theologians, more or less, are going to have to say, we don't have an obvious solution here. There's not like the clear answer that just shuts up all the criticism. There just isn't, and none of the commentators are really going to act like that. They'll advocate different solutions, but we come out of this without having it be just totally crystal clear. So, I mean, what do you take from that? I could have spent this whole sermon preaching the historical problem of Quirinius, but I don't think you would have wanted to hear that. I'm not sure how much I could have edified you with that, but what do you take away from this then? If we say, okay, there's a really complicated problem that a bunch of theologians are just so, so sure on. What do I do with that on my Sunday afternoon, right? This is my conclusion, okay? So you're going to be out there, and people may or may not, but may, use this against your view of the Bible and say, aha, what do you say to that? What are you going to do? My tendency is to trust Luke. And my tendency is to trust Luke that he knows something that I do not and that the scholars do not. Now it's not just willful ignorance. I just want to believe the guy I like. These are my reasons. Luke is actually a reputable historian. We make a point of saying, yes, he has a point he is making, that Jesus Christ came, died. It meant what Jesus said it meant. But he's actually doing history as he goes. And by and large, you're going to find a pretty good deal of consensus that when Luke is doing history and we can validate it with some other source, he's generally doing a good job. Luke is a good, reputable historian. And he's describing a census that is well in line with Roman practice. This isn't some crazy practice that no one in Rome had ever heard or seen or done or anything like that. This has parallel kinds of things that you'd say, oh, this is Rome being Rome. So you have a good historian talking about something that sounds a lot like Roman practice. And then this is my last point. He's a lot closer to the events than we are. He's a lot closer than any of our researchers are, even though they have good sources and they're doing heavy and good work. I still ask myself, the guy was just decades removed from this. I mean, so you start a picture, say 20 years from now, someone was talking about the 1980s when President Obama was in office. That's just so easy to not do when you're near the source. Like we just know Obama was not in office in the 80s, right? We get concepts like that. So I really think a person who lives during this time has a pretty good shot of not missing by a decade a massive census that involved millions of people. So I think his closeness to the events also lends itself to believing him. When you come against these criticisms, when you have to deal with these problems, I think we can humbly still stand for what the Bible is saying even if we don't know all the exact circumstances. So I wanted you to know that there's a lot of stuff you could read about people objecting to Luke's doing of history here. And I wanted you to be prepared for that because I don't want you to just get blindsided when someone brings that up sometime. Now I want to give you one more point of history, and we'll dive deeper, but one more point of history that's just, you just don't want to miss this. Caesar Augustus. The man is unrivaled in power and in majesty, right? Whatever Caesar says goes in this time. And he orders a census and likely he's doing this because he wants to know who he can tax, right? Governments always want to know how many people they get to ask money from or just take it from. And so he orders a census for, for the entire empire. And you just, I mean, just picture this one man speaks. and an empire moves to make it happen. He's a powerful man, really he was. Rome at the time, I mean, if you can picture the Mediterranean Sea, Rome basically owns that. Everything around the Mediterranean Sea is theirs. A popular estimation about the population of the empire at that time, it's around 85 million people. It's a big old empire, isn't it? Rome is powerful and Caesar is at its head. Mighty Caesar orders a census and we are reading the story of how Joseph and Mary had to go and obey. But we know why this is happening. Why is this census happening? Now, on the one hand, you can say because Caesar's flexing his muscle. On a bigger picture, we know that the Messiah was prophesied that he would be born in Bethlehem. The census was happening because God was fulfilling his word, not because an emperor spoke. So what you have is you have this powerful man, so powerful that in some parts, he himself is considered a god. As powerful as it gets, and when he speaks and he flexes his muscle, and do you think for a second he was trying to honor a god? Even a god, if it was the wrong god. I doubt it. I think he did it because he wanted to do it, and he knew he could do it because he was that powerful. It turns out that the most powerful man in the world, just exercising what he thinks is his will, is actually keeping the will of God. Our God is so mighty and he is so powerful and he is truly sovereign, so that the so-called sovereigns of the world, when they act according to their will, they can't help it. They're going to keep God's plans. Marvel at a God who can do things like that. Marvel at a God who sees the mighty Roman Empire as a speck. Truly a speck. Now getting into the details, the personal details of this story, right? Mary, Joseph, going to Bethlehem, and you have this very famous statement. She has her baby, lays him in a manger. Why? Because there was no room for them in the inn. That might be the most famous phrase of the most famous story. There was no room for them in the inn. We should start there because there