Good morning everybody. Happy Sunday. Welcome to The Edge Church online. My name is Steven Van Denend and I’m one of the pastors here. So glad to have you joining with us today on this third Sunday of Advent.
Advent, if you remember, means “coming or arrival” and it is this four week season leading up to Christmas, where we, as the church, both look back at the Christmas story to what God has done for us in the birth and sending of his son, Jesus, and also where we look forward and ahead with great expectation to what God has yet in store for us and to Christ coming once again.
Advent is this opportunity for us, as God’s people, to not just get swept away by all the false promises that are offered to us and the distractions of the season, but really an opportunity for us to incline our hearts and our minds and our focus upon that which will last and still be true long after Dec. 25; to the one true meaning and gift of Christmas — Jesus.
And so today we’re lighting our third of the Advent candles. This one is known as the Shepherd’s Candle. It represents joy as the shepherds rejoiced in the good news of the birth of Jesus from the angels that they proclaimed on that day. And this is actually the same story that we are going to look at together today in God’s word — this popular Christmas passage of some shepherds who encounter the glory of God — and then look at what this means for us today as we continue on in our Advent series that we’re calling Thy Kingdom Come.
As always, at the end of every message I’ll leave you with some questions to hopefully help you just process and reflect upon what you’ve heard today, or for you to talk about with those gathered in your home or in your house church gathering. And also today, I just want to remind you that, following the service, we are starting a brand-new Sunday online virtual community group led by Pastor Neil Schori. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, if you’d like to just have an opportunity to share together with some people, to go through some of the questions and process what you’ve heard here today, we want to invite you to be a part of that. There will be information in the comments section after my message and so please join us and be a part of that.
But let’s pray. Let’s just invite the Lord to speak to us by his word today.
Father, we just come before you this morning, in the name of your son, Jesus. God, thank you for this opportunity. God, thank you for this time. Thank you for every single person tuned into this message, right now. Lord, we just invite you, God, to come, to speak to every heart, Lord, in every life today. Lord, that your word, God, would just bear a good fruit, that your word would transform and change us. God, I pray that you would open up every set of ears to hear from you, every heart to receive of you. God, we just commit this time to you and invite you to have your way in it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, if you have your Bible, open it up to Luke, chapter 2. Our story begins in verse eight and here’s what it says to us, starting in Luke 2:8, it says:
8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told (NIV).
Now there’s a lot that’s going on here in our story, but let me just start off by saying how incredibly, just crazy and seemingly out of place it is that the glory of heaven comes and makes its first declaration of the good news of Jesus’ birth to some shepherds. The reason I say this is because shepherds were really the nobodies of their culture. Notice in the scripture that it doesn’t tell us their names. It simply tells us that they’re shepherds.
Shepherds are the insignificant, they’re the outcast. Shepherds are the unwanted. Being a shepherd isn’t a job that you aim for, being a shepherd is a job you’re left with, that you get stuck with. It meant being a shepherd that you were at the bottom of the social ladder, where the only real friends that you would have are some sheep and other shepherds. Shepherds also had this reputation of being crooks and thieves and so they weren’t allowed to testify in court. They were believed to just be liars by nature and so they were discredited and disrespected. To the religious, shepherds were seen as unrighteous so they weren’t able to go into the temple to worship or to participate in the Old Testament ceremonies of cleansing because they were considered continually unclean. Shepherds were the insignificant, shepherds were the unimportant and shepherds were the forgotten. But though they were rejected by people, they were loved by God and, to show it, God sends the good news of heaven to them first and they are invited to Jesus.
Do you know why I believe God wrote the story like this? I believe he did because he wants this message to us, to be really clear that this Jesus, this Messiah, is literally for everyone. Listen again to the proclamation of the angel in verse 10, he says: Behold, I bring you good news of great joy. That will be for who? For all people. The good news of Jesus is for everyone. It’s for anyone. It’s for every single one of you who are hearing me and listening to this right now. It's for every person on the planet — no one is left out. No one is uninvited. Everyone can experience the powerful miracle of Christmas in Christ Jesus because it is good news of great joy for all people, and God proves this to be true by sending this good news of great joy first to some shepherds.
Listen to me here and grab hold of this for you. God loves you. And it doesn’t matter to God what other people think about you. It doesn’t matter what other people say about you. It doesn’t matter if they love being around you or they can’t stand being with you. And it really doesn't even matter what you think about you. It really doesn’t matter what you think about who you are and who you’re not, whether you think you’re great, or whether you think you’re insignificant and unworthy and awful. Because God loves you and this good news of Jesus is for you. It’s for anyone who will receive it. Don’t miss out on this invitation of God to you.
So, let’s go back to our shepherds here because our story tells us that they are in their fields and they’re watching their flocks, their sheep, and all of a sudden an angel of the Lord shows up and it says that the glory of God is shining around them. Now, that word glory, it literally means “weight or heaviness.” So, the weight of God showed up and it lay upon them. And there is nothing in the universe that is more weighty than God’s glory. It reshapes and reorders. It pushes out and it breaks free. God’s glory changes things and what I want to do is I want to just look at our story and I want to point out four things from our texts about God’s glory and what happens when we encounter him.
Here’s the first one. You can write this down. God’s glory exposes our heart. God’s
Glory exposes our heart. It says, in verse nine, an angel of the Lord appeared to them. The glory of the Lord shone around them and they were filled with great fear.
One of the things that most people tend to believe about themselves is that they’re really a good person. They might not believe they’re the best person, but because we tend to grade ourselves on a sliding scale, we’re certainly better than “those people,” whoever “those people” are, and most likely good enough to have earned our place in heaven. The apostle Paul though warns us, and tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:12 that we don’t compare ourselves by ourselves. This isn’t some relative kind of standard and we ourselves are not the standard.
Think about this for a minute. If it was just me with my five-year-old son, Judah, together, I could easily say, “I am really powerful. I am really strong. I am brilliant and wealthy and generous. I mean, I could run circles around this kid. I can do 10 times as many pushups as he can. I know and understand a whole lot more than he does. My bank account is significantly bigger than his and I give way more than he does.” But if the door opens up and all of a sudden, LeBron James, right, King James walks in, now how great am I? How quickly things would change for me with just one person walking in the door.
Infinitely greater than that is what happens when the real King shows up and his glory, the weighty presence of God, is upon us. In that moment, we see ourselves as we really are and all of our swagger and confidence and self-righteousness and pride melts in the light of his glory. We see this all throughout scripture, whether it’s the apostle John who, in the book of Revelation, sees Jesus and it says that he falls down on the ground as though he were dead. Or the prophet Isaiah who, in Isaiah 6, sees the Lord and, in verse five, he says, “Woe to me, I am ruined. For I’m a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord almighty” (NIV).
The glory of God exposes us, it humbles us and it causes us to become acutely aware of our own sin and unrighteousness and just how much it is that we desperately need a savior. And that leads me to the second thing about God’s glory.
Secondly, the glory of God drives out fear and replaces it with joy in Christ. The glory of God drives out fear and replaces it with joy in Christ. When the glory of God shows up, it exposes us and our sin and how we fall short of God’s holy standard with our thoughts and our motives, with our words and our actions, and when it comes to God, there is absolutely nothing that is hidden from him. God knows everything. God sees everything. We are completely exposed before God and the natural result of that truth is a fear before a perfectly holy God.
These shepherds, it says were terrified. And rightfully so, but what is the response of the angel to them? Does the angel show up and say, “Listen, tremble you wretched guilty sinners!” No. The angel shows up in verses 10 and 11. He says, “fear not.” And why does he say this? Because he says, “Listen, I bring you good news of great joy. And here’s the good news — today, in the town of David, a savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord.”
The good news of great joy for all people, including for you and for me this morning, is that Jesus Christ has come to us. Jesus Christ has come. It has actually really happened, on a real day in history, to a real place that exists and you could go visit. Jesus Christ, the son of God, God in human flesh, the savior has come and he didn’t just come to those people but to you individually, personally, uniquely — you.
That’s how big the love of God is. That’s how great God's love for you is. John 3:16. Most of us know, it tells us:
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
And most of us have heard that and we know that, but John 3:17 is just as important and it says:
17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him (NIV).
Jesus doesn’t show up with a sword looking to take out all the sinners who have disobeyed and rebelled against God. Rather, he shows up like a life raft in a sea of condemnation and despair and deception and death to make a way through himself for all — for all — including you, including me, to be saved. That’s the good news of great joy and the glory of God. It not only exposes us but it moves us and points us to Christ. It exposes us, but not to condemn us in our sin but to point us to our savior.
The glory of God replaces fear with joy, in the good news of Jesus for us.
Here’s the third thing: The glory of God cultivates trust in his word. If you look at verse 15 it says this, it says:
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
I love this because, when the shepherds hear this word, they don’t sit around and try to figure it all out first. They don't theologize it, right? Like they’re not sitting saying, does God really send angels? And is this the kind of stuff angels really do? No. They’re like, listen, this is a word from the Lord. This is what heaven has revealed. Let’s go see it.
We are meant to have this childlike faith and wonderment when it comes to the word of God that prompts us to move and to act and to do. I don’t know about you, but I want my life to be marked by this kind of faith, this kind of trust in God’s word, where I’m going, God, you said it. And I believe it. So I’m going to do it. God, let’s see it. Let me see it.
God, you said that your arm is not too short to save. God, you said to love my wife like you love the church and gave yourself for her and that she’ll be like this well-watered vine that produces much fruit. God, you said to train my children in the way they should go and that they wouldn’t depart from it. You said that you’re working all things together for the good of those who love you and have been called according to your purpose. God, you said that you’ll provide for all my needs according to your riches in glory. God, you said it and I believe it and I'm going to walk in that. God, let’s see it.
Remember here that these shepherds are in the middle of nowhere and this angel is like, “Listen, here’s the sign. Here’s where you’ll find baby Jesus. He’s going to be wrapped in cloth and lying in a manger.” They receive that word and they act upon it. There’s risk, there’s sacrifice, they don’t exactly know where they’re going. They might lose something financially along, for this pursuit, but they move by faith in God’s word to them, which leads them to Jesus — their greatest reward. The glory of God builds up in us a confidence and a trust in God’s word that results in a faithful obedience, regardless of the obstacles we face along the way.
Here’s the final point, number four: The glory of God compels us to glorify God. The glory of God compels us to glorify God. Look at this. This is so good. Verse 20 says:
20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.
Now, I want you to think about this with me because this is definitely for somebody listening right now. These shepherds return to shepherding. Glorifying and praising God and yet nothing has changed regarding their circumstances or status. It’s not like now all of a sudden people want to hang out with these shepherds and befriend them. It’s not like now they’re believed by other people and their testimony is valid. It’s not like now they’re welcomed into the temple by the religious. None of that was any different for them. None of that had yet been fixed and yet all of them left rejoicing in God. Why? Here’s why. Because though their circumstances had not been changed, they themselves were changed by this encounter with the glory of God.
The glory of God infuses gratitude in the highs and lows of our lives so that joy and rejoicing becomes the response of those who’ve truly encountered the love and grace and goodness of God in Christ, regardless of circumstances or position or standing in the eyes of the world. You cannot see and experience God and not be changed by him.
The apostle Paul says it like this in 2 Corinthians 3:18, he says:
18 And we all, [talking about who we are in Christ] who with unveiled faces contemplate [beholding] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (NIV).
Again here, beholding the glory of God might not change your circumstances but it will change you and make you more like Christ, one degree at a time. So, it’s okay if you haven’t arrived yet because God has you in a process. God’s not done with you yet. He’s working in you, every day, to make you more like him and as we look to him, as we gaze upon Jesus, as we set our hearts and minds upon him and his word, as we behold him, we cannot help but glorify and praise him for who he is, for what he’s done, for what he’s doing and for his presence with us right now.
The glory and presence of God, it exposes our hearts. It exposes our sin and pride. But it leads us out of fear and it points us to the joy of our savior and it cultivates in us a trust in God’s word, to have faith and follow him. And the glory of God compels us to glorify and praise God.
I want to just wrap up by leaving you with some questions for you to think about this week, maybe in your personal time, maybe to journal or for you to talk about with those you’re gathered within your home right now or in your church gathering. And remember, too that after this message, there’s an opportunity for you to join a virtual community group with Pastor Neil to talk about these. But let me give you three questions here.
The first question, we asked this one regularly. Number one: What is your biggest takeaway? What is the one thing that most resonated in your heart today from this message?
Number two: How are you trusting and acting upon God’s word to you today? And give us some specific examples, if you can, maybe some specific scriptures that you have just set to memorize and to live by. And where do you find, or where have you found it difficult to trust God’s word? What season of life, or maybe it’s something that’s happened, or maybe it’s just something that you’ve read in God’s word where you’re like, “God, this is hard for me. It’s hard for me to believe you here. It’s hard for me to trust you in this.” What does that look like in your life?
Here’s the third question: Would you say that your life is marked by glorifying and praising God? And why or why not do you believe that’s true. And also with that then, what does that look like in your life? What does glorifying and praising God look like, actively, in your life?
Lastly, I just want to remind you of our Advent Action, which is really just a way for us, as the family of God, to put our faith in action and to practically and tangibly share the love and the goodness of God with others this holiday season. And so, what we’ve been asking is that you just pray and consider who it is that you have in your life that maybe is just going through a challenging time, or it’s just been a hard season for them, and really to consider how it is that you might bless and encourage them in the Lord and, in so doing, just bring glory to God.
I want to pray for us and then just invite you to share some time going through these questions together. Let’s pray.
Father, thanks for this morning. Thanks for this time. Thanks for your word, God. God, thank you for your son, Jesus. Lord, thank you for sending your son for us and to us and God, I just thank you that you invite every single one of us, every person watching right now, to yourself, God, no one is uninvited. No one isn’t welcome to receive the gift of your son. God, I pray that, for all of us Lord, that we would encounter you, Holy Spirit, that you would minister in every single heart. God, that you would expose in us, reveal to us God, just our own hearts, our own sin. But God, I pray that that reality would just lead us to repentance and to turn to you as savior. God, that you would cultivate in us a heart that believes you and trusts you in all things and God, that we, as a people, Father, would bring glory and honor and praise to your name. God, have your way in us, have your way in our hearts. Lord, I pray that this word would just continue to stir in us this week. And God, that this word would produce a good fruit, in and through us. In Jesus name. Amen.
We’ll go ahead and take a little time to dig into those questions or, if you want, just hang on for a minute or two and we will close our time together with a song of joy and praise. God bless you guys.