Merry Christmas. Oh, only one person. That was my own son. That’s not good. Merry Christmas. Oh, okay, that’s better. It’s good to be with you. Christmas Eve morning. It is a Merry Christmas and glad to have our kids in here. So if your kids make noise, I don’t hear it. So you just, you don’t either. Um, we’re going to be in Luke chapter one, verse 78. If you’d like to turn there with me in your Bible, Luke chapter one, verse 78.

And I’m only going to read the first half.

It says simply because. Because of the tender mercy of our God. Because of the tender mercy of our God. We’ve been asking the question or answering the question, I guess. What are the gifts of Christmas? And we could give a million, but we honed in on three. But I want to, I want to ask, I guess, a bigger question, even a more important question. Who gives the gift? Because you can’t give gifts. You can’t receive a gift if there’s no giver. So it would, it would be a mistake to say, why did Christmas happen? Why did Jesus come? It would be a bad answer to say, because we. Don’t start with yourself. Christmas happened because we needed it. We, we had a problem. We had a deficit. We needed it. Friends, you have a lot of needs that aren’t met the way you would like or when you want. Sometimes that’s just life. The answer does not start with we. The answer starts with because God. Because God. That’s why Christmas happened. We said firstly that we got the gift of salvation. And. If you remember, that meant that Jesus, his name is Joshua, which Old Testament means means God saves. And Jesus didn’t just have the name God saves. Jesus was the savior. So Jesus was the means of salvation himself. The angel told Mary, name him. Jesus, because he’s going to save his people from their sins. He was God in the flesh. By him were washed, sanctified in the spirit. We said Jesus is true. He’s the king of truth. He’s true truth. And that’s a premium. It costs his blood for you not to truly know right from wrong, light from dark. And we can expect friction in this world if we’re going to live for the king of truth, because we live in a world that hates truth. And then last week we said the gift we receive from Christmas is calling. Jesus calls not the elite, not a special class. Jesus calls the lowly and common man, people who are especially unremarkable to have new life. And more than that, he employs the unremarkable to work for his kingdom, to make his eternal gospel known. And we depend on his power alone for that effectiveness. So I simply want to consider why God gives these gifts. Which rightly considered is a gift itself. The last Christmas gift is found in God because it is an attribute or characteristic of God himself. And it’s mercy. It’s mercy. Lewis Berkhoff in his systematic theology says the mercy of God contemplates man as one bearing the consequences of his sin. Who is in a pitiable condition and who therefore needs divine help. It may be defined as the goodness or love of God shown to those who are in misery or distress, irrespective of their deserts. In his mercy, God reveals himself as a compassionate God who pities those in misery and is ever ready to relieve their distress. So the word mercy, we could call it compassion. We could call it pity. But more than mercy. It says here in Luke, God has tender mercy. The Greek word is splanchnin and it refers to your entrails, your guts, literally your bowels. If we were to read this in an old King James or an earlier English translation, it would say bowels of mercy, bowels of compassion. In Colossians 3, our translation. Modern translation says put on hearts of compassion, where it says bowels of mercy, bowels of compassion. And you say, why are we talking about gross human anatomy this morning? Because that’s the seed of emotion in Jesus’s time. We say heart. They would have said bowels. Oh, that breaks my heart. Oh, my heart goes out to him. Oh, I love you with all my heart. Heart. That’s how we express what’s really going on inside of us. So for God to say, then he has tender mercy is to say deep in his guts. God is affected. By sinners. God is deeply moved. And his innermost to show compassion and mercy. The sinners. God says, I’m affected by you. So he sent Jesus.

And if we were all very honest this morning, despite it being Christmas Eve, we would admit in our gut. We don’t always like that notion of mercy and compassion. We’re truly hurt. Truly hurt. Do we? We went down to Gardendale to do Christmas with my mom and dad a couple of days ago. And in my stocking, there was a glass bottle of maple syrup. As you know, I love maple syrup. Real maple syrup on Belgian waffles. So I was glad to see it. But as my wife was unpacking our stuff yesterday, she dropped that glass bottle of maple syrup and busted. And she was so upset. And she kept the past. It’s fine. My life’s going to move on. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll get some more. Oh, but I’m so sorry. It’s fine. I’m not a big man because I forgave my wife for busting some maple syrup. It’s not actually a stripe. It’s not a stripe off my back, is it? Life moves on. But it’s different, isn’t it? It’s different when you hear about child abuse, whether it’s in your life or even on the news. It’s different when somebody demeans your character behind your back. It’s different, isn’t it? When someone actually defrauds you in a big way, hurts you, takes something from you, money or whatever. When that happens, we want to know. We want the sky to part and we want the lightning to strike. Compassion of this kind and caliber is supernatural because we cannot show it. Certainly not fully and perfectly. Mercy and compassion of a biblical caliber is not a feel-good experience for us. It’s not, I saw a poor child and I gave them… I gave them something to eat and drink or I went and spent time with the elderly and I feel so good. And I even took a picture of myself and posted it on social media. Look how compassionate I am. That’s not compassion. That’s not mercy. That’s just doing right by your fellow man. This kind of compassion doesn’t give you warm and fuzzies. True biblical God-sized compassion does violence to your sinful flesh. It asks us to, instead of exact revenge, instead of longing for punishment, seek the welfare of the one who is guilty and bears the consequence for what they’ve done wrong. Haven’t you said before, you got yourself into this mess? Now you can get yourself out. Serves you right. You got what you deserve. And strangely, even though it’s from a different religion, we say karma. But Christmas is that great reminder. Heaven looked down on earth and didn’t sentence us to destruction and made a proclamation of life and freedom. Heaven had tender mercy on us. And the Father’s tender mercy for sinners is not a photo op. It’s not in words only. You see, you see those campaigning for office, don’t you? About this time of year. And they’re going to all the hurt and places and pictures and they care. Boy, they care until they get in office and forget it. That’s not this. This, this, this scene is graphic. It costs God a lot to show us tender mercy. It costs God to send his son born of a virgin.

A baby to grow up, to be a bloody and crucified Lord for the people who don’t deserve it. That’s the tender mercy of God for sinful man. He sent his son. So friends, what is that? What is that? But a clear picture of the heart of God.

John says it in his first epistle. In this, the love of God was made manifest. Among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and he sent his son to be the propitiation for our sin.

Once when Napoleon was ruling the world as emperor, he put a man on death row and the mother came and begged Napoleon. Please show my son mercy. And he said, I can’t do it. He’s made the same offense twice. And she said, please, I’m only asking for mercy. And he said, he doesn’t deserve mercy. He deserves justice. And she said, if he deserved mercy, it wouldn’t be mercy. Christmas is a lens, friends, that shows us with perfect clarity the heart of God. And for all of us, for all the sermons and all the religious talk and all the things that Christianity is made out to be, that question hits us every December. Have I seen, received, truly been affected by the heart of God for me? Have I seen that Christ bears my sins? That Christ makes me new, that Christ makes me free, that God would call me a child, Christ would call me a helping friend. Because the window is short. The short little window of mercy before the end comes and then only the wrath of God is reserved for sinners. But God, pleased with sinners now, turn, repent, have true life, be made new, discover what it is to be free in Christ Jesus.

The second half of verse 78 says,

that because of the tender mercy, the sunrise shall visit from on high. And it gives light to the darkness. C.S. Lewis has noted that Jesus isn’t just like the sun and that when you behold him, you see he is the light. Jesus, like the sun, gives light to everything else. Jesus shows us everything clearly. And so he ends that verse and said, in verse 79, to say, he guides our feet into the pathway of peace.

Friends, it’s this baby born in a manger who grew up to be a man and died on a cross that truly washes us clean of sin and shame and makes us new and gives us joy in life that we were created to have and can only be found in him. It’s the light of Christ. First shone in that little town of Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. Let the sunshine of God’s light hit you in the heart and change you.

But I want to say, if we haven’t grasped that, it shows. And you know where it shows? In how we treat people around us. Like, if you talk about that kind of compassion and you put it in the Christmas box, that’s nice, ornamentally, like the Christmas tree. But friends, it’s the same sort of person who has a short wick with everyone else that doesn’t really, hasn’t really been affected by the compassion of God. Are you quick to be offended? Whether someone offended you or hurt you on purpose or not? Would someone describe you? Would someone describe you as hard on those who don’t live up to your standards? Be it your children, be it your spouse, a co-worker, a church member, even, mostly, often, your own self.

Let’s be honest, we’re all that person sometimes. So let us, let us go back to the manger and see how God has helped us. How God has had such great mercy on us. So we ought always to have mercy for one another. Jesus says, the measure to which you judge others is how you will be judged. Jesus says, forgive others as your Father has forgiven you. This isn’t do away with justice. Like God’s mercy all the time, steal, rape, kill, it doesn’t matter. That’s just, that’s Christian love. It’s everyone’s forgiven. That’s, it’s, that’s not the truth. It’s quite the opposite. Jesus took the violent wrath of God for your sins. So yes, that person that hurt you absolutely, absolutely deserves justice. You, in the harshness with yourself for your sins, yes, you deserve justice. But Christ received the full payment that you could be shown compassion and mercy.

So, you and I as God’s people on earth,

we as Jesus’ disciples ought to be the most compassionate, tenderhearted people around. I want to say that again because we need to hear it. As God’s people, as Jesus’ people, we ought to be the most compassionate, tenderhearted people around. And if we’re not, when we’re not, and we won’t be, come March, come May, come July, what do you need to do? You need to go back to this old story of how God became a baby, grew up to be a man, and died for sinners. You need to go back to the gospel over and over again and see the tenderhearted heart of the Father so that you would be able to see him. So that you would, would bear that same heart in Christ. And that’s the greatest gift God could ever give us. So, the gift is not salvation or truth or calling in the abstract. Jesus is salvation. Jesus is truth. In Christ, I have a calling because the Father has been tenderhearted towards me. And that is Christmas. God, who is tenderhearted and compassionate for sinners. I pray that that would be our reason to have a very merry Christmas. Let’s pray.

Father, you and you alone are good. There’s none like you who is so holy and perfect, yet so kind and merciful. There’s none like you who is so ready and willing and desirous to wash and to clean and to make new. Oh Lord, there’s none like you who has given so much for those who deserve so little. Father, we give you all glory. We worship your Son who fulfilled all your will. Who lived and died and rose again. Who is seated at your right hand. He is our Lord and Savior. Father, I pray for every heart that we would set ourselves to live for you. That your great grace and mercy would stir us up to all sacrifice to become fully who you’re calling us to be in Jesus. To live for you. To exhibit your gospel in everyday life. Oh Lord, that we wouldn’t fail to enjoy you above all the offerings that the world has. So Lord, shake us in our hearts. Shake us in our minds. Convict us of sin. We worship you and we praise you.