He Will Save His People From Their Sins

So this is a time of year when we as Christians make a point of celebrating or remembering the coming of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There are many other things that go along with this celebration. If I were to ask you, you know, what does Christmas mean? What goes on? We'd all be able to answer the question and say, well, there's family get-togethers, there's meals, you know, family meals, there's gifts given, there's decorations, there's all kinds of special... stuff that goes along with Christmastime. And it's very easy with all these other things going on to lose sight of what is paramount and why we actually celebrate Christmas. When we celebrate Christmas, what we're celebrating is not our families, it's not our children, it's not the gifts that we're able to give one another, it's not the food we're able to eat or the houses we live in or any of that. That's not the point of Christmas. That's not what it's about.

The reason that we celebrate Christmas is to remember and to proclaim Jesus' coming into this world. But as you look around at our culture and what goes on during this season, I'm sure you've noticed that things have grown away from this reality, that we're actually, this holiday is meant to celebrate Jesus' birth, his coming. Have any of you noticed how much Christmas music has, there's less and less Christmas music being played around, out and about, in public? It used to be that the day after Thanksgiving, whatever radio station, at least that I listened to, it no longer played the music they used to play. Now they play all Christmas music. They'll have the same artists. If you listen to the country station, they'll have the country artists, but they'll be playing all their Christmas albums. All the unbelieving country artists, they all had Christmas albums. Or you listen to Mariah Carey. You listen to Mariah Carey's Christmas, right? You all hear this. But we don't hear it anymore.

It's not on there. If you listen to the country radio station now, there's no Christmas music. There's nothing different at all. And if you turn on the Christian radio station, you get Bing Crosby. Our culture, we've gone away from celebrating Jesus' incarnation. We've even come to the point where saying things like Merry Christmas are offensive. A few weeks ago when David and I were meeting for our pastor's meeting, we were at a Starbucks, and the barista said, Huh? My wife used to be a barista, I know. She said Merry Christmas to me. And I thanked her and I said, thank you, it is a Merry Christmas. I'm glad you said it. And she says, well, to each their own. She just started backpedaling because I said anything that acknowledged that she said Merry Christmas because she's probably not supposed to. She's supposed to say things like season's greetings or happy holidays. Very generic, unidentifiable things. And so...

When we live in this culture, Christians, I'm not telling you anything we don't know. We as Christians, we look around and we go, something's not right. Something's out of shape here and we need to fix it. And so instead of saying Merry Christmas, we say season's greetings or we hear happy holidays, and Christians say that's not right. We shouldn't say that. So what sorts of things do we say? What is our response to it? Well, yes, we might say Merry Christmas, but if we want to argue with them, with the momentum, the inertia that... we feel in our culture, you'll see things like, we need to put Christ back in Christmas. Or you'll see, you know, Jesus is the reason for the season. You guys are familiar with these sorts of very cliche, common responses that Christians have to the trajectory of our culture. And at some level, that is an effort to regain the reason that we celebrate Christmas. But is it enough? Would you be satisfied if...

You got a Christmas card, or you had a Christmas party at work instead of a holiday party. Would you say, yeah, good, we're getting back to where we need to be? If you got cards that said Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays or Season's Greetings, would that be enough? And the answer is no, that would not be enough. That wouldn't be close to enough. It'd be a good start. It'd be a small start, but it'd be a good start. So this morning we're going to be answering the question, What does it mean to celebrate Jesus' advent? And advent means coming. What does it mean for us to celebrate his coming? For our answer, we're going to be studying the passage that was read from Matthew in the advent reading. I'm going to read it again. But we're going to focus specifically on what the angel says to Joseph when he found out that Mary was pregnant. Would you please stand for the reading of God's word? From Matthew 1, verses 18 through 23. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly. But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David. Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which translated means God with us. This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated. Now I want us to, we're going to spend the majority of our time focusing on what the angel said to Joseph, but we have to get into the context of what's going on here. So the majority of you who are adults are married. And that means that you at one point were engaged. And you were very excited during your engagement to be married. And there were things you were looking forward to once you were married. having a wife, having a husband, being able to start a family, living together, all these kinds of things that you were looking forward to, you were anticipating. You understood that God was providing something for you that he hadn't given you yet. And he was going to give it to you just this one time in your life. It was a very exciting, joyful time. And this is the situation that Mary and Joseph are in. They're betrothed. They're engaged. They're promised to one another. They intend to be married. Now, they don't live together, and they haven't consummated their marriage.

