Good morning everyone, and welcome to The Edge Church Christmas celebration. While we are still five days away from Christmas — this is our celebration of that incredible day and also the very last Sunday for our church to meet up in the year 2020. It’s been quite a year, so may 2021 be a little bit different.
We are in week number four of our Advent series called Thy Kingdom Come. As we all join in anticipation of that incredible day in the future for believers in Jesus Christ when everything that is wrong will be made right and everyone sick will be made well and there won’t be one thing in existence to stress over — there’s no sickness, no death and no more tears. What an incredible day that will be.
King Solomon wrote, in Ecclesiastes 3:11, that he, speaking of God, has set eternity in the human heart, but we already just sort of know that don’t we? Deep inside our hearts we know that this life, these experiences, that the love that we feel and share is never supposed to end. It’s almost as if we experience these faint echoes of Eden. Yes, the garden of Eden, where it all began, where God started it all and these echoes get louder and louder the more that we see and we feel the brokenness of the world and in our own lives and one day we’ll go back to the eternal Eden. Ultimately, that’s what Advent is all about — far more than getting and giving gifts but about receiving the one gift, the one gift that will never let us down and that is knowing Jesus and living forever under the reign of the King — the only one and worthy King.
So today, with a growing longing and anticipation for that kingdom, we light the final candle of Advent — The Candle of the Magi.
Father, may our lives reflect your love to our enemies, to our friends and to our family. May we love you back for who you are and for all that you do for us. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Last week, pastor Steve shared about how heaven came down to announce to the shepherds the coming of Jesus and that it was so amazing that he went to the lowliest people on the planet. Today, we’re going to look at almost the exact opposite of that. We’re looking at the story of the magi, who were some of the wealthiest and most highly esteemed people on the planet and this weird balance that you see, the lowly and the high, it all comes together because it demonstrates to us that God is for everyone and that we all need Jesus, no matter how we came to this earth, no matter where we’re from or what we have.
Matthew 2:1-12, read by my daughter, Mia.
2 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”
3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:
6 “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’”
7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”
9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route (NIV).
Now the magi, also known as the three wise men, and they’re also of the We Three Kings Christmas song fame, they’re really misunderstood and often poorly represented in our culture but what they did for Jesus cannot be mistaken. It was very clearly worship of the King. And worship comes from the word worthiness or worth that is bestowed upon another. We all worship something, don’t we? In our best moments as followers of Jesus, we seek to put him in first place in our lives and in everything in our being wants to have Jesus first.
But that’s in our best moments. But we’re human. So we’re flawed in the way we give affection. So we oftentimes mistakenly worship God’s creation, rather than God the creator and we give ourselves away to things. We give our affections to sex and to substance, to entertainment and to leisure, to sport and to careers, but by God’s design we are made to give ultimate worship, or we’re called to give our worth-shipness to Jesus, just like the magi did.
So, today we’re going to look at the infant King in his cradle and learn how the gifts that the magi gave demonstrated how worthy this newborn baby was, to them and to all the world. Let’s look at the gifts. We all know what these gifts are — it’s gold, frankincense and myrrh. You know, the things that all new couples want when they have a baby.
I saw a social media post recently that said that it was very evident that they were wise men and not wise women who gave these gifts to Jesus because if it had been wise women who gave the gifts, they would have done it maybe a little bit differently. Wise women would’ve asked for directions. They would have arrived on time. They would have helped deliver the baby. They would have brought practical gifts. They would have cleaned the stable and brought a casserole and there would be peace on earth.
But the truth is the gifts that the men brought to Jesus had incredible significance. Let’s start with gold. Gold was the traditional gift for Kings because of its great worth. So the magi brought gold to Jesus, the newborn King — symbols of his worth as King. As a matter of fact, the entire gospel of Matthew is about the King and this new kind of kingdom, and the magi knew that wealth and significance came from gold and this was a gift that they gave this King.
Gold was used in pagan cultures for worship, as well as worshiped by the Israelites. God gave Moses instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, which was the place where the very presence of God dwelled on earth and the Ark of the Covenant was designed to be covered in gold — another symbol of royalty and of honor. Gold was determined by God to have an eternal role in even the grand scheme of heaven, and we read about this, the apostle John writes about this in Revelation 21:21, he describes what heaven will look like for all believers one day. It says:
21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass (NIV).
The baby gifted with gold had already envisioned a city made of see-through gold that would line his and our eternal streets.
The second gift that the magi brought to Jesus was the gift of frankincense and it signified that they understood that Jesus was the worthy Priest, the true mediator between God and humans. All throughout the Old Testament, we get this picture of priests that burned incense in the presence of God on behalf of the people of God, and the incense often represented the worship of God by the people.
Incense is actually mentioned 170 times in the Bible, but I love the picture that John gives us in Revelation 5:8, he talks about bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the people of God. So as they burned the incense, God looked down and he saw that it was prayers coming up to meet him. What a beautiful picture of this artistic God that we serve.
We know that God sent human mediators for a while for us, but Jesus is the eternal, he’s the sufficient Priest, and that is the whole theme of the book of Hebrews. Hebrews 10:11-13, it says:
11 Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, 13 and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool (NIV).
The gift of frankincense was to show that Jesus was the one worthy Priest who made a way for us to return to God.
Finally, the magi gave the gift of myrrh, which signified the anointing of the Prophet of God, which every high priest of God received, starting with Aaron, the brother of Moses, in the Old Testament, but it also spoke to this prophetic sense of the burial of Jesus. After he died on the cross at the hands of sinful man, on behalf of every single sinful man, when Jesus was crucified, we’re told in the gospels that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus went and asked for Jesus’s body so they could give him a proper burial. John 19:38-40 records that story. It says:
38 Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away. 39 He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. 40 Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs (NIV).
So the magi brought gifts to honor Jesus: the King, the Priest and the Prophet.
Do you know what gets to my heart the most out of all of these? The truth is it’s none of those three gifts. I mean, they are beautiful and they’re meaningful and they’re symbolic and I think it’s important for us to recognize what the magi were doing when they gave these gifts. But there is something else that just moves in my heart in a completely different way. It’s just a different level that God reaches in and moves in my heart and it’s God’s pursuit of the pagan magi and his provision for his son in this story.
I think it’s really important to understand the background. The magi who brought gifts to Jesus can be traced back hundreds of years to when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had bad dreams after taking many Jews into captivity. He first went to the magi, and I think there’s a little bit of confusion often about who the magi were, but they were astrologers and magicians. They were ones who sort of dabbled in the art of witchcraft. They couldn’t interpret the dreams properly, but then this Jewish man named Daniel did. So the King made Daniel in charge of all of the magi, who were the wise men, the ones who seem to know things that no one else did. But Daniel remained in charge of the magi long after Babylon, even after the Persian King took over. And it’s widely accepted, widely believed, that these magi were descendants of the magi who encountered Daniel 600 years earlier, and Daniel presumably introduced them to the one, true God.
Here’s why this is so powerful to me, because the magi, they were real people and they really represent all of us. They were imperfect people. They were misled people. They were sinful people. They were people who weren’t born into the right families. They were people who, on their own, had no ability to have any knowledge of the God that we read about in scripture. They were people that many would think had no chance to come to an actual biblical faith. Likely, they were people that many of us would say today, “But what about those people.” You’ve heard this said before, right? “What about people who aren’t raised in a place where Jesus is taught? Does God not reach them? Or what happens if missionaries don’t get to those people? What if missionaries don’t reach that one tribe or that one unreached people group?” And the truth is what we’re really asking is this: “Will God be fair to them?” And even deeper and more personally, “Will God be fair to me?” And if we take it one step farther, “Does God really love people, or does he just put up with ones that do the right things?”
Maybe you’ve asked those questions before, but this first Christmas answers that question with a resounding statement. John 3:16-17, it tells us the heart of God for his people, and it says:
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.
The next verse, 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).
And the way that he saves people today is exactly the way he has saved people from the very beginning: he seeks after his children who have a tendency to wander. He is worthy. He is the worthy Prophet, Priest and King and he loves to bring his children home, and really, that’s what Christmas is all about.
The story also impresses me in this deep, heartfelt way about how faithful God was to provide for his son. And if he provided for his son, he’ll provide for this son too.
King Herod wanted to kill all of the little boys because he was a king who was wanting to protect his kingdom. He thought that he was all powerful and he was afraid that this little baby might grow up to be a king that would depose him. He didn’t understand that God’s heart was actually for him too. But God knew that he had to protect his son from this King, and he warned Mary and Joseph in a dream to leave for Egypt, but not until he provided for them the gifts that the magi brought.
The God of the manger can be trusted with the details of our lives.
So the question really is this: What will you do with this Jesus? I want to invite you today to give him the gift of your life in exchange for his. That’s what Jesus came for. Not to punish you, but to save you. You can’t do this on your own. You can try. I know that I have over the years. I used to try and that can come in all sorts of different forms. It can come through self-help. It can come through exercise. It can come through trying to be the smartest person in the room. It can come by trying to be good. It can come by your charitable acts. But no matter what, receiving the forgiveness that God freely offers you, if you don’t do that, if you don’t receive that, you’re as lost in your sins as you’ve ever been. But this is what Jesus says in Matthew 16:25-26. He says:
25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? (NIV).
You can trust this God who loved and pursued the magi from generation to generation because he has also followed you to this very same moment. Acts 2:38-39 tells us the appropriate response to this worthy servant King, and it says:
“Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
I love this part, it says:
39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call” (NIV).
It is for every single one of us, no matter how far away from God you feel like you are, this promise is for you too.
In just a minute, we will have our final worship song but, before that, we’d love to give you questions so that you can discuss this in your home groups. You can discuss this with people throughout the week as we go into Christmas. We just encourage you: make this a time of reflection that’s less about materialism and more about what God might want to do in your relationships with other people and with him.
Here’s the first question: What is your main takeaway from this passage?
The second question is: What aspect of Jesus from the story is the most worthy to you? What aspect of Jesus from the story is the most worthy to you? Are you more struck by the reality that he is the King, that he is the ultimate Priest or that he is the Prophet?
And the third question is: What about the entire Christmas story moves your heart the most and why?
Finally, we have given you this Advent Action throughout this whole series and it’s really just this idea that 2020 has been really tough and we always want to be people that are motivated by our faith to act on behalf of others. So think of someone who needs encouragement and do something tangible for them this week to honor the Lord as we get ready to celebrate Christmas.
We hope you have an incredibly Merry Christmas, and we’ll see you in 2021.