We're going to be talking about preparing for Christmas today. And how do you guys do? You guys feel prepared for Christmas?
No? I can see you in Quakertown. You're shaking your heads no, too. What do you guys do?
Like, do you guys have, like, certain things to kind of prepare for Christmas? I mean, I know for us, we have certain things that we do each year. You know, we start decorating for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving.
And so we put up the Christmas tree, and it's a joyous occasion. And none of us are particular about how that tree goes up. No, I am very, very particular about that tree. I want a certain side to have all of the first Christmas ornaments, all of Jen and I's when we first got married, the kids'first Christmas.
I want it all to be there. I want another side to have all the ornaments from different places we've been. I want the plastic ornaments that are not going to get broken to be towards the bottom of the branches, just in case the dogs hit them and knock them down.
I have a very particular way that I want to set up the Christmas tree. I tell you that so I can admit that, so I can make fun of my wife. She's worse. She's worse.
Not with the tree, but with everything else. She has a little people nativity set. You know, it has like the whole town of Bethlehem.
She has to put that up every year. It has to be a certain way. It has to look a certain way. This year, there's a little like table next to the dining room.
And I thought that I would do something nice. So I went over there and I decorated this whole table. I put like snowy kind of stuff on there.
I put a Christmas tree on there and some snowmen. And I was so excited to show my wife. She walked into the room and she just stops and looks at that. She goes, that's not staying there, right?
I'm like, no, not now. But I mean, what do you do for preparing for Christmas? I mean, maybe you start listening to Christmas songs, or maybe you start drinking eggnog, or you do some, you bake gingerbread cookies.
You know, those are all nice things, but I just want you to understand that's not preparing for Christmas. That's just engaging in our traditions and in the season's rhythm. That's what that is. It's not really preparing for Christmas. And all of that is good, except for gingerbread cookies.
Those are nasty. Those are disgusting. All of that is good. But it's not really preparing for Christmas.
Today we're going to look at a passage. And I hope as we look at this passage from the book of Luke, that we will just kind of get a little glimpse of what it means to prepare for Christmas. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Luke chapter 1. Luke chapter 1. And we're going to read a song starting in verse 67 that a man named Zachariah sang.
as he was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied. Luke 1 verse 67. His father, Zechariah, was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied. Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people. And to redeem and to remember his holy covenant. The oath he swore to our father Abraham to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear.
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven, to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace. And the child grew and became strong in spirit.
And he lived in the wilderness until he appeared publicly to Israel. What we just read in churches... It's traditionally known as the Benedictus. Benedictus is a Latin word that refers to that first phrase of praise be, or also you could translate as blessed be.
It's that word that's translated for blessed. And in more liturgical churches, this is called the Benedictus, like the Catholic Church, and that's what is going on. And what it is, it's a song.
It's a song that Zechariah sang. Now, who's Zechariah? Zechariah is the father of Jehoiada.
John the Baptist. Zachariah is married to Elizabeth, who is a relative of Mary. Mary and Elizabeth get pregnant around the same time.
Elizabeth was pregnant first and then Mary. And both of them are miraculous pregnancies. Mary is pregnant through the work of the Holy Spirit as she is a virgin. And Elizabeth is older and she has lived a life not able to have a child, not able to be pregnant. Both pregnancies are announced by an angel.
And Zechariah is the one who receives the announcement from the angel, and he responds with a statement of doubt. And because of that, because of that, his ability to speak is taken away. His ability to speak is taken away until his son is born and named John.
And when his son is born, born and named John, his voice is given back. And what he does immediately is he begins to praise God. And part of his praise to God is what we just read, this song of blessing. Blessed be. The Lord, the God of Israel.
Because he has come. Because he has redeemed. And because he has won.
What we're going to unpack today in this passage is, Blessed be the Lord. Because he has come. Because he has redeemed. Because he has won. Let's take a look at that first section.
He has come. Those three things are the themes of those verses that we see. that we see here in 68 and 69. And so he says, Praise be to Lord the God of Israel because he has come. And what does he do? He begins to say, he begins to describe it, and he says, as he said through his holy prophets of long ago.
What is Zachariah's song saying in this thing? It's something really profound that Luke is pointing out in Zachariah's song. He has come, just as the prophets of the Old Testament, just as the prophets of the Old have said. What God has done in the Old Testament is made promises.
