The Perfect Timing of God

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Take out your Bibles and let's open together to the book of Galatians and open them to chapter 4.
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So happy to be able to worship together on Christmas morning.
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I will say this though, we know it's Christmas in Florida because I see people fanning themselves and I promise I did turn the AC on, but it's funny to know that it's late December and it's very warm outside.
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But we're going to be in Galatians chapter 4 looking at verses 4 and 5 as the primary texts for our sermon, Worship Through Preaching, this morning.
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It says in Galatians chapter 4 verse 4, But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
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Father in heaven, I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for the opportunity to preach on this important day.
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I thank You that so many people have gathered together today to hear Your Word proclaimed and to celebrate the Christ of Christmas.
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I pray Lord that as we celebrate today, that our hearts would turn to You and focus on what it means when the Word says, In the fullness of time You sent forth Your Son.
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May we be grasped by the weightiness of that truth.
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May we be challenged by the depth of it.
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May we be shaken to the core regarding how powerful this truth is.
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And Lord God, by Your mercy, may we be drawn to repentance.
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Lord, for the believer, that we might draw closer to You.
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Weed those things from our lives that are not pleasing to You.
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And Lord, for those who are among us who have not come to Christ, and accompany this large Lord, we know that there are those who have not yet bowed the knee to Christ.
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And I pray this morning, Lord, that my words would be to them both a challenge and that it would be winsome.
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That they would hear the Word of Christ saying, Come, all who are weary and heavy laden, come and I will give thee rest.
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Lord, may it be that we hear that Word this morning and that we would come.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.
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You may be seated.
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I want to begin this morning with a question, not necessarily one that will require you answering from the congregation, but one that often comes up this time of year, especially when you're dealing with people who are skeptical of the Christian religion, maybe people who have tried to find holes in the armor, as it were, of the truth, and people who maybe have tried to attack what we believe as Christians.
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And the question that comes up, and you'll be surprised, maybe if you've never investigated this, you'll be surprised how often this question does come up, Was Jesus born on December 25th? That question, as I said, is a big question for some people, especially those who would consider themselves skeptics.
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Some say that this date cannot be correct because the shepherds who were in the field by night watching their sheep would not have been out at night during this time of year.
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But the reality is that that's not actually the case.
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There are times during even this time of year when shepherds could be out in the field.
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There are sheep that are used for sacrifices all throughout the year in different times, and there are times when shepherds could be out.
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So to use that as an absolute negation of the December date is overreaching.
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It's someone trying to, I think, just make a point that is not necessarily one that is necessary.
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Last week, if you remember, we had a guest speaker here from Christian Witness to Israel, and he made a little, not really an argument, but he made a point that he thought it might have been September because that is the Feast of Tabernacles, and Jesus came and tabernacled among us, and that was an argument I hadn't quite heard before.
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So there's another point.
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Somebody says, well, maybe it was in September.
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There are some who say that December was chosen because of its correspondence to Saturnalia, which is a pagan festival and an attempt to Christianize pagan practices.
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And I must say there is no doubt that there are certain traditions of the holiday season that have their roots in pagan religious ceremonies.
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So it wouldn't be a stretch to say that there are links there.
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But I do find it interesting, though, that if you go back and you read the earliest Christian writers, going back to the second century writers to Hippolytus and others like that, you find that the date of December 25th actually goes back to those early writers.
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It isn't something that necessarily evolved over the centuries or over the millennia, but it was something that they believed.
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In fact, the Western and Eastern Church divided over only a few weeks.
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The Western Church said it was December 25th.
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The Eastern Church said it was January 6th.
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It's only a few weeks.
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And so really the difference between the major groups of thought in the ancient world was only days, not months or half of a year.
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And just in case you may have heard, and I know that some of you have because you have Facebook too, you have probably heard someone say that December 25th was chosen because this was the birthday of Horus, the ancient Egyptian pagan god.
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That's not true.
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They'll say, oh, the only reason you celebrate on December 25th is because that's Horus' birthday.
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No, it wasn't.
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That's based on the work of a debunked Egyptologist from the early 1900s who just got it wrong.
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There is no ancient writing to say that there was a false god who was born on December 25th and Christians stole that date.
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It's what the Greeks call hui or baloney.
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That's the famous Greek word baloney.
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So it's not true.
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The reality is the date on the calendar is inconsequential when compared to what the date represents.
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On December 25th, we're not celebrating the day of the 25th of December.
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We are celebrating the person with whom it is associated, Jesus Christ.
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And whether or not he was actually born on this day, this is the day that even the world associates with his birthday.
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Even the secularists will say, well, what's December 25th? It's Christmas.
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Well, what is that? It's the birthday of Jesus Christ.
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So whether he was born on December 25th, January 6th, sometime in spring, or even as my brother last week contended for, September, his birth today, whether it was on any of those days, is the reason why we celebrate on this day.
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But that is not to say that the date had no importance at all.
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The Bible says a lot about the importance of time.
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In fact, it references a lot the fact that God never makes a mistake with time.
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That he's always on time, and what he does in time is always correct.
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And that he actually predestines time and things.
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In fact, it's said that the cross, if you look up Acts 4, Paul, or rather Peter, is talking about the events of the cross.
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And he says these things that happened, happened because God had predestined them to occur.
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The cross, and Pontius Pilate, and the Jews rising up against Christ.
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This was God's hand.
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That he had determined that this would happen.
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That God is on time and perfect in time.
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And so it's not that time is not important.
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But what is important is what God did in that time.
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And what God did in that time is something that we need to understand.
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And it's one of those big 50 cent words, and sometimes people get put off by those words.
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But it's something called the incarnation.
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The incarnation.
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God became man.
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The way that the word of God says in John 1, the word, and remember it says in John 1, the word was God.
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This is Jesus.
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The word, what? Became flesh.
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The word became flesh.
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And when we get to Galatians 4, where we are this morning, Paul points out the significance of the time of this particular event.
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And I want to call your attention there, and I'm just going to go through the text, and I'm going to give an exposition of the text as we go.
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In fact, what I'd like to do, because what is the key, and I want to see if anybody remembers, what's the key to proper interpretation? Context.
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There's three things, context, context, and context.
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Context is the key to proper interpretation.
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So if we read just verses 4 and 5, it might be easy to get lost in what he's saying.
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So I want to go back up to verse 1, and I'll read down to verse 7, so at least we see in the context what it is he's saying.
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Verse 1 says this, I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything.
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But he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father.
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In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.
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But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
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And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.
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So you are no longer a slave, but a son.
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And if a son, then an heir through God.
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You see, the context of this particular passage is the Apostle Paul trying to help us to understand the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.
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Under the Old Covenant, there was a structure of law whereby men were bound until the coming of Christ.
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You remember that law.
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It bound their eating.
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It bound their clothing.
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It bound even their hairstyles.
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It bound so much of their life.
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And there was so much in their life that was bound under that law.
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But when the fullness of time had come, that slavery was released.
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And the way that the Apostle Paul describes it, he says, you think about a child.
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A child in the house is no different than a slave.
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A child in the house has to obey the rules.
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If he doesn't obey the rules, he gets spanked.
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And if he doesn't do what he's supposed to do, he gets punished.
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I mean, a child in the house doesn't have the authority of the parents.
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In fact, in your house, your child has the same authority as the parents.
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You need to repent.
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That's not the way it's supposed to be.
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The child is supposed to be under the authority of the parents.
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And we see an example of rebellion right here with my child.
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Because they constantly rebel against that.
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But we understand that that's the way that the household is supposed to work.
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That the child is under an authority until he becomes an adult.
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And at that point, the Apostle Paul says he actually becomes a son.
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Because up until then, he was like a slave.
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Up until then, he was under the law and the rule of the home.
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But when the father put that ring on his finger, when that father gave him that authority and called him a man, now he's not in that same position as a slave.
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Now he's free and he's an adult.
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He still has responsibilities.
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Isn't it so he can be a fool? I mean, we remember the prodigal son who was the fool.
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It's not as if he can go and be a fool, but he does now have an authority that he didn't have before.
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He now has a position that he didn't have before.
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He now has a place in the home that's new and different.
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And Paul said that's what it was like with the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.
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There was this binding.
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There was this slavery.
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There was this law.
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And then, in the fullness of time, God sent His Son for the purpose of what? That that binding would be released and we would experience adoption.
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You know, in the Old Testament, when you read through the Old Covenant, you don't see the people of Israel referring to God as Father in the familial sense.
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You see them referring to God in the creative sense.
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God is the Father of creation.
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He created.
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But when Jesus came, He uses the word Father in a different way.
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He says, when you pray, say, Our Father, who art in heaven.
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And call Him Abba.
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Abba, the term for Dad, Daddy.
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Not just Father who created me, but Dad who loves me.
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There's a new relationship there.
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And so that's the context of this passage.
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Paul's talking about the relationship of the believer which has come into its adulthood or its fullness in the Gospel.
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And so he says in v.
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4, when the fullness of time had come...
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That word fullness means completeness.
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It means totality.
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In fact, if you remember Colossians 3 v.
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9, the Bible says, in Him, that is Christ, the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily.
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Remember that passage? It says the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Christ.
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That's the same word.
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The fullness, the totality of God was in Christ.
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And the fullness of time was when Christ came.
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What does that mean? Well, the word time here, we probably are familiar with the English for this, but the Greek is chronos, and we think about the word chronology.
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Chronos, it means time as it ticks by.
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Time as it goes by.
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It's time like as on a clock or on a calendar.
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Time as it goes by.
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There was a special moment in time that God had set from the beginning.
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God had predetermined before the worlds were made that there was going to come a time when He was going to send His Son.
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I've heard people say this.
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I've heard false teachers, and I will call them false teachers, have said that the work of Jesus, God allowed because He failed with Israel.
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People say God allowed Jesus to come because He tried with Israel and failed.
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Let me tell you something.
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Jesus was not a plan B.
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Jesus wasn't a trap door exit just in case my first plan didn't work out.
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That's bad theology, and that's a bad view of God.
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The work of Christ was planned from the beginning.
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The Scripture calls Him the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
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In the mind of God, the cross was fixed in time and perfect.
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Some people focus on the benefits of when Christ came, and they think that's what Paul is talking about here when he says the fullness of time because there is a lot of benefit to when Christ came.
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If you look at history, you know there was only about a 200 year period where it makes sense for Christ to come.
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It was during what was called the Pax Romana.
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The Pax Romana was because of the Roman Empire having brought relative peace in the known world at the time.
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It meant open highways and open roads, and it meant a unified language, that language that Alexander had force-fed to the whole known world was called Koine, which means common to everyone.
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It was the Greek language.
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So there was a unified language, there was a unified government that opened up roads and byways and highways that the gospel could go down.
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And it was the only time in history that crucifixion was normal and part of the Roman execution style.
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And that was what had been prophesied about Jesus, that He would have His hands and feet now, that He would be hung on a tree.
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So this is a particular time in history.
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This is the fullness of time.
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This is that special moment.
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And it was a special moment for the Jews.
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They had recently, within the few hundred years before, they had come out of the bondage of the Babylonians.
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They had been set free by Cyrus.
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And now they were expecting their Messiah.
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Not the one they got, but they were expecting a Messiah.
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There was so much that was happening.
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This is a pregnant time in history.
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Something's about to go.
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And it did.
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It was the fullness of time.
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This was when the prophecies would be fulfilled.
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This is when Jesus would come.
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God sent forth His Son.
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Now, we could meditate on that phrase all day.
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We could just stop and say, in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son.
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Just stop and pray, because that's enough.
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Because really, by itself, it is.
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Think about that phrase.
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Justin Martyr, who lived between 100 and 165, Justin Martyr said this.
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He said, The Father of the universe has a Son, who being the Logos and first begotten is also God.
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But just think about that phrase.
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The Father of the universe has a Son, and He Himself is also God.
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We've heard this so much that it loses its sting.
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I mean, how many of us have heard John 3.16 to the point that we can recite it in our sleep? But think about what it says.
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In this way, God loved the world, that He sent His Son.
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God gave His Son.
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And the next little phrase, Born of woman.
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Now, given time, we could break this down a lot further, go back to Genesis 3, and talk about the seed of the woman, and go back to Abraham's covenant, and talk about the seed that He was promised, and that Christ is the fulfillment of that seed.
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But in the simplicity, I think what Paul is doing here, when he says, God sent forth His Son, born of woman.
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Do you know what I think Paul's doing there? He's making the statement about the hypostatic union.
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And again, I'm not just trying to use big words, but the hypostatic union is that union of natures in Christ, where He is 100% God and 100% man, or what he said, fully God and fully man.
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Because God sent forth His Son, but He didn't come as a phantom.
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He didn't come as a spirit.
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He didn't come as some type of being that was simply immaterial.
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He came through a womb.
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He came born of woman.
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And so we see God's Son, the divine, born of a woman, the human, indivisibly united in the person of Jesus Christ.
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A perfect divine nature.
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A perfect human nature in one perfect man.
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And then he says He's born under the law.
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What does that mean? The phrase hupah there, the term under, in this context means under obligation.
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Jesus Christ came into the world under obligation to the law.
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Do you know why? Because He was a man.
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He willingly submitted Himself to that because He wrote the law.
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He is the law.
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He is the standard.
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But He submitted Himself to the law.
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Why? So that He could fulfill the law, demonstrating His perfect righteousness.
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He came under obligation to the law and never broke it.
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Had He broken the law, He would have deserved the cross Himself.
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If Christ would have ever broken the law, that cross would have been His.
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But because He never broke the law, that cross was ours.
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Because He never broke the law, He was able to be that sin-bearing sacrifice.
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And that's why the next phrase says, To redeem those who are under the law.
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You see, when the word under comes up, that's for us too.
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We're under obligation to the law too.
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But guess what? We're also under the curse.
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We're under obligation to the law, but because we've broken the law, we're under the curse of the law.
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Christ is not under the curse of the law.
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Christ is under obligation.
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He fulfills it.
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We're under obligation.
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We don't fulfill it.
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Thus, we're under its judgment.
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We're under the punishment of the law.
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So Christ redeems.
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And that phrase comes from the root of Agora, which was the place where the marketplace was done.
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And people would go in and they would purchase out of the marketplace.
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And sometimes slaves would be available in the marketplace and people would redeem the slaves and set them free.
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And that's the redemption that's spoken of here.
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You who were a slave to sin, you who were sold under sin, you who were dead in trespasses and sin, Christ paid the debt you owed.
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He bore the sin you sinned.
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And in Him, you receive redemption and you receive the ability to call God your Father.
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There is a myth that is very prominent in this world, especially with the rise of not secularism, but universalism.
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The world isn't as secular as you think.
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I've done well over 100 funerals in the last 10 years and I've never met a person yet who didn't believe that their loved one was in heaven because that's the normal thing to believe.
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I know when I preach at a service and I know the person knew Christ, that's a comfort, right? But there are also those times when I speak to families I've never met, they have no desire for Christ, but little grandma, she's in heaven because everybody goes to heaven.
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Why do we believe that? Because we believe in what's called the universal fatherhood of God and that is not true.
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The universal fatherhood of God is a lie because John 1.1 tells us this, He came unto His own and His own received Him not, but to many as received Him, and to them He gave the right to become the sons of God.
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You are not born a son of God.
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You're born a son of perdition.
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You are born again into the household of God.
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Beloved, if you've been born again, if your loved ones who have gone on before you have been born again, you know they are with God and you know you're going to be with God because you have been adopted as His child.
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You are His.
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And that is an unbreakable bond.
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That salvation will never be revoked.
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All the Father gives me will come to me, Jesus said, and He also said, and the one who comes to me, I will in no wise cast out.
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This is the promise we have.
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This is the promise of the blessing that we have.
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We are God's children by the work of Christ.
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In the light of the manger looms the shadow of the cross.
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The babe who came in Bethlehem would later die on Calvary's tree.
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He did this so that we who believe on Him could receive the adoption into God's family, paying the penalty of the law we had broken and He Himself never breaking it not once.
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There are many special times in history, but none so special as the fullness of time when God's Son broke into humanity, wrapped Himself in flesh, and came to save His people.
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For the believer, the only time which might compare to that time is that time in our lives when Christ entered our heart.
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He removed our dead heart and gave us a living one which beats for Him.
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In fact, every believer can say this, and I wrote this last night as I was thinking about what I wanted to say today, and I thought about this.
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If you think about the fact in the fullness of time God sent forth His Son, born under the law, that He might redeem us who are under the law and give us the adoption of sons.
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If you think about the time you were saved, if you're a believer, you can say this.
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You can say in a special time in my life God sent forth His Spirit.
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He caused me to be born again so that though the law condemned me, I could experience what it means to be called God's Son.
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That's the way we personalize this passage because 2,000 years ago, God did a miracle, and whenever you got saved, He did another miracle.
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He took out your heart of stone.
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He gave you a heart of flesh.
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My only question to you is can you say that today? Do you know that you have been adopted into God's family? And if not, I pray that the Lord would be so gracious to make Himself known to you.
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Open your heart that you might respond to Him and know that you can call Him Abba, Father.
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Let us pray.
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Father in Heaven, I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for the truth.
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I thank You for keeping me on task this morning to preach Your Word, and I pray that I have been faithful to it, and if I have erred, I pray that You would wipe those thoughts and those words from the minds of Your people.
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I pray, Lord, today I pray that You would open the hearts of everyone in this room and for the believers that You would draw them closer to You.
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And Lord, if there are those here who do not know Christ, that they would understand that 2,000 years ago You sent forth Your Son to do a miracle and You have the capacity to do a miracle in their heart today, Lord.
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And we pray that You would.
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We pray that You would open that heart and that You would give them the ability to believe in You, that they might trust in You and faithfully serve You.
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We thank You and we praise You for all that You have done and all that You're going to do in Jesus' name, Amen.