I'd like for you to turn in your scriptures today or read it on the screen or your phone, whatever you want. In Luke chapter two, it's just two verses, or you can just listen along however you like. And it's in Luke chapter two, and it's just verses six and seven. And it's talking about the holy family, Mary and Joseph, Jesus as he was born. And they went to the town of Bethlehem.

And it says this. While they were there, they had shown up for a census that was required by the government. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her son, a firstborn son, and wrapped him in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. We'll talk about that word in a minute.

But before we get into this story too deeply, we need to back up about 1400 years, because it really kind of plays into this. I've been doing that a lot the last couple of times I preached back in, way up. 1400 years before Jesus was ever born, before 1400 years before Mary and Joseph had to respond to a government mandate to show up to a census. 1400 years before they ever got turned away from a lodging place, 1400 years before Jesus would be born in truly, what was a shepherd's cave. Sorry, our nativities are kind of a little bit wrong on the details.

They usually look like a modern barn, stable. It's kind of not what it was, but. But 1400 years before all of that, God had told his people, the children of Israel, the Israelite nation. He told them that he was going to lead them into a land that he described as flowing with milk and honey. Now, anybody ever tried to picture what that looks like?

Like, just milk and honey flowing everywhere. Like, is that what he meant? No, probably not. You know, I used to think of it as, well, he was talking about something like, where, like, it's like going, moving into a house, and the refrigerator's already stocked. Like, that's kind of cool.

Hopefully they like the same stuff you like, you know, but, like, that's not even what he meant. What he was saying was, this land is a piece of geography that God had specifically designed to meet the needs of his people. Some of his people would raise animals. They were called the milk people. Shepherds raising sheep, farmers, ranchers raising cattle and other animals.

These were, you know, the things where you get milk from those things. And then the honey people were the ones that they would plant crops. And some of them would be like fruits and trees and things, and they would take the fruit off of that and they would kind of dry it out, press it into cakes, and the sugars would crystallize in there. And they called that honey. So, like, John the Baptist lived in the wilderness.

Eating wild honey doesn't mean he was just finding, like, beehives and like Winnie the Pooh Bear, you know, digging in. Like, no matter how many times he gets stung, he's just grabbing scoops of honey. That's not it. It's good for you. Keith and I were talking about that yesterday.

Like, it's good to eat, you know, like, honey every day, local honey. That's good stuff. But that wasn't what John was living off of. He was eating, like, fruit that he picked in the middle of nowhere that was just growing wild. He's living off the land, so to speak.

And so God was telling the Children of Israel, 1400 years before Christ was born, I'm going to lead you. They had come out of Egypt by his miraculous right hand, and they went through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and they were in the wilderness. And he says, I'm leading you to a land flowing with milk and honey. It's as if he had taken a brush and painted these little strips of geography of turf, that some parts of it were for crops and growing food, and some of them were for sheep to graze in and all these things. And he was saying, this is how the land itself is designed.

I designed it for you. God said, this is my land that I'm giving to my chosen people, and you're going to live there. And so this meant that at one point of the year after the crops were harvested in the barley fields, the sheep would be able to go and graze on the stalks, the stubble that was left after the harvesters had harvested the grain. And so they would move in, the milk people would move into the turf of the honey people, and the sheep would eat that stubble there, and they would eat there, and then they would leave their excrement behind, which would fertilize the ground for the farmers to grow their crops on the next year. It was a great cycle, a great system that they had, and God had set it all up, that there would be certain times of the year that the shepherds would migrate their flocks to a certain geographical strip or land or location every year now, 700 years after that, the people had lived in the land for a period of time.

And then there was a period of time that's called the exile, which. Where they were like they had been disobeying God for so long, serving other gods, ignoring him, taking God and just kind of making him whatever they wanted him to be. You've never heard of anybody doing that today, have you? Well, my God does this, or, well, I believe in a God who does that. I can't believe in a God who would ever allow evil to happen to good people.

I can't believe in a God who would ever send somebody to hell. That kind of stuff. People create God in the image they want him to be in. And that's what the people of Israel were doing for so long. And so God said, if you don't stop this, you won't be able to live in this land anymore.

This land was made for people who will worship me and serve me, and you guys aren't doing that. So there was a period of time where a neighboring nation, an empire had come in, overtaken them, conquered them, and removed them from the land. And as they did that, they're living in this foreign land and. And some of the people kind of fell away, and they just adopted the culture of the people they moved in with. I know some Christians that live that way.

I'm ashamed to admit that there's been times as a Christian where I looked more like the people I worked with, the people I was around, than I sounded like somebody that was serving Jesus Christ. And so some of them did that, but some of them said, just because I'm not in the land, just because I can't go to the temple to worship doesn't mean that I'm not going to stand firm in my faith and still serve my God. One of those people was a man named Daniel. This is 700 years before Jesus is born, this guy named Daniel. And he had these three friends that were similar to him.

They were young men. By the way, the movements of revival in the people of God almost always have happened because younger men will stand up and say, no, I will serve God. I don't care what anybody else says. I'm serving God. They lead their families into that.

They lead their lives into that. They change their workplaces because they say, no, I will stand on the truth of the word of God, and I'm going to live my life according to the word of God. And that's how revival movements in our modern civilization, but dating all the way back to biblical times, they happened because of the young men, women. You have a part in it, too. Older folks.

We need you. Guess What? I'm like 40 how old, Amy? Where's my wife? I'm 42, I think.

I think I'm about to turn 43. I forget I'm somewhere around there, though. I guess the age is hitting me, you know, Where? I don't remember. It doesn't matter.

That's the point. I'm in my 40s, and it doesn't really matter which one of the 40s I'm in. I'm in there and I realize at this point, like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I thought I knew in my 20s that I had no clue about. And I'm starting to figure it out now. Like, now, 20 years later, I'm starting to figure these things out that I thought I had a grip on back then.

But also I realized there's some stuff that I need to learn before I hit, like, 60, you know, and I really want to start learning that now. And so I'm working on that. But that also means I need some of you guys that are 60 and up to, like, model it really well, you know what I'm saying? Because I've got the 20 somethings looking to me and I'm like, oh, no, not me. I was doing dumb stuff like you when I was 20 years younger.

You know, Like, I'm just figuring it out now. And so it's like we need the older generation to help model the younger generation. Not to judge them, not to. Not to look down on them, not to tell them everything they're doing wrong, but to show us how to love your wives, show us how to be a good. To love your husband, show us how to be a good husband, a good wife.

You see what I'm saying? We need these. I talked about it two weeks ago when I was up here talking about John the Baptist and how the angel had spoken to John's father and said that his son John would help to mend the generations, bring the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers to restore that. And I understand that sometimes that's not possible because of some issues that fathers or sons have done towards each other. And it just.

Sometimes reconciliation isn't possible. Sometimes that person is passed on. And so that's not available to do. But that doesn't mean we can't still look to the generations above or below us and realize what we need from each other. So, Daniel, this young man and his three friends, they're in Babylon.

Now, this is a land where everything in Babylon is opposed to the people of God. Everything is Set up that's trying to, like, undo them. Daniel and his brothers. There's at least three of them. They're not actual brothers, but his countrymen that committed to following God in the face of utter and despondent evil.

And they tried to eliminate them. I mean, they tried to burn his buddies. They threw him into a big, huge fiery furnace. And they didn't die. In fact, they met Jesus in there.

That's pretty cool, right? Like, they're walking around in the flames. The guards that threw them in died from the heat. And they're walking around, and the king's like, wait a minute, there's four. Didn't I tell you to put three guys in there?

There's four guys. And that one looks like the son of the gods. Yeah, he is. He's the son of God. He's Jesus.

They met Jesus in there. When you stand firm in your faith so many times, that's when you get closest to Christ, when you stand firm against opposition, against people wanting to eliminate you. And so Daniel and his buddies, Daniel, they threw him in a pit full of hungry lions and. And God shut the mouths of the lions because they had no power over him. And so these men were saved because of their faith in God.

But even notice the three young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they said, listen, if you throw us into that furnace, our God can save us. But even if he chooses not to, we're still not going to bow down and worship your idols, O King. They respected their king. They didn't curse him, but they refused to do the things that he was telling them to do that were antithetical to the truth of God. They lived in this world where the pagans were trying to steer them away from their faith.

And we can identify with some of that now. Most of you probably don't have somebody like, literally writing laws to attack your faith like they did with Daniel. When they couldn't trip Daniel up on any matters of treason against the king or anything like that, they got the king to write a law that said, hey, everybody should just pray to you for a month. And the king says, sounds good to me. Let it be so.

And so they made this stupid law where everybody was supposed to pray to the king. How dumb is that? Like, he doesn't even hear you. Daniel still prayed to his God three times a day. He opened the doors in his, like, upper floor, looked out towards where the temple was in Jerusalem, and he prayed to the God of heaven from there, where everybody could see it.

And that's what got him arrested. Because the only law he would break was one that was written to prevent him from worshiping his God. That's when he was willing to break the law.

One of the things Daniel did was he learned all of the stuff that the Babylonians tried to teach him. Even the stuff that he knew was wrong, he still learned it. In fact, he passed the test better than their own countrymen did. Like Daniel was, you know, he was an astrologer. Now, looking to the stars, which you kind of can't do very much where we live because there's too much light pollution and I hate it.

But if you get out into the country really far, where there's no, like, nobody lives there, too much, you can look up and see all these stars, and you're like, it's so beautiful. Well, they would look to the stars, but they were looking to them for signs. They would look to the stars because they believed the stars would help direct their life. They didn't realize that it was the one who placed the stars in the heavens that was the one calling to them, that he was calling to them through the stars. So what Daniel did was he taught these men.

They were his colleagues. He said, I want you to be ready to look for a certain sign. There's going to be a sign in the heavens one day. I don't know when, but there's going to be a sign in the heavens that will point you to the one true savior, the King of the Jews. And he taught them to look through their own pagan methods, to look to the heavens for a sign.

I want you guys to be able to live your faith out boldly. Like, I want you to have a faith like Daniel, where you are so, so assured of your faith in Christ that you can boldly live it out in front of others. Not in a. In a in your face kind of way or an at you kind of way, but. But in a way that is clearly showing that Christ has done something in your heart, that he has changed your life and that there's a difference in how you walk and a difference in how you talk and a difference in the things that you enjoy.

There's a difference between the patterns of the world and the patterns that we lay forth in our own life.

One of the things that Jesus calls us to do is to be his disciple. We'll talk a little bit more about that early on into the new year. And, Elaine, we were kind of talking about some of that this morning before service, about really what somebody like Jesus meant When he talked to people to be his disciples, and when he would say things like, take my yoke upon you. And what does that mean? You know, it means, like, the totality of his teachings about the Scriptures, those kinds of things.

And we'll look into that in a few weeks. But one of the things that we see when we look at what Christ is enabling us or calling us to do is to be a disciple of his. Be somebody that follows him so closely that people see Christ in the way that we live. That's what we're supposed to do. That's who we're supposed to be.

No matter what, your walk in life is your calling, your job, your community that you live in, whatever it might be, you're supposed to be walking so close to Christ that you look like him, that you sound like him, you talk like Him. Now, I know you don't have, like, the voice of Jesus. I'm not saying we can hear that. What I'm saying is we pattern our lives after the teachings of Christ. And I'll tell you, it's a terrible method of you to try to figure out what that looks like by just listening to me talk.

Because, one, I'll miss some stuff. I might get a couple things wrong. That's why there's notes in your sermon guide booklet that say, I think the preacher got it wrong here. And that's why you can come to Sunday school after the service, so we can talk about those notes that you took or questions that you have or whatever it might be. But one of the things that it also means is you don't really get that much in your life.

Like, as far as learning what it means to be a Christian, you're not getting that much from me. I mean, I'll do my best, but I can't possibly tell you everything you need to know. One sermon a week. I can't even add to it with the daily devotionals enough to make you a true disciple. You've got to get into this book yourselves.

You've got to get. Well, not this one. Get your own. But you got to get into the Bible yourselves. If you're like me.

This one's too hard to read anymore anyways. Like, I need the readers. But this book right here, the Bible that God has given to you, it's a library of books all in 1. There's 66 volumes in here written by over 40 different men and written over a period of over 1500 years that God wrote down, had them writing it, and then it's been reliably preserved for you see, God wrote it to certain people at different times. Each one of these different books and authors was written to a certain person or group of people.

But it has been preserved for you. How much time do you spend in it? How much time. If you're going to be a disciple of Christ, how much time do you spend saying, lord, how do I know more about you by reading your Word? You could just live in the Gospels.

I mean, there's a pastor that I listen to every week. And their church for years now has been just preaching from the Gospel of Matthew, like three years running. They've never left that book. Every sermon is something from in there. And it's beautiful.

It's great. I'm learning so much just from listening to those sermons from that pastor. And so as we look at that, it's like you think, oh, I can come to church and I'm good. That'll carry me for a few days. No, it won't.

If by Tuesday you haven't picked up the word of God, you're missing out. You have to read it for yourself. Listen, I'm here for you. Like, there's things. I mean, I can put resources in here.

Like at the beginning of this thing, there's, I think it's like page six or seven. And if you don't have one, there's extra copies under the basket in the back. And if you're online listening, thanks for being here. We'll get you one. If you want one, just let me know.

But there's a Bible reading plan that's on pages four and five. It's a year. You can read through the Bible in a whole year. And the nice thing is you can start at any time. It doesn't have to be on a specific day.

Like, you can start today or tomorrow. It's a good thing. And so you can use those resources. But, like, I can't be there with you every day holding your hand through it. But if you do have questions along the way, I'm happy to talk with you about them.

It's like my favorite thing. I love it. We got opportunities after service in our Sunday school class. We have pastors Bible study on Wednesdays at 11 o'. Clock.

But beyond that, I'm available to you if you want to meet and talk about some stuff. I'd love to. Or if you're like, I don't know, I haven't been reading that much, but I want to know what God has for me. I can help guide you through that and point you to it. And so I'd love to be able to do that.

But you're not just called to be a disciple. You're also called to make other disciples. And that might be a foreign concept to you. You're like, pastor Nick, I don't even understand what you mean by that. Jesus never intended for there to just be one generation of church leaders.

He set up his disciples. He trained them for three years at least, and he trained them in what to do, what to say, how to heal people, how to drive out unclean spirits, how to do all these different things. But he never intended it to stop with their generation. You see, they were also supposed to go after that and make more disciples. And then those disciples, their job was to make the next generation of disciples, so on and so forth.

And if we don't do that, if we stop, then it stops with us. Well, okay, God isn't going to do that. He's going to find somebody who's willing. But wouldn't you rather it be you? Wouldn't you rather be able, when you die, when you go to meet your maker, to face him and him, to say, well done, my good and faithful servant.

You've been faithful in the few things that I gave you. Welcome to your eternal inheritance. Rather than just saying, like, well, all right, God, you know, like, I was a pretty good Christian. Thanks for saving me. Do I get to come to heaven?

He's like, I mean, yeah, I don't know how much you're going to enjoy it. The whole thing was about bringing other people in to be part of this party, and you took no part in that. So you're really going to be sitting like that guy at the outside of the party, like, well, that looks like fun. Have you ever been that person at a party? Have you ever been at a group, a gathering or something?

And you're like, I don't really know any of these people. You ever been there? Yeah, it's not fun, is it? Why not start packing heaven with people that you know and love here on this earth and drag them with you to heaven by the grace of Jesus, literally. And then you're gonna be like, look at all these people that I got helped.

Like, I helped bring them here. They're like, yeah, look at all these people that I brought here. I did the same thing. Like, you made a disciple out of me. I made a disciple out of someone else.

And the thing just keeps going. What a party. That's what heaven's all about. And so many of us are just kind of like, eh, I'm glad to be able to go to church on Sunday. And every now and then I might say God bless you to someone.

And that's about it. Like, seriously, how boring. Come on. All right, we gotta lighten up. All right, cool.

Some days though, life is just mundane. It's just kind of like simple, even keel. It's not like hills and valleys all the time. And thank God for that, right? Like sometimes we like the rainy days.

Anybody like rainy days? Some of us, yes. The rest of you are like, no, I live in Florida. I came here for a reason. Rainy days are great.

Especially if you, like, worked for a long time in outdoor stuff, right? Like when you're mowing and stuff, you like, you're like, rainy day. I might get the day off. The problem is when it, like, Elijah used to work with me when we mowed lawns. So like back in the day, if it was raining in the afternoon, it's like, nah, toughen up, boy.

You're gonna finish the day. You know, like, we put grass on the ground, we got on the concrete. We still got to get the blowers out when this rains done and clean it up because we'll get a phone call if we don't. So it's like we had, you know, we would have to do that stuff. I say we, like the crew had to do that.

I wasn't usually getting that wet. I. I was the boss. But anyway, I would get out there too, though. I'd get out there too sometimes. Well, anyway, so we, you know, when it's a rainy day and you work outside and it's raining at 6am you're like, yes, I get the day off today.

I don't get money, but I don't have to work. And that was. It seemed like a good trade off, you know, like you enjoyed that day off. I still love rainy days for that reason. Because for over 20 years, I did some kind of outdoor, you know, yard work, lawn services, all that stuff.

Barclays nodding too. He's been there. And it's like, you're man, I get a day of rest today I'm going to do nothing because everything I need to do is outside is either work or is fixing my truck. And I'm not doing that in the rain either. So I'm just staying inside today.

It's going to be great. Sometimes it's just a rainy day. It's just mundane. It's simple. There's not much going on in the mundane periods of life.

In the days where it's a metaphorical rainy day for a long time. And those days is when you drill down on your faithfulness on your Christian walk like nothing extraordinarily big is happening. But there's also, thank God, there's no, like, horrible drama, terrible things that are happening. You don't really have to dig deep into your faith for those things. And there's nothing like super exciting going on.

You're just kind of going through it, just normal stuff. In the times of mundaness, drill down, double down on your faithfulness in serving God. On those days are the times that you dig deep into your faith. And that way you're ready for the extraordinary, for the hills and the valleys. You're ready for those times because you're rooted and grounded firmly in your faith.

So that brings us to the story. We went back 1400 years, then 700 years, and now here we are at the birth of Christ. Mary and Joseph, for all we know, lived fairly mundane lives up until the angel visited them and told them that Mary was going to give birth to the Savior of the world. We don't know much of anything about their lives other than what we can surmise from a few details. Joseph was what the Greek, the scripture, the New Testament was written in Greek.

And the word that the scripture uses in the Greek as a tectonic. He was a tecton. Sometimes it's translated as carpenter. It's an adequate word. It doesn't fully describe the picture that we have in our minds when we hear the word carpenter.

He's really a tradesman of sorts. Like, he had a. If he was in modern day, he'd have like a truck with a bunch of tools in it that he could kind of tackle any job. Maybe, I don't know, maybe he was a stonemason. They built a lot of things with stone back then.

Maybe he did build furniture and he had like, you know, woodworking tools. We don't fully know what he did. He was a tradesman, a tecton. That's what Joseph was. Mary hadn't done anything yet.

She was just young. She was of marriageable age, teenager. Joseph's probably around 20 or so. And 20 to 30 was when men would typically get married. And so all we know about them is simply where they lived, what tribal like, groups they were from in the Israelite tribes.

And that's about it. And what we realize is they live fairly ordinary lives, fairly mundane existence, as far as we can tell, except that they had been faithful Jewish people following the word of God, following the law. We see that throughout their whole lives. The little stories that we get of like presenting Jesus to the temple when it was the time for him to be presented there, we see that in the stories of just how faithfully they obeyed God. Even when he gave them a vision or an angel in a dream or something like that to speak to them, they didn't just say, well, that's weird, that can't be real.

They knew that sometimes God speaks to his people that way. And so they listened and they obeyed. We know that they were faithful in all the things. They were faithful to attend different festivals that God had given in his law for the Jewish people to attend at the temple, and they were faithful in their attendance to that. They lived according to the word of God and the law of God.

But even in their kind of average everyday life, they were faithful to God So that when the extraordinary happens, and I'll say an angel visiting you and telling you, like, hey, you're a young virgin girl, but you're going to give birth to a son, and he's going to be the savior of the world. And her response was, I'm the Lord's servant, may it be unto me as you have spoken. And so in these mundane days, they lived a life of faithfulness to God. So that way, when the extraordinary happened, they were ready to accept it on faith and to live it out. And I want you guys to be able to do that in your life.

Like, God might have a big calling for you that he's been hinting at, but you haven't been listening to because you haven't been digging into your faith and setting down solid foundations and roots of your faith. But God has something big for you, like to be a disciple of Christ who makes more disciples. Amen. And whatever it is, whether you're still, like, working, you know, I know a lot of us are retired, but some of us are still kind of young. Ish.

And like, you know, wherever you work or wherever you live, like if you're in a community, some kind of a townhouse community, or a mobile home park, RV park, whatever it might be, wherever you live, wherever you work, whatever business you're involved in, or whatever your community group of people you hang out with, whatever your friend circle is, I want you to know that God is putting on your heart, I believe, an urgency to share the gospel with others. Now, that doesn't always mean it's going to be like the form of, like a gospel tract, you know, where sometimes people pass those out and it's like, where would you go if you died today, would you go to heaven or hell? How do you know? It's not always like that. Sometimes it's just simply saying, can I share with you what God's been doing in my heart and in my life?

Sometimes it's just simply giving testimony to your faith and leaving it at that. And that God will be drawing people into him, and as he does that, they'll know who they can come and talk to because you're the person that's willing to share your faith publicly. And so you're be the person that's willing to share your faith privately with them.

So Joseph was given direction by God through angels on multiple occasions. And they showed up in the town of Bethlehem not because, at least in their mind, not because of a prophecy of any kind that had been spoken hundreds of years before. But they showed up because the ruler of the Roman world, the Caesar, had given a command that everybody needed to go and register this census for. It was also paying taxes. Like, it was just a tax scheme for them, really.

But they're like, hey, why doesn't everybody just travel to where your family's from and go stay there and then register for the census, Pay a tax. Of course, you know, you have to pay us for the privilege of this. You know what I'm saying? Like, fun times. The government really isn't any better now than they were back then.

We just don't have to go anywhere for the census. They, like, knock on your door or something, which I don't remember ever talking to a census man or woman. So I don't know where they're getting their data from. I think they're spying on me through my cell phone. That's a joke.

100% know that they are. Anyway, they get up and they travel. It's not the best time. Mary's quite pregnant. The time has come for her to give birth.

And it's moments or days or hours away when they show up into town. It's not like some of you that got a letter for jury duty and you were able to call him and say, I don't think I can do it because I've got this or that. Like, first of all, I don't like you. I want jury duty. Like, I want to serve on a trial.

It's a dream of mine. And I'm pretty sure they won't ever let me because I'm a pastor, and somehow we can't be trusted with, like, you know, not having an opinion already. I guess that's a. Where's My wife. Oh, she's upstairs leading a craft.

I'm like, Amy would have loved that joke, you know, I'll let her listen to it later online. She's always told me, I have an opinion about everything. I'm like, yeah, everyone does. Just some of us don't know how to keep it to ourselves, you know. So anyway, I'm a pastor, I get paid to talk for a living, so of course I'm going to share my opinion.

They show up. It's not the best time, but they show up for the census, they show up to pay the tax for the privilege of being there. And they went to go look for a place to stay. Now, the word so many times, and we're used to it, is the inn. There was no room for them in the inn.

The problem is they didn't just have like Holiday Inns and Motel Sixes and everything in between. There were certain lodging places that you could pay to stay for the night. And there was a different word that was used for that. And that's not the word that was used in the Greek scripture that we would translate that word differently. That's not the word that was used.

But the in waste was a place. They had these homes, they're one level homes with a flat roof. So it was kind of an open air second floor. And in some kind of a corner on their homes, there would be this separate, like storage room. That's where they would store food and dry goods in there a lot of times, especially to kind of keep it away from like bugs and rodents and things as much as they could.

And also, if you had travelers coming to visit you, they could bunk up there, they could sleep in there and kind of be out of the weather, out of the elements. And that room, if you might have guessed it would be what we would translate as the inn. That was the inn. It would be family members, the family members, the relatives, maybe distant relatives, but the relatives of Joseph or Mary didn't have room for them there. Now, I don't know how much they like pressed it upon people to say, here's our sob story.

Yeah, I know we haven't. We've been married less time than she's been pregnant. Like, I can do math too, you know, Like, I know that what it looks like, but trust me, it's not like that. You see, here's the deal. This guy's gonna be the savior of the world.

And they're like, nah, not buying it. I don't think so, guys. And they wouldn't let them Stay there. They kicked him out. They didn't give them a place to stay.

There was no room for Jesus in their lives. Can you imagine that? There's no room for Jesus in the lives of people that. That were even probably related to him in some way. Maybe a distant relative.

But they said, no, thanks. Now, maybe truly they didn't have room. There's other travelers. Maybe they were already filled up with people that got there sooner. We don't really know.

We're not told the whole story. Maybe we don't need to know that. We don't need their excuses, their reasons. Maybe some of them are legitimate reasons. I don't know.

There's no room. There was no room for Jesus there. And so they had to leave. They went outside of town. They found what was probably a cave that shepherds used from time to time when lambs would be birthed.

And sometimes those things were. They had, like, supplies in there, maybe some. Some. Some animal skins, you know, that they could lay on, some strips of cloth for bandaging up lambs that were born or injured or something like that. And so Mary and Joseph used what they had.

And when Jesus was born, the scripture tells us that she wrapped him in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, which is like a water trough. I know we always have pictures of, like, hay in there. But the animals didn't get to stay inside. You know, the people stayed inside. And they would bring a little bit of food to the sick animals, but really they brought the animals to the food.

That's why they were out there in the fields, in the pastures. And so 700 years before all this, God had spoken that through Daniel, that there would be some signs in the heavens when his king would be born. And Daniel had taught these men, and they passed it from generation to generation to generation, until that group of men that showed up, these wise men showed up and they said, where's the king that was to be born, the King of the Jews? Daniel had taught them. And from generation on, they taught it down, down, down, until these men showed up.

700 years later, 1400 years before, God had said there would be this promised land with strips of milk and honey, flowing with milk and honey, that there would be shepherds that would be in that place at that time of year, at that month, at that moment, so that when his son was born, he could say, he could send angels that said to the shepherds, there is a son born to you, the Savior of the world. And they went there and they worshiped him. And the Angels showed up and they sang a beautiful chorus while Jesus was there, presented to them the shepherds, the lowest rung on the cultural ladder, the guys that nobody wanted to be around. Literally, they were stinky and smelly and dirty and nobody wanted to hang out with shepherds. But God invited them, both them and kings, to the birth of his son to celebrate that, to worship him there.

God's timing is perfect. He had timed all this stuff out for hundreds of years or over a thousand years. He had set this all in motion, that at that moment, these people would show up at their appointed times to worship His Son. So now there's you. You're here.

Congratulations, you're here. And at this very moment, God has appointed a time for you. It's not on me, I don't know what it is, but God has put a time in your life. Maybe you're in that kind of mundane, like rainy day season, that everyday season where it all kind of seems the same. Drill down on your faith.

Learn more about Christ. Dig into videos on rightnow Media, read the scriptures, whatever it might be. Get involved in investigating your own faith and finding out why it is that you believe the things you believe. And know that the God who has saved you is the God who has faith, faithful in those times. So that when you go to the times of extraordinary, amazing, awesome things, or whether you're down in the pits going through the worst things you could ever think you might experience, that you'll have that foundation of faith that will carry you through that.

Know that God has called you. Just as he set up the times for Christ to be born, he set up times in your life that he has divine appointments with you and he's drawing you to Himself in that.

Most of all, I think about the idea of not having room for Christ. And I got to confess to you that there's times in my life where I don't have room for Christ in my life. There's times in my life where I say, ah, this is a little more important right now. This thing sounds a little more interesting. You know the guest that's on my favorite podcast?

Like, I really want to hear that. I'll get with you later, God, you'll always be here, right? Oh, absolutely, he will. So many times I conduct my life in such a way that I'm saying I don't have room for Christ.

So we think those people that turned his parents away for his birth must have been pretty cold hearted, huh? To say there's no room for you here. And yet I live my life that way so many times. I want to encourage you before Pastor Kendall comes up, I want to encourage you that he's going to have room for you eternally in heaven. Make room for him in your life today, right now.

Amen.