Grab Your Ticket: How God Planned Christmas Series

{NOTE: This series is best used with the clips provided by HomeWord with Jim Burns and Max Lucado. You can find many free resources at this link: http://www.homeword.com/PolarExpress/ You may also be able to secure the clips by contacting them.}

This Christmas Season - Believe

“Grab Your Ticket: How God planned Christmas”

GALATIANS 4:4-7

INTRODUCTION:

In the movie, the Polar Express, the “Ticket” is essential to ride to the North Pole. It’s important enough that when hero-boy finds that the girl has misplaced her ticket he hides hers in his shoe, but as you’ll see, he almost loses it.

The Ticket - Clip - 1:15

Ever had that kind of day? An “oh no!” day? Maybe you feel your life slipping, unable to find stable tracks or the maybe you feel that no matter how many “louies” you hang or how many “richies” you throw, the things you prize most are slipping away. Well, God wants you to know this morning that you never have to worry about a spiritual “oh no!” day with Him. You see, God had you in mind from the beginning of time and has taken care of everything you need to ride aboard his train. No, His train doesn’t go to a mythical place, like the North Pole, but to a very real place: heaven. And never is His care, His provision seen more clearly then in how God planned that first Christmas.

Gal. 4:4 says- "When the right time came, God sent his son into the world..." Please understand, Christmas was not a last minute brainstorm by the Creator, some hectic attempt to rescue man. As we learned last week, God had prepared to reconcile man to Himself even before man sinned. Rev. 13:8 talks about the Book of Life being opened at the end of time and says- "That book belongs to the Lamb who was slaughtered before the creation of the world." And although I don’t fully understand it, the Bible teaches, that God knew, even before He created man, exactly what was going to happen and so planned, from the beginning of time, to send forth His Son as a Redeemer, that is, to buy us back from sin. And every detail was prearranged, every circumstance was perfect, every event happened right on cue.

Last week we saw our need for Christmas, that we needed to climb aboard God’s grace train because we are sinners and the real meaning of Christmas is that Jesus came to save us from our sin. This morning I’d like us to consider the details of God’s plan for Christmas. I believe that when we truly understand how God planned that first Christmas, we’ll not only comprehend how we can secure our ticket to heaven, but we’ll better appreciate God’s love for us all through the year and won’t miss the real reason for the season.

I. PREDICTING IT THROUGH PROPHECY: vs:4b

God prepared for Christmas, first, by predicting it through prophecy. God had predicted, for hundreds of years, exactly what was going to happen. He used prophecy to prepare man and also prove His identity. Now the world tries to predict the future. But people aren’t able to perfectly predict what is going to happen tomorrow, let alone for centuries to come. Meteorologist have all kinds of sophisticated instruments but they cannot exactly predict what is going to happen with the weather. That’s never truer than when you live here in Colorado is it? It’s often said, “The only thing predictable Colorado weather is you can’t predict it!” The expert odds makers in Las Vegas analyze almost every athletic contest, they predict the winner & even the point spread. They are very skillful but seldom are they exact and sometimes they’re way off base. After all, some of them predicted the Bronco’s would win the AFC West and the Chargers would finish last. So much for that prediction.

So whether it is meteorologists, odds makers, or psychics, they are all imperfect when it comes to predicting the future. But God’s predictions are always without flaw, always right on target, always perfect! Because only God knows and holds the future. And He proved His Word and authenticated His Son by predicting details about the birth and life of Jesus, hundreds of years in advance that all came true. We discovered last week that the first prophecy of the coming of Christ was actually at the beginning of time in Gen.3:15. The first prediction of Christmas was when God said to the serpent, "The seed of the woman will crush your head.. You will strike his heel."(NIV) In other words, Satan was going to have a temporary victory over a descendant of Eve, which was Jesus.. striking His heel at the cross. But Jesus would have the ultimate victory, the one that would crush the head of Satan, defeating everything the devil had done by dying on the cross and then raising from the dead. An interesting thing about that prophecy is that it speaks about the seed of the woman. Most of the time when the Bible speaks about a seed, in terms of offspring, it refers to the seed of the man. But in this prophecy it only speaks of the seed of the woman. Why? Well, that was a prediction that this particular offspring would be born of a virgin, He would have no earthly father but be conceived by the Spirit.