sermon on 6-Dec-09 by Pastor Ron Woodward

Romans 15:13

One of the most familiar—and mysterious—of all the Christmas stories in the Bible is the visit of the magi … the coming of the wise men to offer homage, and gifts to the baby Jesus.

Nobody knows how many wise men there were because the Bible doesn’t tell us …

… but in a crèche, or a nativity scene, or a work of art you always see 3 wise men, right?

Why is this? Simply because they brought 3 gifts to the Christchild … and folks have figured:

3gifts … must have been three wise men, right? But we really don’t know for sure.

But what were those gifts the wise men brought? Who can tell us? (gold, frankincense and myrrh) Those were the gifts the wise men brought to Jesus.

But let me ask you another question—when Jesus came to earth, the Word become flesh, what are the gifts that the Christchild brought down from heaven for you and me—in fact, for all who receive him in simple faith?

(“Salvation” … “the forgiveness of sins” … “grace and truth,” etc.)

But this morning I want to speak about 3 other gifts that I really hope each of you will receive from Jesus this Christmas. You won’t find them wrapped under the Christmas tree, but Jesus wants to give them to you, nonetheless.

These 3 gifts are hard to come-by in today’s world, but they are gifts that the Christchild gives to all who enter into fellowship with him—to all of us who open the door of our hearts and invite him in … when we hear his gentle knock on the door during this Christmas Season.

My text this morning is Romans 15:13—and it’s a benediction, a blessing, something God wants to give to all of us. Let me read it:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

So, among other gifts that you could think of, I want to suggest that the Christchild wants to give each of us the gifts of joy, peace and hope—not only during this Advent Season, but as an ongoing vital part of our Christian lives.

I. First of all, joy …

If you’re like me, sometimes joy is hard to come-by—especially if I’m not in real close fellowship with Jesus from day-to-day. Often times, I’ve found myself crying out to the Lord like King David did, “Restore unto me the joy of my salvation …” How is it with you? Is joy sometimes a fleeting commodity?

But if we turn to the Gospels, we’ll notice right away how joy is a common theme in the descriptions of that first Christmas.

• Right in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke when the angel of the Lord appears dramatically to Zechariah as he stood in the temple by the altar of incense, the angel promised that the birth of a son to this elderly couple would be “a joy and a delight” to them.
• And then, when Mary went to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth said, “As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.” (Amazing, isn’t it?)
• And then, of course, in the words we know so well, spoken by the angel to the shepherds: “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people.”

And that’s true. The joy the angel announced brought to the world a once-and-for-all joy, a joy that has resounded down through the centuries among all who have dared to follow Christ.

• This joy was foretold by Isaiah when he prophesied that, “The ransomed of the Lord will return; they will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads, gladness and joy will overtake them, and sighing will flee away.” (By the way, do you know of any other world religion that is so characterized by joy … and by singing?)
• In the early church you see this joy—in a Philippian jail as Paul and Silas joyfully sang hymns of praise after being severely beaten by the authorities. How could that be?
• And then, right afterwards when the jailer’s family came to Christ, Scripture says, “and the whole family was filled with joy, because they had come to believe in God.”
• Many of you know that the little New Testament letter of Paul to the Philippians has a theme of joy and rejoicing throughout—even though Paul wrote the letter from prison in Rome.
• And then, down through history we read the stories of countless martyrs who went to their deaths singing because of this unquenchable joy that Christ had given them.

But please don’t forget! This joy is a gift from the Christchild! It comes from Jesus! After instructing his disciples in John 15, Jesus said to them, “I have told you [all] this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

And just a bit later in John 16, in warning them about his impending death, he said, “Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again, and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.”

No one can take away this joy because it’s a gift from the Christchild; it’s a fruit of the Spirit—the second manifestation of the Spirit: joy, (right after love) Again, it’s a gift that no one can take away as long as you’re in vital fellowship with Jesus.

May this gift be yours in good measure in the days ahead! May the joy of the Lord be your strength!

II. The second gift of the Christchild, of course, is peace.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing …”

Peace, like joy, is a bit hard to come by these days! Most of the world yearns for peace in the Holy Land—that there might be “Shalom/Salaam” between the sons of Isaac and the sons of Ishmael, the Arabs, the Palestinians. But, sadly, today that peace seems as far away as ever …

But the Christchild’s gift of peace is real! And it’s a lasting peace. And if you study the New Testament you’ll discover that this peace, this gift has 2 quite different meanings for every believer:

• First, as Paul says in Romans 5:1, “Since we’re justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This, literally, is a cessation of hostilities. This is not an inner peace; this is the end of a war between you and me on one hand, and God on the other. It may surprise some of you, but as sinners we are by nature at war with God—fighting against him and his perfect will for us. Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that the grip that our own selfish egos have on us make us hostile toward God. And, it’s only because of Christ’s death on the cross for you and me that peace is possible. But like other gifts, we need to reach out and receive it!—It’s a Peace Treaty between us and God.

• But there’s a 2^nd, and probably better-known aspect of the Christchild’s gift of peace which is a deep peace in the heart, an inner peace—no matter what kind of waves are crashing around us. One of my favorite verses in Philippians is 4:6-7, where Paul says, in effect, “Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, pray—let your requests be made known to God [and if you do that], the peace of God which passes all understanding will stand guard over your hearts & minds in Christ Jesus.” I can guarantee it! This spiritual prescription for peace really works!

Someone said that there are 2 basic things that rob us of inner peace:

1. One is a sense of disquiet within—an inner tension, an uneasiness, a turbulence in the heart.
2. And the other thing that will rob us of peace is circumstances around us … external things—worries about what’s happening, or perhaps what we think is going to happen.

Many of you will know the Serenity Prayer that’s been attributed to the 20^th Century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. This prayer has been widely used by Alcoholics Anonymous, and by many other groups as a path to peace. The prayer goes like this:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.” It’s a great prayer, well-worth praying.

And, it’s been so popular that it’s been changed, or tweaked for all kinds of purposes. For example, consider this version:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change

courage to change the one I can change,

and wisdom to know it’s me.”

But, again, if we come back to the Christmas Story, we may remember that when Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was filled with the Holy Spirit and given divine utterance, he proclaimed that in these amazing events that surrounded the birth of Christ, God was at work, “guiding our feet in the path of peace.”

And of course, most everyone knows that the word of the angel to the shepherds included the promise that the coming of the Christchild would bring from heaven to earth “peace to those upon whom his favor rests.” – or in the familiar words of the KJV: “peace on earth, good will to men.”

But, let me say it again: This gift of peace to you and me is a gift of the Christchild! Like joy, it’s a manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace … it comes 3^rd in the order of 9 qualities the Holy Spirit brings to the heart that will receive him.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you …” – John 14:27. And then in that great passage at the end of John 16: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

So, there are 2 absolutely marvelous aspects of the Christchild’s gift of peace. And peace, like joy, is so central to the Gospel.

To the Romans Paul asserts that the kingdom of God does not consist of trivial things like rules about eating or drinking; the kingdom is about “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

So in Romans 14, here again are the 2 gifts of the Christchild—linked together and absolutely central, absolutely vital!

III. The 3^rd gift of the Christchild, then is hope.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” … “The God of Hope!” God is the author, the originator of hope …

But just like joy and peace, hope is often hard to come-by in the world in which we live.

Anyone who has money for retirement in the stock market certainly hopes that the market will go up and that money for retirement will be there when needed. But who knows? Some economists in the U.S. have recently predicted what they call “a double dip”—a 2^nd downturn in the American market—after 6-8 months of gains—a 2^nd downturn that would result in some of my retirement funds losing even more value. So, I can “hope,” but it doesn’t guarantee anything!

And then on the world scene, President Barack Obama gave a much-anticipated speech on Tuesday of this week to Army cadets at West Point about plans for Afghanistan. He announced that in the upcoming months he would send 30,000 additional troops for the war effort. He certainly hopes that they would make a difference, but the struggle there is so complex that it’s tough for many of us to entertain a really strong hope.

Hope is hard to come-by in many areas; life is uncertain and unpredictable. But still, hope is so essential! As human beings we’ve got to have hope to live!

Victor Frankl, a Jewish medical doctor and psychiatrist, demonstrated the importance of hope as a prisoner in the horrible concentration camps of Auchwitz and Dacau under the Nazis in World War II. After being liberated by the American Army in April, 1945, Frankl went on to write a book entitled, Man’s Search for Meaning. And in that book he tells about a fellow prisoner who had a dream that all of them would be liberated by a certain date early in April. By that time, the prisoners knew that the war would be over soon, but obviously didn’t know when. But this one prisoner had this unquenchable hope that it would happen on a certain day—I can’t remember the exact date—but let’s say it was the 6^th of April. He was so buoyant and so excited; he just knew that God had revealed to him the exact date of their liberation. Well, when April 6^th came and it didn’t happen, he got sick, and 2 days later he was dead. He’d lived with such a strong hope that sustained him, but when it was gone, his whole body gave up. He couldn’t live without hope. But, in contrast, there were many prisoners, Frankl included, who survived because of hope—a continuing hope and dream that someday they would be free and would be reunited with other loved ones who had survived the Nazi terror.

We’ve got to have hope …

Just think about how many centuries the Jews had waited and hoped and prayed for the coming of the Messiah. That was their great hope—so can you imagine how the shepherds must have felt when the angel announced to them that that very night the Messiah had been born?

And how Anna & Simeon must have felt when they actually saw the baby Jesus in the temple and knew him to be the very Messiah for whom they had yearned so long?

Sure, their hopes and expectations about what the Messiah would do were confused and twisted, but nonetheless, on that first Christmas in Bethlehem a genuine hope was born for the whole world!

In summary, there are 2 kinds of hope

One kind of hope is of the “I sure hope-so” variety. I hope the stock market goes up … I hope there’s real peace in the Holy Land. The other day I was talking to my 7-year old grandson Reeve about what he wanted for Christmas. He didn’t have a ready-made wish-list, so I jokingly said, “Hey, maybe you’d like to have a new car for Christmas (as a 7-yr. old)!” And he said, “Yea!” with great excitement. Well, he can “hope-so” all he wants, but we can be pretty sure it’s not going to happen.

If we made a list of all of our hopes, most of them would have to go into this “hope-so” category. They may all be perfectly good things to hope-for, but there are no guarantees.

The gift of the Christchild is completely different. As Peter says in his first epistle, for all of us who have come to Christ in saving faith, we’ve been “born again to a living hope by the resurrection of Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you.” This is something solid!

When I was a new Christian many years ago I gained a lot from a Christian organization called the Navigators that began in the U.S. way back in the 1940’s. And one of their big emphases was the memorization of Scripture … and another, the importance of an assurance of salvation, i.e. – every believer having a solid hope and confidence in eternal life, based on Scripture.

And one very basic memory verse of the Navigators which I shared many times with others was 1 John 5:11-12 which goes like this in the KJV:

“And this is the record that God hath given us eternal life. And this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.”

What that means is that if you’ve really invited Jesus Christ into your life, confessing your sin and surrendering your ego to him, you have Christ Within! And, John says, if you have Christ Within you have eternal life. It’s not a hope-so thing; it’s a guarantee from God himself! It’s solid. It’s a hope, as Peter says, that can’t perish, spoil or fade away.

This is the gift of the Christchild—a solid hope. “Christ is you, the hope of glory.”

So, this morning, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit!”

One final thing: These gifts are yours from the Christchild. But like presents under the Christmas tree, you have to open them!

How do we do that?

Well, in one of my very favorite Christmas carols, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Phillips Brooks puts it this way:

How silently, oh how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him, still
The dear Christ enters in.

He knocks at the door. Invite him in, and in doing so, you’ll receive his gifts!