Embracing the Peace of Christ This Christmas

This Christmas season, we thank you for this reminder. So we've opened up in this song of praise, reminding us of the greatness of who you are. May this carry on throughout this entire service. May you be honored and exalted and blessed. Lord, may you increase as we decrease. [00:20:19]

And Lord, may you be amongst your people now. May you be the great Emmanuel, God with us. We pray this in Jesus' name and all God's people said, amen. [00:20:30]

So the first sign is the sign of Emmanuel. Now we know Emmanuel means God with us. If you haven't heard that, you should now. Emmanuel means God with us. It is a Christmas word that's used, just like in a moment, I'm going to use the word incarnation. These are big words. We don't usually go around just saying, hey, Emmanuel, hey, incarnation. [01:11:21]

The Messiah would be actually, a sign would be that God would send Jesus of his own essence. The word in the Greek is homoousius, of the same substance, and that he would come. And dwell among us. So look right here in Isaiah 7, 14, therefore the Lord himself will give you and me a sign, and that sign will be, see, there will be a virgin who will conceive and will give birth to his son, and his name will be Emmanuel. [01:12:10]

When we look at that text, it should stir in us a story that we learn in the gospel of Matthew that I'll read here in a moment from Matthew 1, 23, where we see the fulfillment of this text. In fact, let's go ahead and go there and read that now. In Matthew 1, 23, see the virgin will become pregnant, will give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel, which is translated God with us. [01:13:31]

So everyone in here, when we let Emmanuel come, we know God is with us. We know God is with us. We know God is with us. When we let Emmanuel come into our life, that means God's with you forever. There's no changing that. That is what Emmanuel means. God has said that. He changed all of humanity when he did this, and so when we look at this scripture, it's a masculine name both in Hebrew and Greek, meaning God with us. [01:15:32]

The prophecy was the sign would be, there would be a virgin that would be with child, that would be impossible. It had to be supernatural. That's the miraculous conception, right? And then the actual birth of Jesus would be through a birth of a virgin, which is impossible. [01:17:11]

And so this is where we're getting into this miraculous and this virgin birth. So immaculate conception, just so we understand, is a miraculous conception. And so this is where we're getting the dogma of that or the teaching of that is that actually Mary had no original sin. She's the one that's immaculate. And therefore, because the belief is that Jesus, because he had to be sinless, he could not be born through a woman who had sin in her. [01:18:45]

So Emmanuel is one sign. The incarnation is the second sign. That Jesus would be conceived in a virgin's womb, a miraculous conception, and then would be born through a virgin birth. When you see this sign, that's Emmanuel. [01:19:07]

Jesus will reign on earth differently than any earthly King. Jesus will, uh, will bring peace differently than any other King would bring peace. He will bring stability to your life. He will give us guidance is different than earthly guidance. He will do all of these things for us in our life that are uniquely distinct to his kingdom alone. [01:21:19]

We are weak. He is strong, the New Testament tells us. So God is saying, listen, I'm this almighty God. There is nothing I cannot do. If you will just trust in me. And then again, you have to have an eternal perspective here. Because if we only have the earthly perspective, do things always go well? No. Does the good always win? No, it doesn't. Right? But then we can say, but God, you're almighty. There's a bigger picture. [01:27:00]

See, when it says the peace of God, and he is the Prince of Peace, shalom is the word here. And shalom means, I hope everything is well with Jonathan. I want God's blessing upon him. I want what is best for him. I want all the greatness of God to be upon his life. That doesn't mean everything's going to go well for Jonathan. [01:30:14]