Well, it is the fourth week of Advent.
Advent are these four Sundays leading up to Christmas.
And so each week we've taken a different passage preparing us for Christmas.
And so we're in Advent for.
I thought we'd begin with a little game.
And so I'm gonna give you two names and pretend that both of these names, pretend that both of these people are your first cousin.
And you are at a Christmas party, and like we do at Christmas parties, we love to drop a name to impress somebody, you know, just a little bit.
You know, we do that just a little bit.
And so let's pretend when I give you two names, both of these people are your first cousin, and then think about which one you would be more likely to name drop at the Christmas party.
Okay?
Here's number one.
Warren Buffett, self-made billionaire, financial guru.
I mean, perhaps what most of us would think the smartest financial whiz of the past century.
Warren Buffett or Bernie Madoff.
I mean, which one are you more like Bernie Madoff stole$65 billion?
Which would you be more likely to mention to impress people?
Go ahead.
Okay, probably, probably Warren, but we're worrying about you if you say Bernie Madoff.
All right, uh, second one, we're just gonna do two.
We could do these forever, but we'll just do two of these.
Uh second one, Harvey Weinstein.
Or Julia Roberts, right?
America's sweetheart.
She's from Smyrna, right?
Like she's like she's ours, and she's America's sweetheart.
Or you know, Harvey Weinstein on trial for sexual harassment.
Well, which one?
I mean, you're at the Christmas party, you're sipping eggnog.
I mean, it's your first cousin.
This is your first cousin.
You get a chance to kind of, the subject comes up about the movies and acting, and which one would you be more likely to mention?
Julie Roberts, of course.
And here's my point.
Here's my point.
We tend not to mention our first cousin who got kicked out of Harvard because they were selling meth.
We don't, we just, we that's not, it's just not, we just don't tend to do that, right?
No, we tend to mention the person's name that's gonna make us look even better and stronger and more glorious.
But what we get in these preceding verses in Matthew 1, so preceding what Audrey read to us, 18 through the end of the chapter, is verses 1 through 17.
If you look at that, it's just name after name after name after name, and I will save you from me reading it.
But what's interesting in that genealogy is there's five names of women listed.
And this long list of names.
Now, a couple things.
First is Bible trivia.
The first is this is that the genealogy of Jesus, the genealogy of Jesus mentioned in Matthew is through Joseph's line, okay?
And then the genealogy of Jesus in the book of Luke is through Mary's line.
So that's why they're different.
That's just a little Bible trivia for you.
And the second is this in Jewish genealogies, they didn't tend to mention women.
And so right away, you go, like, why is Matthew putting in five names of women?
Well, this was on purpose.
It was to draw attention to something.
And what we do, if we dig into these five stories of these women and the people around them and their stories, we see stories of widowhood, second and third marriages, economic hardship, foreign exclusion, prostitution, adultery, and even murder.
So if we grab just one of those five names, those five women, just one of them, there's this lady named Rahab, and it comes from Joshua chapter 2 in the Old Testament.
There's this story, and Israel's moving from slavery in Egypt, they're moving into the promised land, God's promised them this land, and they're moving into it.
They come upon this city, and they send some spies into this city to try to figure out how they can get into the city, and they want some provision and they want to go into this city.
And so they send spies into the city, scout it out.
And there's this woman, Rahab, and she's a prostitute by profession, and she protects them.
And she trusts in the Lord.
And it actually says in Joshua 2, verse 11, this Gentile prostitute encourages them, the people of God, encourages them to trust in their God.
She says, For the Lord your God is the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below.
So what a conviction.
What a conviction to us who sit in any moralistic judgment or arrogance over anybody.
See, this lineage of Jesus is a way to say, I come for all people.
No one's outside of my love.
Not even you.
Not even you with what's going on in your heart, your mind, and your life.
Not even me.
And how glorious that we don't have to get any better to be loved by God.
There's nothing we can do to be more loved by God.
