What does your name mean? If you’re not sure, you can probably look it up on the internet and find out pretty quickly. Surnames in particular often meant something about a person’s ancestors -
Many names tell us about a person’s parentage, like O’brien, Anderson, Erickson, MacDonald. Some names are a reference to where a person is from, like Hill or Stone. Some names come from a person’s disposition – like Lovejoy or Jolly.
Some names are from a person’s occupation. They help us to sort out what people are supposed to do in life – Porter, Cooper, Smith, Baker, Carpenter, Cook, Taylor, Fowler, Inman, Sawyer, Wagner, Fischer, Mason, Miller, and Ottman
Names often mean something. The first place we get this idea is from Adam in Genesis 2. Adam said she shall be “woman” for she was taken from “man” (the Hebrew is isha and ish). As God interacts with man very early on, we read how He often changes or assigns names because they mean something – Abram, “Exalted Father,” gets his name changed to Abraham, “Father of a multitude.”
Some of the names or titles of Jesus that we’ve been looking at in this series come with some sort of an explanation – He’s called the “Son of God” because His conception and birth are God-enacted. He’s called “Immanuel,” because the miraculous nature of His birth assures us that God, through this person, is “with us.”
This morning, we’re in Matthew 1, where the angel Gabriel is helping Joseph deal with the thought of taking Mary as his wife, even though she is inexplicably pregnant. Joseph’s plan is to quietly end the whole marriage, to back away from his love and try to pick up the pieces of his shattered life.
Matthew 1:20-25 (NIV)
But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"--which means, "God with us." When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.
The name Jesus was a common name. is the Greek form of the Jewish name Yeshua - Joshua. It means, “Jehovah is salvation.” The angel says that’s the name this baby is to have. It’s His “first name,” if you will. It’s what He’ll be rightly known as, because it encompasses the whole reason for His entrance into the world. To save His people.
This name – Jesus – tells us some important truths we all need to understand this morning…
I. Mankind Has Fallen
I’m sure that in pulpits all across the country today much is being said about Friday’s school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 20 children and 6 adults were senselessly shot. If it doesn’t tear your heart, you need to have an exam to see if you have one. We want to learn from the whole thing. We want to learn why it happened, because we want to figure out how to stop it from ever happening again. We want to learn how to stop the hurt, and how to save lives in the future. We want to come up with answers that will help people. I’m afraid that a lot of those answers will continue to elude us, or we would have had them many years ago.
But there’s this fact that we can’t avoid learning from it all, if we’ll listen. That is, that we’re living in a fallen world – that our lives are impacted daily by the presence of evil. The Bible puts it to us this way:
Romans 5:12b (ESV)
… sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…
Romans 3:23 (ESV)
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Just in case you were among those who thinks that if people would just follow their hearts we could all get along…
Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV)
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
Last Friday, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy said, “Evil visited this community today.”
He’s right. While others may spin and speculate, these words are true. Evil visited that community openly and harshly. Satan is all about ruining human life. There is no age restriction, no sacred ground where he will not tread.
One of the greatest tragedies of Friday is that so many will reflect on the whole event and fail to understand that the world has fallen, and that the enemy is working hard to destroy humanity. That has been his agenda since Genesis 3 and it will be until his final judgment.
If I could have 5 minutes on the media, I’d use it to express my grief to the hurting and then take the rest of the time to point out that we’re living in a stained world that’s crying out to be redeemed and restored to its original perfection! I’d want people to understand that their Creator is also grieved by the effects of evil, and that’s the only way we can begin to make sense of a world where innocent children and their teachers are gunned down. Mankind has fallen! Listen to it! What else could it possibly take to prove it? Do we really need to argue the point?
Romans 8:21b-23 (NIV)
…the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
Ill - The #1 commercial of 2008 was a TIDE detergent commercial. It showed a man in a job interview. He had a stain on his shirt, and the stain is speaking. Every time the man spoke, the stain also spoke out loud, so that the interviewer couldn’t hear a word the man was saying. The point was to show how important it is to get the stains out of your shirt, because if you don’t that’s all that people will notice about you.
The world we live in has a stain we can’t ignore. It’s fractured at its core. It’s always there, and it’s always interrupting our lives from being the way we want them to be. Turn on the news any other time as well, and you’ll be quickly reminded of it. We don’t know how long the earth was perfect and Adam and Eve enjoyed perfect fellowship with God. We simply know that they rebelled, that mankind has fallen and that has continued ever since.
(II. We Can’t Save Ourselves)
But this is Christmas time – the season of perpetual hope! Right?
Even though things look out of balance and the world seems wobbly in the way it’s spinning, there’s hope, right?
Surely there’s enough good to be found on earth to fix things.
Surely we can come up with enough kindness, even in the worst of people.
There has to be enough good deep inside of people, if we can just help them find it.
Surely we’ll eventually get it together. Right?
Ill - To quote from the great theological masterpiece, “The Muppet Christmas Carol,” in the opening song about Ebenezer Scrooge,
“He must be so lonely. He must be so sad.
He goes to extremes to convince us he’s bad. He’s really a victim of fear and of fright.
Look close and there must be a sweet man inside. Nah!”
For centuries, people have been seeking to right themselves with their Creator. It’s called religion. Religion is man’s effort to somehow please God, appease God, satisfy God, or find God. It’s all about what man does to get himself out of the mess he realizes he has created. Some religions are easy-going and kind-sounding; others are rigid and difficult. All of them have this goal – to somehow benefit ourselves by doing enough of the right things. That’s religion.
At the very center of it is ME, and what I need to do in order to ultimately help ME in some way. Religion. If you came here this morning seeking religion, you might be a bit thrown off by this.
The problem with religion is that it’s man-centered rather than God-centered, and the idea that somehow man can conjure up from within himself enough virtue to fix himself. That’s sure not what we read in Isaiah:
Isaiah 64:5-6 (NIV)
5 You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved? 6 All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
Christmastime cheer that ignores this fact is voluntary blindness. There is no “season of perpetual hope,” no “spirit of Christmas,” no reason that “makes everything bright,” if the idea is that somehow, on our own, we’re going to make everything OK.
The Baby’s name means Savior because there is some saving work that needs to be done. We can’t take care of that ourselves. If we could, we wouldn’t be reading about a baby Whose name means Savior. We wouldn’t be reading a Christmas story at all, because there wouldn’t need to be one.
One of the reasons that people get so lost in the Christmas season is because they skip these first 2 points. No wonder we get rushing around and aren’t sure why. No wonder we get depressed. No wonder we get frustrated that people take the emphasis off Jesus - and no wonder they can’t understand our frustration. The Christmas story without understanding our need for a Savior, is little more than an interesting Dickens novel or a fascinating collection of trivia.
Ill – A man dives into a pool, and later emerges on the surface. Not a very exciting story. But, what if a man watches as a desperate swimmer in a muddy sinkhole helplessly goes under for the last time? What if the swimmer’s only hope is for someone to rescue him, but there’s only one who’s near enough and strong enough to save him? What if that rescuer, without hesitation, dives headlong into the murky waters, and for what seems to be the end, doesn’t reappear again? Then, what if that same man, suddenly bursts from the depths, gasping for air, and holding in his strong arms the one who had sunk below, now saved from certain death? That story would be a story worth repeating.
That’s why the story of Christmas is worth repeating, year after year. It’s the greatest rescue story ever told – and it makes sense only when we understand our own need to be rescued.
Friend, if you’re here this morning and you’ve been counting on your own goodness to somehow be enough, please understand that you are surrounded by a group of people who understand our own fallen condition and who understand there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves. We need a Savior.
Another important truth we get from the name Jesus is that…
III. God Wants Us Back
It’s not just a NT concept. Long before the birth of Jesus there was this understanding of God and the fact that He has always had a plan for our forgiveness.
Psalm 103:9-14 (NIV)
9 He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; 10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. 11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; 12 as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. 13 As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; 14 for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.
Psalm 130:3-5 (NIV)
3 If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared. 5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.
In the book of Hosea, God is telling the story of His desire to have His people back. He uses the prophet Hosea to tell the story. God commanded Hosea to marry Gomer, a woman who would eventually leave him. She would bear children – who were to be given names like Lo-Ammi “not my people” and Lo-Ruhamah “Not loved.” Gomer left Hosea and went into a life of prostitution. That could have been the end of the story. Goodbye and good riddance, Gomer! No one would have blamed him. But God told Hosea to go after her, to buy her back, and to take her home as his wife again. It wasn’t just an unusual story – it was an illustration of the way Israel had run off from God, and He was patiently going to great lengths to bring them back to Him as a nation.
