Sermon.
New baby changed world.
Reading Lukes gospel
LK 2:4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
LK 2:8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."
LK 2:13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
LK 2:14 "Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."
LK 2:15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."
LK 2:16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.
LK 2:21 On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived.
LK 2:22 When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord" ), 24 and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: "a pair of doves or two young pigeons."
Everynow and then something happens in the world that changes the whole world around it.
sometimes that change is for good and sometimes it is not!!!
William Wilberforce
History of William Wilberforce
How William Wilberforce Changed the World
By Eric Metaxas
Remembering the Impact
We often hear about people who “need no introduction,” but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it’s William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction—whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity—it’s Wilberforce.
What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that’s ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again—and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.
The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today—and because of Wilberforce—the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it’s impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that’s the wild miracle of his achievement—that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.
There’s hardly a soul alive today who isn’t horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can’t fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.
The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn’t even mention it publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade—on the buying and selling of human beings—but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to begin to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle—brutal and heartbreaking—would take twenty years.
Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and books. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce’s accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his lifelong goal on his deathbed.
Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, “preferred party to mankind.” But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: He pulled the world around a corner, and we can’t even look back to see where we’ve come from.
Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions—with your voice and mine—shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew—and what you and I know today—that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible—no matter the cost.
But how is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen “the monster” and are trying to tell everyone else about it—and no one believes them.
To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did, we have to see that the “disease” he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: He vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mindset that supported it is gone.
Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization’s view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it’s nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment: It was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.
In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age 26 and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God’s reality—what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God’s reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers’ keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
These ideas are at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least 18 centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would.
That was what Wilberforce changed forever.
William Wilberforce changed the world forever for good ------------
It’s not what you know, but who you know. And Osama bin Laden knows all the wrong people.
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 and developed a bad case of "middle-child syndrome" -- he was the 17th of 52 children. I think we all know how difficult that can be. But while Jan Brady contented herself with agonizing over "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia," bin Laden decided on a much larger target for his rage — the entire world.
Osama bin Laden’s terrorist networking organization al Qaeda has unified a diverse collection of smaller extremist groups into a worldwide coalition responsible for tens of thousands of deaths over the last decade.
His war on America culminated in the September 11 attack on America which destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and made the world’s arch-terrorist into a household name
Two people who changed the known world one from a christian base - for good.
the other from a moslem base not for good.
However neither of these men have made any where near the lasting impact on the world as a baby born in an obscure
middle eastern village two thousand years ago.
The baby Jesus, born to Mary and her husband Joseph had really nothing about his circumstance about his birth to suggest what was about to follow.
This one small baby who grew up in a very small geographic area in Israel has influenced Governments through twenty centuries - he has infl;uenced charity - in fact gave birth to charity in any true sense of the world - He has changed worship throughout the world - His love has completely changed lives.
Nations living in darkness where human sacrigfices and appalling immorality raged have been totally transformed.
billions of lives have been affected and those who have closely followed Jesus Christ have seen increible change in their lives.
the world has never seen anything like this baby before or since.
Let me share you the story of just one man.
in Korea, Joon Gon Kim, a well-known Christian leader, witnessed his wife and father slaughtered before his eyes by Communist sympathizers from his own village. He himself was beaten senseless and left for dead. He survived the beating and asked God to give him love for the souls of his enemies. He eventually led 30 Communists to believe in Christ, including the person responsible for the death of his family members.
Not only does the love of Christ impel Christians to face persecution and death but also to work to make the world a better place. Mother Theresa was an outstanding example of a life poured in the service of Christ. Of her well-known ministry among the poor, she said: “Our work is only the expression of the love we have for God.”
This takes us back to the manger:-
In the reading we read earlier we read this:-
LK 2:8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."
LK 2:13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
LK 2:14 "Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."
LK 2:15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."
LK 2:16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.
This is an extraordinary series of events
Combine this with the wisemen who also came to Jesus as we read about in matthew along with other events surrounding the birth of Jesus including prophicies that describe his life in pinpoint accuracy written hundreds of years before his bitrth.
In this reading we read about an amazing range of people and heavenly beings all involved in this one great event.
There are theAngels - Powerful heavenly beings who have so much of the light, love and power of the living god in them that tough season hardened farmers are reduced to terror by their very presence.
There are those tough sheep farmers who take a backward step to no man or beast but who quickly realise that even they are embroiled in something that has taken them way beyond their depth.
Then of course the Wisemen astute university type men who are astute and brilliant and yet spiritually street smart.
These wise men find that they two are bought to the humble birth place of the christ Child.
Of course there also is the Parents Joseph and Mary.
All of these are powerful testimony to the fact that there is something of enormous significance happening here in Bethlehem.
What is it that is of such significance????
We have already noted the incredible changes the birth of this one child ushered into world history.
Important and profound as these changes are - they actually pale into the background compared with God’s incredible plan.
The amazing thing about this is, it affects us personally.
This baby came - lived - died and rose from death for one purpose.
That purpose is that ordinary - everyday - dare I say it plain pack woman and men like you and bme can find a peace with god that will take us into eternity.
As Paul wrote in romans chapter 3 and verse 23.
for the wages of sin are death but the gift of God is eternal life in christ Jesus.
No one could think of a man on death row being set free by someone who bvolunteered to take their place.
But that is precisely what Jesus christ does for every man woman and boy and Girl who will accpet him as their saviour and Lord.
The really incredible fact about christmas is that the majority of the world will reject Jesus and refuse to take him seriously.
Osama Bin Laden has done this to his great peril - but there is hope for him yet he can still change!!!
William wilberforce took Jesus very seriously and had an amazing influence on the world around him.
Which of these two should we choose to copy.
The terrorist or the kind reformer.
Incredibly most will follow the terrorist and will have no lasting impact on the world around them.
The rest hopefully all of us here to night - however clumsily will follow christ and like him we will by the power of the
cross and the holy spirit bring enormous change on the world around us.
what will you do???
To do nothing is to side with the likes of bin Laden.
Let us pray.
