A Message of Peace

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Well, 2020, I really don’t even have to tell you this, but 2020 has been a year of unexpected news, right? I mean, just one thing after another. There was a sermon months ago where I started listing things.

Coronavirus. I don’t know. I lost count after murder hornets.

It’s just been like something out of a science fiction movie. Just one bit of unexpected news after another. And I saw this week Charlie Pryde died, and my dad and I were both sad about that.

We didn’t expect it. I didn’t expect it because I didn’t realize he was still alive, but I was disappointed when I found out he had died, and I didn’t expect it to happen. We have one of our children who right now acts like everything they hear is unexpected news.

I can say, would you please pass the salt? Pass the salt? I didn’t, are you shocked?

I like salt. time to get ready for church. Ready for church?

How long have you been in this family? It’s Sunday. Yes, get ready for church.

Stop that. And as much as I want to strangle that child, and I’m not naming names, whenever they do that, Charlie, I decided this morning it’s just because 2020 has conditioned them that everything is not to be expected. So I’m going to cut them some slack.

It’s just the year we live in. It’s been one bit of unexpected news after another. But you know what I think is the craziest just, for me anyway, the most unexpected bit of news that’s happened this year, I know it has nothing to do with COVID.

Because if you think about it, I’ve heard, not many, but I’ve heard a few scientists and maybe one or two people in the government for years warning about a pandemic and are we prepared? They didn’t know it was going to be COVID, but warning, are we prepared for a pandemic? Somebody’s been thinking about that.

Let me tell you what, nobody expected peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Are you kidding me? If somebody had told me in January, we’d be looking at peace treaties between Israel and Arab neighbors, and listen, I don’t know how that affects our understanding of the end times and all that.

I haven’t studied that out yet. I just know here’s what’s happening right now, and nobody saw that coming. At least nobody that was talking about it.

Nobody saw it coming. But they’ve had these things, if you haven’t heard about it, it’s because the media is not talking about it, but they’ve had these things called the Abraham Accords, where the U. S.

has helped broker these deals between Israel and several Arab nations, just in the last few months. Several Arab nations have signed peace agreements with Israel, including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morocco, and there’s additional discussions being held with Oman and Saudi Arabia. That just, mind blown.

Now, does that mean that there’s suddenly peace in the Middle East? No, but it does mean the Middle East is maybe a little more peaceful than it was this time last year, and I sure didn’t expect that. It was unthinkable, unthinkable just a few years ago, but sometimes peace can come unexpectedly.

Sometimes a message of peace can come unexpectedly. And this morning, we’re going to be in Luke chapter 2, where God announces another message of peace that came out of the Middle East. You probably already know where I’m going with this. But another unexpected message of peace that came out of the Middle East and caught everybody off guard.

Nobody expected it. Nobody expected it in the timing it came, and certainly nobody expected it in the way that it came. But we’re going to look at Luke 2 this morning, and if you’re there already and you can, if you’d stand with me as we read together, if you can stand without too much difficulty, We’re going to be in Luke chapter 2, starting in verse 8.

We’ve been looking for a few weeks at some of the announcements that God made so that we wouldn’t miss what He was doing. And this is an announcement that we’ve actually been acting out nightly with our shepherds at the live nativity. Starting in verse 8, and we’re going to read through verse 20.

It says, Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be to all people.

For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you. You will find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill to men. So it was when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, that the shepherds said to one another, Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us. And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.

Now when they had seen him, they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen as it was told them. And you may be seated. God sent these angels to announce Jesus’ birth to the shepherds near Bethlehem.

They were out in the fields. They were watching their sheep near Bethlehem. And God didn’t want them to miss the announcement.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve talked about the announcement to Mary. We’ve talked about the announcement to Joseph. God was making sure nobody missed, at least nobody that needed to be involved missed, because there were a lot of people who, even after Jesus was ascended back to heaven, still didn’t understand or accept who he was.

But in this instance, God wanted to make sure that all the people who needed to be involved knew what he was doing and what was going on, who this child came to be. And so he sent these angels to announce Jesus’ birth to the shepherds near Bethlehem. Now, once Jesus was born, we’ve talked about those two previous announcements, but just because Jesus had been born in the previous part of Luke chapter 2 that we didn’t read, verses 1 through 7, just because he had already been born, it didn’t mean that God was finished working either in the life of Jesus or in the circumstances surrounding his birth or in the lives of those that were there in Bethlehem.

It didn’t mean that God was finished, and it didn’t mean he was done announcing what he was doing. So he told these shepherds that they were to go find Jesus, and he said, here’s the sign, because God was all about providing the sign too, so that they would know where he was at work. Remember, he told Ahaz in the prophecy through Isaiah that the sign would be a virgin would give birth to a child.

That’s a flashing neon sign if there ever was one, because that just doesn’t happen. Here he says, here’s the sign. You’ll find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

And to us, we accept that as part of the Christmas story. It doesn’t sound like a miraculous sign. We’re going to talk about who the announcement portrayed Jesus to be and why that’s so amazing is because Jesus is portrayed as the king, and yet the sign here is that the king is going to be wrapped in rags and lying in a feeding trough.

You wouldn’t expect to find a king. Well, you wouldn’t expect to find many babies, even in poverty, in such a lowly situation. And yet God said, the one that I’ve sent, this is how you’ll find him.

You’ll know it’s the right baby when you get to the feeding trough and there’s a baby laying there wrapped in rags. God sent word to the shepherds and told them what he had done and where the baby was. These shepherds were just outside town.

We need to understand some things about the shepherds too. They were just outside. They were living in the fields and I’ve heard people say, well, that means he couldn’t have been born in December.

I heard people say he had to have been born in April. Because evidently, and there’s some things here I don’t understand, but there’s some movement of the sheep and the shepherds that they would be in certain areas in certain parts of the year. But as I was studying on that this week, I realized there’s a group of temple shepherds who kept their flocks out in the fields near Bethlehem all the time.

So was Jesus born in December? Maybe. Was Jesus born in April?

Maybe. God evidently didn’t think it was that big of a deal. He didn’t record exactly when it was. So we celebrate Jesus.

You know what? There’s not a wrong time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. And so we know that they were out watching their flocks in the fields.

Maybe it was winter, maybe it wasn’t. The important part, though, is that they were spending all their time out there with the sheep. They didn’t punch out at five and go home to their families.

Their life was out there in the fields. And so they were literally on the margins of society. And the angel, the messenger of God brought to them, to this group of people, not in the palace, not in the governor’s house, not in the mansion of some really rich person.

It was to these shepherds out in the fields that God sent his messenger to bring this incredible news of what he had just done. It’s an announcement of joy, he says in verse 10, to all people. Joy which shall be to all people.

Why did he send an announcement? It’s because a Savior was born right there in Bethlehem. The best news I’m sure those shepherds ever heard in their lives before or after.

But the Savior of mankind had been born right there in Bethlehem. And in verse 11, this is a verse I’ve quoted numerous times. You’ve probably done the same thing.

It’s on Christmas cards. It’s on ornaments. It says, for there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.

And we think, okay, it’s an announcement of the birth of Jesus. Take this apart into its little pieces. And God’s messenger is saying a lot about who Jesus is.

That word Savior is the Greek word Soter. And it’s a word that the Greeks would have used to describe their gods or for great kings, you know, kind of like Alexander the Great that they looked at as being almost godlike. You didn’t necessarily use that word for somebody who just ordinarily saved you in a situation.

You know, I was fighting with the copier this week. Come in sometime, it’s a frequent occurrence. We laugh about it in the office.

They laugh about it. I laugh about it later. I’m crying on the inside.

I was fighting with the copier, and Stella said, you know what, I called the guy to come out. Thank you, Stella, you saved me. Okay, that kind of thing, you wouldn’t call Stella Soter for that kind of situation.

They used that word to describe their Greek gods and to describe, again, somebody like Alexander the Great, who had done great things for the people. So don’t gloss over that where he calls Jesus a Savior and think, well, we know Jesus is a Savior. He was announcing something incredible to them that a Soter had been born in Bethlehem, a Savior who is Christ. That word Christos is the Greek word for Messiah.

A lot of times we think Christ is Jesus’ last name. I met a kid in middle school who asked me what Jesus’ middle name was. I said, what are you talking about?

He said, well, if his first name was Jesus, his last name was Christ, what was his. . .

No, it’s a title. All right. He was.

. . The messenger of God was identifying Jesus as the Messiah.

He was saying, this is the one that God has been promising for thousands of years. All these Old Testament prophecies, all these times that God has promised, He’s going to deal with the sins of His people, and He’s going to make peace with you once and for all. That person has come.

That fulfillment of all those promises is here. And to say that He was the Lord, the Greek word kurios there, sounds a little like curious. That word kurios, it means master.

There’s a little more to it than that. It’s the word that they use in Greek to translate the Hebrew word Yahweh, which is the personal name of God. When you see the Lord in all caps or small caps in your Old Testament, that’s not a title.

That’s something they have put there in place of the Hebrew name for God. And when they were identifying Jesus as the Kurios, it was an announcement that God himself had come. I realized, I talked about this last week, that gets a little confusing.

Jesus is God, Jesus is the Son of God. Yes, Jesus is God the Son, and he’s the Son of God the Father. So sometimes if that’s a little confusing, it’s because preachers and teachers were not as precise as maybe we ought to be in our descriptions of things.

But when he says Christ the Lord, he’s announcing that God himself has arrived. It’s like Joseph was told, he will be God with us, he will be Emmanuel. So in this little verse, verse 11, that we’ve all read so many times, there’s so much meaning there of what he’s telling the shepherds.

A great God king is coming to fulfill the promises that Yahweh has made for thousands of years to the Jewish people. And He’s fulfilling those promises by coming Himself as a man. God the Son became a man to live among us.

The Word was made flesh, as John chapter 1 says, and He came and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. So they were being given this good news that something unexpected was happening because nothing like this had ever happened before. And I would think if I was given that announcement, you know what?

God has shown up in human form. I tend to be a little skeptical. We’ve had some conversations in the office about this vaccine. I’m a skeptic.

I want to see the evidence about the vaccine. I also want to see the evidence from people making crazy claims about the vaccine. I’m withholding judgment.

I just want to see the evidence and see how this plays out. That’s me. I think I would say, I want to see this.

Where can I go check this out for myself? God’s messenger told them where they could go check it out for themselves. How they would find him, again, I already mentioned, he would be a baby wrapped in rags and lying in a feeding trough, swaddled and lying in a manger.

So they were told, here’s what God’s done. Here’s where you can go find it and see it for yourself. And then if that one angel appearing wasn’t enough, then the Bible says in verse 13 that suddenly a multitude of them appeared.

A multitude is kind of one of those words you use when I can’t count that high. There’s lots of them. And they appeared and they began proclaiming the message of what God was doing.

They began proclaiming the glory of God. And the shepherds realized they needed to go and see. They needed to go and look.

And what this tells us as we read this story is that God was fulfilling his promises to Israel in unexpected ways. God was moving in ways that nobody ever expected. For one thing, people often expect judgment and doom from God, right?

You go outside these four walls and talk to people out on the street, and if they believe in God, a lot of them look at God as somebody who’s ready to squash them. They expect judgment and doom, and yet here God shows up and God speaks up through his messengers, and he’s bringing a message of what? Great joy.

He’s bringing good news. He’s bringing them something to be joyful about, something to celebrate about. That was unexpected.

It was unexpected how he did it, too, because the religious system of their day often excluded various people. If you didn’t look right, if you didn’t dress right, if you didn’t smell right, if you didn’t go to the temple on the right days, if you didn’t do all the religious things, if you didn’t check all the boxes, then you were excluded to exclude people. A lot of people see God the same way today.

A lot of people in Jesus’ day probably thought that’s how God operated, because that’s how the religious people operated. They had a religious system that excluded various people, but he said in verse 10, he was sending out this message of good news to all people. The message was there for everyone.

It wasn’t just good news to the really religious. It wasn’t just good news to the rich. It wasn’t just good news to the Jews.

It was good news to all people. This baby was unexpected. His arrival, his means of arrival, everything about it was unexpected, but he was everything that God had been promising.

He was the Savior that God had promised. He was going to bring them eternal blessings, eternal life, instead of just the temporal blessings that they would expect from other kings that the term Savior had been applied to by the Greeks. They might be able to help you out with things here on earth.

They might be able to write you a check or take care of your parking tickets. But Jesus was here to provide them with eternal life by forgiving their sins. Nobody expected a Savior to come for that reason.

Nobody expected a soter to come for that reason. And as Christ, He was everything that the Father had promised. He was the Messiah, but He was not this earthly king, earthly ruler, political guy that they expected to come and kick the Romans out and usher in a golden age to Israel.

He wasn’t some political leader born in the halls of power. He was born in the lowliest of circumstances to come and reach even the lowliest of people with a message of hope and good news in the forgiveness that He offered. And as Lord, as this master, He was no mere human leader.

But again, think about the two-fold meaning of that word. He wasn’t just a human master that bends us to His will. He was God, the Son in human flesh, who came to take up residence among us.

Nobody expected the Lord himself to show up in our midst, and yet there he was. Everything about this was unexpected. The announcement that God’s promises were going to be fulfilled by this baby were even then being fulfilled by this baby.

It was totally unexpected. But the way the announcement was made, the announcement, I think I’ve pretty well covered that, right? The announcement was unexpected.

What God said was happening was unexpected. But even the way the announcement was made was unexpected. Why shepherds?

Why would God announce it to the shepherds? It’s probably not the first place I’d go. Probably most people thought that’s not the first place they’d go.

Now, we need to be fair to the shepherds, though. Contrary to some popular misconceptions, they weren’t total outcasts. I’ve heard some sermons, I may have even talked about this at times, that shepherds were considered less than human.

A lot of that comes from several hundred years after the time of Christ. Shepherds weren’t all that bad if God describes himself as a shepherd all throughout the Old Testament. And Jesus talked at length about being the good shepherd in the New Testament. And God told the pastors and elders to go and shepherd his church.

Shepherds weren’t these subhuman creatures. I’ve heard even some preachers say they were about as respected as prostitutes in that day. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

But I think they were just ordinary people. And I think that’s the beauty of God sending the message to the shepherds. They were just ordinary people.

No, they weren’t viewed as the scum of the earth, but they also weren’t the political, religious, or economic power in the places where they lived. They were ordinary people. They were just guys trying to take care of their animals so they could feed their families, feed themselves.

They were just ordinary people trying to get through life. And it was to those people that God invaded their world and said, look at what I’m about to do. You get to be the first to know about it.

They were the kind of ordinary people that Jesus came to reach with a message of salvation. And this part’s just my opinion, but I suspect God spoke to the shepherds about the coming of Jesus because they were a perfect illustration of what Jesus was coming to do. He wasn’t coming, at least in that first coming, to bend everybody to His will.

He was coming to shepherd God’s flock, Israel, back to God. If you think about what Jesus’ mission was, it makes perfect sense. that God would go to the shepherds.

And yet nobody expected that. But from the message itself and who He brought it to first, in all these unexpected ways, we see that Jesus Christ can bring anyone peace with God. That’s what His message really was about, was peace.

Peace between God and man. It says in verse 14 that the angels proclaimed, Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men. Through Jesus Christ and through His coming, The Father in heaven is glorified, and man on earth is reconciled to Him.

The word reconciled means to bring peace. I think my favorite Christmas song is Hark the Herald Angels Sing. I never thought much about it as a child, and then I started as an adult reading the words.

That is some of the richest, deepest theology you will ever get into in poetry. And it’s so compact. But one of the lines says, Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.

That was the message of Christmas. That was the message of Jesus coming, the reconciliation between a holy God and sinful man that was not possible up to that time. There was only the momentary appeasement of God through sacrifices, but the blood of bulls and goats could never once and for all cleanse our sin guilt before a holy God.

There needed to be a perfect, infinite sacrifice. And that’s where God the Son came and offered Himself so that we could have peace with God. And that peace with God is available to everyone.

Now listen, when I say the message of Jesus is for everyone, when I say it’s for all people, regardless of where they’ve come from and background and choices and all that, it doesn’t mean God is suddenly okay with everything we want to do. Don’t misinterpret that. But it means where we’ve been is not so deep and so dark that God cannot save us through the blood of Jesus Christ. And this message was to all people.

He brought the message to regular people, the shepherds in verses 8 and 9. He said in verse 10, it was a message of great joy to all people. He said in verse 11, again, all this is through his messenger, the angel, but he said in verse 11, the Savior was born to you.

He said in verse 12, the sign was to you, to these shepherds. God sent his son, the father sent his son so that we could find peace with him because there was no other way. This was an unexpected message offering peace to the world from a God that folks we had rebelled against. We had sinned against. We had dishonored and disobeyed in every way conceivable.

We did not deserve even the offer of peace. And yet God not only offered the peace, He paid the price in full for us to have that peace. The peace is available to all people, but it’s only available through Jesus Christ. Jesus said it Himself.

We talked about this just a few weeks ago. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes unto the Father but through Me.

Some people say, well, there’ve got to be other ways. If there were other ways, then God made a horrendous mistake and went through a lot of unnecessary hardship at the cross. God doesn’t make mistakes.

God had this all planned out before Jesus was born at Bethlehem, before He created any of us, before He created the world. In eternity past, when it was just the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, He had this all figured out. And His plan was to send the Son to be born among us so He could die for us so that that message of peace and reconciliation could be spread out to us.

So God could make the offer that we could have peace. You may think, some of you this morning may think, I need that. You may realize you need that because you feel the distance between you and God.

You know how sometimes you’ll be talking to somebody and you know things are just, nobody’s saying it necessarily, but you know something’s not right between you and that person. Sometimes we feel that with God. That’s our sin getting in the way of the relationship and the fellowship as it ought to be.

Some of you may say, I need that peace. I know that I’m estranged from God. Maybe you’ve tried all kinds of good religious things.

You’ve tried checking all the boxes, but you still don’t have that feeling of peace with God because Jesus is the only way to have it. Some of you may say, well, I didn’t know I was at war with God. Why would I think I needed peace?

Listen, the Bible says friendship with the world, meaning love of the world and love of our sin is enmity with God. It means to be an enemy of God. Romans 5.

1 says that being justified through faith, we have peace with God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The truth is this world always has made itself the enemy of God through our sin. And we’re all guilty.

And there’s no way for us to make peace with God because we can’t erase our sin. We can’t do enough good to overcome our sin. All that disobedience.

Jesus Christ came, suffered, bled, and died to pay the price. And this announcement was the message that He was coming to do just that. And that leads me this morning to the final part of the message, that this offer of peace with God is a message for us to believe and for us to share.

Now, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior before, you need to understand that you have sinned against God. We like to think that we’re good people, and by human standards we may be, but we have all sinned against God. And God’s standard is absolute sinless perfection.

I liken it to one of those rides that you go on at an amusement park. If you’re into such things, I’m really not. But they’ll normally have a sign that says you must be this tall to ride the ride.

And if you’re not that tall, you can’t go on. Well, God has a sign too, metaphorically speaking. All right, this is just an example.

But God has a sign too that says you must be this holy to enter heaven. You must be this holy to enter my presence. And the sign, I can’t even reach that high.

Where it’s pointing is infinite, sinless perfection. And we’re all down here and never reached that standard on our own. Jesus Christ had to come and deal with our sin.

He had to come to be born among us, to live among us, to die for us, so that He could reconcile us to the Father. And God called them to believe. He told them, go check it out for yourself.

Come and see. He called them to believe. And this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ, you need to understand that you’re a sinner.

I’m not trying to be mean. I’m a sinner too. But you need to recognize that you’ve sinned against God and need a Savior, and you can’t do it yourself, and that’s why He sent Jesus Christ to be your Savior.

And if you understand all that, believe that Jesus Christ died to be your only Savior, to be your only shot at redemption, and ask God to forgive you because of what Jesus Christ did. It’s that simple. Believe it and ask Him for it.

And it’s a message for us to share for those of you who have already trusted Christ as your Savior. The message that God offers peace with mankind is a message for us to go and talk about. It says the shepherds went and they told everybody.

They couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Sometimes as Christians, you can’t get our mouths open, right? They could not get their mouths to close over the good news that they had heard.

The God who created us suddenly has offered peace and we can be forgiven. They went and had to tell everybody that they knew. Folks, that’s our job as well.

We’re doing that in the park right now, sharing that through the live nativity. But folks, it’s so much more than that, and we have so many more opportunities than just at Christmas time. Tell people that God sent His Son so that we could have peace with God and be reconciled to Him.