"Unwrapping Christmas"

Pantry last week! THANK YOU!! (your stuff)

Christmas Eve -5:30 invite, invite, invite!!

Toys 4 Tots Outreach!! next week!! friends to help!!

Logo "unwrapping"...

Last week: Mary-God with us

INTRO:

Christmas always feels a little more . . . religious. A lot of the songs are about God and angels. There are nativity scenes and signs that say, “Jesus is the reason for the reason.”

Even if you don’t consider your family “religious,” when growing up, you’ve probably still noticed how the volume knob on God, faith, and religion gets turned up during Christmastime. It’s like we’re all thinking about God-stuff a little more than usual!

Because all of this talk about God and Jesus and faith and angels reminds me that I’ve drifted far away. It makes me think about all the things I should be doing, but I’m not. There's something about Christmas that leads us to think about how close or far away from God we feel.

Even if you’re not a Christian, you may actually still get some of the same feelings. Like if there’s a God, there’s a good chance He’s not a big fan of yours right now. If He showed up in your life, it would probably be to strike you with lightning—or at least give you a good lecture.

For some of us, for those of us who have been in church a while, I think sometimes we tune out the Christmas story because we’ve heard it so much. Angels. Wise men. Baby Jesus in a manger. We already know how the story goes.

So who are these people? The shepherds. Believe it or not, the shepherds weren’t just placeholders in the first Christmas story. They were major players!

Which might surprise you. Because when we consider how religious this season is, the shepherds were far from religious. Back in the 1st century, all young Jewish boys were required to memorize certain portions of the Torah—the Jewish law. And then, at a certain age, the high achievers in the group would continue to learn and eventually move on to become teachers, rabbis, or religious leaders. The other boys who didn’t show as much promise? They just took up the family trade.

But when it came to being a shepherd, it was like a bottom-of-the-barrel job option. Shepherds lived in the fields with their sheep. They smelled bad. And because they were physically dirty, they were considered religiously unclean, too. This meant that certain privileges that other men had, like going into the temple to offer sacrifices and worship, were not possible for them.

God obviously knew about the reputation shepherds had. And yet, when it came time for His Son to be born, God chose to tell the shepherds the news FIRST.

It wasn’t like there weren’t other options to tell FIRST. God could’ve told . . .

The innkeepers who turned Mary and Joseph away—just to make a point.

King Herod.

Religious leaders in the Temple.

The carpenters—since that’s what Joseph did for a living

The governors or advisors.

Despite all of those options, God went with a group of ORDINARY shepherds!

The angels say is, “Glory to God in the highest.”

What does that mean? It means God is worthy of worship. And what does that mean? It means that you can count on God because He’s good.

In other words, the angels announce to the Shepherds . . .

God is good.

God is good toward us.

A God who went after the people no one expected.

A God who revealed Himself to people everyone else counted out.

A God who sent Jesus to pay what we owed.

A God who sent Jesus to remove the barrier between Him and us.

...Let's see what happens next:

This same good news is what we celebrate this time of year. And it began with God sending angels to talk to a group of ordinary shepherds!

-This story illustrates one of our FCC core value: God using us ordinary people to be a part of His plan...like he used ordinary shepherds

FCC core value: We are ordinary people doing God’s extraordinary work. To accomplish our mission, we must step out in visionary faith and take risks for God.

This story also shows obedience & action . .

-The Shepherds obeyed & acted. What do you need to obey God with & act on today?