But if you listen carefully in the King James, when we read this passage earlier, it said that once he found out she was pregnant, he had in mind to divorce her. And here it says to put her away quietly. And so I want you to understand that their relationship and the commitment to one another is very high. Very high. We're not just dating and hanging out and seeing if we like each other. No, they were committed to one another. Their intention was to be married. And yet before they get married, what does Joseph find out? Well, he finds out that his betrothed is pregnant. So go back to your engagement and have that happen. And all of a sudden you can begin to understand this is not an easy circumstance, not an easy situation to live in. The woman that you love and that you're engaged to, that you intend to spend the rest of your life with, is pregnant. So Joseph considers this and intends to divorce her quietly, to put her away, to break off the engagement. Now some of you have had that happen.

Where you've been engaged and you've had engagements break off. It's very hard and it's very painful. Some others of us have watched it happen with other people. And it's not a small thing. It's not a light thing. It's very difficult. It's very sad. Especially given the circumstances under which Joseph is operating. His wife-to-be is pregnant. And we want to say, yeah, yeah, we know, but that was by the Holy Spirit and it was really a good thing and it was all of that. And I say, yeah, you realize that he found that out when the angel told him that. We can presume that Mary told him, you know, when, hey, you're pregnant. And she says, here's what happened. The angel came to me. But Joseph still intended to put her away. And so it's a very difficult time. And Joseph intends to put Mary away. And then an angel comes to him in the dream and tells Joseph and confirms that Mary has become pregnant by the Holy Spirit, that she hasn't been unfaithful to him, and that actually, instead of putting her away, he should go on and marry her.

And then the angel reveals who this child is. He says, this child is, you shall name him Jesus. He's going to be Emmanuel. He's come for what purpose? He's come to save his people from their sins. And so Joseph, being a righteous man, would have understood what was being said to him, at least in some capacity. He understood that there was a Messiah that was promised that was to come. The promise made by Isaiah that's quoted toward the end, Joseph would have known, oh, you're saying this one is him. It wouldn't have been lost on him. And so we know that Joseph didn't put Mary away, but rather took her as his wife, cared for her and for Jesus for the rest of his life.

So this is the context in which Joseph's going through. It's a pretty tumultuous course of events. You're about to get married, and you're excited, and then your fiancée is pregnant, and then an angel comes and tells you, no, she's pregnant with the Messiah. It's quite a roller coaster. But in the middle of all that, when the angel speaks to Joseph, he tells him, why this one's to come, why the Messiah is to come, why Jesus is to be born. And the purpose is very simple. It's to save his people from their sins. That's why Jesus has to come, was to save his people from their sins. So the short answer to the question I asked at the beginning, what does it mean to celebrate Jesus' advent? It means to celebrate his salvation, to celebrate his coming to earth, taking on our flesh to save us from our sins.

we need to open that up and understand what that means. What does it mean to be saved from our sins? Well, we need to start, if we're to understand what Jesus' advent was meant to accomplish, we need to begin by understanding what sin is. Because that's what we're saved from. So what is sin? Sin is breaking God's law in any way. And you can break God's law in many ways. You can break God's law by not doing what he commands you to do. And you can break God's law by doing what he forbids you to do. And in your experience and your own knowledge of your own sinfulness and the ways that you sin, how often does sin feel like the right thing to be doing? In the moment. You have a conflict that goes on inside of you that goes, I know I'm not supposed to do this. I know I'm not even supposed to want this. But I do, and I'm doing it. And we have this conflict that goes on. What are we going to do? Are we going to follow what we know we should do?

Are we going to follow what we want to do? Sin often feels right to us. It feels like it's normal. It's just what people do. How often when someone comes to us and wants to talk to us about lying or laziness, really simple, really straightforward, fairly common sins, and you get the response, but he did it, but everybody does it. Am I supposed to be the only one who's righteous? This is what Asaph was tempted to believe and what he confesses in Psalm 73. Surely I've kept my hands clean in vain. There's no pain in their death. They can do whatever they want without consequence. Everyone's doing it. And what happens when we see sin and we say, well, everyone's doing it, what we're doing is we're justifying it. We're minimizing it. We're sweeping it away. We're saying, yeah, it's not right, but...

Everyone does it, and we really can't help it anyhow. And yet every one of those things, can you imagine if you're a father or you're a business owner, anywhere where you're in charge and there's mutiny in the ranks, all the kids are crawling up the walls, in the house, in your classroom, in your workplace. Everyone's going nuts. Everyone's doing it. What does the boss do? Does he say, oh, well, since everyone's doing it, I guess it's okay. No, that's not what a boss does. That's not what a boss does. That's not what a captain of a ship would do if there was mutiny in his ranks. He'd discipline it, and he'd discipline it severely to warn everyone to stop, to not continue in their way. And so if we can understand that an earthly authority would not tolerate mob rule, everybody's sinning.

we must not use that sort of rationale to justify our own sin and say, well, yeah, I know we're not supposed to do that, but I'm in a big group of everyone who's doing it, so it's okay. Somehow I'll get lost in the shuffle. I'll get through. It's not really sin. We won't get through. We won't work that way. Not only stand before God. And so there's this really difficult thing that exists inside of us where sin feels right, and actually righteousness feels strange. If you start... going, oh, I see, just God says this. And then you just make a point, I'm going to do that. It feels really strange. And everyone looks at you funny. Really, really funny. For things like, yeah, we, so we're Christians, and no, we haven't had sex. And no, we don't live together. And yeah, we're getting married, maybe even before we finish college. Because the scripture tells us it's better to marry than to burn, and marriage is a good thing and all that. And so you say,

That's why we're getting married. Why don't you come? We're 20 or 22 or 19 or whatever. And it feels really strange. If you've had an experience like that, you know that everyone looks at you and they're like, you've got a third eyeball growing out of your forehead. Something's wrong with you. Because you're not going along with what everyone else is doing. You're not doing what feels right. What feels right is do whatever you want. Live together. Be intimate. Fornicate. Don't get married. Do all of that. That's what feels right. Feels normal. And yet our senses have to be trained by the word of God to do what's righteous. And it's like getting a bucket of cold water dumped on your face when you have to engage or see other people interact with it. And you even begin to think, is this really what was right? Is this really what I should do? Is this really how it all should work? So what is sin? Well, we have to get it clear in our minds from the very beginning that God is the one who defines sin. And he defines it in his word.

And it does not matter how many or who is sinning. They're nothing more than a creature. And they're sinning against a holy God. And he's not going to say, oh, well, because everyone was doing it, it's okay for you. Or because you're so important, it's okay for you. Sin is breaking God's law by not doing what he requires us to do or doing things that he forbids us to do. And to this point, you say, okay, yeah, I got it. We're supposed to do what God says. And then I want to ask, okay, so how often do you sin? And it's interesting when you actually ask people this question, what kind of responses you get. And sometimes they don't answer directly. You don't ask them, how many times in a day do you sin? And they say, about six. You know, you don't get those kinds of responses, though they think it. They think it. Every one of us thinks we only sin sometimes. Occasionally. Oh, yeah? And what were you doing the rest of the time?

When you weren't sinning. Is it fair to say that the rest of the time you just didn't even think about it? You didn't think about sin. You didn't think about righteousness. That wasn't even a thought in your mind. You're just like, well, that's a cool bike. Well, that's a neat thing. Well, let me look at that. Well, let me check that out. We didn't even think about sin. And so then when you come to Jesus Christ and you see what he had to endure on the cross, and you go, there must be something. wrong with me, like really wrong with me. Because what happened to him was awful and terrible. Or you read of what the consequences of the unfaithful slave, what happens to him. He gets cast out into the outer darkness where there's weeping of gnashing of teeth, where the flame never subsides and the worm never dies for all eternity. And you go, sin must be a real thing. And it must be pretty bad too. I'm glad I don't do it very much.

What I want you to see is that our awareness of our own sin does not define our sin. Just because we recognize sometimes that we've sinned doesn't mean that's the only time we've sinned. It doesn't determine the frequency of, our awareness doesn't determine the frequency of our sin or the guilt of it. A way of trying to get at this and expose this is to think, how often do you think your children sin? Occasionally? Once or twice a day? Per child? How about your spouse? How often does your husband sin? How often does your wife sin? How often does your boss sin? Just occasionally, right? Just every once in a while we have, you know, we hit the rumble strip of life and, you know, somebody sinned. No, that's not how it is, is it? They're sinning all the time, aren't they? They're forever doing things to get under your skin and upset you and they're inconsiderate and they don't love you and they're selfish and they're lazy and they're all these things all the time.

It's as if your kids wake up in the morning and their life's mission is to make you mad. It's as if they pursue sin with all of their energy. But not you. You're not like that. They're like that. And we don't know where they got it from. But to believe that is to believe a lie. You're right. Your children sin all the time. They're children and they're weak and they don't understand things the way you do. And there's more reason to... To accommodate their childishness. But not so with you or me. We're grown-ups. If you're a grown-up, you know better. You do know better. When you tell your four-year-old he should know better than to spill his water, you're lying to yourself. But when you talk of yourself and you go, I do know better. I don't sin very much. You're lying to yourself. You may know better, but you don't do better. The reality is when it comes to our own lives, we prefer blindness. We're not blind when it comes to other people.

But when it comes to ourselves, we prefer blindness. We prefer ignorance. You ever end up in a fight with somebody that's just like 0 to 60? I mean, you get from pleasant to nasty, faster than the fastest car. It's like that. And all of a sudden, it's like there's rage, there's anger. And you're kind of sitting in the corner watching yourself going, how did that happen? Like, I don't even understand how I came home and I said hello and my, you know. My kid did spill the water or tracked their boots through the house or dinner's not ready or whatever. And I'm just furious. Like, I'm on a rampage now, and everyone's to blame. And how does that happen so quickly? It's because you're really, really sinful. You're entirely sinful. You don't just sin occasionally. It amazes me in my own life. You know, Vanessa and I have been married for 11 years now, and we've grown a lot. We're very different.

in terms of our personalities, our upbringings. It's a very, very different type of people. And so we've had to rub off a lot of each other's rough edges. And there's been lots of compromise in our house because we don't, you know, at the beginning of a discussion, we hardly ever think the same thing should happen. We just, we approach life very differently. And we have to, it's hard work for us, just like it's hard work for you guys. in your own marriages and in your own homes and with your own children. And the reason that it's so hard is because of how sinful we are. And so as Vanessa and I have worked through it, and I've learned the things that I do that are not loving to her. She doesn't appreciate them. And it's just my carelessness that, you know, I can take my shoes off when I come inside. I can call to tell her when I'm going to come home. Simple things. No reason I can't do them. And so...

I start to have these thoughts, like when I'm coming home. I've got a wife who's been caring for the home and the kids all day. She's busy, she's tired, and the rest. I'm going to come home and realize I've got people to love, to care for. I'm coming home to work, right? We've all talked about this. If you're a man, you're coming home to work. You don't come home to just veg out and do nothing. You come home to work, to love the people that you've been away from all day, your wife and your children. And so when I'm driving home, I start to think about that. Okay, I'm going to come home to people who need me, so I need to be available to them. These are the thoughts I'm having as I'm driving home from work. I need to not come in and expect them all to just be there for me, but rather I need to come in and I want to come in and provide for their needs, care for them, love them, and all the rest. These are the thoughts I have. And I prepare, and you can hear, you've been texting all day with your wife, you've talked on the phone, and you kind of can gauge what the stress level is at home.

how the day's gone. You know what you're coming home to, you think. And so I prepare. Okay, I'm going to come home and I'm going to attend to her needs and pay her some attention before I am concerned about myself. And inevitably, what happens? A curveball comes when I get home. Something that I did not prepare for, I didn't think about, happens. And I'm angry. And I'm left going, how did I get so angry? How come so quick? I was even preparing. Like I was thinking. I was proactive and all the rest. And here I am angry. I've been home for five minutes. What other explanation is there other than I'm a lot more sinful than I thought I was? I thought the preparations that I made were sufficient, and all it took was one little turn of the dial somewhere that I didn't prepare for, and I'm caught completely flat-footed. So I sin all the time, and I'm ready to sin constantly. And you are too.

We don't just sin occasionally. We break God's law constantly. And we say, no, no, no, you can't say that. That's not nice, and I don't appreciate that, and I work really hard not to. Good. I commend you for it. But you sin way more than you're aware of. You're really wicked. When someone confronts us with our sin, I come home and the thing I wasn't prepared for happens, and then I'm angry, and Vanessa says, hey, what did we do? then what do I want to do? Well, what I should do is, honey, I'm really sorry. Immediately, I'm really sorry. Here's what happened. And I repent. Please forgive me. No, that's not what happens. At least not initially. What happens is I defend it. I justify it. I ignore her and say, no, you're wrong. That's not what happened. In some way or another, I'm trying to deny my sinfulness. I'm trying to ignore it, cover it up, sweep it under the rug, get it out of the view.

And if I do it, then I know all you do it because you're just like me. So we're utterly sinful, you and me, full of it, full up to the brim with it. We break God's law all the time. We're not aware of all the ways we break God's law. We're not even aware of most of the times we break God's law. We are sinful. You're sinful. Where did the sin come from? Well, it came from Adam initially. When Adam chose not to obey God, but rather to listen to the voice of his wife and to eat the fruit, sin entered the world. Romans 5.12 says, We're in that category of all. We are the all who sin. We got our sin initially, the seed of it, from Adam. And the reason this is important for us to realize is because we have to see that if we inherited something from somebody, we didn't choose it.

In the first instance, we didn't choose it. We inherited it. It was given to us. In God's eyes, when he looks at us, apart from Jesus Christ, what he sees is sin. He does not see anything else. He doesn't see anything good. He doesn't see anything redeemable. He doesn't see anything salvageable. He sees sin. We are the definition of sin. Every part of us has been corrupted by original sin. Our actions, our thoughts. the way we speak, it's all been tainted. It's all been infected. There's nothing in us that's righteous. Isaiah 64, 6 says, for all of us have become like one who is unclean and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment. All of us wither like a leaf and our iniquities like the wind take us away. And which one of us has the stomach to listen to this anymore? You know how hard it is to say this? If you could come up here and look at your guys' faces, it's discouraging.

You know, John said amen and I'm like, you say amen to how wicked we are? What is wrong with you? I thought we were talking about Advent and Jesus and Christmas and all the good stuff. If we're going to come to understand Jesus coming to save us from our sins, we have to understand our sinfulness. And it can't be sugar-coated and it can't be lied about and it can't be minimized because it doesn't need to be. Do you understand that? It doesn't need to be lied about. It doesn't need to be hidden. It doesn't need to be justified. It needs to be crucified. It needs to be put to death. It needs to be forgiven. That's what our sin needs. It doesn't need our hands in it, monkeying with it and explaining it and hiding it. That's not what it needs. That won't do us any good. We will not relieve any of our guilt or any of our condemnation by doing that, by denying our sinfulness.

by hiding it. We stand to gain nothing by doing that. Knowing that you're a sinner and what you deserve is the precursor, it's the foundation to being able to understand Christmas and to be able to celebrate Jesus' coming. Apart from this damning knowledge of ourselves, we can't celebrate Christmas, at least not in a way that glorifies God. We can still have meals. We can still hang out with family. We can still sing songs. We can still buy gifts. We can still do all of the stuff that... All of the unbelieving world does. But we won't glorify God in it if we don't understand who we are. The angel told Joseph, You shall name him Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins. We have to cultivate in our own minds an understanding of sin that's congruent with God's understanding of sin. It doesn't matter whether it feels right. It doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it. It doesn't matter if you've been doing it your whole life. It doesn't matter if you know...

If you feel hopeless, those things are not what define our own sinfulness. Our sin is defined by God's word. That's what God will hold us up against when he judges us. He'll hold us up against his law and his word and say, how have you failed and how have you fallen short? That's what happens in his judgment. And that's what Jesus came to save us from. It's what the angel told Joseph. You remember that when we started this Advent series, we started back in Genesis, and we looked at the fall. And we looked specifically at the curse given to the serpent. And what was a curse to the serpent was a promise to us and to Adam and Eve. And the promise was that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent and that the serpent would bruise him on the heel. And we understood even then that...

that Adam and Eve knew what was being said because the very next thing that's recorded in Scripture is they went and had a baby because they wanted that seed to come. They wanted that promise fulfilled. And then we moved on and we looked at Simeon who had waited and waited and waited. And we don't know how long Simeon waited, but he was at the end of centuries of waiting of the people of God for the Savior to come to save them from their sins. And this is the news that Joseph receives. You think of Simeon and he said, now I can die in peace for I have seen, my eyes have seen the consolation of Israel. And what did he see? He saw a baby, just a baby, the son of God, Jesus Christ, but a baby. And he said, this is the one who's going to reconcile all things, who's going to save his people. And he said, now I can die in peace. Let your servant depart in peace.

for I have seen the salvation of the Lord. And this is the good news that was told to Joseph. Your wife, Mary, she's going to have a baby conceived by the Holy Spirit. You call him Jesus because he's going to save his people from their sins. Now, whether Joseph understood that that meant he had to die, I don't know. Hebrews tells us that according to the law, one may almost say all things are cleansed with blood and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. So we understand looking back what... what Jesus was to endure, what his end was going to be, and that the grave couldn't hold him. I don't know to what extent Joseph understood the particulars of it, but we do. It's important to note that in Hebrews it says that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. And forgiveness in this verse stands in for salvation, being saved. Through the forgiveness of sins, we are saved. Not through the acknowledgement of our sins, not even through being sorry for our sins.

Do we find forgiveness? We find forgiveness through the shedding of Jesus' blood. And his blood is sufficient and powerful enough to cover every bit of your sin. Every bit of it. And so you don't need to lie about who you are anymore. Yes, it will be strange. If you're honest about who you are and you tell people what you're like and what your inclinations are, That you do understand people whose wickedness, they've acted on it, and you say, yeah, you know, that is wicked, and I do understand how that happens. That one, the one who's honest in that way, will appreciate the death of Jesus Christ, will appreciate his coming. They will celebrate Jesus' birth. And they won't need food, and they won't need gifts, and they won't need all of the pomp and circumstance of the world to celebrate an empty tradition, because they understand the substance.

That we're sinful. We're broken. And that Jesus is the provision that God has given us. So this Christmas season, this Advent season, this time that we live in between Jesus' first coming and his second coming, as we look forward to celebrating Christmas, it's not simply his birth. He didn't just come to earth to be born. He came to earth to die. Because that's what it required for us to be saved. And it's the sweetest thing. that could ever be done. It's a death that brings life. His death brings us life. Not so that we can go do what we want, so that we can do what we were made to do, so that we would have joy in him, so that we would have what we can't have any other way. You understand with Christmas, it's the same with Christmas celebrations and weddings with people who've cohabited before they've married. The bigger the...

The lie, the bigger the performance, the bigger the pomp and the circumstance. Christmas, if you don't know your own sinfulness and you don't find the humility of loving Jesus Christ because he came to earth to save you from that, well, then you've got to do something to make it special. And the pressure that you and I feel to make it special, special for our kids, special for our family, to have all the stuff that we think it just has to be this way. So much of the pressure that we feel is rooted in our lack of understanding of our own sinfulness and why Jesus came. You don't have to have all that stuff. I think you should give gifts at Christmas, by the way. I think it's a great practice because Jesus Christ was given to us freely as a gift. The salvation that he made for us is a gift. And so I think you should give gifts. I think you should celebrate. I think this should be a really, really happy, joyful time of year for you.

And there's no conflict between it being that and you acknowledging your sinfulness. That's what makes it joyful. That's what makes it joyful, is that you're not left in that spot, not left in that place to bear your own iniquities yourself. And so when people look at you strange and they're like, you know, you tell your kids, you know, they go to school or they go to co-op or wherever it is they go, and all the kids are like, look what I got, look what I got in here, and look at this, and they've got hundreds and hundreds of dollars of junk. And here your kids are with a new pair of shoes, you know, a netcha sketch. You know, I don't know what you get your kids, but I know what my kids like. And how do you teach your kids not to be ashamed of not measuring up? You teach them why we give gifts in the first place, why we celebrate. Why do we do any of this anyway? There's nothing sweeter than having a kid that doesn't covet the gifts. That's very sweet. You want a child that way, then...

Tell them they're sinful and tell them that Jesus came to save sinners. That's what the angel said to Joseph. He came to save us from our sins. And so say it to them with hope. Say it to them in such a way that they don't have to be ashamed when they go out the week after Christmas and don't have all the cool new stuff, if they don't. If you have the means to get them all the cool new stuff and you want to, God bless you. Go ahead. Do it. No problem there. But if you don't, you don't have to be ashamed about it. You shouldn't be ashamed about it. The greatest gifts in life are free, right? You know? Jesus came to earth to save us from our sins. And he accomplished what he set out to do. And so this Advent season, however you celebrate, whatever your family does, whatever your traditions are, whatever your desires are, remember, Jesus came to save you from your sins. And so a part of your celebration ought to be an acknowledgement of your sinfulness and rejoicing that you're not left in that spot. And then Christmas will be sweet to you.

Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you that you sent your son to save us from our sins. If we were to list our sins to even our own knowledge of them, we'd be here all day, longer than we have. And yet you know us perfectly. You know everything that we've ever said and done and thought. And you still chose to send your son into this world to save sinners, to redeem us, to give his life for ours. What a joy, Father. What a privilege. We love you. We love you. We pray that you would help us to remember, to wait expectantly as Simeon did, to be joyful, knowing that our sins have been provided for through the birth and the death and the resurrection of your son, our Lord Jesus Christ. I pray that you give us joy in this knowledge and that you help us not to forget it. As we go and as we celebrate and remember with our families and with our friends, I pray, Father, that you would make us salt and light.

especially at this time of year. We pray, Father, that you would use us to build your kingdom, to bring many sons to glory. And we pray, Father, for endurance and strength in the fight against our sin. Our victory is in you, through your Son. And we look forward to seeing you face to face when the battle will be over and the battle will be won. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen.