The hope of the world and the promise of God

Pastor James Avery

Today, it isn’t hard to become jaded. It isn’t hard to look around and see a world full of hurt and brokenness. On the world scene there are wars, famine, fighting, injustice, and greed. On a more local level there is still hurt, homelessness, brokenness, addictions, slander, greed ... and the list goes on. We are hurting people - broken and in need of a Saviour. Long ago, the prophet Isaiah saw a time when God would send a Messiah to set His people free. Isaiah writes, “The Lord Himself will give you a sign: The Virgin will be with child and will give birth to a Son, and will call Him Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14) That name means ‘God with us’. The virgin birth is the way that God saved His people. Centuries after Isaiah wrote that prophecy, the hope of the world is realized through the means of a young girl and her betrothed husband. We read about it in the Gospel of St. Luke. The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a little out-of-the-way village in the Galilee district. Gabriel was sent to speak a simple message to a simple peasant girl. Her name was Mary. She was a teenage girl, whose future had already been planned for her by her family and the family of a man named Joseph, a carpenter by trade. But God had different plans for Mary and Joseph - plans through which He would bring peace on earth, joy and salvation to all mankind. God would use the virgin Mary to be the mother of the Messiah, and together Mary and Joseph would care for the infant Messiah. God chose simple, ordinary people - not kings or nobility - to raise the Messiah. God chose Mary to have His only begotten Son. God’s promise was spoken to Mary through the angel Gabriel: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus.” It is here in this birth that we find the hope of the world and the promise of God coming together. In the humblest of circumstances, the Saviour comes to deliver the world and to make true the promise of God - the promise of eternal salvation. Humble circumstances - this place is certainly humble. Dirty, smelly, it is certainly no place for a woman to be delivering any child, let alone the Son of God. However, angels rejoice and surround this humble manger. The three regal guests make their way to present impressive gifts to the newborn King. But the rest of the crowd is quite common. There are shepherds who are still dusty from tending their flocks in the surrounding fields, and look, the woman who runs the inn - she is hardly a pious woman. Stone cutters, weavers, fishermen, farmers - even you and I - look in awe at the sight of the One who holds all the mysteries of the universe in the form of an infant - lying in His mothers arms. Those tiny hands and feet are the same ones that will be pierced as He gives His life in order to save His people - you, I and all others - from our sins. Now is the time of year that marks the birth of our Saviour. When we strip away all of the lights, the trees, the presents, and the consumerism from this sacred time, we find at the heart of Jesus in the heart of Christmas. Without Christ, there is no Christmas, and there is no hope. In Christmas, we see the Saviour of the world coming to us in human flesh to deliver us from our hopelessness, brokenness and pain.