Ready For Jesus The Messiah (Advent / Christmas)
(Luke 1:39-40)
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Luke 1:39-40
39 At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea,
40 where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. NIV
Well, it’s now the first Sunday in December, and the Thanksgiving holiday is officially behind us. Most of us probably spent Thanksgiving eating too much turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and our favorite vegetables and pies. Some of us (me included!) may have watched way too much football and golf on TV (I don’t know…is it possible to watch too much football or golf?).
So now it’s time to think about the upcoming Christmas holiday. Again, we’ll probably eat and drink too much, and watch too much TV. But the Christmas season has a whole lot of other distractions, too, probably more than any other holiday.
We have to worry about shopping (getting just the right gifts for all of the people on our lists). Many of those same gifts will then have to be returned the following week (including clothes that don’t fit, and items the person already has or doesn’t like). The malls are crowded this time of year, and the traffic and parking are slow.
If you get a real Christmas tree each year, then you need to decide where to buy it, the size and the type of tree you want, and how much you want to spend. Then you have the trouble of putting it into the car, driving it home, and getting it to stand straight and sturdy in the house. If you have an artificial tree, which we just bought this year for the first time, you can avoid some of the problems of getting and keeping alive a real one. But then you have to be able to put a fake tree together. With dozens of parts, that wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be.
Christmas decorations need to be purchased and taken out of storage. Putting up those decorations takes a lot of time and energy, because it has to be done "just right". There are decorations for the windows, the doors, and the outside shrubbery. And let’s not forget decorating the tree, with garland, lights, balls, and all types of other keepsakes we’ve gathered over the years.
I’ve saved the biggest material distraction until last, and that’s money! We need to be able to pay for all of the other distractions I just mentioned, and a lot of us overspend in trying to buy all of those things that we think we need.
There are many of what I call religious distractions, things that keep people from remembering the Christian meaning of the season. Jewish people celebrate Chanukah, and many blacks observe Kwanzaa. In the City offices where I work, decorations are up for these holidays. However, putting up a stable scene or a star of Bethlehem is not usually permitted in government offices (despite the fact that many employees who object to Christian symbols consider themselves to be sensitive to cultural and religious diversity!).
Today, I want to talk about Mary and Elizabeth’s readiness for the birth of the Messiah. In Luke 1, verses 39-40, which I just read, we see that immediately after the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, telling her that she would give birth to the Messiah, that Mary "got ready" and "hurried" to visit her cousin Elizabeth. I want to look at what these two women of faith can teach us about our own readiness to celebrate our Messiah’s birth, as well as our readiness to see Jesus when He returns at any time to rapture us into heaven.
Mary and Elizabeth have a number of things in common. First, they are cousins, related by family ancestry.
Both women also have unusual and miraculous pregnancies. Although Elizabeth was barren and elderly, in Luke 1 we read that she becomes pregnant, and she will later give birth to John the Baptist. Mary is a young woman from the city of Nazareth, a virgin who is unmarried, yet she also becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit and will give birth to Jesus the Messiah.
Both women would have endured varying amounts of religious and social ostracism. Elizabeth lived most of her life unable to have children. In her Jewish culture, the problem of a woman being barren was viewed as punishment from God for some grave sin. Mary was a young girl who, although engaged to Joseph but not yet married to him, became pregnant. According to Levitical law, she could have been stoned for the sin of fornication. While this didn’t happen to her, no doubt people in her culture gossiped and maligned her for the sin of which they wrongfully judged her, just as people undoubtedly did to Elizabeth for what they mistakenly assumed about her.
Despite what people back then might have thought and said about them, we know from the Bible that both were women of faith. They were ready for what God had planned for them, and were willing to be used in whatever way God desired.
This could not be said as quickly for the men in their lives. When an angel himself appeared to Zechariah and told him the news that his wife Elizabeth would have a son named John, Zechariah had doubts and questioned it. He was then made mute, unable to speak, until Elizabeth first showed her faith in what the angel had said by telling people that her son would be named John. Then when Zechariah was asked and wrote the same thing on a piece of paper, only then did his voice return.
When Joseph learned that Mary was pregnant, he initially planned to quietly break the engagement to her. Only after Joseph was told in a dream that Mary had became pregnant by the Holy Spirit, did he then accept the message that Mary had received from the angel Gabriel.
Because the births of John the Baptist and Jesus the Messiah were both foretold in the Old Testament Scriptures, I think we can safely assume that both Elizabeth and Mary knew God’s word and trusted in it. They looked ahead to the first coming of Messiah.
Today, as New Testament believers who live in the Church Age, rather than in the Age of Israel like Mary and Elizabeth did, we look ahead to the second coming of Jesus the Messiah. This will happen at any time, when He first raptures the Church, removing us from the earth to be with Him in Heaven. Then after a seven-year period that we call the Tribulation, God will finish the Age of Israel and Jesus will then return to the earth to rule here for one thousand years, a period of time that we call the Millennium. There are some believers today who expect this to happen in a few weeks on New Year’s Eve, when the calendar changes from 1999 to 2000. However, Jesus Himself told us in the gospels that "no man knows the day nor the hour" when He will come again.
