In Those Days A Decree Went Out From Caesar Augustus

It could have been to demonstrate his glory and how far his kingdom had advanced. What we do know is that this decree, this census, would have been onerous. It would have been difficult. It would have been hard, particularly on the poor or the sick, or in this case, Mary, who was about to give birth. The idea that you would have to go and travel days away at nine months pregnant would be quite difficult. If you're pregnant and you go to the doctor and you say, hey, can we go travel for the holidays? What they want to know is, well, how far along are you? And they sort of tell you and they give you some cover to say, no, you probably shouldn't be flying or driving 10 hours or whatnot. When you're that close to delivery, it would be very difficult. You realize that the mother would like to be nesting. Mary's not getting to nest. Mary's getting to travel on a donkey.

Nevertheless, Mary and Joseph, you might think, well, I just wouldn't have gone. Joseph and Mary shouldn't have gone, or they should have sent a messenger, or they should have been able to stay. But we're told here they both went. In this time of year, this time of pregnancy, they both go. Joseph with his wife, who is great with child, they go and they travel. So what does that mean about Joseph and Mary? Well, it means they have to do the things of the world. that being the mother and father of Jesus didn't exempt them, being one of the people of God didn't exempt them from having to live in the world and do the things that all the people in the world had to do. We, like them, live in this world. The difference for us as Christians, for Joseph and Mary, was that while we live in the world, we're not supposed to be of the world. And that's really what we're going to talk about this morning, is what does it mean to live in the world but not be of the world.

Have you ever felt like that your responsibilities of just the normal mundane life that you have to deal with get in the way of the things you really want to do? Things like work, home maintenance, cut the grass, maybe shovel the snow, cook, go grocery shopping, wipe the noses, pay your taxes, take your kids to sports or to school, pay your bills. There really is a lot. And I would argue the vast majority of our lives are made up by the maintenance of what we have to do simply because we live in this world. This traveling that Joseph and Mary are doing, this is just one thing that they have to do because they live in this world. They have a government. They're supposed to do, the government says, you're gonna come and you're gonna be registered and you're gonna pay tax. And so they go and they travel pregnant and register and pay their tax and have a baby.

while they're gone away. You have things that pop up in your life that are not what you would plan for. Probably the best example of it would be sickness. You know you're going to get sick every winter, right? Like the people in your house are going to get sick. You know it, but you wish and you hope that somehow it won't happen. Somehow we'll be exempt from it. We'll take our... our vitamins and our fish oils, and we'll get good sleep and drink lots of water, and we'll have whatever things. Timothy's like, we don't do any of that. That's why the Deaton's always sick. They don't even try. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. You live in this world. You have a daily grind. You have things you get up and you have to go do. It's mundane. It's boring. But the truth is, if you neglect those things that are mundane and that are boring, if you neglect them for very long, they will cause you problems.

If you decide, I don't feel like going to work today. I don't feel like cutting the grass today. I don't feel like going to the grocery store. I don't feel like paying the gas bill. It won't be long before your unwillingness to do the duties and responsibilities of living in this world will start to cause you problems. And so this decree from Caesar was one of the things that had to be attended to by all who lived under Roman rule, including those who were about to give birth. Mary and Joseph didn't get to sit this out as much as they may have wanted to. And so it would be easy, if you ever thought like, if you were Mary and Joseph, what your conversation would have been like on the road? Mary, you mothers, nine months pregnant, what would you be saying as you were sitting on the donkey, riding along, bouncing and bumping? Very uncomfortable. You'd be happy about it. Isn't this fun? We're going on this adventure, right? No, nobody wants to go do this stuff. We all understand our own sinful natures. We'd be like, why are we doing this? This is stupid.

Caesar's an idiot. Down with Caesar. What's that? Defy tyrants, yeah. What do you think it was like for Joseph and Mary? Do you think it would be all that different than if you and your wife had to go on this type of trip? It'd be inconvenient. It'd be frustrated. That would be the natural response, right? Why do we have to do all this hard stuff? Why did you have to get sick right now? Why did the water heater have to go out right now? Why does my car have a flat tire? It's all part of living in this world. And whenever our normal routine gets just a little difficulty put into it, it causes us to stumble. And it really doesn't take a big difficulty. It just takes a little difficulty. But this is a big difficulty. Like traveling at this point in marriage or this point in pregnancy is quite hard. We like to think, I wouldn't mind doing it if we could just do it at a different time. Sickness wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't during the holidays. I want to go to the funeral, but...

We're really busy this week at work. There's things that pop up that end up on our schedules that we don't plan for, we don't look forward to, but have to be done. They never happen at a good time. And yet we attend to them because that's part of living in this world. The difficulty and the danger is that most people tend to gripe and bellyache when this sort of thing happens. When heartache and unnecessary, inconvenient, stupid things happen. When there's an act of authoritarian overreach. We complain. We gripe. How many of you aren't looking forward to the holidays because of all the pressures and expectations and schedules and burdens? I'll do you a favor. You don't have to worry about any of that. You need to concern yourself with Jesus and with his birth. And the food will be the food, and the relationships will be the relationships, and the gifts will be the gifts, or the gifts won't be the gifts. And if your kids get upset because you didn't get them the thing that they really wanted, then maybe you should talk to them about their ingratitude.

Instead of cultivating it, we feel these pressures. And because we feel these pressures, we tend to gripe and complain about them. We shouldn't have to be like this. Why is everyone else making my life so difficult, so hard, so inconvenient? Why do I have to do all these unnecessary things? We tend to complain, as I said. Holidays. I'd say for every one person I run across that loves the holidays, and I don't just mean they're those weird people who like Christmas music. for a whole month. But I mean, they like the holidays, Eric. I'm poking at Eric. Eric's that guy, you know. But for every one person you meet who actually looks forward to the holidays, you'll meet 10 to 20 who just loathe it. Now, what's wrong with that? Here's what's wrong with that. If you think of Joseph and Mary having to travel at this time, you can understand them griping and complaining or being frustrated. It's inconvenient. It's onerous. It's burdensome. It's expensive. It's not a good time.

The problem with that sort of thinking is that it denies or it ignores God's purpose in the burden or the hassles that we have to endure. It ignores it. It says God has no purpose in this. All this extra unnecessary inconvenience. I know how my life should go. I know how my time should be spent. I know how my energies and my money and all that should go. And then something unexpected happens. And we skip right past the question, why did God allow this, to just, well, it just shouldn't have been. We don't think that God has a good purpose in what we've determined to simply be a waste of time and energy, a thing that distracts us from what's really important. This is how the world thinks. This is how our flesh thinks. This is what comes naturally to us. But it's not how Christians should think. We're not told how Joseph and Mary perceived their We're just told that they went. Which, to be fair, is probably a lot more than can be said of us most of the time. We just go, no, I'm not going to do it. If I don't want to do it, I'm not going to go do it. But they did go do it. But this grumbling and complaining, this is worldly thinking. This is not Christian thinking. We're to live in this world and to attend to the cares that attend us in this world, but we're not to be of this world. And so when this decree came out, Joseph led Mary to Bethlehem to fulfill their obligation.

knowing that Mary was carrying a baby who was about to be born. Now here's the thing. We read in Micah, chapter 5, verse 2, during the Advent reading, something about Bethlehem. What did we read about Bethlehem? What did it say that Bethlehem was supposed to be? It's the city of David, and what's supposed to happen in this city of David? The Messiah is supposed to be born there. Now here's an interesting question. Did Joseph and Mary know who... Mary was carrying. It's interesting because it's kind of like, we want to say, well, we know clearly because we're getting to Monday morning quarterback this whole thing. So we understand all of it with a lot of clarity. They certainly knew something, right? She'd been told about her son and what he was going to be and how his life was going to go and what he was going to accomplish. And Joseph did too. And so my question is, were they planning to go to Bethlehem anyway to fulfill this prophecy?

