All through these days, weeks, months, Joseph has been making a plan.
God knew what He was doing when He created marriage and made it the central place where mankind would be reproduced, and nurtured. Little boys will grow up to become young men. Young men will feel the urge to establish their own place in the world. Can we assume that was true of a man named Joseph?
Preparing a home, and the thought of taking on the responsibility of a wife and family stir something deep inside chest of a man. He begins to dream big dreams. He finds himself motivated to work hard - to do whatever it takes to turn over the page over to the next chapter of life that lies ahead.
In Genesis 29, when Jacob agreed to work 7 years to be given Rachel to be his wife, it says that those years “seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.” I would expect similar kinds of emotions flowed through the heart of Joseph, the carpenter in Galilee.
“…had been betrothed to Joseph.”
There are the unwritten parts of these verses this morning when it says Mary “…had been betrothed to Joseph.” Sometime before - maybe days, maybe months - Joseph had asked permission to take Mary as his wife, parents had consented, and Mary had also agreed. In that culture, an engagement lasted about a year. All during that time, the groom would be busy, preparing the place that they would call home together. In that culture, an engagement was a very serious commitment - serious enough that to break off an engagement required divorce papers. That means Joseph was as good as married in the eyes of people in his world, and in his own eyes.
Maybe Joseph was building a home by hand. We know he made a living by being a skilled tradesman. I can picture Joseph, marking off the living space in the house, building walls, thinking about living there with the woman he loves. I can picture him, setting up a workshop, starting to set some money aside. He probably thought of children, maybe grandchildren. Dreams for the future. Those help a little boy grow up into a man.
“…before they came together…”
During this period of preparation, Mary would have been planning too. Probably the date was set for their formal wedding and feast. While they were legally bound by their engagement, they still weren’t living as if they were married. This was something else Joseph was planning for. He was kept for one woman and looking forward to the day when they would finally move into the place he was preparing. For now, they were waiting.
Then, out of the blue, everything changed. Mary was “found to be” pregnant. While she was adjusting to the news of this miracle, Joseph wasn’t. His planning went from preparing for the rest of his life to just getting through this difficult part of it.
“…unwilling to put her to shame…resolved to divorce her quietly…”
Who can blame Joseph for the changes he began to plan? He was betrayed by his bride, and now he’d also face the public shame. He’s described as a “just man” - a good man who was going to try to handle a bad situation in a good way. He didn’t want to cause Mary difficulty, and it seems he could have. Instead, he was going to legally break their engagement as quietly as he could.
“…as he considered these things…”
That took some planning. In fact, that’s partly by God’s design. When Moses delivered God’s instructions about getting a divorce, it included some work and some waiting. The effort it took created some time to think things through. That seems to be why God required a certificate of divorce. It wasn’t something you just did on the whim of a bad moment.
That’s where Joseph is as we start reading v20. Plans disrupted. Dreams shattered. Spirit crushed.
Not everyone of us has experienced some heart-wrenching tragedy in life. Some of you here have experienced several. Some are even in the middle of one now. At the very least, everyone of us can relate to the experience of making plans, getting our hopes up, and then having them abruptly changed.
It’s one thing to have your plans change. You know, Dunkin Donuts doesn’t have pumpkin flavor and you have to get caramel in your coffee instead. It’s another thing to be sent a totally different direction in life - car accident, death of a spouse, job change, unexpected pregnancy, illness. Look back at your life. What surprises have sent you a different direction in life?
A number of those have the potential not just to change your plans, but to change your whole outlook in some pretty tough ways.
Ill - 1992, we were setting up the room in our house that would be the nursery for our son, making plans. We knew he was a boy. We already named him, and everything seemed in good order for his birth by induced labor July 8th. We didn’t expect that baby Stan would never come home to be with us.
Taking apart the crib, taking down the pictures from the nursery, is more than just a change of plans. It changes life.
Once you have had some difficult experiences in the past, it can become hard to face the future without some sense of fear.
For Joseph, this whole thing wasn’t just about having his plans changed. It involved having to go down a road that was demanding and hard. So God sent an angel, again, with a message you’ll recognize, again: Don’t be afraid.
Joseph had a weighty future to make him afraid; it was the kind of future that would have had him steering off the road that God was sending him to walk. He needed help not to give up; not to give into fear. So God sent the message: Don’t be afraid.
Remember, one goal of this series of messages this Christmas season is to help you have a fear-free Christmas; maybe the first fear-free Christmas you’ve had in a long time. So, straight from heaven to earth, into the life of a righteous man named Joseph, and through the story of Christmas, once again here’s this same message: “don’t be afraid.”
For Joseph, the message of hope centered around the fact that God had a plan.
1. God has a plan
Christmas ought to remind us of the way that God has all along had a plan. The details of Jesus’ birth didn’t just fall together like some cosmic coincidence.
Matthew 1:22-23 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).
That’s Isaiah 7:14. That was written about 700 years earlier.
Matthew 2:6 will point out that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, just as Micah 5:2 predicted. Micah was written also about 700 years before.
Matthew 2:15 tells us, Joseph would take Mary and the Baby and flee to Egypt, several hundred miles away. More than 700 years before, Hosea wrote “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”
Matthew makes another connection for us in 2:18, when the innocent boys of Bethlehem are murdered by Herod. “A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Those words were written by Jeremiah about 600 years before.
A person could look at history without all these prophecies and say, “Kings conduct censuses, tyrants conduct manhunts, people call babies by nicknames…” and that would all be true. But no one predicts the time and city of a baby’s birth, the actions of a king in response to it, and lays it out 700 years beforehand.
Listen, if you have a hard time accepting that the Bible is God’s word, let this part of the Christmas story help you along. Look at it honestly, and you’ll have an even harder time explaining how multiple details of the birth of Jesus were predicted multiple centuries before He was born.
Ill - We have a granddaughter expected to be born around January 15th. She’s a girl. Her name is Sophia. She’s supposed to be delivered in Springfield, MO. I’m not a prophet, but there’s a pretty good chance that most of that is going to come true, just as I’ve stated it. If it does, that won’t be overly impressive. But, if I could show you verified documents by John Wycliffe and Dante Alighieri that predict her birth, that were written in the 1300’s, that would be pretty remarkable, wouldn’t it?
The whole OT is a message, written by God, that Someone is coming. That’s a great part of the wonder of the Christmas story, and great reason to find comfort and confidence in the Lord this time of year.
God has a plan!
Just when it seems things have fallen apart, God has a way of helping us to have an Aha! moment. It may take some explaining, but it’s worth the listen. Suddenly, everything seems like maybe it’s going to be OK after all.
Once again, I want to take you into the land of Narnia, just for a couple of minutes, in the story by CS Lewis called The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The law decreed that Edmund Pevensie’s life belonged to the evil white witch because he’d become a traitor. Aslan, the great King of Narnia, quietly struck an unthinkable exchange that no one expected. He gave his own life in place of Edmund’s. In a dark and ugly scene, the witch and all her minions gathered around the great stone table to humiliate and murder the king as he willingly walked into their midst. Susan and Lucy watched it all unfold, and later came, in disbelief, to be near Aslan’s now cold and lifeless body… (Show clip, 2:21)
Once Aslan explains there was a plan all along, the next news is that the children have a part in that plan. That’s another reason to be unafraid this Christmas. God has a plan, and…
You have a part in it
The news to Joseph wasn’t just that his plans had been changed. It was also that he had a new set of plans from God. He would give this Baby boy a name: Jesus - YHWH saves! And Joseph would be the adoptive father of God on earth.
I can tell you that taking on the role of fatherhood is an ominous task. I can tell you that taking on the role of adoptive father is an ominous task. But I can’t begin to tell you what is must have been like to be named as the earthly father of God with Us.
At this point, the Christmas story can start to seem like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but let’s reel it back in here.
Joseph had a role in God’s plan. He was called to do something that God had in mind for him to do. So do you have a role.
Ephesians 2:10
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
We aren’t saved by our good works. But we are God’s good work, and we’ve been created to do good works already planned out for us.
Just like the birth of Jesus, and all of the people and places involved in it aren’t random facts and characters, neither are you! God has good works prepared, already, that we are meant to live out.
I wonder - are you doing them?
Just like God prepared a prophet named Jonah to go preach to the people of Nineveh, it may well be that God has prepared that someone is supposed to get to know your next-door neighbors and invite that family to some event at CCC this Christmas. What if that someone is you? What if that’s a good work that God has prepared in advance for you to walk in? I wonder - are you doing it?
God has prepared all kinds of works of service to be done in and through this Church family, and some of those works are specifically something He has prepared for you to do. Are you doing it? What if you’re the man, woman, boy, girl, and you’re not doing it? What will happen? Ephesians 2:11 doesn’t tell us! I’m afraid to find out one day all of things that were supposed to happen, could have happened, that God prepared to be done, but they didn’t happen because we failed to live like we have a part in it.
What if Joseph had responded to the news from Heaven by boarding a ship headed for Tarshish? Look, instead, at another person in the Christmas story who responded by doing just what the Lord told him to do. Then, sit back and think about it: you have a part in this. I wonder, what is it?
Here’s one more feature of God’s plan:
It’s bigger than you can realize
There’s no way that the words “for He will save His people from their sins” could have registered all of their significance with Joseph. Joseph first needed to figure out what he was going to do about taking a pregnant woman to be his wife. That was going to take more work than he thought before. But there was this issue of a little baby boy Who would need to be taught about God, His word, and ultimately God’s plans for His life. Every soul of all human history was riding on Joseph getting this right!
Parents, I don’t think all of you fully appreciate the significance of your impact on the eternal souls that God has placed under your care. You realize that teaching them to brush their teeth, say please and thank you, work hard in school, and ultimately attain marketable skills is important. That’s great. It is. But do you understand that your child’s relationship with Jesus Christ is more important than anything else you can teach them? Do you realize that your attitude toward God’s word, time spent in prayer, giving the Church priority in life, modeling your family after God’s design, learning to have a Christian worldview is going to come through you? It’s on you to instill in them what is really important in life. You get one shot at it. I wonder - are you doing it?
What if, right now in your home, is living a powerful preacher, a Christian author, a missionary, a Sunday School teacher, a church planter? Are you getting that child ready to go where God will lead him or her? This is on you, parents! It’s not up to a child to decide if he or she will be present for the opportunities created for them at Church. It’s on you.
That’s your children. I wish I had time to go into more detail on all of the other ministries of CCC that are bigger than you realize. I wish I could explain to everyone who cared for children how your act of service helped to create an opportunity for a young mother to be involved in Bible study and ultimately to become a Christ-follower. I wish I could help people who greeted at the doors, or who got up to get to know people as they visited CCC, to understand what an impact their smile and sincere care had on someone who needed to see it that day. I wish I could explain to everyone who makes sacrifices to teach or lead how those efforts are going to have eternal impacts. No matter what it is, when you decide to walk in the good works that God has prepared in advance for you to walk in, the impact of that is bigger than you can realize in this life.
What may not seem significant to you may be VERY big! And if you can look at your changed plans with that perspective, maybe you’ll find it easier not to be afraid this Christmas.
Conclusion:
In 1948, a high school student at church camp listened to the challenge of a missionary named Dr. Garland Bare to consider serving the Lord overseas. He became a student at Ozark Bible College, married a girl named Helen, and in the early 1960’s, Ziden and Helen Nutt moved to Rhodesia, Africa - what is modern-day Zimbabwe to be missionaries there at Moshoko Christian Mission. One of the tools they used there was films they showed to share the Gospel. Large crowds came to watch, but they seemed more like they were there to be entertained, rather than to respond to the message. So, Ziden stopped showing them. One day, while working together on a building project, a local follower of Jesus challenged Ziden to create his own films that would connect with the culture where they were living. He laughed at the idea at first, but within a few years produced the first film strip that featured Africans in it, in their local language, reflecting their local customs. Good News Productions was born. They began to travel and show these messages on filmstrips, and sometimes as many as 2,000 people would gather to watch them. But more importantly, over 1,000 people a year were coming to life in Jesus. The work moved forward. Within a short time, missionaries from all over the world were contacting Ziden and requesting similar materials, made in the language and cultures where they worked.
But there was a need. Ziden and Helen had a little girl named Lynda, born in 1966, who had special needs. Her health concerns were finally pronounced enough that the Nutts made a difficult decision.
To properly care for their little girl, they left the work in Africa in 1975 and returned to the US. It wasn’t what they had planned. It seemed like so much of what they had accomplished and that was beginning to bear fruit was now being left behind. But God had a plan.
With the Lord’s help, Ziden was able to turn Good News Productions in to GNPI, based in Joplin, MO. GNPI is, today, one of the missions we support here at CCC. It’s impact has grown far beyond what Ziden and Helen would have dreamed, especially after leaving Africa. Today, 13 regional centers and teams have produced visual and audio media in more than 100 languages and have shared the gospel message with millions of people around the world. Their goal now is to preach the good news to every tribe and tongue, in the way that is most meaningful and relevant to each of those people groups. Didn’t see that coming. And, most likely, if they hadn’t come back to the US, it wouldn’t have happened. God had a plan.
But Paul reminds us to open up our view of things:
Ephesians 3:20-21
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Lord’s Supper
The gospels record for us 7 different lines that Jesus spoke from the cross as He hung dying. The last is recorded only in John’s gospel:
John 19:28-30 After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
It is finished. These same words used here by John are commonly found at the bottom of receipts written in the 1st Century - “completed”; “Paid in full” we would say.
When Jesus said “It is completed,” He was talking about something that had been started long before - God’s plan to save mankind. The crucial moment - the time when Jesus took His perfectly lived life and laid it down in our place - was passed. It was done. That part of God’s plan was completed.
It seems that, along with the great victory of the cross, there’s an ongoing skirmish being fought until the war is completely over. It’s true in our own lives. We’re not done, and God isn’t finished working on us yet. Paul told the Philippians he was confident that “He Who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.”
That’s partly why we’re here at this moment today - because God is still at work on us, and we need Him to be.
I want to encourage us to do 2 things today - to praise God that Jesus finished His task by dying in our place, and to ask God to continue the ongoing work He’s seeking to do in each of us, until He returns again.
Offering Thoughts
In one week, we’re going to gather a special offering that we’re calling A Gift for the King. Each week, Tom and I have been taking turns speaking about that offering to help us be prepared for it. That’s why I’m standing here right now - to say something profound and inspirational that will result in maximum return next week. Not quite so much!
What I want to do is remind us all to consider what the Church is all about. There’s a reason we try not to take too many “special offerings.” That’s largely because taken too often, they won’t be “special” anymore. At the same time, we know that there are people who are eager to meet needs when they are placed out there and talked about. That’s what A Gift For The King is meant to be. But there’s always a danger that somehow an emphasis will become too much of an emphasis and that misplaced emphasis will create something it shouldn’t - like taking our eyes off of what the Church is all about: Loving God…loving people.
We’ll continue to point out that the building we meet in is not the Church. It’s a physical building that we’ve set aside and use, but we’re not dependent upon it. All along the way, that has been clearly spoken about at CCC. I wasn’t here when the new addition was put on, but I have heard stories and seen pictures. We’re not the only church family to do it, but I find it very much encouraging to know what’s under the carpet in Fellowship A. All over that room, written with markers, are verses of Scripture that the people of this Church wrote there - reminders that this physical building serves a very spiritual purpose; that it has been set aside for the Lord’s use. By the way, that’s what the origin of the word for “holy” means.
Having a place to gather, to worship, to share life, to eat together, to laugh, to cry together, and all the other things I listed a couple of weeks ago, helps us be a family. Let’s keep the emphasis where it should be. Let’s use this building to honor the Lord Who has blessed us with it. And, in the process, let’s keep it useable just as surely as it had to be financed to build it in the first place. Its purpose hasn’t changed.
There’s a scene in Jesus’ ministry not long before His crucifixion when Mary comes before His feet with a precious treasure. It’s ointment, sealed in an alabaster jar, probably a life savings for her. She takes that precious aromatic ointment, breaks it open, and pours it out on Jesus. Some are indignant and start to grumble. I’m glad I wasn’t there saying what they said, “Why this waste?” Here, now, reading about it in the NT, I get to think of a good zinger to answer such a question. And the response is, “When anything is given to Jesus, is it wasted? When anything is given over to serve the Lord, can it be too extravagant?”
Next week, as we give, let’s honor Jesus. Let’s take an offering that will indeed be a gift for the King, worthy of the King. Let’s give it with the same kind of adoration that Mary brought when She poured out her gift on Him. And when it’s done, we’ll rejoice that we have deliberately, thoughtfully, worshiped our Lord.
