The First Sunday After Christmas - Gal. iv

From the start, it was proclaimed that this child born to Mary was on a definite mission. The angels tell the shepherds that He that was born was a Saviour, and by an angel Joseph was told to name the child Jesus, for He was come to save His people from their sins. Thus it was that his cousin, John the Baptist, was sent to the Jews to call them to repentance. One cannot very well be saved from their sins if they are not willing to give them up! If the child’s mission was to be fulfilled, the people would have to repent.

Why Was He Born?

We are very strange people. We hate our sins, which cause us to mess up our lives, yet we also love them; we don’t want to give these things up that keeping ruining us. We are in a desperate condition of self-destruction. We need someone to save us. We need someone to come into our lives and change us from within, that we will hate our sins and be glad to be rid of them.

Thankfully, this is part of what Jesus does for us. To save us from our sins, He gives us a new heart, freely, by His grace. It is this newness in our lives that baptism is all about. We who were dead in trespasses and sins are now raised from the death of sin to live a new life in God’s Son. The Holy Spirit spiritually unites us to God’s Son and His life is now ours, forever. What a wonderful gift from God! What a wonderful Saviour was born to us. And because He fulfilled His mission, Peter was able to proclaim on Pentecost: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost”; new life from heaven for those who will receive the Son.

Our Adoption

God, being so infinite in the abundance of His love and grace and mercy toward us miserable sinners, gives us this new life with a new privilege. He makes us His children. He gives us the life of His Son and He also gives us the title of sons, co-inheritors with His Son, of all the wonders of His glory forever. St. Paul tells us of this wonderful privilege in Galatians iv, our Epistle reading for this day. Paul says, “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (iv.4,5). This too was part of the mission. Jesus came, not only to be our Saviour, but to be the One through Whom we might be adopted into the family of God. This is part of why Jesus came.

This standing of adopted children is meant to give us great encouragement as we seek to be faithful to our Lord in the midst of a crooked and perverse world. It is always threatening, in one way or another, to publicly identify with Jesus in our community. But we must do it; if we will not confess Him before men, He will not confess us on the judgement day. It has to be done. It is an amazing honour to be able to do it. But it can be scary. So, for the strengthening of our faith, the Lord gives us to know that we are His beloved children. That means we are safe. That means we are secure. We are the beloved delight of the Almighty, all-knowing God. There is no opposition to our faith in this world that He is not able and ready to overcome for His love for us. Though the world throw us its worst, we remain the children of God and in the end all will be well with us.

Sticks and stones may break our bones,
Words may hurt our feelings,
But we can stand and stand we will,
For our Father brings us healing.

We are His children and we never lose His love and He knows how to keep our hearts and at the last raise us up to share the victory Christ has won for us. “Be not afraid,” Jesus says, “for I have overcome the world.”

Why was this child born? To save us, to secure our adoption, to overcome every obstacle in our lives to the love of God for us.

How Was He Born?

It’s also helpful to consider how He was born. Paul tells us that “God sent forth His Son.” This shows us that the child came, commissioned by the Father. He did come, of course, of His own will. But He also came in obedience to the Father. God sent Him to us. Jesus would testify of this. He said, “I came not into the world to do my own will but the will of Him that sent me.” He would speak of how he had works that were given to Him to do; responsibilities for Him to fulfill. We thus see something here of the beauty of the communion that flourishes in the Trinity, the Godhead. As the persons of that Mysterious Unity love each other, they gladly share a delight in our salvation, each in their own way. The Father comissions His Son, the Son gladly obeys the will of the Father, and the Spirit brings into our lives the benefits of the Father’s gift and the Son’s obedience that we might know the love of God, have the love of God, live in the love of God, share in the divine nature of the love of God, and live out the love of God in our own obedience and adoration of the Trinity forever. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God!

How was Jesus born? He was born as one sent by the Father. He was also born of a woman. He had to be born of a woman and not a married couple so that He could fulfill His saving mission. If He was descended from Adam like the rest of us, He would have been a sinner, too. He himself would have been under the curse and in need of a Saviour as well. But He was not. In the wisdom and by the power of God, He was born of a virgin. Thus this child was doubly unique. He was unique in that He was the incarnate Son of God; God become truly man, with a human body and a human soul. But He was also unique as a sinless man, standing as Adam stood before the Fall, without sin. Thus being truly human and without his own sin, He could do His mediating work between us and God, representing sinful humanity to God, standing in the place of sinful humanity before God, taking upon Himself the punishment of death due to us for our sins, that we might be saved from that very death.

The virgin birth, contrary to the recent comment by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is no “take it or leave it” doctrine. It is at the heart of the gospel. Without it, Jesus could not have been our Saviour. Without it, we do not understand who Jesus is. Without it, we do not understand how He has saved us. While it is possible for a person to be regenerate without understanding these things – indeed we are all saved in some degree of ignorance – nevertheless we cannot be considered Christians unless we confess this Christ, born of the virgin Mary, as the Holy Spirit teaches us to believe.

Jesus came sent by God, born of the virgin, and He came as one made under the law. What law is this? Think of it in terms of the whole system of regulation given by God to Moses, which consisted of the civil, the ceremonial, and the moral laws of Israel. In terms of the history of the Church, corporately considered, Moses, in a particular sense, kept the Church from the adoption she now enjoys. For one thing, her members being sinners, she was constantly threatened by the condemnation which the law spoke against her for her sins. Her ceremonies, though they taught her about what Jesus would do for her, kept her from the fulfillment of that work until their time of use was past. Her civil laws kept her separate from the other nations, preventing her from extending her tent across the face of the whole earth to include all the nations of the world, thus fulfilling the promise to Abraham. So it was that Jesus came, not only as a true man, but as a true Jew, faithful to Moses, indeed, in fulfillment of all that was in Moses’ law. He did this so that in His death and resurrection, He might remove forever the condemnation of the law, fulfill all the ceremonies, thus removing their usefulness, and, in that His sacrifice was not just for the Jewish nation but the whole world, He might open the door of the Church to all humanity. Thus, those who were under the law could have the law removed from over them, become the adopted sons of God, and, through them, receive into their number any one in the world who would believe in Jesus. “For”, to quote Peter at Pentecost again, “the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.” What an amazing plan for His people! What a perfect Saviour was Jesus. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

How We Know These Things Are True About the Birth

Well, we have considered why Jesus came, how Jesus came, let me end by reminding us of how we know these things are true about Jesus. St. Paul tells us that those who are the adopted sons of God have a certain experience. Verse 6: “And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” How do we know Jesus did these things? Whence comes our assurance that these things are so? Well, being people with western sentiments, it is important to recognise that there are objective matters to consider. We have reasonably reliable accounts behind all this. However - if you will remember my comments earlier about how we naturally love our sins – our hearts are so desperately deceitful that even if we had been there to see all of this with our own eyes, we would not have believed it – as was the case with many – except God had revealed these things to our hearts by His Holy Spirit. Our faith itself is a miracle. It is something born in us by God’s hand. It is a gift from God. We simply know. There is something in us that lifts our minds and hearts to heaven and instead of naturally refusing to believe, we naturally believe. We naturally know that God is our Father in heaven, for we have a new nature that answers to the presence of God in our world, and we have the Spirit of God Himself in our hearts as a witness to us. A great Someone Else affirms these things as true in our conscience with an authority that can only come from God Himself, the true Lord of the conscience.

And that witness is a witness of love; of a filial affection. It is the affectionate cry of the child to its parent; a cry that is a recognition of divine presence and love. God loves me and I love Him. This is the experience of all the adopted children of God. That is how we know the truth of Christmas. The truth is revealed to us, as it was revealed to the shepherds that night, not with so much heavenly ceremony, but with even more authority. For the revelation comes not from angels alone, but from the very Spirit of God Himself. O wonderful, friendly Witness! By this blessed Spirit, we already begin to know the joy of the family banquet that is ours when the Son of God returns. We begin to taste the love of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for us miserable creatures. And so tasting, we cannot help but confess to our city and to the world: Jesus Christ is Lord!

Amen.