Luke 2:21-52 - God Has Spoken To You

Main Idea: Choose to listen and respond to what God tells you.

GOD HAS TOLD YOU HE UNDERSTANDS (vs. 21-24)

GOD HAS TOLD YOU HE SAVES (vs. 25-32)

GOD HAS TOLD YOU THAT YOU’LL SUFFER (vs. 33-35)

GOD HAS TOLD YOU WHAT’S TRULY IMPORTANT (vs. 36-52)

Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

I really enjoyed going through this study and looking at how good God is to us. He deals with us even in our doubt and our unbelief, like he did with Zachariah.

He loves us and he gives us mission and purpose, even when no one else might think like, hey, I'm going to have you do something important. God values you, and he gives you a wholly purposeful mission, just like he did with Mary.

That just as she physically carried Jesus, so we are called to, if you will, spiritually carry Jesus into every circumstance of our life. Every relationship and every room we walk in, we carry the Savior with us.

Also enjoyed seeing how the response that we have to God's goodness in our life ought to be praise and telling other people about him, as we learned from Zachariah and his like declaration and song and prophecy that we learned about last week and

then certainly as we think about the Christmas story itself, that the word, the pre-existent Son of God from all eternity past, he came down, he put on human flesh, he didn't unbecome God, he added to himself, added on his humanity. And as a result,

we are able to have forgiveness from sin. We are able to have a high priest who knows exactly what it's like to go through this life with our sicknesses and sadnesses and difficulties, and we can trust in him and listen to his voice.

Today, we're going to be closing out with Luke 2 and verses 21 through 52. Title of today's message is, God has spoken to you.

And as we look at the various aspects of this passage, we're going to see that Jesus communicates some things to us, certainly some through his words at the end of the chapter, but even at eight days old, his life speaks something to us through the

word of God. And as we see four things in particular that Jesus tells us, the main thought that we're going to have is to choose to listen and respond to what God tells you. Choose to listen and respond to what God tells you.

We can read the word, we can listen to preaching, we can sing songs all we want. But if we leave today and we don't respond to what Jesus has told us that we need to do or to believe or to reject, then it has done us no good.

We ought to respond to what God tells us. Let's pray. We're going to dive into the passage.

We're going to look at those four things that God has said to us. And we'll be done for the day. Dear Jesus, thank you for this morning.

God, thank you for everyone that is here.

God, I pray that you would please bless them, Lord, for the time that they've taken to tell themselves and to tell those in this room that knowing and following you is something that they want to pursue with their life.

And God, I ask that you would bless them in 2025 and continue to stoke those fires, if you will, of a desire to follow the Lord. We love you. We pray all of this in your name.

Amen. All right, like I mentioned, I've got a four-year-old and a two-year-old in the room right now that are mine. And so I've got a ticking time bomb.

So listen fast and we'll go through. Luke chapter 2 and verse number 21. When the eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived.

Jesus would later tell John the Baptist, the baby that we learned about last week, he would later tell him that he would get baptized in order to fulfill all righteousness, everything that was ever good to do, Jesus did.

And by the way, scripture also tells us that when we accept Christ, when we turn from our sin, we believe on him in faith, we make him our savior and our Lord. The scripture says that God applies the righteousness of Christ to our account.

2 Corinthians 5, He became sin for us, he who knew no sin, so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. When God sees you, if you're a Christian today, God does not see your sin. He does not view you with condemnation.

Instead, he sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

And this righteousness happened even when Jesus himself couldn't physically do anything, that he was circumcised as God had given under the Mosaic law for all of those that were God-following Jews for them to do. And he did this good thing.

And his name, Jesus, Jehovah, or Yahweh, saves, was the name given by the angel before he was conceived. That God knew the purpose why Jesus came. It wasn't at some point along Jesus' life, God was like, man, this guy's really good.

I don't think he's messing up at all. I guess I'll make him the Messiah. No, no, no.

He already knew why Jesus was coming into the world. Verse number 22. And when the days of their purification, this would be both Mary and Jesus.

If you were in our Tabernacle Talk study in the Book of Leviticus, you would read about some of this. When the days of their purification, according to the law of Moses, were finished, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.

That is, they were going to the temple, and they would pay a particular, if you will, it was a baby tax, that basically, in effect, said God thank you for giving me this child, and I want to recognize that you are the one that gave me this child, and

I want to respond in gratitude to you. How do you respond to the gifts that God has given you? Maybe you didn't get everything on your Christmas wish list, but whatever you did get, are you thanking the Lord for it?

Verse number 23, just as it is written in the law of the Lord, that every firstborn male will be dedicated to the Lord. So they're quoting from Leviticus of why did Jesus go there? Well, it was a righteous thing to do.

It was a good thing to do, and so Jesus did it all. So they went to have that dedication and to offer a sacrifice, according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.

Now I highlighted this last year when we were in this particular portion of scripture.

If you've read through Leviticus, you'd know the pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons, that's not the normal gift that you would give for the sacrifice for a first born son. You would normally give a larger animal.

But it says for those that could not afford the larger animal, you could give this pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. I'm thankful that God understands and he knows like our weaknesses and the areas in which we fall short.

And I love that even Jesus' family here, they were not the well off. God could have had his son be born into, if you will, any family and into maybe a more richer, a more established family.

But he sent Jesus to Mary and Joseph, just a poor young couple who brought the smallest thing that they could bring in sacrifice to the Lord. Maybe God has not given you a million dollars to be able to give.

Maybe God hasn't given you expert skills in tap and dance that you can use to dance for the Lord. But whatever God has given you, he has given to you intentionally so that you would use your gifts for him. In what ways has God enabled you?

Maybe it might just be something like, well, I can't really do overall baking, but I make a mean snickerdoodle. God might have you to make some snickerdoodles and give them to a neighbor and give them a gospel tract or an invite.

God might not have given you a bunch of maybe physical abilities, but you have the ability to pick up the phone and to call someone else and to let them know that you're praying for them and to ask how you can be a help to them or what you can pass

the word along to help someone else. However, God has blessed you, whatever God has given to you, use it for him. Then verse 25, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon.

This man was righteous and devout, looking forward to Israel's consolation, and the Holy Spirit was on him. This sounds like a great guy.

Verse 26, it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he saw the Lord's Messiah. What a promise that would have been.

But I wonder as the years went on and on, if he like Zachariah or Elizabeth began to doubt, to say, God, like you told me this, but it's been a couple decades and I've not seen anything yet.

For you have some Holy Spirit inspired patience in your life when you don't see the answers to prayer right away. It doesn't mean that God doesn't see you, doesn't know, but he does everything in his time and by his plan.

Verse number 27, guided by the Spirit, he entered the temple when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform for him what was customary under the law.

Simeon took him up in his arms, praise God and said, now master, you can dismiss your servant in peace as you promised. Did you notice there that it said, how did Simeon end up in the temple? He was guided by the Spirit.

I think of what Paul says in Galatians chapter five, walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh. I think of what the Apostle John told people in 2 John.

He says, I have no greater joy than to hear this, that my children walk in truth, that walking with the Spirit. Paul gives a really apropos statement in Ephesians five in verse number 18. He says, do not be drunk with wine wherein is excess.

He says, but be filled with the Spirit. I don't know everyone's background in this room. Some of you might have a little more vivid familiarity with being drunk with wine or whatever thing that you were drunk with.

And that moment of going like, hey, well, it kind of feels like someone else is talking. It kind of feels like someone else is determining how I'm walking. That's how Paul describes walking in the Spirit.

That yes, you are still culpable for your actions. If you drink and drive, the officer's not going to say, oh, well, it wasn't you, it was the alcohol. So I'll just give the alcohol a ticket and you're fine.

Instead, you are still culpable for your actions. And certainly as we walk in the Spirit, as we follow the Spirit, we don't lose who we are.

It's not like a possession type of thing where we black out and we wake up and we've blessed the hungry and seen people come to Christ.

It's not like that, but we are allowing the Holy Spirit of God to use the Word of God to affect our actions and our words and our motivations that we say, okay, well, yeah, if I was just, you know, in my mind without the Holy Spirit, I would respond

to this person with anger. But we are filled with the Spirit, guided by the Spirit, just a Simeon. And we say, well, but I remember Ephesians 4, forgive one another, even as God, for Jesus' sake, has forgiven you.

Okay, I'm gonna be guided by the Spirit in what I'm doing.

And man, if this was true for this guy, that was literally just walk into the temple, walk into the place where God's people are meeting, then certainly we can follow in even bigger and bigger steps to say, God, whatever you want for my life, I'm

following you, I'm being filled with you and directed by your Spirit. And he says, you can dismiss your servant in peace here. He views God as the one that is in control of his life.

This would be the Greek word despotis, where we might get the English word despot. It is the all powerful one. And he says, God, my life is yours to control.

You are the master, I'm the servant, the bond servant, the slave. You can tell me to come, you can tell me to go, and I am at your disposal.

As you read through the word of God today and this week, are you viewing God as your master, the one that will determine your actions? Then in verse number 30, Simeon says, my eyes have seen your salvation.

What a very, very true statement that that was. Notice here, the salvation of God wasn't found in a bunch of good works. It wasn't found in great financial outpouring.

It wasn't even given through getting baptized or through entering the temple. That's not where salvation was found. Salvation was found in the child Jesus.

And today, for you, salvation is found in the person of Jesus Christ alone.

As the apostles would tell the Pharisees in the Sanhedrin, a couple decades later, they would say, there is no salvation in anyone else because there is no other name given under heaven whereby we must be saved than the name of Jesus Christ.

If you've never turned in faith to him and accepted him as your savior, today can be the day that you do that. He is the salvation that we have.

And then Simeon goes on in verse 31 and says, you have prepared it, your salvation, in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and glory to your people Israel.

This Messiah, even though he was ethnically Jewish, religiously Jewish, he was a savior for all people. And I'm so grateful that Jesus didn't just come for one race or one group of people or one continent, but he came for everyone.

That's why we've had our Lottie Moon Christmas offering this month so that we can send the gospel out to the nations and to be a part of that process.

I'm so thankful that God didn't just leave us though, at this time, the Gentiles, they weren't seeking after God. They were worshiping the false gods.

And we could look back to Greek and Roman culture and see all of the different deities that they worshiped. Even our planets to this day are still named after Roman and Greek deities. And yet God shined a light out to us through the person of Jesus.

I do want to take just one moment. Who is a person that maybe right now, you feel like they are never going to accept the Lord? They are far from God.

They have rejected him.

If God can save you and me, if he can save the Gentiles, a people that once were not named by the name of God, well, he might just have a plan for that person that you've written off in your head that they're never going to accept the Lord.

Keep on pursuing, keep on loving, knowing that God is the one that shines a light of revelation and gives glory to the people of Israel, that this promise that they had received down from Abraham all the way down through the rest of the generations,

they knew the Messiah is coming. He's coming through the line of Abraham, coming through the line of Judah, coming through the line of David, and now he was finally here.

Verse 33, his father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him, though certainly they had been told by the angel of who Jesus was to hear it from an outside source, someone led by the Spirit would have been a marvelous moment.

I don't know if many of you have held a 60, 70, 80 day old baby. I don't know that you've ever been like, oh yes, this is the light of the salvation of all peoples. And certainly what a moment that would have been for this young couple.

Verse 34, then Simeon blessed them and told his mother Mary, indeed this child is destined to cause the fall and rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed.

And a sword will pierce your own soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. I find this an interesting statement. Simeon blesses them.

He tells them like, hey, happiness, good things to you, because he is going to cause the fall of many in Israel.

That those that had been trusting simply in their genealogies to give them a relationship with God, those that were just trusting in their own good works and weren't relying on God for salvation, it would cause their fall.

That many, like the chief priests and the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes and lawyers, they would not enter into a relationship with God, not because God didn't want them, but because they did not want the salvation that

God provided. They wanted to set up their own salvation.

Maybe if you are not a Christian today, is there something that you've set up as, this is how I get my relationship with God, this is how I receive the good life, and it doesn't come through knowing and loving and following Jesus, comes through my

own creation. Can I challenge you? Turn to the Lord and follow him in his way. Be one of the ones that rise, as many in Israel would, to know Jesus, to know the Messiah personally.

He was a sign that would be opposed, not due to any flaw in himself, but when light shines, darkness wants to fight back.

We can think even of the cross, is the greatest example of this, or the persecution that many of the apostles and the other disciples would face after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, and as they lived out the Christian life, there

was opposition. Say more on that later. He says, a sword will pierce Mary's own soul and that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. Mary, it says, was there at the feet of Jesus at the cross, as he was crucified.

And the child that she had held and placed in the manger at Bethlehem, she saw bloodied, whipped, beaten, and bruised, bleeding out on the cross, crying out, God forgive them, because they don't know what they're doing.

Crying out in the words of David from Psalm 22, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from me? And then at the last saying, it is finished.

And father, into your hands, I commit my spirit. Verse number 36, there was also a prophetess, Anna, daughter of Faneuil of the tribe of Asher.

She was well along in years, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage and was a widow for 84 years. She did not leave the temple serving God night and day with fasting and prayers.

What faith that this woman had, that after only seven years of marriage and then 84 years of being a widow, she was still following the Lord. It says she was a prophetess. She was telling people, hey, the Bible says this.

Well, Bible wasn't compiled at that time. The Old Testament, the scriptures say this. And what a testimony.

She didn't leave the temple serving God night and day with fasting and prayers.

Can I tell you, maybe if you're a little bit older in years, and I'm trying to move my eyes around so that no one feels like I'm calling them old, I'll stare at my wife, my wife's not old.

If you are more well along in years, know that God has a purpose for you.

And God might have you to be one that through fasting, through prayer, through telling other people the word of God, you might be able to have an even bigger impact on following generations than you have had up till this point in your life.

This woman, Anna, this prophetess, at that very moment, she came up and began to thank God and to speak about him. To all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. You see, Christianity is not just a boy's sport.

It is for everyone. And whether it's Simeon or it's Anna, whether it's Joseph or it's Mary, God has a plan for you.

And what a cool thing that Luke here highlights, decades after this has occurred, to be able to say, you can believe what we say about Jesus because there were all of these eyewitnesses, all of these people that heard from Anna, all of these people

that heard the prophecy of Simeon. And it is all true. And so you can believe it. Verse number 39, when they had completed everything, according to the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.

Matthew 2 would fill in a couple of blanks for us. After they are here at the temple, they would return to Bethlehem.

They would be there for up to two years, at which time the Magi, the wise men from the Orient, kind of Persia, Babylon type of area, modern day Iran, they would come to Jerusalem. They would say, hey, where's he that's born king of the Jews?

We've seen a star in the east. We've come to worship him. It freaks out the Ijamaean king Herod, who was over the region of Judea.

And so he asked the chief priest and scribes, he says, hey, where is the messiah supposed to be born? He has belief that what was happening actually was from God, though he himself did not believe in the messiah.

And in fact, scripture would tell us he wanted to kill this infinite messiah. So they tell him, ah, you know, in the prophet Micah, it says he's gonna be born in Bethlehem.

So he sends the wisemen to Bethlehem and he says, hey, if the baby is there, come back and tell me so that I may worship him. The worship is in the original Greek, I think.

But the wisemen, they go, they see the child Jesus, they fall down, they worship him, they give him the gold and frankincense and myrrh. God comes to them in a dream and tells them, don't go back to Herod, go another way.

They leave, Herod finds out that they left and they didn't come back. And so then he sends down a murderous group to kill all of the baby boys under two years old in Bethlehem. God comes to Joseph in a dream, warns him about what's going to happen.

Joseph and Mary and Jesus, they flee down to Egypt in fulfillment of the prophecy of the prophet Hosea, sorry, Hosea, who said, out of Egypt, I've called my son.

Once Mary and Joseph heard that Herod the Great had died, that would have been in about 2, 2 BC if I remember correctly. They then traveled all the way back up to Nazareth. And that is where we find here.

They returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. By the way, that's one of the big reasons why it's really cool that we have the four gospels. They are not like four alternate accounts of what happened.

They are four pieces of a puzzle that when you put the whole puzzle together, you see a beautiful picture of Jesus. And the Bible is all complimentary. The Bible is never in opposition to itself.

We find out, okay, God, how did you design this thing to go together? But that's all free. Verse number 40, the boy grew up and became strong, filled with wisdom, and God's grace was on him.

That Jesus wasn't just, you know, born full-fledged man, but he was born strong, he had to grow up. And just like my son or any of your kids or any of you, Jesus had to grow up. I wonder what that would have been like.

Many people over the centuries have thought about that and said, I wonder if he did any miracles while he was a kid. None of that's recorded for us in scripture, but it does tell us that he became strong, filled with wisdom.

He was, after all, the perfect wisdom of our God, the wonderful counselor that we would read about in Isaiah chapter 9. And it says, and God's grace was on him. You might wonder, how do I get that grace of God?

Scripture tells us, draw near to God and he'll draw near to you. That if we humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord, he will lift us up. God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.

To those that say, God, I don't know if I can make it through 2025, but I need your strength. I need your gifting, your ability to make it through. God gives his grace to those that know that they need it.

Then the last portion of scripture that we'll see today is the account of Jesus going to the temple again, but this time no longer at 60 or 80 days old. Now he's about 12 years old.

Every year, his parents traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. Again, following the law of Moses, everything that was good to do, Jesus did. When he was 12 years old, they went up, according to the custom of the festival.

After those days were over, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it.

My pastor back in Washington, Dennis Fountain, has a hilarious story of him and his family, and they were driving through some of kind of the northwest of the US and they were at a gas station in Montana, and they accidentally left him behind.

And he was there for like a couple hours, just there. And I don't know if any of you have lost your kids at any point, but I can only imagine the fear that they had.

Verse 44, assuming that he was in the traveling party, it wasn't just like the nuclear family traveling.

It would be, you know, Mary and Joseph, and maybe Mary's parents and siblings, and maybe any of their spouses and kids and some cousins, and all of them would all go down from Nazareth to Jerusalem.

And so when they were coming back, they assumed Jesus was in the traveling party, and they went a day's journey. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. I'd be so scared, guys.

I get scared when my regular human, non-divine babies, when I can't find them. I am certain that there was like, okay, God gave us his son and we lost God's kid. It's one thing to mess up with your own kids.

It's another to mess up with the son of God. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.

This would be something similar to us, like losing our kid and going back to DC and hoping to find one kid, one young teenager, in this whole mess of people.

After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all those who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers. I just want to note that real quick.

Okay, he's sitting among the teachers, these people that had given their entire life. This is the pastors, the theologians, the seminarians. He's listening to them and asking them questions.

If you're familiar at all with the story and life of Jesus and how he interacted, like he was always asking questions. People were going like, are you the Messiah?

And he would tell them, I'll tell you if I'm the Messiah, if you can tell me whether John's message came from heaven or from earth. And they'd get all wound up in a thing.

Okay, well, if he says heaven, then he's going to ask why we didn't listen to John. But if we say from earth, people think that he had a message from heaven. And so then the people will get mad at us.

So they come back and they're like, okay, we can't say anything. And so Jesus is like, all right, I'm not going to tell you either. And here he's listening to them.

He's asking them questions. And then we'd see in verse 47, Jesus, the Lord at his birth, he was giving answers. Are you listening for answers from God?

Or are you trying to supply God with your answers to say, God, here's what I want done in this situation. Oh, God, if it's your will, will you do this?

And oftentimes we need to just be like Jesus in his kind of final temptation there in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he says, God, here's my prayer request, but I don't want my will, I want yours to be done.

Are you listening for the answers from Christ? Verse number 48, when his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for him.

Searching for you. This is pretty normal mom response. Why were you searching for me?

He asked them, didn't you know that it was necessary for me to be in my father's house? Notice there, the end of verse 48, your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.

And Jesus reminds her, I have a father, and though Joseph certainly was, if you will, that step father to Christ, he was not his earthly father. He had a heavenly father, and Jesus came to save, to give light to all peoples.

And so he says, there is something more important than even this earthly family, and that is accomplishing the will of God for my life.

I wonder for me and you how many times we wish Jesus was doing something that we wanted him to when he is about his father's business.

Are we more intent on telling Jesus, hey, do this and this and this for me, when he wants us to be focused on what is the will of God? What does God want me to do? Are we about our father's business?

Also, because you're in church right now, if even Jesus knew that he needed to be in the father's house, certainly we needed as well.

If the perfect, sinless son of God needed to be in the temple, then certainly his people, those that claim to follow him, we ought to consistently gather together as the bride of Christ.

Verse 50, as was often the case in Jesus' ministry, they did not understand what he said to them. Verse 51, then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. His mother kept all these things in her heart.

This verse is astonishing to me. That Jesus was already about his father's mission, but because it was good for him to obey his father and mother, according to the law of Moses, he did it. He didn't have to follow them.

He's God incarnate. He could have said, no, God said, no, I need to be doing this now. But it says, he was obedient to them.

We've got some of our kids here today, you know, Zoe and Bea and Evelyn. Hey, Bryon, Jesus obeyed his parents, so you got to obey your parents too, okay? Thanks, bud.

He was obedient to them. Can I encourage you, there are going to be times in your life where you have to obey or follow or submit some people to some people that aren't the best.

All of us, all of our lives have governmental rulers that are less than perfect. There are laws that are not the most just that they could be.

And in those moments, we can choose to be like Christ and to say, okay, they don't understand what God's doing, but I'm still going to submit. I'm still going to follow. Not because the person deserves it, but because it's the right thing to do.

That's really hard for us. We only want to follow perfect people. The problem is there's only one perfect one, and he's told us everything, and we don't do a great job at following him, even though he is perfect.

And I love that it says his mother kept all these things in her heart. Do you keep the things of God, his mission, his actions, his character, his purpose for you? Do you keep that within your heart?

And then verse 52, an incredible verse that I'm probably going to be meditating on and thinking about for a good long time because it is mind-blowing. Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and with people.

This one who was perfection, who needed nothing. When he became human, he came small. And so he grew in stature, had growing pains.

The one who wept at the tomb of his best friend certainly might have cried a couple of times as, you know, his legs, he's starting to grow a couple of inches.

Times when he would have tripped and skinned his knee on the dirt or the rocks there in Palestine. He increased, but he didn't just increase in stature, he increased in wisdom.

That the infinite God, whose omniscient, who knows all, took on the mind of a baby, the mind of a child so that we can know our God. If even Jesus needed to increase in wisdom, certainly we do. Let's never be done learning about the things of God.

Let's never stop growing in our pursuit of the Lord. And it says he increased in favor with God and with people. His favor increasing with people didn't come because he, you know, used to be sinful and then he slowly got better and better.

No, the more that people interacted with him, there was more and more favor. There was an excitement about this young child. Can I encourage you?

Not everyone is going to like you. I don't know if you know that yet. Not everyone's going to like you.

But as Paul told us in Romans 12, as much as lies in you, live at peace with everyone. For your part that you can play, live at peace with other people.

And if there is just consistent enemy after enemy, after people, person who hates you, after person who hates you in your life, let's maybe take at least one step back to go, okay, God, is there something that I need to grow in here?

If Jesus was here increasing in favor with people, maybe I need to be doing some of that as well. Would you help me to grow and to mature in my life? And then there, Jesus increasing in favor with God.

I can think each moment that went by, just the ever escalating delight in the heart of the Father as he saw his son fulfilling all righteousness, knowing that every moment, that every good deed, every refusal to sin, every good word and action and

thought that he had would be passed on to you and to I, so that we can stand before our God when we die or when he returns, faultless and blameless because of the righteousness of Christ. So there's four, it's just four sentences that we'll end with

today. God has told us four things through this passage. Number one, God has told you to understand. He knows what it's like to be poor.

He knows what it's like to be far from home. He knows what it's like to not have enough. So if you're in that spot, know that God understands and he sees you.

He's not against you. If even Jesus himself went through it, then it does not mean that you are not under the favor and love of God. God understands where you're at.

He understands your humanity, the temptations, the sorrows that you go through. Secondly, God has told you that he saves. He saves through his righteousness, not through your own.

If you've never repented of your sin to say, I'm not following me in my way anymore, I'm no longer in charge of my life, Jesus, you're in charge. If you've never done that, you can do so today.

I would love to talk with you right at the end of service and open a Bible and show you how God says that he saves. Third, God has told you that you will suffer, just as he told Mary, the sword that would pierce her own soul.

Jesus would tell us, in this world, you will have trouble, you will have tribulation. He says, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.

When you go through hard times, when you get that health diagnosis, when you lose that job, know that Jesus knows. And that it doesn't mean that when you go through hard times, that you are experiencing like God's condemnation on you.

No, he's just helping you to become more conformed to the image of Christ.

That as we go through the crucible, as we are melted, the dross of our life, the imperfections, the anger, the bad habits, the laziness comes to the forefront in times of trial. And we realize like, man, I'm really messed up in a lot of ways.

And then we turn to God and we say, God, would you remove this from my life? And so what's left after a trial is a heart that is less consumed with this world and less consumed with ourselves.

And it is just consumed with knowing and following and being like Jesus. As Paul told Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 2, all those that live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

If you're looking for a life or a religion in which everything's always okay at every moment, Christianity is not that. Bible Christianity isn't that. God has told you that you will suffer.

Will you choose to still faithfully follow him even through suffering? And then lastly, God has told you what is truly important.

Through his interactions with his parents, with his mother, and with Joseph, we realize that God has things that are more important than what we're concerned with. God is more important than even our physical family.

God is more important than your job. God is more important than your hobbies. God is more important than your romantic relationships.

Now, that's not to say that God doesn't want you involved in any of those things. He wants you involved in all of those things. It's part of what it means to be human.

But are you placing him at the forefront of everything? As he told us in the Sermon on the Mount, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you. Are you seeking first the kingdom?

Are you pursuing what is truly important? Today, God has spoken to you. Will you choose to listen and respond to what God tells you?

Or stand, or to pray? Have a time of invitation. I want to encourage you here on this last Sunday of 2024, if God's spoken to you today, respond to him.

Choose that in 2025, that you're gonna follow and pursue the voice of Jesus. That you're gonna follow whether good times or bad times come. And you're gonna choose to prioritize what's most important to him.