And He has fulfilled those promises by becoming the fulfillment of the promise. What He's saying is that everything that was said in the Old Testament, all that this was pointing to, all what the voices of the prophets were saying, has come. Because God has come himself. And what God has come, as we continue on in the book, as we see God has come in the form of Jesus, fully God and fully man. And what Luke is doing is pointing out that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything in the Old Testament.
He's the fulfillment of what the prophets of old have said. We just got through the book of 1st Peter. We just finished a series on 1st Peter. And we talked about different things.
We talked about suffering. We talked about being citizens of God's kingdom. But we talked a lot about one thing. Anyone remember what we talked a lot about? Sandwiches!
Good. We talked a lot about sandwiches. That is absolutely correct.
And I know some of you are like, man, you really do talk a lot about sandwiches. I think you're a little bit too into sandwiches. The reality is I am a little bit too into sandwiches, especially if a strong sandwich.
Pastrami sandwich with a nice kosher pickle right next to it. That's good stuff. That's good stuff. But I love sandwiches.
And not only do I love sandwiches, I love sandwiches in the Bible. And what did we say about these sandwiches that first Peter did? He began to look at something in the past and look at something in the future. And what that did was tell us something about what was going on in the present.
A lot of times we see in the Bible these sandwiches where something is set up and then something's set up later and what we do is we learn that that begins to reveal what we learned in the middle. Luke is also a sandwich maker, except he makes big sandwiches. And here's what he does. In Luke chapter 1, we get Zechariah's song. And we see that he says, Praise be to the Lord, because he has come.
He has fulfilled the word of the prophets. He is the fulfillment of his promises. And we get this theme that Jesus is the fulfillment of all that has happened in the Old Testament. In chapter 1, the first chapter of Luke. What about the last chapter of Luke?
The very end of Luke. What do we read in the last chapter? Well, let's go to it.
Luke chapter 24. Jesus has been born. He has lived a life, a perfect life. He has died on the cross, a death that was meant for you and me.
And he has risen. He has walked out of the tomb eternally victorious. And after he has risen, after he has resurrected, He is on a road to a town called Emmaus, and he's talking to two people on that road.
And as he's having a conversation with them, he says this. This is Jesus talking. He said to them, how foolish you are and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken.
Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself. Luke makes a sandwich with his whole book.
And one of the themes that comes out in Luke's book is the fulfillment of God's promises, the fulfillment of the Old Testament, the fulfillment of the words of the prophet, the fulfillment of everything in Jesus. And this is a huge thing that we need to understand when we look at the Bible. In fact, it's one of our...
It's one of our pillars of theology that we have here at Calvary Church. You see, when we approach the Bible at Calvary Church, we don't think of it as a series of disconnected events or disconnected stories. It's one story, but here's the key.
The point of that story is Jesus. The point of that story is Jesus. Everything is pointing to Jesus. The climax and point of everything is Jesus. And there's this sandwich that Luke creates that we need to pay attention to, and it starts in Zechariah's song, when we learn that the Lord has come.
He has come just as he promised. He has come and fulfilled his promises by being the fulfillment of the promises in the form of his son, Jesus. So praise be to the Lord, he has come.
But what did he come for? What did he come for? Well, that's where we get to the second point.
He has come and he has redeemed. He has redeemed. Redeemed is an interesting word.
It's a word that we use a lot in church. I'm not sure we really know what it means at times, though. We might just say the word because it sounds like something we're supposed to say, but do we really know what we're saying? If you were to look up redeem in Merriam-Webster's dictionary, you'd get multiple definitions.
Let me read them to you. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, redeem means to buy back, to get or win back. It also means to free from what distresses or harms, to free from captivity by payment. It also means to change for the better. It also means to restore.
It also means to remove the obligation of by payment, and it means to atone for. All of this is what God did through Jesus. God had to step in because of our sin, and because of our sin, we were separated from God. We were separated from God because we outright rebelled against him when we sinned. We rejected him when we sinned.
And he had to step in to buy us back, to win us back. God... Through the sacrifice of his son Jesus, he frees us from the consequences of sin, from the punishment of sin, from the captivity of sin. He frees us from that bondage and he changes us through new birth. right we got that in first peter right he changes us through new birth and gives us new identities and a new inheritance and he changes us for the better he restores that relationship that was broken because of sin he removes the obligation of that payment of sin because he paid it through jesus and god in the form of jesus is the source of our atonement this is what it means when it says God has redeemed us.
Why did the Lord have to come? It was to redeem us. But Zachariah's song has an interesting reference in it. It has an interesting reference in it. He refers to this holy covenant with Abraham.
He refers to this holy covenant with Abraham. And I'm just going to pause for a second and I just want to acknowledge something. We're not going to go through the whole Abrahamic covenant today.
It's too much to go in right now. We would need like kind of a sermon just for that because there's a lot of layers to it. What I want to do is actually talk about a circumstance around that covenant.
In fact, it's a circumstance that the writer of Hebrews talks about. Hebrews chapter 6, starting at 13, it refers to this promise, this oath, this covenant with Abraham. And it says this, when God made his promise to Abraham, Since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, saying, I will surely bless you and give you many descendants. And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised. People swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument.
Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that by two unchangeable things. in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.
It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. What is that talking about? What is that talking about? What is the writer of Hebrews talking about?
What he's referring to is actually a story in the first book of the Bible. in the book of Genesis. He's referring to a story in the book of Genesis, Genesis chapter 15. And what you need to know is that during the time of Abraham and in the culture of Abraham, one of the ways that covenants or oaths were made was this. The two parties would make a covenant and then they would kill animals as a part of that covenant and they would split their bodies in half and put them on two sides, okay?
And then the two parties would walk through that line together. And what they were saying is, if I do not hold up my part of the covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to me. Okay, here's the deal.
God makes a promise to Abraham. The animals are put apart on two halves. But in Genesis chapter 15, only God travels through that. And what God is saying is this. If I do not uphold my part of the covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to me.
And if you do not hold up your part of the covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to me. That's huge. That's huge. Because it is Jesus'body that is broken on the cross that fulfills that oath.
Not because God didn't keep his end of the bargain, but because we didn't. God redeems by paying the ultimate price. Jesus paid the price we were supposed to pay.
So when Zachariah sings this song of praise and sings, blessed be the Lord because he has come, because he has redeemed, there's a very real, very real cost for that redemption. And Jesus paid it. So Zachariah prays the Lord because he has come, he has redeemed, and he has won. He has won.
Zechariah refers to Jesus with a phrase that is only used to describe Jesus in the New Testament in this passage. Only time it's ever used. He uses the phrase, a horn of salvation.
A horn of salvation. What's that? Well, here's what it's not. It's not a saxophone.
Okay, it's not a trumpet. It's not a tuba. It's not a musical instrument. The horn that is being referred to is the horn of an animal.
Actually, oftentimes it was referred to as the horn of an ox. It was what it depicted. was might.
What it depicted was power. What it depicted oftentimes when that image was used was the image of a mighty king. In fact, David, years before Zachariah sings his song, actually praises the Lord and uses this title for the Lord in Psalm 18. Okay, we're going to look at Psalm 18. Verses 1 and 2, he says, I love you, Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer. My God is my rock in whom I take refuge. My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. The word horn is a description of might and power.
God has come, he has redeemed, and he has won, he is victorious. Nothing can stand before the power of God. This statement is one of might and power, a mighty king.
May I remind you of what's going on in the story though. Where is Jesus when this song is sang by Zechariah? He has a baby developing in the womb of his mother. He hasn't even been born yet. He's in the most fragile, delicate position.
This is how God displays his might. This is how God expresses the might of the horn of salvation. This is how he claims victory.
By stepping in to humanity in the form of a baby. By stepping in to humanity and living out a fully human life. By stepping in to humanity.
and dying a brutal death on a cross. Again, remember 1 Peter? Yeah, we learned a lot about sandwiches in 1 Peter, but we learned a lot about suffering.
We learned about how Jesus'life included suffering. And what we need to understand is that Jesus expressed his might through his suffering. Jesus expressed his power through his suffering. It was the suffering that redeemed us.
It was the resurrection that vindicated us. And so what happens? Jesus doesn't just win a battle, he wins the war. Jesus goes beyond just an earthly salvation.
He declares victory and secures an eternal salvation, one where death and sin have been conquered. He has won. And the result of that victory, the result of that victory, In verse 74, what do we see? To rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve Him without fear in the holiness and righteousness before Him all our days. We can serve the Lord without fear.
For the horn of salvation has declared His might. Death has been defeated. Sin has been defeated.
He has won. Praise be to the Lord, because he has come, he has redeemed, and he has won. So what do we do with all of that?
How do we respond to that? How do we respond to this passage? How do we respond to this song?
Well, again, at the beginning of this sermon, I told you that we would be looking at how to prepare for Christmas. But as I read this passage, I thought to myself, perhaps that means something a little bit different than what I usually think of it. Perhaps preparing for Christmas actually is a little bit different. Here's the deal. As a disciple of Jesus, as a follower of Jesus, as one who has accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I shouldn't be at a place where I need to prepare my heart.
to receive the joy of Christmas. I shouldn't have to get in a place where I'm preparing myself to receive what the Holy Spirit does in me by being with me each and every day. I should experience the joy and wonder of Christmas every day, just like I should experience the joy and wonder of Easter every day. And as I began to think about that, I began to think about preparing for Christmas is not necessarily about me as a disciple of Jesus preparing myself and my heart to somehow have a more profound encounter with Jesus.
Because the Holy Spirit is in me. He dwells in us. That preparation should be true every day. So then what does it mean to prepare for Christmas? What is our response?
What does Zachariah say to his little baby boy? What does Zachariah say to his little baby boy, John? He says, prepare the way.
Prepare the way for him. Verses 76 and 77. And you, my child, we call the prophet of the Most High, for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him that gives people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins. What is our response to be when our hearts collide with the reality of Christmas, when our hearts collide with the reality of Easter and they are completely changed and we become a disciple of Jesus?
We are sent on mission. To prepare the way, to bring the knowledge of salvation to those around us, to our family, to our friends, to our classmates, to those we work with, to the cashier at Giant, to the person who makes your coffee order, to the person at the gym, to the waitress at the diner, to everyone and everyone. Our response is to prepare the way and bring the knowledge of salvation, the knowledge of Jesus, to others.
That's what it means to prepare for Christmas. It's to prepare the way. If your heart has collided with Jesus and you've accepted him as Lord and Savior, you need to go and bring that message of salvation to others. Prepare the way.
Bring the knowledge of salvation to everyone and anyone around you. Here's what we're going to do. We want you to invite someone to Christmas. We want you to invite someone to our Christmas services.
Here's why we do not want you to invite someone to Christmas. If you're going to invite someone to Christmas because you want to let them know how great Calvary Church is, please don't invite them. Because we want them to know how great Jesus is.
Our purpose is not to ask you to invite people to come to Calvary Church so they hear about Calvary Church. We want them to hear about Jesus and have their lives changed. And so here's what we're going to do in order to prepare for that.
I'm going to ask you to pray. I'm going to ask you to pray for a few things. Pray for the one that God is asking you to invite.
Maybe you already know. You're like, oh. I know. Cousin Bob. If I invite him, then I have to go out for dinner with him afterwards.
Go out for dinner with Bob. Pray about it and pray that God begins to work in his heart that he would hear the message, the good news of Jesus, the gospel. Pray that God prepares his heart. And pray that God shows you who else you need to invite and gives you opportunities to invite them.
Again, not so that they hear about who Calvary Church is. That's not the point. The point is we want them to hear who Jesus is.
We want them to encounter Jesus. So we want you to pray. Then we want you to invite.
There's different ways that you can do that. You have an invitation that you can physically give to someone. There's invitations on our social media where you can share that with other people. You can direct them to our website. Or you can do, you can just go to their house or you can invite them over.
You can have dinner with them. and actually invite them into your life as well and actually explain to them what God has done in your life. Explain to them about what Jesus means to you.
Prepare the way. And then after you invite, we want you to pray again. Pray. Pray that God stirs in their heart.
Pray that the gospel will find root. So pray, invite, pray. I didn't even realize this when I wrote this down earlier. I just created another sandwich. Pray, invite, pray.
Let's do that this week, Calvary Church. The message of Jesus is one that people need to hear. The gospel is good news for people who desperately need it. So go and prepare the way for them to hear that good news and experience the knowledge of salvation. Let's pray together.
Lord, we thank you that you did come. We thank you that you did redeem us. We thank you for the price you paid to redeem us.
Lord, I ask you that each day we would have wonder and joy and marvel at the beauty of Christmas, at the beauty of Easter, at the beauty of Jesus. But as we invite others, I ask you that you would prepare their hearts to receive the good news of the gospel. that you would allow us to live out lives that speak out that message with our actions and our words. Lord, we pray for not just those who would be coming here to Calvary, but for those who would be coming to Living Hope or Renew or East Swamp Church or any of the local churches around us, that you would speak to any of those visiting at Christmas in any of your churches. that you would do a mighty work, that you would draw people to you.
We thank you, and we pray this in Jesus'name. Amen.