But let's read in Matthew, chapter 2, verses 13 through 23. After they the magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, get up. Take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to look for the child to kill him. Then he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and went to Egypt.

He stayed there until Herod died. In this way, what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet was fulfilled. I called my son out of Egypt. Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he became enraged. He sent men to kill the children in Bethlehem and throughout the surrounding region from the age of 2 and under, according to the time he had learned from the wise men.

Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled. A voice was heard in Ramah weeping in loud mourning Rachel, weeping for her children. And she refused to be comforted because they were no more. After Herod had died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, get up. Take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who are seeking the child's life are dead.

So he got up, he took the child and his mother and returned to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. After being warned in a dream, he went to the regions of Galilee. He came to a town called Nazareth and lived there. Then what was fulfilled that had been spoken by the prophets was fulfilled that Jesus would be called a Nazarene.

So Jesus was born in these, like, glorious way, right? I mean, angels showed up in the heavens. And by the way, I've got a theory on that. Like, I'm already interrupting myself. I got a theory on the angels.

I believe they were always there. It's not that they just, like, showed up. It's that there's this veil that's between the world that we live in, what we can, you know, see, smell, hear, touch, feel, taste. Like there's the world that we live in with our senses, and then there's this spiritual realm that we don't see. It's been called the spiritual realm, the unseen realm, all these things.

It's the realm where God dwells. It's the realm where angels live. It's the realm where all these things are. It's even there's the unseen evil forces, evil spirits that are in this world. And they're all around us.

There's times in the scripture where there was angels protecting people. For instance, one of the prophets, he's got men that are coming up, A whole army is coming to take him captive, and his servant is with him, and he's shaking in his boots, and the prophet says, nah, we're good. And the guy's like, do you see all that? He's like, lord, open his eyes so he can see what I see. And he opens his servant's eyes and he can see this army of angels that's protecting him.

There's times where even the believers don't see the angels, but there are others that do. But there's a story of a missionary named Otto Koning, and he had people surrounding his house one night. They were ready to attack him and his family. But the people that he was on mission to is kind of an ironic thing, you know, like sometimes that happens in churches for pastors, right? You know, like your own sheep attacking you.

But anyway, I thank you guys for not being like that. You're awesome.

But I've heard some horror stories, you know? And so there's these people, they come up to attack them, and then it turns out they don't. And the pastor and his wife, they've been praying and they pray all night, and they never get attacked. And they're wondering why not. And then the next day or two, they talk with the leader of the tribe, and they say, what happened?

I thought you guys were coming to kill us. He said, well, we couldn't get in there with all those men you had around you, huh? The missionary didn't even notice. He couldn't see. But.

But the enemy could see that there were angels surrounding his family's house and protecting them. So sometimes these things are there and we don't see them. But then God allows the veil to be pierced between our realm and that spiritual realm where we can see what's going on, where we can see what God is doing. And so I believe on the night of Jesus birth, there were angels that were already singing a joyous song praising God for the birth of his son to come and save humanity. Did you know that angels rejoice when people come to know Christ?

When people come to know Christ, the scriptures tell us that there's a party in heaven, that angels rejoice every time because their number one goal is to see God's number one goal happen. And God's biggest desire is salvation. He wants you and I to be saved. He wants us to go and reach Others so that they can be saved, redeemed from their sins and brought into new life in Christ. And so the angels rejoice at that.

And so when we see that angels were rejoicing at Christ's birth because they saw God's plan unfolding. But in those moments, as the shepherds had been alerted to the birth of Christ and they showed up, God allowed the veil to be pierced. It was a thin spot in that veil, I guess, and they could see the angels, they could hear the angelic choir and they were able to rejoice along with the heavenly host of God. Jesus was born in a glorious way and yet it was very humble in its circumstances, in its setting. It was a humble place and they'd gotten there with much hardship and trial.

And so as they were there then in a short amount of time, in some amount of time after this, we looked, I think last week, how 40 days had passed and they would have gone to the temple. Then Jesus was presented there and an old guy named Simeon and an older lady named Anna had both beheld Christ. Simeon prophesied over him and praised who he was and what he would do. But as they were there, they returned back apparently to a home, a house of some kind in Bethlehem. And they were there for some amount of time after that.

40 days had passed where the magi showed up, these wise men from somewhere to the far east, these astrologers showed up and they worshiped Christ and they gave him these gifts and they supported him with that. And then they left and went on their way.

This birth of Christ was very, very spectacular, very odd. It wasn't normal for anyone, it was unprecedented if you will.

But Jesus as an infant is immediately hunted by an evil ruler. He's immediately like they send a killing squad after him. This guy immediately sends a group of people and not just to kill him. He's not sure if he's going to get the right one. And so he says anybody that's under the age of two, that's a safe number for him.

He says, I don't know how long ago the child was born, but I know when these guys saw the star or the sign in the heavens and, and so I'm backtracking it to that. And so any child that age and younger, I want them slaughtered. In one part is terrible. On another hand we comfort ourselves and say, well it was a small village. Bethlehem maybe had four or five hundred people.

How many two year old and under boys could there have been?

One. One child being slaughtered is despicable. One, one child being killed, an innocent little kid being slaughtered by somebody in power, somebody in the government, whatever it might be, is heart wrenching. 10 or 12 is a tragedy of huge proportions. And this is what was going on at the hands of the government.

And I say anybody, anybody who is willing to maintain their power or achieve more power or status in life at the expense of a life of a child is not a human being that is very pleasant to be around. That's not a human being, that's not a person that is living at all how God would have them to live. In fact, I believe that they are more influenced by Satan than anything else. I want to tell you about some of these people, specifically Herod and then Joseph and Mary. Herod was this guy who, his name was Herod the Great.

If you read through your gospels and the book of Acts especially, you'll find several different men named Herod. And it gets confusing. And I'm not going to try to like tell you straight who they all are because it's like a two page thing that I wrote from my own notes just to keep it straight in my own head as I researched all this. And I'll tell you, it gets confusing after a bit. But one thing I did take away from all of this study that I did over a few hours, honestly about the Herod dynasty is that all these guys that were related to him, the ones that were fortunate enough to make it through to adulthood because he killed some of his own sons and wives, he was a bad dude.

Anyway, Herod the Great, he became king over the Israel area, the Jewish area, in the year 37 BC before Christ. And he ruled until the year 4 BC whenever he died, he came in, he conquered Israel, conquered Judah and Judea. He conquered these areas and became the ruler over them, kind of uniting them under the. He was a king under the power of Caesar of Rome. And he would end up having his sons.

After he died, three of his sons took over and they ruled in his place. And so Herod did a lot of things. He murdered many people. He also built a lot of things. He actually built the temple.

It was already built, but he like expanded it, made a huge building project. He did all kinds of great things in that sense. But what Herod did was on the time where he was dying, he wanted to make sure that somebody would be grieving after he died because he didn't think anybody would grieve him for his life, for his passing. And it reminds me of a king in the Old Testament where it says that he died to no one's regret. Nobody cared.

And they didn't have a big fire in his honor. And that just made me sad. I think I told you guys about that recently, but it still makes me sad. Like they didn't have a bonfire in his honor. Like every guy wants a big bonfire in his honor after he dies, I think.

And if you didn't think that, you are now you're like, yeah, I'd like to have a big fire in my honor, too. I'd like to know that they did that. What Herod did was he imprisoned 3,000 prominent men from Israel so that they would be in lockup until the moment he died. And then when he died, he had a standing order that they would be executed so that there would be people mourning on the time of his death. Not for him, but just that there would be mourning at that time.

One of his sons who was supposed to carry out this order when he thought his dad had died, which I don't even. I'm not even going to get into the description of how bad it was, but he was rotting from the inside out. He was stinky and nasty, and there's some clinical terms for what he had, but it was absolutely disgusting. And it involves maggots. Anyway, they thought he was dead, and his son decided it was a bad move for him to start his new rulership by slaughtering 3,000 men.

So he rescinded his father's standing order, and then his dad wasn't actually dead. They thought he was. He wasn't. He kind of revives and comes to finds out that his son was disobedient to his orders and then has him executed. And then later when he dies, still has that standing order bad guy.

Right? Like killing the innocent children was just one small thing that he did. It was a lot of what he did, but he had done so much more throughout his reign and rule over those years. And so it's interesting to think of Jewish people that are serving God, honoring God, trusting God for their lives, and still living with that kind of terrible ruler over top of you all the time. To walk down the streets of Jerusalem or other cities and see some of your countrymen being hanged on crosses.

It wasn't just Jesus and the criminals next to him. This was a frequent occurrence in their world. And to see that and to almost be in a way, desensitized to it because it happens so often, sometimes we get that way in our world. We see the violence. We watch it on social media or on the news.

We Hear another story about some kind of fire or stabbing or shooting or something or another. And we just kind of look at it and say, well, it wasn't near me. It didn't affect my people, my family, my neighborhood. And as terrible as that sounds, it's like you almost have to just to insulate your heart so that you can still feel something when it happens locally, when it happens close to home. Does that make sense?

You kind of shut off that stuff that goes on around the world because you want to still be able to feel something when it happens near you, when it happens in your realm of existence. And so it was common for people to see these killings that happened, these crucifixions and all these other things, and just kind of keep on walking and maybe, maybe even lose hope that something would change. They might have even lost hope that God was ever going to swoop in and step in and change something. So often we can feel that way in our own world. We can say, lord, I see all this stuff going on and I just wonder, like, is it ever going to change?

I just wonder, is there ever actually going to be peace on earth? We sing a lot about it. We light the candles. One of these symbolizes peace. And we light them at Advent season.

And we think, is it going to happen? Is it ever going to occur? We're looking forward to that day, Lord. So Herod wasn't a good dude at all.

I'd love to spend more time telling you about his sons, but let's get into that in Sunday school class. If you stick around and if you don't, then you're going to miss out. Sorry. Joseph and Mary, now, they're interesting in a lot of ways because we don't know a lot about their family. There's some historical records that tell us a little bit about Mary potentially, but we don't know for sure.

They're not, like, verifiable. But we think that there's a good chance that her parents were actually not from the town of Nazareth, but from the town just about five miles away called Sepphoris. And Sepphoris was a little more cosmopolitan than Nazareth, which was considered a redneck, backwoods, backwater town. Sepphoris was a little more upscale, a little nicer, little pricier. And there's a church history that thinks that her parents were from there, that that's where she grew up, and that Nazareth was just kind of a few miles south of there where Joseph and Mary end up living and raising their family.

Joseph, it doesn't really say exactly where he grew up. He was in Nazareth at some point to be betrothed to Mary. We sometimes use the word engaged, but that's not really what they were. They were betrothed. And that's a little bit different.

What we see is that Joseph had an extraordinary faith that would follow God obediently no matter what God told him to do. Even some stuff that seems a bit crazy, a few points in his life, and that he followed the law of God and the word of God as close as could be done. He was willing to take Mary, who Mary was also, we see, very responsible and obedient to the word of God. She was very faithful to who God called her to be. And when an angel meets her and gives her this absolutely like what seems like just impossible to her, she says, I'm the Lord's servant.

If you're saying it's going to happen to me, then so be it. I'm the Lord's servant. Let it be done to me as you have said. And so Joseph, he finds out his betrothed woman is pregnant, and he knows it's not him, he's not the dad. So he has an option here to divorce her.

Now, the way betrothal worked, and I'll give you the brief version of it, is when it was kind of an arranged thing, perhaps a lot of times, but not necessarily 100% arranged. But there were families involved, parents would be involved, fathers of the girl and the guy, and they would get involved to kind of arrange the deal. There would be a dowry that was paid and all these different things. And so they would be involved in that. But there would be a time where the betrothal was sealed.

This means you're almost as good as married. You're just not ready to live together yet. You're not ready to have a marital union yet, to have children yet, or any of these things. In fact, at that time where that betrothal was sealed, the then the man would go off to his father's house on their property. He would build a home for him and his family to live in.

It was an extension of the father's house. And they would set up a place for them to live. And then once that home was built sufficiently enough, the father would say to the son, go and bring your wife home. And then he would go and get his wife. It might be in the middle of the night or something.

And they would have this big procession. There's a whole lot of details I don't want to get into today. It's A long story, but it was a beautiful ceremony and they would bring the woman to be with him and they would have a wedding ceremony then. And it would last seven days. Everybody would get called up.

It was a big party, it was a good time. You can read some of that a little bit. Because Jesus went to one with his brand new disciples in John chapter two, where they go to a wedding in Cana of Galilee, which by the way is just a few short miles from where Jesus grew up in Nazareth. So you've got Mary and Joseph. Joseph perhaps had grown up in the village of Bethlehem and at some point had gone up to Nazareth.

Perhaps he was an itinerant worker there. He was known as a craftsman or a tradesman of sorts. So many times our scripture calls him a carpenter. But his material he worked with would probably been a lot of stone. That's what they built most of their structures with, with maybe some wood bracing and things.

But it was a stonework. So he probably worked with wood and stone quite a bit. And so Joseph might have learned that trade in Bethlehem, gone up to Nazareth for some work, perhaps even worked in the bustling city of Sepphoris, like I had mentioned. There was just to the north.

And so he could have gotten to know Mary from a couple different ways. Now this is me going way out, like in the. I'm guessing here, but this is as my mind wandered as I read a lot of stuff and I'm paying attention to it and I'm thinking, how did he meet her? Nazareth is like 50 something miles away from Bethlehem. How would he have gotten to know her?

And there's a couple things. One, your scripture is beautiful in interpreting itself. In other words, the more you know in the Bible, the more you can piece a couple things together and you realize how it all connects. Much like the picture on the wall back here, all those little arches are from one point of scripture to another. And they're showing that on the COVID of your sermon companion guide too.

It shows all the connections from one section of the Bible to another and how it is all interrelated and intertwined. That's why we're doing this series, so that we can see the message of Christ spoken of through the entirety of Scripture. And so as I'm looking at it, there's one possibility that Joseph had just gone up to, except Forrest perhaps to work and lived in Nazareth because it was cheaper. And as a young guy, that's a good plan. Like you live cheap.

I said before that guys are probably willing to live in literally a Shack with a big garage, you know, like a barn, you know, got to have a place to work on cars and tractors and trucks and whatever else that we deem necessary. And for the most part, we're fine with a shack. But we get married and our wives and kids like nice things and like, you know, running water and stuff, which I do. I like running water and air conditioning. Those are kind of my minimums, though.

Like, I'm good with that, you know. But anyway, Joseph, he might have met Mary somehow that way. But here's where I think the scripture might help interpret where he would have met her. Mary. We found out early in the book of Luke that she had family relatives in the hill country of Judah, where Elizabeth and Zechariah were the parents of John the Baptist.

And she had gone to stay with Elizabeth for a time. And that is in the same general region as Bethlehem. Now, think through this. If Joseph is a tradesman, he might have worked for some people that she was related to. He might have worked for her relatives.

And one time he's over there working, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doing some work, doing some remodeling or something. Hey. Oh, hi. How are you? You know.

And he finds this young woman. He's like, well, I'm 20 years old. It's time for a guy to get married. She looks like she's of marriageable age. Let's make something work here.

So who knows if they might have done that or not? But that could very well be how he had met Mary. And then I think beyond that is the providence of God putting the two of them together. So now as he somehow meets her, as he's somehow betrothed to her, perhaps he had met her there and then when he found out she was working near Sephora, and he thinks, I can go make some money there and have some money to start out my family. Like, it's good for guys to have a little bit of a foundation before they get married.

Or you can just do it like I do and be flat broke when you do it. You know, that's fine, too. It works out in the long run, I think. I'll tell you when I get beyond that stage anyway.

So he might have moved up there to be close to his betrothed and work with her or work nearby her. But one of the other things, though, about betrothal that happened a lot, or that was how it worked, was that they wouldn't have had much contact during that time. Like during the time of betrothal, which might last for a year, you actually wouldn't have much contact. People do it kind of backwards in our world. They decide, well, hey, let's get together, let's move in together, let's get engaged, let's get married.

They got to know each other a little bit, got betrothed, and then didn't see each other for a period of time. And, and what they were doing during that time was preparing for marriage. And it was also a time to prepare to stay holy and pure. In other words, to forsake yourself to all others during that time. Not just not to be united to your soon to be spouse, but also that you would not entertain the idea of being with another person in that way.

And so when Joseph finds out that Mary's pregnant, this is a problem for him and he decides what he's going to do according to the law and is to divorce her. You actually had to file for divorce in these situations. But what that would have done was that would have triggered a proceeding against Mary for being unclean and impure, for being an adulteress. And as such it would have triggered an execution for her stoning to death. And so he didn't want to do that.

So he says, I'm going to do this in the quietest way possible so that she, so that she isn't put to shame or even put to death. He was a noble man, an upright man, a man that would do something that many men wouldn't have done. But he was faithful to God and he was obedient to God. And in order to do that, you have to be listening to God. So when God spoke to him, even though it was at night, in a dream by an angel, he's still ready to listen.

As far fetched as any of that sounds, he's willing to listen. To listen. Amazing. I love it. Daniel.

So sorry. I just couldn't help it. That's fantastic.

So then Mary, of course, as we talked about, she's, she's young, she's trusting, she's obedient, she's willing to do this, despite what she knows is the potential that it ruins her entire life. Because from her vantage point, she's pretty sure that her betrothed husband is going to leave her. So she doesn't know how she'll be a single mother raising the son of God, but she's willing to do it if that's what it takes. And she doesn't realize that God is also working behind the scenes in Joseph's life to unite them together. So moving through all that we see Their life, their faith was extraordinary.

We see that when God says to Joseph, marry her anyway, he does that. And I believe he cut their betrothal short, cut all the ceremony, all the beautiful wedding, all that stuff, cuts it short and he marries her. He. Anyway, he joins up with her anyway, despite what seems to be the obvious that she has been unfaithful to him, where it turns out she's actually been the most faithful she could possibly be.

So they end up in Bethlehem. Now, Luke tells us that it was Joseph's ancestral hometown, where his ancestors were from. But it also says it was his hometown. And that's why I think he started out there and later had moved up to Nazareth as a young man. And so it's likely that he had quite a few people back home, so to speak, in Bethlehem.

It's likely that he knew quite a few people there and perhaps even still had. Like his parents household might have been there, but they just didn't. Hadn't had time yet to build his house for them to live in. We're not really sure. All we know is that when they show up, they show up in Bethlehem and it's time for her to give birth.

Now, he didn't necessarily have to bring her to this. Like, it doesn't say that. It seems like he was actually planning on moving there, like he was planning on staying in Bethlehem, putting down roots there. That's where they might have moved to anyway, once they were married, because that's where his family's from. But they find out that there's no room.

In a word that is usually translated as the inn, which is not like a motel inn, it's a guest room. There was no space for them in the guest room. Perhaps there were other travelers, or perhaps people thought that they had kind of jumped the process and slept together and got pregnant before they had even had their marital union. And so perhaps they said, we don't have room for people like you. We're not really sure.

Luke doesn't tell us much about that. But what we do know is that they made do with what they had and they were trusting in God all along the way through every step of it. So many times we look at a tragedy or some terrible thing that happens in our life or some setback, and we look at that and we think, okay, what is going on here, God? Why am I dealing with this? Why do I have to go through this trial right now?

But God might be wanting to turn those trials into some kind of a triumph in your life. See, Jesus said That our Father like gives. Our heavenly Father does discipline us, you know, like a good Father, he provides for us, but he also disciplines us. The writers in the New Testament tell us that if we don't have discipline, then we're illegitimate children. We're not really sons and daughters of our Father in heaven if he doesn't discipline us.

So there will be times where you're going through something that you think, why do I have to go through this trial? Why do I have to suffer in this way? Why is God allowing this to happen? Why is God doing this to me? Have you been there in any of those?

Why? Why? And we don't sometimes have the faith to step back and realize that God is with us. And that God, even though he doesn't orchestrate evil, he works in the midst of it to bring about his plan. And so we see all these evil things that Herod's doing.

This, this overreach of a government leader. I know they don't, like, we don't have that today. We don't have the government overreaching into our lives all the time. They would have learned that lesson by now, right? Eventually the people revolt against that which they did a few years later, after the scriptures come to a conclusion.

But what brought them to Bethlehem in this moment was an overreach from the government. It was evil that would occur towards them, that would send them to Egypt, as this child is being hunted by an evil, bloodthirsty, paranoid king. And yet God in the middle of all that is bringing forth the fulfillment of prophecy. He's spoken throughout the scriptures in the Old Testament saying that some of these things would happen. And now he is working in the midst of these things to bring it into occurrence.

So I look at the journey that they had. The easy part was getting down to Bethlehem even though she was pregnant, even though that must have been not that easy. It was familiar territory. It was only a few days journey. It's about 50, 55 miles.

You know, it's not the hardest thing ever. They walked a lot like that. Seems like most of us were like, can you walk 55 miles? You're like, no, no, not happening. You know, like I'm not feeling it right now.

I can be sitting down and tell you, no, I can't make it that far. You know, like it's not happening. They were used to it. They walked a lot. That was their primary mode of transportation.

And so they're, they're used to doing that. They're on that journey. That's the easy part. The hard part is after the magi come and visit and leave. And the angel wakes Joseph up in the middle of the night and said, leave, get up right now, leave.

Take your family and go. For they are seeking the child's life. Now, he doesn't know what that entails. He doesn't know just how bad it's going to get there. But he takes off as God had told him to do, and they go to Egypt.

Now I looked into this quite a bit and you think, why in the world Egypt is still a Roman province? It was actually conquered by the current emperor at the time, the. After Mark Antony and Cleopatra had been there as rulers and then he had overtaken them, that solidified his position as emperor over Rome. And that's a fun little bit of history that you can look into if you feel like it. It's fun stuff.

But Egypt was a Roman like province at this point. So they're still under the auspices of the Roman government, but just outside of Herod's reach and Herod's clutches. And so they go to Egypt. And there was actually a lot of Jewish people in Egypt. They'd been there since the exile in the time of Jeremiah.

In fact, the exiles had brought Jeremiah there against his will. He was prophesying against that idea, saying, like, don't go to Egypt, just take what God's given you. And instead they went to Egypt anyway. And so they brought Jeremiah with them. And Joseph and Mary probably found some fellow Jews that were living there.

They probably assimilated into some of their villages or their areas that were scattered around Egypt. But we don't really know for sure where they might have stayed. Egypt was a big place, still is, in a sense. And there's at least 25 different places that early church tradition and from the Coptic church have claimed that they lived. So it's like everybody says, yeah, they were here.

And then tourists, religious tourists come and view it and they're like, cool. Jesus might have walked on this floor as a baby, you know, who knows? Who really knows? It's hard to say. But the beautiful thing is God brings them to an unfamiliar place and through that he's able to teach them a few things and prepare them more than anything to listen to the voice of God leading them.

And as I work through all this and I'm trying to think like, because, I mean, I wrote this sermon guide months ago now, and I'm thinking, like, what in the world was this one about? Like, what is the bottom line of this message? And for me, the bottom Line is, I need to listen to God a whole lot more than I do right now. I need to hear his voice in my life a whole lot more. Because it's not that he's silent with me, it's not that he's not speaking to me, but the scripture tells us that his voice is a still, small voice.

The prophet Elijah found that out firsthand when he had like the highest of highs and then he crashed to the lowest of lows right after that. In fact, he got real hangry. I don't know if you've read the scriptures much and you know, with the term hangry, like hungry and angry, right? He got real hangry. He shows up, just goes into the wilderness, crashes under a tree and says, I'm ready to die.

That's pretty hangry, you know, like sometimes it just takes a little bit of food to kind of tone that down, you know, maybe a little nap. And sure enough, that's all he gets. An angel brings him like a snack and tells him to take a nap, sleep it off. And then he wakes up and he's like, do it again. Like that wasn't enough.

He gives him another meal. Like he eats the food of angels and then takes a nap. And then he has enough energy for 40 days. So like, for a 40 day journey, that's pretty awesome. Sometimes all you need is food and a nap.

So just take that to mind, you know. So he goes, he travels those 40 days. He goes up onto this mountain. He's expecting to see God there. And there's like an earthquake, but God's not in it.

There's a huge, like fire. There's a windstorm that shears the rocks. There's all this elemental extremity that's going on. All the elements are just to the extreme and God's not in any of those. But then there's the sound of a whisper.

And he hears God in that. Some even interpret it to be in the silence. He heard God. How many times do you get silent before God? How many times do you prepare on the journey that you're on to meet God?

Like having intention and saying, lord, I'm going to do some things. It might be a season of prayer and fasting leading up to hearing a message from God. Sometimes God is ready to speak to you, but he needs to get you prepared into a place where you are ready to receive that message from Him. It might be a period, not just a fasting of food. It might be that you need your physical strength maybe for the job that you have or the life that you lead.

Maybe you have a medical condition that requires it, but there are a lot of ways that you can fast. It might be fasting from the news of all kinds. It might be fasting from something. You know, sometimes people say, oh, I'm going to fast. From, like, gossiping.

No, you're not supposed to be gossiping. Anyway, that's a sin. It's not something you fast from. You know, like, you can't offer up to God, like, hey, I stopped sinning. He's like, you're not fasting.

You're just being obedient, you know, but like, giving up something that isn't necessarily harmful or evil but is so that you kind of like, take yourself into submission before God. If there's something that you're obsessing over, spending your time on, your money, on your life on. And that thing might be robbing you of connection with God. And so you need to remove that from your life. You need to push that out of your life for maybe a season.

And you might find, as you've done that for a season, that. That he'll make it easy for you to just leave that out. And you might find the less that you dwell into that, the less you even care about it.

So, like Elijah spending a season preparing that 40 days on a journey to meet God on the mountain. It was after he had spent time in preparation that he was ready to actually hear the voice of God as just a whisper or perhaps even in the midst of the silence. God gave him clear direction at that time. So often we want a clear direction from God. We want to know, lord, what do you want me to do?

He's saying, well, when you're ready to hear it, I'm ready to tell you. We think we got to jump through all these hoops or something, but in all reality, we just have to get quiet before God and say, lord, I want to remove all of these distractions. I want to remove all of these things that are taking up my focus and my time and my attention. I want to just give my heart only to you, Lord. And as we do that, as we just totally give our heart and life over to God, we begin to hear him like Joseph at that time.

I mean, he hears God in a dream, and he wakes up convinced that it wasn't just some, you know, something bad that he ate the night before that was talking to him, but it was actually the voice of God speaking to him or that it was an angel of God speaking to him. You have to be Spiritually prepared to discern whether it's the voice of God or whether it's something you made up or something somebody said or whatever it might be. But as Joseph and Mary were listening to God, even the magi, after meeting Jesus, they heard from an angel in a dream like Joseph had been hearing. And even though they were pagan men, they've now met the Christ child and they're ready to listen to the voice of God. In your life, you might make some plans.

It's a couple days before the new year. It's the time where we take a reflection. Usually most of us do. We reflect on what has happened this past year. We look forward to the challenges and opportunities of the new year and things that are going on.

And we try to kind of weigh it out and see where we need to go and navigate through all that and make some of these decisions. We've all got them. And it seems like this is the time of year that it just makes the most sense for us to evaluate those things. And at that point, we want to hear God's voice. We would prefer, I believe, to God to, just as the scripture says, rend the heavens and come down and speak to us like, lord, just show up and tell me what to do.

If you'll tell me what to do, then I'll know what I should be doing. And I won't have any doubts or questions about it. We still will have those doubts. Even people that are strongest in their faith still have moments where they have doubts. And then they come back to the word of God and they read what they already know and they say, okay, Lord, I hear you again.

Joseph, as he's leading his family, following the word of God, he goes to Egypt. They live there for a while. God tells him, the one who wants to kill your child is dead. King Herod, he had died. And so Joseph heads back.

I believe his plan was to go back to Bethlehem. That's where he wanted to set up home. That's where family was. That's where comfort was. That's where he was familiar.

And then as he's headed there, he realizes he hears the news. He finds out what's going on. The current events are there's a son of Herod named Archelaus, and he's no better than Herod. He is just as evil, murderous. In fact, he was so bad that the Jews sent a delegation to Caesar in Rome and said, seriously, we hate this guy.

He's the worst. Can you please give us someone else? And they did that. And finally, Caesar's like, yeah, good case. He's out.

And Archelaus falls off the radar. Like, we don't actually really know where he went after that. But he only reigned for about 10 years and then was deposed. And as you know, just being an ineffective leader because of how bad he led the people and how evil he was, how murderous he was, he didn't listen to the desire of the people that he ruled over. I wish some of our politicians would get that, but they seem to keep thinking that they were elected to do whatever they want and not to do the will of the people.

It's a lesson that they have to learn. Pretty soon, I think, because we'll start saying, we're done with all of you guys and we're going to vote you all out and put new people in. I don't care what letters after your name or what party you're with. We're just gonna vote new people in. Like, that's where I'm coming right now.

Anyway, that doesn't matter. That's endorsing literally anybody other than the people that are in there right now. I'm not making an endorsement, just an UN endorsement.

Joseph finds out that this isn't a good situation to go into. So he decides, like, I gotta ask God what I need to do. God says to him, don't go to Bethlehem. I want you to go to Nazareth. And then it says, they went and lived in Nazareth to fulfill the scripture.

He will be called a Nazarene. Now, lovely thing, you're sitting in a Nazarene church. And that's cool. Like, we're named after, like, who they said Jesus was. But I want to tell you something.

Like the word Nazarene, he will be called a Nazarene, doesn't show up in the Old Testament prophecies. It just doesn't show up. Or, like, where does it say that one God? Most of your Bibles, if you've got a study Bible, it'll have footnotes. It'll say where that verse came from.

It doesn't say that. Was God lying? No. Here's the thing. There was a prophecy that somebody would grow up as a shoot from the stump of Jesse.

Jesse was the father of David, the great king of Israel. And he says that there will be a shoot that grows up from the stump of Jesse and he will rule over Israel. Here's the beautiful thing. The Hebrew word for that shoot, that little offshooting branch that sprouts up out of the ground is Netzer. A Netzer.

This sounds a lot like the city of Natsareth and Nazareth is literally like stumped shoots town, like, growing out of the stump, like this little shoot that grows up. He's literally fulfilling the prophecy that there will be something that shoots up out of the root of Jesse, out of the spirit stump of Jesse. And the beautiful thing is, like, in their language, they didn't really use vowels. They just had all these consonants, and it would be spelled nzr. And it's the same thing for Nazareth as it is for Netzer.

It's both nzr. And so it's this beautiful, like, Hebrew play on letters. Not play on words, but play on letters is saying, like, Jesus fulfills that prophecy that a Netzer would lead over Israel. And Jesus is the literal shoot that pops up. And in the middle of nowhere in this little town of Nazareth, that the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, they like to really look down on Nazareth because they said, what good can come of that town?

Nothing good can come from there. There's nothing special there. And isn't that the beautiful thing, that Jesus grew up in a town of nothingness? There's nothing special about that town, nothing that would attract us to that town. Isaiah, the prophet, says of the Messiah that there was nothing attractive about him that would draw us to him.

And yet he grew up before the Lord and he grew up faithfully. Jesus is calling to each of us today. Pastor Kendall, I'll ask you to come forward. We're going to close in a moment. Jesus is calling us today to follow him.

As unlikely as it seems that this guy Jesus would have been anything, even his own hometown looks down on him later, when he comes back home to preach, and he comes back to the synagogue to preach, and they say, who is this guy? He's just the carpenter's son. We know his family, we know his sisters and brothers, we know his mother. He ain't nothing, and yet he's the Savior of the world. He's the one that wise men came from afar to worship, that shepherds bowed down before that the heavens opened up and we saw the angels presenting, praising him in glory.

He's the Savior of the world. I pray that he's your Savior. If you know Jesus Christ, it's your job to go out and share that gospel with others, whoever you come into contact with.