Weary World Rejoices - Audio
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Good morning. We are starting our Christmas series today, which is really fun. It's called weary world rejoices. And I don't know about you, but sometimes when people ask me how are you doing, I get tired of saying I'm tired. That's kind of like the go-to result I'm tired, you know? And a lot of that is because I'm not sleeping enough, but I'm trying to do better at in the guys in the small group know that, that I'm working on it. And part of it I think is there's just this settled sense of like the world doesn't seem to change. It just seems to be the same nonsense over and over and over. There's war on streets, there's war in the Middle East. It's like that was true in like 1990. It's true today. When O Holy Night was written, the author actually was not, it was started out as a poem, and he was not a very faithful person. He was a French nominal Catholic. He was the village or town city distributor of wine and spirits. And he rarely darkened the door of a church. But his parish priest asks him to go look at the Gospel of Luke and write a poem about it. And so he does, and so he's looking through the Gospel of Luke, and he's writing this poem, and then he has a friend who's of Jewish ancestry, also not a very faithful person. Both of them we think might have been atheists. His Jewish friend or of Jewish ascent, friend writes the song of Holy Night. And now it's become like an anthem of Christmas. But what makes it special is the fact that he came to Luke with fresh ice. And what he sees in the Gospel story is that sense of weariness. The sense that, what does he say, long lay the world in sin and error or pining, to just failure after failure after failure. Then he appeared, Jesus appeared, and the soul found or knew or met, it's worth. And then what? A thrill of hope. A weary world rejoices. Because something new is about to happen. And so this Christmas, this Advent season, we're going to be looking at the thrill of hope. The way that the weary world rejoices, because as we see in the Gospels, the characters who are part of the story, all of them are worn out, they're tired, and then suddenly grace invades. So let's pick it up in Matthew 1, and we're going to be looking primarily today at the story of Joseph. This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place. When Mary, his mother was engaged to Joseph before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, was a righteous man because he didn't want to humiliate her. He decided to call off their engagement quietly. As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you will call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins." Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet in Isaiah 7, if you're looking for it, would be fulfilled. Look, a virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel. Immanuel means God with us. When Joseph woke up, he did just as an angel from God commanded and took Mary as his wife, but he didn't have sex with her until she gave birth to a son. Joseph, in obedience, called him Jesus. That first that first bit is interesting. It says, "Joseph is a righteous man." We might think typically when we think of righteousness versus not righteousness, we tend to think of righteousness as like, you know, doing obeying the law or something like that. There's the right way, the wrong way. I do the right way. So that's how we typically think of it. That's not how the Bible thinks about it. In fact, a better way to think about righteousness would be doing right by somebody. That kind of faithfulness to somebody in your life. So it could be God, it could be a spouse, it could be your family, your friends, your work colleagues, but that's what righteousness is. It's doing right by them. And we know this because it can't just be following laws because sometimes laws aren't right. They're wrong. And to do right by our family, we have to disobey the law. That happens. Hopefully not very often, but it does. And so a righteous person can be the one who disobeys laws because they're doing right by what matters, God, family, community, church. And Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Well, that's a surprise. Didn't see that coming. Notice, by the way, at this point in the story, Joseph doesn't know this. She might tell him, she's like, no, no, I just became pregnant. He's like, okay, Mary's probably a teenager at this point. And Joseph's probably a significant,
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org