I don't preach very often at church, but it is such a blessing to me when I get to. Pastor Aaron asked me to preach the first sermon in our series
Advent: Songs For The Savior.
It was an honor and a privilege to serve BLDG28 Church by opening up the Word with them last Sunday.
Below is my sermon transcript if you'd like to read it. I hope that God's Word will speak to your heart and begin to prepare you for this Advent season.
Be Edified!
I don’t know
about you, but I get very excited about the Advent season. I love all the fun
traditions that our family has done over the years. I look forward to seeing my
children’s faces when they open up their gifts, and I love sitting down to a
big full, Christmas meal. I expect all of those things to happen. I expect for
this season to be similar to last year.
Part of me has the expectation that this year is going to be better than
last year.
Some of you
might not have that sort of expectation this year. Some of you are looking at
your lives and you are in the middle of a huge trial. Things at home are not
what you want them to be. Relationships might be strained, people may be in the
hospital, you are wondering if you are going to get over the flu in time to
celebrate with your friends and family.
But we expect that something good will
happen because it’s Christmas, that Christmas miracle is bound to happen.
A couple
nights ago, my son Ethan really built up my expectations.
As we were driving home from a friend's house,
he said, “Dad, when I get home, me and George are going to clean my room.” As
soon as he said those words, I thought, “Wow, Louise and I are getting through
to him. He is really beginning to mature." At the same time I felt so proud of him for saying what he said. "What an incredibly
giving and thoughtful attitude my 4 year old really has down deep.”
Then just
moments later, he says, “Just kidding, Just kidding.”
My next
thought was, he must get that from his mother’s side of the family...no what I
really thought was, what a cruel joke.
For all you
Georgia fans yesterday, that game was a cruel joke. I could have never imagined
such a disappointing loss. I did not expect Georgia Tech to come up with the
win.
Some of us
build up expectations in our mind of what someone might buy me this year…are
they really going to Jared’s or whether that special someone is going to “pop
the question.”
When it doesn’t happen,
we are filled with disappointment.
I heard Matt
Chandler say, “All FRUSTRATION is birthed from unmet expectations.”
As we go
into the Christmas season, we need to
set our minds on the right expectations…The Advent of Christ should be dominant
in our minds and hearts, and our expectations should be centered on the
promises of our God.
Today we are
going to camp out in Luke 1, so if you have your Bible’s turn to Luke 1.
It’s important
for us to keep in mind what Advent is all about.
The word
“advent” simply means “arrival” or “appearance.” When we use the term in
Christianity we are always referring to the coming of Christ. While many
Christians celebrate the birth of Christ, the Christmas season is more than a
celebration of Christ’s birth, it’s a celebration of his first coming, and all that Christ came to accomplish. As Christians we believe that someday
there will be a second advent or second coming of Christ where he comes to
gather his church and we will be with our Savior forever.
My wife has
this horrible habit whenever we decide to watch a new TV series. We don’t have
cable, so if we watch a TV series we either watch it on Netflix or Hulu Plus.
We love watching TV shows on Netflix because we don’t have to wait till next
week to find out what happens at the end of the show, we can just play the
next episode. We always look for a TV
show that has multiple seasons so we know that if we invest our time to watch
the show, we are going to be entertained for weeks to come.
What my wife
likes to do though, is go preview some of the future episodes of the next
season, so she knows what’s going to happen to a certain character. When she
does this I say to her, “Louise, what’s wrong with you, don’t you want to be
surprised. Why are you trying to find out what’s going to happen?” She always
say, “I don’t care, I want to see.”
If you are like my wife
then you will love studying prophecy in the Bible. Prophecy is a way that the
Bible allows his people to glance into the future, and see what’s going to
happen.
Luke 1:68-79
is a prophecy of all the things Christ will do when he arrives. God begins the
first advent story with sort of a spoiler so that we can catch a glimpse of
God’s Glory in what the future holds.
Let’s meet
the cast of characters and put this prophecy in it’s proper context.
First we
have Zechariah. The first part of this chapter tells us that Zechariah was a
priest, and he married a woman named Elizabeth.
Priests were honored among the Jews. They were men who were considered
to be leaders who were set apart by God for duties that gave them access to the
holy place, the temple. Luke tells us
that that Zechariah and Elizabeth both come from the line of Aaron to
communicate to the reader that Zechariah and Elizabeth would have held a sort
of an elevated level of status in the community due to the fact that they both
came from levitical ancestry.
The second
character in our story is Elizabeth. I’ve already told you that she is
Zechariah’s wife and comes from the line of Aaron. This means that she was very well acquainted
with the life of a priest as she would have grown up in that type of
surrounding. We learn from Luke 1:7 that
Elizabeth and Zechariah were very old, but specifically that Elizabeth could
not have children.
At this time
in history, it would have been very common for someone to pronounce judgment on
this couple. Not being able to bear children would have been considered a sign
to some that she or Zechariah may have committed some grievous sin, or maybe
their parents did.
We actually know this
is exactly what was going on when we see Elizabeth’s response to her pregnancy
in verse 25, when she says, “the Lord has done for me in the days when he
looked on me, to take away my reproach among people.”
The idea
that “God controls the womb” is firmly embedded in the Old Testament. Ps. 139
Children
were seen as a blessing from God (Ps. 127:3-5), and many times if there was
some sort of physical issue, many would think that God was punishing them for something they had done. Deut. 28:15-17
A good
example of this can be found in John 9. In John 9 Jesus and his disciples come
to a man who is born blind. In verse 2, the disciples say to Jesus, “Rabbi, who
sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” This type of thinking was very common in
those days.
However,
Jesus’ answer shows us how stupid and ridiculous this type of thinking can
be. In verse 3 Jesus answered, “It was
not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be
displayed in him.”
The same is
true in our story of Zecharaih and Elizabeth.
The text
says they were both “righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the
commandments and statutes of the Lord.” Now that doesn’t mean that they were
perfect, but what it does mean that her barrenness was not the result of sin in
her life.
You see, God
had a much bigger purpose behind what was going on with with
Zechariah and Elizabeth.
It is wrong
for us to jump to conclusions about people when they are going through a
difficult time, may have some sort of sickness. There are preachers today that continue to
spread these types of lies. They teach
that Christians should never get sick, and if they do it’s because of some sort
of sin or lack of faith.
James 1:2
say, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for
you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” One thing that many Christians overlook in
this verse is that little word, “when”…”when” you go through trials, that make
you ask the question, “God, what is going on? What are you doing? Why is this
happening?” This verse doesn’t say “if” you go through trials. The point is
that YOU WILL go through things that will make you question God.
1Peter 1:6 tells us that
we are to REJOICE in the various trials we go through. Both of these passages
say that trials are GOOD for us. Trials make us STRONGER.
Wayne Grudem
puts it this way, “It seems best to conclude that the sufferings which God
allows us to experience from time to time in this life may at times include
physical illness, which God in his sovereign wisdom decides not to heal. There
may in fact be many cases when, for various reasons, we do not feel freedom to
ask in faith for God to heal. Yet even in these cases the heart of faith will
take God’s Word as true and believe that this also has come into our lives for
good (Rom. 8:28), and God will bring good to us from it!
This is the
attitude that the text seems to communicate to us when describing Zechariah and
Elizabeth. This seems very evident to me because verse 6 says they walked
blamelessly in ALL the commandments and statutes of the Lord.
It is also
important to note that Zechariah and Elizabeth were advanced in years. While you might read this and simply note
their age, it’s important to realize that they have gone almost their entire
lives dealing with this issue…dealing with the turmoil of their trial.
We don’t
always understand God’s timing. Someone may deal with a trial for a short amount
of time or a long amount of time, we simply rest in God’s sovereignty, knowing
His plan is good.
Luke 1:8-9
says, “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.”
Zechariah
was chosen to enter the temple and burn incense, by the casting of lots. If you don’t know what casting lots is, it’s
kind of like rolling dice, or flipping a coin. Casting of lots was mentioned 70
times in the OT and 7 times in the NT. We know that casting lots eventually
became somewhat of a gambling game because we see the Roman soldiers doing it
in Matthew 27 for Jesus’ garments, but we also see it a method used to
determine God’s will throughout the Bible.
We see the apostles doing this when they had to determine who would
replace Judas in Acts 1. We see it in Joshua 18 when he is determining the
Lord’s will with apportioning the land to the people of Israel. We see it in other places in the OT as well,
and we see it here as Zechariah is chosen to burn incense. One of the reasons
they had to cast lots in the first place was because of the large number of
priests who would be considered for this honor. This was an honor that a priest
would receive once in his life as part of the preparation for the sacrificial
offering.
While some
might think that these events were a quincidence or possibly random, Proverbs
16:33 tells us that they are not.
Prov. 16:33
says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”
Nothing here
is happening by chance. Every part of this story is part of God’s Grand design
to rescue and redeem his people.
This is made
even more evident when an angel appears
to Zechariah and tells him what he’s been praying for, and that his prayer has
been answered.
Have you
ever noticed that in this story? The text doesn’t say that Zechariah told the
angel that he wanted a son, it simply implies that the angel knew his thoughts.
He knew what he was praying for…why…because the Lord told him, and verse 14
says, “you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth…
Then we see Zechariah’s
doubt in the way he responds to this news. In verse 18, he says, “How shall I
know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” Verse 20 says that because Zechariah did not
believe, he would not be able to speak until all of this came to pass.
Zechariah’s
reaction to this news at first seems crazy. When I first read this section, I
said to myself, “I would never doubt God if an Angel came to me and told me my
future, but then I thought about it again and started to ask myself, how would
I know if the angel was really from God, why would I believe some crazy vision,
over the overwhelming scientific evidence and logical reasons for the problems,
sickness, and issues that I am going through at that moment.”
I think all
of us would like to think we would be convinced of the reality of Jesus if some
miracle happened before our eyes, but the truth is that miracles happen every
day, and we don’t pay any attention to them.
What’s sad is that we doubt an ALL
POWERFUL, ALL KNOWING, SOVEREIGN Creator God, to fulfill his promises to his
people.
Turn now to
verse 67 and let’s look at what many throughout the years have called the
Benedictus. The name comes from the
first word of this prophecy in the Latin Vulgate.
This series
is titled: Advent – Songs for the Savior. This prophecy is commonly known as
the 3rd of 5 songs mentioned in the book of Luke. We see Elizabeth’s
song in 1:41-45, Mary’s song at 1:46-55, Zecharias song at 1:68-79, The angels
announcement in 2:13-14 and finally Simeon’s song in 2:25-32.
The song of
Zechariah introduces us to two more characters in our story. The first is John the Baptist.
When John is
born, Zechariah’s mouth is opened, and he is able to speak again. And
Zechariah, being filled with the HS prophecies.
We will come
back to verses 68-75 to talk about the final character of this story, but first
jump down to verse 76 and following, which reads,
“And you,
child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the
Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness
of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise
shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in
the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
John the
Baptist is the one who will go before Christ and prepare the way for him. We
see John role reinforced in Luke 7:26-28
“What then
did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.
This is he of whom it is written, ‘Behold, I send my messenger before your
face, who will prepare your way before you’ I tell you, among those born of
women none is greater than John.”
Specifically we see
John’s task to “give knowledge of salvation.”
Last time I
preached, I explained the Great Commission passage in Matthew 28. Luke
parallels the task of John the Baptist with the Great Commission in Luke 24.
It is
prophesied that John the Baptist will “give knowledge of salvation to his
people in the forgiveness of their sin…” and In Luke 24:46 it says, “Thus it is
written that the Christ should suffer and on the 3rd day rise from
the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in
his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem. “
We have this
in common with John the Baptist. God has given us the same task he gave John
the Baptist. We are to proclaim salvation. We are to proclaim repentance and
the forgiveness of sin.
Most of you
know that I am a bi-vocational pastor.
In my full time job I spend time as an admissions director for a small
bible college. Believe it or not, I get all kinds of applications from people
who want to attend bible college. I don’t always know all the reasons, but when
an application looks strange, their essay doesn’t seem to be complete, or there
is an academic issue, I call the prospective student and conduct an interview
over the phone. Sometimes I can’t seem to tell whether they truly are a
follower of Christ based their application alone, so I ask them a very simple
question.
I say this,
“If you were to die tomorrow, and stand before the gates of heaven, and Jesus
asked you why he should let you into heaven, what would you say?”
I have heard
prospective students, who want to come to bible college mind you, say things
like, “I’m a good person, and I don’t deserve to go down there.” One student
told me the reason he should get into heaven is because he makes people laugh.
Last year,
after one of these interviews, the prospective student asked me what I thought.
He said do you think I will get into heaven? I paused for a second , thinking as
a director I am trying to protect the institution from students who aren’t
there for the right reasons, but then I thought, what a great opportunity to
share the true gospel with this young man, so after a brief pause, I said, “No,
I don’t think you will be in heaven.” The student then said, “well what would
you say?” I paused again, and said a quick prayer, “Thank you Lord” and then I
proceeded to tell him the following:
Romans 3:23
says that we have all sinned and it is sin that separates us from God.
Romans 6:23
says that the consequences of sin is death, which means we will be eternally
separated from God, but…
Romans 5:8-9
says that while we were sinners, Christ died for us, and through the sacrifice
that Christ made for us, we can be saved from God’s wrath.
I said that
Eph. 2:8-9 says there is nothing we can do to earn salvation, rather it is only
by God’s grace that it can be received.
And finally
I told him that Romans 10:9 says when you confess with your mouth that Jesus is
Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be
saved.
At the end
of that conversation, I knew now that he understood that he was not actually a
Christian, because he said to me, “Wow, I guess I need to learn more.” From
then I was able to talk to him about getting more involved with the church he
said he attended.
You never
know who God will bring into your life, but there is no doubt in my mind that
God continues to set up “divine appointments.”
One of the
Bettelli family holiday traditions is to get 90% of our shopping done on Black
Friday. For us, it is the perfect time to go shopping. Grandma and Grandpa take
the kids for a sleep over, while mom and dad shop all night.
While in
line at Target, I had a conversation with a lady which ended with her taking
down our church information. Then on my
way out of the mall, I ran into a friend who I had been talking about coming to
BLDG28 for a while. I was able to spend the next hour and a half with him.
We are
called to take the Gospel into the community, which out compromise, without
hesitation, and without apology.
This was the
purpose of John the Baptist, and as the advent story unfolds, we eventually see
John the dying for what he believes.
This brings
us to the final character of our story today, Jesus Christ.
Go back to
verse 68 and lets look at who this prophesy foretells of:
“Blessed be
the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has
raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he
spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved
from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy
promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant the oath that he
swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand
of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness
before him all our days.“
This
prophecy speaks of a savior. A man who will come and redeem his people, save
them from their enemies, and keep the covenant that he swore to Abraham.
In the very
first sentence we see God conquering Zechariah’s unbelief. In his announcement of Christ’s redemption of
his people, he puts it in the past tense. It’s as though Zechariah is so sure
that Christ will accomplish his purpose that He’s already done it.
John Piper
puts it this way, “For the mind of faith, a promised act of God is as good as
done.”
Now in
Zechariah’s mind, it is probably most accurate to say that he has in view a
messiah who will procure physical salvation for national Israel from the
tyranny of the Roman Empire, however as we see the story unfold, we find out
that Jesus was more than a man, and he didn’t come to save a nation from the
Roman empire, he came to save his people from sin and death and give them life.
Isa. 9:6
says, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government
shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor,
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
The man that
is coming is more than just a man, it is God in flesh coming to redeem his
people through his death on the cross.
Isa. 53:5
tells us, “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our
iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his
wounds we are healed.”
You see
Zechariah as well as the rest of Israel had it all wrong, they were expecting
to return to political power, but that wasn’t God’s plan. God’s plan from the
very beginning was to send his son into this world to rescue his people from
eternal death and give them eternal life through the sacrifice of his son on a
cross.
One of the
most significant parts of this prophecy is that the messiah is reference as a
“horn of salvation.” We are not talking about an instrument, but rather a
weapon. Think of a bull or a wild ox. Their horns are used to protect and
defend.
This is the
only place in the NT that this phrase is used, however it is used in the OT,
but only twice. We see it in 2 Samuel 22:3 and Psalm 18:2. It’s important to
note that both of these passages use this title for God, and now we see it in
the NT referring to the messiah that is so come. The inevitable conclusion is that the one who
is coming is God himself.
Zechariah’s
song alludes to no other man but Jesus, the son of God, the one who would bare
the wrath of God so that we might be reconciled back to God.
Jesus is the
from the house of David, Jesus is the one spoken by the prophets of old, Jesus
saves us from sin, death, and Satan. It is Jesus who pours down his amazing
grace and mercy on us.
At the beginning of the sermon I said that our
expectations should be centered on the promises of God, so where exactly should
our expectations be focused?
1. We should expect hard times. We should expect to go through trials and sickness,
but at the same time
2. We should expect to be made stronger through our trials.
3. We should expect God to conquer our unbelief and reveal his sovereignty
4. We should expect to share the Gospel with people God puts in our lives
5. We should expect God to rescue lost souls who need to know who Jesus is and
that he came to die so that we might live.
As we go
into this season of Advent, let’s turn our expectations off of people and
places that disappoint, and let us focus on the purpose Christ came in flesh,
to save sinners like you and me.
