Pastor Mike will be speaking on Who Is He in Yonder Stall? He will be reading out of Matthew 1: 18-25.

The Bible declares, I, even I, am the Lord. And besides me, there is no savior. It is only God himself who can save your soul.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man cometh unto the Father but by me. Hello, this is Pastor Mike Sanders, and I’m delighted to welcome you to Hope Worth Having radio program. And we hope that the message today will bring some insight into your faith and help you to live a faithful life for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Today, we’re gonna be in Matthew chapter one, and I wanna say Merry Christmas to everyone as we are soon to celebrate the birth of our savior. And so I want us to look in Matthew chapter one and begin to talk about who is he in yonder stall. If you have your Bible this morning, I want you to join me in the gospel of Matthew chapter one.

Matthew chapter one, verse 18 through 25, and I want us to talk about the Christmas story from the gospel of Matthew, and I want us to think about there’s an old hymn that says, who is he in yonder stall, at whose feet the shepherds fall? It is that question and its answer that is so critical to each of our hearts. It is critical and important to us because it determines our spiritual destination, our answer to the question of understanding who is this babe, who is this Jesus that was sent to us in which we celebrate his birth? If we answer incorrectly, we definitely will miss our Messiah. We can make mistakes about many things in life and still be a true believer and enter into heaven, but we cannot be wrong about who the baby is in the manger.

We understand him to be as the scriptures teach us, the God-man, 100% human and 100% divine. Two complete natures combined in one person. I want us to begin to investigate that very truth as we consider who is he in yonder stall.

The first thing that I want you to see is the virgin birth reveals the deity of Jesus. Now look at verse 18 in the gospel of Matthew and note again what the scripture says. Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows.

After his mother, Mary was betrothed to Joseph. Before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. The Bible says that Mary and Joseph were betrothed.

Now we sometimes don’t understand that particular language because we live in a different culture, but in the times of the Middle Eastern culture of when Jesus Christ was born into this world, parents decided who you were gonna marry. But I want you to understand that Joseph and Mary, their marriage was arranged by their parents. And once that had been arranged and established, when the children would become teenagers, they went into a phase that they were betrothed together.

And what that meant is that they were kind of like engaged. It was a very serious commitment that was made. And then the final step would be that they would be married together as husband and wife.

This scripture says that Mary and Joseph were betrothed. That would usually take about a year in a time span. And the family’s getting ready for this great marriage.

But in the midst of that circumstance, the Bible tells us that Mary was found with child of the Holy Spirit. Now this created a great dilemma because there was really only two options as we consider this story about the virgin birth of Jesus is that either Mary was a virgin or she was not. And when we investigate the life of Mary, not only just in what the scriptures teach us, but what history teaches us, there is nothing that would indicate that Mary was ever unfaithful to Joseph.

And there was nothing that would ever indicate that if Joseph was the type of man who would not take responsibility or that he would ever try to say, well, it’s not my child. Joseph was just the opposite. He was a man of great integrity.

He was a man of great character. And so if Mary had not ever been with Joseph or she had not ever been with any man, then the only option we have to understand is what Matthew declares under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that Mary was a virgin. The angel came to Mary and in the gospel of Luke, the angel declared to Mary that she was great with child.

And the Bible tells us that Mary began to question the angel. How could this be? And in Luke chapter one, verse 35, the angel responded and said, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the highest will overshadow you. Therefore also that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.

The Son of God. Again, sometimes we read the scriptures and we Americanize it. And we look at it from the context of our own culture.

But in the Hebrew language, the reference to Son of God was a idiom. It was kind of a phraseology, if you will, in reference to the substance of Jesus, the very nature. And so when the Bible says that Jesus is the Son of God, it is literally saying Jesus has the very nature of God, that he has the very substance of God, that he is the very essence of God.

When the angel declared to Mary that she has conceived in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit, that she has conceived the Son of God, she understood it in this terms, that God himself was within her and that God himself has come to this earth to bring salvation and redemption and forgiveness to all who believe in Jesus Christ. And that is why she would break out later in the Gospel of Luke with great praise and honor and joy to her heavenly father. The virgin birth reveals the deity of Jesus Christ.

