Allen Jackson - From Manger to Majesty
It is such a privilege to be with you today. Our topic is "From the Manger to Majesty". And we're focusing on the miracle of Jesus's entry into time. But it was a very inauspicious beginning. It's in a stable, it's not celebrated by the powerful, the rich, the wealthy, those that had access to authority in any way. The shepherds were the primary, or at least the first attenders to Jesus's birth. It's a pathway for us today. It's a lesson that's important. If we want God's best, it typically begins with an attitude of serving. And usually we're serving in a way when there are very few people who even notice. You serve the Lord anyway. Grab your Bible and a notepad, but most importantly, serve God.
The topic for our Christmas Eve this year is "From the Manger to Majesty". We live in a broken world, have you noticed? Just seems to me just about any window you look out of, it's pretty apparent that we're living in a season of really unprecedented turmoil and confusion. When we have an unseasonably cold winter day, our electric grid is not sufficient to help us heat our homes, and yet they insist that we all go buy an electric car. The lack of logic in those two things doesn't seem to settle upon anybody who's pitching all those ideas to us. It really doesn't seem to matter where you look, that type of insanity rules.
The rule of law is crumbling around us, violence in our cities, we can't enforce our own borders, we're practicing voodoo economics, spending money that we haven't had for a long, long time. The good news of Christmas is in the midst of all of that craziness and darkness and insanity comes the light of hope of Jesus. That no matter what happens in our world, there's a hope for us that's anchored beyond time. So that being a Christian isn't about just where you sit for a few minutes on a Sunday or how you observe a holiday, it has to do with the authority in your life, the authority that you live under and what the implications of that are.
And we're gonna use the familiar words of the birth narrative of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke to open that door. We're gonna follow Jesus's journey from the manger to the demonstration of the majesty of heaven. Majesty has kind of a particular meaning in the scripture. The majesty is the displayed glory of God, the awesomeness of an Almighty God, an omnipotent God. It's God and his power and his wisdom and his divine authority. All of that breaks forth into the way that our senses can experience it in the majesty of God. And Jesus's life is the story of that journey from the manger to the display of the majesty of God.
And I wanna invite you to imagine that God would do that for you as well. We'll start in Luke chapter 2 and verse 4. It's a passage of scripture that I suspect is familiar to all of us. If you didn't learn it by reading it in the Gospel of Luke, I bet you learned it from Charlie Brown's Christmas, makes me smile. Luke 2 and verse 4, "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 in the 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".
Again, it's a familiar story, I hope, to all of us. It's a very humble beginning for the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords, the Lord of all creation. And yet his entry into time takes place in a stable, in a relatively insignificant village, overlooked by almost everyone. It's a very humble beginning. And if you're reading it for the first time, it's abundantly clear that he's gonna need help. I mean, there doesn't seem to be a lot of momentum behind the Jesus initiative at this point. The only people who attend his birth are the shepherds and they're babbling about something they've seen or heard.
The circumstances I think could honestly be described as less than perfect. Does that feel right? Those of you that have experienced the birth of a child or perhaps a grandchild, if the message came that that was gonna need to happen in a barn 'cause there wasn't any room anywhere else, probably not the most perfect circumstance. And yet in the midst of it, the message of God through the angels and every other way is that it's a time of tremendous hope. So I'm gonna ask you to process that with me for a minute. It's a bit of a paradox that in the brokenness of a stable and the lack that is demonstrated there, in the humility that is demonstrated there, there is the hint of the emergence of the power and the glory of God. Jesus's story begins in a barn.
Now that works for me, I like barns. I mean, I'm happy in a barn. Has something to do with the way I grew up. My father was a veterinarian so I spent a lot of time in barns. When I lived at home the majority of the time, he was an equine practitioner, he only treated horses. So I was in the barns in Miami, the thoroughbred tracks in Miami and then we moved to Tennessee and I was in the walking horse barns here and occasionally, usually with less enthusiasm, I might've been in the barn where there was a dairy herd. I've been in a lot of barns.
So when I read the story of Bethlehem, I like this scenario. And I would even submit to you that from the vantage point of hindsight, and we're all much smarter in hindsight, it's a preview of what is to come in Jesus's life. The demonstration of humility often overlooked and discounted, diminished, not celebrated by the people who perhaps should have. I don't know how much time you've spent in a barn, Murfreesboro's changing. Middle Tennessee has changed, but barns are a place where you find something very specific.
If you don't have a lot of experience, your answer might be livestock. You'd expect to find a horse or maybe a cow, or if you visited church on Christmas Eve, our barn might have a camel in it, or the odd llama, or a few goats. Livestock in a barn, that's pretty consistent. The type may change, but the one thing that's consistent across all those barns that are populated by livestock, have you figured it out yet? Manure. I checked, it's a word cleared for church. I looked it up in the theological dictionary, it's okay, I'm allowed to say it.
And here's the reality, barns are places where you find lots of manure. And I can announce to you, if you don't know, life comes fully loaded with a lot of manure. You might suggest I'm something of a manure authority. I spent my teenage years and early adulthood cleaning out barns. I have hauled thousands of pounds of manure. Cleaned it out of the barn, distributed all over the farm. You know, there are some very sophisticated and effective mechanical devices that will spread manure around the farm. My father didn't wanna invest in one of those. He thought he was feeding me, that was enough. I was the distribution system. And in doing that day after day, and week after week, and month after month, I discovered something, manure makes things grow, it really does. It can change the quality of the vegetation on the farm. You have to be persistent with it.
So I came with some good news this Christmas season, and you'll be very grateful you got out on a very cold Christmas Eve for this nugget of truth. If your life is filled with manure this Christmas, it's growing season. Oh, slipped that one right in there, it's true. It was true in Jesus's life to grow from the place of the manger for his story to be the canvas where the majesty of God could be displayed. If you're gonna follow that pathway, you and I will have to know what to do with all the manure. No life escapes it, not one of us. I mean, we can dress up and come to church for a few minutes and act like we always smell nice, but we don't. I would submit to you that that scene in Bethlehem was filled with stress.
Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, you know them, we've seen the manger scenes recreated in our homes, or the lobbies of the churches, or in the public square at least once upon a time. But there was more than enough stress there, there is an unplanned pregnancy. No matter how you shape that, or craft that, or tell that story, that's stressful. Plans have to be changed, stories have to be altered. Wedding plans are awkward now. Just a few days ago or a few weeks ago could be centered on the color of the dresses or the icing on the cake, now the plans are altogether different. Trust has been strained. Initially with just Mary and Joseph, but some angelic interventions helped with that, but as far as we know from the text, the angels didn't go any further than that.
They didn't talk to Mary's parents, or Joe's parents, or the grandparents. The angels didn't visit everybody in the synagogue. So as the story begins to grow, quite literally, trust is strained all around. And then we read Luke 2, they're in Bethlehem. They live in Nazareth, the northern part of Israel. They had to make a lengthy journey to Bethlehem, not because it's a holiday, not because they have family there they wanna go see, they have to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of the order of Caesar. You see, first century Israel is under the authority of Rome, an authoritarian pagan government. They suffer the humiliation of being taxed, having the wealth from their own pockets and their own businesses flowing to Rome to feed the habits of the pagans. They have the indignity of billeting Roman troops. The men suffer the humiliation, the women and children suffer far more.
So the hated Romans send them to Bethlehem, there's plenty of stress in that stable. And then the shepherds show up. They only guest to the birth other than the livestock are the shepherds, and they were uninvited. I ride a donkey halfway across the country to give birth in a barn and you invited the shepherds? They're babbling about something. Angels or heavenly hosts, "Peace on earth, goodwill to men". It looks good on a Christmas card, but if you've just given birth, maybe not so much. And then perhaps the most unexpected component of the story to me, and it's wrapped in stress.
The angel visits Joseph again, the last time he chatted with the angel or the angel chatted with him, it was to tell him not to be afraid to take Mary home as his wife because the thing that was conceived in her was from the Holy Spirit. And the angel's back this time. But this time the message is different. The angel says, "Run for your life. Take the baby and his mother, run for your life". Oh, we know it in more biblical language, the flight to Egypt. Folks, they didn't board a plane. They got out the donkey again and they ran for their lives. Does that bother you at all? It bugs me a little bit. I've read my Bible, God's pretty good with fireballs, like, directed lightning strikes on his enemies.
I mean, occasionally even the earth opens up and swallows a few thousand people. He can part an ocean, he can strike them with a botch, or the itch, or the plague. None of those things are on the menu this day. The message is, "Joseph, run for your life". I'm pretty certain that when Joseph had that first meeting with the angel and he said, "This is a God-thing," and he thought that that God thing would come with a whole contingent, the whole cadre of guardian angels. And now Joseph is being asked to rearrange his life and his plans, to run. So how do we get from the stable to the King of kings? How do we move from an infant fleeing for his life to Jesus, the name that's above every name? I wanna take just a couple of more minutes and see if we can understand.
Look with me in Philippians chapter 2. It's not presented to us in the scripture as a part of the birth narrative, but it's very much a part of Jesus' life story. The book of Philippians is written to the church at Philippi. It's the only letter in the New Testament that's not written as a correction to some mistake, either theologically or behavioral problem, it's written to encourage the Christians in Philippi. And in the second chapter, Paul talks about Jesus specifically. And he presents his life to us as a pattern for our lives. He begins with a statement that, again, is a little odd to me. He said, "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus".
Did you know God cared about your attitude? Who knew? I thought he cared about my dress code and my beverage list, sometimes my vocabulary, but I didn't know he cared about my attitude. The Bible says, "Your attitude and my attitude should reflect Jesus". The single most important thing I can tell you about your attitude is that whatever it is, good or bad, it's your attitude. Nobody gave it to you, you chose it. If you're grumpy and mean spirited, you chose it. Merry Christmas. You see, your attitude doesn't reflect your circumstances, your attitude reflects your choices about your circumstances. Jesus had every reason to be angry, or resentful, or embittered, and he wasn't.
And so we're given the counsel to have the attitude of Christ Jesus. And then they're gonna give us some details about that beginning in verse 6. "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross". Wow. I don't believe it's a call to be a martyr. I don't believe that at all, but we're told to model Jesus's attitude. And it starts with this expression of yielding. "He didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped, but he made himself nothing".
Now I will confess in public and online, yielding is not my favorite thing, I've had to learn to yield. It's taken the Spirit of God and some determination for me to even make the beginning of an inroad in learning to yield. I don't like to yield when I'm driving. Do you see those yellow triangular signs that say yield? When I see one, you know what that means to me? Hurry, 'cause if I can get to the intersection ahead of you, you can yield. I've got the right of way. Yeah, yielding is not fun. And yet the story from Jesus, the pathway out of that manger to the majesty of God was he yielded. I don't think it's ever easy. He humbled himself.
You see, we choose to think of others before we think of ourselves that we would serve someone else. Humility is something that you collect or develops within you indirectly. There's behaviors you engage in that allows humility to grow within you. If you forfeit that, if you reject the choices towards humility, the alternative is you can be humiliated. Very different thing, same outcome, humble yourself. And then it says he chose obedience. We have to choose obedience. I don't believe obedience is very often fun. I don't think it's fun for children. It has to be taught and reinforced with love and discipline and consistency or it will never take root.
And the same is true for us as adults. Obedience to God is not automatic, it's not intuitive. It has to be reinforced, it has to be demonstrated, and then it takes loving discipline for that to take root in our hearts. But ultimately we have to choose it, we will have to choose obedience, or we will lead our lives as rebels. If you're living in rebellion to God tonight, that means there's a truth that you know and you're choosing not to be obedient to it, understand you're forfeiting the opportunity you have on that pathway out of the stable.
One of the great reliefs of life is to discover there is a God and it's not you or me. His ways are better than my ways, his thoughts are higher than my thoughts. He has more strength and power and wisdom and experience than I'll ever have. So I'm learning to yield to him far more readily and far more gratefully than I've ever done before because I want him to write my future, not me. Philippians chapter 2 and verse 9. "Therefore, God exalted him," Jesus, "To the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father".
There it is, because he humbled himself and became obedient, obedient even to death, and even death on a cross. He wasn't grasping, he yielded, therefore, God exalted him. So if you're in a manger and there's way too much manure and the aroma's not good and the footing's poor and you don't know the way through, I would invite you this Christmas Eve to take Jesus as the pattern. Choose obedience, choose to forgive, choose to live generously, choose to yield to the Lord. I trust God. He can take every one of us from those scenes in our lives and those circumstances in our lives that look like they're defined by the stable and make them a display of his majesty.
I suspect you know it's true. There's probably some circumstances in your life where you've already experienced it. I wanna pray with you. When you came in this evening, they gave you the elements of communion. If you'll retrieve those, if you didn't receive them when you came in, there's ushers in the aisles, if you'll raise a hand, they'll bring one to you. They may try and sell it, but it's really supposed to be free. If you're at home online, you don't have to have one of our communion kits, you can grab a saltine cracker and a glass of water. You can use an Oreo and a Coke. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but you don't have to have a wafer that is stamped with a religious symbol in order to participate in communion, isn't that good? You know, communion is not a church tradition or just a ritual. It is a tradition and a ritual, but it's far more than that.
Our Lord himself implemented this. He did it as a part of his observation as a faithful Jewish Rabbi. You see, the Jewish people already had a meal that was significant to them. Every year they celebrated Passover, it was the last meal they had in Egypt before God delivered them. And he commanded the Jewish people every year to celebrate that Passover meal so they would never forget that he had delivered them from slavery. And Jesus is celebrating the Passover meal with his disciples in Jerusalem, but at the end of the meal, he reaches over and takes bread. There's a place set for Messiah. And he takes the bread and he said, "This bread is my body broken for you, as often as you eat this, do this in remembrance of me".
Well, he hasn't been to the cross yet. They haven't seen him suffer yet. The importance of what he was saying to them was only gonna become clear in the few hours ahead. So they wrote this for us after the fact so that we would never lose sight of it. We don't come to the communion table because it's a holiday or a part of a religious service, we come because we benefit from what happened on that cross, and Jesus is the one that told us that.
See, something supernatural happened on the cross. It looked like a great defeat to Jesus and a victory for his enemies, but in truth, through the cross, Satan's power over humanity was broken. A divine exchange takes place on that cross, the perfect, sinless, obedient Son of God took upon himself all of the judgment that was due by divine justice, my ungodliness, my rebellion and yours that in turn, you and I might receive all of the blessings due to his perfect obedience. So when we come to the communion table, we come to appropriate by our belief what Jesus provided for us. We take the paradox of the defeat of the cross and make it a victory in our lives. Not because we're smart, or powerful, or clever, but because Jesus is.
See, whatever power you think is arrayed against you, whether it's demonic, or political, or relational, or whatever you may think it is, the power of God is greater. And so for that reason, we come regularly to the communion table. Now, let's come tonight as disciples. Again, Jesus said, "This bread is my body broken for you. As often as you eat this, do this in remembrance of me". Let's receive together. Then he took a cup and said, "This cup is a new covenant". Literally a new contract. "It'll be sealed with my own blood. And as often as you drink this cup, you proclaim my death until you see me again". Let's receive together. Will you bow with me in prayer?
Father, thank you. Thank you for your great love for us that you sent your Son. And Lord Jesus, we thank you that in your obedience you offered yourself as a living sacrifice, that we might be set free, that we might be forgiven, and cleansed, and redeemed, and justified. That through the shed blood of Jesus, every claim against us has been canceled. We praise you for it tonight. And as we have received the bread and the cup, we receive your life into our lives. I thank you that we've been declared righteous, made holy, set apart for the purposes of God. We thank you Lord Jesus, that we can face Christmas morning with the great hope and promise of our redemption alive within us. And I pray for those that are listening that have broken hearts, I pray you will mend them. Those that face serious diagnosis, that you would bring life to their bodies. Those who are filled with despair and hopelessness, that you would bring joy and a purpose. I thank you for your faithfulness in our life, that greater is the one who is in us than whatever may be arrayed against us. We thank you for the victory of the cross and for the blood of Jesus that has transferred us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of your Son. In his name we pray, amen.