Have you ever wondered that? I mean, the Messiah is supposed to be born in Bethlehem, and here they are sitting up in Judea, up in Galilee. They didn't look like they were headed to Bethlehem. Didn't look like they were planning on going and seeing this prophecy fulfilled. Now maybe, and to be fair, and I really do mean this, they may not have had all that put together in their heads the way that we might. Because we have people who put together nice little Advent readings and kind of tell us the story and lead our thoughts through it and interpret the prophecies from long ago and say, look, this is the fulfillment. See how the puzzle all fits together? But when you're handed a puzzle and you don't have all of the picture in front of you to put it together, you may have pieces that fit real close to each other and you don't quite know how. And so I've got sympathy for the fact that they may not have recognized at that time that Mary needed to be in Bethlehem, but God realized that they needed to be in Bethlehem.

And you know what Matthew Henry says about this census? He says that God willed that the whole world should be counted. An inconvenience so that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. And I thought, yeah, there you go. The whole world. I mean, we're talking about the inconvenience of Mary and Joseph. And to be fair, many people in the Roman Empire probably lived close to where they had grown up. And it may not have meant a travel for them, you know, a long trip for them to go to be registered where they belonged. But Joseph and Mary were of the house and lineage of David. And it may have been especially important to Caesar that they be accounted for because he knew that there was something special about this line of David to these Jews that were under his care. And he wanted to know where they were at. At any rate, in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus under the...

will of God that a census should be taken. God had a purpose in it in sending Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Do you see when things are coming up in your life that would be inconvenient in the way that this would have been inconvenient to them? Do you see that God has a purpose in it? Most of us would answer no. That's actually part of the problem is I don't see the purpose. If I saw the purpose, it would be easier for me to accept. But remember, we just said we don't know if Joseph and Mary, we don't know to what extent they understood what was going on in real time. What they did know was we have to get up and leave as we're about to have a baby because the pagan ruler said so. So away we have to go. We have to go to this little place that's out of the way at an inconvenient time. And yet God had a very good purpose in sending them.

We're the beneficiaries of it because we get to look back and say, isn't that all great and wasn't that all wonderful? And look at the blessing of all of this. But I'll tell you, most times in your life when you're being inconvenienced, when your life and your routine and your schedule is being upset by things, whatever it is, you will not know exactly why. And you'll have to fight the temptation to grumble and complain about it. When you get up and you go to work and the computer, update that happened over the weekend screwed everything up and you can't get your emails and your customers are upset and it's the week before Christmas and you're stressed out and you just wanted to get done. It's guys like Daniel's fault when things like that happen, right? Because he programs on the back end of websites and stuff and has these migrations and all these people depend on him and get mad at him though they don't know who he is. But we're those people who get mad. We get frustrated. It's not fair. It shouldn't be that way. Why does it have to happen right now?

Instead, we ought to ask, well, I would say, before we ask what God's purpose is, we ought to settle in our minds that God has a good purpose in it. We should settle in our minds that God has a good purpose in it. You remember last week we talked about, the sermon was about prophecy and how seriously Simeon took it. Simeon knew that God had said, you won't see death. He'd said it to him. In a special revelation, you won't see death until you've seen the Lord's Christ, until you've met the Messiah. And he believed it. He knew it. He said, that's going to happen. I'm not going to die. I know I'm not going to die because I haven't seen the Lord's Christ yet. And then when he sees him, he goes, now I can die in peace. Now or later, now I can die in peace because he'd taken God's word, his promises, seriously. And I want you to see here that this birth in Bethlehem was prophesied, was foretold.

by the prophet Micah, this is going to happen. And God takes his word seriously too. He sees to it that it's going to happen. While we have no indication that Joseph or Mary had any intentions of going to Bethlehem, though they were devout and faithful and righteous, there's no indication they were planning on going and doing this thing. And so God upset their life and the lives of the whole inhabited world so that his word would be accomplished. I think much of our frustration in life comes from us not knowing what God's purpose is in the world. We sort of feel, you know, it's like God's purpose for me in the world is, and then we just, it's like a personal answer. Well, I think it should be this, so that must be what God's going to do for me. When instead, we ought to answer that question according to what we read in the Scripture. I mean, how many of us believe when Jesus says, in this world you'll have trouble?

When we have trouble, do we think, that's what he told me was going to happen? It's not what we think. We go, this isn't fair, and this isn't right, and that's somebody else's fault, or woe is me, I should have never done this, it's all my fault. But if you're one of God's children, he has a good purpose in everything he does towards you. Even though most of it, as you get older, you'll be blind to the goodness that's being worked in you. You young parents, there's a lot of good being worked in you right now. And you're real grumpy about it. You're really grumpy about it. You're really frustrated. You're frustrated with your spouse. You're frustrated with your kids. You think it's not fair. It's too hard. Why has this got to be like this? Whose idea was it? It's just not the way I thought it was going to be. I'm telling you God's working good in you. You mothers, the Bible tells you that you're going to be preserved through the bearing of children if you persevere through what you're feeling right now in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.

Do you believe that? Or is every little nuisance and every little bother that comes to you from your child, who should know better by now, says you, do you know that God's using that to accomplish his will? It's really ordinary. It's really mundane. Every time one of your kids gets sick, he's making you more like Jesus. Every single time. Every single time. Husbands, every time your wife's overwhelmed by that and you just want to come home and chill out because you don't feel like dealing with it. And she comes and she's like, maybe she got on the phone before you even got home. And she's like, God's using that. It's such a stupid argument, isn't it? Why doesn't she just stop it? God's using it. You have to come to see as Christians that God uses the very simple things that you do in your life to make you like Jesus. You have to learn not to despise them or to resist them or to grumble and complain about them.

What I mean to husbands, when your wife comes and she's an emotional wreck, and maybe her emotional wreck just means she cries and is quiet and really doesn't know and is just very discouraged. Or maybe her emotional wreck is that you are the singular problem in her life and the source of all that is wrong. I don't know which it is. Maybe it just depends on the day which it is. God is at work in your marriage and has given you a wife that needs you to care for you. You wives, when your husband sits on his phone, He's gone and he's disengaged and he's busy. He seems to talk to everybody but you. He could talk on the phone to his buddies about something stupid for a half hour, 45 minutes, but to lead a discussion at the dinner table? I mean, he's incompetent. He doesn't know what to say. Is God working in that frustration? Yes. Don't you wish he'd do it a different way? We say yes as long as we can decide what that way is.

But it could be so much more painful than what you're going through. So I tend to think regarding Joseph and Mary's disposition toward this trip, given their godliness in other areas of life, their faithfulness to God, that they weren't given to grumbling and complaining about this. There's just no indication in Scripture anywhere that that's what they did. So we ought not either. They went, well, if it's what we need to do right now, if it's what God would have us do right now, that's what we're going to go do. God's will came to us. through this pagan Roman emperor, Caesar. But it's God who's taking us to Bethlehem. What if I have the baby in Bethlehem? Well, then we'll have the baby. What if there's nowhere to have the baby in Bethlehem? The baby will come. The baby did come. And the baby was fine. We have a tendency to look at our lives and to see the burden that's on us right this moment as though there's been no kindness of God in sustaining grace.

Leading up to that point. And that because of this burden right now, everything after it is going to be ruined as well. Like every hardship becomes the pinnacle of misery in our lives. It's an awful way to live. It's an awful way to live. Some of you might be like, what are you talking about? I don't live like that. You're probably single. You will be married. You'll marry someone who feels that way. And they'll help you understand these sorts of temptations. And you'll realize it then about yourself that you actually do struggle in these ways. You just don't know it yet. I think that as Christians, we ought to see everything that comes to us. We should make it our aim to see that everything that comes to us, good or evil, remember what Job said, shall we accept good from the hand of the Lord and not also evil? That we should accept everything that comes to us.

as coming to us from the hand of the Lord, even if it doesn't come directly to us from his hand, but comes to us through Caesar, as this command did to them. That we would do well as Christians to see all of our lives being attended to by our Father in heaven, who works all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. We can use that verse as a theological kind of, you know, bat. But really, do you believe that God is working all things in your life? If you're a Christian, you say, I'm a Christian. Okay, then what goes along with saying I'm a Christian is that I believe because the Bible tells me, not because I feel it, but because the Bible tells me God works all things for the good, for my good. Do you believe that when the kid pukes in the backseat of the car? Do you believe that when you lose your job?

This is a mature understanding, and I'll grant that many Christians don't think this way, and that I struggle to think this way many times, but we ought to. We've become accustomed to the easy things and the soft things and the comfortable things of life, but not the mature things, not the serious things. Hebrews tells us, he says, everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he's an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice, What does it mean to practice? Practice means that when you have these difficulties come in, that you would make it your aim to get a hold of yourself or your spouse and say, we may not see the good that God's doing in this right now, and we may never understand the good that God's doing in this right now.

Joseph and Mary were sort of at the top of the heap in terms of having the potential for understanding the good that God was doing. They knew who Jesus was before he was born. The whole rest of the world, all the other people who were inconvenienced like them, would have never understood in the moment. And so we ought to say, God has a good purpose in this. And that part is settled. What that purpose is and how it works out and when it works out, I may not be able to say. But I am convinced that it's good. Now, that is not logical. You will never reason your way into what I just said. Do you understand me? It doesn't make any sense. At men's group yesterday, we talked about this with Abraham. It's like he left his city and his people with his family when he was old. Go out into this place and I'll tell you later where it's at. Where and why and what's going to become. Just leave. Okay. It doesn't make any sense.

How many times do you say, I just want to understand. I just want to understand why. And then I'll do it. Come on, be honest. Does understanding really help you do it? I think many times understanding just makes you more scared or angry or discouraged. It's not really about understanding. It's about trusting God. It's about trusting God. And so in those moments when your kids get sick, or the holidays are coming, or the money's tight, or the water heater goes out, or whatever, those are opportunities for you to practice discerning the difference between good and evil, the good that God's working in us. Somehow this is good.

And it may be that, you know, going back to the work thing the week before Christmas, when everyone else is stressed out and then the bad thing happens, that the good that's being worked out is the way that you respond to it as opposed to everyone else. And that your calmness and your steadiness and your faith strengthens somebody else. That may be the good that's wrought in them. And you may never see that. Maybe someone will come ask you someday, how come you don't get upset like everybody else when that sort of stuff happens? It is unfortunate that it happened, but I believe that it's God who orchestrates and ordains everything that happens in our lives. The Bible tells me he knows how many hair in my head. So if the computers crash, then God has a purpose in it. And me being angry and upset about it is not going to fix it. If I've got the skills to go in and figure out what happened and fix it technically, then that's helpful. But me being angry about it just doesn't help. God has a purpose in it. And so me being angry just amounts to me cursing God and grumbling at him.

For his will, and I'm a Christian, we ought not to do that. That'd be a really sweet thing to be able to say to a co-worker or the grocery store attendant or whoever you interact with. It's a Christian testimony. That's the maturity that Hebrews is talking about here because you've practiced to train your senses to discern good and evil and to say there's good in this because God says there's good in this. And one thing I'll say about the good is that the good doesn't do away with the difficulty. This whole idea of silver linings. It's like, well, I can deal with all the bad as long as I can find the good thing. Silver linings don't always make the storm cloud dissipate. They just don't. And so the lives that we live as Christians, we have to live by faith in the Son of God. Not trying to figure out how to balance the scales of, well, there's this good, so it outweighs the bad, and we're just kind of always in this like weighing it out thing. There's good in it because God's at work in it.

And I don't have to know what the good is in the moment for it to have been good or for me to be faithful. I have to trust God to be faithful. So as I said, this is not natural. It's not easy. It's foreign to our flesh. But it is the fruit of Christian maturity. And each one of us should seek to be better equipped in trusting God in these kinds of situations so that when the next census in our lives gets decreed, we handle it by faith. Do you think that when they went there that Mary might have said, well, I just hope we can get home before we have the baby? That would be one of the thoughts that would cross our mind. Well, if we have to go do this thing, hopefully we can just go there and get back and then have the baby. Sometimes in our lives, the worst case scenario is exactly what happens. And not only was it like we're just going to have the baby away from home, we can't even have it in a room.

That's about as bad as you can imagine. I mean, I suppose it could have been raining. Maybe it was raining. The birth was less than ideal, shall we say. Circumstances were not the ones you would choose. But when that birth is set in its context, the context of all of the other things that Jesus and his parents would encounter, both the good and the bad, the circumstances of his birth aren't actually that consequential. Are they? It didn't really ruin anything. Or destroy anything. Nothing was irreparably harmed. Remember earlier I said we get this idea that everything in the past has just been misery after misery and that this new misery is the one to top them all? Actually, giving birth in a manger amongst the animals wasn't the worst thing in the world that could happen. It just wasn't. You said it in its context. And I don't mean to say like all of your fears are silly and unfounded and you ought to get over them. Like that's an easy thing to do.

But let's be honest with ourselves enough to say that we are people who overreact. All of us. Some of us, our overreaction just kind of pours out of us. And some of us, our overreaction goes deep down inside of us. And it just sits there like a lump and makes us a miserable person to be around. But we are people who are given to overreacting. And so everything that's going on is the final straw. And I just want to say to you, no, it's not. God's not done with you. And it's not the final straw. And there will be more new things in the future that will be hard. And there will be new things in the future that will be good. And through all of it, God will be faithful to his people. And so you ought not to live your life on this constant carnival ride of fear and frustration and misery when hard times come. When unforeseen circumstances arise. You aren't going to keep them from coming.

You need more than you're going to keep your kids from getting sick this winter. They're going to get sick. If they haven't already, they're going to get sick. And if they've already been sick, that's not a guarantee that they won't get sick again. And you should love them through it and not be like, oh, well, whatever. We just don't need to wear hats and gloves and coats and get good. You don't have to react poorly and fatalistically. You should take care of your children who are going to get sick and love them while they're weak and praise God when you're up with them at 2 o'clock in the morning. Because when you set that night, in the context of your life, it doesn't matter. You won't remember it. As frustrated as you are in that moment, you won't mark it down on your calendar as something to remember next year. And so we as Christians really do have to believe that God is at work in the simple and the mundane things that go on in our lives. The unfortunate things, the inconvenient things, the things that we and our flesh say, this is stupid and unnecessary. Hold your tongue, Christian. Hold your tongue.

And remember that God has a purpose in it. And even if you never see that purpose, that's not God's fault. There's nothing wrong if you don't understand all of the things that God's doing in your life. There's nothing wrong with that. If he revealed all of his reasons and all of his rationale and all of this stuff, you couldn't take hold of it anyway. Not all of it. And the part that you did get a hold of, you'd twist it because of your sinful nature into something that's not what it truly is. And so the life that you live, you have to live by faith in the Son of God. You have to trust that God's at work even if you can't see it, even if you don't know how. And you have to be cheerful while you do it. You ought to be cheerful or you ought to aspire to be cheerful while you do it. And so let's work to trust God, to keep our overreactions in check because God's at work even if we can't say how exactly, even if we can never say how. God's Word is true. He cares about it being fulfilled.

He had the whole world be counted so that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem. He cares about his word being honored and kept way more than we do. And so if he says that he's working good for us, if he says that he's patient, if he says that he'll receive us, if he says that he'll forgive us, then we ought to take him at his word and leave all of our foolish ideas about how we know better than God. We ought to just leave them aside, throw them away, and trust God. Let's pray.