We may be seated.
Well, welcome.
My name is Russ Masterson, the pastor here at Redeemer.
Welcome to you, whether uh you're one of our regular folks, or whether you're here with family, or you just found us because you're looking for a Christmas Eve service and you ended up here, or perhaps you are at home and you are watching uh from your living room and you're unable to be here.
Merry Christmas to you.
And I say that knowing that it has not always been a merry year, has it?
It's been more interesting.
Uh we use the word unprecedented more this year than any other year for sure, but you are here.
You are here, and I am here, and you are watching.
And for that, we are so excited.
We are so excited that you are here with us.
Last Saturday, I went to take my afternoon nap, and so I got my blanket.
It's the long gray one.
The short gray ones go to the girls, the long one gray one goes to me because you know, I've got to cover the feet, get cozied up on the couch, and I turn on the P and C golf championship.
And you ever watched the PC Golf Championship last weekend?
And so, what this is, most of you don't care, but I'll fill you in on it.
It's a pro golfer plays in this tournament with like a loved one, maybe a daughter or a son or you know, their dad or something like that.
And so you have pro golfer, family member, they're playing together, but it's a tournament, and Tiger was there.
And so anytime Tiger's there, the focus goes toward Tiger, like 50%, maybe 80% of the TV coverage just follows him.
And it was interesting because he was playing with his son, Charlie.
And Charlie is 11 years old.
And Tiger, if you've just been asleep for the past 20 years, Tiger has won 82 PGA events, 15 majors.
I got curious, so I Google stalked a little bit.
There's lots of information out there about him.
He's worth about a billion dollars just to fill you in.
It may be 800, it may be 900.
Let's just round up, right?
Like at some point, you're just like, that's a lot.
I can't comprehend it.
He's one of the most known, greatest, uh, wealthiest, powerful athletes in history.
And then he was there in Orlando playing a golf tournament with an 11-year-old boy.
Now, the pros they tee off way, way back there.
Way back there.
And then, like, some of you play golf, and you look at that, you drive right by, you go head to the white T's.
That's where I tee off the white T's, and it's still not pretty.
And further up are some other T's.
Charlie's up at the front T's, he drives the ball at 11-year-old, he drives the ball 200 yards.
I can comprehend a drive of 200 yards.
Like, that's something like I've known before.
I can I understand, I can comprehend it.
Tiger's driving at about like 330 yards or something like that.
I can't comprehend that.
There's so much I can't comprehend.
Now, here's a picture of Charlie and Tiger at the golf tournament, the two of them.
Now, the announcers couldn't stop talking about Charlie.
I couldn't get enough of watching Charlie play because this is Tiger's son, right?
Like my mind has a difficult time processing and comprehending Tiger, but I can get my mind around Charlie.
If you've been on church long enough, you know where I'm headed with this.
You can already see it coming, right?
Because I can understand the Son, even while I can't always comprehend the Father.
That's why we get Colossians 1, verse 15.
He, Jesus, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
So Jesus is the exact representation of God for us to know.
It's God incarnate, God in flesh.
It's God saying, I want you to know me, to be able to understand me.
And this Jesus, this Christ, is the firstborn of creation, basically saying, it's not a plan B.
Like from the very beginning, it was God's desire and delight and plan to pursue us and move toward us, even while we never and don't move toward him all the time.
He pursues and moves toward us.
And that's what we have in this Jesus.
The Christmas story we're going to read tonight is Matthew chapter 1, verses 20 through 23.
Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet.
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.
So I have a one-point sermon tonight.
Merry Christmas.
Next Christmas present.
Nothing else.
I didn't get you anything else, but a one-point sermon's pretty good right on Christmas.
You didn't know what you're going to get when you came here.
One point.
In great compassion and abundant pardoning.
God is with you and for you.
That's the story of the scriptures.
It's the story of Matthew 1.
We're going to look at Isaiah 55.
It's always the story.
In great compassion and abundant pardoning, God is with you and for you.
Emmanuel means with us is God.
It doesn't mean God is against us.
It doesn't mean God is sort of for us when we get our acts together or God is for us when we're for him.
No, it just means God is with us.
This whole fall, I've been studying my way through this book called Gentle and Lowly.
It's a book on Jesus.
I just read like two pages a day in the morning as my devotion.
Dane Ortland, who wrote the book, he writes this.
This hit me this week, just happened to hit me this week.
We tend to project our natural expectations about who God is onto him instead of fighting to let the Bible surprise us into what God Himself says.
So the question for us is, are we willing to allow the arc of the scriptures, right?
The arc of the gospel story to tell us who God is for us.
Right?
So not one story in the Old Testament that you scratch your head on, you're like, what in the world was that story?
Not one like commandment, but the arc of the story of the scriptures as God is revealing himself in time.
Are we willing to allow that to surprise us into who God is for us?
Ortland takes us to the Old Testament to show that even in the Old Testament, God is revealing Himself to be this God of redemption and love.
Isaiah 55, 6 and 7.
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near, let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts.
And I can pause and just say, maybe you relate.
I can relate to that.
I can relate to having wicked thoughts or even behaviors at times.
I've known unrighteousness.
Let him return to the Lord, that he, God, may have compassion on him, me, and you, for he will abundantly pardon.
So the first part of the passage tells us what to do: seek the Lord.
Repent, return.
So as you come aware that you're more broken than you originally thought, yet you're more loved by God than you could ever dare to dream, fall back into the grace of God.
Repent back.
Turn to Him.
And then the second part tells us why.
Well, why would we do that?
Why would we want to do that?
And it's not because He's going to zap you.
That's not the reason here.
The reason here is so wonderful for us that He may have compassion on us.
And abundantly pardon us.
That's the desire of God to you and to me.
Wow.
So God doesn't just merely accept you.
Like, ah, sort of gotta accept that one.
Yeah, he turned back.
And no, no, no.
He doesn't merely just accept you, he delights, abundantly delights to pardon you.
And then Isaiah, after that, just grace bomb of what God's regard is to us, says his thoughts.
Verse 7, his thoughts aren't like your thoughts.
Now I'd always connected that over time to like God's sovereignty, mysterious ways.
He's in control of all things.
His thoughts aren't like your thoughts.
He's so much bigger.
But in the context here, it's connected to compassion and pardon.
So, verse 6, we're a wandering people.
We need to repent.
We need to fall back into God's mercy and grace.
Verse 7, God is compassionate and abundantly pardons us.
Yet Isaiah knows that the human mind plays tricks.
And we don't always allow the Bible to surprise us into actually who God is for us.
We often project back onto him.
And so then he lays eight and nine to us, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
As high as the heavens above the earth are these loving, compassion, pardoning regard of the Heavenly Father to us.
That's what we have.
Last weekend, Christy and the girls, they made a bunch of Christmas treats.
They put them in different bags.
Each girl got to pick a few friends to go and drop treats to.
And so we got in the car.
It had gotten dark.
So it was a little kind of fun to kind of like ninjas sneak up to somebody's door, right?
And so first we pull in the driveway, I pull in the first driveway, and our youngest one gets out, and we say, Oh, you're going to do this on your own, right?
Like we wanted to make it feel like pretty fun.
And so she gets out and she sneaks up, you know, to the door and she peers through the window and she sees a few people, and then she sets the treat down, she rings the doorbell, and she comes flying back through that, through that, down that sidewalk to our car, and she jumps in.
And it was the first time I realized that's the fun part for Christy and I is watching them run back.
And like, so in order to increase my fun, it means I need to park further and further away from the door.
So I'm not pulling in the driveway anymore.
Now I'm on the street, like I'm making them run through the yard.
And every single time, every single time, they come running back, laughing and smiling.
Just laughing.
They're huffing it through the yard, they're jumping over bushes, and they are just laughing the whole way.
Why?
Because they had a plan and a delight to deliver this gift.
Right?
Their hearts just overflowed in delight at getting to deliver the gift.
See, in Jesus, God doesn't just put up with us.
Jesus is God incarnate, saying to us, coming to us to say, I delight to redeem you and have a relationship with you.
God delights to forgive and redeem and accept you.
It's his plan and his delight to do so.
Now if we go back to verse 9, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Wow.
Okay, so that first phrase, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, that's a Hebrew way of saying spatial infinitude.
Spatial infinitude.
So God's compassion to you, right where you're at, you don't have to get any better for this.
God's compassion for you and abundant pardoning of anything you've done or will do, currently doing, it is so abundant, it is spatial infinitude.
Right?
And what does that mean?
Goes on forever.
And we know this in Jesus, this God incarnate who comes, and our sin is put upon the cross.
And his righteousness is given to us.
So we're forever beloved, forever, spatial infinitude.
This year probably hasn't been the year you thought it would be.
I'm taking a guess at that.
Probably didn't expect last Christmas to be in a Christmas service this Christmas with all these constraints and stuff.
It probably looks different.
Maybe even your Christmas traditions had to get changed around.
Maybe you're online.
And you would have never thought last year that you'd be watching a Christmas service online.
Maybe, maybe, maybe it's just another year feeling like you're not quite enough.
You're still carrying around some guilt of some sin.
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, Jesus, for he will save his people.
And this Jesus is Emmanuel for you.
With us is God.
He is compassionate to you and abundantly pardoned.
May we allow the scriptures to surprise us for who God is for us.
Let's pray together.
God, thank you for your grace and your mercy to us, which we desperately need.
That you are a God of compassion and grace.
Help us to trust more in the great gift of Jesus.
Amen.