Atlanta Bible Baptist Church

Pastor Ray P. Smith: Good morning. If you have your copy of the Scriptures, I invite you to take them or the device that contains them and turn with me to the Gospel according to Luke. Luke chapter 2. We will actually spend our entire three sessions in Luke chapter 2, talking about Christmas and about the coming of the Lord and gaining a biblical perspective on the same.

This morning, I want us to just look at Luke chapter 2, verses 1 through 7, and then we'll talk about Christmas: a perfectly timed inconvenience. It says, "And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place when Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child. So it was that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn."

Father, thank you so much again for this day and thank you for all that we have done, beginning with the first hour in Sunday school. Thank you for all that we are learning, even as we plumb the depths of Your Word. Thank you for the freedom to do so, and in part of the world where the Bible is more hated than in this country, where Christians are being persecuted, some incarcerated, some put to death because of their faith.

Nevertheless, Father, in Your mercies, You've been especially gracious to us in allowing us to be in this country, which to this point has freedom of religion. Father, as we take advantage of the opportunity to glean truth from Your Word, we ask that You will speak to our hearts, strengthen our hearts, allow us to receive with meekness what You say, and apply the truths as the Spirit drives it into our hearts.

We ask always that the evil one will be silenced and held at bay so that we will only hear from heaven. We ask that the grace You give us so abundantly might be used by us judiciously to listen to You attentively as You speak to us from Your Word. As always, we'll be careful to give You the praise, the honor, and the thanksgiving. Indeed, we ask all of these things in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen.

I call this "Christmas: A Perfectly Timed Inconvenience." Ecclesiastes 3 says something very interesting. In fact, verse 1 says, "To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven." I thought about that long and hard this week as I thought about this particular season. The world does seasons and they expand, but Christianity, the Christian faith, the coming of Christ, is not a seasonal event. It is an event.

The Bible speaks with abruptness and simplicity about the coming of Christ and then moves on into the life of Christ and spends much of its time there. In fact, the only thing found in all four Gospels that is familiar is the death of Christ, His burial, and His resurrection. His coming is just almost an aside. It is an event. It is the most important event. But in our world, where we don't do events so much as seasons, Christmas has been expanded.

It used to be when I was a young kid, it was a week long, and then it became two weeks long, and then it became the entire month of December. Then it backed up into November and the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. Black Friday now begins at the beginning of November. It seems like Black Friday begins about thirty seconds after they're done with Halloween. We go right from celebrating the evil one until talking about this season called Christmas. I think about all of this and get kind of animated.

I wrote some things in my notes and I'll read them so I don't dawdle because I'm working at being brief. Solomon says some interesting things about God and His timing. God made everything appropriate, beautiful in its time, showing that God is not only aware of everything, God has absolute control over everything, even all of the moments and all of the vicissitudes of our life. Everything appropriate in its time.

When I read this account again this week, I thought about that, about the timing of this entire event. When a woman is pregnant—and I'm speaking from second-hand knowledge, obviously—she goes through a season, and it's nine months long. A lot of things go with the season: backache, and the changes in personality when the pain hits. The Drifters back in the '60s sang the song "She's Got a Figure Like a Bottle of Coca-Cola." You go from Coke to penguin as an expression of the changes that are taking place. Gestational diabetes, all this stuff is part of the season.

But then the event takes place. The event is the birth of the child. The thing that you dwell on, the thing that means the most to you, is not all the stuff surrounding the season, but it's that event: the little one. We celebrate the event, and then of course the world traffics in the season. In this particular account, I want us to just think ever so briefly about how these events took place. I want to make three points.

I want to talk about the fact that from a human perspective, Mary's perspective, this seemed like a real inconvenience. But in Galatians 4, it says it was the perfect time. So there's a difference between what we see and face at first. God's plan for Mary indeed seemed very inconvenient. Because when you think about what she went through, there was a decree. That decree meant Mary's got to leave home. Maybe she wasn't planning to leave home. Maybe she was going to be there with all that support structure.

But then there was this dilemma. The angel said, "You're going to be with child. The Holy Spirit will take possession. He's going to overshadow you. The holy thing placed in you will be called the Son of God." Now she's got this dilemma because she's got to explain to people how she got pregnant and say to them, "I haven't been with a man." You can imagine how that would sound and how that went. Joseph, without angelic intervention, without God speaking to him, would have put her away.

Then when they do travel, she was six months when Elizabeth gave birth to John. Then she goes back to Nazareth and then they decide they're going to go down to Bethlehem. It takes a minute to get there. When she's going in the bumpy ride of the donkey or whatever she's riding on, and she's probably seven or eight months pregnant, it's not fun. Very inconvenient.