But while we as 20th century believers should look forward in Bible prophecy to the Rapture of the Church, we also in December of each year, celebrate the Advent and Christmas seasons. During Advent, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and December 25th, we try to go back in our minds and spirits to a time before Jesus’ birth. We remind ourselves how He came, born humbly in a stable in Bethlehem. We remember why He came, to ultimately die horribly on a wooden cross to pay the penalty for the sins of the whole world. In this sense, we prepare for His first coming, as Mary and Elizabeth did.
Just as we today have so many social and religious distractions that get in the way of our readiness, so did believers back at the time of Jesus’ birth. Their primary distraction was religion. Instead of knowing the Old Testament Scriptures and walking in the spirit of God’s word, the religious leaders (the Scribes and Pharisees) had replaced faith and the true spiritual life with religion, a system of man-made laws for the people to follow. They turned true Judaism into legalism, that is, into hundreds of rules and requirements that the people had to observe. Most of these centered around what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath.
For instance, if mud were to splash onto your garment on the Sabbath, you were not allowed to wash it, because that would be work. Instead, you could let the mud dry on the garment, squeeze the muddy area one time, and brush the mud away with your hand once. Anything more than that and you were then considered to be doing work on the Sabbath. Another example is, that if you had an upper bunk bed and had forgotten to move the ladder to it before the Sabbath began, you were not allowed to move the ladder during the Sabbath. There were hundreds of these kinds of rules.
Because of this legalistic type of religion, in the gospels we often see how enraged the religious leaders became when Jesus would do something like heal a lame person on the Sabbath. To make a spiritual point that angered the Scribes and Pharisees even more, Jesus would then tell the lame man He just healed to "take up his bed" and to go tell the religious leaders what had happened. Not only would the healing then anger those leaders, but the sight of someone carrying his bed on the Sabbath would directly upset the legalism that the Scribes and Pharisees taught.
Since Jesus the Messiah was born into this kind of a religious environment, many Jews were not ready for Him mentally or spiritually. Religion got in their way.
Christianity today can be a religion that distracts the majority of believers in much the same way. The spiritual life becomes a set of do’s and don’ts, such as:
- I go to church on Christmas Eve or morning;
- I don’t drink alcohol nor go to Christmas parties like unbelievers do;
- I only listen to "godly" Christmas music and radio stations;
- I won’t have a Christmas tree in my house because it’s a pagan symbol;
- I don’t let my kids believe in Santa Clause.
Now don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. These things may be good if a believer does them out of a true love for God, acquired through knowledge of His word and walking in fellowship with Him. More often, however, such things are turned into religion. They are rules practiced by carnal people in a spirit of arrogance and hardness of heart. When observed as religion, we see such attitudes and observances expressed in ways such as bragging ("Aren’t I a good Christian for doing or not doing such and such…!"), and often in judging ("…and you’re not!").
Believers today who observe Christianity as a religion, as basically a list of do’s and don’ts, are usually not practicing the true spiritual life as the Bible teaches. They are not consistently studying the word of God. They are not frequently confessing sin, nor having an active prayer life. When Jesus returns a second time, many Christians will be unprepared for Him, just as so many Jews were unprepared the first time He came to a stable in Bethlehem.
But just as Mary and Elizabeth were both prepared for Messiah’s first coming, we too can be ready for celebrating the Advent and Christmas season, and for Jesus’ second coming. It’s just a matter of our free will. We only have to choose to prepare ourselves. How can we prepare for Advent and Christmas? Here are some of the main things that come quickly to my mind:
- We can read some of the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus the Messiah in books such as Isaiah and Micah;
- We can read about Mary and Elizabeth’s preparations, Jesus’ birth and John’s ministry in the opening chapters of the four gospels;
- We can also read in the gospels about the efforts to stop Messiah’s coming, by people such as King Herod and his massacre of Jewish infants;
- We have many opportunities during the Christmas season to share our faith with family and friends;
- There are many people with physical and spiritual needs for whom we can pray;
- We can thank God in prayer for sending Jesus to save us;
- We can teach and remind our children about the real meaning of this season;
- We can participate in many of the Christian-related activities at our local church.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying and participating in so many of the secular activities occurring during the Advent and Christmas season. But if we are truly ready mentally and spiritually for celebrating Messiah’s first coming, as well as our anticipation of His second coming, we can enjoy this season for all of the right reasons. We can replace carnal attitudes of worry and despair with those of love, peace, and joy, God’s greatest gifts to us in the form of His son, Jesus the Messiah.
Thank you.
Copyright © 2000, Frank J. Gallagher,
Abiding In The Word,
http://members.aol.com/abidingitw
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