Jesus Arrives in History

All right, we are kicking off kind of a little series, mini series here. Just as we look at Advent, we're going to take three weeks of looking at Jesus Arrives. And so we're taking a break from Mark. We're slowly going through the Gospel of Mark and taking a little break here to look at Advent and kind of looking at three different aspects here of Jesus arrives. First Jesus arrives in history. Next week will be Jesus arrives in reality. And the next week will. The last week will be Jesus arrives in Glory. And yeah, I'm really excited about this because the Nativity, right? When you think, when you see a little nativity scene or you drive by a church and they've got one out front or maybe your grandma does that or whatever, that there's just this. It becomes so commonplace, right? This idea that there's just this star. And for whatever reason, it's always this open manger. I don't know why, because they get a lot of rain in the Middle East. I don't know why it's always this open structure. You got the wise men coming in and it just becomes so common. And even within the church, we only talk about two, like, topics, specifically all the, like twice every year, and that is Easter. We look at the resurrection of Jesus and then we talk about Christmas every year and the birth of Jesus and we just get so, ah. Because there's. Very rarely do I ever drive by a Nativity scene or get a Christmas card and see this image and go, oh, my goodness, God of the universe took on flesh. Isn't this amazing? It just, I've lost that. And so I want to look at this. And specifically in this little miniseries of Jesus Arrives. And I just want to. If we can make Jesus a little bit more tangible, touchable, reachable as he enters into our space. And so specifically this sermon we're going to be looking at Luke chapter two, just those verses that I just read one through seven, that Jesus arrives in history. So every once in a while when I get done preaching and I feel like I bombed. I mean, I just bombed it. You know what I mean? It wasn't, it definitely wasn't a home run. I didn't even get on base. It was a sac fly. That's what I feel like it did, did something, but it didn't feel good. I didn't, I didn't like it. I will ask my wife. Hey, what'd you. What'd you think of the sermon? And every once in a while, every once in a while, she's the best, right? There's trusted voices in this room. She's one of them. Some of you. I will never ask that question. No, I'm joking. Kind of. But I will ask my wife. I will ask my wife. What did you think of the sermon? And there are times, only a handful, but there's been times where she would say it kind of felt like a seminary lecture. Right. It just. Okay. All right. I hate that. Right. I love it when she tells me that, because I need to hear that. I don't want it to be that it's not what we're here for on a Sunday morning. And yet this might feel like that. So I want to be very upfront with you that that's the goal. The goal? Yes. I want us to see Jesus tangibly in history, and yet there's a reason for it, and this is why that when we think about our Christmas, you know, a meal that might be coming together with family, and it might look like something like this if it was, like, perfect in a Hallmark card, but you get. Gather around the table and you have people from all different family members and. And people who've been married in May. You have some. Some friends and guests that are there. Then it's a good time. And. And it's. And it kind of. It's kind of inevitable that as you talk about Christmas, or you might say, hey, I want to. Hey, do you. Before we start opening presents, I don't know if you have this tradition we do of. Could we. Could we read Luke too? Could. Could we. Could we just pray and, like, thank Jesus, like, for being the reason that we're all here, gathered together in the first place? And someone might even vocally say at that point, like, are you joking right now? Like, you actually believe this stuff? It's just a fairy tale. This is a figment of your imagination that was made up thousands of years ago. And you actually think that's what's going on? What I wanna do, maybe. Maybe is that I want you to have the same confidence that someone might have to push back on your view, that you actually can have the confidence to say, well, actually, this isn't crazy. This is actually historically proven that Jesus lived during this time, that he was born in Bethlehem. And let's talk about facts. You want to talk about facts? Talk about facts. And I want you to. I want your faith to be deepened this morning. And if you don't believe in Jesus, if you believe that this is all just a fairy tale. Hold on. Because this is gonna get real this morning. And I Pray. I really do. And I've been praying all week that we see that Jesus arrived in a real place, in a real time in history, born by an actual woman, a mother who was pregnant, who gave birth to a baby and named him Jesus. That Jesus grew up and he had some of his best friends that watched him get murdered and he flipped the world upside down. That happened in history, in this real world. And so I just want us to see that and that we see that Luke, in this passage, isn't just telling us what happened. He's going to do that, but he's telling us why it matters, that God stepped into our world. I brought up the whole snow thing. Snow day. There's a reason for that. So when I was a kid back in the 1900s and 80s, that we would sit around. We would sit around the tv. That's what happened. There's a little ticker tape kind of thing on the bottom, and it would scroll by and it would show you which schools were closed. Now, my dad worked at the school. He was a band in, choir director. And so this didn't happen. Okay, this is a hypothetical. I'm trying to prove a point with this. But we would imagine my brother and sister and I were sitting around the TV and my dad steps out of the room for a little bit because it's snowing, and we're all like, oh, man, we hope school is going to get canceled. And then, sure enough, we see our school pop up. Market Manor Baptist Academy would. Would scroll across the bottom like, yeah, school got canceled. Right. And then my dad would come back in the room and he would say, did you see our school? And he. And we would say, yeah. And he'd be like, I don't believe you. Right. Why? Well, because we don't want to go to school. Right. So even if school wasn't canceled, of course we're going to say that. So he would say, I don't believe you. They say, yeah, there's three testimonies, there's three voices that are attesting that this is true. Yeah, but you all were in the room together when you supposedly saw it. Right. It just doesn't validate this eyewitness account. But then if at that moment, the landline rang from the kitchen and my dad ran in there, and it was the principal saying, hey, Rod, Rodney, we just want to let you know that school's been canceled today. They go, okay, now this is what's called double attestation. Okay? Multiple attestation. I know, it's super nerdy. But just let me get into this. What does this mean? It's an event that is reported in more than one source, and the sources must be interdependent from one another. Okay, so my brother and sister and I watching it, we're not independent from one another. We received the information, we witnessed it at the same time. And so my dad would say, I don't believe it. But as soon as somebody else completely separate from me and my brother and sister verifies that, okay, well, now, now I do believe this. Now I do believe this story. And so it adds credibility. And so when we look specifically from the Gospel of Luke and Matthew, two separate sources written apart from one another geographically, and they write down incredible details that aren't normal things that we would normally talk about, that the likelihood of both of them making this up simultaneously is honestly a preposterous notion. And historians that aren't Christians believe this and they attest to this. And so if we look at Matthew and Luke, that they both say Jesus was born in Bethlehem. He's not from Bethlehem. They both say he was born in Bethlehem. They talk about a virgin birth. That's a wild thing for two people to come up with. Mary is Jesus biological mother, that Joseph is his legal father, not biological. They both say that there's an angelic announcement of Jesus birth, that Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit. That's again, a wild statement. And that the Davidic lineage is emphasized through King David, through whether it's his father with Joseph or through Mary in Luke. This is what's called multiple attestation, that you have two voices saying it, writing it simultaneously from two different geographical languages or around the same time, that would not have copied. They could have copied, but they didn't. And to say this is. This is what happened. Okay, so that's one aspect. Let's look at eyewitnesses. Eyewitnesses. Okay, this is in Luke chapter. If we read this here. I already read this a little bit. But going Back to chapter one, Dr. Luke, he was a physician as he writes the Gospel of Luke and then Acts, he says, in so much as I have undertaken to compile a narrative of things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word have delivered them to us. It seemed good to me also having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you. Most excellent, Theophilus. He's kind of the. I don't know what you call him. Money. Money bags. He's the. He's the guy who paid for the whole thing. What is it? Patron? Patron. There it is. Thank you. That. That may have certain certainty concerning the things that have. That you have been taught. Okay, so. So Luke is saying, hey, Theophilus, you. You've been taught these things. The church has been going now for some time. This is, again, only in the late, maybe 60s, 78s AD that Luke would have penned these things. And so they're the story. This is an oral culture. And so they remembered immense amount of things that only 10% of the population could read or write. So if you wanted something to be remembered, you taught it in an oral story form and fashion. But Luke says, hey, we should actually write all these stories down, but do so in an orderly, composed way and then interview the eyewitnesses. So when. When you're reading especially the Gospel of Luke, when you come across a name, that most likely means that he interviewed that person, because there are names that he'll drop, that's like, what does that have to do with anything? It's because they're the storykeepers. They're the gatekeepers of the event, the eyewitnesses, and they're able to write it down. Now, I know that we have a couple, several lawyers that. That attend here, and we can all know. We all know that that eyewitness account can usually be deflated. We can argue against that. Or did they really see that? You know, remember that when you're a. When you're a child and if some of you maybe this has happened to you, that you're sitting around, you know, Thanksgiving with your brother and you're like, remember that one time when we were kids and you found a shaving cream bottle and you threw it in the fire pit and it blew up? And they're like, what are you talking. I didn't do that. You did that. Right? Give you everyone a head, Something like that, right? And it's like, what do you. No, I was there. Yeah, I was there, too. Right? So eyewitness accounts can be a little interesting, but they can be incredibly valuable. Incredibly valuable if they are personal, unusual, and impactful. Meaning this. How many of you remember what you had for dinner on Thursday night, Thursday night this week? You can sit there and think about it, and you're like, well, I eat the same thing every day. So I mean, of course I remember. That could be one thing. Right? But usually we don't remember that. But if I said, what did you eat for dinner on Thanksgiving night? How many of you would remember what, you had that meal, right? Of course you'd remember that maybe. Right. You could probably even go back multiple Thanksgiving meals. Because it's personal. I was there. It was unusual in that I'm getting together with family and friends and. And then it was impactful because it just doesn't happen that often, the Gospel. Some people might say, well, the Gospels weren't written down until 30, 40 years after the fact, right? How do you know they're not doing this whole, oh, you threw the shaving cream in. No, you threw the shaving cream in. How do we not know that? How would they? How do they not. How do we know that they can take this seriously? Well, my guess is because it would be personal, unusual, and impactful that if I was with Jesus and I watched him as Peter. As he's recording, Mark is writing things down that Peter eyewitnessed. And Luke is going around talking with people, and he says, I remember this time when Jesus healed a man who was a paraplegic, right? And they're like, john, do you remember when Jesus did that? And he's like, no, I don't remember that. I don't remember when he healed that guy. You talked with him. Cause you didn't know. You didn't know if he was actually paraplegic. He's like, I don't. I don't remember that. That just wouldn't happen. These are things that are very deeply personal and unusual and impactful. And so we can read a lot of philosophy on this. I won't spend a whole lot of time, but a guy by the name of C.A. cody, he says that we attest we accept testimony as a matter of course in the vast majority of cases, and it's only special circumstances that we should withhold or suspend belief. The sheer extent of our dependence upon the reports of others shows that testimony enjoys a degree of trust essential to the functioning of human knowledge. This is true in so many things. The fact that I just read that. How do you know I'm not making this up? I'm not. That's why I try to put footnotes on a picture and all the things. But I'm trying to verify it. But you all are putting a little bit of trust in me to say things. We do this with any teacher or any communicator. We do this with the weather report. Even Henry's doing a thing for class right now. He's got to get the weather every day. And then he's got to check it with London. It's a lot Warmer in London, by the way. I didn't know that. A lot warmer. And, and, but how do we, how do we know that? Because I know. I've seen a lot of weather reports that are false. They don't end up becoming true. But yet I still believe it. When I look and I say, hey, Google, what's the temperature out? And it says it's negative 10. You know what? It's got a pretty good track record. And I'm going to, I'm actually going to believe that, that that testimony is true. Our accountants or our friends when they tell us a story. Oh, you're never going to believe. Last night I got on the train, I left my phone on the train. We wouldn't in that moment go like, prove it. I don't believe you. Can you verify that story? No. There's a, there's a level of trust and that's exactly what's going on here. From these first century and by far the best biographies. And this is from all across historians, not just Jesus historians. Any ancient historian would say that the gospels that we have are by far the best, most accurate biographies that have ever been written. That they are the standard of which all other ancient historical biographies are measured. Which. What's cool about this, and I think maybe, just maybe a little bit of a personal application is that God gives you multiple attestation. He gives you multiple eyewitnesses in the sense that he gives us scripture that has just been proven over and over and over again. I could talk a lot about that. He gives us church and our community that we have and just seeing the love of Christ in each other and demonstrated in our time of need. He gives us our own stories of transformation and others stories of transformation. And they all attest that Jesus arrived for you. This is real. It happened. Let's look at the census. When was Jesus born? Year one. Right. Obviously he was born and born in year one. Well, it's not that, not that simple. What's cool, because we have multiple attestation that both Matthew and Luke tell us that Herod the Great was king. We know based on other historians, Josephus to name one, that he wrote that Herod the Great was king of Judah, Judea, excuse me, between 37 BC before Christ and 4 BC. But Herod the Great, then if Jesus was born during the time of Herod the Great, that's four years back before Christ. How does that work out? Right. Okay, so then we got to do a little bit more historical things. We know that Tiberius, the emperor of Rome was He ruled from 14 A.D. after, after the death of Christ to 37 A.D. we know that. And what's cool is that in Luke chapter three, Luke is so specific. There's not a whole lot of other historians that will get like very specific dates who was ruling, who was reigning, what they did. In. In Luke chapter three, we read that, that in the 15th year of Tiberius's reign, Jesus was 30. Tiberius was emperor again, like I said, from 14 to 37. So in his 15th year, you do the math. That's AD 28. You count back 30 years and that could take us to the max. 6 BC. So it's gotta be somewhere between 6 BC and 4 BC is the birthday of Christ. And so that's where we get. And a lot of historians arrive at 5 B.C. most likely was when Jesus was born. But again, how do we. Where did the. How did we get off five years? Where'd that all come from? Right, There's a guy by the name of Denisius Essius, which just means Dennis the Little, which is. That's a great nickname, I guess. In 525, a guy by the name of Pope Sir John, he asked him, hey, can you find out when was the year of our Lord? And based on what he had he got within, historically within five years, which is a lot better than I probably would have done, Mike, is my guess back then. But we now have more information. We've dug up records and we've found stones and things that, that prove to us that these things are. Could be a little bit more accurate. So around 55 B.C. now what's interesting though is we have the census and the census, we only have one record of, of proof, like tangible evidence that there was a census during this period, but it was from 6 A.D. well, how can we go from 5 B.C? that's too, too big of a. There's. That's too big of a discrepancy, even within historical terms. The thing is we only have about 1% of historical records and artifacts from the first century. So we can't say, oh, the Romans never did this. Well, we only have 1%. The fact that we have any record of the census from 6 A.D. is wild, right? That is a wild thing that we had some papyra that was buried in some garbage heap and some nerd found it in the 1800s. That's a wild thing that we have this. So we can't just say, well, you know, argument from silence. And so this is where. Then we look at then the account of Dr. Luke. He says, in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered or taxed. This was the first registration. Okay. This is the first one. He's saying there was clearly other ones. Right? That's a very key point. Why would Luke say to his original writers in the first century that there was a first registration? His readers are like, no, there wasn't. There was only one. Why would you say this was the first? It just doesn't make any logical sense. And then when Quinius was governor, now some people will say Quinius wasn't governor of Syria in 6 B.C. he was governor of Syria in 6, 7 A.D. that we know. The word, though governor in the Greek is very confusing. And it could mean that he was the. He was governing. We know that during this time that Queus was the prefect, he was overseeing. And so he could have been governing this registration, all of that. Right? Which is very, very interesting. So as we keep going, I just want us to see that we have Nazareth Jesus moving down to Bethlehem. This is not a small hike. It's about 50 miles. And today, you know, it might take 45, 50 minutes, an hour at most to drive that. Not the case. Most likely they didn't have a donkey like all the children's TV shows. On a show, they would have walked this. This is a long haul, especially for a pregnant woman in her condition. I just mentioned that this morning. Sorry. Okay. And so this is what's happening. And you can only imagine that Joseph didn't know that God was moving emperors to make sure that Jesus would be moved into Bethlehem. And so why. Let's look at this. Another thing that might commonly pop up, some people like to bring up is that this was a prophecy in Micah chapter 5. 2. This is brought up in our New Testament in the Gospel accounts that the wise men. We'll get to them in a couple of weeks that as they are coming into. And they say, we want to worship the new king. And they say, well, where is he? Herod goes to the scribes and he says, where is he born? He said, he's going to be born in Bethlehem. This is why they had a prophecy. But you, O Bethlehem Ephratah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth from me one who is to be a ruler in Israel, who. Whose coming forth is from old, from ancient days. And so they believed that this was a prophetic, messianic truth, that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. So did Matthew and Mark move Jesus try to come up with some wild thing to get Jesus to be born in Bethlehem so that there would be an account to make him seem more Messianic, to see him more like he was the anointed, Promised One, the Messiah. Why would Rome care about a census that would cause people to travel long distances like that? And some people just say there's no way that would have happened. But we know that this just isn't true. It says this in verse three. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. They would say that that never happened. The records that we have, no one had to go, like home to their birthplace. We don't do that in our country. Why would Rome do that in theirs? But it just doesn't add up. It says, so Joseph went up from Galilee and went down from Nazareth to 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, who was with child. What we do have proof from that first century is that Rome also did when they would do a census, there was a few where they had people go back to a place where they owned land. So landowners would have to go back. And so some people would speculate, we don't know this for sure, that Joseph might have been a landowner if his family had heritage in Bethlehem, that he had land, and if it was going to be taxed, and if he was the landowner, then it would make sense that when this registration came out to be taxed, he had to go back to his land ownership, which would have been in Bethlehem. That's a possibility. But another thing is that Rome was incredibly detailed in their censuses, that they would actually have even physical descriptions, that this woman has a cut above her right eye, this man has a cut above his, on his left thumb. They were very detailed and very descriptive. So to say that they would do this is not out of the realm of possibility. Rome did it all the time. That Jesus enters into a real time, a real place in a real history. And so finally, let's look at this inn. I know a lot of times, right, we did anyone play the innkeeper? When you, when you're doing that, get nativity play. Anyone do that? Yeah, Henry did a couple years ago, right. And so when you think about this, right, that you've got Mary and Joseph and she's really pregnant, they come knocking on the door and everyone, there's no room. There's no room in the inn. It's just not the greatest translation, and that's okay. It doesn't affect anything really. Let's just read this. And while they were there, the time came for her Mary to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. Now what's going on here? The manger, that word can also be a little misleading. It's not so much like a feeding trough, it can be that. So I don't wanna. Like what? Jesus wasn't placed in a manger. Yes, I do think he was. But manger was more of a broader term. Think of it more of like a. Well, I don't even know, a barn or a doghouse maybe. Cause we would say they would have their house, their living quarters and then they would usually have an extra room for guests and that then that's here what I think. And what a lot of people would say that that is the inn is this kind of guest room, if you will. And if there was a taxation and people had to come to Bethlehem and they weren't used to being there. It's a tiny little village now all of a sudden it's bursting at the seams of people. Joseph goes back to his family home. Maybe he's got some like third removed great uncle who's there that he's like, hey, I remember when you were knee high to a grasshopper. And he's like, great, my wife's about to give birth, can we take over your house? No, you may not do that. I don't know what do you mean? And he might have said, but you can go into the manger. It would have been another attached room. You can go to Bethlehem. I've never been there, but you can go there and you can see caves that would have, that people would have lived in. And they would have had a second section area that would have been a manger, that would have been where the animals were kept. And again that might feel weird to us but a lot of you own dogs and cats, lizards, any of lizard people out there? I didn't think so. We're not those kinds of people. And I'm just joking. I'm just joking. Lizards are cool too. And so they would say no, these animals are in the house. And that's just, that was, that was normal, that was just a natural, a natural thing. And so that's where that was the only room and the only space available. And so Mary and Joseph, you can, you can go in there and we'll Talk a little bit more about that in a couple of weeks. But I want to bring this up as we bring this to a conclusion. In Luke, chapter 2, verse 19, it says this, but Mary treasured up all of these things, pondering them in her heart. How in the world would Luke know that? How could Luke possibly know that? He's just writing. Because I don't think we get our scripture from God dictating, right? In the sense of whispering in someone's ear. Write this down. I think Luke did the work. I think he wrote it down. He wrote down on a historical account. But when he did this, and he's able to say this again, he names the name Mary. I think that he's just sitting across from her at a table saying, mary, I've heard some pretty wild things about the surrounding the birth of Jesus. Can you tell me about that? Can you be like, you were there, right? Were you there when Jesus. Yeah. She's like, yeah, I was there. Can you tell me about it? What happened? She's like, well, man, you know, Caesar Augustus, he said that we had to go to Bethlehem. And she just maybe explains everything and just says, I just. It was just so wild. Jesus is born. We're. We're in the. This manger to lamb in a feeding trough. And these shepherds come running in and they're like, these angels just showed up and said that the Messiah was born. No, he had to go to Egypt because these wise men said that Herod was gonna kill him. And I didn't understand it all. I didn't. I had no idea what was going on, just pondered him. I just treasured him up on my heart. And it wasn't until I saw my son rise from the dead that things started to click. Because Luke is gonna do that. He's gonna start here. He's gonna say, mary treasured these things. Now, let me go through in an orderly account and talk about history. All the nerdy mumbo jumbo, gobbledygook that I just dumped out on you, there's a reason for it. And the reason is so that we can see and read this stuff and go, this isn't just made up. It's not a fairy tale. It's grounded in real, tangible history. And this is what adventure is all about. So maybe the Gospel application this morning is, do you believe that Jesus entered into history again? I know that was a lot of history and details and dates. There will be a test. I've got one in the fireside room, in case you were wondering. But I Wanted you to show you, right tangibly, that the God of the universe really took on flesh. That when you go by, you go drive by a church or the cathedral's got a massive one, it's beautiful. But manger, it's like, bigger than my house. This. This scene, this nativity scene. And when you go by that, it's. Don't just think of it as commonplace that this is God who took on flesh 2000 years ago and he's laying in a manger, a lowly manger. So when people say, yeah, I don't. I don't believe that we can take any of this seriously, I hope that you can say actually there. There's actually data, there's proof that we can look to that these events did happen. And if. If Jesus entered and arrived in real history, might it be possible that he can enter into my story, my real life, my real story now, in this place, in this time? If he really rose from the dead, then maybe he actually could mean something more than just history that he can enter into. And he wants to enter into your story, too. I think some of you this morning didn't need to hear dates and times and Tiberius and blah, blah, blah. Some of you just needed to hear that, that Jesus entered into this world to enter into your time and into your space and into your story as well. All of that to try to, in some tangible way to show you that Jesus, he loves you so much that he entered into our story. But what's really beautiful and what's kind of even weird about this Christmas season, Jesus doesn't stay a baby. It's really amazing that Jesus took on flesh, but he doesn't just stay a human being. He is. Lives a life that we couldn't live. And he dies. He dies for our sins in a horrific way, but he doesn't stay dead. He. He rises from the dead. Jesus doesn't stay in the manger. And we are going to celebrate that like we do every week at Lowertown by communion. And so we take the cracker that represents his body that's broken for us, that Jesus says this to his disciples. I want you to take this bread, and as you break it, I want you to remember me until I come back again, that this is my sacrifice. This is my body which is broken for you. And then we take the juice that represents his blood that was shed for us to forgive us of our sins. This sacrifice that we could never atone or do on our own. He had to do it. He doesn't stay in the Manger, he goes to the cross and he dies a death that we could never do and pays for our sins in a way that we could never atone for or be good enough for. And he does that and he rises from the dead and he has all power and authority. And we get to remember that. Finished work on the cross this morning. So we have a gluten free option on my left, your right. If that's a dietary restriction and if you're a follower of Jesus, if you're like, yeah, that guy, that guy who really entered into history, the guy who really was born in a manger, who really died on a cross, who really rose from the dead, I believe that then you can take these elements with us. You don't need to be a member of this church or a member of any church, but if you are a follower of Jesus, you say, yes, I bend my knee to that king. Would love for you to take these elements with us this morning as we remember the finished work of him on the cross. We can't add to it, can't take it away. Let me pray. The worship team's gonna come back up, they're gonna sing two songs and feel free to take these elements as you see fit and just pray, confess, sit, stand, sing. Whatever you feel led to do, we can do. Let me pray and then we will. We'll have communion. Father, thank you just for our time together this morning. Thank you. That even things that might seem mundane, things like dates and names in the birth account of your son in the Gospel of Luke, are not mundane. These were real people. And we can see that historically that these events and a lot of them did take place. We might not be able to prove the miraculous events and the miraculous nature of some of these events that are recorded. But we do know that Jesus, your son, was born in Bethlehem in a manger. That we had multiple accounts of people telling these stories and the birth of Jesus. And we can look to Mary who pondered these things in her heart. I thank you that we live now with the rest of the story, that we get to go back, we get to read about it, we get to sing about it, we get to study it now and looked at. Jesus is the one. He is the savior of the world. And so I pray for all of us this Advent season that we would just see Jesus a little bit more real. That Jesus arrives in history and he also arrives in our story. I pray that would be real. I pray that you just give us boldness. Those of us who are going to sit around the table with somebody who just might be skeptical, who just might have questions, or maybe have been hurt by the Church, or maybe even been hurt by something I have said to them in the past, or that we might have said. We repent of that, and I pray that you would just give us the ability to speak truth in love and care for people. To not use something that maybe we've learned, maybe even this morning, as some theological club, to convince them that we're right and they're wrong, but to show grace and love and mercy, because that is exactly what you do for us on a daily basis. We love you, and I pray that you would just be honored now and glorified as we take his elements and we sing about your Son's birth. Now it's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.