There's nothing we can do to cause God to love us less.
Because it's not based in what we do, it's based in what he did for us.
That's the gift of Jesus the Christ.
And this brings us into our verse this morning, Matthew 1.21.
She will bear a son.
And you shall call his name Jesus.
For he will save his people from their sins.
Now, point number one is this: you don't have to be your own savior.
You don't have to be your own savior.
Now, we say that all the time here.
We say it all the time.
We almost say it every week in different words.
And we do that on purpose.
We do it because we need to hear it not only every week, we need to hear it every morning because we wake up to prove ourselves, to justify ourselves, that we're worthy enough, righteous enough, beloved enough.
If I just do enough, then God will love me.
If I just do enough in the world, I'll be worthy as a human being.
Maybe I'll finally be forgiven of that thing.
I'll be absolved.
Maybe finally I'll be righteous.
This line of thinking of enoughness, self-justification, self-saving.
And what a relief that Jesus came to relieve you of the endless cycle of self-saving.
That sin, that mistake, that that behavioral mistake, that that that the thinking, the heart thing, the motive, you just figured it out what the motive was about that thing a long time ago.
Oh my gosh, I can't believe that's what that was.
I can't believe I did that or I caused that.
And the absolution from God to fully forgive you is not based on you digging back out of that hole or working back out of that hole.
It's based on what Jesus did for you.
Jesus wasn't just a teacher, he was a savior.
Now let's make more sense of that.
Point number two is this.
And we see it there in the verse 21.
You shall call his name Jesus.
And point number two is this there's power in the name of Jesus.
Now that's something we say, that's something we sing, but what does it mean?
What does it mean?
Oh, there's power in the name of Jesus.
Like, does it mean if you say it enough in prayer, like you get it said seven times in prayer, all of a sudden you'll get the prayer, right?
Like you've been praying with people in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus.
Like if you say it enough at the end of every sentence, all of a sudden, then God answered, well, it hadn't worked for me.
If it works for you, great, I'm gonna start giving you my prayer requests.
But there's something deeper, more profound about that.
It's not formulaic.
This name was actually really, really common.
This past week I nerded out on the Social Security website because if you go to the Social Security website, there's actually this page that reports the most popular names in the last 100 years.
Most popular names in the last 100 years.
Here they are.
These are the most popular names in the United States in the last 100 years.
At first I thought, is there that many more males being born than females?
It's actually we're more creative and we vary our names with the females.
And so as you go down the list, uh the names, the numbers start to even out.
But you know, so you got James at 4.7, you got Mary at 3.3, you got John, Patricia, Robert, Jennifer, maybe read your name.
Oh my gosh, I mean, that's so common.
But you already knew it because you you weren't Patricia, you were Patricia T, right?
Like in grade school, you're Patricia M.
You weren't just James, you were you were James G or James O or James.
It's a common name.
Good news.
Jesus' name, this powerful name, was common.
It was just a name.
But there was a reason for the name.
And now that reason tells us something.
Jesus is the Jewish name for the Hebrew name Joshua.
Now that would have been pronounced Yeshua.
Now Joshua means to save.
Joshua comes from Yahshua.
Yahshua.
And Yah comes from Yahweh, which was the name for God.
So you have Yah, God, Shuah meaning saved, so it means God saved.
So when we say there's power in the name of Jesus, what we're saying is God saves.
God saves you.
You don't save yourself.
When we say Jesus, is us saying, in this manifestation and incarnation of God's pursuit of us into human history and his life and his work on the cross, his resurrection, this is God saving us.
Oh, what good news.
Oh, what a glorious name.
Then we have that word save.
God saves.
That word saved comes from the Greek word sozo.
That's the Greek word for save.
And it not only means saved, it means healed.
Made whole.
Don't you love that?
I love that.
That in God's limitless love and absolution, righteousness for us, it begins to make us whole.
And we're delivered.
We're delivered out of any sort of penalty or sin or separation from God into right, loving relationship with our Heavenly Father.
And it's not based on what we do, it's based on what God did for us.
It's Jesus as God saves.
What relieving and glorious and good news for us, that we're in this loving relationship with God because of God for us.
So we're free in Jesus and still not even as free as God intends for us to be.
We're declared whole and we're not even as whole as God wants for us to be.
Matthew 1, 23 says, Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.
So Matthew lays it on a little bit thicker here as he tells the story.
He says, not only is his name Jesus, his name is Emmanuel.
Now Emmanuel means God is with us.
God is with us.
So point number three is this in Jesus, in Jesus, as you surrender your heart and life, soul, the core of who you are, in to Jesus the Christ, to be your Savior, not yourself.
So in Jesus, God has already decided to never leave you.
Last week we were watching the movie The Christmas Calendar on Netflix.
Has anybody watched the Christmas calendar on Netflix?
You can raise your hand proudly.
If you haven't, it's still there.
You can watch it tonight.
Watch it tonight.
It's an extremely poorly rated, warm, fuzzy, Hallmarkish Netflix Christmas movie.
And I can guarantee you, you'll have a very moderate experience, and at the end of it, you'll feel very warm and very fuzzy.
And I didn't even know this until I started to kind of hear a little bit about this Hallmart, you know, just Hallmark's dominating, by the way, from like the end of October through New Year's, just all Hallmart movies.
I mean, they and they dominate the number one cable channel during this season.
Anyone into the Hallmark Christmas movies?
You're just way in, you're just super deep, like it's just on all the time, right?
I understand that.
I mean, what?
Because maybe you went to Target in the last two days.
I'm sorry if you did that.
I went to Ulta in the last two days.
It's a women's makeup store.
I went in to buy my wife some lotion.
It is it's the opposite of an Apple store.
Okay?
So you walk into an Apple store and it's peaceful.
There's you know these wide aisles, you can just kind of like roam around.
And like an old test, I mean you could barely walk.
I mean, I was I was getting literally, I'm not kidding, I was having a little bit of like I was feeling that anxiety attack building up as I waited in the line, and everybody's bumping into each other, and then certain products have the little beeper on it as soon as they like pulled it off.
Like you weren't even trying to steal it, you're just walking around the store and it starts beeping, and then the employee chases you down.
And I'm I'm just I'm like, breathe, you know, breathe, breathe.
I'm practicing my meditative breathing to calm my heart rate down.
Maybe you did, you were to Target yesterday, like, oh my god, and then you got out of Target and you're in the parking lot, you made the wrong turn in the parking lot.
You didn't realize that's how you usually exit, but then there's the Christmas Chick-fil-a traffic, and that's much worse than normal Chick-fil-a traffic.
And you're just sitting there, you're like, oh my gosh, I made the wrong turn, and you just think, if I can only get home, if I can only get home, I'm gonna have a glass of red wine and turn on a Hallmark movie.
That's what you're thinking.
And you did that, and it worked.
It was wonderful.
Because they're reliable, right?
They're reliable in a season that can feel so hectic, and by the end of the movie, you feel happy, you feel fuzzy, and maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the movie, I don't know, the combination.
But for a moment, like the fear and the anxiety, even the loneliness we can feel in the season, and by the way, those are real things in the season if you're feeling those.
Anxiety and loneliness in the season, it scales up.
I mean, if you're feeling those, those are real.
But one thing I can say that you don't have to worry about God already decided he'll never leave you.
Now your emotions may go up and down.
I mean, mine go up and down.
But it's so good to hear from Matthew.
His name's also Emmanuel.
And in Jesus, he already decided that he's never gonna leave you.
And Matthew says, hey, behold this.
Behold it.
There's our word.
Remember back in 1 John this fall?
I mean, I was nailing this word over and over again, and then this popped up this week.
I'm like, oh my gosh, here's this word again.
We're gonna be looking at it today, and then also on Tuesday.
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.
That's our favorite word.
Here it is again.
Behold, don't move on.
Don't move on.
Sit and rest in this good news of what I'm telling you.
That's what Matthew's saying.
Maybe you have a favorite Christmas food.
We can think about it this way.
Maybe you have a favorite Christmas food.
Your mom makes it, your granddaddy, your grandma, I don't know.
Somebody.
Alright, mine's chocolate delight.
In our family, we just call it the dessert.
We don't call it chocolate delight.
You probably know this dessert.
So it's the graham cracker crust, and then it's the cream cheese, and it's the chocolate pudding, and then it's the whipped cream.
It's so simple and it's perfect, right?
It's perfect.
And it is so good.
And maybe you're looking forward to that food that your grandma brings over, and you know it.
And so what happens for us on Christmas Eve is after we eat the dessert comes out of the fridge, you pull the aluminum foil off, as my mom always puts aluminum foil on top, and the aluminum foil, and it's been smushed down, and so you get, you know, you can get your finger and get all that whipped cream off the aluminum foil.
That's the bonus.
And behold, there it is, and it's so good.
Right?
And I cut out a you cut out a little piece, maybe a little, maybe a big piece, little piece.
I don't know, no judgment how big the piece is, right?
Like you could get a big piece, I don't care.
And then all of a sudden, the phone call you got earlier that day that your aunt, she's not saying one night, she's saying three nights, and that was new for you to process, and you got some anxiety about that, like all of that, all of the anxiety, all that.
Something is so overarchingly good that you get that piece of chocolate delight.
Here's what I do I make sure my children are doing something.
I don't want to be disturbed.
They have to have something going on.
Make sure they're good.
Because I want to I want the whole experience.
I don't want to just eat it, sit, you know, standing at the kitchen counter.
I want to get in my chair.
I want it.
I want my children, you know, because this is this is an entire experience.
I want to behold this chocolate light.
Right?
Look and see and taste.
So that's so good.
This is what Matthew is saying.
This is what John was saying in 1 John.
Whenever we see this word behold, it means stop, don't move on, stop and rest and see, don't move on.
What Matthew is saying is his name's Jesus.
God saves.
His name is Emmanuel.
So don't move on.
And what we see in these two names, right?
In Jesus, we learn that we don't have to save ourselves.
We don't have to make ourselves whole.
It's by God's grace to us.
So relieving.
And in Emmanuel, we learn no matter how difficult we are, how imperfect or broken or wounded or sinful we are, or how hard life gets?
God's already promised us in Jesus that He will not leave us.
So here's what I'm wondering in terms of application, gracious application.
Two questions came to my heart and mind this week.
Here's the first one.
What would it mean for you to behold the names Jesus and Emmanuel in the full weight of their meaning in greater ways this season?
What would it mean for you to behold the names Jesus and Emmanuel in greater ways this season?
That's not to put you to work, that's to place you in greater rest.
Second question.
What would it mean for you to surrender the toxic names you have heard and even accepted about yourself?
As to receive the name of God's beloved that Jesus gives to you.
My brothers and sisters, may your hearts be taken captive by this great redeeming love that is powerful for your hearts.
Let's pray together.
God, we thank you for your incarnation for us to see in history, for us to know that Jesus is the glimpse of who you are in fullness for us to know, and that your work on the cross is for us to know and be secured by your grace for us.
Our sin forgiven, righteousness given to us.
We are in loving relationship because of the Christ.
Help us to know in greater ways God saves.
We don't, God saves.
Help us to know in greater ways that you've already decided you will not leave us.
May this minister in great ways to our hearts.
Holy Spirit, would you bury this in deeper ways in our hearts in the places we need it?
We thank you for this season that we get to ponder the greatness and the richness of your love and behold it.
Help us.
Help us, God, not to move on.
But to behold the power of the name of Jesus.
Amen.