might be some misconceptions about what we're talking about. Actually, I guarantee there are misconceptions about what we're talking about. What do you picture? You picture the Motel 6 down the corner. And it's on the outskirts of Bethlehem. And Mary and Joseph ride in on mules or whatever. Mary is in labor, doing the breathing exercises in so much discomfort. And Joseph goes up to the mean keeper who's got a shifty look to him. And he goes up to him and says, please, please, I need a place for my wife to give birth to our first son, who also happens to be the miraculous son of God. And this mean keeper says, no. I dislike pregnant mothers and I dislike babies. No, but I've got a stable you can go maybe use. Right, we got, we have this picture of the, of the, of the common sort of in and the mean in keeper. Well, you start with the word inn. Inn is actually I-N-N, not a preposition. It's actually not so obvious as you might think it would be. And there are a lot of ideas about what we're talking about here. But anyone who studies this pretty quickly rules out the idea that this is a formal inn. This is not Bethlehem's Motel 6. The first reason why they do that is because it's a different word here in the Greek. The word used here is a, there is a formal word for in, and Luke does in fact know it. He uses it later when talking about the Good Samaritan. Here he uses a more generic word, one that you would maybe render lodging. You might also render a guest house, or guest room, excuse me. So in that case, so take the guest room scenario. If we're not talking Motel 6 and we're talking guest room, what you have is a massive pilgrimage, almost, of people who have to come back to Bethlehem. And Joseph probably is like, hey, we can stay with my second cousin. They've got an extra room. Well, the second cousin has a lot of second cousins, it turns out. And they've all been mandated to come back. And so they get back. And what do you know? There's 18 people staying in the house. So there's no room for them, perhaps, in the guest room of these people's house. So it sort of takes some of the sting out of the whole mean innkeeper idea, right? You actually may just be talking about just sort of this public shelter idea that people in caravans may just pull up and sort of make a tent or, you know, all under one big roof. And it's much less formal, much less organized than what you think of when you think of an inn. So yeah, we banish the mean innkeeper imagery from our heads, but you're still left with this basic truth of this story. There was no good place to have a baby. That's the main point that Luke's going for. There was no good place to have a baby. So where did Mary give birth? Where did Mary give birth? Again, there's actually a number of traditions. It's funny, you think you know everything to know about a story. It turns out there's all these other details. The most popular one, and a fairly good answer, we've often assumed that this was a stable. A stable where animals were kept, and that would make sense that after giving birth in this stable, Mary then goes to the manger, which is a feeding trough, and lays down her newborn son in the manger. That makes a lot of sense. But you actually have traditions going all the way back to the second century that say Mary gave birth in a cave. In a cave. And that actually still works fairly well with the stable imagery because animals were often kept in caves. So you might have Mary giving birth in a stable, maybe in a cave, maybe, actually, just mothers, just picture this, maybe just out in the open air. You maybe have Mary, so if this is that kind of caravan, common, big tent idea, there may be a courtyard out front, and that's where Mary's giving birth. Whatever it was, it was not ideal by our definition, was it? I mean, if I gave you all three of those choices, I'm like, okay, mothers, yeah, pregnant mothers, which of the three would you rather give birth in, right? the stable, the cave, or just in the open air. I mean, all mothers. Before you had your first child, didn't you have somewhere in your mind a picture of what it was going to be like? You had some sense of these are like the standards that are going to be there. This is how it's going to go. I know for our family, that didn't work out. It went every which direction besides that it felt like. How many of you would say, when I was dreaming of giving birth, I was really thinking of a stable, a cave, or just being out in a courtyard somewhere. This is no one's dream. This is no one's dream experience. Not a single person, not a single sane person, dreams of this kind of experience, I think. Come talk to me afterwards if you think I'm totally off on that. And I think the weird part is that after a couple of thousand years of hearing this story, being familiar with this story, we can do the weirdest things with history. We can romanticize anything as long as it took place in the past, in a past time. Times were different. People were different. Wouldn't that have been something to give birth in a stable? You can imagine someone saying, man, that is so wholesome. That's an organic delivery right there. Back to roots. Back to your roots there. And man, that's so much better than those money-hungry hospitals out there. Not really. Not really. Wherever she gave birth, it was dirty, and it was uncomfortable. So let's do a group exercise. This is nonsensical for the men, but we'll try anyways. Imagine giving birth, and just imagine the discomfort of being on bare dirt or bare stone. Like, the mother's got enough discomfort going on without being on a stone floor, right? I mean, can I get an amen, mothers? Imagine, you know those famous breathing exercises that you often see people doing? Imagine when you do that, you breathe, you're like, that's manure. Imagine that you're inhaling abundant amounts of manure smell in the midst of everything else that you're dealing with. Imagine how you would feel when the neighbor's kid pokes his head around the corner to see what's going on. I can imagine some irate statements out of mothers, right? Get him out of here. Out of here. This is no one's ideal experience. When Mary was first told of what God intended to do through her, for her, you know, the virgin pregnancy and who her son was going to be, she responded with one of the most faithful responses in scripture. She said, let it be to me according to your word. Let it be to me according to your word. Do you think she had any idea what was in store for her? Do you think she pictured that this miraculous baby would not even have a decent place in which to be born? She was told as the son of God. Do you think she expected that the son of God might call a stable his first throne room and a feeding trough his first bed? I remember when we, when we picked out Lewis's crib. It was, I mean, it's a special experience. It's a symbolic experience, I guess. We're, you know, we're researching cribs and what are all the safety things now these days. We go down to the place, like Baby's R.S. or something like that, we go down to the place, and I'm doing my dad research at the time, right? Naomi does all the, like, intelligent research. I'm going up to the thing and I'm shaking it. Okay, okay, yeah, that'll work. I don't know if I'm expecting earthquakes or the kid to just be really violent, but that'll work. And then at some point, at some point, we decide on the crib. And truly, that was a special decision. I'm not above it in the slightest. That was a special decision to pick a crib for our first son. And it's the crib we still get to use with our second right now. And it was a big deal the first time that we laid our son down in his crib. It really was. Here you have Mary. Mary, exhausted. I just have to imagine, confused. And in many ways, alone. I think Joseph's there, but one part we miss about the text is that she wrapped the baby in swaddling cloths. That's actually not normally what happens if someone's around, if there's a midwife or a doctor or whatever. Someone else is generally swaddling the baby. This feels like a pretty lonely delivery. And here Mary is, trying to figure out what is going on. You can imagine, she knows, she is integral in these amazing plans of God. And can't you just picture her as she has to get up after giving birth. She's all exhausted. She's somewhere that she's not familiar with. It wasn't comfortable in any way. And then she's like swallowing the baby. And you can picture her as she's doing it, marveling at the baby, but also thinking, God, I have no idea what you're doing. Can't you picture this worn out mother wondering what her God was doing? Let it be to me according to your word. As she lays the son of God down in his first crib, a feeding trough. Let it be to me according to your word. And it turned out that prayer, that wish had some totally unintended consequences. Let it be according to your word was Mary totally laying down her plans and her control. If it had been according to Mary's word, do you think she would have at least had a more comfortable and cleaner environment to give birth to her son? You can bet that if it were according to her word, some things would have been a little more comfortable. But it wasn't her plan. It was God's plan. It wasn't her word. It was God's word. And in the perfect plans of God, Mary's time to give birth came upon her arrival in a crowded city where there is no place for her to give birth. Sometimes we pray and we pray that God's will would be done in our lives. We pray that God would work His perfect plans in our lives. And we, as much as we're trying to faithfully do that, we have some picture of what that means. We have some sense of what God's perfect plan looks like. And then sometimes God goes and answers that prayer and he does his will and not our will. And there we are in the middle of God's plans and we have no idea what he is doing. I had some sense of what perfect looked like. This is nothing like it. We never planned on the marriages we ended up with. And we never planned on the family that God gave us. We never planned on the health problems that we would have to do battle with on a daily basis. We never planned on just how hard this calling would be. But God did. God did plan on all of these things. In the perfect plan of God, you are where you are. And that's not to minimize. Your life may be a brutal ordeal sometimes. Your life may be nothing like what you thought you signed up for. And I offer you a thought. Maybe this is exactly what God's plans feel like. Maybe God's plans are meant to be nothing like what we expected. I offer Mary's story to you so that you have a ready encouragement that there have been many a saint before you and there will be after you who have found themselves in situations that they never expected and there may be none too pleasant. And yet God's good work was going on. And let Mary's story remind us as well, that when we pray for his will and not ours to be done, we might be praying for something radically different than what we thought we were praying for. I don't know if there's anything else that you can do to brace for that, but just be ready. He may well answer that prayer. It may well look nothing like what you were expecting. And we spent all this time on Mary. And Mary is clearly prominent, central to this story, but it would actually be wrong to end a sermon right here. Because there is a more important story that was going on in the midst of Mary's story. We focused on the story of the mother. We have to also now talk about the story of the son. Jesus Christ The son of God was born. He was born. That should bewilder us, that should blow us away. We should have no idea how that was possible. The creator took on the flesh of his creation. And he entered, he entered not with parades and strength. He did not magically appear when he turned 30. He was born. His mom labored like mothers, you labored over your children. He was born with all the sounds and frankly, the smells that go right along with that. When he was born, he cried out, like babies do. When he was born, he needed to nurse like babies do. Jesus Christ, who is the definition of strength and majesty. Jesus Christ took on the world's definition of helplessness and weakness and humility as we sing fullness of God in helpless babe. How could that be possible? Jesus Christ did not seem to be a baby. He was not masquerading as a baby. He was a baby. And not only did Jesus the Almighty condescend to become a baby, look at the welcome he received. Look at the welcome he received. Where are the heralds crying out, God is here, God is here? Where are the adoring crowds just longing to be anywhere near the entrance of divinity into the world? Where was the lavish welcome? Where was any of it? It was nowhere to be seen. He had none of those bells and whistles. And if ever there was a baby that deserved to be celebrated, it was the Lord Jesus Christ taking on the flesh of man. And yet there was no welcome. He was overlooked. He was ignored. He wasn't even a blip. on the radar of the world, the light of the world shone into the darkness and the darkness yawned and went back to what it was doing before. The humility of Jesus's entrance into the world, it is staggering. It is staggering. How does God enter his creation quietly? How does God receive anything less than the complete adoration of his creation? How does the son of God not even have a decent place to be born? If he had a palace, it wouldn't have been good enough, but he didn't even have a palace. How does the son of God not even have a decent place to be born? How is it that the creation had no room nor welcome for its creator? Well, the reason the creation didn't welcome its creator is the reason that the creator came. See, that lack of welcome, it's just a symptom and it's a symptom of a world in rebellion. The lack of a place for their God, for their Savior indicates just how desperately the world needed that salvation. Just how desperately they needed their Savior to come. And the lack of a welcome was hardly the worst sin that the world would ever commit against him. Because as you follow the path of Jesus's life, the world's willful ignorance would one day turn to willful rejection. Willful rejection would one day turn into flagrant violence. One day the creation would find that it was striving to murder its God. And these aren't sins that stopped 2,000 years ago. These are not sins that are just committed by the heathen masses all around us or something like that. Closer to home would be to look at our own hearts. Frankly, we would do a whole lot better to consider our response to the Son of God. The tragic irony of Jesus's birth was that the creation had no place for its creator. The tragic irony of the church is that disciples often have no place for their master. The heartbreaking, heart-wrenching thing is how little we have, how little welcome we have for the one who welcomed us into the family of God and died to do it. I mean, what do I mean? And just look at the way we spend our time. Think about the way you spend your time. And I ask you this, do we offer God fully devoted lives? Or do we actually just offer him devotionals? Does the Savior have a place in your life when a Bible isn't open? Is the Lord welcoming your life outside the Lord's day? Outside of the two hours you're spending here? Is the Lord's place still secure in your life when you turn to your callings as an employee, as a parent, as a sibling, as a student? You know, the danger really seems to be that once we put on our so-called real world hats, We go out into the world and we seem to think that the Savior's sphere of influence has just sort of faded away. What does Christ have to do with my work? What does Christ have to do with the way I treated that person just now? What does Christ have to do with my free time? That's my time. We have a Jesus who in reality is not welcome and has no place in a lot of times and in a lot of places in our lives. Not your life, not someone else's life, in our lives, in my life. He does not rule our thoughts when we go out, nor does he rule our attitudes, nor does he rule how we even planned the day. Sometimes it's like the best we've got is here's our starting point. The rule of God is my starting point, but it's certainly not a way of life. Sorry, Jesus, no room for you in the inn. Christians have this terrible problem of acting like the blood of the lamb was good enough to buy 30 minutes a morning and two hours on Sunday. But you were bought with a higher price than that. Our Savior paid a much higher price than that for you. Christian, you do not belong to yourself. You belong to him. Your time is not your own. There's no such thing as time that's your own. Your time is his. We do not grant God control over our lives. He owns it all already. So the life we live, we live for him. The time we spend, it's time for him. We need to understand that our faith, our Christianity, our discipleship is so much bigger than reading your Bible. The time you work, it's time for him. The time you play, it's time for him. The time you're resting. It's time for him. We are his all the time. The one who owns your life does not need to carve out a spot for himself. It's all his already. And Christ's place in our lives, it's not one place among many. Christ's place in our lives, it is the place of authority. It is the place of preeminence, and it stands above all the other places we've got, all the other callings we've got. And we've talked about this before. There's going to be plenty of times where we are going to resent God's claim on our lives. We don't want to yield control. Let me do this, God. I've got this. And that resistance would make a whole lot more sense if we could point to even one case when we did something better than God. Isn't that the case? Can you look at any time in your life, Christian, where you're like, I sure am glad I went my way and not God's. Does it ever work out better for the child of God when we do that? Are there any success stories? There's not a single one. We are over 5 million at this point, and yet we keep trying. And I imagine we've all tasted just how bitter this fruit is. What happens? What happens when you refuse to submit to God and you absolutely insist on your own way? Does it ever work out? Ever. Have you ever been happier? Have you ever been more blessed for going your way? And I mean long-term blessed. Probably never. Do things ever really go better when your hand is on the wheel? Never. A life with us in control is a life of sorrow. It's a life of turmoil. Sin and folly always bear fruit. And the fruit they bear ends up being some mess we have to clean up and some wound that we're nursing and hoping heals up. That is what happens when our hand is on the wheel. That is what happens when we're in control. And in contrast, what happens when we submit? What happens when we do go the way God is calling us to go? What happens when we do his will for our lives? When we welcome him in his rightful place as the Lord of all of our days, not just the Sundays. It's always better. Every single time, always better. Our control led to sorrow and turmoil. God's control leads to joy. It leads to peace. So don't you, don't you just look at yourself and you're like, why is this so hard for me then? Why is it so hard for me to yield to the one who's clearly so much better at calling the shots than me? Why do I struggle with that? It's foolish, sinful insanity. That's really, I think how we have to look at it. There's not a good reason you're going to give yourself. foolish, sinful insanity to prefer our control over God's. If we had clear minds, if we had pure hearts, we would rejoice in God's control. We really would. God can and does work all things all the time together for good for those who love him. And I compare that to me and I'm like, I can hardly work getting out of bed and making breakfast together for my good. Look at our track records. I am so much worse at this than God. Why don't I go with him? If God comes and offers to exert that kind of control, shouldn't I just be like, praise God. Praise God that he's willing to step up and save this wretched existence that I am living. Why do we prefer our own way? Why do we do that? Why are we so sinfully stupid? We should be rejoicing, rejoicing in the privilege of a God who wants to be engaged with his subjects. I mean, isn't that gracious? Isn't it generous? If I saved the whole lot of you, would I really want to spend time around all of you? Would you? Would you want all these problems and all these people who can't keep their word, who can't do the things they know they're supposed to do? But the perfect God over all creation, he wants to be engaged with his people. This is not some obligation imposed upon us where we say, oh, God's always so controlling. No, this is a gift. This is an incredible gift. If we really understood what was good for us, truly good for us, like you can empirically verify good for you, wouldn't we then say to our God, take it all? Take it all, be Lord over it all. You have a place over it all. Take every detail, take every day, take every appointment, take every item on the to-do list. It is all yours. If we saw it clearly, that would be a shoo-in. The good news, brothers and sisters, even for all of our neglect, the blessing of the birth of Jesus is the blessing we still have. The Creator, for some loving reason that I can't even imagine, He still wants to be near His creation. He wants to draw us near to Him. He still wants to welcome us. I hope, I really hope that the Word is bringing conviction to you all today, because I know it brings conviction to me, but I really don't want that to overshadow what is most important. What our Lord calls us to do, He already did for us. What our Lord calls us to do, He already did for us. The Creator embraced us. So let us likewise embrace Him. The creator came in love for us, so let us in love live for him. The creator welcomed us into the family of God. So let us welcome him into his rightful place in our lives. The good news of the gospel. The creator gave everything he had for us. So let us likewise give everything we have to him. Let's pray. Our Father, we fall so far short of the things that we know we're called to. And we ask that you would forgive us. Forgive us because we can think of a dozen things where you aren't even Like an afterthought, where we have no place for you, even though you had a place for us and you went to prepare a place for us. Father, forgive us and help us to repent. Help us to turn from a life where we think we have ownership over it. Help us to embrace a life where we live entirely in joyful submission to a God who knows far better than us. We pray for your help and we thank you. We thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ who came for his people, who was born for his people. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. We hope you've enjoyed this message from Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. To receive a copy of this or other messages, call us at area code 775-782-6516 or visit our website gracenevada.com.