The Christmas Story, Our Love For Each Other
Genesis 3:1-14 Luke 1:26-45 12/9/2018
Today we are in part 2 of “The Christmas Story. Last week Pastor Toby preached on God’s love for us. I will look at our love for each other. Many times when we think of love, we think of romance. Did you know that someone could pick out the right person for you in every way, and it can still turn into a disaster with you turning against the other person.
There was a song by the Bee Gees, “How a love so right, can turn out to be so wrong.” A lot of us are going to have some good intentions for Christmas, but despite our best efforts, some things are just going to go wrong. There will be some breakdown in relationship problems.
To truly understand Christmas, you need to understand how Christmas got started in the first place. It all began with two people who were loved by God, and who loved each other. They had the perfectly arranged marriage, because it was God who put the two of them together. Now if God put you together, and you still have problems, you can imagine what’s going to happen if you get to choose on your own.
The Christmas story began with God giving Adam and Eve, just one commandment to demonstrate their loyalty and trust in Him. God told them, they could eat of any tree in the garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because when they ate of it, they would die as a result. It’s not that Adam and Eve did not know that doing right was good and doing wrong was evil. They had that head knowledge. God didn’t want them to have the heart knowledge of the experience itself because it would corrupt their hearts.
It’s one thing to know that cocaine or fentanyl is bad for you. It’s another thing to know the actual experience of the use of it through your body. Satan’s lie to Adam and Eve was that by keeping them from the experience, the sensation of eating the fruit, God was limiting their freedom to enjoy the world. What they found was that, once they broke away from God through disobedience, it would not be long before they broke away from each other.
The moment they left God, the love they had for each other shifted, and they tried to hide certain parts of themselves from each other. We have been playing this hiding and shifting behind things ever since. We find its hard to be 100% honest or to tell the truth to each other completely and honestly.
When God challenged them on whether they had broken the one commandment he had given them, they did not want to take responsibility. Adam blamed Eve and God. “The woman you gave me, she gave me some and I ate. If everybody had of left me alone, I would be okay.” Eve blamed God and the serpent. The serpent deceived me and I ate. God if only you had of created me a little bit smarter, I would have seen through his lies.”
Isn’t it amazing that Jesus is interested in loving us at all, knowing how deceitful and prideful we can be. Why on earth would he be willing to die for us, when we won’t accept responsibility for our sins putting him on the cross in the first place.
Adam and Eve had been contaminated by sin, and once sin is a part of our lives, we are quick to blame and quick to change the way things really happened. Neither of them mentioned they spent some time looking at the fruit and thinking wow this looks good, they did not mention it was tempting to taste, and they did not mention the like the promise it would turn them into little gods.
The worst thing about it all is they had broken their love relationship to God and their love relationship to each other, and could not do a thing about it. This is where Christmas begins with a promise. God tells Satan, one day, one of Eve’s descendants would come into the world and crush the head of Satan. It’s interesting that God said, it would be Eve’s descendants, not Adam and Eve’s. God intended to send a Savior that would be born of a woman, but not with a man’s help. It would take a supernatural event to crush Satan because he is a spiritual being.
Adam and Eve were sent from the perfect garden of Eden that God had created for them. Hard work became a part of their lives. The love they had for each other was a struggle. Their first two children, Cain and Abel got into a fight and Cain killed his younger brother Abel over the issue of jealousy. God banished Cain into exile. Sin grew and grew upon the earth, until our love for each other was filled with all kinds of violence, anger, unforgiveness, cruelty and lack of kindness to each other.
But God never forgot his promise. Thousands of years later, there is a young lady by the name of Mary who finds herself in the midst of another arranged marriage. In the first century, the groom’s family would always have to pay a negotiated price to the bride’s father. After a settlement was reached, the engagement would be publicly announced. The couple would continue to live separate and apart for a year. They were not to have sex during this period to demonstrate the bride’s purity. The engagement was binding and could only end by death or divorce. If the bride was found to be pregnant during that time, the groom could annul the marriage, or the couple would be married immediately and begin living together.
Mary’s father was no doubt happy with the price he had fought for his daughter, the joy of his life. Her mother is thrilled because she knows of Joseph’s reputation as a righteous and honest man. Joseph is happy knowing he could afford the price to get married. His father is glad that his son is marrying into a good family. Mary is content knowing who is going to be her husband. Everything looks perfect, until God intervenes into the situation.
God’s love for all of them and the rest of us, sets forth God’s plan for all humanity. God sends the angel Gabriel to Mary to let her know, “I have some good news of great joy. Of all the women in the world since the beginning of creation until now, God has chosen you to have a son, who will become the Savior of the world. Your child, is going to be the fulfillment of God’s promise. You are to call him Jesus, for He is to be the Son of the Most High.”
Mary’s response is, “how can this be, since I am a virgin.” Mary knew that to get pregnant you had to have had sex. The bible makes it clear that Mary and Joseph did not have sex with each other until after Jesus was born. The angel Gabriel tells her, “the Holy Spirit is going to come upon you and cause your pregnancy so that the Holy One born will be called the Son of God.” Remember, God had told Satan, that it would be the descendant of Eve, that was going to crush his head.
