Building a Great Life III, A Life of Freedom

I'm going to look at God's Word this morning. If you've not received a Christmas packet from North Way, you should be getting this in the mail. Most folks have gotten these. There's a nice little message board in here where you can write messages, put it on your refrigerator and write messages. I hope you... How many have not gotten this yet? That's scary, Pastor Scott. There are hundreds of them. Let me just say this. We mailed out about 1,200 of these, 1,200 households, I think is the number. So, if you didn't get one, why don't you wait a couple of days and then we'll have all the extras that we have out there in the Information Center. If you know you're on the mailing list, then you will definitely be getting one. If you're not on the mailing list, then you may feel free to pick one up out in the Information Center. I want us to look today at Luke Chapter 2 as we talk about building a great life, and particularly this morning, a life of freedom. This will be a little different direction than I had anticipated in this message, and I now see why the Lord wanted that. Let's read Luke 2 together. It's just going to help us putting this on the overhead. If you have the NIV, please read with us. If not, look up here on the screen, and let's declare God's Word together, because I believe there's something that stirs in our hearts when the Word of God fills the place where we gather. Let's declare this. In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was the governor of Syria. And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him, and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. I'd like to pray for just a moment. I just sense how important this message will be for some of you today. I'd like to ask God's anointing on that. Lord, as we come, I want to pray right now, Lord, for this people. Lord, I so appreciate them. I appreciate their hunger for your word and for your will in their lives. And I pray that you'd give me today, Father, extra strength. You know, my weakness is today, Lord. Give me strength to proclaim this word in such a fashion that it will be rhema, it will be life, to each person that's made the effort today to be gathered together in your presence. And Lord, we thank you today. This is all about your glory. It's all about your working out your purposes in our lives. Speak to us, I pray, in the mighty name of Jesus. You know, over the last weeks, particularly the last ten days or so, I've been experiencing Christmas moments. I mentioned Salty's Christmas Calamity. I came one Sunday evening. My kids are a little bit past the Salty stage. But I came because there was just a neat thing happening here. With this platform full of kids. And remember the song last week? Christmas is a time to... Do it again. Christmas is a time for love. All of us know this. This is time. We all know time. And that message just has been playing in my head, in my heart. And then Wednesday night, we had this wonderful Christmas carol singing. Many of you came. If you missed Wednesday night, it was just a wonderful time. And there were people singing specials. And we sang carols. And there were personal things that were shared. And I was moved. Because, you see, I sense just the authentic life that God's bringing to pass amongst us. And it's starting to go through generations now. And I'm starting to see your children and see their enthusiasm for following the Lord. And it's beginning just to take this deep rootedness amongst us. And I've been reaffirmed that Christmas, friends, is far more than just sort of a nice little lovely legend. If you're taking notes, this is the first point. A lovely legend that we somehow possess as our own. Christmas isn't a legend. It's far more than that. It's factual. It's historical. And it's as well a symbolic picture of how God works. And the precious, wonderful scriptures that we read. And the carols that we sing, friends. These are things that are established in truth. These are not just myths and fairy tales. This isn't just once upon a time in a far off land. And I need you to get a hold of that. Because sometimes the images that we see, especially at Christmas, it just kind of whirls around and gets all sort of clouded, especially in the world today in which we live. Two weeks ago, in the first message of this series, we talked about what brings real meaning to life. We said there were three things. The first was wonder. A sense of something that's bigger than us. And then the second was truth. Something that is purer than us. And the third was love. Something other than us. And you know what? Christmas really captures all three of those, doesn't it? The wonder of God becoming man. The incarnation. Describe for me what happened in the incarnation somewhat. Go ahead and put some parameters. Put some boundaries around God being confined to flesh. Infinite character becoming finite man. Think about it. No more can you explain that than you can explain how the universe that we live in has never ceased to continue to grow and expand. It's infinite. Think about the truth of it all. And I want to focus on truth today because this is truth that we're talking about. You know, archaeologists dig over there in Jerusalem. If you ever get the opportunity to go over there, all along the way you'll see people digging. You'll see sites where they're excavating, constantly unearthing things. Why? Because for centuries nothing was done in Jerusalem. Until it became a nation, most of the excavation had stopped. Now there are many students doing their graduate work over there. It's one of the finest archaeological finds in all the world. There are more Roman monuments and so that have been unearthed in Israel than any other country other than Italy. Just tremendous depths. And what they've discovered is, in recent times, that there was an emperor named Caesar Augustus who did appoint a Roman consul or governor by the name of Publius Quirinius Tiberius to be the governor of Syria in 7 BC, according to our current calendar. Now the Romans had a different calendar back then. You know that. And even that is an interesting point, isn't it? Has it gotten lost to anyone here this morning that we, even the people that you know who have no room for God at all in their lives, people that you maybe work alongside who curse God, they, when they sit down to write their little check to the power company, they unknowingly acknowledge the fact that all of history as we know it accounts for itself chronologically based on the birth of Jesus Christ, BC or 1997 AD. Even that event in and of itself should be enough to give people pause to think, well, why is this taken so seriously? Thousands of documents representing thousands of literal events in this book recount in detail the action of God in our lives, the action of God in the lives of people and places then, and likewise the action of God in our lives today. And that's why I don't want this congregation ever to lose the wonder, the mystery of the birth of Christ. Never to let it just sort of fall into the big vat called sparkle season. And I hope you're as offended really as I am about the whole idea of expunging the origins of this great festival of celebrating the Incarnation. And if you have an opportunity to tell someone in media or retailing or whatever, you know what, it's Christmas. Thank you very much. I heard one radio announcer say, well, we're getting through one holiday and pretty soon we'll be on the next one, Valentine's Day. Well, you know what? It's not the same. Valentine's Day was made up by Hallmark. I mean, it's fine. But Christmas, you see, is a special revelation of God to man. Christians in a sense come to understand that Christmas as a particular event was the ultimate act of history when God invaded the human scene. And Bethlehem is a literal place. I've been there. I mean, you can go there today. It's different than it was 2,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago there was maybe three, four, five hundred people. Today there's about 20,000 or so. And it's very interesting there because converging in the same place. I remember coming out of the place, the literal place, where they say that Jesus was born. I mean, it's the way down this long kind of tunnel and into this very strange sort of catacomb and put your hand in this little place and you crowd in with a group of people. And then you come out of that and here's this group of Christians and we walk out with our Jewish guide and head over to our bus which is parked underneath these blaring loudspeakers that are playing the Muslim call to prayer at 5 p.m. And so they're in this one city. These three great religions of the world start to kind of converge. But it's a real place. You can go there. Mary and Joseph went to the little town of Bethlehem because God led them there. And I want to talk about that. I don't know that they understood that God was leading them. And you may not understand what God's doing in your life, but I want to talk about Bethlehem moments that many of us have. See, if you're setting out to build a great life, and that's the title of this series, a great life begins with worship, understanding the God of the universe. We talked about that. A great life number two, as Dave said last week, has to do with a purposefulness. Do you know why you're here, friend? Do you know why God put you on this earth or are you just going through the motions? And the third thing I want to talk about is a life of freedom. A great life is a life of freedom. Listen, freedom from having to have things go your way in order to be happy. Freedom from having to have it your way. The Bible says, He whom the Son sets free is free indeed. He whom God sets free, free from slavery to sin, the slavery, literally, the bondage to need to have it your way, the Bible says that is a person that's really free. And friends, how many of you know it starts at a young age? How many of you would attest that through your children you've already seen that sin, selfishness, having to have it your own way, sets in real early? I remember when my boys were little, Dave and John. One time, and it must have been after one of the holidays, Jonathan went in and ate all of David's Christmas or Halloween candy or whatever it was. Just ate the whole thing. David