What Will You Do With The Christ Child?
Mathew 1:18-2:1-12 Luke 2:4-18 12/22/2019
Let’s see what type of groups we are made up of this morning. Suppose you went to a restaurant and ordered something, but when they brought the dish to you, it was not made the way you had ordered it. How many of you are going to take the initiative and say to the waiter, “this is not what I asked for, please take it back and prepare the way I ordered it.”
How many of you are going to be disappointed, but you will eat around it and only say something if the waiter asks you how it is? How many of you are going to eat a little, but still leave a tip? How many of you are going to leave it, say nothing, and not leave a tip?
What is it that gives you the right to act in any one of these ways? You’re right, the fact that you are paying for the meal gives you certain rights to handle the situation in the manner you choose. It’s your money, so you should be able to determine how the meal should be prepared for your liking.
But what if you have been invited to be the dinner guest of a famous person. The person has catered the meal, and everyone is serve the exact same dish. You are already seated at the table and the food is served to you without any input from you. It’s obvious the host has spared no expense to provide you with this free meal.
But the meal is not prepared the way you really want it. What rights do you now have to complain about what is being served? Actually the only right you have is to choose between eating the meal and not eating the meal. What are you going to do with meal?
Christmas is actually about a heavenly host by the name of God, who realized that we are all in need of a meal that can nourish and sustain us. God has served up to us in the form of a manger, this Christ child, named Jesus, who one day will declare, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Here is the problem with what God has served. It is the same Christ child that is being presented to all of us, but there is something in us that will cause us to react differently to the meal that God has provided for us. We are going to look at the meal and try to decide if the meal meets our specifications, our desires, and what we think is in our best interest. Now I know some of us may be wondering if the meal was actually sent by God.
I think one thing we can all agree on is that this world today is a pretty messed up place. With all the money, the power, and the wisdom of the brightest minds on the planet, we are no closer to ending poverty, crime, sexual abuse, slavery, in-equal justice systems, racism, sexism and oppression. Not only do we see these things on a national and international level, we also see them on an individual level.
If we are completely honest with ourselves, we see them on a personal level in which we ourselves have a problem with greed, envy, selfishness, anger, un-forgiveness, hatred, and disobedience toward God. It’s hard to argue against both the world and us as individuals are in need of a Savior.
That is why the angels announced gladly to the shepherds, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you. He is the Messiah, the Lord.”
The good news of Christmas is that God is ready to do something about the pain and suffering going on in the world and in our own lives. All of us are included in those words “great joy that will be for all the people” because all of us need a touch and a change by God. What were the reactions to the meal that God had provided for the world to eat. Let’s look at the reactions of some of the Christmas characters as they answered the question “What will you do with this Christ child.
The first group we look at are the shepherds. The angels are not sent to the good people in the temple to announce that Jesus is coming into the world. Instead they are sent to the shepherds. The shepherds were out in the fields guarding their flock of sheep. Among occupations, they had a very lowly place in society.
Think of a dirty with little pay that job you wouldn’t want to apply for and you can understand the nature of the job of a shepherd. During the first century in Israel shepherds were considered outcasts. They were not allowed in the city and were not trusted by the general public. When you passed by one of them, you would hold your purse or wallet tightly, because they had the reputation of being thieves.
God knew all about the reputation of the shepherds, but God wanted to show, God’s love has no limits. This coming Savior is to be for everybody, even those at the bottom of the social ladder who may have done things they were not very proud of in their past. Nothing we have done can exempt us from God reaching out to us in love in order to rescue us.
Once the angels told them about the Savior being born and where they could find him, they said to each other “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has told us about.” They had to make a decision of what they would do with the Christ Child. They went and saw him.
After seeing him, the shepherds and went and told others what had been told them about the child. They made the decision to tell others about what they had seen and heard, but there is nothing here to suggest that they opened their lives to be changed by the child. They probably kept Jesus in the manger for the rest of their lives. They could tell the story of his coming, but never got around to asking how is this suppose to change my life. If a savior has come into the world, why am I no different now, than I was the day before he came? Why do I keep on making poor choices.
Some of us have been like the shepherds. We come and see Jesus on Christmas or Christmas Eve, and we celebrate this glorious event of God stepping out of heaven into the world of humanity, but we keep Jesus in the manger.
We don’t ask the tough questions of how this event is suppose to change my life? We keep God at a distance of “awe”, but we do not invite him into the dirty and messy areas of our lives where he wants to come. For deep down inside we know that God wants to start a cleaning process, but we are not ready for that right now. Just like the shepherds, we want to keep on being shepherds for just a while longer. We just want to see the Christ Child, but that’s as far as we want to go for now.
Then there were the soldiers from King Herod who came looking for the Christ child. There only reason for attempting to come to Jesus was that they were under orders to do so. They would have much rather been somewhere else having a good time, than to be searching for what they considered to be an insignificant child. But then again, who knows, there might have been something in it for them if they were the one who actually came across Jesus first. Perhaps the commander would give them a reward, maybe an extra day of leave or something. Something to make it worth their while to search for this child.
Some of us are like the soldiers. We can think of a number of other places we would rather be right now. We may be thinking “If my family had not of dragged me to church or my wife or husband insisted that I come because of Christmas Sunday, I’d be doing something else right now.”
We see the whole idea of coming to Jesus as a burden, a chore to be performed or a religious duty to be checked off. We don’t see the so called “good news of great joy”, because we don’t feel as though we need all that religious stuff. We’re tough, we’re rough and we have our own swords to make our own future.
But then again, who knows there might be something in it for me. I did hear there were special cookies and hot apple cider after church today. Or maybe I might make a business contact that can help me in the future. We do not come to Jesus on the basis of who He is or what He’s come to do. Somebody ordered us or begged us to show up and that’s what we have done. And just like the soldiers, we have arrived to late to do what were sent here to do. We miss the gift God has sent to us, and we go after false substitutes.
We march to the tune of the dominant voice and we don’t consider the pain and agony of others that are hurt by the choices that we make. For the soldiers it was Herod’s voice they were listening to as they killed the boy babies and the little boy toddlers in the city of Bethlehem. If you only come to Jesus out of obligation or orders, who or what is the dominant voice that you are listening to.
What allows you to be so confident, that you are not in need of a Savior? What makes you believe that God’s meal for you is unacceptable or unfit for you to eat. Whose meal are you choosing to eat, and how long will it satisfy you? Why do you think, that just because you are doing what others told you to do, or doing what you think is best for you, that it will somehow exempt you from responding personally to God’s love. God’s making an offer to you personally. If Jesus is not the good news, do you consider yourself to be the good news that God has sent into the world, that is making all the lives around you that much better?
Another Christmas character that wanted to come to Jesus was King Herod. When King Herod found out from the wise men that they had seen the star which indicated the King of the Jews had been born, the Scriptures state that “King Herod and all Jerusalem was disturbed.” Maybe that baby born in the manger was more significant than they had thought. Of all the Christmas characters, King Herod knew best what Jesus’ coming into the world meant for him personally.
Herod knew the people were expecting God’s Messiah to come soon. Most of God’s people expected the Christ to be a great military and political deliverer similar to Alexander the Great. Herod understood, you can only have one king at a time. Herod fancied himself to be the King Of The Jews. But he had not gotten that title from being a descendant of King David. No, he had been appointed king by Rome.
Many of the Jews hated Herod and did not seem him as their rightful king. If this baby was a rightful heir to the throne of King David, King Herod could face a lot of trouble from the Jews. There might even be a violent political uprising seeking to throw him off the throne. He saw Jesus as a potential threat to his position and to everything he held dear.
Herod simply lied to others in order to get to Jesus for his own ends. He was one of the first great pretenders. He said to the wise men, “Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” Herod wanted others to think he was far more in touch with God than he really was. Hidden behind his professed faith in the child, was a desire to kill the child at all cost.
He recognized that he could not encounter Jesus, and then go on living in the same manner as he had before. He more than all the others recognized, that if he accepted the meal that God had provided, he would have to yield his life, his authority, his possessions, and all that he had over to the authority of another. He did not want that meal.
Some of us are like Herod. We don’t mind all the religious things around us, we don’t mind going to church, and we even believe some of the Scriptures, but we are not ready for a radical transformation of our lives.
We can’t trust that yielding to a new king is actually going to be a better move for our lives. We have gotten use to being in charge and we plan to stay in charge. We will hang around the meal that God has provided, but we have no intention anytime soon of actually eating it.
But like Herod, we also see that meal as a threat that must be removed from our lives. It bothers our conscience. It keeps us away at night thinking, “what if this is possibly true”. “What if God really does exist?” “What if I have to answer for my sins.”
When Herod’s plan to silently get rid of Jesus fails, he shows his true colors. He orders all the male boys two years and under to be killed to make sure he removed God’s meal once and for all. He wanted to destroy the story of the Christ child by killing the child itself. He failed in his attempt.
He never was able to get any closer to Jesus than he was at the time he first heard the news. The distance from Jerusalem to Bethlehem was only 5.2 miles. But as far as Herod getting close to Jesus it may as well have been 5.2 billion miles. Their lives did not intersect again in this life. Herod died while Jesus was in Egypt with Mary and Joseph.
How close are you to Jesus in your pretending to want to give him everything you have? If you don’t make up the distance, it doesn’t matter if you were a mile away or a million miles away, you are sending back the bread of life that God is trying to serve you.
Finally, the magi or the wise men from the east showed up. Not much is known about these men. We do not know how many of them there were. We assume there were three because we know they brought three gifts. They certainly were not kings. We do know they paid the highest price to come and to see Jesus. They traveled the greatest distance nearly a 1000 miles. Their goal was to come and worship the child.
We know they paid attention to what God was doing in the heavens. How they knew the star indicated the birth of the king of the Jews we do not know. These wise men could have been Jews that remained in Persia after the Babylonian exile was over. If they were, they would have had the Old Testament Scriptures to study from to know of the coming Messiah. Or God could have appeared to these people just as God had appeared to the shepherds.
The Magi were the only ones to come to Jesus with a gift that cost them something personally. Their sole motive in coming was to come, kneel down to worship, and to offer the Christ child the best offering they could. They brought to Jesus, gold, frankincense and myrrh. They didn’t know it, but Mary, Joseph and Jesus were not going to need these expensive gifts in order to escape to Egypt in Africa where they would be living for the first few years of Jesus’ life.
Some of you here are like the wise men or the Magi. You know that following Jesus means leaving others and possessions behind. Your goal is to come and to eat what God has prepared for you. You find joy in worshiping the Lord because you are grateful for what God has done. You know that you did nothing to deserve God’s favor and that God’s extension of love to you was a free gift that you chose to accept and to keep.
The only group that came or tried to come to Jesus that had a fresh experience with God after running into Jesus was the wise men. God’s protection was upon them, in that they were warned in a dream to not go back to Herod, and not to even take the same route back to their country.
When you give your life to Christ, God continues to have a hand in your life. The wise men still had a difficult journey ahead of them, but they journeyed knowing God was looking after them. They came in faith and they left in faith. They did exactly what God wanted them to do with the Christ child.
My friend what about you. As we come to the close of another year, “What will you do with the Christ Child?” He’s God Bread of Life. I pray you do not send him away, but rather you would choose to come and to worship. Eat the bread God has for you.
