We’ve Got Joy For You, The Joy Of The Lord
Calvary 12/9/12 Genesis 3”:1-12 Luke 1:26-38
Today we are in our second sermon in the series We’ve Got Joy. Last week Pastor Toby spoke on the Joy of the church, next week Pastor Kellie will speak on the Joy of the Angels, and today I will speak on the Joy of the Lord. It’s hard to go through the Christmas season and not see the word Joy. Joy is that feeling you get inside when something wonderful has happened
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Imagine for a moment that you and a friend were on a trip and you were having a great time out hiking in the wilderness, you sit down to talk. Your companion leans back and yells ouch. You immediately see a poisonous snake scurrying across the path, but not before leaving its venom in your friend. You both know without the antidote to the poison your friend is going to die. You look in the backpack for the antidote because you knew you had been warned to watch out for that snake. Yet when you get to the bottom of the backpack, you realize the contents have been dropping out because of a hole in the bag.
If you stay there and do nothing your friend dies. You can’t move your friend, because motion would make the poison flow that much faster through the body. Your cell phone is out of range. You tell your friend, “I’ll find the antitdote. I’ll come back with it. I promise.” You go back down the path you’ve hiked. Your search seems hopeless and you know time is running out. You have no idea of when or where that red package might have fallen out of the bag.
Then all of a sudden you see something red up near the path. You hurry toward it. It’s the emergency pack that had fallen out. You pick it up and you squeeze it, and you head back to your friend. You have a great joy in your heart, but you’re wondering are you going to get there in time. You arrive and see your friend still propped up against the tree, and you come running saying, “I found it.”
The feeling you have inside is some of the joy that the angel brings from the heart of God in our New Testament Reading. You see in our Old Testament reading, God was walking with two companions whom God loved dearly. They were called Adam and Eve. God did all that he could to put them in a perfect surrounding where they had all they needed in life, with none of the pains of sickness, sorrow, heartache or misery of any kind.
God told them, to just show their love for God, by refusing to eat from just one tree in the garden. They could eat from all the other trees, but not this one. If they did eat from the tree, they would surely die.
Things worked out beautifully until one day a poisonous snake showed up in the garden. This snake was beautiful and intelligent. You know him by the name of Satan. He convinced Adam and Eve that God was trying to hold them back from having a good time. God was not telling the truth about the tree leading to death. As a matter of fact, if they did the opposite of what God had instructed, they would become just as smart as God. How often do we think that God is holding is back from having a good time, from some of the rules God has in place. How many of us discovered the hard way, God was right the first time and we wished we would have listened.
Well Adam and Eve, chose the good times over God, and immediately found out the consequences of their actions were far worse than they had imagined they could be. They found they had broken their relationship with God, they had strained the relationship they had with each other, they had begun to know what sorrow was, they were removed from the garden of eden ,and they would no longer live forever because death was now a part of creation. God was heartbroken over his loss of relationship to them, but God is holy and cannot accept sin without a payment for it.
But God gave them hope, that one day things were going to change. God told the serpent Satan, “one day one of Eve’s descendants is going to crush your head.” The word crush implies complete destruction. One day one of Eve’s descendants would come into the world and undo the work Satan had done and bring people back into a real relationship with God.
Hundreds and thousands of years past. Only God knows the day when it’s going to happen. God gives people prophecies to let them know the day is approaching, and God provides them with signs. Then comes that moment when all of history comes together, and God is going to intervene in the life of humankind in a very dramatic way. The way you felt, when you saw that medical packet lying on the ground, because you knew what it meant for your friend, was the way God felt, when it was time for Jesus to come into this world in human form.
The angel Gabriel who stands in the very presence of God , was immediately dispatched from heaven with the joy of the Lord. God said Gabriel, “Get ready, get ready, get ready. I want you to shoot earth once again. You see six months earlier, God had sent Gabriel to tell Zechariah that he and Elizabeth were going to have a baby. That baby had been prophesied about, and that baby became John the Baptist. John the Baptist was the prophet who was to preach to announce the adult ministry of Jesus Christ when Jesus came on the scene.
God had determined that John needed a six month headstart to get the world ready for the work that Jesus was going to do. But the moment Elizabeth reached the six month of her pregnancy, God sends his angel Gabriel with the joy of the Lord, to a world that had been tricked into believing, it really was better off without God. God could see us, propped up against the tree dying, in need of an antidote to the sin and problems in our lives. God is saying, “I’ve got it. There is still hope for you. If you give me the chance I can change things for you.”
But God does not do things in just any old fashion. The antidote that was to come into the world was God’s son, Jesus. It’s hard for us to understand but, Jesus existed in God before all of creation. Jesus is God. God is actually going to come into this world in Jesus.
He looks for a human body to come through, because the prophecy said that he would be one of Eve’s descendants. So Jesus has to be both God and Man in order for him to crush and destroy the head of Satan, and to put people back into a right relationship with God. The joy of God, is that now, all of this is possible. The timing is right in accordance with the prophecies.
But the prophecies also indicated that Jesus had to come through the line of King David, a king of Israel who had been dead for centuries. So God had limited Himself through whom He would enter this world. God sends the angel to a young woman, whose name was Mary.
Mary was engaged or pledged to a man name Joseph, who was a descendant of King David. If you traced Joseph’s fathers back far enough into time, you would eventually reach King David. So part of the reason that Mary receives the visit from Gabriel is because she is getting married to someone in the lineage of King David.
