This week, Pastor Luke continued on with our Christmas series “The History Channel” with part three; covering the time period from 1800 to modern day.

SECULAR

Queen Victoria popularized Christmas in the 1800’s, and Charles Dickens wrote ‘the Christmas Carol’ in 1843. This invented ‘the spirit of Christmas’ and humanitarian efforts as the center of Christmas; effectively muddying the waters of the spirit of Christ and His coming to earth.

The way that we celebrate Christmas today is therefore only about 200 years old, and we need to be careful not to bury Jesus under a pile of Christmas presents.

SACRED

Pastor Luke used Galatians 4:4-5 as his key passage:
“But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”
1. God knows, plans, and acts.

God’s sovereign hand is all over the details of the Christmas story. The birth of Jesus was strategic, and “in the fullness of time”. Jesus came into the world at the perfect time; when four key things came together:

The Pax Romana (peace and stability in the region)
The Roman roads were built and in place (this meant that Gospel was able to travel quicker than ever before)
Kione Greek (there was a common language)
There was a religious fervor across the empire (people were open to talking about big ideas and religion).

Jesus came in the perfect moment of human history. God knew, planned, and moved in accordance with this moment – the world was ready.

God’s providential hand is all over the Christmas story, which shows us that God is in control, and if we can trust His timing at Christmas – the first advent - then we can also trust His coming for the second advent – when He is coming back again. And this also means that we can trust Him for the details of our own lives as well. We need to stop, slow down and see God in the big and the small details of our lives.


2. Your nativity set is actually a really big deal.

Our nativity set represents the incarnation – when God Himself came into human history and put on flesh. When Jesus stepped into human history, He truly crossed worlds, and became like us in every way.

Because of Jesus our sins are forgiven, and we can be made right with God. And so when we think about Christmas, we need to be filled with joy, hope, wonder, and awe at the fact that Jesus came. We need to be forever thankful for the reality of both the humanity and the divinity of God.

Many of us stop at this truth; that we are justified, without understanding the second truth – that we are then also adopted as sons and daughters of God.

This means that we are co-heirs with Christ, that we will rule and reign in His new Kingdom, and that we have the same access to the Father as Jesus did.

Sometimes we can get caught up in the secular Christmas traditions, but we need instead to slow down and focus on the one who has saved us. This Christmas costs us nothing, and cost Jesus everything. We are adopted as heirs, and the truth of that is eternal and awe-inspiring.

This week, Pastor Jermaine continued on with Week Two our Christmas Series “The History Channel” with the time period of 0AD – 1800.
Every week, this series will be talking about the Sacred and the Secular history of Christmas.
SECULAR
In the early 17th Century, a wave of religious reform changed the way Christmas was celebrated. The Puritans moved to eradicate decadence from society, and as part of that – they made Christmas illegal. For example, from 1559 – 1681 the celebration of Christmas was outlawed in Boston.
This was partly because of the sins associated with the season; greed, drunkenness, thievery, and public havoc. Often, the poorer classes would terrorize the rich during this season, going
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from house to house and demanding their best food and drink. If the rich refused, the poor would cause mischief on their properties. Christmas was an unhealthy mix of the spiritual and the secular, and the thus the Puritans sought to eradicate it in order to focus solely on God.
Christmas was only declared a federal holiday in the USA in 1870.
SACRED
In early Christianity, it wasn’t common to celebrate the birthday of any martyr, including Jesus. Instead, they were honored on the days of their death – as this was recognized as their true “birthday.” Thus, for a long time, Easter was celebrated as the primary Christian holiday.
When Christians began to celebrate the birth of Christ, the date was chosen not because of any mentioned date within the Bible, but because it fit into the cultural celebrations of the time. Thus, the date of December 25th is entirely symbolic and somewhat arbitrary.
Pastor Jermaine led us through the four “R’s” of the Christmas narrative: responsibility, reality, reassurance, and reply.
When Mary became pregnant, she was 14-16 years old and bore a huge weight of responsibility. She lived in Nazareth and in poverty – seeing herself as having done nothing worthy of special mention. Mary had to face the disgrace of being seen as one who became pregnant out of wedlock. It would be a very different story if she chose to say no, and yet she took on the task with grace and humility.
Additionally, Joseph’s reputation was also on the line. He could have chosen to make a scene, and bring Mary to trial for her sin – and yet he didn’t. He was a man of low estate but high integrity.
From Mary, to Joseph, to the Magi, we see that the Christmas story is interjected repeatedly with the intervention of God – angelic visits, dreams, and alignment of the stars. It would have been so easy for it to be so different, and yet we have the miracle of Jesus birth, and the story that we know and love today.
We need to continue being awed by the truth and wonder of the Christmas narrative. God came to earth. The holy, perfect God came to earth and died for us – the unholy and sinful ones. The wages of our sin is death, and yet God came to save us from those just and deserved consequences. We must never became calloused to this incredible truth and reality, and Christmas is a wonderful time to allow the truth and wonder of this miracle sit and stir deeply within us.
Our reply, and our response should be that of Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