was mad and upset. And I walked into Jonathan's room and said, Jonathan, how could you do that? How could you take all of David's candy? And he said, Daddy, I just couldn't help myself. Isn't that true? Why couldn't he help himself? Just because he had a bad day? No, because he's a little sinner. Just like we're big sinners. And there are many of us in our honest moments who would say, you know, we do things we don't want to and we can't help ourselves. It's the nature of slavery to sin. What does Bethlehem teach us? First of all, what's the nature of this freedom? Well, it's a mystery, friends. The mystery of Bethlehem. Think with me for just a moment. The mystery, that's the first Roman numeral. Think for a moment. Why would God choose a little village like this to have his son born in? I mean, why not Jerusalem? The city of kings. The place where royalty had established their home throughout the centuries. In fact, in Matthew 2, we read that the wise men went to Jerusalem seeking the king because that's where they thought he'd be born. But in fact, that wasn't the case. Maybe you're thinking, well, they had to go to Bethlehem first on their way and they just stopped there. No, let me show you the map if we could please, Sue. Look at this map. For those of you who aren't familiar with the geography of Bethlehem and that whole area, you need to go from Nazareth down through Samaria, which by the way was kind of antagonistic towards Jews, into Jerusalem and literally just about four or five miles beyond Jerusalem to get to Bethlehem. So do you see they had to go right by the place where you would think that a savior would be born, where a king would come. And that trek, by the way, it doesn't look very far on that map, but it's 80 miles, friends. 80 miles riding on a mule, nine months pregnant. Bethlehem was not a likely spot for a savior to be born. We so romanticize that picture. It's sort of a tender thing with Mary and Joseph sort of clinging to each other. But you know what? Bethlehem is a very difficult place. Bethlehem was a rough place to be. There wasn't the kind of stuff that we're accustomed to, the kind of conveniences. Roman guards were stationed around helping the people to just kind of press in. And we know when they got there, there wasn't any room for them, any place to stay. And all of this was done. Bethlehem was chosen, you see, to fulfill the word of prophecy given 700 years beforehand. Look on your notes in case you wonder where that prophecy was in the Bible. Micah 5, verse 2. O Bethlehem, you are but a small Judean village, yet you will be the birthplace of my King, who is alive from everlasting ages past. It was there that the Lord said through the minor prophet. Minor doesn't mean less important, it just means less content. God prophesied that the Savior would come through the town of Bethlehem. Why Bethlehem? Because the Lord, you see, friends, delights in choosing the simple, humble, obscure things oftentimes to do His grandest work. And I don't know what it is about we particularly, we Americans, but we find it so difficult, don't we, so difficult to believe that God would use unimportant things to bring glory to His name. But that's the paradox of how God works. Remember 1 Corinthians chapter 1, Paul's writing to the Corinthians, and this is a powerful quote. I'd like you to just read along with me as I read it from the screen here. Here he's describing what the Corinthians had discovered about one another, and I think this is an accurate description of North Way. He says this, Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of the brightest and the best among you, not many influential, not many from high society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses? Chose those nobodies to expose the hollow pretensions of the somebodies. That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have, right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start, comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have the saying, if you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God. Isn't that a great sort of paraphrase from the Message Version? Look around. God has chosen to use just ordinary folks like us to do his work. So we can't stand up and say, hey, I had the influence and the power, I brought it to pass, I deserve God's blessing. How many of you say, thank God, he takes me just as I am. He takes me with my sin and all. The greatest living example that I can think of, Mother Teresa, recently, of course, went on to be with the Lord, but she represents countless thousands of others. When I travel overseas and see people and some of the conditions in which they live, and yet their love for Christ, the presence of Christ in their lives, so powerful. Those of us who've traveled will tell you, it's something to do with just the simplicity that brings people to a point of knowing God in a powerful way. Bethlehem was chosen by God because it was obscure and of humble means and of low account. He did it so his name could be glorified. Friends, your life may be like Bethlehem. It may not be much to look at on the outside. Some of you may feel very inadequate. You may even feel like a career flop in your life. You might feel like a person who's blown it in different ways in life. But can I tell you something? God doesn't look at that. He can take the mundane of our lives, He can take the failures of our lives and turn them into miraculous temples of His glory. And how many of you know, once the Lord gets a hold of your life, He begins to change all of that failure, all of the things that you point to and say, you're not me. And He can use all of that to His glory and give you a grace that flows through that weakness that once choked life. The mystery of this work, friends, is that we must cooperate with it. Now listen carefully, those of you who've been Christians for a while, and that's a number of you in this service. Don't ever lose the passion to pursue God with all your heart because, you see, you've got to keep cooperating with that grace. Once you just start sitting back on it, you'll wonder why the Christian life starts passing you by. Eric Little is a name that's familiar to those of us who saw the movie Chariots of Fire or who read his biography. Those of you who don't know the story, Eric Little was a gifted athlete. He was a sprinter. His race was the what? The 100-meter dash. And he broke every record in England and he was headed to the 1936 Olympics to run to win the Olympic gold. And on the way, he found out, on the boat, on his way to the Olympics, that the heat the qualifying heat for his race had been moved to Sunday, the Sabbath. And he was a man of conviction. And when he found this out, he was devastated because he knew that he couldn't violate his Sabbath conviction and compete on Sunday. And so he had to tell his coach, I can't run. And the dream that he'd spent his whole life preparing for seemed to be slipping away. But he was so convinced in God. You see, his sister, Jenny, if you remember the one time when they were talking and Jenny turned to him and said, why do you do this? Why do you subject yourself to all this? Why do you have this regimen, this discipline? Why do you work out the way you do and run all that you do and put all this effort forth? And he turns to Jenny and he says, Jenny, Jenny, Jenny, God has made me for a purpose. He's made me for China. He knew he was called to be a missionary. But he's also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure. Remember that statement? And so Eric Little faithfully pursued what God put before him, even though his Bethlehem moment had happened. It looked like what he had purposed for God to do in his life wasn't going to happen. And how many of you remember this story? What happened? He changed races and had never run the 400 meters in competition before and began the process of running the heats on Monday and so and qualified for the 400. And if you know the story, I'll get the money. He won the gold medal in the 400 meter dash. It's a mystery. God works in ways and in places that we just don't expect. Second, there's a movement here toward Bethlehem. I've already hinted at this. Let me just sort of summarize again. You see, once we know that God has started to work in our lives, getting there is sometimes very difficult. Frank and Debbie's testimony is so helpful. I mean, they set out on a course, but it didn't happen the way they hoped it would. And they had struggles and disappointments along the way. This movement toward Bethlehem is never easy. I can hear Mary saying, when Joseph said, we've got to go to Bethlehem, I can hear Mary saying, I don't want to go to Bethlehem. I don't want to go 80 miles on a donkey. Look at me. I'm nine months pregnant. Why do we have to go, Joseph? Because the governor said we have to go. We have to register. You know what? I don't know. You may just see this as a tender little love story, but I see it as a very tough journey, a very difficult moment. I mean, here's a man who's already befuddled and wondering what in the world is happening to his wife and what's going on. You know, that's not all that unusual. But then, it gets really difficult because now he's asking her to do something that seemed unreasonable, but they had to go. And we have no reason to believe that Mary and Joseph knew that they were about to fulfill a prophecy. There are some people who say, well, they knew God was going to have the Savior born in Bethlehem, so they probably woke up and went and said, hey, this is it. This is that prophecy. Let's go on. Let's start trucking down to Bethlehem and singing choruses like, glory to God, heading down to Bethlehem. Micah 5 says the prophet's going to be born. I don't think so. I mean, I don't believe they were just kind of like happy, hey, this is great, we're going to fulfill. How many of you know that sometimes God says go do something and you have no idea why you're supposed to go do it? You've got to obey the Lord. You've got to trust Him. Probably Mary was saying along the way, things like this. Joseph, could you slow down just a little bit? I mean, every time this donkey stumbles, it hurts. Where are we going to stay tonight, Joseph? You know, it's a four-day journey, at least. Joseph, could we get a little bit of water? It's so dry out here and I'm so thirsty and we don't know what time of year it was, but I can also tell you it gets chilly. It gets kind of cool and sometimes even a little bit rainy if it was at this time of year. We don't know what the conditions were like, but these people are real people. Bethlehem is a real place and friends, it's real for you as well. There are some of you here today who are going through difficult moments. When you're on your way to God's will and you really don't even know where it is that God's taking you, you just know that He said, follow me and trust me and I'll provide for you. And even more than that, I want to speak to those of you who feel like you've been obeying God and something very difficult has happened, some disappointment has happened in your life. I got an email from one of our missionary families. David and Betsy Hunter. Most of you have known the Hunters for a while. If you've not, they are a wonderful, devoted couple, very bright, highly educated, could have been very successful here in the States in a lot of different careers. But God called them to the nation of Turkey 12 years ago. Turkey has 50 million Muslims and somewhere between 500 and maybe as many, some say, as 5,000 Christians, which is one tenth of one percent. It's very adversarial. David and Betsy have been laboring very faithfully in that field. And the email said simply this, pray for us because we've been getting threatening phone calls. Phone calls that say that someone is going to take our children. That had never happened to them before. Phone calls that were saying that they were going to expose the Hunters for what they are. Subversives to the culture in which they find themselves. And then to their dismay, it appeared in the newspaper, come to the Bible study and their address and their phone number was listed in the paper. And, of course, it's totally illegal to have a Bible study in the nation of Turkey. And so David wrote the email asking for prayer. And he said, we don't know what the authorities are going to do now that they know why we're here. We don't know how long we'll be able to stay. He said, but the most difficult thing is we wondered who would say this about us. And the most difficult thing was that the person that was calling them and writing these things in the paper turned out to be one of the young men that they had converted to Christ, who now was backing away from his commitment to the Lord and seeking to bring persecution upon the hunters. And David wrote and he said this. He said, I don't understand this, Jay. This is very difficult. He said, but I know this. God's going to work it together for good. And he needed to purge out from amongst us this unbelief so that we could go on and trust him fully as a believing community. We're not moving unless God moves us. We're here. This is our Bethlehem. Maybe you're in a place like that where you can't make sense of the circumstance. Trust God. Trust him. Be free from having to have it your way, friend. That's what this is about. And third, I want to just share with you the miracle of Bethlehem is this. That if you're faithful to just hang in there, just to trust God through those difficult moments, if you embrace the mystery of it all, if you enter into the movement of faith and obedience heading that way, trusting God along the way, as Hebrews 11, 6 says there in your outline, then you'll come to the place where the miracle will happen, where the birth of the purpose of God in your life is going to take place. If we can come with that heart of Mary that said to the angel, when the angel appeared to her and told her that she was going to have this child conceived in her supernaturally from God, and she didn't know how to respond, and she finally looked up at the angel and said these simple words, well, be it unto me according to your word. Just do what you promised. I can't do anything. Let it happen. If you can say those simple things, then miracles begin to happen in your life, and lives will be changed, and words will be given to you, and your hope will be fulfilled. Mary and Joseph, you see, at some point I believe it all began to fit together to them. I believe it may have happened that night. We don't have any way to know for sure, but could you imagine the shepherds showing up there at the manger as is described in Luke chapter 2 when the angel appeared, the shepherds got the message, and they went over to see, and maybe one of the shepherds who had read the book of the law said, you know, it says in here somewhere that the Messiah is supposed to come from our little village. Could this be the one? And maybe at that moment, Mary and Joseph had this light going, wait a minute, that is what it says. And in that moment, all of the dreams of their heart began to make sense once again. How many of you could say by the raising of your hand that there's been a time in your life when you got to the other side of a working of God and then you realized why God had let you go through all that process to get to where you are? It's called 20-20 faith, 20-20 hindsight says, now I see it. When I was going through it, it didn't make sense, but now that I'm there, I understand the word of the Lord. Listen friends, I'll tell you candidly, I'm standing here today. Some of you have spoken words from the Lord about this congregation, about this ministry that haven't happened yet. Not there yet. I'm in Bethlehem, kind of waiting for God. But believing that the miracle is on its way. And that is my word to you. Trust God and continue not to slip into a posture of unbelief. Whatever it might be, trust Him and affirm Him. Maybe your spouse today is far from God and he's been that way or she's been that way and you don't know why he's not moving. Maybe you have a friendship that's really gotten cold and distant. Maybe your job isn't producing the kind of fulfillment that you hoped it would and you wonder why God's letting this happen. Maybe your body isn't healing up as you hoped it would. Maybe your family is in turmoil. I don't know what it is. But the mystery of Bethlehem is this, that God will work His purposes in those who trust Him and allow His word to come to fulfillment in their lives. Praise Him, friends, for the freedom to trust Him. Being free from having to have it your own way. Trust God to fulfill your word in His way. An elderly lady told of the pain of watching her husband slip into the grip of Alzheimer's disease. Slowly he lost a sense of orientation, even an awareness of people that were around him. Pretty soon he didn't even identify friends that were close to him, even his own wife. One night the elderly lady was telling this story that she went to get into bed with him and was at least comforted that at night they could be together and have that companionship. But one night he wouldn't get into bed. She said, Honey, what's wrong? He had that far away look in his eyes and he said, No, I can't do this. She said, What's wrong? He said, Because my wife wouldn't want me to sleep with another woman. She told the story of the pain of not having that companionship any longer, but how it was overshadowed by the sense of the deep loyalty that even in his incomprehensible state he wanted to remain faithful to his vows. When the husband finally went on to be with the Lord, about eight months later, the wife was now alone. People from the church came around at first and they seemed to be there when she needed them. But after a while, that flow of support stopped and she began to feel a little sorry for herself. And she wondered why, well, maybe they don't really care. We're there? She was listening to a Christian talk show and a hostess was speaking to someone who was in a similar circumstance. And the host said this. She said, Please don't feel that I'm unsympathetic to your loss, speaking to the person on the other line, but let me just suggest something to you. Have you ever considered the possibility that the Lord has arranged the circumstances that you're in so that other people aren't flocking around you any longer, so that you will be drawn closer to God Himself? That perhaps the greatest need in your life isn't other people to comfort you right now, but that it's God and His presence fully meeting the need of your soul. That's why you're not getting your way right now. And the elderly lady said, telling this story, she said, It hit me right then that that was right. That's what she needed to hear. That God's presence was the higher good. That other people weren't as necessary in that moment. Friends, she was having a Bethlehem moment where freedom from herself, the need to have it her way, put her in a place where God could bless her fully. I don't know where we need to look that could be any more powerful, as I close, than at the cross. You see, when Jesus came, He knew that He was on a mission. But I'm not sure that He fully realized what it would mean to Him to give His life the way He had to do it. And the reason I feel that is this simple scripture. It comes from Matthew 26, verses 38 and 39. Look at it with me. These are Jesus' words when He heard fully and clearly that He was headed to the cross. Here's what He said in the Garden of Gethsemane. My soul is crushed with horror and sadness to the point of death. Stay here, He says to the disciples, and stay awake with Me. And He went forward a little and fell face downward on the ground and prayed, My Father, if it be possible, let this cup be taken away from Me. I don't want it this way, Father. If it's at all possible, isn't there another way that I could redeem the world from their sin? He was having a Bethlehem moment. But He said, nevertheless, not my will be done. In so doing, the Bible says, giving His life on the cross in obedience, God the Father has highly exalted Him that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord of all. And He will now sit at the right hand of God the Father in eternal glory forever and ever. Friend, have you done that? Have you come to the place where you can say, Lord, I'll do it your way. Would you stand with me, please? I'd like to come to a moment of just confronting that in each of our lives. And I want us to begin by singing this simple little chorus of the words of Mary. Be it unto me, Lord, according to Your word. That's my choice. That's my will. Let's sing it.