As you all know, it is our custom sometime around the first of the year to give a “state of the church” message. Sometimes it relates more to the condition and challenges of the national church, and other times the emphasis is more local. This year, for reasons that should become obvious, the observations and exhortations will be more local.

We’ve looked at Joseph & Mary the embodiment of the best of Faithful Israel’s longing for God to bring salvation. We’ve looked at the Wicked Dynasty of Herod which the text of Scripture intends to be viewed as the incarnation of Man’s Satanic Rebellion. But now, we must look at the babe which was born a child, and yet a King. The Lord Jesus.

Here is your Christmas invitation. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. Christ is Lord. Give up your unbelief. Lay down your arms. A prophet does arise from Galilee.

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of the great Dragon-slayer, and in Him, the birth of a race of dragon slayers. So lift up your heads. Lift up your hearts. Christ is born. The Seed of the Woman has come. The dragon has been mortally wounded, and you have been set free. So take up your arms. Confess your sins. Forgive one another. Rejoice and sing and celebrate. This your testimony, and by this testimony you overcome the dragon.

These days leading up to Christmas should be a crescendo of celebration. It shouldn’t be a descent into a legion of carnal indulgence. Whether it be to partake to the point of drunkenness, snap with annoyed anger at your children or spouse, scroll aimlessly down the dark corridors of the Internet, or bemoan some degree of loneliness, you must not invert the celebration of Christ’s Incarnation into an indulgence of the very things which He came to deliver you from.

An essential part of the Christian confession is that Jesus of Nazareth is “fully God” and “fully man.” If you sometimes wonder why the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon are so specific and so detailed, it is because there are numerous ways to slip off the point and into heresy.One of the easier ways to do this is to imagine Jesus as having a human body, but being “God on the inside.” But no. We confess that Jesus was and is entirely human, and a good way to reinforce this in our minds is to consider what the Scriptures teach about the emotional life of Christ.

The godliness and virtue of Mary coupled with the profound significance of the task appointed to her of bearing God in the flesh in her womb, has led some to revere Mary in her own rite. But, when we look at her life, we must resist two temptations. One would be to overly reverence her (the Roman Catholic error), the other to disrespect her (the error of our irreverent age). She ought not be venerated, but rather, emulated.

During the course of Advent, we are celebrating the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. I say celebrating, not mourning. In contrast to a number of Christian traditions, we do not treat this season as a penitential season, but rather a season of anticipation and longing. We celebrate the Incarnation itself, with the deliverance it brought to us, when we come to Christmas itself. But in faith we celebrate the promise of deliverance as we prepare ourselves for the full celebration.But what is entailed in that promise? The Incarnation highlights two things that we need to have anchored firmly in our minds. First, it underscores the essential goodness of the material creation. The Word of God took on human flesh. Second, it emphasizes the depth of our sin and rebellion. This is what it took to deliver us from our unholy condition. And so the Incarnation must be seen and understood as simultaneously earthy and holy.

There is comparatively little that Scripture tells us about the man who raised our Lord Jesus as his own son. He leaves the stage almost as soon as he entered it. We have no dialogue from him. But while he is a silent character of Scripture, he still speaks volumes.

We are continuing our series in 2 Corinthians, but we are doing so mindful of this “giving season” that we are in. We are all active participants in this matter of giving and receiving, and so this is wonderful time to practice the spirit of generosity. Like other virtues, this is not something that just happens all by itself.