How many of
you are really anxious for Christmas to come?
You know, we all have different
times when we start really getting into Christmas, when we feel like we just
cannot wait for it to come. For some of
us, today is that day, because today is the first Sunday of Advent. Some of us started this past week, once
Thanksgiving weekend was over. Others
started a few days before that, with Black Friday and the doorbuster
specials. Still others started before
that. For some of us, as soon as
Halloween was over we started getting fired up about Christmas.
It can be hard to wait for
Christmas. It’s hard for me sometimes,
too. It was especially hard for me when
I was a kid. See, my birthday is
December twenty-second, so not only was I waiting for Christmas, I was waiting
for my birthday, too. And it was
hard. I had all this stuff I wanted,
stuff I was waiting for and hoping for, stuff I could not get for myself, but I
could not find out yet whether I was going to get it. I wanted the time to pass quickly and for the big day to come,
but time just kept moving one day at a time.
All I could do was wait.
But then, finally, the big day
would come, and sometimes I would get exactly what I wanted. And when I did, it was always worth the
wait. That’s the thing—anything that’s
really good is worth waiting for. And
that’s the theme of our sermon series for Advent and Christmas: “It’s worth the wait.” We’re going to look at some of the people in
the Bible who were waiting for that first Christmas and how they felt about
having to wait.
In a sense, though, the whole world
was waiting for that first Christmas.
The world had been waiting, really since the first humans walked the
earth. We read the story of Adam and
Eve and the serpent this morning.
That’s the story of sin entering the world.
As soon as sin entered the world,
humans became separated from God. We
tried to find our way back. That’s what
all that Old Testament law was about.
The theory was that if we could just follow all the rules, if we could
just do everything the way we’re supposed to, then we’d be the people we were
supposed to be, God would be happy with us, and we’d feel close to God again.
Maybe that would’ve worked. We’ll never know, because we humans never
could follow all the rules. We could
never do everything the way we’re supposed to.
The thing is, we were trying to do something by ourselves that we cannot
do by ourselves. We were trying to get
back to God by our own abilities, and by our own merits, and that simply was
not possible. It was not possible
because we were and are sinful people, and sinful people cannot follow all the
rules perfectly and do everything we’re supposed to do, no matter how hard we
try.
Eventually, people figured that
out. They knew they could not get back
to God by themselves. They knew they
needed God to bring them back. In other
words, they knew they needed a Messiah.
They knew they needed a Savior.
They knew they needed a Savior, but
they had no way to get one. There was
no way they could bring a Savior about.
They knew, from scripture, that they’d been promised one, but there was
no way they could cause the Savior to come.
They wanted the time to pass quickly and for the Savior to come now, but
time just kept moving one day at a time.
All they could do was wait.
And so, they waited. Day after day. Week after week. Month
after month. Year after year. Eventually, it became decade after decade,
even century after century. They
waited, and they hoped, and they prayed.
And nothing happened. They
waited some more, and they hoped some more, and they prayed some more. And nothing continued to happen.
Eventually, some of them got tired
of waiting. Some of them got so
desperate that they started following false Saviors, false Messiahs. Some of them got discouraged. They decided their hopes were worthless,
that there was no point in praying.
Either God did not hear their prayers and was not going to answer, or
God did not exist at all. And so, they
quit waiting. They gave up.
And so, when the Savior finally
came, they missed it. Think about
that. Can you imagine what that would
be like? They’d waited all that time, all
those years, but they just could not wait long enough. And then, what they’d waited for and hoped
for and prayed for finally happened, and they missed it. They saw it, maybe, but they could not
recognize it for what it was. As John
says, “the world did not recognize him.”
That’s an incredibly sad thing, when you think about it.
We wonder, sometimes, why God
waited so long. We don’t know, of
course. We never will know. We assume there was a reason. There are theories people have, but we’ll
only know when we get to heaven and can ask.
And at that point, it may not matter to us any more.
What we do know is that, for those
who did not give up, for those who did not get tired of waiting, for those who
kept waiting, and kept hoping, and kept praying, it was all worth it. It was worth the wait. Because, eventually, the Savior came. The Savior came, and they no longer had to
be separated from God. They could come
back to God through their belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior.
So can we. We don’t have to miss out. We still wait for Christmas, but we don’t
have to wait the way they did thousands of years ago. We don’t have to wait for something to happen. We just wait to celebrate the anniversary of
something that’s already happened.
We don’t have to wait for the
Savior to come. The Savior has already
come. We’re not waiting for the first
Christmas. We can have Christmas any
day of the year. Any time we make a
decision for Christ, any time we dedicate our lives to following Jesus, it can
be Christmas Day for us. And any time
we renew our decision for Christ, any time we re-dedicate ourselves to
following Jesus, it can be Christmas Day for us, too. We don’t have to wait. We
can do that any time. We can do it now,
today.
You know, when I was a kid, Mom and
Dad would try to get me what I wanted.
They did not always succeed.
Sometimes what I wanted was not practical or was not good for me. Sometimes they made mistakes because they’re
human. But they tried. God, though, did not need to try. God knew exactly what we wanted and what we
needed. God knew the one thing we could
not get for ourselves. And that’s what
God gave us: a Savior.
When we’re kids, and we get just
what we want for Christmas, we don’t hesitate, do we? We tear off the paper, we see what it is, our eyes get big, we
get a big smile on our face, and we take it out of the package as fast as we
can. We cannot wait to start enjoying
the incredible gift we’ve been given.
And yet, too many times, we don’t
do that with the most incredible gift of all, the gift of salvation. God has given us this incredible gift, but
so often, just like people did two thousand years ago, we’re not sure about
it. We see it, but we don’t always
recognize it for what it is. We wait,
as if we’re deciding whether to accept it.
And so, sometimes, we miss out.
So, sometimes, it’s God’s turn to
wait. We’re no longer waiting for the
Savior to come to us. Instead, now the
Savior is waiting for us to come to him.
God will never get tired of
waiting. God will never give up on
us. God will never quit on us. God does not want to wait, of course. God wishes we would make the decision now,
today, to dedicate or re-dedicate our lives to God. But God is willing to wait.
God is willing to wait because, to God, you and I are worth waiting for.
Really, that’s the most amazing
thing of all. We understand why it’s
important for us to be close to God.
What’s hard to understand is why it seems to be important for God to be
close to us. We understand why it’s
worth waiting for God. What’s hard to
understand is why God would decide it’s worth waiting for us.
Yet, God does that. For reasons that we cannot understand,
reasons that don’t really make any sense to us, God does want to be close to
us. God does think that you and I, the sinful
people that we still are, are worth waiting for.
When you think about how strong and
powerful God is, and how small and weak we are in comparison, there really can
be only one reason for that. God loves
us. We’re God’s children, and God loves
us, and God thinks we’re worth waiting for.
When you think about it, that’s the
real message of Christmas. God gave us
the greatest Christmas gift of all. God
gave us just what we’d been waiting for:
a Savior. It was exactly what we
wanted and exactly what we needed.
The world waited for a Savior for
thousands of years, but we don’t have to wait any longer. Let’s not make God wait any longer,
either. Let’s make the decision today
to dedicate or re-dedicate ourselves to God.
Let’s accept the incredible gift of the Savior that God has given us.
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