The Most Important Visit

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This morning I’m going to ask you to turn with me to Matthew chapter 1. Matthew chapter 1. We were discussing before the service the feasibility of getting back together for our Christmas caroling time tonight.

And I’ll talk to you about that a little bit more later on. But we were discussing it and I was telling Charla kind of what was going on, kind of what my thought process was. And she said, well, some of them won’t want to get back out.

I don’t want to get back out. I don’t want to get out and drive on this. Here’s where I’m going with this.

She said, if they want to still do it, you could invite them all over to the house. She said, no, don’t do that. Wait, no, I think it’s okay.

I think the downstairs looks good. No, don’t do that. I kind of went back and forth.

I warned her I was going to talk about this a little bit. My wife, and some of you ladies are probably the same way, my wife has this idea that the house needs to look nice when people are coming over. As a matter of fact, before we moved here, I would tease her that I have to apply three days in advance to invite somebody over.

If somebody’s stopping by, they need to give us notice. She’s gotten much better since we moved here because we now have an upstairs with bedrooms and playrooms, and the kids’ chaos is often confined to upstairs, and so the downstairs stays cleaner. So she’s gotten a lot better.

I no longer have to let her know three days in advance. But she worries about preparing for people to come over. And I’ve told her many times, she’s probably sick of hearing this.

Honey, it’s okay. We live here. This is not a museum.

They’re coming to our home, not a museum. They understand that they all have homes too. But there’s something that, and I get it, there’s something in her that wants to make sure everything’s ready, everything’s prepared, everything’s presentable.

And the reason I get that is because we all do that to an extent, I think. Now, I’m not going to go put a fresh coat of paint on the house every time my parents come over, or every time Brother Mike or Brother Bob stops by. But you know what?

I would probably spend a lot of time getting the house ready if, say, the president were going to stop by, or the Queen of England, or somebody really, really, you know, somebody really big like that. not to say that you’re not important, Brother Mike, you know, but, but, you know, we, we all get that way. Okay.

These people are family. I’m not going to bother getting the laundry off the couch. Oh my goodness.

So-and-so is stopping by the house has got to be immaculate. We understand that. Most of us do that.

And that means we’d probably like some notice if somebody important is going to be stopping by. God provided us with notice that somebody important was coming for a visit. Matter of fact, he provided a lot of notice of the most important visit that mankind would ever experience.

Last week, if you watched the video, I started talking to you about some of the announcements that were given in Scripture about the coming of Jesus Christ. Because he was, as I talked about last week, no ordinary baby. His was not an ordinary birth. His was the single most important visitation that any of us or that all of us could ever receive.

And so God announced it over and over and over again to make sure people understood and to give people the opportunity to prepare themselves. Last week, we looked in the book of Luke at how God, through the angel Gabriel, announced to Mary that Jesus was going to be born. And he sort of explained to deal with her curiosity about how the virgin birth works, because he said, you’re going to bear a son, you’re going to bear a child.

And she said, how is this possible? Because I’ve never known a man. She had not been involved in the things that you had to be involved in to conceive a child.

She said, how does this even work? And so the angel, speaking on God’s behalf, explained the Holy Spirit was going to work a miracle. He was going to create a baby inside of her, and with God, nothing is impossible.

And we saw how all of that led Mary to the realization that Jesus was going to be the Son of God. This morning, I want to look at God’s announcement to Joseph and how Jesus was announced not just as the Son of God, but as God the Son. Those are two different terms, mean two different things, but they’re connected to one another.

And how when God the Son showed up, it was the most important visit that mankind has ever received. So if you have already turned with me to Matthew chapter 1, I’m going to ask you to stand, if you’re able to, without too much trouble. And we’re going to be in Matthew chapter 1 this morning, starting in verse 18.

It 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. 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. And she will bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

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 child and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated, God with us. Then Joseph, being aroused from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took to him his wife, and did not know her until she had brought forth her firstborn son, and he called his name Jesus. And you may be seated.

So in this announcement, the angel appeared to Joseph to explain the birth of Jesus, because Mary has come up pregnant, they are betrothed, which is an additional step from what we have, you know, we go dating, presumably engagement, marriage. They had engagement, betrothal, marriage. They were basically at this point legally married, but they were not living together as husband and wife.

When you were betrothed, if you wanted to back out, you had to go, my understanding is you had to go through the whole divorce process. There was a legal proceeding here. This was a step beyond engagement.

We normally classify it like they were engaged, but there was a degree of commitment between these two beyond just engagement. They were betrothed, and Mary has turned up pregnant. Joseph knows it’s not his, and somebody’s got some explaining to do.