Then they get there and everybody's scrambling because of this massive influx of people from all over who are there to register, such that there's no room. Everything's very crowded. Then it says that while she was there, she gave birth. Mary's giving birth to her firstborn child and she's a long way from family. Mom and Dad and siblings and everyone else—aunts, uncles—they're all up there in Galilee. She's far away from her support system. There's Joseph's support system, but that's not hers.

I'm sure that if you interviewed Mary at this time and said, "What do you think of God's timing?" she would say, "It rots. I don't know why God couldn't have done it at a more convenient time. I don't know why these things happen this way and all the stuff that I had to go through as a result of that." But that is exactly what happened.

Often what God has in mind for me, what God has in mind for you, it seems so inconvenient for my schedule. When I was here way back in the '80s, I was involved in youth work, Toby, and just as a deacon. I'd started some things: started the men's fellowship, started meeting with some young couples, started meeting with some young guys. We were just busy enjoying ministry and doing it, and then God's calling me away to seminary.

I remember people being puzzled about that. "Why would God pull you away?" Family members, spiritual people around me, friends, they all questioned the timing of God. But God didn't ask them. He didn't ask me either. He just said, "Go." So I just was obedient and I left. Sometimes it's inconvenient for my schedule. Sometimes it's inconvenient for my social status.

God may ask you to do some things that make you shake your head and maybe other people shake their heads too. How would you like to have been a prophet like Isaiah? You wake up one day and God says, "Isaiah, today I want you to strip naked and I want you to walk around barefoot and naked and let people see you. And then when they say, 'Have you lost your mind, Isaiah?' say, 'No, I'm doing this because God said this is how it was going to be when you all get taken into captivity. I'm just modeling what you're going to go through.'"

How many of you would sign up for that assignment? Not many of us. Sometimes God calls us to do things like He says to Hosea, "I want you to marry a... no, not that one, not that one, not that one. Oh, a prostitute? Yeah, that one." It maybe doesn't seem like it makes sense to you what God wants you to do. Maybe what God has in mind challenges your security. Maybe you think, "I need to make a lot of money first."

I mentioned before, I was talking to Teresa Character and asking her, "Teresa, tell me, does Have Christ Will Travel, the mission agency, have a retirement account set up for you?" No. "Do you have a retirement account?" No. "Teresa, have you been saving any money for retirement?" No. I'm just one of those simplistic people. I want to know about the future because that's where I plan to spend the rest of my life. So I want some stuff ahead to drop into the future so when I get there, it'll meet me.

But she said, "No. I just trust the Lord." She says for all of these years, almost fifty years, she's trusted the Lord moment by moment, day by day, and God has supplied all her needs. Praise the Lord. How many of us sign up to live like that? Sometimes what God has you to do might require you to just trust Him and not other people.

But in spite of all of that, it may seem inconvenient, but what God has planned shows that He has full control. God is fully in control of all this while keeping His promises. I went through and I just listed like seven promises that God had that He fulfilled with respect to the Messiah. The Scriptures in the Old Testament say the Messiah would come and He would be victorious from Genesis 3:15, when the first parents sinned and God pronounced judgment on them.

He says to the serpent, "You're going to bruise His heel," her Son, her child, "but He's going to crush your head." God's promising that He would send a Deliverer and the Deliverer would emerge victorious after a brief period of harm. He says in Genesis 12 that the Messiah would come from the nation of Israel. He says to Abraham, "Look up in the stars. Can you count them? That's how your seed's going to be." And He said the Messiah was going to come from the tribe of Judah.

In Genesis 49, He's just dropping these hints. You remember that game they used to come on television a long time ago, Concentration? Yeah, I know you do. But see, people like T—T's like, "What?" It's okay. He's a young man. But those of us who are a little more seasoned, we remember Concentration. It's a simple thing. They just turn over a card and then they turn it back over. You got to guess which of all these other squares contains a similar card. When you match them up, they flip it over and there's a puzzle behind there.

Eventually, when you match everything up, all of it gets turned over and then there's a rebus. A rebus is a statement that's printed out in pictures. The point is what God did is He began to drop hints of what He would do in the Old Testament, and then when the New Testament came along, you could see the fulfillment. Then the picture came together and you could see this is the Messiah. You wind up with Peter's statement: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," because all of the things came together.

The Messiah will come from the house of David (2 Samuel 7). The Messiah will be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14). The Messiah will be born at Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). The Messiah will be visited and honored by wise men (Isaiah 60:3, Psalm 72:10-11). God just began to give all of these hints to what He was going to do, and in Christ, He fulfilled them all. God always keeps His promise and He's able to work out all of the circumstances in your life so that what He promised, He delivers.

I told you before that when I was a young man, I wanted to go to Bible college and it was not at all the will of God at that time for me to go to Bible college. In spite of the fact that every single one of my friends told me that I was supposed to be in Bible college. My youth sponsor, Sister Joanna Usher, she said to me, "Don't listen to them. You do what God told you to do. God wants you in pharmacy school, go to pharmacy school."

So that's what I did. But while I'm there, while I'm practicing pharmacy, I'm reading the Word of God and one day Ecclesiastes says it's good that you hold on to one thing and also not let go of the other, because the one who fears God comes away with them both. I stopped, I looked up and said, "Lord, are You saying to me that You're going to work it out so that I'll be able to stay in pharmacy and still be able to study the Bible?" which was my desire. Confirmation, peace in my heart. I'm going to give you both of them. I don't know how He was going to do it, but He did it. He brought all of those things together.

God does that. When you look at the prophecies, the timing of God was at the right place at the right time. In fact, when I say that what God has planned shows His full control with perfect timing, that's why Galatians 4:4 says, "When the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law." I like the way The Message says it: "When the time arrived that was set by God." He's in full control and He knows exactly what He wants to do and He does what He wants to do in His time. He's made everything appropriate in His time.

Sometimes we say, "I don't know about this. I'm not sure. So I'm just going to go over here." When this is where God wanted you to go, this is where God wanted you to be. You just have to trust Him. God's timing in history involved five things. First, there was the Diaspora evangelism. That was simply the fact that what God did is He dispersed His people, His Jewish people throughout the world. He spread them out before the coming of Christ. He sent them to all these different nations.

That was a great thing. It seemed like a bad thing at the time, but do you know that when Paul got ready to do his mission work, when in Acts they separate Paul and Barnabas for the job that God had appointed them to? You know what they did? They set out and they went to all up and down Asia Minor and everywhere they went, there were Jewish people because God had spread them out. Everywhere they went, when they got ready to start, they met with Jews and they began to teach the Scriptures because there were already people there who were aware of the Scriptures.

Then they would teach these Jews and the Gentiles that had become friends with those Jews, they would teach them the Word of God. But everywhere they went, there were those people that God had placed there ahead of time. That's why God dispersed His people throughout the world. He knew what He was doing. The people might have complained and said, "Man, why are we getting sent away?" God put them there so that when He was ready to plant the seed of the Gospel there, they would be there. It was through them that the churches could start.

Not only that, but there was this Jewish exemption. Rome conquered the whole world. There were all these people, all these nations, all these tribes. They all had all these different religions. Under Rome, they said, "We don't care, you can have all the religion you want. There's just one thing you got to do. You got to say Caesar is God." As long as you say Caesar is God, you can practice anything you want to practice. Everybody in the world did that, except one group.

The Jews said, "We're not doing that." So they cracked down on the Jews, and they wouldn't change. They persecuted the Jews, and they wouldn't change. Finally, they said, "Forget it. We'll give the Jews an exemption. You guys are the only people in the world who don't have to say Caesar is God." Why is that important? Because when the Gospel began to spread out of Jerusalem in Acts chapter 2, the Romans thought it was a Jewish thing because it started in Jerusalem with the Jews.

The Jews had an exemption. So the Romans never really bothered with them. As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, the Romans just said, "It's a Jewish thing. It's that Jewish religion, and they have an exemption." So they never bothered them at all. They could just keep on spreading the Gospel. By the time the Romans realized that not only were they saying Caesar is not King, but that Christ is King, Christianity had spread throughout the Roman world.

God said, "This is the right time because I placed people all over the world and I put it in the mind of Rome to create an exemption so my Son's Gospel can spread throughout the world." Then of course, to spread throughout the world, Pax Romana. This is Caesar Augustus's emphasis. You know there used to be a lot of infighting. You remember Julius Caesar? There was a lot of infighting when Julius Caesar was Emperor. But after he died, things kind of quieted down, and then Caesar Augustus came on the throne.

He was a brilliant man and he held absolute authority. So then he issued his Pax Romana, Roman peace. So there was peace all over the world. With peace all over the world, instead of Rome fighting people everywhere, they began to build roads everywhere. The bridges and create access and ways of travel. So now people could travel all over the world. When Paul became the missionary, he could travel all over the world and of course they could travel in safety because of this peace that Rome had in place.

In fact, Greek as the world language took place at this time. You do realize that initially the world was one language and then Tower of Babel. So God confused the languages. All of these languages from all of these clans all over the world emerged. However, when Rome took over, they were heavily influenced by Greek. Alexander the Great, who was the first world conqueror. So everybody in the world learned Greek. It was the only language that was spoken by everybody in the world.

So the Bible was first written in Koine Greek, the common everyday language. So the Bible became accessible all over the world in the language that everybody could speak. It's the only time since Babel that the world was conversant with one language. Then of course, there was philosophical bankruptcy. That simply meant that people like Aristotle and Plato, those guys, they had a lot of questions about why things happen in life, but they didn't have a lot of answers.

As they began to discuss philosophical issues, Acts 17 is an example of that, they spent all the time just trying to learn something new and tell something new. There was this bankruptcy because people didn't know what was true. There was this thirst for knowledge. So when God sent out His missionaries telling that the answer is found in Jesus, then there was that acceptance. It seemed that it was the wrong time for Mary to have her Son, for Mary to put up with all of these things. But in God's time, it was the perfect time for all of these things to take place.

Christmas is about God's timing in my life, in our lives. It's about all the coincidences, the census, the going to Bethlehem, the little coincidences and circumstances that happen in our lives just like they did in Mary's. She didn't think all these things made sense. They seemed inconvenient, but in the mind of God, it was the perfect time, the perfect scenario, and He moved her in the perfect way to have the solution to mankind.

Someone said one of the great things about going to heaven will be the ability to see how God used the little things in my life to bring about His purposes. I told you before when I was a young man, a single young man, I was lying in my bed. I had real bad asthma and I was allergic to dust. I still am. I woke up and I'm just congested and I can't breathe. I sat up in bed. I was going to lie back down and I thought, "I'm just going to get up."

I got up out of bed and our roof was leaking. I didn't know it at the time, but the water was leaking and it dropped right on my pillow. After I got out of the bed, the entire ceiling dropped right down on top of my pillow. If I had not gotten up out of bed, then I would have been face-planted. I would have been plastered, literally, with ceiling. But God kept me to get up. He woke me up and I moved. Little coincidences like that. I know you can probably think of things in your life, things that happened where you said, "What was that?" and then you look back and say, "Wow, if God had not allowed this to happen, I would be undone." When we get to heaven, we're going to find out that God did a lot of little things that seemed weird to us, but it accomplished His purposes in our lives. That's one of the great joys.

What God has planned should cause me to do three things. Number one, it should cause me to trust Him, to trust Him fully. God not only knows what He's doing, but He's able to get done all that He's doing. So then I need to trust Him. Maybe you're here today and you say, "I need to get better in my life." No, you don't. You need to get right with God. You need to give your life to Jesus Christ. That's why He brought you here. God sent His Son, Jesus came, Christ died for the sins of the world. But the truth of the matter is He died for you. He came for you because you're the one that He loves. You're the one that He wants to be saved. You're the one that He wants to change.

You hold out and you shuffle your feet. You got to trust Him. Salvation is giving up trying to live life on my own terms and coming to Jesus and saying, "Lord, You take control. You call the shots." Then when He does come in, like Revelation 3:20, "My Heart Christ's Home," He has the right to make all the changes He wants. There are going to be some things in your life that He's going to touch and say, "No, we can't have this." And you're going to say, "But that's not so bad."

But the Lord is saying that's got to go. If you ever planted any trees like Brother Lennet, he knows that you have to prune. You got to cut back the deadwood. There may be shoots on the plant and besides it's not doing anything, it's not just not producing, but those shoots that are producing are still sucking energy. So you got to cut them off so that that energy isn't siphoned off, it's now able to be directed to greater pursuits. When you cut off those sucker shoots, then you're able to have a healthier yield. That's what God does in your life and my life. There are things in my life that they need to go. Those things may not be things that are morally wrong, but they're things that just hold me back from being all that God wants me to be.

So I have to surrender and say yes to Him. I need to trust Him fully. And then the second thing, I need to comply. I need to say yes to God without saying, "Fine, be that way." I got to give that up. He knows what He wants. But here's the thing: what God wants for me is way better than anything I can envision for myself. I think that I like this, but the thing that you like may be the very thing that's siphoning your life. God is saying, "Give it up, let it go." And you're holding on. "Let it go." "I am one day."

Remember the movie with Whoopi Goldberg when she was the psychic? "Ghost," yeah. I know y'all saw it. I ain't even going to ask you. But the ghost had her write out the check for a million dollars, was it? He said, "Put it in the orphanage in the donation box." She's holding on to that check, and he said, "Let it go, Oda Mae!" And sometimes we get like that. There are things that God says, "Please, just give it up." And you're holding on and you're trying to convince yourself that you can have your cake and eat it too.

Can I tell you something? In my life over the years, and I've said this before and it is true, there have been things in my life that I wanted to hold on to and God is saying, "Give it up." I might hesitate, but then the Spirit of God would speak to my heart in a way that I recognize that it's Him, and He'll say, "You know what? You will never be happy until you give Me what I want. You're not going to be happy." And I'm like, "That is so true. I'm going to be miserable because all I want to do is be pleasing to Him. I don't want this thing to stand between me and being pleasing."

So okay. And as someone taught me to say years ago, "Lord, it's hard, but I'm willing to be made willing to give You what You want." God will work with that. Philippians 2 says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure. God will give me the "want to" so that now I want to do the thing that pleases Him. I just have to comply and say, "Lord, okay, it's hard for me, but I'm willing to be made willing by You to do the thing that You want." That takes courage.

Then the final thing is joy. If the truth be told, doing what God wants and having what I want, that struggle, that tension, sometimes you say, "I ain't reading today," and you lose your joy. The thing that God wants contradicts what maybe it keeps you from having the complete access to the unsavory friends that you had that you needed to let go a long time ago. There are things and it's brought sorrow to your heart to know that you aren't doing the thing that God wants. Give it up. Choose the joy of the Lord.

For those of you that every year you have real hard times with the Christmas season, and you say Christmas is too commercialized, and it is. Christmas is supposed to be about Christ and it's about everything else, and it is. Then you become Grinch during the Christmas season. Listen, give it up. Choose joy. It is just that, a choice. You can enjoy the fact, even though Jesus wasn't born December 25th, okay? We all know that. In fact, next week when we see that the shepherds were out in the field keeping their flock by night, they don't keep their flock by night in wintertime, they house them. They're out by night because it's warm.

So Jesus wasn't born December 25th. December 25th is just one of those things that the Catholic Church put in place to keep pagans from celebrating the winter solstice and this paganism. So they said, "We're going to focus on the arrival of Christ." And that's true. But listen, Christ did come. And the event, Christ coming, is a great reason to celebrate. Just enjoy the coming of Christ, just choose joy this season instead of complaining and moaning and other things of that ilk. Just choose the joy of the Lord and let that be your strength.

I like when they say obedience is the very best way to show that you believe. I know you say the pastor's done when he closes his Bible and tells a story. This morning I'm going to close my Bible, but I'm not going to tell a story. I'm going to issue a challenge. Can I just challenge you this Christmas, make it about Christ? I know we did a lot of other things that go into that. Can I suggest that this season you make it about Christ? You make it about His coming, you make it about His coming for you, you make it about His coming for those that God has called you into relationship with. Make it about Him.

Can I challenge you? If there are things in your life that prevent you from being all that God wants me to be, can I challenge you to say yes to Him? Don't say, "Yeah, I should." Don't say you should, because that means you're not going to do it. Just will you say yes to Him? Can I challenge you to put Jesus at the very center of all that you do? He came to save you. Will you let Him? Will you let Christmas be about Him and your relationship with Him and let the joy of the Lord fill your heart?

Father, thank you again for this day. Thank you for Your love. Thank you for caring for us and for the way in which You work in our lives. Indeed, Your own timing is Your business. Our business is walking in obedience and submission, surrender. But Father, the truth be told, many times we have expectations as to how You should be working in our lives and what You should be doing in our lives. As we compare what we have with others, as we compare circumstances, as we moan about what's not ours, as we buy into the world's system of buying things that we can't afford with money we don't have to impress people we may not even like.

May it be, Father, that this year we'll put all of that behind us and let the focus be on the All-Lovely One who came in innocence in the manger. As inconvenient as it was for Mary, she still did it and we are the beneficiaries of that. As difficult as it was for Joseph, he still did it and we are the beneficiaries of that. As difficult, I think, Lord Jesus, You said for the joy before You, You endured the cross. But Father, I know that for You to punish Your Son for my benefit could not have been a tasteful thing.

But Father, You did it because of Your great love for me. I'm thankful. I'm unworthy, but I'm grateful that You loved me so much that You looked beyond my unworthiness and You chose to save me. And everyone here, Father, I pray if there's anyone here today who is still holding out and has yet to embrace Jesus in the pardoning of their sins, not received Him as Savior and Lord, still holding out and listening to the excuses that the evil one, the enemy of their soul, perpetrates, I pray that they will shut him out today, bow the knee of their hearts to Jesus and be saved. To make this event the most important thing this year. I ask these things in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen.