All I Want For Christmas Is Jesus
Luke 1:26-39 Matthew 1:18-24 December 25th
Today is Christmas, and we find ourselves at the end of our series, All I Want For Christmas Is. How many of you have either given or received forgiveness this Christmas season?
How many of you have either given or received some peace this Christmas season? How many of you have either given or received some hope this Christmas? Today we are going to look at, “All I Want For Christmas Is Jesus.”
The Christmas story does not begin in Nazareth, it does not begin in Bethlehem and it does not begin in a manger. It actually begins in a garden thousands of years before Jesus is born. God had created the heavens, the earth, and all the living things on this planet. God created a man and a woman in God’s own image so that they could have a close relationship with God that was different from any of the other animals God had created. God spoke directly to them, and they likewise spoke directly to God.
God placed them in the garden of Eden which was a beautiful place with everything the couple needed to live and to enjoy life. The couple’s name were Adam and Eve. God wanted them to be free to make up their own minds whether to love God and to obey God or not. God never has ever forced anyone to believe anything about Him.
God told them, you can eat from any tree in the garden you like, but you must not eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die. There had never been death before but Adam and Eve, knew whatever it was it must be pretty bad, so they stayed away from the tree for a good while. They had a
good thing going for themselves and they knew it.
Have you ever had something good going for you, and you made a bad decision and lost it. It could have been a toy you had that you took apart and then couldn’t put it back together. It could have been a cell phone you owned and you put it too close to the sink and it fell in.
It could have been a job you had and you did something that caused you to lose it. It could have been a relationship you were in and you chose to look at somebody else for a moment to long and you lost the relationship.
Adam and Eve did okay, until Satan showed up in the garden and basically told them, they were missing out on something good. If they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would be as smart as God, and no matter what they would not die.
Have you ever had somebody try to convince you to do something you know you should not do, but you listened to them a little longer than you should have? The next thing you knew, you convinced yourself you could get away with it, so you went ahead and did it, even though you knew you shouldn’t have done it. Did you discover after you did it, that it really wasn’t all you thought it was going to be?
Well Adam and Eve, went ahead and listened, disobeyed God, and ate from the tree that was forbidden. Up until this time, they had been naked since the day they were created and felt very comfortable in each other’s presence. Once they ate from the tree sin entered into their nature. The first thing they did was to try to hide their bodies from each other. The oneness they had in their relationship was gone. Honesty went out the window.
The next thing they did was to allow fear to enter into their existence. Sin always produces fear. How many of us have done things, and afterwards were afraid that somebody was going to find out what we did. Well some of us are worried about what we did this week and even this morning.
The next thing they did was to try to hide from God. The sinful nature in them did not want to be in God’s presence, because it did not want to obey God. The next thing they did was refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Have you ever tried to blame somebody else for the wrong you have done.
You see what had happened was…. Adam blamed God and Eve for his disobedience. Eve blamed the devil. The only thing that kept them from dying on the spot was God’s mercy.
Even though God had given them a perfect environment, had been faithful in meeting their needs and did everything necessary for them, they chose to reject God for their own plan. But God is so loving that God forgives them on the spot.
But forgiveness does not mean a removal of the consequences. They were still going to die. But God was going to still try to rescue them. God prophesies that Christmas is going to come. He tells Satan, you will battle with the offspring of Eve for years to come but one day, one of her descendants is going to come and he will crush your head.
Instead of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil making them more like God, it had in turn made them more like Satan. They introduced sin into the human race, and all of us have been under its power ever since then.
Thousands of years past and then God decides the time has come to fulfill the prophecy. God sends the angel Gabriel on an earthly mission. The last time we had heard from Gabriel was 500 years earlier, when he had been sent to Daniel. But this time he goes to Nazareth to speak to a poor young girl by the name of Mary. Now Mary is just an ordinary girl whom God chooses to use for his purposes. She is engaged to be married to a guy named Joseph.
They did not have paternity tests back then, so to make sure your first child was actually the husband’s first child, after you got engaged, you lived with your parents for a year after saying, I do. You did not have sex during this one year post engagement period. Mary is in the start of this one year period.
The angel Gabriel tells her that she is highly favored by God and that God has chosen her to give birth to the one that everybody has been waiting for. Mary says I think you have the wrong person, I have not had sex so how could this happen to me. Gabriel explains that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and she would get pregnant and she was to name her child Jesus. Jesus was to be the Son of God.
It was important for Jesus to be born of a virgin. You see when sin entered humanity back with Adam and Eve, every child conceived with a male’s sperm inherited Adam’s sinful nature. Nobody teaches any of us to start sinning. It just comes with being human.
That’s why even when we want to do the right thing, we still find ourselves doing wrong. That is why God wants to give us the gift of Jesus for Christmas. Luke tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin. Luke is a medical doctor and the book of Luke is based on eye witness accounts of what happened. The only reason he would include it in the book is because it actually happened and he believed it.
Mary says yes to God’s plan for her life, and her life falls apart. What do you think her parents said, when she went home and told them, “I am pregnant by the Holy Spirit.” What do you think her friends told her?
They probably said, think what you like so long as you’re just thinking. What do you think her parents said after her pregnancy started to show? What do you think her friends said? What do you think her fiancée Joseph said when he found out this news? I can imagine Mary saying all I want for Christmas is Jesus so that when he arrives there may be something about him that will make others see I am telling the truth.
Well Joseph found out that she was showing and it wasn’t good news for him. She had embarrassed him, humiliated him, cheated on him and made him look like a suspect, but he had no desire for revenge. He wanted to distance himself from Mary and this child, but at the same time he did not want to embarrass and humiliate her. How would you have handled this situation, and how would the Christmas story have ended if you had been Joseph?
Joseph was a righteous man, and the only way he could divorce her without causing a scene was to go for a no-fault or any cause divorce which would mean he would financially have to take care of Jesus, but he would not have to be there to be his father.
Joseph was about to put this plan into action. The night before an angel came to him in a dream and told him, “Joseph forget about what others are saying and how this will affect your reputation, go ahead and 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.”
When Joseph woke up from the dream, he went to Mary’s family and said I am here to pick up my wife. Can you imagine how shocked they must have been? Here they were thinking they were going to have to refund the bridal price and did not know what they were going to do with Mary.
They were convinced she was losing her mind by sticking to her story about angels and virgin birth. Yet here was Joseph, claiming her as his wife, so that he could take her on the 65 mile journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem for Jesus to be born. All Joseph wanted for Christmas was a healthy baby to name Jesus.
Both angels told Mary and Joseph that the child was to be named Jesus. The name actually is Yeshua which comes from Joshua. Joshua is a fierce military leader who destroys the armies so that he can lead God’s people into the promised land. His name literally means Yahweh Saves. God is going to use this Christmas child as a means to save people from their sins.
We think that Christmas is about God forgiving us of our sins. Christmas is not necessary for God to forgive us of our sins. Just like God forgave Adam and Eve, God forgives us all the time whether we are saved or not. Otherwise it would be impossible for God to love us a much as God loves us. God does not wait for any of us to get saved before God chooses to love us. God loves us, in order for us to get saved, because God knows the consequences that are waiting for us if we don’t.
Jesus was born to start the process by which we can be saved from our sins, not forgiven of our sins. Being forgiven does not change our nature. It is being saved from the power of sin that is at the heart of Christmas. When Jesus comes into a person’s life, Jesus brings the gift of the Holy Spirit to live inside a person to save them from sin.
Jesus did not just die on the cross. Like Joshua, Jesus was a mighty warrior on the cross that goes down fighting. He left the cross and went to hell fighting madly to release people from the power of sin and the power of death by preaching the truth.
Jesus does more than forgive you of your sins. He makes us a new creation with a new nature and gives us the power to say no to sin. If you get Jesus for Christmas, you get the power to say no to sin. You don’t have to stay in bondage to lust, to anger, to jealousy, to unforgiveness, to drug addiction, to alcohol, to sexual immorality, to pornography, to materialism, to gambling, to selfishness, or to abusing others.
Jesus came that you might have life and have it abundantly. As nice as all the Christmas presents we have received are, none of them can do for us what Jesus can do and wants to do in our lives.
If all you see on Christmas is a baby in a manger. You need to discover that this baby in the manger is the Son of God, with more power to unleash in our lives that we can ever imagine. We have to humble ourselves and admit, if we do not allow him to save us, then we will not be saved. Our eternal destination is not going to be on the new earth that he wants to give us, but rather it will be in the lake of fire.
God has chosen a means by which we can all be saved, but even God knows that for some of us it still will not be enough. For the bible tells us in John 3:16-21 (NIV) 16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."
What will you do with the light that has come into the world on Christmas?