This week, Pastor Matthew launched “The History Channel,” our Christmas series.

The Christmas that we know and love today is a huge mix between the secular and the sacred, and in this series we will be digging deep into its history - untangling the messy mixed roots from one another and looking at the reasons why we do the things we do.

This week we are going back as far as we can, all the way BC.

THE SECULAR

Christmas has only been a federal holiday in the United States since 1870, and it does have ancient secular toots.

Well before Christ, many cultures across Scandinavia celebrated the Winter solstice, the end of Winter and the coming of Summer. The end of December was often the only time of year that they had a supply of fresh meat. It was a time of rest and celebration for them. There were similar celebrations in Rome at the same time of the year.

There are therefore many things that we do at Christians that come from non-Christian traditions. The Christian faith has long traditions of taking things within our culture and redeeming them in order to meet people where they are at. This is also true of many Christmas traditions.

THE SACRED

We have been grafted into the line of Jesus, which is a great family to be a part of. We have become part of God’s story and inheritance – an amazing lineage of incredible men and women of God.

The story of Jesus is woven throughout the entire narrative of Scripture, from well before He was born on earth. Everyone pre-Christ was waiting and longing for the day that we have had the privilege of seeing. We live in the day that was longed for – we have the King and the Messiah, and He came in the person of Jesus – the Lord and Savior of the world.

As we celebrate Christmas this year, we need to remember God’s story and the fact that we have been grafted into it. It’s the story of Jesus, and we live our lives surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who celebrate that same story alongside us.

Many longed to see the day that we have seen, so let us not take it for granted.

We must be careful which hills we die on as the people of God. We don’t have to get mad about people saying “happy holidays,” but we also don’t need to get caught up in consumerism and greed. We need instead to be captivated by the King, and both the joy and the heartbreak of the season. Let us be inspired to run the leg of our race well, knowing we are a part of something – an amazing legacy – that is so much bigger than we are.

Christmas has both sacred and secular roots, and that’s okay. We must choose to live our lives captivated by our Christ.

Join us for our last episode of the Take Me To Church podcast series where we discuss the practicals of Living on Mission at Waypoint Church.

Join us as we talk with Pastor Matthew about being a missional presence as part of Waypoint Church's spiritual assignment.

This morning, Pastor Matthew continued on with our Take Me To Church series on the topic of living on mission.

God is not angry, He is good. If God was angry, He wouldn’t have sent Himself. Too many of us live as if God is near, but angry.

He loves us and wants us to be in relationship with Him and one another. God’s plan has always been His people being His Ambassadors spreading His glory in every corner of the earth. From the beginning, humanity’s problem has always been that we think we know better than God.

When we read through the Bible, we see that the narrative has always been – I am going to bless you, now go and be a blessing.

Living on mission is part of God’s design for us. Pastor Matthew made three primary points:

1. Doing flows from being.

We must be people who start with understanding who God is, and who we are in Him. We go beneath the surface, we become emotionally healthy, and we minister from that place of solid identity in Jesus, and His purposes for us.

We need to slow down enough that we receive from the Lord, and minister and live from that place. When we do flow from being, we find abundant joy and life in Him.

2. Mission God’s way: with people.

The whole Bible is about God being with people. He loves people, and He desires to be with them. If we are going to live on mission God’s way, we need to learn to be with people.

We have to slow down so that we can actually be present with people. We must allow people to know us, as well as take the time to know others.

3. Mission God’s way: for people.

Too many Christians have a reputation of being against things, instead of for people. God is not against people. The kindness of the Lord leads people to repentance, and not us being against them.

Jesus did not come to condemn the world, He came to save it.

We take a quick break from the Take Me To Church series to visit with one of our church planters, Jeff Waalkes.

This week, guest speaker Jeff Waalkes shared a message under the topic of: God speaks, people obey, things change.

The Bible narrative is all about the character of God, which culminates in the person of Jesus.

To understand its message we need to start at the beginning (Genesis 1:26-28), with understanding that God functions as we – that all of creation comes out of community; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Men and women were created together to reflect the image of God collectively. Therefore, every person who has ever lived on earth carries the image of God; the Imago Dei, which gives us the foundation of inherent value, basic human rights, worth, anddignity. Therefore, anything that infringes on the dignity and worth of people is sin, and we need work towards changing that.

Within Scripture, God’s starting point for human beings is that they were very good. This is the waypoint that we need to begin with; that all people (including us) are created in the image of God, and that our starting point is one of immense value.

When sin enters the story of humanity (Genesis 3: 2-5), Adam and Eve are tempted by the idea of being “like God.” The problem is, they were already like Him by being made in His image. Right from the beginning they had forgotten their core identity, and it is always a temptation for us to do the same.

Often, we replace walking with God with wanting to know about God. The consequences (as we see from the fall) is that we – like Adam and Eve - become self-focused and full of shame. Their relationship with God and one another became broken, and what started to come out was the pursuit of knowledge in replacement of a relationship with God.

What we see throughout the entire narrative of Scripture is: God speaks – People Obey – Things Change.

We see this in the story of Abram. In Abram’s time, it was a communal culture, and life was about group identity. God asked Abram to move, to leave his people, life, family, country, and culture with no guarantee that it would work out. His only guarantee was the character of God. God did bless Abram, but there were decades in between his obedience and the blessings that came.

We need to never stop being awed by the incredible gift that we have: that the God of the universe desires to speak to us.

If we don’t want things in our lives to change, we should not listen to God. Because often times, when God speaks it involves loss. Therefore, if we are not willing to take personal loss, we can not obey God.

We obey because we love God, not because of any guaranteed outcome, and therefore our posture towards Him has to be “yes – now tell me what to do”, instead of “God give me some options and I will get back to you.”

You can not obey people that you do not trust, and therefore we can not trust God if we do not deeply love Him, and know Him.

We are not responsible for walking into our blessing, we are only responsible for doing what God has asked us to do. Where do we start in this journey of obedience? Jesus summarized it like this: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The word used here for love is agape, which is an unconditional love.

As Christians, we need to be judged by the world for our love, kindness, compassion and selflessness. If we have to tell people we are Christians, we are doing something wrong. We have made God manageable and small, but He is neither. We should be overwhelmed by Him, when too often we are fascinated by the wrong things.

We are responsible for being a demonstration of God’s agape love to the world, and He is responsible for doing the changing within people. Our job therefore is not to condemn people, it is to express God’s agape love to others. Jesus’s starting point for transformation was agape love, not the law, and like Jesus, we need to cling to the relationship and not to the rules.

God is worthy of our obedience.

Join us with Pastor Matthew as we continue the discussion of multi-ethnicity and Waypoint's vision.