Music.

This morning I've got really the privilege to get to open the Word of God with you.

And we're continuing in on this series that we've been doing,

where we've been taking well-known Christmas carols, and we've not been using them,

I'm not preaching necessarily the carol, but we've been using the song as kind

of the starting point, of looking at the song,

saying what are the theological and biblical truths truths that are embedded

in this song that we sing during Christmas, and kind of examining where they touch in the Bible,

and then where they touch in our own lives, and where we ought to not be just singing these truths,

but living these truths out.

Today, I am very excited because we get to talk about what has always been one

of my favorite Christmas carols, and that is O Holy Night.

And as I was thinking about this song and it's got quite an interesting history as a song,

but it's kind of the national anthem of Christmas carols and by that I mean

you're waiting to hear if they're gonna hit the high note, right?

Like oh night, do you, right?

Like are they gonna hit it, it, right?

And there's some history as to why the song is notoriously difficult to sing.

And so we'll kind of talk about that. So let's dive into a little bit of the history.

I'm going to absolutely butcher the names of the people who wrote this because

they're French and I don't know how to speak French.

So it's an interesting story.

So the person who wrote the lyrics, Well, the original lyrics for O Holy Night,

because it was originally written in French, was a man named Placide Capot.

Yeah, I'm just going to go with it.

Sending it right now. Yeah.

And so he's not a Christian.

He wasn't known for going to church. It seems, to the best that I was able to

find out, that he was asked by a local priest.

He was kind of like the local poet in the area. He was like,

hey, we've just refinished commissioning and fixing the organ.

This was like 1840s, by the way.

And he was like, could you write a Christmas poem?

He kind of seems to have maybe been talked into it, or he just said yes,

because he didn't feel like he could say no.

So he wrote the song, O Holy Night, or he wrote the text of it.

And he, what seems to have been said is that he studied the book of Luke.

He read through the book of Luke and he used that as kind of the basis for the writing of this poem.

And then he was, gave the text of the song to an Adolf Charles Adams.

And he, this guy was a a classical composer who mostly wrote opera, right?

Why the song is difficult to sing, right? He wrote it for a retired soprano opera singer.

And so that is your answer as to why it goes up as high as it does and it's got the range that it is.

And so it was sung, performed like that Christmas Eve at that local church,

and it was kind of a big hit.

Everybody really liked the song, and it was kind of, you know,

passed around in local until kind of church officials kind of heard the song

and read the song and found out who wrote the song,

and it was banned for two decades in France.

Now, the interesting thing is, is that like if you or I were to,

I don't have the French lyrics up here, but if you and I were to sing or if we could read French,

the literal translation of the French lyrics are actually very different from

the song that you or I sing.

There's actually some words in there that you'd be like, huh. Huh.

That's different, right? It wouldn't look like the song that you or I know very well.

And it wasn't until John Sullivan Dwight, who I think was Canadian.

Found the song, discovered the song, and he made what everyone calls an English translation.

I say that's a little bit more, that's a pretty loose credit.

I think he probably deserves something of like a producing slash co-writing

credit if there were such a thing for him.

For the English translation, because he sort of changed a lot of the phrasing.

He introduced, he kind of got rid of a couple of ideas in the original French

text, and he introduced a couple new.

And he is the one who has been accredited with kind of, at least in my mind,

having written O Holy Night in the way that which we now know it and sing it every Christmas.

Now, the original song in France was, it kind of has like a little bit of.

Subtext. You can kind of read it as a, it's possible that Placide Capot,

who wrote it, was kind of pointing a finger at the church a little bit.

And we'll kind of talk about those places in the song where he kind of was maybe trying to do that.

But I think John Sullivan, Dwight, really brought the themes that was written

in this song and really elevated the truth that inhabited it and brought it

in to kind of make it much more worshipful.

So uh and then yeah we'll

we'll we'll continue we might talk more about

some of that history if it becomes pertinent as we kind of talk about the song

but let's go ahead and let's read the song in its entirety it'll be up here

on the screen so you can kind of follow along it should be fairly familiar the

second verse is the verse that

is less often sung and so that might be a little little bit newer to you.

So, O Holy Night goes like this. No, I'm not singing. O Holy Night,

the stars are brightly shining.

It is the night of our dear Savior's birth.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.

A thrill of hope, The weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices, O night divine,

O night when Christ was born.

Led by the light of faith serenely beaming, with glowing hearts by his cradle

we stand, so led by light of star sweetly gleaming.

Here came the wise men from Orient land, the king of kings lay thus in lowly manger.

In all our trials born to be our friend, he knows our need, to our weakness he is no stranger.

Behold your king before him, lowly bend.

Truly he taught us to love one another. His law is love and his gospel is peace.

Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother and in his name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy and grateful chorus raise we.

Let all within us praise his holy name. Christ is the Lord, then ever and ever praise we.

His power and glory forevermore proclaim.

Interestingly enough, this song was also probably the first song broadcasted on the radio.

In case you didn't know that, there was a guy who was like, he was like tinkering

around with a microphone and he was trying to figure out how to make, you know, radio work.

And he decided, he was like, he read some Bible verses, I think it was around

Christmas, and then he got out a violin and he played this song.

And could you imagine, like, just imagine, like, I know we've got,

like, you know, phones in our pockets and all this stuff, but,

like, imagine a world in which radio didn't exist and you were,

like, a Morse code operator, right?

You used to listen, like, put, like, you know, listen to these little speakers

and hear a little dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee, right?

That was what you thought. and then all of a sudden you hear somebody reading

scripture to you and playing O Holy Night, like that would freak me out.

And it did freak out some people. But anyways, that's the story is that of this

song kind of sits in kind of unique broadcast history.

So let's dig into this song. We won't be able to talk about all of the different

themes throughout the entire song because there's too much to kind of talk about.

But I want to turn to a passage that maybe doesn't get a whole lot of airtime

in the Christmas story, and maybe not just in general.

So we're going to turn to Luke 2. Luke 2.

So Luke chapter 2, we're going to go into verse 22.

So this is actually after Christ's birth.

The song, of course, talks about this idea of, you know, it talks about the nativity scene,

the magi, and the shepherds and the angels and all of that.

But it also, you know, it kind of comes to this place of, like, behold your king.

Before him you need to lowly bend, behold your king, lowly bend in front of

him. It's kind of this presentation of Christ as king.

And I want to talk a little bit about that from this text here,

starting in verse 22 of chapter 2 in Luke.

It says this, When the time for purification rites required by the law of Moses,

Joseph and Mary took him, speaking about Jesus, to Jerusalem to present him

to the Lord, as is written in the law of the Lord.

So they're going to go take him to the temple. He's going to present the sacrifice.

They're doing all the things that they ought to be doing with Jesus as a young baby and child.

And so now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simon. And he was righteous and

devout, and he was waiting for the consolation of Israel.

And the Holy Spirit was on him, and it had been revealed to him by the Holy

Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Messiah.

Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought

in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the law required, fired,

Simon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,

Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace,

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the sight of all nations, a light for revelation

to the Gentiles and the glory of your Israel.

The child's father and mother marveled at what was said about him.

And then Simon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother, this child is destined

to be the cause of falling.

And rising of many in Israel, to be a sign that will be spoken against,

so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed, and a sword will pierce your own soul too.

That's kind of a, like, can you kind of picture that a little bit?

Like, Mary and Joseph have got, like, Jesus with them, and this guy is just

like, you guys, and he comes up, and he just, like, picks up Jesus, right?

And he's just like, and he says this, all this stuff. And then he's like,

and he's like, you guys, like this, this kid's going to be like,

like a sign that people will be like divided against.

And Mary, your heart will be pierced because of what's going to happen to him.

And you're just like, oh, okay. Right?

Like that's just like this really intense, like kind kind of like shocking kind

of interaction that happens here.

But there is this question is, what's kind of, what is he saying here?

Because even when I was reading this, I was just like, what does it mean when

Simon says that this child is destined to be the falling and rising of many

in Israel, to be a sign that will be spoken against,

so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.

What is all of that talking about? Why is Jesus a sign to be spoken against?

What's all of this, the rising and falling of people?

It's kind of all very confusing. And I think the text is probably pointing back

to a passage in Isaiah, Isaiah 8, and also possibly possibly Isaiah 28,

where this is kind of talking about this imagery of a stone of judgment,

a stone that people either reject or a stone that is incorporated.

It's brought all together and explained in 1 Peter 2, so we'll flip further

into our New Testament to turn towards the back to 1 Peter.

And we'll read this section here, which I think lays out a very clear idea of

what exactly this is that Jesus is a sign that some will speak against and that

will cause the rising and the falling of many.

So 1 Peter 2, we're going to start in verse 6.

So this, for in Scripture it says, so it says that, it's saying,

we're quoting Scripture, we're quoting the Old Testament passages I just talked about in Isaiah.

It says this, I see I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone,

and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.

Now to you who believe this stone is precious,

but to those who do not believe the stone the builders rejected,

has become the cornerstone, and a stone that causes people to stumble,

and a rock that makes them fall.

They stumble because they disobey the message, which is also what they were destined for.

So this talks about this kind of like, this picture, this imagery of God has placed this stone.

He's like, this is the stone. It's the cornerstone, which means like it's the

place where the building starts, right?

This is like, this is where everything else kind of gets measured off of.

You're like, how far away is going to be the next room?

Well, measure it from the cornerstone. This is where everything kind of gets anchored to.

And God's saying, this is the cornerstone. You need to build off of it.

But some will reject it. Some are like, I am not going to build my life.

I'm not going to build the house around that cornerstone.

I'm going to reject it. Well, the cornerstone's not going anywhere.

And if you don't build the house on the cornerstone, you're just gonna have

to kind of build around it and you will probably ultimately trip over it.

It will become a place of stumbling. So there's this imagery that's being given here.

And I think all of this is particularly, at least in my mind,

tied to the song, O Holy Night, because of that image,

One, of the declaration very clearly that the song has of Christ's divinity,

of who he is. He's not just a cute baby.

He is the divine savior. He is God incarnate coming to save us.

But then also this very clear call to worship.

You are to worship him, right? It says, behold your king. Before him lowly bend.

And so there's this call of like, what are you going to do?

Are you going to accept Christ as king or are you going to ignore him?

Christ is king. You either make him the cornerstone of your life or he becomes

the rock that you trip over. over.

You can't avoid dealing with Christ and who he is and what role he's going to play in your life.

You can plug your ears and ignore it, but eventually it will trip you up. And so,

Let's see. I'm going to tell a somewhat personally embarrassing story.

I was, this was like towards the end of my studying to become a pastor.

I was studying pastoral ministry, getting my degree.

And I was excited because it was my very last semester.

I had some great classes to take. I was very excited. The class I was excited

to take was canceled after the first week. And I was like, oh, that's a bummer.

What are they going to do? because they canceled it because of some complications

with the professor and they were like oh well we'll just

put Luke in this like really hard class that's

online and I stink at online classes I'm not good at them there was a reason

I went to a in-person college and it's because I found that I didn't do good

in online classes and so I went to this class and it was like it was the the

philosophy of hermeneutics,

which is like the philosophy of studying meaning and the meaning of the Bible in particular.

So it was a pretty heady class.

And this was like, it was a class I needed to take in order to graduate.

If I didn't take this class, I wouldn't graduate.

So throughout the semester, I go to all my different classes and I would think

about starting my online class class that I needed to do.

You know, and I came to, you know, it came to like spring break and I was just

like, oh man, yeah, that class.

You know, I should really work on it during spring break, I think.

And I started, I like maybe got like, I don't know, two weeks worth of work done.

And then I ignored it some more because it was really hard. And pretty soon,

you know, I was I was starting to kind of get a little panicky because people

were like, oh, hey, Luke, how's that online class going?

Fine. It's going fine. It's maybe like a 12-week class that I've maybe done

two weeks of so far, and I've got four weeks left in the semester.

And I just continued to put it off until it came up to, like,

it started to finally dawn on me because I started to try and work on the class,

and I was like, oh no, like, I'm in trouble.

Because it was like a week before graduation, and this class was was like not done.

Like I had 10, nine weeks of work that I needed to do.

And I had like six days, seven days before I was supposed to graduate,

which was like a big deal.

Nobody in my family ever graduated from college before.

And my parents had like booked a hotel. They had all these plans.

And I am like, oh boy. I'm like, if I have to call my mom and say,

hey, so you guys just want to hang out in Chicago?

Like, you know, like that whole graduation thing is kind of overblown, right?

And so I went, I begged my teacher and he gave me, he's like,

sure, I'll give you an extension.

Like you can complete the class after the semester is over.

He gave me like an extension on the class. I was like, yes.

So I got to walk and cut to kind of like walk across, even though I hadn't finish all of my courses yet.

And then I kind of forgot about the class a little bit.

And I kind of got, you know, because it was summer and all my other classes were done.

And I just like, ah, I'm going to put it off. I'm not going to deal with it.

This week's too busy. Until I was like,

I got like three weeks to do like nine weeks of coursework.

And that was pretty much all I did for three weeks. I didn't manage to pass

and get a decent grade in the class.

But it was this place where I was just like, if I do not pass this class,

I'm going to have to like incur a whole lot of money to pay for the credits

and to stay here and to get this coursework done.

It was going to cost me a lot because I had just kind of ignored and ignored

and put off this class, where if I had rather at the beginning of the semester,

if I had just said, you know what,

this class, I maybe don't like it,

but I need to have it sitting in the right place in my schedule.

I need to block it off. I need to have it kind of have the right priority in

the things that I'm doing throughout the semester because if I don't,

I'm gonna be in trouble later. and I very much almost was.

And I still to this day have stressed dreams that I didn't graduate because

of how stressed out that class made me.

And so that's kind of a somewhat vulnerable story to share,

but it kind of illustrates this predicament we put ourselves in when we maybe

don't put put something in its right place, when we don't incorporate it into

the place in which it ought to be.

It becomes this kind of elephant in the room that we have to somehow cover our eyes to and ignore.

And that's kind of what we need to kind of wrestle with when it comes to the

declaration that Christ is king.

Is Christ actually your king? Or are you going to kind of, Let's not talk about that.

I kind of want Jesus as more of my guru, kind of like as my self-help person,

as kind of the permission for me to kind of live my life the way I do. Yeah.

Or maybe he's just my buddy. You know, Jesus is a pal. He's a friend of mine. But Jesus is king.

That means I kind of have to think about the things that he wants me to do and

how I ought to live my life.

And what he says ought to have impact on the things that I do and the way that I do them.

And ultimately, I have to humble myself underneath that. And for many,

many people, that idea of humbling ourself is really, really difficult.

Because no one actually likes to lowly bend.

We would rather keep Jesus as kind of one of those angels in cartoons,

cartoons like the angel and the devil that pops up on your shoulder and like

tell you the right or wrong thing to do, right?

We like to put Jesus as like, oh, he's like my conscience, or he's like a spiritual

guide, or he's kind of, you know, he's this guy who I just kind of pull out

and talk about when it's convenient.

But as Jesus is king, well, that's very different.

That means like he's he's deserving of my worship. It means he's deserving of

my energy, my time, my focus, my love, attention.

It means he's deserving of priority.

And I don't know about you guys, but man, there's a lot of things I like to

kind of shuffle around in my priority, and I'm tempted to not always put Christ as that priority.

But if he's king, he deserves that. that.

And so we come to this place where we have to recognize Christ is king.

And if you don't, that will become the stone, not that your life is built around,

but that you stumble over.

If we put Christ as our king and we orient our life and we make Christ the cornerstone

of our our life and we build our whole life oriented around that one truth,

everything else will fall into place.

But if we ignore that, if we just want to make Christ something that's more comfortable than king,

then we kind of start building with a skewed foundation and we will run into

that stone and it will cause us to stumble.

So Christ is this contentious figure. We have to do something with Jesus.

You have to come to some sort of conclusion. Either you believe his claim and

the Bible's claim and history's claim that he is indeed God and King,

or you have to cover your eyes and plug your ears and ignore that.

And so that is one piece of the themes I think are in O Holy Night.

The other piece, I think, is kind of brought forward in sort of the last verse here.

It says, truly he taught us to love one another.

His law is love and his gospel is peace.

This last verse drew some contention when it was brought here into the United

States because slavery was still a thing.

And this was brought into and adopted largely by the abolitionist movement because

of the lyrics in this last part of the song.

Now, I was doing some amount of research.

And this song, O Holy Night, from what I was able to tell, is actually,

like, it's not included in as many hymnals as you might think it would be.

Meaning, it's in less hymnals, like, significantly less hymnals than a similar

song, you know, Silent Night.

Silent Night, I think I found, was in a couple hundred hymnals.

I think O Holy Night, I found record of it being in, I think, less than a hundred.

Now, there's a whole bunch of reasons as to why that might be,

and I think it's probably a number of reasons why, right?

It might be, one, it's a difficult song to sing, so it's not the greatest congregational song. too.

It was originally written in France by an atheist and someone who seems to have

been a little bit critical of the church.

But I also don't think it's inconsequential that the song was introduced in

a place where it was particularly that last verse was met with contention and a place where people,

I was able to find a handful of people who still to this day dislike this song

because of racist bias and things that they want to hold on to and not submit to God's word on.

And so that last song, like where is that, not just in the song, right?

It might make us, we're like, we literally like that part of the song.

Where is it in the Bible?

And so let's turn back to Luke, and we're going to turn to Luke chapter 4.

Thank you.

So Luke chapter 4, I perhaps wonder, there is no historical record that indicates this necessarily.

This is just me wondering, since the person who wrote this is said to have written

the song based off of his reading of Luke,

this song being not too far after the Nativity story popped into my mind as

perhaps a place that perhaps he read and perhaps he chose to incorporate into the song.

So let's go to Luke chapter 4, verse 14.

Jesus is in his hometown of Nazareth, where he grew up.

Jesus returns to Galilee, in verse 14, in the power of the Spirit,

and the news about him is spreading throughout the whole countryside.

He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day,

he went to the synagogue.

And as was his custom, he stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

As he took the scroll, he unrolled it, and he found a place where it is written,

the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners. and recovery of sight for

the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

When he rolled up the scroll, he gave it back to the attendant,

and he sat down, and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.

He began by saying, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

So this passage, right, I think comes and touches on that theme of the outsider,

of the downtrodden, of God's heart for the foreigner.

We even saw that in the passage that was read earlier during the lighting of these candles.

I'm going to pull it up because I can't remember it exactly.

It says this in Deuteronomy 10, 17 through 19. For the Lord your God is a God

of gods and the Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome,

who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the foreigner

residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.

So the Bible throughout it has this bent, and God has always indicated that

he has a heart for the outsider, for the person who is low in social status,

no matter what form that has taken over the centuries and the years,

no matter what culture or nation,

God has always had a heart for the person who does not sit high in power,

but for those who are weak and needy and oppressed.

And God's heart has always been

to set them free and release them and establish some sort of equality.

And so this point is kind of made here.

The kingdom of God comes for those on the outside.

But Christ doesn't stop there. If reading that passage from Isaiah wasn't enough,

he goes on to kind of point the finger even more pointedly in the rest of this

story in chapter four. He picks up,

and says this, and we'll pick up in verse 22.

All the people who were watching Jesus spoke well of him and were amazed at

the gracious words that came from his lips.

Isn't this Joseph's son, they asked. And Jesus said to them,

surely you will quote this proverb to me, physician, heal yourself,

and you will tell me, do here in your hometown what we have heard you did in Capernaum.

Truly i tell you he continued no prophet is accepted

in his hometown i assure you that there were

many widows in israel in elijah's time

when the sky was shut out uh shut

for three and a half years and there was severe famine throughout the land yet

elijah was not sent to any of them but to a widow in zarephath in the region

of sidon and there were many in israel with leprosy and in the name of Elisha the prophet.

Yet not one of them was cleansed, only Naaman the Cyrene.

And then all the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this.

They got up and drove him out of town, and they took him to the brow of a hill

on which the town was built in order to throw him off the cliff.

But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

So Jesus reads this scripture. scripture, everybody's like, hmm,

yes, Jesus read that scripture.

They were all very excited until Jesus decided to tell this kind of anecdote,

this story, and point something out.

And then they all of a sudden got really mad, mad enough that they were going

to throw him off a cliff, right?

So can you kind of imagine a church service where I said something enough to

make you guys angry that that you decide to go toss me off a bridge, please don't do that.

Slash, I don't think I'm doing that. But Christ tells this kind of story.

He talks about Elisha and Elijah, and you're like, why did that upset them so much?

Why did these people all of a sudden go from being like, oh,

Jesus is great, to suddenly wanting to throw him off a cliff?

Jesus told these stories. He says, you know that story where there was a famine

in the land and there was a drought,

and Elijah goes to this widow and he heals the widow's son and provides food

for the family? Well, she was a foreigner.

She wasn't an Israelite. She wasn't part of God's people.

There was a whole bunch of other hungry widows and people inside of Israel.

Why didn't God send Elijah to one of them?

And in Elisha, there was this scene where this foreign diplomat comes and seeks

healing from God, and God grants him that healing through an encounter with Elisha.

And Jesus is pointing out, he's like, that story is about another foreigner.

Surely there were other Israelites who had leprosy, but Elisha didn't heal them.

And it was when Jesus started to point out that the gospel and the kingdom that he was bringing,

was not just for the people who were on the inside, but for people who were on the outside,

that all of a sudden people's flash, people's bias, people's anger started to come out.

People started to say, they started to get angry because they were just like,

well, we're God's people.

Like, surely God would never, he couldn't love or he couldn't have a plan for those people.

And so there's this idea that I think, you know, the gospel certainly breaks down all those things.

It breaks down all of our prejudices. It invites us to be in community with

one another, not based off of how we fill out a demographic survey,

not based off of what party we vote for,

not based off of our lifestyle or our achievements,

not based off of how we talk or how we dress, but based off of Christ and his

dying and coming for each and every one of us,

regardless of who we are and where we come from and what we've done.

It's this leveling of the ground. The kingdom of God comes for those who follow Jesus.

The kingdom of God is not for those who play religious games.

Names, the kingdom of God is not for those who look put together.

The kingdom of God is for those who follow Jesus.

It doesn't matter what else you do. It doesn't matter how much you even talk

about Jesus. You can play the church game.

I talk to people all the time who have experiences in churches where there's

politics and there's like, and I've witnessed those.

I've been to of church meetings and things like that, where I've seen politics at play.

And I'm like, is this what following Jesus is about?

About, you know, getting this or that?

Or is it about actually, you know, serving Jesus? Have we maybe started to miss the point?

There are people who know theology and can quote this Bible,

but seem to not know Jesus.

And that's the thing, is that you can read all of the theology books.

You can know more church history. You can do all of those things.

But if you don't know Jesus, if you aren't committed to following him,

if you aren't willing to humble yourself and say, he's my king,

and you aren't willing to live the rule of love, what are you?

Because it talks about that word, right, the law of love.

Jesus says this in Luke chapter 10, verse 25.

This is a fairly well-known passage, and we've talked about this here before

for sure, but verse 25 in Luke chapter 10 says this.

On one occasion, an expert of the law stood up to test Jesus' teacher.

Sure, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

What is written in the law, he replied. How do you read it?

And he answered, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your

soul and with all your strength and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

And Jesus said, you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.

God's people are marked by love more than anything else.

I know we've talked about this before, but we are so, so tempted to elevate

people who sound religious, talk religious, know religious things,

people who can maybe quote the Bible, people who've got it, seem to have it

all figured out, who seem to be very convinced of their opinions,

who are maybe very winsome in the way that they talk or they behave or the way

they they make us feel, but if they don't have love,

There's this massive crisis in the church and honestly in the world where we

seem to continually elevate leaders who have everything else but seem to lack love.

If we don't love God and if we don't love others as a result because of that love, what do we have?

That passage that is so often talked about in weddings, right?

If I speak in tongues of angels but have not love, I am a resounding gong.

The thing that we ought to be pursuing in our following and discipleship of

Jesus is, am I learning to love Jesus more and more every day?

And as a result of experiencing that love of Jesus, am I learning to love those

around me more and more every day?

That is the marker of Christian maturity.

So often we get into a place where we're like, oh, he's such a mature Christian. Why?

Well, he just, like, he goes to church every Sunday and he seems to have a really

big Bible and seems to know a lot about theology, right?

Or he gets into these arguments all the time with people who, like, right?

Surely the person who's online and defending the faith all the time and all

the Facebook comments, surely that person is mature. Yeah.

If they have not love, what is that?

The Christian mark of maturity is us knowing the love of God,

growing in love for God, experiencing that love, and then loving one another out of that overflow.

We ought to be a people known by love.

That's what Jesus said. He says,

he will know you by your love for one another, not by how right you are.

And so here in this song, I think it does manage to capture that,

this place where we ought to be loving God.

We ought to be coming and recognizing and bowing down before him and recognizing he's my king.

We ought to be coming into a place where we ought to be growing in love for

one another as we grow in our love for Jesus.

I want to tell you really briefly about perhaps my favorite performance of this

song, O Holy Night. One of the

reasons that this song sticks with me is because of a performance of it.

I saw one time I I.

I have a brother who has a mental handicap, has a mental disability,

and, you know, he's not able to live, you know, exactly the same kind of life

or a regular life like many of us are.

But he has many, many things that he does and he loves and enjoys,

and he's been an absolute blessing to me and to my family.

And one of the things that he does is he loves song and dance.

I'm up here always always talking about how I'm not going to sing.

He would be up here singing, right?

You do not want to play him in any sort of Disney trivia or like a Disney song

competition because he will win it all.

And he is, he participates in a adult, in an adult daycare program for people

with different abilities and disabilities.

And they, what they do is they write, produce, make the costumes and put on

and perform their own plays and musical productions.

And honestly, it was one of my favorite things when I was able to be able to

go and see them perform Shakespeare, like a Midnight Summer's Dream,

my favorite performance of that, because they were just like,

Shakespeare to the wind, and they were just like, let's have fun.

That was so much more interesting than Shakespeare's original play.

So they have an absolute blast. It's so much fun.

And they had a Christmas performance. I can't remember what the actual play was.

It might have been a Christmas carol or something like that.

And they were kind of done with the theater performance of the night,

and they were kind of just letting any of the participants who wanted to kind

of perform a song of their choosing, wanting to kind of sing.

And I remember this one individual who I know and my brother is good friends

with, he came forward and this young man decided to sing O Holy Night.

And, you know, like I said, this is kind of the national anthem song of like Christmas songs.

So like, you know, you kind of are, you know, you've kind of got that,

like, it's difficult to sing, right?

And, you know, this guy's not trained.

He's not particularly, you know, I wouldn't say that he's going to win American Idol anytime soon.

But he didn't care.

He didn't care. care. He got up there, and he started to sing this song.

I think he was in like five or six different keys at once, and he just was going for it.

He didn't look at any of us in the crowd,

wasn't looking for any of us to give him any recognition, mission.

And he just got on his knees and he sang that song over and over again.

Because he got it. Christ is king. He's deserving of our worship.

The law is love. No matter matter who you are or what you look like.

And that's it. And in that moment, I'm challenged still as I think about it,

because I don't know if I could have the same heart that he did in that moment.

To have that place of abandon where I'm not concerned about what other people

are thinking thinking of me, or I'm not doing it because I want other people

to think me a certain way,

but because I'm so wrapped up in just singing a song for my king.

That's the heart of it. And that's the heart of the Christian life.

If we don't get that, that it doesn't matter how much you talk the talk.

It doesn't matter how you kind of play the religious game.

It doesn't matter how many Christian books you read or how you can kind of weave

God into your story to kind of make it justify the decisions you make or the

way you you live your life, if you don't know Christ,

and if you aren't experiencing that love,

and in loving others out of it, and submitting yourself to Christ the King, you've missed it.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, Lord, I pray

that you would give us a heart that is willing to submit to you as king,

that is willing to say that you are our Lord.

Lord, that you would give us a heart that submits and lets go of our pride,

lets go of our fear of self, lets go of our fear of judgment,

Lord we want to know you Lord we want to be a community here where we are consistently going after you,

Lord I pray that you would fill our hearts with your love the love that sent

your son to be born to live and then die for us,

Lord, help us to know the love of a father that would give up his only son for

us who were enemies of you.

Lord, help us to know that love.

And Lord, might we too love one another with that love.

Lord, I pray that you would break down the walls of what we feel as comfortable and acceptable,

Lord, might we have you define who is our neighbor and not define who that is ourselves.

Lord, I pray that we would know you above all things and that we would know

you as our King and as our Savior.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen.