Divine Movement: A Christmas Story Full of Hope
*The 1st Sunday of Advent has a theme of hope - the hope of the Messiah’s coming prophesied in the Old Testament.
Focus: In the midst of distresses and disappointments, God is continually moving to fulfill his eternal purposes in and through the hope of the promised Christ.
Distress
Disappointment
Divine Movement
Distress
God is moving, even in our unexpected distresses to open us to receiving Jesus in our lives.
The things that can cause a sense of instability and distress in our lives abound - from family dysfunction to health concerns, the testing of prolonged singleness, from the relational trauma of adultery or divorce to embracing aging and loss, the shock of political strife, job instability or loss with the advent of AI, or for the young, the challenge of finding work after graduation.
In all of these scenarios, God is positioning our hearts to receive Jesus.
And with Jesus comes hope.
Matthew 1:18-23 ESV
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "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 Immanuel" (which means, God with us).
First the important people in the story.
Jesus Christ is both Jesus’ name and title.
Jesus, which means “Yahweh saves” originates from the Hebrew Yeshua and would speak to his divine identity and work.
It is equivalent to the name Joshua.
Christ is a title, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah, which meant the “anointed one” of God.
Those anointed in the Old Testament were chosen by God and set apart to him for his service.
They included kings, priests and prophets, all which Jesus would embody.
So this is the story of Jesus the Messiah or Jesus the Anointed One - the Christ.
Joseph and Mary were small town kids from Nazareth (Luke 2:4).
At the time, Nazareth was a small, relatively isolated agricultural village of a few hundred, with estimates ranging from about 200 to 480 people, though more recent archeological works suggests the population could have been as large as 1,000.
You may feel like your life is small, detached and insignificant, but as with Joseph and Mary, God cares, is involved and wants to use your story to reveal his Son.
Joseph had a plan for how he saw his life going.
He was a young Jewish man who was taking a young bride and they would build their lives together in the Lord.
He hit a detour when Mary showed up with child from the Holy Spirit.
It challenged his confidence in Mary, his picture of the future and how he would walk out his faith in God.
He tried to do the right thing within the confines of his own reasoning - to put Mary away quietly - but God intervened.
Life does not always turn out how we planned it or wanted it, but that does not mean that God is not on the move.
Even when it seems that you’ve tried to do all of the right things before God, situations and circumstances can arise that remind you that your relationship with God is not transactional, but based on his purposes and grace.
The question we need to ask in the midst of life’s surprises is, “What is God up to?”
And, “What is God trying to reveal about Christ and his gospel in and through your life?”
We need to pause and pray.
How often do we react to our circumstances without consulting God and miss the very thing by which he wants to reveal the hope of Christ in and through our lives?
*What God does in his movements, often with unexpected scenarios, is pull us out of a trajectory for hell where we are simply consumed with self.
”I am really upset with the most pernicious of all the literary images of evil, it’s Goethe’s Mephistopheles in Faust. The humorous, civilized Mephistopheles strengthens the illusion that evil is liberating. But the real mark of hell is a sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon the self. We must understand hell as a place where everyone is perpetually concerned about his or her own dignity and advancement, where everybody always has a grievance, and where everybody lives in the deadly seriousness of envy and self-importance.”
-C.S. Lewis
There was no room for this as Joseph and Mary were thrust into the visual scandal that had them in the center of the purposes of God.
God’s unexpected movements allow us to move from solely focusing on self to the freedom of Christ and his purposes.
Disappointment
If we wait on the Lord, he will show us his divine movement in the midst of initial disappointments.
God will show us who he is, what he is doing and what we should do.
Why?
Because our unexpected circumstances are meant to help reveal Jesus to the world.
Matthew 1:20-25
“But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "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 Immanuel" (which means, God with us).
When the angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph in the dream, he gave context to his initial disappointment and showed him God’s purpose in Christ.
Mary would be the prophesied virgin who would birth the promised Messiah, God in the flesh, the Savior of the world.
Though not having a particular birth story, the Apostle John spoke of Jesus’ eternal, divine existence when he wrote:
John 1:1-5 ESV
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
John 1:10-13 ESV
“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
John 1:14-18 ESV
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'") For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.”
So what Mary would be carrying in her womb was the uncreated second person of the Trinity, the Son of God who would become flesh to bring grace and truth to the world.
*Thus Matthew’s account is one of hope because what was a surprise to Joseph and Mary was no surprise to God.
You see, God let us know a long time ago that he works in extraordinary, and at times, unusual ways, to show his miraculous hand of intervention in our ordinary lives.
God does this to grab the hardened hearts of humanity to turn them towards the saving person of Jesus Christ.
Isaiah 7:10-17 ESV
“Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz: "Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven." But Ahaz said, "I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test." And he said, "Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted. The Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father's house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria!"”
So in our disappointments, we must avoid the trappings of religion and humbly receive God’s grace.
There are at least two unforeseen dangers to religion:
The danger of religion is that we think that we can reduce God to being like us, making him manageable and controllable.
Psalm 50:19-21 ESV
““You give your mouth free rein for evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.”
But the truth is that he will not be controlled - God is infinitely better, wiser, and more loving in his movements than we ever could imagine.
The danger of religion is that we think that if we’ve been good enough, like Joseph trying to do all of the right things, that somehow God owes us a good life - the spouse of our dreams, impenetrable health, comforts and joys without end.
But the point is that we live in a fallen world, and we have all added to its fallenness through our own sin and bitterness, and deserve death and hell.
But as secular people we reject this notion because we do not understand the complexity of sin as God understands it.
*More than just lawlessness (breaking God’s commands), sin is a dislocation of the soul where we do not love God, his design or his ways, and suffer accordingly.
Jeremiah 2:1-9 ESV
“The word of the Lord came to me, saying, "Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, Thus says the Lord, "I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord, the firstfruits of his harvest. All who ate of it incurred guilt; disaster came upon them, declares the Lord." Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord: "What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthlessness, and became worthless? They did not say, 'Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that none passes through, where no man dwells?' And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination. The priests did not say, 'Where is the Lord?' Those who handle the law did not know me; the shepherds transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit. "Therefore I still contend with you, declares the Lord, and with your children's children I will contend.”
Henry David Thoreau would give vocabulary to this in Walden when he described people who feel trapped by their routines and societal expectations, leading to an internal, unspoken dissatisfaction despite outward appearances of success and stability.
I know far too many men and women like this.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
-Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
This reality is on full display in the endless drone of YouTube and the internet.
The one person show reveals that most people are just boring because they are simply consumed with sin and self.
We are enslaved to sin when we are focused on ourselves and our condition rather than looking to the person of the promised Christ.
In A Preface to Paradise Lost C.S. Lewis would write:
“To admire Satan is to give one’s vote for a world of lies, propaganda and incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement toward it in every one of us. Sin in each of us is something that wants to just be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives. It especially wants to be left to itself. It wants to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that would make it feel small. But unimpeded, sin would exploit the whole universe if it could.”
In explanation, Timothy Keller would later comment:
”Advanced sin makes you boring because all you’re ever worried about is how you’re doing, how you look, how things are affecting you. There’s always a grievance - incessant autobiography. You can never get out of yourself. You’re always feeling sorry for yourself…. Sin makes you mediocre… There’s nothing more boring than someone who is always worried about how you look. Sin makes you these very uninteresting, unprincipled, shallow, boring people.”
Yet we find our sense of our true, intended self when we turn to Jesus in distress and disappointment because we see God as bigger as he pulls us out of the smallness of myopic living into his eternal purposes in Christ.
Jesus came to save us from our sins.
He came to save us from ourselves.
To do so, he would put on the flesh of sinful humanity while being conceived of the Holy Spirit that he might be sinless himself.
As God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus would live in perfect obedience to the Father’s commands by the power of the Holy Spirit.
He would eventually die sacrificially on the cross, again, not a likely imagined destiny of a savior, to pay the price for our wrongs and through his resurrection provide us not only reconciliation with God but the power of new and eternal life through the same Holy Spirit through whom he had been conceived.
Jesus would continually enter into distress and disappointment to save those who were in and of themselves enslaved to and bound by such a fate.
And in the place of distress and disappointment Jesus would offer hope - hope of forgiveness, salvation and purpose - both eternal and abundant life in him.
But how do we enter into this hope?
*We must trust and obey God to see Jesus revealed in and through our lives.
This is the life of faith.
Matthew 1:24-25 ESV
When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.”
The gospel was seen even in the power of this virgin birth being foretold.
What did Joseph do?
He changed his mind and went in a different direction.
To meet the savior Jesus, all we have to do is, like Joseph, repent (change our mind to turn away from our sin) and believe the good news.
So the question then is why would God choose to visit us in the manner in which he did - in seeming scandal to fulfill the prophecies of the coming Messiah and to give us hope?
Amongst other reasons, he would do so to show us that in the midst of life’s distresses, disappointments and mess, the Father was sending Immanuel, the Savior who would be “God with us.”
" The first link between my soul and Christ is, not my goodness, but my badness ; not my merit , but my misery ; not my standing , but my falling ; not my riches , but my need . He comes to visit His people , yet not to admire their beauties , but to remove their de - formities ; not to reward their virtues , but to forgive their sins . "
- C . H . Spurgeon
The powerful thing is that as Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born in the flesh to the Virgin Mary, now each time that God transforms a life, we have the opportunity to see Jesus - his goodness, mercy, grace, and love being displayed again and again.
Divine Movement
God is moving in our unexpected circumstances to bring about the promised salvation and Lordship of Jesus Christ.
So what was this hope that would be found in the Messiah, that Joseph and Mary were now able to welcome through their unexpected circumstances?
Isaiah 9:1-7 ESV
“But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. You have multiplied the nation; you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil. For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.”
God’s movements in history are ultimately about bringing Jesus into the world and for him to increasingly become Lord of our hearts.
God’s intervention in confusing circumstances leads to greater trust and obedience because we learn that if God is involved, it is leading to a greater good.
After losing her husband in missionary work in Ecuador along the Curaray River, January 8, 1956.
“God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.”
-Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor
*As you determine to obey God, you’ll see that your surprises are no surprise to him, and he has a hope for you and the world that he is birthing as you steward Christ’s intervention in your life.
*No matter what distresses or disappointments you have experienced, there is hope for you in Jesus as you submit to his wisdom and will.
As you allow Christ’s rule, his government, to increase in your life, you will know him as Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace.
Despite the trials of your present, you can experience “God with you” and find yourself a part of the Lord’s redemptive plan to reveal the eternal hope that is found in Christ.
Just as Jesus came the first time to die on a cross to save us from our sins, by the power of his resurrection, so he will return to make all wrong things right.
The fact that God continues to move means two things:
The first advent of Christ was for the payment of sin.
The second will be for the vanquishing of it.
So as we wait, the question remains:
What are the distresses and disappointments of your life meant to birth, and how are they being used by God to point people to the hope found in the saving person of Jesus Christ?