It's in my heart. I don't know when Jesus came into my heart. I'm not sure when I was saved. All I know is that I was saved. You know, we don't know for sure when Jesus came. We don't know the date exactly. And Christians have bantered this for many, many years. One of the best articles I read about it was an article by a church historian in one of our large seminaries. poo-poo, anything to do with Christ. And he was explaining how the Christmas was celebrated in the first and second centuries, where the church was still under persecution. And he made the point, and I think it's a good point, that they didn't take things from paganism to celebrate Christianity. They did later, that's no, Problem with that, I take a lot of things from paganism and use them. My ladder at home I don't think was made by a Christian and I don't mind getting on it when I have to. I don't mind using paintbrushes that were probably made by ungodly people. I use paint, I eat food probably raised by ungodly people. So I use the things that God has come and ultimately God gave it. And God gave us Christ. and he gave us in the early centuries. In the first two centuries, they were keenly aware that Christ had come. I mean, that's the heart of Christianity, is Christ came. It makes no difference if we don't know exactly the date and exactly the time. I do like the article or the discussion in Adersheim, who was a great scholar from the last century, from 1800s, last century. And his explanation is that in Jewish, in the Jewish writings, he was not only a Christian expert in the New Testament and Old Testament, but he was also a student of the Jewish writings, the Talmudic writings and other writings. And he said that in Jerusalem, that's where in Bethlehem was the place where they raised the beast to be offered in Jerusalem. So these sheep, he said, these shepherds were special shepherds. They were embodied sort of as people that worked for the church. They weren't priests or anything, but they were working for the church because they were raising the animals that were going to be offered up to God. And they had to be very strict with how they raised them. And one of the things that they did, and this is why he thinks it was in December, was to take them out into the fields. They didn't take them out into the fields during the summertime, not in the high field. They took them out into the higher fields. The flocks were taken up into the mountains, what we would call, they called mountains. If you're from Denver, you know that people in the Midwest have mountains too, but they don't look like mountains. These are mountains, but they had some of those around, but not close to Jerusalem. When they say in the mountains, sometimes in the Bible, they don't mean into things so high as what we have. But they took the shepherds, these special employees, underlings in the temple procedure, took these special sheep out and pastored them at night. And so he feels that they did that in the wintertime. And also in the first two centuries, there's a tradition, a written, that Christ was born sometime in the midwinter, their winter. And the Jew, if you study the Old Testament, you see that all the feasts of God were implants in place, usually, of pagan feasts. They were replacements for them. The pagans had feasts very much on the same days often. And so he figures one of the things that some of the scholars argue, and I have the sympathy for that argument, we know that when solstice was in the middle of the winter, we know that the shepherds were doing their thing in the middle of the winter, and so there's no problem with us observing the celebration of Christ in December. It's December 25 if we want It doesn't make any difference, it's good. It's not a bad thing to celebrate Christmas. And I'm always a little surprised. Some Reformed speakers seem to think that it's a sinful thing to celebrate the coming of Jesus with Christmas. You can do it in the summertime, you can do it on any day, just don't do it on Christmas Day. I'd rather use Christmas Day as a Christian holiday. I understand that it may not be the day that Christ came, but he did come. There's no doubt in my mind that he came. And I don't think it's a doubt in the minds of anybody that would argue against the 25th of December. I don't mind exchanging gifts in the name of Christ. I gave my wife a baby. She gave me a baby, same baby. And we did that four times. And I don't care if the pagans are doing the same thing. It doesn't bother me that they're having babies and I have babies. It's a common experience if you're married and sometimes if you're not. But human beings do this. And so I don't mind celebrating Christmas on the 25th of December and I don't mind having a Christmas tree. It's not a sign of the Norse gods of however they were worshiping, it's a sign of the freshness and the presence of Christ and the glory of Christ. I enjoy having a Christmas tree, I enjoy thinking about Christ as I see the Christmas tree. The little lights and the little dingles on it remind me that God, Christ is a glorious person. And we try to teach that of our children, too. I felt it was not fair robbing our children of presents at Christmas time. So we never had a Christmas on Sunday. We never had a Christmas opening of presents on Christmas Day. We let the pagans do that, and so we did it on New Year's Day. But I didn't want to have the children not get the gifts. And we did it in the name of Christ. They knew that it wasn't just the parents. They knew, I hope they know this, that we parents, we did this for them because we love Christ, because it represents the giving of Christ, the greatest gift that ever came. And we prayed for our children with them and for them that they would become Christian. Now that didn't make them Christians. What made them Christians was Jesus Christ. Some of them were saved from the time they were little babies. Some of them were saved much later. Some of them we thought were saved that weren't saved. And then they wandered around in paganism for a while and finally God got a hold of them. You can only be saved by the grace of God. But the gift giving, and we try to explain this to them, we want them to know ultimately this comes from God and the greatest gift of all is what? Jesus Christ. Christmas represents the coming of Christ. I'm glad to be driving around the city with everybody having their Christmas carols on their radio, even if some of them are about the rooty-tooty tummy-tummy-tum. I mean, I don't like those especially. I mean, they're good tunes, nothing wrong with them, but that's not the heart of the message. But it's a wonderful occasion that all the nation has their mind focused on Christ. Some in anger. Some in hatred, but still in all, the whole nation is focused on Christ. That's a marvelous thing. I wish they were all in church, in a good church, a church that preaches the gospel, and even the best of all would be the OPC, if they were all in, could we say OPEC? But if they were all in the OPC, that would be great. Maybe that wouldn't be good for us. Sometimes you get a big church, you get a big cat, and your head is so big you forget about one little thing, the Bible. And the Bible goes out the window as you grow. That's not good. All right, so we don't know exactly when this was. The Bible talks about the taxing under Caesar Augustus, and it talks about Quirinius, who was governor of Judea at that point of time. We know who Caesar Augustus was, but we don't know just when he took taxation. In those days, you had to all come to your family, sit in your hometown to be paid taxes, and that's what Mary and Joseph were doing. And so God brought them from way up in the north. To us today, we'd just get in our car, it'd be a couple of, maybe two or three hours trip. But to them, it was, it took, by walking, it took a long, much longer time than that. And they took this awful trip down to Jerusalem, why? to pay taxes. You think your taxes are bloodsuckers? I mean, just look at what they had to do. They had to do all this effort, all this, leaving their homes, leaving their jobs. And they were poor enough the way it was. Now, sometimes the kind of jobs they had, they took in their back pocket. That is, they had to hammer nails back there and they could build or do whatever. I don't know if they used nails. At any rate, they took their jobs with them, so it wasn't like what we would have to do. But nonetheless, it was a very great sacrifice, is to travel from your homeland to Jerusalem to pay taxes. Now everybody, every Jew, wanted to get to Jerusalem once a year. Every Jew in the whole world, and there were Jews scattered all over the then known world. Because of persecution, they just were scattered everywhere. And many of them tried to get back to Jerusalem at least once a year, hopefully, maybe for the Passover. Now, Mary and Joseph came to pay taxes, and they were enrolled, and they paid taxes. This was in Bethlehem. They went to Bethlehem because that's where, that's Joseph's family, that's his background. In those days, like the days when a wife marries a man, she inherits his relatives. and his name and his wealth, whatever that may or may not be. And so it was a very close relationship. In those days, some men had more than one wife, and that's not very common today, thank the Lord. One wife is enough. Wives say the same thing about when one husband is enough. It's hard to get your life going well even with just one. Think what would happen if you had two or three. It's like one child. One child's not bad. Two children, much work. Three children is 10 times the work. Four children is 800 times the work. I mean, it's a lot more labor, unless if you're blessed like we are with one that was always older than all the rest and understood all the fine points of changing diapers and mopping floors and doing all kinds of, I don't know if you mop floors, but he was a very, very helpful little guy. He helped us a lot, because I was always preoccupied. Okay, so they went to Bethlehem to the house, and because Joseph was of the house, the family, and of the lineage that he was in the line, that line of people of David, and Bethlehem was the House of David. That's what its name was. That's what its fame was. David was the one that built it. It was his capital city, and people were glad to go there, especially his relatives. And so they went there to pay taxes. And she went, even though she was, the Bible says, heavy with child. And we know what that means. She was well along in her pregnancy, and it was hard for her to walk, and they had to walk the whole way. Maybe he had a donkey, maybe he had a mule or some kind of beast of burden, and they could have Mary ride a good deal of the way, but she probably walked a lot. Women were tough. Women are still tough today, much more than we men know. I don't think men could stand having a baby. It's just too painful and too much work and all that kind of stuff. But women, God gave us women so they could do that hard labor for us. Okay, that's the story, and the explanation is recorded in the scripture in verses eight to 14, which we read. We read that the shepherds were out in the fields giving watch over their flock by night, and then an angel, an angel of the Lord stood before them. I've never seen a real angel. I doubt if any of us have ever seen a real angel. Now it's possible that God could send an angel today for whatever reason, but God more or less has not sent angels since he closed the canon in the New Testament. At least that's what we believe in general. Anything's possible because God's not limited by our understanding of things. He can do whatever he wants, but I've never seen an angel. But it must have been a frightening thing. An angel of the Lord, if they looked like they looked in the Old Testament, were, now sometimes they would just look like ordinary men, like the angels that went up in the book of Genesis. They were just, they went to Abraham, they would just look like ordinary people. But many times in the Bible, the angels don't look like ordinary people, and I think perhaps here they didn't look like ordinary people because it says, the glory of the Lord shone around them. That is, they were, we depict angels that way today sometimes, in white clothes, and they were fully dressed in, that's fancy, that's a fancy suit in the days of the New Testament. You wore a white muumuu, right? You know what a muumuu is? It covers everything. And it's a long robe with long sleeves, and the angels are wearing these white, these white things, and the glory of the Lord shone around them. And the men were very afraid, the people that the angels appeared for. The angels frightened these men. It's no shock that they were frightened, at least it isn't to me. If I were out watching some cows at night on the field, which I never did, but if I had done that, and suddenly an angel occurred, I'd be frightened too. because angels weren't, they weren't ordinary sights. These weren't things you ordinarily saw in the days of the Bible, certainly not today. And then the angel spoke to them, and it told them, don't be afraid. So, guess what, they were afraid. They didn't welcome that angel as a blessing from God. It was a blessing from God, but it's because it's an angel. Why do angels come? They said, well, here's this angel. What do we do wrong? Are we going to get punished in some way or the other? Is this judgment on us? And the angel said, don't be afraid. I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Now, everybody wasn't excited about the coming of Christ. So the angel isn't talking about what's going to happen. He's talking about what ought to happen. Everybody that knows about Christ today isn't excited about it. When you listen to the ungodly, they curse constantly. They're not aware sometimes even that they're cursing. It doesn't mean anything to say we had a family that just visited us where the children are accustomed to saying, oh my God. That's cursing. They aren't saying, God, take note of this, like, I worship God, God, take note of this, or God, this is shocking. They just said this is what comes off of their lips because they're shocked or they're surprised, they don't know what's happening. It's just part of their ordinary conversation. When I was a little boy, I was raised in a house like that. My stepfather swore constantly. He was a good man. He treated us great. He fed us well. We were warm. Well, we didn't have central heating in the farmhouse, but we could get warm there if you huddled around this little potbelly stove. You could get warm, and at night you got warm by sleeping under enough covers. But he was a man that swore. I guess he had a PhD in it. I don't know, but he was a very, Fluent cursor. But all the men around there that I knew, and when I was a child, all of them swore. It was common. And I think in America today, that's common. People swear a lot, and you hear them just talking idly, you can hear them swearing. And sometimes even Christians mix in with the flow, and they swear too. But God says you shouldn't use his name as if it's meaningless. None of them says, our kids don't say, Oh my, Satan. Oh my, Satan. Oh my, demon. They don't say those kinds of things. Why not? Why can't they say, oh my, Gilgamesh? Or oh my, Ishtar? Or some other ancient god or godlike figure. Why do they use the name of God or the name of Jesus? Or even sometimes Jesus Christ? Because they're aware that God is important, and they, in their souls, they don't care about taking the name of God in vain. We should as Christians. And the angels talk about the birth of the Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Christ in Hebrew is Messiah. This is the Messiah that is the promised one from the beginning. Remember in the Garden of Eden, God told Eve that she would bear a child and that he would crush, the child would crush and defeat the work of Satan. And mankind held to that promise. In the New Testament, Jesus is called the Son of Man. When I get to heaven, I want to ask, does that mean that he is this promised son? Is that a way of saying he's the son of Eve as well as Adam? Is that a way of saying that he's the promised one from the beginning? And you know, mankind, they were Christians from the beginning. The Bible doesn't highlight them, but it certainly assures us that they were there. In Hebrews 11, there's a long list of them. And so it says, suddenly there was an angel with the angel, a multitude of heavenly hosts, there's a multitude of angels praising God saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill towards men. That is, they were praising God because of the birth of Jesus. Now clearly, in my mind, the most important event in the history of the world is the birth of Jesus. There's nothing more important, there's nothing more that our children should know. Even if they're little pagans, which many of our children are, they're not born again, I don't mean to be insulting, but they're pagans, they're heathen. Because either you're a born-again Christian or you're a pagan. But they need to know that we believe, and know in our hearts, that Christ is the promised Savior, promised from the beginning of the earth. And prayerfully, God will use that knowledge in their hearts the way he used it in our hearts. I don't remember when I was born again. All I know is that I am born again. I have one child that said she's always been born again, and she's living good now. There's some that say, well, I wasn't always born again, and then they were converted later in life, even after they left our home. And so I don't care when they're born again, it's just my prayer before God that they'll be born again. And all the children in church, it's our prayer that God would be born again. We baptized a baby this morning, the pastor did. And what we're saying is that in God's book, In heaven, at least I think what we're saying, is if this child dies in infancy, God's taken him home. Now I don't pray for children to die in infancy, but I think that they have an eternal soul, and if they're baptized into God's church, God, when he brings them home, claims them as his own. I don't think other babies go to heaven. In the Baptist church, they believe that all babies go to heaven before the age of accountability. And I can remember, as a Baptist layman, and certainly as a Baptist minister, trying to figure out when the age of accountability is. And it depends upon the Baptist minister you're talking to. But they all believe, except the Reformed Baptist, all the others believe, and many, many other churches believe, that if babies die before a certain age, They're innocent, and they go to heaven. So I used to tell them, if they still talk to me, that you pray for the deaths of babies. You pray that babies would die. That's a better way of evangelism. Because more babies die, especially in America. Just think of all the babies that are being murdered or killed. And if you think of it as sending them to heaven, then it makes it not so terrible. And all over the world, all the tragic things that happened, especially strikes the young children, because they can't defend themselves. Well, of course, I don't believe that all babies that die in infancy go to heaven, so I don't pray for their death, but I think the Baptists should. All right, so they're announcing that Jesus has come to bring peace on Earth. What kind of peace? Peace between God and man. If you're not a Christian, whether you realize it or not, you're fighting against God. Because you're not keeping God's laws. You're not doing what God wants you to do. You're in rebellion against God. And why they mean peace on earth is because now there's going to be an outbreaking of the promise of God and the work of God through Jesus. to all the world. There'll be people that'll hear about Christ in nations that have never heard directly about Christ. Even though Romans 1 tells us they all know about God and ultimately they all know their sinner and they're all in rebellion against God's law. They all know that, but they do it anyway. But there's no good news. There's no news that you don't have to live this way. Now that's not good news if you don't want to repent. If you like the way you're living, that's good. If you live that way long enough, perhaps you'll find out that it's a miserable way to live. Because the only real way to get peace in your heart is by having Christ in your life. And those of us who are Christians realize that. It doesn't mean everything is smooth and without problems. It just means that we have a higher way to live, a higher way to go. So the explanation was ultimately that Christ, the baby is Christ, the Messiah, Christ the Lord. He's not only man, he's also God, and he's come to bring salvation and make it clear. and to attain it by his death on the cross. And then this established his church and sent forth a missionary all over everywhere to the world to announce the gospel that men would be born again. So the reception of these things, the reception by Mary in 16 and following, the shepherds came and found Mary and the babe. And when they saw Jesus, then they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this child. They were the first evangelists, first New Testament evangelists. And people must have thought they were nuts. If you're a born-again Christian, and you live that way, and people ask you, why are you doing this? And you tell them, they think, I've had people tell me, you're just nuts, that's all. Well, it's a wonderful way to be nuts, I tell you that. Because we don't have to wallow in all the stuff, all the terrible stuff that they have to go through. Life, if you're a thinker, life without Christ is hopeless. because all that you can attain in this life, you're gonna lose when you die. You can get huge amounts of money. Trump has got a lot of money, I understand. He's probably got more than he knows, and I doubt if they've counted it carefully, because he's got so much. But you know, when he dies, it's all gonna be gone. He's not gonna take it with him. And if you're a great athlete, and that's your wealth, And you can, you know, you're like, oh, I can't think of any great athletes right now, but you know, the great basketball players that we have, and if they're not Christian, they're gonna get old, and they won't be able to do that anymore. If you're a great runner, you're gonna get old. If you don't get crippled somehow before that, you're gonna get old. And it's all gonna go, if you're very beautiful, You're going to get old. You're going to look like all the other old women. No, they're still attractive to their husbands. Now, we wouldn't admit it if they weren't so. But they are. They have a beauty that goes beyond the skin. They have a beauty of soul. I mean, we love them because of who they are, not what they are. And they still look beautiful to us. But when you die, you lose everything in this world. You can't take any of it with you. You just can't take your smarts. I always had a kick when I was a teacher. I had a Greek student, one of them that studied Greek before, and he came into the classroom and he started talking to me in Greek. I can't talk a word of Greek. And so he was really showing the professor up. But I tell you what, he couldn't decline a noun. He'd taken Greek, this was his third year. He'd flunked both first years, so he knew a little bit of talking Greek, but he didn't know anything about writing Greek. He didn't know anything about reading Greek. He was an idiot when it came to that, but he was very fluent in talking and saying hello, how are you, what's your mustache or something like that. He could do some words in Greek. And we are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how brilliant you are, you're not as smart as God. And people get conceited because they believe they're smart as God. I've got a very high IQ. I've had a lot of people tell me that. Not me personally, but they told me they had a high IQ. And I'm glad they do. So what do you do with it? Well, they want to carve wood. They want to waste it, or maybe they want to make a lot of money. Whatever it is they want, everything's going to be gone if you don't have Christ as your Savior. When you come to this end of this life, whether you believe it or not, you're going to get old and ugly, and your body's going to get stiff and sore, and you'll get to the place where you just sort of stumble around. If you're a great athlete, you could do a lot. It's all going to go if you live long enough, and if you don't live that long, you're going to die and you're going to lose it anyway. So what they said and what Mary, she marveled at the things which God had said to the shepherds. And she put all these things in her heart and she thought about them. She understood a lot about what Christ was. She didn't understood it all yet because that would wait for Christ to tell her. The shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all the things that they'd heard and seen. So the shepherds got it with the great news, it was great stuff, and they loved it, but were they Christians? I don't know. I think Mary was converted. She had to have some work, there was conversion in the Old Testament. It didn't start just at the death of Jesus. It started at the beginning with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, I believe, were converted. And I think there are many people in the Old Testament that were converted. Hebrews 3 gives us the short list, but that doesn't mean you're done with Hebrews 11. You're done with the 11, chapter 11. That's all that was converted in the Old Testament. I don't believe that at all. And I believe in the New Testament that Mary was one of the very early converts to Christ. And she thought about it. She pondered it. When you become a Christian, do you ponder? Do you think about Christ? Well, I did. You do, and that's why you read the Bible, because the Bible makes you think about Christ. It's good reading the Bible. I like to read the Bible more than anything else. I used to like to read Babylonian. It was fun for me because nobody else can read it hardly. It's just a bunch of scratches on the paper. And I had to learn several languages over that way, and they were hard to learn. But nothing was as precious as the Bible. It talks about my soul, it talks about Christ. It feeds me and makes my life worthwhile. I know that when I die, God is gonna take me. He's gonna make me a lot better than I am. He's gonna make me glorious in his sight, just like he'll make you glorious if you're a Christian. And if I'm not a Christian, I'm going to die, and they'll put me in a hole and throw the dirt on me, and I'll just keep going. Because my ultimate destiny is hell. So that's what Christmas comes, and so I've named this Christmas in my heart. Because Christmas isn't just a tree. Christmas isn't just the day. It's just not the words in here. It's that Christ came into my heart. And it's a great joy. No one can give me a present that is as good as what God has already given me. That doesn't mean I don't like stuff. I still like stuff, like the rest of you. But Christ is the greatest gift of all. If he lives in your heart, he gives you strength and hope. Now you may not always tap into that strength, because if you don't read the Bible and pray and do what he tells you to do, then you get weak spiritually, and then you get down in the dumps. But if you live with Christ, he walks with you, and he understands you, you have a friend that'll never leave you, that's Christmas. The greatest gift that you can get is Jesus Christ in your heart. And the people today that have all the Christmas, if they don't have Christ in their heart, when Christmas stops, they lose their joy. They go out and as they get old, they get old and cranky and they wondered, why am I going through this? Why does this have to happen to me? Because you get old as you get things hurt, your ankles, your side, your arms, your head. I mean, it's just, your strength is going. You can't walk as much as you used to. Sometimes your memory goes, but it's really terrible getting old. But God tells us about it in the Bible, and he prepares it for us, and so if we know what's coming, we're prepared, and Christ is with us no matter what. That's the greatest gift. Christmas in American society is just a song and a tree, oft times, and just giving things to each other or getting drunk. Sometimes that's the greatest thing for a lot of people. The Christian in society, they sing the songs, but the songs are empty. They like the tunes, they enjoy the music, but the message, they miss the message of it. Christmas isn't in their heart. In Christian society, A lot of times, like America, as a Christian society, they tell me, but there's a lot of paganism in America. The Christians are pagans. They don't worship Christ. They don't value the things of Christ. They don't value the scripture and reading it and memorizing it. Now, there are a lot of Christians in America, and I'm thankful for that. And I don't know who all of them are, but I'm thankful for that. But ultimately, I can only know about myself. I know that Christ has changed me. And that's what's important. When I read the Bible, that's God speaking to me. And it's a precious, precious thing. And if you don't have that gift in your heart, then this Christmas is as empty to you as your heart is. You take nothing away from it except the gifts that man can give you. And that's not enough, I tell you, that's not enough. Okay, let's pray. Precious Jesus, those of us who are believers, we don't take the credit to ourselves, we give the credit to you. We were lost and dead in our trespasses and sins. Like everybody else, we hated you and your law, and then you saved us. And you put in our hearts a love for you, and you put in our hearts a help, even the Holy Spirit. who helps us understand the Bible, who helps us understand life better, who strengthens us so that no matter how terrible things might be for us, if we have Christ, we understand that he is our Lord and he's prepared a great place for us and we're going to go there to be with him. We pray, oh God, for those who might be present here who are not Christians. not because we want them to join the church, but because we want them to love Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. And we pray, oh God, that you'd send your spirit into their hearts the way you sent your spirit into our hearts, and that you would change them the way you changed us, and make of them men and women that praise God and that walk with you. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen.