Christmas According To Christ

Christmas According to Christ

Text: Hebrews 1:1 - 18

By: Ken McKinley

Everyone here today has heard the Christmas story. We’ve all heard it; and we’ve heard it from just about every perspective possible. I mean, I’ve heard it from the perspective of Mary and Joseph. I’ve heard it from the perspective of the shepherds, the wise men, King Herod, even the inn keeper who turned Mary and Joseph away. Some preachers even get so desperate that they try to preach a sermon from the perspective of the animals that might have been in the stable… from the donkeys or the sheep. Now I don’t know about you, but to me… if I ever get to that point, it’s probably time to stop.

And the fact is; everyone has a view of the Christmas story… and not all of them are actually Biblical. I really like to get the perspective of little kids. It’s always fun when they tell me the Christmas story. I read the other day about a little boy in Sunday School, and his Sunday School teacher had the class draw a picture of the Christmas story on a card for their parents. The teacher noticed that one little boy had drawn a picture of Mary and Joseph, and baby Jesus, the shepherds, the wise men, and over in the corner was a really big, fat guy. The teacher asked the boy, “Who’s that?” And the boy said, “Oh, that’s Round John Virgin… you know, from the song Silent Night.”

Well what I want to do this morning is look at Christmas from the perspective of Jesus, and I hope that this will help us all understand what Jesus was looking at and thinking of, and why He came. So if you’ll take your Bibles and open them up to the Book of Hebrews 10:1 – 18 (Read).

Now in that passage; I want to hit a few of the main points, but specifically focus on that phrase, “A body You have prepared for Me.” And if you notice the author of Hebrews writes this as if Jesus said this, and some of your Bibles will have a footnote and they will tell you that this is a quote from Psalm 40, and then a little later, in verses 16 and 17 He quotes Jeremiah chapter 31. So which is it? Are these quotes from Jesus, or David and Jeremiah? Well; all three. The Bible is a book from Jesus, about Jesus. In-fact John describes Jesus as the “Word”… the Greek word there is “Logos.” He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God, the same was in the beginning with God.” And, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And Paul tells Timothy that “All Scripture is given by inspiration from God.” And so; since the Bible is from Jesus, and it’s about Jesus, then if we are going to understand the Bible, we need to keep our eyes on Jesus. Every book is telling us about Jesus. It’s a story about how Jesus came and did what we couldn’t do for ourselves, in order to bring us back into a right relationship with God. That’s essentially the story of the Bible. So the context of our passage this morning is the whole Bible.

Now I’m not going to read the whole Bible, but I want you to understand that the Christmas story is what the Bible is pointing to… All of the Bible is talking about how man has sinned, and rebelled against God, and how man – despite his best efforts, and despite all his religion, and works… man couldn’t get himself back into a right relationship with God. But… The Bible also teaches that God had a plan from the beginning. That God made a promise that the Seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. And then it goes into this long history of how God called for Himself a particular people, and How He would teach them, and lead them, and how He would have them institute a sacrificial system that would be a type and shadow of the ultimate sacrifice that would come.

The Bible also talks about how God’s people would go through things and experience things, and how they would continually rebel against Him and His ways, but how none of that would deter Him from fulfilling His promise. And about 4 A.D. the beginning of that fulfillment started to take place, when a body was prepared for Him. Look at verse 5 (Read).

So you see; what Jesus is saying there is that all of those Old Testament sacrifices were just a shadow of what was to come. They weren’t really the ultimate reality of what God wanted. They couldn’t cleanse sin from the soul, they couldn’t wipe clean our guilty consciences, and they couldn’t satisfy the righteous requirements of our holy God. They were a temporary fix whose purpose was to point man in the right direction and prepare us for the ultimate reality.