Somebody had better start explaining. And so the angel here appeared to Joseph to explain what was taking place in the birth of Jesus. Because when it says here that she was found with child, Joseph, being a just man, not wanting to humiliate her publicly, went to put her away secretly.

See, the legal penalty for adultery was stoning. And he could have, under the law, taken her out and had her stoned to death for being unfaithful, which we, again, think of as just throwing rocks at somebody. It’s so much more brutal than that.

I don’t have time this morning to go into the description of everything involved there, but he really could have just been brutal to Mary. But it says he’s a just man, not only that he was going to uphold the sanctity of marriage by saying that this is over, but he was also just in the sense that he was going to show her some grace here, and he was just going to send her away quietly. No need to humiliate anybody, no need to kill anybody, let’s just call this off.

And so he was going to send her away, and that’s when God stepped in and spoke to Joseph through the angel. And she had been told that the child was of the Holy Spirit, as it says in verse 18. We saw that last week in the announcement in the book of Luke.

She’d been told the Holy Spirit is going to be responsible for this. To everyone else, though, it just looked like she’d been unfaithful. And sometimes that can happen.

We can be obeying God. We can be doing exactly what he tells us to do. We know that we’re doing what’s right, and yet to everybody else it looks like we’re in the wrong.

Some of you have been in circumstances like that. That’s where Mary was, only this was a very dire circumstance for her. And so it was then the angel appeared to him in a dream explaining she has not been unfaithful.

She has not cheated on you. She has not done anything wrong here. That’s not to imply that she was sinless, but she was innocent in this circumstance.

That’s why he says in verse 20, do not be afraid to take to you Mary, your wife. He said, this is not something you have to worry about. This is not something you have to fear.

You can trust her. And that’s really what’s at issue here. It’s not, I think there’s a bigger issue than just the public shame of him having a wife who had cheated.

If he can’t trust her, I mean, what basis is there for a marriage? So when he says, when the angel says, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, and explains that what has taken place really is, as Mary said, it really is the work of God. He’s letting Joseph know he can trust the woman that he’s going to be married to.

So he comes and he explains that God has intervened here. God has done something remarkable. She’s telling the truth.

It is as she has said it’s going to be. And Joseph, God is going to do remarkable things that you can’t even comprehend. And what God was going to do was send Jesus to earth as God in human flesh.

This thing that Joseph wasn’t going to understand completely. This thing that, when I say wasn’t going to understand, without seeing it play out, without seeing the whole story, there was some discussion on Facebook yesterday about the song Mary Did You Know. I posted something on there because I discovered something in Mark chapter 3 that indicates to me she didn’t know everything.

Later on in his ministry, she was part of a group involving his brothers who thought he was out of his mind and came to take him home. So Mary from the book of Luke knew some of what God was doing, but clearly I don’t think knew everything Joseph didn’t know everything They were being told that God is going to do something remarkable here But they had no way of understanding at that point. They had no way of comprehending That God in human flesh was about to show up in their midst And as I say all this I need to clarify some things Over the terms that I use because it’s easy to get confused here anytime we bring the Trinity into anything, it’s easy to get things confused.

Jesus is God, and he’s the Son of God. And I’ve heard skeptics take issue with this. How can he be God and the Son of God?

How can you be your own son? We’re using the term God in two different ways here. He is God in the sense that he is divine.

He is the second person of the Trinity. He’s not a separate God from the Father, but he is God. If you accept the Trinitarian doctrine that I believe is taught throughout the New Testament, that there is one God revealed in three eternally distinct persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, then Jesus is that second person of the Trinity, and He is God, and He’s every bit as much God as the Father is.

The idea of Him being the Son of God, when we say God there, we’re referring to the Father. So nobody’s saying, and if you hear a skeptic say that, nobody is saying that He’s His own Son. He is God in the sense that He is part of the Trinity, and He’s the Son of God in the sense that that’s how He relates to the Father.

So sometimes, and this is maybe the fault of preachers and teachers, sometimes we’ll use God referring to the Trinity, and sometimes we’ll use the word God referring to the Father. And what we really ought to say is God the Father, to clarify things. So when it was announced that He’s the Son of God, He’s the Son of God the Father.

And in this passage, we’re going to see that he’s also God the Son. And it’s important that we know that he’s both of those things. Because to be the Son of God, that means he’s divine.

But to know he’s God the Son means he’s no less God than God the Father. And there are people in our world, there are people in our community who believe in Jesus today, and they’ll say they believe Jesus is divine. But they believe there’s some hierarchy here where there’s God the Father, and Jesus is somewhere somewhere in between God and man, maybe a half step removed from each, that he’s not quite God, but he’s more than man.

Now, if he’s God the Son, he’s every bit as much God as God the Father is. I just want to clarify a little bit about those terms, and I’ll try to do better about referring to the Father when that’s who I mean. Now, he’s the, here’s where that brain fog kicks in.

I got started talking about the Trinity and forgot where I was going with it. He is God the Son, And it is important to this and to our understanding of what he came to do for us, that we understand he is not less than God. That he’s every bit as much God as his Father.

And so he says in verse 20, the angel does, that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. He’s saying this pregnancy is the work of God. This wasn’t some normal biological process.

Nobody was unfaithful here. God did this. God did this.

And we want to note, like I said last week, It says that the child was conceived in her, not conceived by her. Now, you may not think that that’s too important of a difference, but conceived in her means she was not an active participant. Every time a baby is conceived, it’s conceived by a father and a mother.

For the baby to be conceived in her means it was entirely the work of God. She didn’t play a part in that, and we need to understand that it wasn’t some physical process. She was not physically impregnated.

God, in His power, created a baby in her womb. That which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bring forth a son, verse 21 says, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.

Jesus means the Lord saves. It’s a Hebrew name that means the Lord saves. He was announcing, even by the name of the child, what His intentions were, that this was going to be the means by which God was going to save his people.

And the way he did this, the way Jesus accomplished this, was that he came and took on a human nature, took on human flesh, and came to live among us and endure all the things we endure, endure all the temptations, all the sufferings, all the things that we go through, and to do it without sin so that he could die in our place. If he hadn’t been a man, he couldn’t have died in our place. but if he hadn’t been God, he couldn’t have risen again.

And if he hadn’t been God, his sacrifice wouldn’t have been acceptable as a payment for all the sins of mankind. And he says in verse 22, so all this was done that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. He was saying that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promises.

It is not as though God the Father just woke up one morning and said, you know what I’ll do? I’ll send my son down to become a human being. He didn’t wake up one morning and decide that.

I’ve met people, though, who think that’s how God operates. Like, everything’s an afterthought. I had a woman say once upon a time that it wasn’t the Father’s plan for Jesus to be crucified.

It just happened, and then the Father said, I think I can make something good come out of this. No, no, no, no, no, no. None of this caught God by surprise, caught the Father by surprise. This was all his plan.

This was all stuff that he had been promising going back thousands of years. One of the songs that we sang this morning talked about crushing the serpent’s head. You go back to Genesis chapter 3, and right there is the earliest prophecy, the earliest promise of the coming of Jesus Christ, and what he was going to do to defeat sin and defeat Satan on our behalf.

There was never a point in time where this was not in God’s plans. And he said this was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. Now he’s referring here to a specific prophecy, but there are numerous prophecies.

The fingerprints of God and this plan are all over the Old Testament. He’s speaking here of a specific prophecy. He was the fulfillment of God’s promises, but this specific prophecy tells us in verse 23, behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son.

Now that refers back to Isaiah chapter 7. And what he was saying here was that the birth of this child was going to be miraculous. everything about Jesus’ coming was going to be miraculous.

Now, at some point, maybe I’ll tell you more about Isaiah chapter 7, the prophecy to King Ahaz that he talks about this young woman, a virgin marrying and giving birth. And his promise was, you’ll know that I am God, and you’ll know that I’m going to save Israel, because in the time it takes before that child is even old enough to know right and wrong, I will have delivered you from these pagan kingdoms that are coming to oppress Israel. That was the initial what was said in Isaiah chapter 7.

But the angel makes it clear that it was a two-fold prophecy. Not only promising the deliverance of Israel hundreds of years before, but also promising that a virgin would give birth to a child. Some people have said, well, that word al-mach in Hebrew, in Isaiah, it doesn’t mean virgin, it can mean young girl.

It can mean both, yes, but the Greek word used here in Matthew only means virgin. And besides, he said, this will be a sign to you. Well, last I checked, it’s mostly young women who give birth to children, right?

Right? I mean, at a certain age, Medicare doesn’t really cover the maternity war usually, right? It’s been a while since I’ve studied Medicare policy, but it usually is young women.

And so if that word means just young woman would give birth, that’s not much of a sign. But to say a virgin gives birth, that doesn’t happen every day. There’s your big neon sign in prophetic history saying, this is the one.

So he’s saying this is the fulfillment of that prophecy. Everything here is going to be miraculous. But how Jesus came wasn’t the only miracle.

It was also a miracle why he came. Because his birth meant that God was showing up in our midst. The God that they had only heard the voice of. The God that they knew through the priests.

the God that they knew through the scriptures, the God that they knew through the stories of miracles down through their history, the God that they only knew indirectly was suddenly showing up in their midst to be among them. He was literally God with us. Verse 23 says, They shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated God with us.

And I want you to think about what it meant to them that suddenly God was with them. They lived in a time of uncertainty. Matter of fact, most people throughout human history have lived in times of uncertainty.

But they lived in a time of war. There were constant revolts and constant conflicts with the Romans. They lived in a time of famine.

They couldn’t just always run down to Walmart and buy more food. If you didn’t raise it and if your crops failed, you starved the next year. They were a step away from starvation all the time.

Again, they were dealing with the Romans. There was social strife, the fighting among the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots and the Herodians. There was all this conflict stirred up.

They didn’t know what was going on. And they had not heard a word from God in 400 years. They had not heard a prophetic word.

That doesn’t mean that God was asleep or God was off on vacation. But the Father had not revealed any new message to Israel, any new guidance to Israel for 400 years. And they’re there wondering, what are we supposed to do?

And for some of them, it probably felt like God had forgotten them or abandoned them. And some of them probably felt a great sense of despair. Imagine if you had to navigate the times we’re in right now with no clue as to what God wanted you to do.

They felt abandoned and they were in despair, many of them. And suddenly, it was into that time of silence, that time of uncertainty, that God suddenly broke the 400 years of silence and He spoke to them. And his first announcement was, I’m with you.

God wasn’t just noticing them. Sometimes we just want to know that God notices our problems. But God went a step beyond that. This wasn’t just noticing them.

He was actually with them. You see, the Father was sending his Son, by the power of the Spirit, to come and live among his people. What would that mean to you?

You suddenly learn that God is with you. That he notices you, that he cares. God the Son Himself came to be one of us.

He came to walk among us. He came to experience all that we experience. He came to minister to us and to serve.

He even said, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many. He came to minister to us and serve us. The God of this universe came to minister to us, and He came to bear the penalty of sin for us.

And He came to lay down His life for us so that He could reconcile us to the Father. God was with us all of a sudden. No more did we have to wonder, does He care?

No more did we have to wonder, does He notice? No more did we have to wonder, what does He want from us? He didn’t send a prophet.

He didn’t send an angel. He sent Himself. God, the Son, was with us.

And Jesus came to be God with us so that through Him we could be with God. So that through Him we could be reconciled to the Father. because each of us is separated from God because of our sin.

God is perfectly holy and just. And you and I have all disobeyed God. Every one of us, we’ve disobeyed God. We’ve sinned against Him.

And that sin separates us from Him. And sometimes people want to say, well, isn’t God being kind of picky? God has to separate Himself from us because of our sin?

Listen, I like the example that was given in a class I was in years ago. If somebody goes and takes a scoop of that stuff out of the garbage disposal, how close do you want them to put it to your plate? See, some things are offensive, and our sin is offensive to God.

Just like we want garbage nowhere near the food we’re eating, God wants sin nowhere near Him. Our sin separates us from God. And you and I have no hope of getting ourselves back into His good graces.

We have no hope of getting ourselves to be with God. But Jesus came to be God with us so that He could reconcile us. the Father so that He could bring us forgiveness, so that He could bring us eternal life.

And Joseph received the news. I’m sure he didn’t understand all of this. Some of this we understand because we get to know the rest of the story.

I’m sure he didn’t understand all of this, but he received the news that God was coming to be with us. He accepted the fact that Jesus was coming to be God with us. Because when he heard this message, everything changes.

And he stops his plan to get rid of Mary. And he realizes that God is doing something remarkable here. Joseph received the news and he accepted what the Father was intending to do through the Son.

And you and I have that same opportunity. We have that same opportunity to recognize that into our time of upheaval, into our time of despair sometimes, into our time of conflict, into our time of uncertainty, God is with us. Not because He looked at us and decided, you know, whatever sin you want to do, it’s fine, I’m okay with it now.

He’s with us because He sent His Son. God the Son took on a human nature, took on human flesh, and came to live among us so that He could serve, so that He could pay for our sins, and so that He could lay down His life. And this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, it really is as simple as understanding that you’ve sinned against God.

And understanding that that sin separates you from God and you can’t do enough good to find your way back to God. But understanding that Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. God the Son was nailed to the cross where He shed His blood and He died to pay for your sins in full.

And now God offers you forgiveness and salvation. Not because of anything you can earn or deserve, but simply because Jesus Christ paid for it. God is with us so that we can be with God.

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