All right guys. Good to be with you. So, I think we've decided that it's not too early to say Merry Christmas, right? Is that right? I don't know about you guys at the sites, but we've, uh, we've kind of made the decision, you know, Thanksgiving has already happened. We had the artisan market here. Uh, Friday night here in Chesterfield was amazing. Like 42 vendors is the most we've had came and, and and sold stuff. And we were able to do that and, and give proceeds to sharing shed. So, so cool. But the point is, we we're past that point. It's time to say Merry Christmas. So Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Thanks. Yeah, good to be with you. I'm so glad we get to do this together. But here's my question, just right here at the outset, why is it Merry Christmas and not happy Christmas? I don't understand that. Do you? Why is that? It's happy Thanksgiving, happy birthday, happy National. Pretend you're a time traveler day. That's today. I don't know if you knew that, but happy pretend you're a time traveler day. Um, why is it happy everything else, but with Christmas, it's Merry Christmas. I, I don't get it. That sounds like a really, like a, like a British way to say merry happy or something, right? Which makes sense. 'cause in the UK they, they all, they say Happy Christmas. This is my point. This is the controversy that I think we need to resolve this Christmas. So get on it. Let's figure this out. There's all kinds of things, right? When it comes to Christmas, it's like, how do you wish people Merry Christmas? How do you do this? How do we celebrate during this year? All kinds of things that get stirred up each year about what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, like this one, um, if somebody's like, wants to say Merry Christmas to you, but they're in a big hurry, then they say, Merry what? Exus. And some people see that big exus and they go, that's not okay. You're taking Jesus' name out of Christmas. Well, can I, can we, let's talk about this for just a second. We do that really quickly. Lemme give you a little, a little lesson in Greek here. The truth is that this x uh, this goes back to the early church. It's been a really important symbol in the Christian faith for a long time. I'm not making that up. Uh, in fact, if you were to spell out the word Christ in Greek, it would look something like this. I mean, I'm not a Greek scholar, so bear with me. This is the hard part. There it is. Yeah, it was. All right. There we go. That's how you spell Christ in Greek. And you see that first letter there. Does that look familiar? The first letter is an X. So sometimes you might go into like a, a church. It could be a a, a Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox church. It doesn't matter. You'll sometimes see a symbol that looks like this. Anybody ever seen something like that before? See what that is? That's called the Kai Row. It's the first two letters. It's in Christ. That's what this symbol means. All of these things. The X, all of this means the same thing. It means Christ. And so some of you're like, oh, good, okay. So Jesus' name is in Christmas. Well, it's a little more complicated than that. 'cause that's not Jesus's last name. It's not, no, it's like a, it's a title. Christ is a, is a title. Well, what's Jesus's last name then? I don't think they had last names in the first century. If you look in scripture, like they maybe might've called him Jesus Bar Joseph, which would mean son of Joseph. Sometimes that's the way people's names would go. Or what you see often is they call him Jesus of Nazareth, because that's where he's from. So that's kind of Jesus's full name, I guess. But, but the, but the word Christ is, is a really important title. So what's, what is that title? Well, in the Hebrew, it's the word ach, which is really fun to say. So I wanna highly recommend that you turn to your neighbor right now and just say, Mach, go ahead. It was fun, wasn't it? Did you hear it in the rooms? It's just fun to say. Okay, so, uh, translated, we use this word messiah. And here's the thing. All of these words, everything here, not this, everything else means the same thing. It means anointed one. That's what all of these words represent. So what does that mean? It means that since the beginning of time, God has anointed his son Jesus, to be the anointed king of the universe. He is our matchless king. And so maybe, uh, you know, uh, this was helpful. Maybe this cleared something up for you. Maybe you already knew all of this. Maybe you've got other questions now in light of what we're talking about here. But here's the important thing that I wanna just, I want us to understand today. Uh, every year we get to Christmas and there's all kinds of, like, people will try to stir up questions about whether or not we should celebrate the way we are, and how do you say it, and what do you do? And all of those kinds of things. The the truth is, when it comes to celebrating this, this, this anointed king Jesus, this is nothing new. Jesus can be kind of puzzling at times, and people have