Who can understand the beauty of Christmas without the ugliness? It isn't the cards and the trees and the lights and the presents and the fantasies and the snow scenes and the warm fires. The beauty of Christmas is that Christ came to cure the ugliness of the world. Welcome to Grace to You, featuring the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson.
What comes to mind when you think about Christmas? Perhaps you recall fond memories from your childhood, time with family and friends. With so much happiness associated with Christmas, what could possibly be ugly about it? Find out today as John looks at a hard truth at the heart of the Christmas story. A truth that can strengthen and energize your worship not only at Christmas but every day.
It's part of a collection of messages chosen by our staff members. Called John MacArthur's Most Memorable Sermon.
So, with today's lesson called The Ugliness of Christmas, Here now is John MacArthur. The dark and ugly side of Christmas is sin. Sinned. The heart of Christmas is this. Christ came into the world to save sinners.
Christ was manifest to take away sin. You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sin. And the real beauty of Christmas is to understand the ugliness that it cures.
Now, I want you to face five questions regarding sin. Question number one, what is sin? What is it? of which we speak that has so blighted the world. John Bunyan prosaically said, Sin is the dare of God's justice.
Sin is the rape of God's mercy. It is the jeer of his patience, the slight of his power, and the contempt of his love. But more than that, what is sin in simple terms? I believe the definition of 1 John 3:4 puts it as clearly as any: sin is the transgression of the law. Sin is Breaking God's law, any violation of God's law.
In the Greek text of that verse, sin equals lawlessness. Lawlessness equals sin. It is living as if there were no God and no law, no authority, no standard, just like people live today and have always wanted to live.
Now that leads us to a second question. What is sin like? What is the nature of sin? What are the properties of sin? What are the characteristics of this which has caused the Christ to be born as a Savior?
First of all, Sin is defiling. Sin pollutes and defiles and stains and mars everything it touches, and it touches everything. in the human realm. Secondly, Sin is also defiant. It is defiant as to its nature.
In Leviticus 26, 27, God speaks of those who choose to walk in opposition to me. It is defying God. Thirdly, Sin is Ingratitude. It seeks to dethrone and destroy the one who gave us all we have. Unbelievable.
That's the nature of sin. Send also is incurable. humanly. Sin is humanly incurable. In Jeremiah 13, 23, the prophet said, Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard?
His spots? The answer to that rhetorical question is no. The Ethiopian can't change his skin. The leopard, by thinking, by doing something, cannot change his spots. And then the prophet says, Then may you also do good that are accustomed to do evil.
As the Ethiopian cannot change the color of his skin, and the leopard can't change the color of his spots, nor can you do good who are bent to do evil. There's nothing humanly that can change that. Not all the resolution in the world. Not all the self-effort. Not all the religion.
Sin is humanly incurable. In Isaiah 1, we read in verse 4: Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, loaded with it. A seed of evildoers. In other words, you just keep begetting evildoers. Children that are corruptors.
They have forsaken the Lord. They have provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger. They are gone way backward. Why should you be stricken anymore? You will revolt more and more.
The whole head is sick. The whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot to the head, there's no soundness. Nothing but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. That's how God describes the sinner.
Total sickness. Sin is the incurable leprosy of the soul. It can't be legislated out. It can't be philosophized out. It can't be psychologized out.
It can't be wished out. It can't be pushed out by self-effort. John Flaville once said that all the tears of a penitent sinner. Should he shed as many as there have been raindrops since the creation of the world, couldn't wash away by his own tears one sin? And then he went on to say: the everlasting burning of hell couldn't purify the flaming conscience from one sin.
Because sorrow can't cure one's sin, and punishment can't cure one's sin, only Christ can cure sin. And so, Christmas is this: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. There's no other way. There's no other cure. Sin is a disease cured only by one thing.
And that is the blood of the divine physician himself. Further, in understanding what sin is like, we ought to say that sin is also hated by God. It is detestable to God. This must be obvious to us, but let me pursue your thinking a little further. Sin is the only thing that God has eternal antagonism against.
He damns no one except a sinner. That's all. The very narrow category in which God has eternal Hatred. God does not resist a man because he's poor. God does not resist a person because they are ignorant.
Or crippled or ill. or despised by the world. or limited in ability? Or because they seem to have little to offer? No.
There's only one thing that alienates a person from God, and that is sin. That is it. God is antagonistic only to the sinner. In Jeremiah 44, 4. God says, oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate.
That's God's word to wayward, rebellious, defiant, defiled. Sinners. You see, our God is holy. All holy? Only holy?
Altogether holy? and always holy. And the sinner is sinful? All sinful? Only sinful?
Altogether sinful. and always sinful. And how the two can be brought together? Only when sin is eliminated. And that is done.
by the work of Jesus Christ who came to save sinners.
So, sin is defiling and defiant and ingratitude. It is humanly incurable. It is hated by God. And listen, sin, if I can add this, is hard work. It is the character of sin that it is hard work.
Have you noticed? All it causes is pain and yet people go through pain to do it. It's a strange compulsion our nature gives to us. In Jeremiah 9, 5, the Bible says, they weary themselves committing iniquity. In Psalm 7:14, behold, he travails in pain with iniquity, describing Cush, the enemy of David.
who was chasing David. He's in pain trying to bring forth evil. And it says of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 24:12, she has wearied herself with sin. Sin is hard work, and people go after it with a vengeance. I'm reminded of Genesis 19, where those Perverted, twisted in the city of Sodom, came to the house of Lot because two beautiful angelic creatures had come to his house from God.
And they saw those magnificent creatures and they wanted to come and molest them in their vile, perverted way. And they wanted them to come out of the house so that they could do that to them. And of course They would not allow that to happen. And the Bible says in divine judgment, God struck those perverse blind. And you know what shatters my understanding?
When they went blind, they didn't fall on the ground and crawl around. They didn't run and cry out for mercy. They, with greater intensity, tried to beat the door down and get into the house any way they could. Actually, going stone blind on the spot was not enough to overpower the incredible impulses of their lust. They ignored their blindness and went to extreme effort.
to reach the goal their lust drove them toward. That is the essence of sin. It is so perverse. That ignoring the pain and the consequences, men go after evil. And weary themselves in the process.
People go to hell sweating. But what is sin like? It's defiling, it's defiant, it's ingratitude, it's incurable, it's hated by God, it's hard work. All of that. for men to violate the law of God.
What a wretched thing How many people does sin affect? That's our third question. I've received letters through the years from people who said to me, I don't know what you're so worked up about. I've never sinned. I have it.
How many people does sin affect? The answer is in Romans 3, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. For there is none righteous, no, not one. That's just for you who think you're the one. No, not one.
Sin entered the world through one man, Adam. And by Adam, then came a whole civilization of sinners, like. producers like. Job said it, Job 14:4. He said, Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?
Not one. No one. In Psalm 58, 3, the wicked are estranged from the womb. Psalm 51, 5, In sin did my mother conceive me. Ever since Adam, it's been sinners, and sinners, and sinners, and nothing but sinners.
The only Non-sinner was Jesus Christ in him was no sin, 1 John 3, 5 says. Not only the guilt of Adam's sin. but the depravity, corruption, and pollution of it has been transmitted to us. We drink from the same poisoned well. We inherit the same fallen Genetics.
Adam's sin clings to us as Naaman's leprosy clings to Gehazi in 2 Kings 5. With the flesh, Paul says in Romans 7:25, I serve the law of sin. Original sin in Adam contaminated the entire human stream. And if you have a question about it, it's very simple to answer. The wages of sin is death.
And if you die, you die because of sin. That is. Simple. And clear. If you look at your life and you want to know whether you're a sinner, ask yourself if you've.
Ever been ill? If you're growing older, if you will die. The answer is yes, and sin is the reason. You cannot deny that. And the roots of sin are so deep.
They are so deep that even after salvation, sin remains a problem. for the Christian. Paul cries out. The things I want to do, I don't do. The things I don't want to do, I do.
I see the sin that is in me. And even when it was forgiven, and even when the Lord had put the righteousness of Christ over that sin, because Christ had paid the penalty for that sin, it's still there. The roots of sin are so deep. All of us are affected by it. All of us, even when we're Christians.
Sin is still a reality. And if you say you have no sin, you make God what? A liar. And then a vital question. What are the results of sin?
What are the results? What does sin cause? Let me share this with you first. Sin causes evil to overpower us. Sin turns a person into a victim of evil.
Evil dominates the mind. It says in Jeremiah 17:9: that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. It says in Ephesians 4 that the mind is dark. that the mind is alienated. that the life of God is absent.
It says in 1 Corinthians 2 that we cannot understand the things of God. in Romans 1 that the mind is reprobate. In other words, sin has dominated the mind so that its thinking process is overpowered with evil. It thinks evil, it plans evil, it conceives evil. And then we know too that evil also dominates the will.
I mentioned earlier, quoting from Jeremiah 44, 17, but we will do whatsoever things proceed out of our mouths. The will is also dominated by the evil that overpowers the sinner. He is a total victim. And if his thinking is overpowered by evil, so will his willing be. For he will will to do what he conceives, and what he conceives is dominated by evil.
And then evil dominates the affections. Men love. Darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. Their loves, their affections, their wishes, their wants, their desires, their longings are toward those things which are not right. And so man is overpowered by evil.
As Paul says, sin that dwells in me. It hangs like blackness hangs to night. And sin is in the nature even of a Of a Christian, it's in the essence of a Christian, it's in the person of a Christian, like a sleeping lion and the least thinking and rage it. It is an overpowering thing. It smolders.
Sometimes high like a flame, sometimes low. The slightest wind of temptation fans it to fury. Secondly, in thinking about This matter of sin. And the results of it, sin brings us under the dominance of Satan. People think that they're free, you know, they're free, really free to do whatever they want.
We say they're free spirits. Listen. The only free person is one whose head is sin covered and is free to do what's right. A sinner's not free, he is under the total domination of sin and the control of Satan. Ephesians 2:2, the Apostle Paul says in Scripture that the sinner walks that is daily conduct according to the prince of the power of the air, the Spirit, working in the children of disobedience.
Satan is at work, he's in control. They bear the imprimature of Satan. They bear on their faces the image of their father. And Jesus said it, John 8:44, you are of your father the devil. It was obvious they were visibly the devil's children because they were manifest that way.
They bore the mark of satanic control. Man is a slave to Satan. He is not free. He is totally controlled. Satan works in him.
to accomplish his own will. Only Jesus said, if the Son makes you free, are you free?
So, the results of sin, sin overpowers and brings into the control of Satan. Thirdly, sin makes a person an object of God's wrath. It is sin that causes us to be condemned and damned. It is sin that sends men to hell. We are exposed, Ephesians 2:3 says, to the wrath of God.
And the psalmist said in Psalm 90, 11, who knows? the power of God's wrath. That's why we don't want to mock That's why Proverbs 14:9, I think it says, only fools mock sin. Because when you mock sin, you mock the wrath of God. God's wrath is not some momentary whimsical passion.
It is a holy hatred. It is an act of his pure and holy will against that which is evil and unacceptable. and he will destroy it. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God, of a mighty God. of a judging wrathful, vengeful God.
And so sin makes men the heirs of God's wrath. And while they think they're feasting like Damocles' banquet, there's a sword hanging over their head held by a thread. And someday the thread will snap and judgment will fall. And then another thought about the results of sin that's very important. Sin subjects a person to all the miseries of life.
Sin brings the worst of all there is on the individual. Job said in chapter 5, verse 7, man is born under trouble and trouble becomes his name. Trouble is everywhere. Paul says the sin of Adam has subjected the creature to vanity, subjected the creature to emptiness, to uselessness. There's something missing.
There's an unsatisfaction.
So it's trouble and it's nothingness. You live a life of sin and you get trouble and nothing else. Emptiness.
Solomon said, Vanity of vanities, emptiness of emptiness, all is nothing, all is nothing. What a conundrum, what a paradox. A man enters the world with a cry and leaves with a groan and nothing in between. Only emptiness. Sin has torn man down from the place of honor.
He has lost his dignity. He is robbed of peace. He knows no lasting joy, no hope, no meaning, no values. There is no peace, says my God, to the wicked. The wicked, rather, are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.
And the wicked, says Proverbs 28:1, flee when nobody pursues. They are hounded with the nothingness and the meaninglessness and the guilt and the absence of peace in their lives. Judas so terrified, Judas so wrought with guilt and horror, hanged himself to quiet his screaming conscience. And even hell proves no rest. Listen.
Sin brings the worst things in life. It exposes men to all the ultimate misery. The final result of sin is that it damns people to hell. In Revelation chapter 20, it says, In the end, at the great white throne of judgment, the Lord will gather all the unbelieving and cast them into the lake of fire. that burns forever.
Jesus taught the doctrine of hell. He was the one who framed it and articulated it in the Gospels. The apostles picked it up, and it's repeated throughout the New Testament. And we need to know this, dear friends. Fifty million people will die.
this year 136,986 die every day. and hell awaits the vast majority of people. Spurgeon said. Man is hanging over the mouth of hell by a solitary plank And the plank is rotten. And that is the fatality of sin ultimately.
What a horrible thing it is.
Now, why all of this? Because this, dear friends, is the ugliness of Christmas that brings us to the point of its beauty. You see, the beauty of Christmas is that Christ came into the world to what? Save sinners.
Now, isn't that the beauty of Christmas? And who can understand the beauty of Christmas without the ugliness? It isn't the cards and the trees and the lights and the presents and the fantasies and the snow scenes and the warm fires. The beauty of Christmas is that Christ came to cure the ugliness of the world. And Ezekiel Hopkins, many years ago, said, it is not man's cannots.
But his will nots It is not Impotency. But obstinacy. That destroys him. Men will not. obstinately will not come to the Christ.
who came to save. God determined to send His Son into the world, the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person. partaker of the divine perfection. to die for us. That's Christmas.
That's the meaning of Christmas. And no matter what you may think and what sentiments you may have and what warm feelings you might have about Christmas, unless you understand the ugliness of your own sin and embrace Jesus Christ, who alone by his death and resurrection can save you from that sin, you don't have any connection with Christmas. Joseph Hart wrote, Come ye sinners. poor and needy. Weak and wounded, sick and sore.
Jesus ready stands to save you. Full of pity, love, and power, He is able, he is able, he is willing, doubt no more. He is able, he is able, he is willing, doubt no more. Come ye weary, heavy laden, bruised and mangled by the fall. If you tarry till you're better, you will never come at all.
Not the righteous, not the righteous, sinners Jesus came to call. Not the righteous. Not the righteous. Sinners. Jesus came.
to call. Shall we pray? Indeed, our Lord, We know that this is the truth. This is a trustworthy word. and worthy of all acceptance.
That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Yes. That is the beauty of Christmas. That is the glory of Christmas. The wonder.
The beauty is not a A tree or decoration or lights. or scenery. The beauty is that the ugliness can be cured. by the coming of the Savior. You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur.
Our current study pulls together classic messages by John that our staff has selected as John MacArthur's most memorable sermon. That's the title of our series.
Well, friend, as John talked about Christmas and the gospel in today's lesson, it's clear that we really have a great opportunity to give the gospel at Christmastime.
Some might call it a season of openness, a time when the whole world takes time to celebrate Christ's birth. The question is, how can you take advantage of that openness? How can you make strategic use of Christmastime for the Gospel? Here's how John answered that question. You know, I think there's a myriad of ways to introduce that kind of conversation.
A simple way is to ask a question. To say to someone, if you wanted to find an opening for the gospel, this is Christmas season. What do you think is important about Christmas? Do you know why? We as Christians celebrate Christmas.
Obviously you have basically joined the world in stopping everything to celebrate this. Do you know why? I think starting with that question, rather than sort of attacking people on the front end, do you believe in Christ? I think it's helpful to hear them articulate it so that in their own words, they're essentially admitting that they don't understand what it's about.
So I think you want to set the thing up. By making them explain where they are in relation to the person of Jesus Christ. And then the fact that you've said that and you recognize Christ and you recognize that this is the celebration of his birth. Do you understand why he came? Do you understand the point and the purpose of a virgin born?
child, a a Savior who is Christ the Lord.
So I I think I I always think it helps if you can have them articulate where they are and then kind of jump in at that point, because then it feels a little bit more like you're answering questions rather than sort of firing at them. I think you can generate a conversation that can be very productive if you let them explain to you what they think about Christmas, and that opens the conversation.
So that's how I would start that conversation in most cases. And, friend, as a tool to help explain the significance of Christ's birth to others, let me suggest you go back and listen again to John's message today. You can download it free of charge in mp3n transcript format at gty.org. In fact, you can download all the lessons from the series called John MacArthur's Most Memorable Sermon. To take advantage of those free downloads, get in touch today.
You'll find all 10 lessons from John MacArthur's most memorable sermon at gty.org. That's our website. While you're there, take advantage of the thousands of other free resources available. You can read daily devotionals by John. You can read practical articles on the Grace TU blog.
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Now for the entire Grace DU staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember to watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV Channel 378. And be back next time for another half hour of Unleashing God's Truth one Verse at a Time on Grace to You.
