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161: The Birth of the King
35 Plays5 days ago
After a nice summer break, we're returning to our message series based on "The Story" and looking at the Christmas narrative in Chapter 22.
See that simple manger? Removed from the pageantry we typically associate with the season, its humbleness reflects the values of the kingdom that Jesus ushers in. He arrives in an unexpected form to a world where what he said and did was contrary to the expected order. Reading and learning about our savior's birth in the context of God's grand story of redemption and outside the trappings of the holiday season, we get a fresh opportunity to reflect on an incredible gift from an incredibly loving God. Join Pastor Jim Mueller in this week’s episode to worship the newborn king!
If you’d like to dig deeper, check out these discussion questions. You can complete them on your own, with your Community Group, or with family and friends.
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Transcript
Introduction and Series Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Divine Media production.
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to Normal Goes a Long Way. I'm your host, Jill Devine, and it's been a little bit since we've covered the story. We took the summer off from the sermon series, The Story, and now we are back at it and we are so excited.
00:00:27
Speaker
I want to remind you that Thursdays following our episode today, you will get to hear the story sermon series in kids form with Miss Hannah and Miss April. So I encourage you to come back on Thursday with your family and listen to their take on what you're about to hear today.
00:00:49
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But let's get back into it. It's been a while. Chapter 22, present to you now.
00:00:55
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Now, as Jill just said, we are back in the story. We did the Old Testament during the spring semester, took a little break during the summer, and now we're gonna be going through the New Testament portion of the story of the story um from here into the fall. And so, even if you haven't been with us from from the beginning of the story, this is actually a good jumping on point right now as we get into the New Testament.
Exploring 'The Story' Bible Series
00:01:21
Speaker
and just a kind of brief summary that the story is for anyone who's ever said they want to read the bible they want to read the whole bible but they've never taken that step or they felt intimidated or they felt confused when they opened it up and so this is an abridged chronological bible that reads like a novel and you uh need a copy you can find them on amazon back at christmas time we actually handed out free copies of the story, and I asked our staff, do we have any left? And they said, one. So actually, if anybody needs a free copy, storm the lobby right now and go get that one leftover copy that we have.
Virtual Art Tour and Bible Connections
00:02:00
Speaker
um Before I get into the chapter, though, I think A little virtual trip to Europe might be nice right now to look at two famous works of art. um And that will give us a little bit of insight into how we can um look into the most important book in the history of the world um and get our arms around it. So first off, I want our plane to take us to Paris, France.
00:02:25
Speaker
ah to the renowned Louvre Museum. I've been to the Louvre before. ah When we were first married, I tried to take my wife to the Louvre, and we were there on the one day it was closed. So I messed that up for her. but um And when you're going through the Louvre, you're going to see um ah paintings by Rembrandt, paintings by Van Gogh, by Monet. But let's be honest. The one painting that you are there to see is the most famous painting of all time, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.
00:02:52
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And supposedly right now, this painting is estimated to be worth $860 million. $860 million. Now, when you first enter the room, you are stunned at how small the painting is.
00:03:07
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um Based on the legend of this painting, you would think it would be ah a big canvas or two stories high, but it's only 20 inches tall. by 30 inches, about the size of your oven door. So not not not very big.
00:03:20
Speaker
And as you probe deeper into the story of Miss Lisa, you discover that she was born in 1479 during the Italian Renaissance. Her husband was a wealthy Florentine merchant who supposedly commissioned the painting ah for their home to celebrate the birth of their second son.
00:03:39
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um And then we catch another flight, and you catch a flight to Rome. You grab a taxi. You use your best Italian to ask the driver to take you over to Vatican City.
00:03:51
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And you walk across the magnificent plaza. You enter the Sistine Chapel, and you see arguably the second most famous painting in the world, The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo.
00:04:05
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It's the strong finger of God is reaching out to give life to the limp finger of Adam. Yeah, we we took a little liberty to cover it up there and make it a little bit more PG.
00:04:16
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um Now, both paintings are stunning. And interestingly, they were painted at just about the same time. But there's one obvious difference.
00:04:28
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The Mona Lisa is sitting in a room, recently renovated, by the way, for $6 million, dollars um and it's all by itself isolated from the other paintings, all by itself.
00:04:39
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The story of Mona's life is completely disconnected to the stories behind the other paintings that are in the building. But the creation of Adam... is connected to paintings of over 300 characters.
00:04:53
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ah Noah, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, and Abraham, and Ruth. So this is a picture of the top of the Sistine Chapel, but backed out a little bit.
00:05:05
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And you see that essentially what it is, it's a mosaic of the entire story of the Bible.
Bible Organization and Chronology Explained
00:05:11
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it's It's a Bible in artistic form. And it tells this mural tells one grand story,
00:05:19
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of God's work in the world, creating the world, and then redeeming the world after it fell. And that's how I want you to think about the Bible.
00:05:30
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It's kind of like this painting that just tells you the whole story. The Bible is like a mural that tells one story, a single story. But the Bible doesn't often read like a story.
00:05:44
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It is a story, but it's not quite organized like a story. um If you have your Bibles, you can open up to the table of contents, but I ah took a picture of a table of contents in a Bible and even did a little highlighting here with ah with some different colors.
00:05:59
Speaker
um So first, show you a picture of the Old Testament, how the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is organized. um And there's 39 books in the Old Testament. And first off, you start with the law, the first five books in the Bible. They're sometimes called the Pentateuch because there's five books, Pentateuch, just like you have the word Pentagon, five sides, ah Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
00:06:24
Speaker
And as you read through Genesis, it's in chronological order. It's in chronological history. So is the book of Exodus. ah But when you get to Leviticus, Leviticus is a little different. It's more about the individual laws, the priesthood code.
00:06:39
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And then you go into Numbers, and it goes along in order. And then you get to Deuteronomy, and it sounds like Moses is repeating himself. And the reason it sounds that way is because he is The name Deuteronomy are two words that are put together. Deuter, which means second, and nomos, which means law.
00:06:59
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So it's a repetition of the law, a second telling of the law. um Then you get to the historical books. That's the next group that's highlighted there.
00:07:10
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There's 12 historical books, um and they're pretty much in chronological order from Joshua ah down to Esther until you get halfway into 1 Kings.
00:07:21
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And 1 Kings begins with the story of Solomon's reign over the united Israel, and then it describes the demise of Solomon and the dividing of the nations into two weaker nations, Israel in the north,
00:07:35
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and Judah to the south. In the book of 2 Kings, it goes back and forth between the kings and the prophets to the north, and the kings and the prophets to the south, all the way up to their destruction, and then their exiles.
00:07:51
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And what makes it even more confusing is... The names that mothers were calling their children back then, like names like Jeroboam and Rehoboam and Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin, they're hard to pronounce, or they're hard to read, and some of them even look the same.
00:08:07
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And then you get to the bottom, you get down to 1 Chronicles, and you think the story's gonna keep going on, but we're back to the story of Solomon again. So it's a repetition of the stories of the kings and the prophets.
00:08:20
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Except in 2 Chronicles, this time it leaves out all the kings to the north, and it just mentions the kings that that that were in the south, because God's going to use Judah, God's going to use the southern kingdom to bring Jesus into the world.
00:08:39
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Then you get to the poetry books. There's five poetry books, from Job to Song of Songs, and And um now Job's story is believed to have taken place maybe around the time of Abraham. So it would be a very old story ah that was penned later on.
00:08:56
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um So it would have occurred like during the time of Genesis. And these books, the poetry books, contain writings by David and Solomon. This is poetry, it's songs, it's a hymn book. And primarily, there's even a psalm that was written by Moses,
00:09:12
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And had been so remembered that when they decided to write the Psalms, write the hymn book out, that Psalm of Moses that Moses wrote was included. Then we get to the last two sections. These are the prophets, the last 17 books of the Old Testament.
00:09:29
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The first five that are in pink are called the major prophets, and then the bottom 12 are considered the minor prophets. And here's a way to think about this. 12. 12, 5, 5, 5,
00:09:42
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That's how the Old Testament is organized in our English Bible. Five books of the law, 12 books of history, five books of poetry, five major prophets, and 12 minor prophets.
00:09:54
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Now, why is one group called the major prophets and one called the minor prophets? The major prophets are prophets. Just longer. They're not more important. The books are just longer. After 12 years of college, that's what I figured out. That's why we call them that.
00:10:09
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And the major prophets are more or less in chronological order, as are the minor prophets. And so this is the time of the kings. It ends with Malachi and the people going to exile.
00:10:20
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And then the Bible is silent
Significance of Jesus in the New Testament
00:10:22
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for 400 years. From the time of Malachi to the beginning of the New Testament, the Christmas story, the Bible Now I'm going to show you a picture of the table of contents of the New Testament, and this is how the New Testament is organized.
00:10:39
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ah The first five books are historical books. The first four are the gap Gospels, the stories of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then the book of Acts first Acts. is the story of the disciples, the church, how the church got started, how the disciples, now that Jesus has ascended to heaven and he's back with his father in heaven, he has handed over the keys to the disciples, and now we get to see the ministry that they do ah after Jesus.
00:11:06
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And then we get down to the letters or the epistles. ah Romans is a is a letter to the church at Rome. It's not a history book. It's a it's the first of 21 letters or epistles that were written to churches or individuals.
00:11:21
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um And if you think they're arranged in chronological order, that would have been helpful, but of course they're not. They're arranged by author. So the first group that you see that are in blue are the books that Paul wrote. Paul wrote most of the New Testament books.
00:11:36
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And then the next books that come after that, from Hebrews down to Jude, these are often called the general epistles because they're written by various authors. The letters by John were written by John. The letters by Peter ah were dictated to Peter.
00:11:53
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ah the The letter of James was written by James and so on and so forth. And then the last book of the New Testament is the only prophecy book in the New Testament, the book of Revelation. By the way, we should do a series on Revelation sometime.
00:12:07
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We'll pack out the church. Well, let's get into our chapter for today, the birth of the king. And it begins, when you open this up, with a reading from John's gospel. This is John chapter one.
00:12:18
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It says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things came into being through him, and apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.
00:12:33
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In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. Now, if you have a study Bible,
00:12:45
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or any kind of Bible that has notes in it, you're going to see a note by that word comprehend. And if you were to look in the margins of your scriptures, you'll see that this word ah can also mean overpower or overcome. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness could not overpower it.
00:13:04
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It could not overcome it. And that's really the force of what this word means. So in essence, what just happened is the word comprehend, came among men and in so doing has overcome darkness has overpowered the darkness And the Greek word there for word, the reason it's capitalized, this Greek word is logos.
00:13:25
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Logos. Logos is translated word, but it doesn't have the meaning of like words on a page, like writing words. In fact, in most other translations, when the Bible translated into other languages besides English, the word logos is usually translated something like way.
00:13:43
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The way was with God and the way was God. ah Jesus himself said, i am the way and the truth and the life. So the force of that word isn't about words on a page. The force of that word is ah is about a way. It's about a path. It's about a journey.
00:14:02
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And of course, it's referring to Jesus. So John is starting the story of Jesus way before Bethlehem. Way before Bethlehem.
00:14:13
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Because Jesus' birth in Bethlehem is nowhere near his beginning. In the beginning was the Word. The beginning of what? Everything. Everything. everything
00:14:26
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Let me tell you why i have, and and we we at Messiah, we have so much confidence and hope that Jesus has overcome the darkness. Because Jesus is not some philosopher or teacher. If you see him that way, you don't see him.
00:14:42
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He's also not a ah moral ethicist. That's not why he's here. The Bible reveals he is God in flesh. We don't follow the ways of a philosopher or a prophet or a teacher. We follow God in flesh.
00:14:58
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That's the difference. So Bethlehem was not the beginning of Christ. It's the beginning of his human story. And he's here to overcome because things are not okay.
00:15:11
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The world needs healing. We, people, we need healing. That's why he's here. In the teachings of Jesus, He's going to create a difference, if you will, between existing and being alive.
00:15:25
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He thinks there's a difference between existence and really living. They're separate things. Here's his example in John 10. He says, I have come so that you may have life.
00:15:39
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But he's saying that to people who are functioning. They're eating, they're sleeping, they're breathing, they're thinking. they have kids, they have homes, they have jobs. What does he mean to give me life? I feel alive. No, no, no.
00:15:51
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You're merely existing, but you're not really living. C.S. Lewis said it best. He says, Jesus came to bring life because existence is all there is in the darkness.
00:16:05
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Existence is all there is. In him was life, John says, and the life was the light of men. It's not good to live in darkness. When you live in darkness, you don't see other people.
00:16:20
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You don't even really see yourself when you look in the mirror. Christ is the light that lets us see. That's what John's saying. That's his promise. And according to John, the church It's supposed to shine just like the nativity stars shined to draw people to the healing of Christ.
00:16:40
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We tell the Christmas story. I think a lot of times it's easy to get focused on the manger, the animals or the shepherds. And then we like miss the point of what the story is really about.
00:16:52
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I mean, what's the story about? God is here in flesh to save the world. So what starts with the manger, we know, ends with the cross until he's reborn from a tomb.
00:17:09
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And from there, he brings salvation and eternal life to all who believe. That's the message of Christmas. That's the message of the cross. That's the message of the whole Bible. That's the story.
00:17:21
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And so the story, the book is meant to unravel all this and allow some of you, maybe for the first time, to see the one story that God's always been telling.
Relevance and Divine Inspiration of the Bible
00:17:32
Speaker
mean, every time i read the Bible, every time I read Jesus' story, it doesn't change.
00:17:39
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But I have. I've changed. You've changed. You've changed. That's why we say that the Bible is a living book. um Every time you go back to it, you're gonna experience fresh discoveries.
00:17:55
Speaker
You're gonna see things in a whole new light, unlocking secrets that you couldn't see previously. And that's gonna lead you into the life that God wants for you. That's one of the ways that the Holy Spirit works.
00:18:06
Speaker
The Holy Spirit is working in the middle of the reading, showing you what you can handle then. and hopefully growing your faith and growing your understanding now.
00:18:18
Speaker
mean, usually when you read a novel, you finish it and you're done with it. Not my kids, I think they've read Harry Potter like 20 times. and Some people can reread maybe their favorite book over and over again, but you don't usually reread too many books all that often.
00:18:33
Speaker
um But with the Bible, i mean, for the last 2,000 years, we're getting pretty close ah to to when Christ was crucified. We're 2025, we're almost 2,000 years later.
00:18:48
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For 2,000 years, close to 3 billion people gather together every week and they keep reading the same book.
00:18:57
Speaker
I bet I preached the story of the prodigal son in church more than 25 times in my life. And it's still relevant. And it's still fresh.
00:19:10
Speaker
And there's still new things to discover all the time. And that's the thing. We read read the Bible like every year over and over and over again. And we're still stumbling across fresh, new, beautiful things that need to work on us.
00:19:27
Speaker
That's the power of the Word of God. In the Old Testament, Moses actually tells the people that every seven years, you are to reread the law for the whole community.
00:19:40
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Every seven years, reread the law. And I think it's interesting that Moses decreed that the reading of the law would coincide with the year that they canceled all the debts, the Jubilee year.
00:19:51
Speaker
I don't think it's accidental. You see, when you see the one story that God is doing from beginning to end, you're gonna discover just how far God has gone to get you back, to find you.
00:20:07
Speaker
When you were overwhelmed in your spiritual debt,
00:20:13
Speaker
you were leading a life that leads you straight to hell. But God, through Christ, came and he canceled your debt.
00:20:24
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He credited your spiritual bank account with the righteousness of Christ. When he sees your morality, he sees Christ's morality now.
00:20:35
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That's what atonement is. to credit one's righteousness something somebody else. You'll also see that the gospel story doesn't begin in Matthew. It begins way back in Genesis.
00:20:49
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And you'll see from the story the great lengths which God went through to save you, namely, giving his son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. Amen.
00:21:02
Speaker
And Jesus says the word of God, it's like a seed that's planted in the soil of the heart. And if the seed falls on hard soil, it doesn't grow.
00:21:14
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but if the seed falls on soft soil, good soil, it's implanted and it produces fruit upon fruit. So the deciding factor for each of you, for each of you,
00:21:28
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is not whether or not the story will be a good experience. It's about the condition of your heart. Is your heart ready to receive what the Holy Spirit is speaking to you?
00:21:41
Speaker
Is your heart ready for God to reveal something new to you? 2 Timothy chapter 3 says that all Scripture is God-breathed, and it's useful for teaching and rebuking and correcting and training in righteousness.
00:21:57
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so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. All scripture is God-breathed. At the beginning of the Bible, it says God breathed into Adam.
00:22:11
Speaker
He took clay, he formed it, and when he breathed into it, it came alive. So God's breath gives life.
00:22:22
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And at the end of the Gospels, just after Easter, Jesus comes back to life and he goes to see his disciples and they're scared. They're scared.
00:22:34
Speaker
Why are they scared? Well, maybe they've never talked to a dead guy before who's back. He came back to life and he's there and they're scared. And what does he do next? he breathes on them.
00:22:50
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So God's breath gives life and it gives faith. And then here in 2 Timothy, it says that when the disciples were writing down the stories of Jesus, our Bible, it says God breathed on them.
00:23:05
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So scripture is God breathe. So God's breath gives life. It gives faith. And it tells us the truth.
00:23:17
Speaker
Life and faith and truth. The reason we read the Bible is because it is God-breathed, which means His Spirit is there, and we know the Bible points us to Jesus.
Conclusion and Upcoming Episodes
00:23:30
Speaker
It's definitely good to be back, and i'm so happy that you chose to hit play on this week's episode. Please come back and join us on Thursday as Ms. Hannah and Ms. April equally as excited to come back after taking a break over the summer as they present to you the kids' version of Chapter 22 in Normal Goes a Long Way Kids.