The angel comes to her with the joy of the Lord, saying “Greetings, you who are highly favored, the Lord is with you.” Now Mary woke up that morning doing what she usually does. She had no idea that an angel would be visiting her that day. She had no inkling that her life was about to be forever changed. For her it was just an ordinary day. That’s what’s so amazing about our God. God comes to us when we least expect it. God intervenes in our lives in ways we could never imagine. What looks like an ordinary day, can become a life changing event, when we are touched by God.
When Mary saw the angel, she was both troubled and afraid. Was the angel really talking to her? Was the angel really real? How could she be highly favored by God, and when did God catch up to her. People often think to be favored by God means to have riches, fame and power.
Mary had none of these. As a matter of fact she was quite poor, young and female. These qualities would have made others think she was highly unlikely to be used by God in any major way. Her husband to be, didn’t have enough clout to get them a room in the inn, and he didn’t have enough money to present a lamb as a sacrifice when Jesus was born. Nazareth where she lived was a town far from the center of the religious life at the temple. It had the reputation of a ghetto. Religious people asked, can anything good come of out Nazareth?
Yet God, send His good news of joy of an antidote, to a poor, young girl, in the ghetto of the nation by the mouth of an angel. Not just any angel, but the angel Gabriel himself. He and Michael are the two most powerful angels in the scriptures. God is so excited with joy because God knows that God’s plan is going to work. God knows that there is hope for all of us, because of what God is going to do.
The angel Gabriel tells Mary. “ You don’t have anything to be afraid of. You have found favor with God.” Do you know what it means to find favor with someone. Favor gives you special access to someone. It allows you to expect them to come to your aid, when you’re in a crisis. All you have to do is just let them know of your situation and they actually want to do something to help you out. Favor gives you an advantage in a situation.
This whole season that we call Christmas is actually the story of how God wants to let us know, that we have received God’s favor, and God would love to have us get in touch with him. As a matter of fact, we complete God’s joy over us by willingly choosing to get back in contact. We are greatly blessed when we choose to access God’s favor.
The angel informed Mary that she had found favor with God, but it would not have done her much good if she had said, “oh that’s alright. I’m good. I appreciate it, but I don’t need it right now.”
How many of us are there today, in which God wants us to know that His favor is there for the receiving, but we think we have a better plan. Even though we are lying against the tree, dying from the poison in us, we believe that we are going to come up with an antidote on our own.
We think “Thanks God, but no thanks. I got this covered.” Mary never would have known what she was missing out on. In the same way, most of us have no idea on what we’re missing out on by holding God at bay. Even those of us who have given our hearts to God, are still not sure just how much of ourselves we want to completely turn over to the Lord. God has a plan for your life, but God loves you too much to force you to take it.
The angel told Mary, in Luke 1:31-33 (NIV) 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."
Notice the emphasis is not simply on the birth of Christ, but on what Jesus is going to become. God’s joy is due to us no longer having to be under the reign of the ruler of this world who is Satan himself. God is ready to establish a kingdom in which Jesus is going to be the ruler of us all.
Mary’ response was “ how could this be since she was a virgin.” If the angel had come a year or two later, Mary could understand all of this from a human point of view. She and Joseph would be married and ready for a family. But part of the reason of a year between the announcement of the engagement period and the actual wedding was to prove the bride was free of all sexual activity. Mary understood that without sex, there would be no pregnancy.
That detail of being a virgin, was not going to be a hindrance to God’s plan. Don’t forget, God created the first man out of dust. No sperm involved He created the woman from a side of the man. Again, it would not be the first time a sperm was not involved in creation.
The angel told her Luke 1:35-37 (NIV) 35 The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. 37 For nothing is impossible with God." When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you can do more than you ever imagined, because its not you doing it.
The angel reminds Mary, that it’s God who is going to do this work. God will start it and God will finish it. He reminds her that nobody believed that Elizabeth could have a child because she was out of eggs. Not having a sperm involved was not going to stop God going from sharing God’s joy with the world. From a theological perspective, Jesus is born with the seed of God to keep him from having the same sinful nature that we have. Like Adam, Jesus was sinless from the beginning. Unlike Adam, Jesus chose to remain sinless.
The Virgin Birth is true, because it’s in the word or God and Luke who tells us about it is a physician. The Virgin birth is a doctrine of most Christian churches. We recite it with the Apostle’s creed. But the only person who had to believe in the Virgin Birth was Mary. She believed and said, “I’m your servant to do whatever you want to do with me.” Our salvation is not dependent on believing the virgin birth. It is dependent on believing that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and that God raised him from the dead. We start there. We then let the Holy Spirit work in the lives of others to bring them to the knowledge of other truths about God.
We can be deceived into thinking that Christmas is about wishing everybody peace and joy for a season. No Christmas is recognizing that you were slowly dying from a poison called sin, and that you could do nothing about it. But God came along and said with great joy, “I have the antidote.” His name is Jesus.
This Christmas season, don’t argue with the cashiers about Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. Instead be willing to simply let others know that Jesus has given you joy and hope and that He wants to do the same for them. We serve a God who wants to give us His favor. Please go out and let the whole world know. Let Jesus be your antidote for the temptations you will face this Christmas. Don’t look to a bottle or to a drug. Don’t look to trying to control everything and boss others around. Don’t look to trying to please everyone by going into debt. Recognize the joy the Lord is giving to you, because God’s favor is upon you.