wrestled with this through the centuries. But the part of the reason for this is because when we say that Jesus is king, and then we look at what kind of king he is, it, it's just, it's, it's kind of, it's different. So this is what we're gonna look at today, and I think it's gonna be really, honestly, for me, it continues to be surprising. So let's pray. Father, as we come to you now, uh, I wanna acknowledge that you are with us even in this moment. God, you are the king of the universe, and yet you are with us in this conversation guiding us, helping us figure all of this out. Your Holy Spirit is speaking to us as we open up your word together. And so, father, I'm praying that, um, honestly, I'm praying that you would shock some of us out of our senses here, that we would be drawn into this Jesus who is different than anybody may have expected. He, he's, he's, you're upside down sometimes. So help us understand this. We pray in the strong, the mighty name of Jesus, our king. Amen. Okay, so, um, in order to get where we're going today, we gotta go back and do some review. In fact, a couple of months ago, we were in the middle of our Lord's Prayer series, where we spent eight weeks going through line by line, uh, the words of the Lord's Prayer. And on the weekend where we did Thy Kingdom come, I got a chance to talk you through some things. And I wanna go back to something that we said that weekend. It'd be good to just remind us of some of this stuff, um, because, uh, it's just, it's just, it's helpful. So most of the Jewish people living in the first century ad and a lot of the non-Jewish people in those days as well, they all knew what it meant when they said they were waiting for Messiah to come. Uh, they knew that, that if somebody came along and claimed to be Messiah, they had expectations of what that was supposed to look like. In fact, it happened. If you go look at history, there were, there were a few guys that rose up and said, I think it's me. I'm the anointed one. And then things would happen. And, and then it turned out to not pan out that way. But when Jesus comes along and people start saying, could he be the Messiah? Everybody already had written the story of what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to kick Rome out. It's go time. The King of Israel's. Here, grab your swords. Grab your S spears, grab your weapons. Let's go and let's get Rome outta here. That was the plan, because they were looking at their current moment in history, and this is what they thought Messiah was supposed to do. See, hundreds of years before 5 86 bc if you wanna be specific, the people who were living in Israel, uh, in, in the, in this region that, that in the first century, they called Judea, were kicked out of their homeland by the Babylonians. Now, over the course of hundreds of years, some of those people were allowed to return home and reestablish their homeland, uh, in Judea. But the whole time, they were never in power. They just got kicked around from one bully empire to another. So first the Babylonians, and then the Persians, and then the Greeks, and now it's Rome. And these people are sick and tired of these empires pushing them around. And so their thought was, when Messiah comes, well, we know exactly what he's supposed to do. The good news, the gospel of this Messiah is that he will rise up Marshall in Army to claim the throne of David and kick Rome out and reestablish the nation of Israel and will be God's chosen people. This is kind of what they're all expecting. So if you read the, the Christmas story, like in the gospel of Matthew, you'll see, uh, this character, king Herod. And this is why he's really disturbed in this story, because Herod, he wasn't the rightful heir to David's throne. He was like a, he was a puppet king that Rome had set up. And they were like, look, you can go ahead and be in charge as long as you keep the peace. As long as there's no Jewish uprisings, you get to keep being king. So the last thing Herod wanted was for the rightful king, the Messiah, to come along. And so this thought, this idea of what Messiah was supposed to be was so pervasive. It was so strong that even after Jesus comes, and even after Jesus acts totally different than they expected, he would, they still thought this might be the plan. In fact, even after, uh, he is rejected by the Jewish leaders, he sensed to death on a cross, he dies. He's resurrected from the dead. Even after all of that, his disciples still thought this might be the plan. I love this verse in Acts chapter one. If you go and look, this is after the resurrection. This is after Jesus has risen from the dead. He's taught them all these things. He's performed all these miracles. Now he's risen from the dead and the disciples look at him in Acts chapter one and say, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? Jesus, all that resurrection stuff, that was amazing. Now we go to war. Is it, is it time? Is this when we're supposed to do it? See, they just couldn't get this idea out of their heads. And, and at this point, you may