TLP 219: Prepare the Way for Jesus in Your Home This Christmas, Part 1

Parents, where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, AM Brewster.

The Christmas Message and the Three Annunciations of Christ

This two-part episode is going to be very different from our previous format. Recently, I had the opportunity to preach at Faith Baptist Church in Pembine, Wisconsin. The message was called, The Believer's Response to the Three Annunciations of Christ.

I believe the topic of that message has significant impact on how our families should respond to the baby in the manger. Last time, we talked about Christmas traditions and we discussed how we shouldn't allow certain unimportant habits to overshadow the significant traditions.

We also talked about how, if we're not careful, we can allow the glorious truth of the Incarnation to overshadow the greater glory of the death and resurrection of Christ. So the topic of this two-part series is, how can you prepare the way for Jesus in your home this Christmas?

And this message teaches us how to present the full story of Christmas in a way that benefits not only our homes, but our churches and communities as well. The message will be highly edited for time, fluency, and just to remove elements that are not directly relevant to you and your family.

But there's one other reason I'm formatting the episode the way I am. I could have taken the same notes from the message and reworked them for our purposes here, but I've made a definitive choice to rest the week these episodes were to air.

I had been just falling behind on the production side of the podcast. No doubt some of you may have noticed from the way that the shows are being posted quite a bit later than usual. And after doing that episode on burnout, you know, I just decided it would be valuable for me to simplify my schedule, streamline the production, and afford myself and my family a little extra time to rest.

But despite all of that, I believe this content will be just as applicable and beneficial to you as it was the original congregation who heard it. You'll also have the opportunity to get to know me a little bit better.

I tend to be quite a bit more passionate and animated when I'm behind the pulpit in a room full of people than I am behind a mic. In fact, just a full disclosure here, I may or may not have stood upon a chair or two during the sermon.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy that as well. And without any further ado, you can prepare the way for Christ this Christmas by responding correctly to his three annunciations. Today though, I have a very high churchy, highfalutin title to the message.

The Believer's Response to the Three Annunciations of Christ. However, highfalutin as it may sound, it's actually extremely practical and it's going to hit us where we are today. Every person in this room has responsibilities based off of the scriptures that we're going to see today.

Let's start with the basic definition of annunciation. Annunciation is an older term for an announcement. We could say the three announcements of Christ and it would say the exact same thing. However, in churchy language, annunciation is normally the word that they go with.

So we're going to look at the three annunciations and we're going to look at our response to those annunciations. Because if it doesn't require us to do anything, then what's the point of announcing it?

God, the Prophets, the Angels, and the People Announce Christ's First Coming

So the very first annunciation, we're going to look at what the annunciation was, who was involved in announcing. And in each of these annunciations, we're going to find that God played a part. We're going to see that the prophets played a part.

We're going to see that angels played a part, and we're going to see that mankind played a part in each of these. For the first annunciation, we see God playing a part. In Genesis 3 .15, we read the very first clear, concise giving of the gospel.

Adam and Eve had just sinned and they were receiving the consequences of their sin. And one of the things that God himself said, God the Father said to Adam and Eve, I will put enmity between you and the woman, talking actually to the serpent at this time, and between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

A picture of the triumph that Christ was going to have on the cross of Calvary. Of course, that's not the last time that the gospel is shared in the Old Testament, specifically just a couple chapters later in Genesis 5 .1 -32, we see one of the very first genealogies in the scriptures, and it goes from Adam all the way down to Noah.

What's interesting is that as you study out, and you have to kind of do a deep study. I'll tell you right now, your general concordance and your general Bible dictionary is not going to give you the right, the best understanding of these names.

But as you go through the genealogy, you see 10 men's names listed there. And if you look at what their names mean, it is astounding. And it should just slap you with awe at the awesomeness of our God.

I'm just going to go through them quickly because this is not the main point of the message, but I want to share it with you this way. So we have Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah.

Very familiar names. Here's what their names mean. I'm just going to read the meanings of their names without saying their names. Starting with Adam, man, ending with Noah, whose name means rest. Man appointed mortal sorrow.

The blessed God shall come down, teaching his death shall bring the despairing rest. Worked into the very fiber of the first genealogy in Scripture, God set forth his glorious gospel. That started with the coming of Christ into this world during the time that we celebrate during Christmas.

Man appointed mortal sorrow. The blessed God shall come down, teaching his death shall bring the despairing rest. And then obviously we have more. God himself in Genesis 12 verse 3 saying to Abraham, in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Then the Lord obviously reestablishes this gospel promise with Isaac and Jacob, multiple times talking about his covenant. So God was involved in the first enunciation of Christ, but also the prophets were.

And of course, God was involved through the prophets, inspiring them as they wrote the.

Scriptures.

But we have very famous passages like we looked at even last week. In Isaiah 7, 14, therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, written by the prophet Isaiah many, many years before the coming of Christ.

In Micah 5, 2, talking about O Bethlehem, you are too little to be among the clans of Judah, but you shall come forth for me. One who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from old, from ancient days.

And even Jesus himself tells us that the Old Testament was a compendium of information concerning him. In Luke 24 verses 25 through 27, Jesus points to the Old Testament to show how it spoke of his coming.

He said, Oh, foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? Jesus is saying you should have known that from the Old Testament.

And then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he being Jesus, interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. So God has filled the Old Testament with prophecies so that no one should have been able to miss the fact that the Messiah was coming.

Of course, we know he also used angels. He sent an angel to Mary, one of the only two named angels, other than I should say Lucifer I guess, only three named angels. One of them went to Mary, one of them went to Joseph, one of them met with the shepherds, and then a whole host of them sang and praised the Lord on the night of his birth.

So God himself spoke of this first coming. He used the prophets to continue that, he used the angels to announce it, but he also used the followers. After witnessing what the angels said, the shepherds then went and did something about.

It.

They told people, they marveled, they wondered, they went about praising the Lord for what they had seen. The Magi, a group of Gentiles who, it's beyond us in a way to even understand how they knew what they knew about the coming Christ, found their way here, told Herod about it, told other people about it.

We see Zechariah who was told by an angel that he would see before he died the Messiah himself telling people. Now what was interesting is that a part of his promise was that he was going to be mute, unable to speak, and some of the very first words out of his mouth when he finally regained his ability to speak was proclaiming that the Messiah had come.

God spoke it, he used the angels, he used the prophets, and he used his people. And so what should be the response? For the people who hear this annunciation, what should be our response to all this? Well, we need to respond to it.

If we don't respond to it, there's a problem. One of the first responses we see is that of awe.

Awe.

In Luke 2, 17 through 18, we read, And when they saw it, this is the shepherds, right? They made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child, and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.

This word speaks of awe, like, wow, this is amazing. The sacrificial coming of the incarnate King should amaze us to no end. I think sometimes, though, it's easy to get bored with it. Can we be honest?

Year after year after year celebrating Christmas, it comes sometimes passe. We need to be in awe of this, and if we're not, we need to look to ourselves to see why are we not amazed by this most, I can't think of another word other than amazing thing that God has done for us.

But there's a second response that we should have to this first annunciation, and that's joy. You can have a dreadful awe. You can have an awe where you look at the power of something and it scares you, but there also should be joy.

Luke 2 .20, and the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told to them. This awe should produce in us a supernatural joy that we should be the recipients of such mercy and grace.

But then we also see that the third response should in itself be annunciation. As we hear the announcement, we should then turn and want to share that announcement, and we see that all of these people did that.

Each group, each individual was so moved with awe and joy that they could not help but share what they had experienced. What person who witnessed the angelic choir or saw the direct fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures could keep that to themselves?

Now here, we're after the fact. Are we responding to that first annunciation as the way that we should? Does this news of the coming of Christ and the incarnate King, the Christmas story, does this bring us, work in us the awe and the joy and drive us to want to announce that to others?

It should. Number two, let's consider the second annunciation of Christ and the responses we should have. Now, some people are a little iffy on this. You know, we know of the first coming of Christ and we know of the second coming of Christ that will come, right?

And sometimes in our minds we think of the first and second annunciations going with those two, but the second annunciation actually happens before the second coming. It's the third annunciation that announces the second coming, right?

So let's get our numbers straight here. The second annunciation was at a slightly different time. Yes, the Messiah came, God was with us, and yet He had not started His official ministry. And when the time of His ministry was coming, there was another announcement.

Christ's Baptism and Ministry as the Second Annunciation

All four Gospels reveal that when Jesus was baptized, and this is normally considered the start of His earthly ministry, that the heavens opened and the Father audibly proclaimed to everyone standing there, this is My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.

God Himself announced the beginning of the ministry of His Son. Now, as far as we know, God did not directly reveal the nature of Christ's work to anyone beyond the inspiration of the prophets, okay? Yes, He directly revealed it to them so they could record it for us, but He did not specifically speak to anyone in regard to what Christ's ministry on this earth was going to look like.

Obviously, the prophets were used in this process. The Old Testament is chock full of annunciations concerning the ministry of Jesus in this world. One of the more famous ones that we like to focus on during Easter is in Isaiah 53.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And as one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised and we esteemed Him not. Surely, He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but He was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray, and we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him, that's referring to Jesus, the iniquity of us all.

It's a wonderful passage showing that God was telling us, He was announcing what Jesus came here to do. Now, the angels played a part in this, but a slightly different part. The angels, He did not use them in a unique way to announce the beginning of Christ's ministry per se, but they did announce its fulfillment, which is very cool.

In Luke 24, 1 -7, after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we read,. So, the angels did play a part in announcing the glorious thing that had occurred that wonderful Sunday morning. And of course, just like the first annunciation, God wanted to use His followers to also spread this news of what was about to happen.

Now, who's the one person who should stick out in your mind as being the guy that God used to announce the coming of Christ's ministry? Yeah, John the Baptist, very good, yep, John the Baptist. Actually, I want to read later what John the Baptist did, what he said.

I want to actually go through, he's talked about in all four Gospels. You know, sometimes we don't really know a lot about John, and yet all four Gospel writers spend a lot of time talking about him, and I want us to see what he said.

So, we're going to look at what is said about him from all four Gospels. We're going to come back to that later. For now, let's just establish the fact that God used John to help announce His ministry, but we also know that God used the disciples to do the same.

And in the same way that we're going to do with John, we're going to come back, and we're going to look at what the disciples were told to say about Christ's ministry a little bit later. Moving on then, let's talk about our response to the second annunciation.

We see a few more responses than we saw with the first one. With the first one, the fact that God had come to live with us, that's joy, that's awe, and yes, we should go tell people. But the actual ministry of Christ, what He did on this earth, His purpose in coming to live, to die, and to raise again, produces a slightly different set of responses in us.

First of all, we see the necessity for honesty. This verse, among many others, shows us the true, real, genuine state of all of us who are born into this world. We are sinners. Romans 3, 23,. We've missed it, and we're never going to be able to reach up to it.

We need to be honest with ourselves. It's a beautiful thing, the child in the manger, but we need to go a step further and realize the implications of what it means. This honesty, though, should produce in us grief.

Matthew 5, 4,. In James 4, 9, we read,. Why would this be a response to the work that Christ did on the cross? Because we need to see the fact that we desperately needed that work. That work wasn't just for somebody else, that work was for us, and the reason He had to come and die for us is the fact that we are sinners, separated from God, and that should break us.

I mean, think about this. Think about a husband and wife, or a boyfriend and girlfriend. One of them cheats on the other. They come back and they admit to the first, I did wrong, I cheated on you, whatever.

Is the admittal of the sin good enough? No, you would argue that they don't truly understand what they did. They don't truly understand the depths of what they did. It's not until they come and they show that they are broken that they realize the significance.

I have cheated against you. I have hurt you and our relationship. I have, and that is going to produce a genuine grief, and that's what Christ is saying here. We need to not just realize that we're poor in spirit.

That needs to grieve us. We need to mourn over that fact, because that will lead us to the third thing, which is humility. We should have a humble response to this information. Matthew 5, 5, James 4, 7 through 8, in verse 10 says, I've lived in many big cities.

I lived in Detroit. I lived in Chicago. And, you know, lots of people who have absolutely no problem asking you for money. Now, most people in this room would have a very uncomfortable time going to anybody else and asking them for money.

But yet these people easily ask strangers for money all the time. Why is that? Because they know they have nothing. They know they need something, and that strips them of all pride. And they have no problem whatsoever saying, hey, can I get five bucks?

See, the person who realizes that I am spiritually nothing, I have sinned against God. The person who is grieved by that fact, realizing that there's nothing they can do about it, has no problem humbly going to God and saying, I need you.

It is the prideful, arrogant person who says, no, I'm fine. I don't need to ask for help. Our responses should be honesty, grief, humility, which should all then lead to repentance. The fourth response, Matthew 5, 6,.

They've turned from their sinful ways. They've repented. The word means to turn from something to something else. James 4, 8,. There is a step that must be taken. We can't say, God, save me from my sin so that I can go back to my sin.

Like a dog returning to the food it just threw up on the ground and eating it again. No, we should desire to repent, to turn from our sin, to deny ourselves and follow after Christ. Which is faith of the fifth response to the second enunciation.

The previous responses of this honesty and this grief and this repentance is in itself faith. It's a product of faith. Hebrews 11, 1 tells us that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

We say, God, I believe you. I believe that I have sinned. I believe you are who you say you are. I believe I need to do what I need to do. Romans 10, 9 through 13 says,. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

For the scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame. For there's no distinction between Jew and Greek. For the same Lord is Lord over all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him.

For everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved. And that should produce in us the sixth response to the second enunciation, worship. This faith will not only enable us to accept the free gift of salvation, but will continue to work itself out in our reasonable act of worship.

Romans 12, 1. Living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. And then we see that the rest of the Beatitudes in Matthew chapter 5 are a picture of this worship. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Blessed are those who are merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers. Those who are persecuted for righteousness sake and those who rejoice when they are persecuted. This is that worship. This is that daily saying, God, I'm going to live for you.

And then obviously the seventh response we should have to this second enunciation is we should want to share it with others as well. We too should be announcing what's been going on in our lives. Everyone who honestly experienced true grief over their sin and humility by faithfully repenting and living a worshipful life, gladly shares it with others.

This life-changing work that's been done in them. How could they have done anything differently? We would argue that if somebody experienced something like that and didn't tell people about it, that perhaps maybe they didn't experience it in the first place.

What Packers fan, if the Packers were to miraculously win the Super Bowl, what Packers fan wouldn't talk about it and wouldn't then rub it in the face of all the Vikings and Bears fans? I mean, you know, and just to be really mean to the Lions fans.

Now, I just say that because I have no allegiance whatsoever to football. I happen to live in Wisconsin, so whatever. But my point is you see the fact that if you truly love something, you truly believe something, you're going to talk about it.

So we need to be prepared to speak this truth. There's seven responses so far. We have, well, we said enunciation twice. So we have nine responses so far just to these first two enunciations. The problem is, though, we're not done.

The gospel isn't done yet. And there's a very important third enunciation. Those two past tense enunciations of Christ, when we put them together, we see two glorious thirds of the gospel. There's still a third enunciation.

It's a coming enunciation. And it's the enunciation in which God calls us here to participate. Because really, we can announce what happened in the past for sure. But there's actually an enunciation that is still coming to which we have been called to participate.

And I fear that far too often we, well, oftentimes we shy away from our job to announce the past enunciations. And even if we do those, because it's always easier to talk about the baby in the manger for sure.

But even if we bring ourselves during Easter to talk about the second enunciation, it's still super, super, super hard to talk about the third. Thank you for joining us today. The foundation we've laid will help you and your family truly appreciate the richness of Christmas.

But the responses our families are to have to Christ's third enunciation should revolutionize the holiday for us. So to that end, I'll see you next time.

Truth. Love. Parents. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent. Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.