In Order to Be Like God

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, chapter 2, verses 22 through 40.

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When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought Jesus up to Jerusalem to present

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Him to the Lord. As it is written in the law of the Lord, every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the

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Lord, and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.

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Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the

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Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the

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Lord's Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child

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Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took Jesus up in his arms and blessed

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God and said, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word.

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For my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the

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Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel. And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him, and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,

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Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and the rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed, and a sword will pierce through your own soul also, so that the thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.

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And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years, having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin, and then as a widow until she was 84.

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She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day. And coming up at that very hour, she began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.

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And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to their own town, to Nazareth.

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And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.

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This is the gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, O Christ. In the name of Jesus.

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Amen. All right, we have to go back to Genesis for a minute, pick up a little bit of information from there, and then move forward a little bit in our story to kind of figure out what's going on in our gospel text.

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There's so much going on, it's almost impossible to plumb all of what's going on in there.

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Back in Genesis 3, when our first parents, Adam and Eve, the two human beings that God had made originally for our race, they were tempted by the devil to disobey the commandment of God.

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The commandment of God was that you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was in the midst of the

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Garden of Eden. This was the covenant God had cut with Adam and Eve, and they broke this covenant.

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But listen to the attack of the devil first. Here's what it says. The serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field than the

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Lord God had made. So he said to the woman, Did God really say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

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And the woman said to the serpent, Well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that's in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

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Now here comes the most important part. The serpent, and this is the devil acting within the serpent, said to the woman,

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You will not surely die. A little bit of a note here is that he is attacking

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God himself, basically claiming that God is a liar. And the narrative gets a little bit worse.

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For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil.

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So Satan, oftentimes in church history, is described as an apostate angel, and Satan himself is a slanderer.

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That's kind of the gist of what his vocation is all about. He begins by slandering

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God, basically saying, God lied to you. You're not going to die. God is holding out because he knows that you're going to be like him if you eat of that tree.

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So I'm telling you the truth. You can trust me. An apostate, slandering angel, slandering the very character of God, and then saying when you eat of that fruit, you will be like God.

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However, we know how the story goes. Rather than being like God, we became children of hell.

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We were enslaved under the tyranny of the diabolical despot known as the devil.

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And rather than be filled with the love, the peace, the mercy, the grace of God, we were instead filled with a whole different set of traits that is nothing like God.

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Anger, wrath, malice, slander, suspicions, scheming, discord, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.

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Paul, in one of his epistles, warns us, as I warned you before that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

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These are the marks of those enslaved under the grimy grip of the apostate angel called

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Satan. These are his fruits. So did Adam and Eve become like God?

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Not even close. They became like the devil. And one of the major themes, then, of Scripture is the theme of slavery and redemption.

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Now, Jews have an interesting way of looking at the Exodus, and they're actually right in how they view the

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Exodus. The Exodus is not some story about a bunch of people long ago that they're disconnected from. Over and again, each year during the

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Pesach, during the Seder liturgy, the people who are presently living are considered to be participating in the

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Exodus themselves, time and space somehow collapsing in upon itself. And their story is not their story.

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It becomes our story. And this is good theology, by the way, because this is exactly what

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Exodus teaches us. And we have to understand this cross -reference that we read in our Old Testament text from Exodus 13 to get what's going on in our

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Gospel text. Because it's really all about slavery and redemption.

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It's about, really, what it takes to be like God and what Jesus was up to and already busy doing even as a newborn infant.

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And so in our Old Testament text we read, the Lord said to Moses, consecrate to Me all who are the firstborn, whoever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast.

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They are Mine. And so you're going to note something. This is in the context of God about ready to unleash

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His tenth and final plague in Egypt, the one that will ultimately lead to Israel being set free from slavery to the evil

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God -King known as Pharaoh, that false God -King who is in type and shadow representative of the devil himself.

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And you'll note that the tenth and final plague applied to everyone, Egyptian and Israeli alike.

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And the only way you could survive the tenth plague, whether you were

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Gentile or Jew, was to have the blood of a lamb on the lintels of your doorpost so that as the destroyer was passing through, then

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He would see the blood and pass over. In other words, God was going to take the lives of all the firstborn unless the firstborn had a substitute.

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And that substitute had to be a lamb. That's the point.

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And so now, moving forward, God is telling Israel, oh, don't think for a second that just because I'm going to take you out of slavery in Egypt and then put you in the

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Promised Land that somehow the future generations are exempt from this.

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Instead, what God is saying, each and every subsequent generation, the firstborn males, just like the firstborn males who were living in Egypt in slavery at that time, they must be redeemed.

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Period. And so redemption, remember, is the price that is paid not to purchase a slave.

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Redemption is the price that is paid to purchase a slave and then free that slave.

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And that's the themes here. So God then instructs Moses, say to the people, remember this day in which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery?

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For by a strong hand, Yahweh brought you out from this place. No leavened bread shall be eaten during this time.

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When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, that as He swore to you, as your fathers, and He shall give it to you, you shall set apart to the

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Lord all the first opens of the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the

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Lord's. Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb. If you will not redeem it, you shall break its neck.

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Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem. And when in time to come, your sons ask, what does this mean?

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Which is the catechism question, is it not? Basistas. You shall say to Him by a strong hand,

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Yahweh brought us out of Egypt from the house of slavery. For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the

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Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both of the firstborn of man and of the firstborn of animals.

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Therefore, I sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first opened the womb but all the firstborn of my sons

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I redeem. Now, a little bit of a note. Paul in Philippians 2 reminds us that we are to have the mind of Christ.

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If you want to be like Christ, this is your mindset. So, here's what it is. Although he was by nature

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God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. Instead, he emptied himself taking on the form of a slave.

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So, there's little newborn Jesus. He's going to be presented in the temple.

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Why? He needs to be redeemed. Why? Because he was born a slave.

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In other words, have you considered this fact that Jesus is our redeemed

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Redeemer. And this is kind of an interesting aspect of God's law.

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There are certain commandments that you must actively obey in order to keep it. And there are certain commandments it is impossible for you to actively obey.

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You must passively obey them. They must be done for you. This is one of those types of commandments.

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So, Mary and Joseph and their newborn baby go to the temple to obey

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God's law for Jesus. He must obey these commandments.

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If he does not keep them, then he cannot be our Savior and our Messiah. And so, our

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Redeemer, the one who will set us free from slavery, himself had to be redeemed. And that's what's going on in our

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Gospel text. And so, the Gospel text then says, When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the

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Lord. As it is written in the law of the Lord, every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the

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Lord and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord.

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And here's the interesting part, a pair of turtle doves. In the case of Mary and Joseph, they were so dirt poor, they couldn't even afford a lamb for the sacrifice.

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So, they had to default to the sacrifice that was for only the poorest of the poor.

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Not only was Jesus born a slave, servant, became obedient, obedient to the point of death on a cross.

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He was born to dirt poor parents. King of kings, Lord of lords, not in a palace.

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King of kings, Lord of lords, laid in a manger in an animal trough. Born to parents from a backwoods town called

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Nazareth. Too poor to even afford a lamb for his redemption. And in some ways, it's kind of appropriate that a lamb was not offered for Christ's redemption because he is the lamb.

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Now the text says, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. And here's the interesting part.

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We all know, because we've been to church more than one time or two times. We've been to church many times.

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We all know the exploits of Christ. What Christ has done, how he conquered mightily, how he drove out demons, how he raised the dead, gave sight to the blind, even conquered death in the grave itself.

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But keep in mind, Jesus is a week old at this point, a week.

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The only thing he's successfully done is fill diapers up to this point. These are his exploits and needed to be burped and things like this.

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And so that makes it even more profound because nobody there was aware of what the

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Messiah was about to do. And so here Simeon under the Holy Spirit is going to declare who

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Jesus is and give us some sense of the exploits that he's going to accomplish. But look at the package.

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The package says none of that. This was revealed to him from God Himself. So there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was

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Simeon. This man was righteous, devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him.

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It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ.

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And he came in the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for Him, for Him passively, according to the custom of the law,

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Jesus is obeying the law passively. He, Simeon, took Jesus up in his arms and he blessed

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God and said in these famous words, Lord, now You are led to Your servant to part in peace according to Your Word.

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For my own eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared in the presence of all peoples.

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A light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of Your people Israel. And if you know the

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Noctimitis, you are at this point ready to sing Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the

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Holy Spirit because that's the right way of ending these words because this has become a liturgical song sung for millennia.

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Lord, You are letting Your servant depart in, and here's the word, peace. And that's what's missing in our world, is it not?

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Within our own lives. Within our own families. Within our own country.

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Do I need to tell you what's going on in our country? The politics is toxic. Even within our own church, there's a lack of peace.

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Why? Because we, all too often, default back to being like the devil and being his children and being like him rather than being like God.

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But Jesus has come to bring us salvation and to bring us true peace. To rescue us from the dominion of darkness and slavery to the devil.

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And so His Father and His Mother, they marveled at what was said about Him. Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother,

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Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and the rising of many people in Israel and a sign that is going to be opposed and ominous words at this point and a sword will pierce through your own soul also.

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Clearly foreshadowing the agony that Mary must have gone through at the foot of the cross watching her firstborn son being crucified and even bleeding and dying for her own sins.

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A sword will pierce through her own soul as well indeed so that the thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.

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And if that wasn't enough, there happened to be a prophetess in town as well. We're going to get everybody here who's hearing from God now proclaiming

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Christ because after all, the spirit of prophecy is the proclamation of Jesus.

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So the prophetess Anna, she was a daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, 84 years old.

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She's an octogenarian and she did not depart from the temple worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.

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Coming up at that very hour, she began to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for and here's the word again, the redemption of Israel.

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Strange talk indeed. Israel wasn't technically in slavery. Maybe they were under the boot of the

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Roman Empire, but the redemption of Jerusalem, the redemption of Israel is not referring to being freed from being a slave state to Rome.

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Instead, it is about the redemption that comes from being set free from slavery, the devil himself.

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So when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord for Jesus who is very busy passively obeying

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God's law for us, they returned into Galilee to their own town of Nazareth and the child grew, became strong, filled with wisdom and the favor of God was upon him.

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So the devil said, you will be like God and nothing like God are we at all.

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As one theologian of the 20th century put it, God became a child so that we could finally become children of God again.

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You see, remember, we were originally created in the image of God and that image has been broken and marred by our own sin and our rebellion.

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This theologian continues, the birthday of Christ then inaugurates our divine birth, being born of God.

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And see, with Christ, we were born as God's children. And see, all of this is possible because God became man.

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This truth is utterly incomprehensible to our puny human minds, that the eternal

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God, whom heaven and earth cannot contain, who bears the world in his hand like a nutshell, like a peanut, before whom a thousand years are as one day, that this eternal, omnipotent

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God should become man. Whew! Consider the magnitude of what's going on here.

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Would it not have proved his mercy and love had he appeared for a mere moment in the splendor of His majesty amid thunder and lightning as at once on Mount Sinai?

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And he writes, no, absolutely not. Such would have shown us far too little of God's love and His kindness.

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You see, he wanted to be like us, to become a child of man, a poor child of the poorest people.

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He wished to be born in a cave, in a strange land, in hostile surroundings.

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Cold wind, hard straw, dumb animals. These were there to greet him.

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So the scene then fills with amazement. And what can we do other than fall down in silence and adore him?

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God put on the beggar's garb, became a tiny crying baby in order to offer humanity the divine image back so that we can once again be like God.

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In paradise, the fallen angel, the slanderer, promised he did the fruit and you'll be like God. Man ate and became the prisoners of hell.

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But on Christmas night, another angel, the church now, stands before the world and offers him an interesting food.

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A food and says, take and eat of this and you will be like God. Is that not what happens

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Sunday after Sunday? When we have the Lord's Supper. Take, eat. This is the true body of Christ given unto death for your sins.

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Take, drink. This is the true blood of Christ shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.

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Eat this and you will again, finally, be like God.

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Romans puts it this way in chapter 6. You see, if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, and we have in our baptisms, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.

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We know that our old self, our old self like the devil, prisoner and slave of sin and Satan, that our old self was crucified with Christ in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

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For one who has died has been set free from sin. This is why

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Paul writes in Galatians, you were called to freedom, brothers, so don't use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.

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Instead, through love, serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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But if you bite and devour one another, oh, watch out, that you are not consumed by one another.

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He continues, so put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, put on compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another.

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And you'll note then this list from Colossians in our epistle text. This is what it's like to be like God.

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The God who reveals Himself to be slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and pardoning iniquity, who demonstrates

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His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for our sins, who promises that anyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

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This God who abundantly forgives our trespasses now calls us to a change, a change that's even greater than the change of Ebenezer Scrooge.

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We're all familiar with the story. Ebenezer Scrooge, that miserly, greedy, old, horrible bat, right?

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And you feel sorry for him when he's in the midst of his most satanic self.

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Oh, but God is merciful on him and sends him three ghosts of Christmas to reveal to him the ugly truth about himself.

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And what does it lead to? Repentance. It leads to a new Scrooge, a man who is not greedy, but is, well, generous.

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A man who is not mean, instead is loving and kind. A man who is not looking out for himself, but instead consumed with helping others.

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And see, that's the Christmas miracle that should be wrought in all of us. This is why then

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Paul writes, put on then as God's chosen one, holy and beloved, because you are holy and beloved because of Christ.

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So put on compassionate hearts. Kindness. Humility.

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Meekness. Patience. Bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, that happens.

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Forgiving each other. Not holding a grudge. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive.

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In fact, Christ himself says in the Sermon on the Mount, if you're offering your gift at the altar, there remember that your brother has something against you.

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Leave your gift there before the altar and go first be reconciled to your brother.

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Then come and offer your gift. Be reconciled to each other because you are reconciled to God.

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This is what it's like to be like God. And above all things, Paul writes, put on love.

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Love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And then let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body.

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Be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom.

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Singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the

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Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through him. So on the one hand, we listen to the slander of the devil and rather than become like God, we became children of hell.

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But God himself having mercy on us becomes a man. Born of the Virgin Mary, a tiny little baby who is actively and passively obeying

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God's law for us so that we can be forgiven and redeemed. But more than that, so that we can finally again be like God.

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To be like God is to be loving, kind, merciful, forgiving. To be like the devil is to hold a grudge, to refuse to be reconciled, to be angry and slanderous and murderous.

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Which will you be? In the name of Jesus. Amen. We thank you for your support.

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