A Holy Christmas, Part 1

The reason God sent Jesus is to rescue us from the consequences of our sin. Dr. Tony Evans reminds us Christmas is much more than a holiday, and there's a real reason to rejoice. Now salvation ought to lead to celebration. Celebration because there's good news.

This is the alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of the Urban Alternative. The well-known Christmas carol, Deck the Halls, proclaims "'Tis the season to be jolly," and there is a lot to be cheerful about during the holidays. But Dr. Evans wants to make sure that amidst the food, fun, and family time, we don't miss the key reason to celebrate.

Let's join him as he elaborates. There'll be a lot of parties going on this Christmas, a lot of eating and drinking and celebration and family time. While it's supposed to be about Jesus, it's gonna wind up being about everything else. Christmas is celebrated for a lot of reasons. Number one, you don't have to go to work.

You celebrate time off from employment responsibility to some degree. It's gonna be plenty of parties. People will even get drunk in the name of Christmas. Gifts will be purchased and exchanged.

People will eat to their hearts content and the malls will be filled. We need to revisit the context in which Jesus was born. It was not a sterile environment. He was born in the midst of political oppression as the Romans held their thumbs over the Jewish nation and insisted on them being their servants. It was a high time of taxation.

So people had to go to their place of birth so that the census could be taken, so that they could be taxed appropriately. It would be a time of infanticide as babies would be killed during this season. It was in the midst of cultural chaos that the Christmas story unfolds. It was in the midst of cultural confusion, frustration, disappointment and upheaval that we come to Christmas.

So it would seem like it's a lot like today. We're celebrating Christmas while the world is falling apart. We're celebrating Christmas while there are conflicts on every single level, internationally, nationally, in our personal lives, in our families. And Christmas has become that getaway moment. When we try to use the birth of Christ to forget our troubles. It is in the context of this reality that we celebrate Christmas. There were some interesting scenarios when Jesus was born.

Maybe you can identify with one of them. Number one, according to Luke chapter two, there was so much partying going on in Bethlehem, there was no room for him in the end. So many people, so much activity, so many festivities, so much concern about census and passing new tax codes. There was just no spot for Jesus because too much was going on. No room for him in the end.

Or perhaps you can identify with this one. King Herod said, where is he in Matthew chapter two that I might go and worship him all the time knowing he wanted to kill him. See the problem with Herod is there wasn't room for two kings. He can't be king and Jesus be king.

One of us has got to go. But he used worship as the excuse to get rid of him. See a lot of folk use Sunday as an excuse to get rid of Jesus all week long. They don't want him ruling their lives, but they want to pay what appears to be legitimate homage to them.

Because there's only one place for a king and that is me being my own king, not him being king over me. But they'll still talk worship. Or perhaps you would think like the religious leaders of the day because in Matthew chapter two, it says that they told the wise men where he would be born. They quoted the prophecy of Micah 5 2, which said hundreds of years before Jesus was born that he would be born in the microscopic town of Bethlehem. So these leaders knew the Bible but never made the trip. They quoted Micah 5 2 but never went to meet the Savior themselves because it's easy to quote the Bible and do nothing with it.

It's easy if you've been around it long enough to know it and it not help you. So these religious leaders could quote the Scripture and it had no effect on their life, on their decision, on their choices. So there were different reactions to the birth of Christ. But I want to look at four specific responses to the birth of Christ as recorded in Luke chapter two.

Just four things that ought to call your attention to him in a fresh way. In Luke chapter two, the first thing that we see in verse 11, it says, For the day in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior who is Christ the Lord. So the first reason you need Christmas is because you need to be saved. It says the first thing that's born for you is a Savior. To be saved means to be delivered from something. The word saved means deliverance or rescued. The reason God sent Jesus is to rescue us from the consequences of our sin. Sin has separated man from God. And because God is perfect, he cannot lower his standards just because he loves us. And because we're imperfect, no matter how good we are, we can't meet the standards of a perfect God.

So we needed to be saved. When I was in school, I loved it when the teacher said, They're going to grade a test on the curve. Oh, that made my day because if I didn't do good on the test and knew that they would curve the grade given the fact that everybody had failed, it became good news that I would be delivered by the teacher from my failure. But every now and then there'd be one nerd in the classroom. A nerd is a weird, smart person. There would be this nerd in the classroom who would make a hundred and mess up the curve.

Everybody hated the nerd because his presence didn't let us get away with our failure. His presence reminded us because now the teacher would not grade on the curve because the standard had been met by another. There was only one person in human history who's met the perfect standard of a holy God.

So God can't grade you on the curve. He cannot reduce his standard to our level of sinfulness. But what he will do is allow us to have a savior. And that's why Jesus came.

He came to rescue us. He came to deliver us from sin, from circumstances caused by that sin, and from the worst thing of all, death. Do you know that the good news of the gospel means you never get to die?

Jesus told Mary in John chapter 11, he said to her, he that believeth in me shall never die. So the worst thing you can think of in the physical life, physical death will never happen to the believer for to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. You get delivered from the thing we fear most, death.

Because we have a savior, a rescuer, and all who place faith alone in Christ alone are given the gift of eternal life and the forgiveness of sins so that they are saved by a savior who is Christ the Lord. So one of the benefits of Christmas and the most important one is salvation. Now, salvation ought to lead to celebration because we're told in verse 10, do not be afraid. Behold, I bring you good news of great joy, which shall be for all the people.

That's celebration. Celebration because there's good news. There's a lot of bad news out here.

You read your newspaper and there's bad news every day and the news only gets worse. Well, I got some good news. Because Jesus was born on a bad day, in a bad time, in bad circumstances. And he says, I've got good news and this good news will make you want to shout because it gives you joy.

And the Bible was always associated with celebration. Good news, even if you're having a bad day. And some days can be really bad. It makes me think of a doctor who called his patient in after he'd gotten his test results. He said to him, well, I got your test results back and I got bad news and I got really bad news. He said, well, what's the bad news? The bad news is based on these test results, you only have one day left to live. So that's the bad news. He said, yeah, well, what's the really bad news?

I should have called you yesterday. Because sometimes the news is bad and other times it's like really bad. But I'm here to declare to you today some good news, a reason to celebrate joy. And that is the birth of Jesus Christ and the good news of the gospel that he brings that even if you're at a bad stage in a bad time and in a bad circumstance, he can give you joy in the midst of your madness and your mess. So you can live with good news on a bad day if you really understand what Christmas is all about. Dr. Evans will be back to continue this message of good news in just a moment.

Right now, though, he's here in the studio to share a quick thought with us. Dr. Evans, we've been talking about God's gift today, but the world has turned the whole idea of gift-giving into something that misses the point of what Christmas really is, hasn't it? You know, Dave, a lot of people are confused about it because it's become so secularized today. At the heart of this celebration is the coming of God as he became a man in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus says the way that you recognize his coming, the way you give him a gift, if you will, is when you touch the least of these, when you help somebody who can do nothing for you in return.

If you're really excited about Christmas, then what are you doing for somebody who can never pay you back? Because, you see, we couldn't earn our way to heaven. God did something for us, and our response is out of gratitude because we could have never purchased our salvation.

With this gift of salvation, we now have eternal life. You know, one way you make an express that is by helping us reach people you could never reach. We could use your help in the name of Christmas, the real reason for Christmas, to send the gospel message to hundreds of thousands of individuals who hear our broadcasts.

As we've mentioned so many times, the alternative is a 100% listener-supported broadcast, so we really do depend completely on listeners like you to keep this important work going. Please visit TonyEvans.org today, or call 1-800-832-22 to let Tony know he can count on your support. Whether you make a contribution online or over the phone, as our way of saying thanks, we'll send you the best of Tony Evans 2020, an audio compilation of 20 of his most requested messages, as well as his popular devotional book, Called for a Purpose. Just visit us today at TonyEvans.org or give us a call at 1-800-832-22 to make your year-end contribution.

I'll repeat that contact information for you a little later, but right now let's get back to today's message. So he offers salvation, celebration, and that led to a marvelous worship. It says in verse 13, And suddenly they appeared with the angel and multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest.

All heaven broke out in worship at the presence of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is what I like to call the celebrity of the universe. We live in a day of saccharine celebrities, celebrity substitutes. People have a name because of their talent, their skill, their money, their presence, their power, all of which can be reduced to ashes in life and will be reduced to ashes at the end of life. So they're celebrity substitutes.

But we got some real sugar here. Worthy of praise, if you're going to give an Oscar to anybody. There's only one superstar of the universe, and that is Jesus Christ, who alone deserves the accolades and the glory that heaven offers. Because it says, Glory to God in the highest. It's Jesus all by himself. He is glory to God in the highest. So no name is to be put beside Jesus's name because he is in a class all by himself.

And at the birth of Jesus, it says heaven broke out in worship and gave glory to God. Every football game only has 17 minutes of contact. There's only 17 minutes where players are hitting each other. Those 17 minutes are in a one hour game. So for a one hour game, you get to see 17 minutes of action. But you're going to sit for three hours. You're going to sit for three hours to watch one hour to see 17 minutes. Now if you drive to the stadium, that's two hours to sit three hours to watch one hour to see 17 minutes. And then you got to go home, work through the crowd, get to the parking lot, drive home, that's another couple of hours. So now that's seven hours to sit for three hours to watch one hour to experience 17 minutes. Then you're going to get home and turn on Sports Center and NFL Network to look at clips of what you just saw for seven hours where you sat three hours to watch one hour in order to see 17 minutes. And then at work around the water cooler, you're going to talk about what happened yesterday.

The problem is somebody's going to be talking about a loser. See because one thing about that worship service is it's unpredictable. Sometimes up, sometimes down. But the one who we worship never has a losing season, a losing day because he's King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and he's worthy of our highest worship.

And he's worthy of it all year long because he's saving all year long. That's why I like the Magi. I know we call them the three wise men. The Bible doesn't say they were three wise men. The Bible says they were three gifts. So the assumption is they're three wise men. But when they finally came and they said, where is he, King of the Jews?

They said because we saw his star in the east. So the wise men came from the east over toward China. And so they said we saw his star, the Shekinah glory, the manifestation of his glory in the heavens, and we came to worship him.

Let me tell you why I like the wise men. Because when they arrived, Jesus was a child in the house, not a baby in the manger. So all those nativity scenes where they got Mary and Joseph and the animals in the manger in the star are wrong.

Matthew 2 says when they arrived, they saw the child in the house, and the Greek word for child is toddler. So that means Jesus is two years old or so when the wise men show up. So the reason I like the Magi is because they went to see him when they saw the star of his birth, but they didn't get to see him until he was two years old, which means they got on their camels, their horses, their donkeys, and their caravan and took a two-year trip because Jesus was worthy of the inconvenience of the travel of worship.

Some of us, when we saw it rain last night, were debating, am I going to make it this morning because he's not yet risen to the place of being worthy of my inconvenience because of who he is and what he has done and because he's Christ the Lord. But the Magi said he's worthy of worship. One of the things that you will find in the story, particularly in the book of Matthew, is the name of the Holy Spirit will show up all the time in the story. And with the Magi, it says because of what they did to worship him, the Holy Spirit led them another way to escape Herod. See, one of the benefits you get in your worship is God the third member of the Trinity guiding you on your journey of life. So I would advise you, if you know the Lord, to make worship a lifestyle and get rid of it as a holiday. Because if you're only good once a year, you're not getting all the benefits that accrue to you because you are worshiping the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

But then there was a fourth area of benefit in the birth of Christ. Verse 14 says, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men. Reconciliation. In other words, the answering of conflict. The opposite of peace is conflict. And we live in a world of all kinds of conflict. First of all, we live in a world when people are in conflict with themselves.

Because if you can't get along with you, everybody else is in trouble. So we live with our personal conflicts, our inner dialectic, our inner confusion with ourselves. And then we have relational conflict with one another, whether it's in the home or at work, and we lack peace. And then there is all manner of social conflict.

The racial problem appears to get worse and worse and the class divide continues to grow and the political fissure continues to separate people and parties. And there is no peace. And yet it says Jesus came to offer reconciliation. People being able to get along with themselves, with others, and in a world where people are divided, that Christmas at the center of it is to give peace, and He says it is to give peace among men.

People being able to answer the question, can we all get along? Dr. Tony Evans with the good news of Jesus Christ this Christmas. Before we go for today, let me quickly remind you about our special year-end offer, The Best of Tony Evans 2020. 20 of Tony's most popular messages plus his powerful devotional book called For a Purpose. We want to send you this special resource bundle as our thank you gift when you make a donation to support Tony's work for the close of this year and into the next.

Get Tony's best so you can be your best. The devotional book and 20 messages to end 2020. Make the arrangements today by visiting tonyevans.org or call our 24-hour resource center at 1-800-800-3222. That's online at tonyevans.org or by phone at 1-800-800-3222. Well, tomorrow Dr. Evans will continue his look at how we can make this Christmas a holy Christmas. I hope you'll join us.