have some questions. Some of you're like thinking, Tim, you are getting way ahead of the Christmas story. Like you're in Easter Pentecost kind of stuff. You're absolutely right. I just think it's so interesting that the whole time Jesus's story in scripture is taking place. Um, people just had this upside down idea of what kind of king Jesus was supposed to be. And so it's easy for us in retrospect, looking back at these people to sort of feel a certain superiority to them and go, how could they miss it? I mean, Jesus was standing right in front of him. He'd done all these miraculous things. How did they miss it? How is it that they couldn't get their heads around this idea that this Messiah was different than what they expected him to be? And it's really easy for us to think those things. But here's why I think this is so important. 'cause I think sometimes we miss it too. In fact, I think wherever you're coming from today, we're coming from a bunch of different places and we have different ideas about who Jesus is or who he's supposed to be, and could be connected to something that you were taught growing up about Christianity or about Jesus. Maybe it's the way you've heard other Christians talk or seen things that they've done. And so you've written a story of who you think Jesus is. I wanna ask all of us today to just take one hard deep look at Jesus and let's, let's see if we don't learn something new about him. Okay? So in order for us to do that, I want us to, uh, to for starters to just talk about, um, I want to talk about the nativity scene. The nativity scene that we have in our homes. You guys know what I'm talking about? Many of you do, some of you don't. And that's okay in just a minute. You can ask the people around you, I'm sure somebody around you can explain what the nativity scene is. But this is a, like a, a, a thing that, that that depicts the birth of Jesus. And we, we have it. A lot of us have it in our homes. Sometimes we display it on our front lawns, right? Here's what I want you to do. I want you to turn to the people around you and just come up with as many details as you can in that nativity scene. What's there? Okay? We're not going for historical accuracy here. Just have fun with it. What are all the different things? Go ahead. All right, how'd you do? How'd you do? You think you got 'em all? Let's just do this together. Can we, everybody, wherever you are, just kind of shout out answers at the screen. We'll start in the center and work our way out. What's at the center of the tivity scene? Baby Jesus. Baby Jesus, right in the little, in the little manger, and there's the straw in the golden fleece diapers. Jesus is right there in the center, right? And then just outside of Jesus, on either side, we have Mary's in Mary and Joseph, and Mary's in the white and blue robe because she only has one outfit. And then over on top, uh, uh, of the is what's, what's on top A star or maybe angels. Yeah, which are usually blonde haired. I don't know why, but that's just the way it is. And then, and then there's some other characters. There's some animals around, right? What else? The wise men, the three kings, which we probably should come back to those, but, um, uh, anybody have the little drummer boy in your nativity scene? Get him out of there. He is not in the scriptures at all. That's made up just all right. He's not supposed to be there. And then, and then the last of all, you guys have already said it. Who else is in the scene? The shepherds. What's the deal with the shepherds? Why are they in our nativity scenes? I mean, who are they when you read the story, you think, are these guys even important? Well, here's what's interesting, uh, in the, like, they're not that important to the people of that time. In fact, these guys would've been like on the bottom of the social strata, nobody would've thought much of these shepherds. And yet there they are in our nativity scenes. If you grew up in church, somebody in your church wrapped you in a bed sheet and put a dish towel on your head and said, you're a shepherd. Now go be in the show, right? Why? Well, because these shepherds, they are in the story. If you go to Luke chapter two, verse eight, it says, there were shepherds living in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. So it's nighttime, which means these are the shepherds that have the night shift, which makes them even less important because sheep are not nocturnal. So just think about that for a second. These shepherds were out in this little tiny one stop side town, just on the back end of town in the hills. Doing what? Watching the sheep sleep. That was their job making. Make sure they didn't like wander off a cliff or get eaten or stolen or something like that. Didn't happen very often. This was an easy job. In fact, the truth is, if you like had sheep in your family, this was the job you would usually give to the youngest kid in the house. Now, how many of you are the youngest in the house like me? Yeah. Do you remember some of the crazy jobs your parents gave you when you were