But I also want you to see this morning that the angel’s words that were announced reveal Jesus’s deity. We come back to our text in the Gospel of Matthew chapter one as Matthew is unfolding this incredible, amazing story of the birth of Jesus Christ. His purpose is that he would help his readers to see that Jesus truly is the King of kings and he is the Lord of lords.

He has already spent in verses one through 17, he has spent the time to help us to see the kingly or the royal, the Davidic heritage that Jesus had. And now he wants us to see that he is Jesus’s God through his birth. And the angels have made an incredible announcement.

Look in verse 19, then Joseph, her husband, being a just man and not wanting to make her a public example was minded to put her away secretly. But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary, your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. Mary’s pregnancy truly crushed Joseph.

The Bible says that he was a just man. We’ve already declared unto you that he was a man of integrity and character. He was devastated from a human perspective as to what was happening.

He was confused and could not truly grasp why it is that Mary would somehow be unfaithful to him. As he’s going through this process, the Bible says that an angel appeared to him and reminded him that what is conceived in Mary is of the Holy Spirit. When you read that in the original language, it means literally it is out of the Holy Spirit.

And so implying again, as we have already taught you, that Jesus is the very substance of God himself. And Joseph received this understanding and he began to grasp what was really happening, that a miraculous thing was appearing before them. John put it like this in the Gospel of John 1, verse 14.

And the word, which is Christ, was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Again, the word became flesh. Jesus has become flesh.

Mary has conceived Jesus in her womb through the miracle of the Holy Spirit. And when the Bible says that the word became flesh, it is helping us to grasp that God has now become touchable. He has become approachable.

He has become accessible, that God has not left us. He has not abandoned us. He has not forsaken us.

He has not left us in our plight of our sinfulness and our selfishness, but rather, he has come to this earth to bring us salvation and redemption and forgiveness. Can God’s people say amen? That’s what Christmas means, church. That’s what it’s all about.

That’s what we can’t forget. And we have to make sure that we take this message of good tidings, this message of great joy, this message that a Savior has been born. It is this message that we have to do well in communicating to our children and our grandchildren.

We have to communicate it well to our neighbors, our family, our friends, and every person that God puts in our path that they cannot forget that it’s so much more than a present. It’s so much more than a tree. It’s so much more than decorations.

It’s so much more than getting together with family and friends. And all those things are wonderful. And we certainly don’t look down upon any of that, but we cannot forget the real reason of the season.

And that is we are here to celebrate the coming, the advent of a Savior who has not forgotten us, but he has remembered us and he is bringing salvation. That’s what the angel’s words announced. The third thing that I want you to see this morning is that Jesus’ mission demands his deity.

Again, look at verse 21. As we are going through the narrative of this Christmas story and the birth of our Savior, we see again that the angel continues and says to Joseph, and she shall bring forth a son and you shall call his name, what church? Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. The name Jesus means God saves.

Jesus’ name and his mission reveal that he is truly God, that his deity is true. But what it means to us spiritually is this, that God saves, Jesus saves, and hence Jesus is God. I want you to see that.

Now you might ask the question, why must Jesus be God in order to save us? Why is that even necessary? Well, here’s what I want you to understand, that all of us are sinners. The Bible teaches us that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. There’s not one of us that can stand up and say, hey, I am perfect, or I have never sinned against God.

And you say, well, I’m not worried about sinning against God. Well, let me ask you this, have you even sinned against your own conscience? Have you even sinned against your own morality and your own mind that you have designed? Whether the Bible has shaped your thoughts and your standards of what is right and wrong, certainly every person in their conscience understands what is right and wrong. And in normal society, there is a general conclusion of what is right and what is wrong.

And so the Bible teaches us we have all sinned and we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God. And there’s no one that is perfect. We’re all selfish in some way.

And the Bible says that the wages of sin is death. A lot of people really don’t understand what death means. Death means separation.

When your loved one dies, it is the separation of their soul and spirit from their body. That’s what death means. For the believer, we understand that the wages of sin is death, is that we are separated from God Almighty as an unbeliever.

But when we trust in Christ, we are separated to go be with God. We are separated from our body. Now, the Bible teaches us that we’re either going to heaven or we’re going to hell.

And I want you to understand that there’s no in between. There’s no, hey, I hope a bunch of people pray for me and light a candle for me and somehow help me to squeeze into heaven. Because you see, friends, that’s not in the Bible.

That’s not in the word of God. Those are things that are made up through traditions and thoughts of people who would like to think that somehow there is a different way. But friends, there is only one way.

And that one way is through Jesus Christ. The Bible teaches us that there is a punishment for our sin. 2 Thessalonians 1.9 reminds us, for those who do not believe, they shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.

The worst thing about hell is not just hell in and of itself. Jesus described hell as a place where there is weeping and there is gnashing of teeth. Jesus described it as a place of great sorrow and sadness.

Jesus described hell as a place in which we will remember. We’ll remember every opportunity that we had to come to Jesus. Every opportunity to receive Christ and his forgiveness in our life.

Every opportunity to believe in him. But friends, once you have been separated from your body, there is no chance for you to reverse course if you have not trusted Christ. And that’s why it’s so important.

The birth of Jesus means so much to us because the penalty of sin is eternal. That if our Savior was just a man, he could not eternally pay for our sin. He would just have to continue to be offered up in his physical body and there would be limitations to how much that sin could be paid for and thus our sins would never be paid for.

The Hebrew writer put it like this in talking about this same topic. He said, otherwise, referring to Christ, he would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world. But now, once at the consummation of the ages, he has been revealed to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Understanding the birth of Christ is best always understood in the shadow of the cross. For Jesus came to die. I know sometimes that’s hard for us to wrap our brain around but Jesus Christ came into this world to die on the cross for your sins and for my sins.

And because he was not only 100% man and 100% God, he was able to wipe away our sins forever and ever and ever. If you and I are to be saved, we have to have a Savior who can pay for our sins but who can pay for it eternally without taking eternity to do it. And that’s why it was essential that Jesus be born of a virgin and that the spirit of God would conceive within her the very substance and the essence of God in the very nature of God in Jesus Christ.

So that as he came into this world, he was 100% God and 100% man. The Bible declares God himself saying, I, even I am the Lord. And besides me, there is no Savior.

It is only God himself who can save your soul. It is only Jesus who can forgive you of your sins. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life and no man cometh unto the father but by me.

You’re not gonna get to heaven by being religious. You’re not gonna get to heaven by being better than the other guy. Some people are under the false understanding that somehow if their good outweighs their bad, they’re gonna be okay with God that he’s got a heavenly scale up there and he’s weighing out our good and our bad.

But friends, I want you to know that no matter how much good you and I do, it would never be enough for us to enter into heaven. And the Bible says that our righteousness, meaning the best of Mike Sanders and the best of you is like a filthy rag before God. And he’s not just talking about that filthy rag that is sitting in the kitchen sink that has been sitting there for several months that you wash these wonderful dishes with, but he’s talking about a filthy rag that the lepers used.

And they would come to this place where different rags were laid out under the sun and they would take those rags and they would wipe all the pus that was on their body spewing from their wounds. And rather than running it down to the laundromat, they laid it on the rock to dry out and the next leper would come and wipe their body down. And if you had ever thought, hey, somehow maybe my righteousness is pretty incredible and maybe there’s something within me so good that I would be worthy to enter into heaven.

This metaphor that God gives us that our righteousness is as filthy rags crushes that very thought and makes us to have to come to the understanding that the best of Mike Sanders falls miserably short of the righteousness of God. Jesus said, unless your righteousness exceeds the Pharisees, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. You and I, because many of us have been taught about the Pharisees, we think in terms of negativity, obviously, because they were very hypocritical and they were very prideful and condescending.

But in Jesus’s day, Pharisees were considered the best of the best. They were considered the cream of the crop. They were considered some of the finest people.

And so when Jesus made this bold declaration that unless your righteousness exceeds the Pharisees, you cannot enter into heaven. Again, it was shocking to his hearers, perhaps even as shocking as you might hear. If I were to say to you, unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of mother Teresa, or perhaps I might say to you that if your righteousness does not exceed the righteousness of Billy Graham, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.

You would think, man, Mike, those people did so much for society and they sacrificed so much for the poor and they did so much in telling others. How is it that you could say that? Because even the best of all of us, even the best in the cream of the crop of our own society, that unless our righteousness exceeds their righteousness, we cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. And that’s why Jesus came.

And that’s why we celebrate Christmas. Because Jesus Christ came as the son of God, 100% God, 100% man. He walked on this earth and he lived a sinless life.

He obeyed every aspect of the law, different aspects of the law that you and I could never obey. He obeyed it in its minutest detail. He fulfilled it all.

And then he offered himself up as a sacrifice for your sins and my sins. He went to the cross to pay the penalty of sin. For the wages of sin is what, church? Death.

It is Jesus who died on the cross for you. He took the punishment. I like to put it like this.

He took the wrath of God for the sins of mankind so that you and I could take on his righteousness, his grace, his love, his forgiveness, and we could stand before God Almighty and we could be welcomed into our heavenly home, not because of our righteousness and not because of all the good that we have done and not because we’re more religious than the other guy, but because of what Christ did in coming to this earth, living a sinless life and dying on the cross for my sins. And friends, it is that mission, it is that purpose that reminds me that Jesus truly is God. The fourth thing that I want you to see this morning in our text is that Isaiah the prophet predicts Jesus’s deity.

Now, when Matthew was writing this gospel under the inspiration of the Spirit, he was writing to a Jewish community and they would be very familiar with the Old Testament. They would be very familiar with the prophets proclaiming the coming of a Messiah. They would understand what is being said and what Matthew wants them to grasp is that Jesus is that fulfillment of what the prophets spoke about.

So let’s look in verse 22. So all this was done, what was done? The birth of Jesus. All of the, what has been spoken of relating to the virgin birth, that he was conceived in the womb of Mary through the Holy Spirit.

So all this was done that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, behold, the virgin shall be with a child and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated God with us. The Bible teaches us something very profound here, that the prophets had already spoken. They had already said this was going to happen.

So what Matthew does is take them back to what the prophet Isaiah had said, and more specifically, what had been said in Isaiah chapter seven and verse 14. Now, what were the circumstances in this verse? There were armies that were attacking the kingdom of Judah, and they were led by King Ahaz. And fear had gripped Ahaz as he began to realize that he was under attack.

And God instructed the prophet Isaiah to go to the king and to remind him that he had a responsibility to come to God and ask for a sign. But the king in his stubbornness and the king in his pride refused to look to God and to look to God for a sign of hope and help. And so here’s what the scripture says that the prophet said to Ahaz.

I’m in Isaiah 7, 14. Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name.

What church? Emmanuel. Emmanuel, meaning God with us. Had the king been smart, he would have looked to God.

It would be smart if our politicians would learn to look to God, amen? If they would seek God for a sign, if they would seek God for the help and the hope that is so desperately needed. But sometimes politicians are so full of themselves, they can’t see beyond themselves. And I know that may upset you, but don’t be upset because in the Old Testament, they had the same problem in that they would have political leaders who were full of pride.

And yet Ahaz refused to look to God. And so Matthew explained, hey, this sign is really Jesus himself. Isaiah 7, 14 is fulfilled right now in what I’m telling you about the birth of Jesus Christ.

We again see the prophet in Isaiah chapter nine and verse six saying, for a child will be born to us. A son will be given to us and the government will rest on his shoulders and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor. Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

Friends, in all of those titles of the names of Jesus is the answer to every dilemma in your heart. It is the fulfillment of every desire in your life. For Jesus Christ will satisfy all that you ever desired in your heart and in your mind.

And though the world is looking for peace and though people are looking for peace within their own families and they are looking for peace in their own hearts, it is only found in this child named Jesus Christ. And I want you to know that this is not only foretelling the birth of Christ, but it is reminding us as we study deeper that one day Jesus is coming back and he is going to destroy all the enemies of God and all the governments that hate God and all the governments that wanna kick God out and he will establish his own physical kingdom on this earth and we as believers will rule and reign with Jesus Christ. It’s gonna be awesome, church.

It’s so mind-blowing and beyond what you could even really grasp. The Bible says as a believer that you will be a judge. It’s hard to believe when you think about the miracle of the birth of Jesus Christ that he came to die on a cross and we know the world makes Christmas into something that it’s really not about all the material stuff, but for us as believers, it’s a celebration of eternal life and that our sins are paid for on the cross through the resurrection.

So I pray that as we head into the new year, into Christmas day, that you and I will be reflecting on the significance of our Savior coming to this earth, Emmanuel, God with us. This is Pastor Mike Sanders reminding you that in Christ, there is hope worth having.

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