Evangelical Free Church of Oroville

If you are familiar with this section of scripture, you know that at this point Paul moves from discussing the family, which began in chapter 5 with a long section on marriage and then briefer comments dealing with fathers and children. We have looked at that for a fairly extended period of time because family life in America is under such stress. Now he comes to the issue of work. So -Who is Your Boss- is the question that rightly helps us to walk into what Paul has to say.

To make the Thanksgiving Feast even richer please turn with me to Psalm 145. That is what we are going to be looking at today. Let David the Psalmist of Israel instruct us. This psalm - though you cannot tell this in the English - along with Psalm 34, right after the Psalm we read as a call to worship this morning, and all of Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the whole Bible, these are each one an acrostic. In other words, every single either verse or stanza begins progressively with another of the Hebrew alphabet, all the way through. That is worth thinking about. David did not dash off the top of his head all these thoughts. Rather, in each of the three cases that I have mentioned, and certainly in others as well, what we have given to us here is the fruit of very deliberate time and effort spent carefully pulling together thoughts and remembrances and writing them down in a specific manner in order that it would convey the meaning to any who would read thereafter. So we might ask ourselves this question- When I think about giving thanks, am I thoughtful the way David was thoughtful- Should or could I write a psalm, a poem or a song of praise- Just keep that in your mind as we go on and look at what David has to say.

-And the Word became Flesh.- That great truth is the theme for our Advent messages and hopefully for our Advent meditations as well. Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation of the Son of God as the Son of Man. That happened by means of the womb of Mary, a peasant Jewish girl of the family of David. Mary gave birth to a boy, a little boy, a baby, and she named him Jesus just as the angel Gabriel had told her she should do. I have mentioned that each week we want to lift up another aspect of the Savior who has been sent to us.

Advent is the four weeks leading up to Christmas, and Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the Son of God in a young Jewish girl named Mary who was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph. He was a carpenter in the small city of Nazareth in Galilee. All this happened some two thousand years ago when Herod the Great ruled Palestine from the city of Jerusalem. The theme for this year's Advent is -And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.- It is taken from the first chapter of John's Gospel. On each of the four days set aside by God's people for worshiping the Lord, we light a candle on the Advent Wreath which symbolizes a special attribute or characteristic of the Lord Jesus Christ which will be the focus for daily meditation during the following week.

As mentioned in the Advent Candle ceremony, what is written down in Luke 1-30-35 is critical for our appreciation of God's purpose in sending His Son. We are told there in Luke's gospel that God sent the angel Gabriel. Gabriel told Mary she was to have a child. -It would be- no ordinary child. We know that because the child was to be conceived in her womb through the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit that made of the child a remarkable child in and of itself. But what the angel had to say about the child, the purpose of -for- the child, was even more remarkable.

Christmas We read about the fact that Jesus is Lord of lords in the scriptures and we hear it sung, but do we wonder sometimes, -Is there really a distinction between King and kings and Lord of lords, or is it just sort of redundant, two ways of saying the same thing--

Christmas

Christmas

simply to indicate that what is going to be mentioned now describes what you and I will be engaged in until Jesus comes back.

Christians I think commonly assume that spiritual warfare is something of an exceptional matter. They also assume that only a few select people, probably people with special gifts and great strength and maturity, are the ones who are expected to engage in so harrowing a thing as fighting with the enemy of our souls and his demonic legions. However, when we read this section of Paul's letter to the Ephesians we learn that in fact simply to be a Christian - as I said last week, to sign up with Christ is to sign in to the war. The war is Satan's war against God. Satan is the enemy of our souls, most particularly because believers are works of God's grace, and Satan hates God's grace, for it is the complete opposite and refutation of himself. So we would realize that the warfare is not strange and exceptional at all. Indeed, it is the context of all that we experience in Christ.