little and you couldn't do anything else? I do. I had two jobs that we kept coming back to. One, if my dad was in the workshop or the, or the garage and he was building something or repairing something or something like that, my job was to stand there, to stand there until he like needed a tool. And then he'd tell me which tool he needed, and I would go get it and bring it back to him, and it'd be the wrong tool and he'd have to go get it himself. That was my job. And then my other job was holding the flashlight. How many of you got to hold the flashlight for dad? Remember that? Yeah. And when you're little, like, it's easy to get distracted and so, so son, hold it up. I can't see what I'm doing. Sorry, dad. Okay. That was the job. Now, it's not my dad's fault. When you're a little guy, there's only so much you can do. But you want, you want your kids to feel like they're contributing to things. And so in the first century, you, like, there was a lot of jobs to do, there was a lot of work to be done. You had the crops to manage, you had a plow to work, or who knows what, but you'd have clothes to make and food to prepare, and maybe certain things going on in the community. And if you had sheep, somebody had to watch 'em, so you'd just let the youngest go do it. Now, this is actually, it plays out in the, in the, in the biblical story. Anybody remember in First Samuel chapter 16 when the prophet Samuel goes to a little tiny town and anoints David, uh, king over all of Israel? Let's go back to that story real quick. Samuel goes into this town, he finds a guy named Jesse. He says, Jesse, bring out your boys, because I'm gonna anoint one of them to be the king over Israel. And so Jesse goes and lines his sons up from the oldest to the youngest, and one by one Samuel goes, no, no, no, no. Gets to the very end. There's no one left. And Samuel goes, Jesse, you don't have any other kids. And Jesse says, well, well, there's the youngest. Well, where is he? He's watching the sheep. That's how that works. Well go get him. And so he brings him. And this is David. Now, uh, a side note, this is the moment where, where, where Samuel anoints David in the presence of his family and everyone in the community, it says, this young man is going to be the king of Israel. If you fast forward to the first century when people are awaiting the Messiah, this is the picture they have in their heads. They're thinking the Messiah's gonna be like another David, another anointed one who will be king over Israel. And the fact that this story with Samuel and David takes place in a little town called Bethlehem, all of these details start crashing together, and you start to see that God's up to something. And we don't even have time to go into all of the, the, the dots we could connect. But for now, I wanna go back to my main point, which is shepherds shepherds. This is not a hard job. This is not an important bunch of people, and yet it is these guys that God chooses to announce the good news that will cause great joy for all of the people. It's these shepherds that God sends a choir of angels, and the heavens open up and they declare glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace on whom his favorite rests. They're announcing this to an audience of sleepy ragamuffin. Nobody's on the back end of a tiny one stop sign town. Why is that? It just doesn't even make sense when you look at that detail. Uh, John Calvin writes about this and says, though, God had at his command many honorable and distinguished witnesses, he passed by them and chose shepherds persons of humble rank and of no account among men. In other words, God could have announced this to heads of state, to kings, to rulers, uh, even to religious leaders and theologians. But he didn't. He announced it to shepherds. And at first glance, that makes no sense. But if you start to really dig into the Christmas story, what you start to see is there's all kinds of details like this that don't make sense. You've got the angels announcing it to a bunch of shepherds. You've got, uh, uh, you've got Jesus who is the rightful heir to David's throne, but he's not being raised in the royal nursery. He's in a feeding trough for animals. And then there's this little town, Bethlehem, where this story takes place. You start to add it all up. And what you start to see is that there's a theme that starts to emerge. All of these little things are pointing to something. And as you look at that story and you begin to zoom out, and you look at the rest of Jesus's life, that you see that that theme is still there. In fact, it runs through the whole Bible. So what I wanna do now is zoom in to another story in Jesus' life that I think brings this theme into sharp focus. Like it's like this, this, this is a way where you see this theme presented in the most amazing, shocking way. And in order to get there, I want to ask, I wanna go back to this idea of the household chores, okay? I mean, I wanna go back to, to these things that you, you would have to do. And, and so when it comes to these household chores, uh, helping around the house, what's your least favorite? Do you have one? I know someone in my house who hates to cook. I know someone in my house who hates cleaning the bathrooms. Uh, what, what, what is it for you? For me, growing up, it was raking leaves. I hated that job. So what, what's your least favorite household chore? Turn to somebody around you and just tell 'em real quick, what is it? And we'll keep going. All right. That's it. Is a quick one. Did you get it? Is it emptying the dishwasher? Is it, uh, no cleaning the house vacuuming? Who knows what it could be? Alright, so, uh, so I wanna look now at a, at a another story about a household chore. And, um, this is, uh, this is in the gospel of John. We're gonna be in chapter 13. Now. Let me just set the scene. This is a famous scene. It's the Last supper. This is such an important moment where Jesus is sharing one last meal with his disciples before he's getting ready to be arrested. And, and, and, and he's headed towards the cross. And so he knows this is like the last opportunity to celebrate with his friends. And in this dinner that they shared together, he introduces to them this idea of communion, that the church has been practicing now for 2000 years. So it's a really important moment in scripture. But John's version of this in John 13 is totally different than the other gospels. And what I mean is different is it's, he covers different details. And so I want us to take you there now and we're gonna start in verse two. John writes, the evening meal was in progress. And the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon, a acat to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God. So he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples feet, drawing them with the towel that was wrapped around him. So let's just talk about this foot washing here for a second. This was an essential household chore In the first century. If somebody was coming over for a meal, you washed their feet and there's a really good, actually two really good reasons for this. Can I give 'em to you? Reason number one, their feet were super gross. I, I'm telling you, it's like they smelled so, okay. Uh, anybody here have someone who really likes their Birkenstocks? You know somebody who likes the Burkes? Yeah. Okay. I mean, they're comfortable, right? But watch out for those guys 'cause it can get gross. Alright? So now just imagine taking those sandals back to the first century. Now people are walking around 'cause it's the main mode of transportation on unpaved, dirty streets, sharing those streets with donkeys, camels, dogs, you get the picture. Not to mention that in those days, if your toilet got full, typically you would just dump that into the gutter that was on the side of these unpaid streets. At times. This was to sky sting. So that's the first reason that you washed people's feet. Here's the second one. When you would have dinner together, you didn't sit at an upright table with chairs in this culture, people would recline at a table that was lower to the ground. They still do this today. In some cultures, this is how you eat, which means that your stanky feet are right behind the guy sitting next to you. Thank you very much. This is why whenever you got together to share a meal with some people, somebody had to wash everyone's feet. But this was such a, uh, a hated household chore. It was so low that most people believed it was beneath them. Get this, if you were in a Jewish household in those days and you had Jewish servants, you wouldn't allow the Jewish servants to wash everybody's feet 'cause it was beneath them. You'd find a gentile servant or a kid and let them take care of this. So keep that in mind. When you look at this story, you go back and you see that in verse two, the meal was being served. They were already having dinner. It's not until verse four that Jesus gets up and washes everyone's feet. Well, why is that? 'cause no one was about to lower themselves to doing that disgusting job. This gets even more, uh, uh, uh, uh, um, um, obvious. When you look at Luke's account of this meal and you find out that part of the dinner conversation was these disciples arguing with each other over who was the greatest. And so now the greatest among them gets up, wraps a towel around his waist and does what no one else in the room was willing to do. Now, there's so many things that we could unpack about this story and, and I just want us to go back to it now and look at what Jesus says. He puts on his robe after he's done washing their feet. He sits down and he says this, you call me teacher and Lord, and rightly so for that is what I am. But now that I, your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, so you should wash one another's feet. And then he says this, I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master. And there we have it. There's the theme. What is it? The kingdom of God is upside down because the king of the universe is a humble servant. That's who Jesus is. Paul states this in eloquent beauty in Philippians chapter two, when he says Jesus, even though he was in the very nature, God didn't use his status as God to his own advantage, but instead made himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant. Now, that word servant in Philippians two in the original Greek, it's the word dolos. It's the same word for slave. There's no difference in the Greek. That's who Jesus is. That's exactly what Paul is saying here. This is Jesus revealing to the world who God is. I love ff Bruce's quote about this. He says, the form of God was not exchanged for the form of a servant. It was revealed in the form of a servant. It's upside down. The people were wanting a king who would come and, and, and rebel in violence, who would rise up in great power and dominate and subdue their enemies. And instead, what they got was Jesus, the humble king, the one who washes his disciples feet. There's never a point in Jesus's story if you read it, where some great prophet comes from out of town and has everybody gathered together, and he anoints Jesus's head with oil and says, here is your king. It doesn't happen. The only time that you see Jesus being anointed with oil is when a grateful woman comes in and pours expensive perfume on him as an act of gratitude. And when that happens, the people in the, in the, in the in the house that where it happens are outraged. And he looks at all of them and he says, no, no, no, she's preparing me. She's anointing me for my burial. Do you see how this is a theme that runs throughout the entire story? So this is the humility of the incarnation. That word incarnation is just a, it's a, it's a big word that really just means God moving into flesh. Jesus became flesh. He became humans so that we could know. And this is a humbling thing for God to do. It's the upside downness of Christ. Christmas changes everything. So the question that is, how do we respond to that? Well, for the rest of our time, I just wanna give you a few ways that I think that we can respond and then we'll be done. The first one is this, as followers of Jesus, I think we ought to pay really close attention to what Jesus just said to his disciples in John 13, no servant is greater than his master. Do you know what that means for us? If you follow Jesus, we are called to a life of service. We're called to serve. Now, I don't know that there has ever been a a, a preacher who said better words about this idea than Dr. King. And so I wanna read to you, uh, a a an excerpt of a sermon of his from, um, it's called the Drum major instinct. He says, and so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you wanna be important, wonderful. If you wanna be great, recognized, wonderful, if you wanna be great, wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you must be your servant. That's your new definition of greatness. And this morning he says, the thing that I like about it is that by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject in your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of special relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics and physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love, and you can be that servant. What Dr. King is telling us is that when you allow Jesus the servant king to move into your heart and transform you by his grace, regenerate you, give you new life by his love, then you will be drawn to serve as he serves and you can become more like him. Now, serving is hard. It's costly, but at the same time, if we really pay attention to, to what happens when we move into acts of service in Jesus' name, what you will find is the surprising thing is that Jesus is always there serving you in the middle of it because that's who he is. It's what he's always done. It's so easy for us to lose track of the fact that in our daily lives, God is with us, living with us, serving us even as we go through all of this. And so, uh, uh, I I I told this story, uh, several months ago. Many of you know that here at our church, um, one of our pastors, one of our founding pastors, Russ Kirkland passed away earlier this year. And when he died, we, a whole bunch of us were just telling each other stories and laughing and remembering things he'd done and things. He'd said, well, this is my Russ story. So we were hanging out with some friends and we were sitting outside one evening and, and Russ and I were having a conversation, and I don't know how we got into it, but we started to talk about how Jesus seems to never ask us to do anything unless it's hard, right? Deny self love, the unlovable say yes to really big heart assignments and big visions. Even this idea of allowing Jesus to transform us from the inside so we can become more like him. All of this is so hard. And I was just saying to Russ, Russ, it just seems that sometimes these things seem so hard, so scary, even that you don't wanna say yes. And yet, every time I say yes to Jesus, I always find that it wasn't as hard as I feared it would be. And Russ looked at me and smirked because Russ had a smirk. And he said, Tim, that's because Jesus did it for you. So one of the ways that I think we can respond to this, this surprising idea of who Jesus is, is this, we simply receive, it's so important to receive what Jesus has done for us. If you go back to that story where he's washing the disciple's feet, there's this moment where he gets around to Peter, I think it's in verse six, and Peter looks at Jesus and goes, oh, really? You think you're gonna wash you? Jesus, you are gonna wash my feet. It's not happening. The truth is that that receiving in this way can be humbling. It can be difficult, it can be awkward, but this is who Jesus is and this is what he wants us to do. Peter had no idea that what Jesus was doing in that moment was just a foreshadowing. It was something Jesus was about to do something far more humiliating on Peter's behalf when he would ultimately be stripped, naked, beaten within an inch of his life and nailed to a criminal's cross for all the world to see why, so that Peter might have life so that all of us might enter into this life with Jesus. Some of you, you still have questions about Jesus, you're still looking into all of these things and I would challenge you to keep asking questions, keep exploring, keep imagining what it would be like to receive this kind of a gift. Maybe you heard something new today that that surprised you about who Jesus is, but I'm telling you that that Christmas might be the perfect time for you to come before Jesus and say, I'm choosing to receive this gift of grace that you have offered me on the cross. I accept your love. And now Jesus, will you begin to transform me from the inside out because this is who Jesus is and this is what he does. And he will answer that prayer. When you look back through the pages of scripture, what you begin to see is that cover to cover. This is who God is. He's a servant. That might be hard to reconcile in your minds with what you read in the Old Testament, but if you go back to the very beginning, like Genesis chapter three, when the first man and the first woman choose to disobey God and openly rebel against his plan for their lives, as soon as they have done that, God is now going to have to banish them from the garden. Everything is about to fall apart. But before that happens, one of the first thing, God, the first things that God does is he puts together garments of clothing for them so that they can clothe themselves. He's a servant. Fast forward to the end of the story. You get to Revelation chapter five, and the apostle John is given this vision of the throne room of heaven. And he says, I looked and I saw, and Jesus is on the throne. But when you see how John describes Jesus on the throne, it's, it's so shocking that honestly it's part of what we're gonna talk about next week. You gotta come back and hear more about this vision that that John sees in that moment. But if you keep reading, you get to Revelation 21. This is where John has the vision of the new heavens and the new earth coming together and the people of God coming down like a bride dressed beautifully for her husband. And in that moment, John says he heard a loud voice from the throne saying, look, God's dwelling places now among the people and he will dwell with them. He will be, they will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away. Now I gotta tell you, if you will just allow me to be a little bit kind of vulnerable here at the end of our time together because um, I'm on my own here. I gotta tell you what I think I see in this story and I just need you to know, I just need your grace 'cause I'm out on a creaking limb. Okay? But here's what I see. How is it that he's gonna wipe the tears from our eyes if there's no more crying? How does that work? Here's what I think it is. When we talk about the second advent of Jesus, when he returns in all his glory, I think we, we only have what scripture tells us. And yes, there's gonna be trumpets sounding and angel choirs will be singing and it will be huge and magnificent and beautiful. You'll have all of the pageantry that you would expect when a triumphal victorious king returns to his people. I think all of that's gonna happen, but I think there are gonna be details that are gonna surprise us because this is the humble king Jesus we're talking about. So I wonder if the tears that he's wiping from our eyes aren't tears that we cry when he comes to us face to face and says, child, I want to show you now through the moments of your life where you felt Mel alone, here's what I was doing for you. Here's how I was serving you. Here's how I was loving you. Do you see how the details of this story made you who you are and prepared you for this moment? And then Jesus will put his hand on our face and begin to wipe the tears from our eyes. Have you ever had anybody do that for you? No wonder the angels declared glory to God and the highest. What is our response to that kind of humble service? Adoration come. Oh, cut your worthy to receive all glory and honor and praise. May you be crowned with many crowns for you are good. You are the anointed matchless king of the universe.