This sermon is from the series CHRISTMAS IS and was preached at Cornerstone Baptist Church In Cherry Log, Georgia on December 1, 2013 by Pastor Paul Mims. You can hear this sermon at www.csbccl.org CHRISTMAS IS: LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS Isaiah 9:1-7 A man was sitting after breakfast reading his morning paper. His wife said to him, I bet you don t know what day this is! He was notorious for forgetting important events in their lives like birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine s so he said, Sure, I know what day it is. But he had no idea! All that day he kept wondering, What day is this? Just to be sure, on the way home from work he stopped and bought a dozen roses, a box of candy and some perfume. When he got home he said to his wife, Surprise, Honey! She said, This is a surprise. This is the best Ground Hog s Day I have ever had. He was in the dark just as many people are about the meaning of Christmas. It was reported on the news last week that the Post Office has come out with their offering of holiday stamps. There were three: Hanukah, Kwanza, and a Ginger Bread House. No new stamp for Christmas this year. Can you believe that even Christmas is now offensive? John gives us the meaning of Christmas in 1:14 which is our theme scripture for these Advent sermons: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Today we are going to look at I. OUR TERRIBLE DARKNESS. Isaiah was 20 years old when he was called to be a prophet in the year 740 B.C. He saw the corruption in the government. The enemy Assyria was ascending down of little Judah. The people were neglecting the
things of God. In this climate Isaiah penned the beautiful truth, The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. Messiah was coming to enlighten the darkness of man. Light is very important to us as human beings for we cannot live without it. The spiritual darkness is very deep. Let s look at what the scriptures say about light. In Genesis 1:3 we read, And God said, Let there be light and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. That is what he did in creation and that is what he does in the recreation of us. All of us were in spiritual darkness. In Psalm 27:1 David said, The Lord is my light and my salvation. In Psalm 18:28 he says, You, O Lord, keep my lamp burning; my God turns my darkness into light. Psalm 104:2 we read, O Lord, my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty. He wraps himself in light as with a garment. Jesus said in John 8:12, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Christmas is for believers beholding His glory in the light he brings to our darkness. There is the darkness of loneliness. The holidays are very lonely for some people. W.C. Fields was an actor in the early days of film that Hollywood has revered through the years. One day his nephew said to him, Uncle Clyde, do you really hate Christmas or is this one of your advertised Bah Humbug things? Fields said, I ll tell you why I hate Christmas. It points out something that disturbs me a great deal. It points out my loneliness. I was born lonely. As I have traveled all over the world, I had to be in various places on holidays such as
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year Day. When I was in Australia, or Scotland, or South Africa, I was there alone. That day just pointed out my loneliness. That is why I hate Christmas. There is the darkness of self-centeredness. A new word has emerged in our language recently. It is selfie. It refers to people who hold up their camera phone and take a picture of themselves to put on Facebook. But man was self-centered long before this. This is just a new way of expressing it. King Duncan tells of a man named George Mason. Mason was so self centered that he didn t have time for anyone else. He was a modern day Scrooge. After everyone left his office on Christmas Eve one year, he went into the vault to get some extra cash. As he walked into the vault, he heard the vault door slam behind him and click. He ran to it and began to bang on the door, then he realized that there was no one out there. The light then went off in the vault. He said that it was the most terrible darkness that he had ever imagined. He began to panic. Then he remembered that years before, when they were installing the vault they told him of a vent that could be opened to let air in. It was not big enough for him to climb out, but it would keep him from suffocating. Mason groped around in the darkness and finally found that little opening and let some fresh air in. He realized that he would have to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day tombed in. Then, on the day after Christmas he heard someone come into the office and unlock the vault, but did not open it. Mason staggered out and went over to the water cooler to get a drink of water. He then went out on the street and hailed a taxi, went home and changed his clothes and came back to the office. He said, No one asked me how my Christmas was. No one cared. This taught him a lesson. He put up a sign in his office which said, Success is really loving and caring for people. Then, there is the darkness of sin. C.S. Lewis said, Christianity has no message for those who do not acknowledge that they are sinners.
Christmas has no message for anyone who does not have a need of the Savior who came to redeem us. A few weeks ago, several hundred atheists gathered in a Hollywood auditorium for the inaugural meeting of the Los Angeles Sunday Assembly, the latest blossoming of the atheist church movement slowly spreading across the country. Thanks to a fundraising tour by the British comedy duo who launched Sunday Assembly in the U.K., America is suddenly hearing about new atheist mega churches that have cropped up in several major cities. (ABC News) They are duplicating the church without God. Christmas has no message that they will believe. How great is the darkness! I read a book called This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. It is about a town called Ashton. The story centers around the leaders in the town. There is a newspaper reporter, two pastors, a college teacher, and other leaders. One Pastor is preaching in his church the New Age Philosophies that he is learning at the local college. Another Pastor saw the evil of it and told them what the scriptures said. There are unseen demonic forces that are working on the people of the town. Then God breaks through the darkness to bring truth and light to the people. The same can be said of our beautiful communities here in the mountains of North Georgia. Satan is promoting the darkness and God is shining the light. II. THE GLORIOUS LIGHT. We, like ancient Israel, have walked in darkness but upon us has the light of redemption has shined. In John 3: 19-21 we read, This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives
by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God. Jesus gives us the light of hope. Years ago, a Christmas card company put out a Christmas card with the title: What if Christ had not come? It was founded on Jesus words If I had not come. (John 15:22) Inside the card they told the story of pastor who had fallen asleep and dreamed of a world without Jesus. In his dream he finds himself at home, looking through his house. It is Christmas day, but there are no stockings hung by the chimney, no bells ringing in the church steeple, no wreaths and no holly. There were no churches, no books in his library about Jesus. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. A young man asked the pastor to come to his house. His mother was dying. Would the pastor have words of comfort for her? The pastor picked up his Bible, but when he opened it to look for comforting Scriptures he noticed it ended at Malachi. There were no gospels, no promises, no hope. All he could do was bow his head and weep. Two days later at her funeral he had no words of comfort and hope because there was no consolation or hope of heaven. I majored in Psychology in college and studied the famed Austrian psychologist Carl Jung who once wrote about a life without God. He said, Those psychiatrists who are not superficial have come to the conclusion that the vast neurotic misery of the world could be diagnosed as a neurosis of emptiness. Men cut themselves off from the root of their being, from God and then life turns empty, inane, meaningless, without purpose. So when God goes, goal goes. When goal goes, meaning goes. When meaning goes, value goes, and life turns dead in our hands. We who have the Light of understanding are given a mission to shine the light in the lives of others. We do this through mission compassion. This is the season when we turn our thoughts to the people of the
world who have not yet heard of Jesus. Out of the world s 11,000 plus people groups, nearly 7,000 are considered yet unreached which is more than half of the world s population. More than 3,000 people groups have no Christian witness at all. I urge you to support Cornerstone s goal of $2,000 for the Lottie moon Christmas offering for International Missions. We support 4,867 Missionaries who in a recent year presented the gospel to 1,400,000 people and baptized 266,000 new believers. They started 24,000 new churches and engaged 133 new people groups. Our national goal to support this work is $175 million which is 54% of our total mission budget. There is no use to send a light overseas that won t burn at home so I encourage us all to be a light for somebody here at this Christmas season. If Jesus has lightened your life, he wants you to be a light for him to someone else. How did you come to the light? Somebody told you. What if they had not told you? What would your life be like without Christ? You would still be in your sin. You would still be separated from God. You would still be on your way to hell. You would not have wholeness, peace, joy, or the quality of life you now have. Think of it! That is the condition of people you know that are without Christ. If they were dying of cancer and you had the cure would you tell them about it? They are dying of an eternal cancer and we must tell them. The time is fleeting. The condition is urgent. We must be about the Father s business. He has no spokesman but us. He has no hands but ours. Tony Campolo tells the story about the late Mike Yaconelli, who told the story about a deacon in his church who wasn t deaking. He just didn t do what he was supposed to do as a deacon. One day he said to the deacon, I have a group of young people who go to the old folks home and put on a worship service once a month. Would you drive them to the old folks home and at least do that? The deacon agreed.
The first Sunday the deacon was at the old folks home, he was in the back with his arms folded as the kids were doing their thing up front. All of a sudden, someone was tugging at his arm. He looked down, and here was this old man in a wheelchair. He took hold of the old man s hand and the old man held his hand all during the service. The next month that was repeated. The man in the wheelchair came and held the hand of the deacon. The next month, the next month, and the next month. Then the old man wasn t there. The deacon inquired and he was told, Oh, he s down the hall, right hand side, third door. He s dying. He s unconscious, but if you want to go down and pray over his body that s all right. The deacon went and there were tubes and wires hanging out all over the place. The deacon took the man s hand and prayed that God would receive the man, that God would bring this man from this life into the next and give him eternal blessings. As soon as he finished the prayer, the old man squeezed the deacon s hand and the deacon knew that he had been heard. He was so moved by this that tears began to run down his cheeks. He stumbled out of the room and as he did so he bumped into a woman. She said, He s been waiting for you. He said that he didn t want to die until he had the chance to hold the hand of Jesus one more time. The deacon was amazed at this. He said, What do you mean? She said, Well, my father would say that once a month Jesus came to this place. He would take my hand and he would hold my hand for a whole hour. I don t want to die until I have the chance to hold the hand of Jesus one more time. (Campolo, Tony. Becoming what God intended you to be, ) All believers can take the light of Jesus to somebody. PRAISEBE TO THIS NAME!