Jesus' Favorites

Wow. If you believe in the power of God to change a life, would you just say, amen? Amen.

At all of our campuses and at homes around the Triangle and even around the world, want to welcome all of you here. What an amazing testimony the change of God brings into somebody's life. And I just want to say to you, whether you're watching at home or whether you're sitting at one of our campuses, that if you have never had the power of God change you like that, we want to give you an opportunity for you to experience that today. That is not some kind of mystical sacred privilege for just a few people. That is something God wants to do in your life.

He is present here this morning with the power to heal and to change if you are open to receive it. Well, Merry Christmas. I know this might be one of the most unusual Christmases that we have all experienced, but it's still Christmas, right? Typically these weeks are filled with parties, family parties and neighborhood parties and church parties and work parties. And I don't really want to go to a party, but my wife is making me go to a party, parties. In fact, I will go ahead and just disclose the secrets of some of your hearts. Some of you have been secretly grateful for lockdown because it's given you an excuse to not go to a lot of the parties you didn't really want to go to anyway.

Am I right? I'd love to come to your Nutcracker Christmas themed costume party, but you know, pandemic. I don't know if this is officially a thing, but I feel like some people have, I guess you would call it selective COVID anxiety.

I'm not talking about people with legitimate concerns. I'm talking about the guy who will play poker for several hours around a table with six of his buddies, but then is really concerned about getting together with his wife's side of the family because of, you know, COVID concerns. And so I'm talking about it. I know it just got weird between a couple of you husbands and wives out there, but somebody had to say it, right? Christmas is a time of gift giving typically.

And I assume by how many times that Amazon truck passes my house and how backed up the mail is that that is still the same. But how we give gifts this Christmas may be different. I know some of you are having to rethink getting your family together on Christmas morning or Christmas Eve, which by the way, just out of curiosity, how many of you are, I'll just go ahead and say it. How many of you are heretics and open your presence on Christmas Eve? Okay, go ahead, raise your hand, put it up.

All right, where are you? We're going to keep it up. We're going to call our prayer team to come from the back. They're going to lay their hands on you. And no, I'm just kidding.

The CDC will not let us do that. But this is a great year for you to change that. I would just humbly say open your Christmas presents on Christmas morning when Jesus opened his, at least that's how I read the story. And of course, during this season, we've still been able to watch our Christmas movies, which is nice that that hasn't changed.

In fact, maybe we have even more time to do that. I know you are expecting me to make fun here of the obligatory sarcastic comment about Hallmark movies again, but I'm not going to do that. I know some of you love them. I know that because you have written me multiple voluminous emails over the past couple of weeks to tell me that. Of course, we all know America's greatest Christmas film, we can all agree on that, right? Go ahead and say it. Die hard. There you go.

Die hard. One of the things that we've had to alter here at the Summit Church is our Christmas services, which is kind of sad because typically our Christmas Eve service is our best attended service of the year. In years past, we've done it at the Durham Performing Arts Center. So it's sad for us to have to scale that back this year, but what we're going to do instead is we're giving you a copy of a book that I just published called Searching for Christmas. It is a very simple, straightforward, short, mercifully short, humorous book, hopefully humorous book that attempts to expose the deep soul questions that Christmas prompts us to ask.

It is the kind of book that I think would fit right inside of stocking or that you would just give as a gift. I hope it is a help to you. If you are at one of our campuses, you can pick up one for free as long as there are copies available. You can give that to a friend and offer to talk with them about it. If you are joining us online or we run out of copies, then you can download a free copy on our website. And if you need extra copies, you can always order them on Amazon.

And if you take one of these today and you don't like it, well, you get what you pay for, okay? All right, one of the questions I ask in the book is what your most memorable Christmas was. So just think right now, right now, whether you are at home or at one of our campuses, what Christmas stands out most in your memory, good or bad?

Maybe it was one from when you were a kid or maybe your first Christmas married or maybe the year that you got some gift that you had always wanted to get. Kids, how many kids we got in the room? Kids, how many of you expect for this to be the best Christmas ever?

Put your hand up. All right, now look at your parents right now and say, mom, dad, right? This is not on Santa, right? This is on you. This part's on you.

That's a lot of pressure on them, but they can totally handle it, I promise. My most memorable Christmas occurred in 1997. That was the first year that I served as a missionary on an island country in the South Pacific. I lived there in a Muslim community and some of my Muslim friends who were so incredibly gracious to me knew that I was alone. My teammate had been medevacked out because of some health concerns and so my Muslim friends decided to throw a small Christmas party for me. It was so sweet. They'd made a bunch of little desserts and little cakes and they brought me over and they said, so why don't you explain to us here on December 25th, why don't you explain to us why Christmas is so important to you? Y'all, I sat there on the floor of their little hut. It was about 90 degrees. None of my friends, none of my family was around.

I wasn't really even able to communicate in English, had to speak their language as best as I could. And I opened my Bible to Luke chapter two and I shared with them the story that I'm about to share with you. And I remember thinking that perhaps, though everything was different, that that was perhaps the purest expression of Christmas I'd ever been a part of, that probably the greatest way to honor what Jesus had done was not through parties and presence, but to make sure everybody in the world knew why he had come.

Luke chapter two, if you've got a Bible and it's accessible, take it out, open it up, turn it on. This is a story that most everybody recognizes, but a story that has one profound point that I find people often miss in all the cutesiness of it. And that one profound point is that Jesus came for the broken. He came for the broken hearted. He came for the mournful. He came for the devastated. He came for the outcast. Let me show you Luke chapter two, verse eight.

In the same region, shepherds were staying out in the fields and keeping watch at night over their flock. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were terrified. But the angel said to them, don't be afraid. For look, I proclaim to you good news, good news of great joy that will be for all the people.

If you underline stuff in your Bible, underline that word all. Today, today in the city of David, a savior is born for you. A savior who is the Messiah or some of your Bible say the Christ. They meant the promised king, the Lord.

And this is going to be the sign for you. You're going to find that baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in the manger. Suddenly, suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest heaven.

Peace on earth to the people that he favors. Now there were lots of people to whom this angelic choir could have chosen to appear that first Christmas Eve. They could have appeared in the luxurious palace of Herod who was the acting king of Israel at the time located just a few miles away. They could have chosen Rome, the capital of the world where all the money and power was. They could have chosen the high priest's chambers located in the temple in Jerusalem not that far away. But instead, instead they chose to announce Jesus' birth to a group of unnamed, illiterate shepherds in an unnamed field in an unknown part of Israel.

And don't miss exactly what they said. Peace on earth to the people that he favors. Based solely on who they chose to appear to, who is it that God favors? Shepherds. And who exactly are shepherds? Shepherds might seem quaint to you and me with their cute little robes and their iconic little hook staffs and their furry little sheep in tow, but they were anything but cute to the ancient Israelites. Shepherding was considered to be the lowest form of labor available, the ultimate expression of unskilled labor. It was a job often given to kids or migrant workers.

If as a Jewish adult you were still a shepherd, that would have been considered a total life fail. That they were so low class that their testimony would not even be considered in court unless it was verified by somebody else. Of all the people in all the world, God chose to announce the birth of Jesus to them. What does that show you about those whom he favors? Let me give you four characteristics, four groups of people this morning that he favors.

Number one, let's start with the obvious. He favors the poor. In sending the angels to the shepherds, God was declaring that he sees and he cares about the poor. Poverty is not a sign that he has forsaken you.

It's not a sign that you're second class, that you have no value, that you have no future. God wants to bless you. He wants to use your life for good, and that starts with giving you something even better than money. You see, Jesus taught that the abundant life was not first and foremost about houses or riches or cars or success. The abundant life, the essence of it was knowing God. Ironically, Jesus would say that those who were poor were usually in a better situation to receive that abundant life because their hands were not so full of money or wealth or dreams that they had no yearning for God.

You see, God only fills empty hands. And the good news is that if you are poor this Christmas in whatever way, you're down on your luck, believe it or not, I can offer you something better than money. I can say with the prophet Isaiah, come to the fountain where you can get food and drink that doesn't cost anything to you. By the way, we at this church would want to know about your physical needs. We would love to help you. But even more importantly, see, we can offer you the assurance that you're at peace with God, that heaven and all of its riches are yours, and that he will begin today working in your life for good and begin to use you as a blessing to others. God's plan for you goes beyond just coming to know Jesus, but that's where it begins, and that's what I can offer you right now this morning. He favors the poor.

Number two, he favors those whose lives are messy. Shepherds were not a group of together people. They didn't graduate top of their classes. Nobody looked at them as exemplary. Nobody bragged on them. Nobody came to them for advice. These were people whose lives had gone off the rails.

Yet God, get this, favored them. I point that out because maybe you feel like this this Christmas. Maybe this weekend you feel like everybody around you has it together, but your life, your life is a mess. Your career, your relationships, maybe your life right now is fraught with addictions.

And frankly, you're embarrassed about it, and that makes you avoid close relationships or stay hidden and guarded in those relationships. And by the way, maybe you've learned to perfect an Instagram presence where everybody looks at you and looks at what you post, and they think you got it all together, and they think that you're admirable, but you know that's not the real you. You know the real you is a mess.

I got good news for you. Jesus favors you, not the fake Instagram you. It's not the one he died for.

The one he came for was the real you. Jesus is the Messiah. Mess is literally in his name. If your life is a mess, the Messiah came for you. One of my favorite names that God gave to Jesus was what the prophet Isaiah called him Wonderful Counselor. Counselor in Hebrew is the word Yahweh, and it means a reliable guide who leads from a place of authority. This is not a counselor that just comes alongside you in a dark time and puts his hand on your back and pats you on the head and says, there, there, it's gonna be okay. This is somebody who can help with your problems because he has authority over all of those problems. He can guide you through problems because he knows the end from the beginning. He can lead you through darkness because he is himself the light.

He can lead you to the valley of death because he went into death for you and conquered it and came back out. He's the Wonderful Counselor. And that way, see, he's kind of like a shepherd, which may be why the angels chose to reveal this to the shepherds because of all people, they know what it was like to be lost and need somebody to guide you. Y'all, I love that name Wonderful Counselor because it shows you that Jesus came for people with problems. People with problems didn't annoy him.

They didn't weary him. But the people that wearied him were people they didn't realize they had problems. People without problems, they don't need a counselor. Nobody goes to a counselor and says, everything in my life is awesome.

I just thought it'd be good to give you an hour of my time and $150 of my money. No, a counselor is for people who feel lost and overwhelmed. That means if you got problems in here today, listen, Jesus favors you. Here's the most obvious statement you have heard in church ever. Every miracle that Jesus ever did started with a problem. You don't find Jesus sauntering into towns doing random little magic tricks.

And now to prove I'm the Son of God, watch me levitate six feet above the ground where I can guess your weight within half a pound. No, he cured blindness. He calmed storms. He multiplied food for the hungry.

He started with problems and he showed that he was the problem solver, the way maker. The good news is that if you have a problem, that means you are a candidate for a miracle. Bad news, you got no problems?

You're going to maintain that Instagram version of you? No miracle for you. If you're one of those special people that you truly don't have any problems, I kind of feel sorry for you. Maybe you should come up afterward for prayer and we will ask God to give you some problems today so that you can experience Jesus as the wonderful counselor.

But for those of you who have problems already, hey, good news, you're ready just as you are. Jesus favors you right now. Listen, some of you have tried to bear these burdens alone.

It is time for you to lay them down at the feet of the wonderful counselor and let him bear them with you. He says, calm all you who labor and are heavy laden and I can give you rest. He came for those whose lives are messy. He favors people with problems. He favors, number three, he favors those who feel forgotten. Shepherds felt forgotten by society, even by their families a lot of times. You usually wouldn't catch a parent bragging about their shepherd's son at a party.

If the sun came up at all, it was usually more with more of a what went wrong kind of tone. Politicians didn't court the shepherd's approval. For all practical purposes, they were invisible to society, yet God favored them. I point that out because maybe some of you feel forgotten this Christmas, overlooked.

Hey, maybe you're sitting right in there right now watching this Christmas service online by yourself because your family has forgotten you. The good news is that of all the people to whom God could have sent that angelic choir that evening, he chose the forgotten. And he said to them very loudly on that field right outside of Bethlehem, I see you, nobody else sees you, I see you. The writer of Psalm 139, during a time, a season when he felt forgotten, he wrestled with the wonder of this. Listen, listen, Psalm 139 verse one. Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me, you know when I sit down, you know when I rise up, even before a word is on my tongue.

Behold, oh Lord, you know it all together before I even say it. You hem me in behind me and before you lay your hand on me. Where can I go? Where can I go from your spirit? Where could I flee from your presence if I ascend to heaven?

You're there. If I made my bed in hell, you're there. If I said, surely the darkness will cover me and the light about me is like night. Even the darkness is not really dark to you.

The night is as bright as the day, for darkness is like light with you. You form my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I'm designed, your eyes saw my unformed substance. When I was just what some doctors call a fetus, you knew me as a person, you called my name. And in your book were written every single one of them. The days that were formed for me laid out for me with a beautiful plan before there was a single one of them.

You saw me in the womb before my mom even knew she was pregnant. And there you fashioned me according to a specific design for a specific purpose, to know specific people, to accomplish specific things. You made me in your image and then you ordained all my days. You laid them out and you watched over me in good times and bad.

What felt like darkness to me was like the full light of day to you. How precious to me are your thoughts, oh God. How vast is the sum of them. If I could count them, they would be more than the sand of the sea. Do you know how many thoughts that is, by the way?

In fact, look at this. You kids, this is sand. I don't know if you can see it real well, but that's a cup of sand. How many grains of sand do you think are in this cup? How many grains of sand do you think that is? Two million. I spent the better part of the weekend confirming that.

Just kidding, I looked it up on the internet. But how many of you, you ever had two million thoughts about anybody? You ever thought two million times about anybody?

That's a cup of sand. And the psalmist says, not just a cup, all the sand on all the seashores in all the world, that's how many thoughts, that's how often he thinks about me. The psalmist says, I literally couldn't escape your love if I wanted to. Even if I made my bed in hell, you wouldn't leave me there.

You would come after me. By the way, that was even more true than the psalmist realized when he wrote it, because after we did make our bed in hell, he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. He came and he absorbed hell in our place so that he could take us out of hell and bring us back to him. No wonder the psalmist concludes how vast, how vast are the thoughts you have about me.

They're more than the sand of the sea. I awake, I'm still with you. In other words, I wake up, this is like a dream. And can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior's blood? Died he from me who caused his pain? From me to him who death pursued? Why would I feel discouraged?

Why do the shadows come? Why does my heart feel lonely and long for heaven and home? Because Jesus is my portion. My constant friend is he, and if his eyes on the sparrow, well, I know he watches me. Hey, you ache to be special to somebody this Christmas? You ache to be special to somebody? My goodness, you're special to him. Do you yearn to matter? You matter to him. In all the pursuits that you've ever been on, whether you knew it or not, that ache in your heart, that unsatisfied craving was an ache for him. The arms that you sought in romance were actually his arms. The acceptance that you craved from your friends is actually found in hearing him say, you are my beloved son or daughter, and in you I am well pleased. He favors the poor, he favors the messy, he favors the forgotten.

Give you one more. He favors the guilty. Shepherds were considered dirty, dishonest. Jesus favored them. Now, in actuality, were they more guilty than other people?

Of course not. The difference was that the shepherds were actually aware of it. So it's no coincidence that the angels chose to make the announcement to the group of people that everybody else considered to be dishonest and shameful and guilty, and who considered themselves to be dishonest and shameful and guilty because Jesus came for those who knew they needed a savior.

That's who he favors. You see, truth be told, all of us in God's eyes are like the shepherds were in Israel's eyes. The Bible says in Romans 3 23 that all of us have sinned and all of us fall short of the glory of God. What that means is that even for the best of us, when our hearts are held up to the light of God's glory, we're going to see that they are consumed with selfishness and self-will and dishonesty and corrupted desires and idolatry. When our hearts are exposed in the light of God's glory, we're going to see what Isaiah said, that all of our righteousness is like a filthy rag. I've heard it described like a needle. If you take a little hypodermic needle that you would use to give a shot and you look at it, it looks so perfect. It looks like perfectly formed steel and sterile and clean, but if you magnify it, you'll see that it's just pock full of all kinds of little pocks and imperfections.

Your eye just can't see it. What Isaiah is saying, from a distance it may look like that person has it together, but God sees their heart and their righteousness is like a filthy rag. Jesus came for those who recognize that. Jesus came for those that need a savior. It's like I said to you the other day, the scandal of the gospel is not that Jesus also loves bad people. The scandal of the gospel is that he only loves bad people because that's the only kind of people there are.

If you recognize that you need him, that means he came for you. Jesus favors the poor. He favors the messy. He favors the forgotten.

He favors the guilty. Unto you, unto that group, he says, unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior. Not a teacher, not a guru, not a life coach, not a model, but a savior. A savior who is Christ the Lord.

That's why he came. You understand, Jesus' main ministry was not teaching. Jesus was not primarily a religious guru who dispensed advice on the best way to live. The essence of Jesus' life was substitution. Jesus lived the life we were supposed to live because we couldn't live it, and then he died to death that we've been condemned to die in our place. That's why we call him the savior. It's why we say around the Summit Church that the gospel is not good advice. The gospel is good news.

It's not good advice about how you need to live. It's the good news that when you didn't live that way, Jesus came as a substitute to save you, to pay for your sin, and now through his resurrection to put his spirit into you so that he can make you new. Jesus didn't come to make you a better person. You couldn't be a better person.

He came to you so that he came so that he could be a better person for you and then be a better person through you. So see, maybe, just maybe, maybe it might make more sense now why the angels chose to first announce this to the shepherds, to the poor, the messy, the forgotten, and the guilty. They're in a posture to receive it. How did they respond?

How did they respond? Verse 15, when the angels had left them and returned to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, let's go straight to Bethlehem and see what has happened. Let's look at what the Lord has made known to us. And they hurried off and they found both Mary and Joseph and the baby who was lying in a manger. After seeing them, they reported the message that they had been told about this child and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had seen and heard, which were just as they had been told by the angels. What do you see them do here? Two things.

In fact, I would say the only two things that are really appropriate. Number one, worship. They glorified and praised God. One of my favorite depictions of the scene of the manger is by Rembrandt.

It's called the Adoration of the Shepherds. In Rembrandt's paintings, what he'd always do is he'd always have the light. Whenever Jesus was in the picture, the light was always exude from him. Not from the sun, not from a torch, but always from Jesus so that the shadows would always fall away from him.

Well, in this particular picture, unfortunately you can't see it because the lighting is not great. But if you look at the picture, you'll see that as the light exudes from baby Jesus, one of the shepherds has his hands stretched out and it causes the shadow behind him on the ceiling to form a cross. It was Rembrandt's way of saying that Jesus' glory revealed to the shepherds was not in what he taught to them, it was in the truth that he would die for them on a cross so that he could restore them to God. That when they had made their bed in hell, he was coming after him. And the only posture to take before that kind of act, Rembrandt was saying, is worship. That's what Luke 2 was saying.

What else could you do? Again, the gospel's not good advice, it's good news. Not advice about what you should do, but good news about what God has done.

Good news that you only need to believe and receive. Salvation you see at its core. Salvation's a gift. A gift, and by the way, in that way it's like any other gift at Christmas. You gotta choose to receive it, you gotta open it. Kids, if you leave a present like this, wrapped, sitting underneath a tree, you just leave it there. Is it ever going to be yours?

No. You gotta take it and open it. When you see that your name is on it, you gotta take it and unwrap it. What I've tried to show you, what I've tried to show you today is that your name is on this gift.

The gift of salvation, and you can have that gift if you surrender your life to him and ask him to be your savior. Which leads me to the second way that they responded. What did they do? They told everybody.

How could they not? How could they understand it and not tell everybody? I want you to understand something. My life mission is not complex. My life mission is driven by one truth. One truth. Jesus died as a substitute for sinners and everybody, everywhere. In villages in the South Pacific and in people right here in the Triangle, everybody needs to know about that. Like the theologian Carl FH Henry said, the gospel is only good news for somebody if it gets to them in time.

They have to hear it for it to be good news for them. So the good news I give to you is this, unto you is born this day in the city of David to you who are poor and messy and forgotten and guilty. Unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. Have you received him?

And are you telling others? Because he came, we go. Because he came, we go. And see, we join with the angels. We join with the shepherds.

We start to sing the words that they begin to form that night. Heart to herald, angels sing, glory to the newborn king, peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners have been reconciled. Hail the heaven born prince of peace. Hail the son of righteousness. Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings. It's a gift you got to receive it.

Why don't you bow your heads if you would at our campuses, if you're joining us there in your home, bow your heads. As I've explained, the only way to respond is to fall on your knees and surrender and amazement and believe and stay in that posture of wonder for the rest of your life. That begins and starts with just receiving the gift. Have you ever received Jesus, have you ever taken that gift for yourself? If not or you're not sure, then right now you could say, Lord Jesus I'm ready. I'm ready. I receive.

I receive you as my savior and I surrender to you. If you prayed that prayer with me just now or you got questions about it, you prayed that prayer right now or you got questions about it, I want you to take your phone out. I want you to text the word ready, R-E-A-D-Y to 33933.

You could sneak a little peek up here at the screen. You want to see it, it says text ready to 33933. If you're sitting at home, you could do that right now. Anytime of the day, anywhere in the world, text the word ready to 33933. Hey, maybe you're a kid here.

Maybe you don't have a phone. You're like, I'm ready. I want you to tell your parents. I want you to tell whoever brought you.

Maybe come up after the service and find one of the pastors or people on a worship team and just tell them I'm ready. I'm ready. We'd love to show you how you can know that you've received that gift. We'd love to tell you what's next. For others of us, are you committed to tell? Who is it that God's putting on your heart to tell? Maybe you could grab a book for them and start this conversation. Think of who they are and I want you just to pray. Spend these next couple of moments praying for them. Again, if you prayed to receive Christ with me, then take out your phone right now and text the word ready. You spend a couple of moments in prayer and then our worship teams will come back.