In Ch 11, God is reflecting on Israel’s rebelliousness and stubbornness and what they as a nation deserved - His wrath! But then He says,
Hosea 11:8-9 (NIV)
8 "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. 9 I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim. For I am God, and not man-- the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath.
God’s dealings with Israel are often a precursor to the way He deals with all of us. We’ve run off. We deserve for God to be angry at us – like a wife who has run off and been unfaithful in the worst of ways. But God has different plans. He created us to live with Him forever. That’s why He made us in the first place. So, God has a plan to bring us back.
You need to know this morning, or if you already knew it, you need to be reminded, that God wants you back. We’ve wandered off from God, and spurned His love like a rebellious wife. But God has been wooing us back to Himself.
2 Corinthians 5:19-21 (NIV)
…God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
God wants us back. Everything He has done points to this fact. The whole story of the Bible – the history of Israel, the early church, and even what is yet to come, is all about the rescue effort to bring you back, because He wants you back. God sends a Savior, at great expense to Himself, because He wants you back. Jesus is preparing a place in Heaven and He’s going to come again and take His followers to be with Him so that where He is where we’ll be also. A Savior.
So, let’s look at this last important reminder…
IV. The Baby is How God Will Save Us
“He will save His people from their sins.”
I don’t know about you – no wait, I do know about you – I need a savior because I’ve sinned. So have you! I’m glad that His name is Jesus, because I need a savior! We need a savior. The Jews need a savior. But this phrase, “His people” can’t be just for the Jews. The gospel message is for the Jew first, but Jesus didn’t come just so that Jews could be forgiven and saved.
1 Timothy 4:10 we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe.
No, “He will save His people from their sins” must mean “the Jesus people” – the ones who are willing to take on His name, to identify with Him, to be part of His family. Like Paul wrote,
Philippians 3:10-11 “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
See, Paul was one of “His people.”
Ill - April of 1970, Apollo 13 experienced a malfunction in outer space that resulted in an explosion and a serious, life-threatening situation for the 3 astronauts on board. What was going to be a lunar visit quickly changed into a massive rescue effort just to get the men home. Thousands of minds back on earth went to work, completely changing the mission, improvising, recalculating, re-thinking all in an effort to guide the spacecraft safely back to earth while conserving oxygen and power long enough to keep the astronauts alive. Finally, as they approached the touchy re-entry phase, there was a whole list of things that had to go just right if they were to survive. The angle and speed had to be precise, the batteries had to have enough power to function, the parachutes had to be able to deploy. Hundreds of contingencies had to all come together, or they would be lost. They entered the atmosphere and the radio signal went blank for the typical 4 minutes of silence. People around the world held their breath. The radio blackout went another 33 seconds, and suddenly Apollo 13 crackled over the radio again. They had safely made it past the atmosphere. The rescue was a success!
This Baby is God’s rescue plan. Yikes! Talk about everything needing to go just right! Talk about a lot of little details, and if one thing goes wrong, the whole mission is over!
God takes this wide-scale operation, this huge undertaking, and makes it to hinge on a frightened young couple and their helpless newborn child huddled in a little village in ancient Palestine. Right away, there will be those who want Him dead. He’ll grow up in a time and place where life was even much more uncertain than it is here and now. This baby is how God will save us! An awful lot had to all come together just right. No doubt, there were plenty who doubted it could ever work. Angels themselves long to comprehend all this.
Praise God His name is Jesus because He will save His people from their sins!
Conclusion:
There have been a lot of magnificent rescues over the past couple of years – 2010, 33 miners were trapped in Copiapo, Chile, for 69 days ½ mile underground. The world cheered as they came, one after another, out of the ground alive.
We need these truths of Christmas the way trapped miners need rescue workers.
Joel 2:32 (NIV)
32 And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the LORD has said, among the survivors whom the LORD calls.
The Apostle Peter repeated these words on the day that the Church began. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved…