Mary’s response to the angel’s offer was, “I am the Lord’s servant, May it be to me according to your word.” Since the angel had mentioned to Mary that her relative Elizabeth had also received a miracle from God about a pregnancy, she immediately went to see Elizabeth. It was a three day journey from where Mary was to where Elizabeth was.
The Bible doesn’t tell us all the details we would like to know. It is unlikely that Mary would take a journey of three days without first talking to her parents about it, especially since she stayed there a full three months with Elizabeth. There were no telephones to talk back and forth.
Do you think, there may have been tension in the relationship between Mary and her parents when she announced, she believed she was about to get pregnant, and that Joseph would not be the father of the child. If you were her father and you had negotiated this price and now your daughter is claiming a future pregnancy by someone other than the family you negotiated with how would you feel?
Would you actually believe this stuff about supernatural birth? Would you want Joseph’s family to hear anything about this? How do you love a daughter who is trying to humiliate you? How do you love a father, who thinks you’re becoming a disgrace?
What about Mary’s mom and their relationship? How do you convince your daughter that she’s just imagining things. There was no reason for an angel to appear to her. Why on earth would she think God would choose her for such an amazing task? She had done her best to raise her daughter with wisdom and skill, and now she is either choosing a path of sin or she’s becoming mentally unstable. How do you love a daughter you want to support, but can’t understand what’s happened to the little girl that you raised? How do you love a mom, who cannot accept what God wants to do in your life?
Their solution is to get some time and some distance between them. There are times when we are so close to a problem, that we need to step back and try to get a better perspective. Go and talk with someone else who can provide some godly counsel. Since the angel had spoken of Elizabeth, that’s where Mary’s parents most likely agreed to send her.
Mary left town no doubt under a shroud of secrecy. The lack of love from others was not what she expected leading up to that first Christmas. Her faith in the promises of God had seemed to hurt her relationship to her family. Sometimes following God is going to lead to some anguish, some hurt, some disappointment, and some depression. You’re trying so hard to do right, but things just aren’t happening as they should.
Elizabeth is the first person that Mary gets full love and acceptance from, but only because of the way God is at work in Elizabeth’s life. Elizabeth knows Mary’s story is true, not because Mary told her, but because of Elizabeth’s child, jumping up and down in her womb the moment she heard Mary’s voice. Mary stays with Elizabeth for three months before returning home.
I’m not sure how much love was waiting for Mary at home. What do you do as Joseph, when your bride to whom you are engaged comes back after being away for three months. Rumors are going around that she might be pregnant. You talk with her and she admits she’s pregnant, but only by the Holy Spirit. You are a righteous man, but you cannot accept this story.
How do you love someone who won’t tell you the whole truth, someone who has humiliated you in public, and someone who has betrayed your trust? Joseph feels his only options are to get even with Mary with a public divorce, or to keep her from being disgraced by getting a private divorce. Of course a private divorce means he will be financially responsible for this child. He chooses the private option.
Everybody we have met believes that there actions and attitudes were the right thing to do and that they were justified in the way they chose to love or not love. But they are all dealing with limited facts. All the feelings they had of being betrayed, being humiliated, being embarrassed, being lied to, being blamed for things they did not do, were all things that Jesus has felt concerning us, and yet Jesus, the Son of God, chooses to love us. We so much want God to understand our reasons for why we are justified in treating people the way that we do.
Could we accept for the moment that God has not put the same thing in each of us? What’s easy for us to do, is not the same for someone else, or even what’s clear for us is not always clear to someone else. Yet Jesus finds a way to bring us all in under His love. He even goes so far as to say, “I’m just going to give you one commandment in your relationship to each other, “A new commandment, I give to you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”
This Christmas, do we want to love others as Jesus loves them, or love them as they measure up to our standard of performance.
This first Christmas just looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Who will be there when Mary delivers this baby? What will become of this child born out of wedlock? How can this child become anybody’s Savior? Where does Mary go from here. How does Joseph rebuild his reputation? What is family life going to be like for Mary and her parents. What kind of grandparents are they going to be?
God sends an angel to Joseph before he can go through with is private divorce 20 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. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,[f] because he will save his people from their sins.”
Joseph then took Mary home with him. How did Mary feel, knowing that Joseph did not believe her until an angel spoke to him. There are going to be times, when we wished things would have happened differently with the ones we love, but sometimes its okay to accept the next best thing. Don’t let your pride cause you to lose out on what God wants to do either in you or through others, because it did not go according to your plan or the way you wanted. Our job is to love others, not change them or even save them. Just do what Jesus told us to do.
God might be doing something far larger in this situation than anyone could realize. We can’t see 20 years down the road. The very thing we’re fighting against or has caused us the most disappointment is something that God is going to turn into a diamond in our life. Only a few people really wanted Jesus to arrive on that first Christmas when they first heard about him. He truly was an unwanted child.
Aren’t you glad he made it. Because he made it, he lived long enough to die for our sins and to be raised from the dead, so that this Christmas we can allow the love of Jesus Christ to flow through us so that our families can be saved. The Christmas Story offered the promised of restored relationships. The same promise is still being offered to us if we are willing to invite Jesus Christ to come into our lives and determine how we will choose to love others.
