▶ 1:05:46

The last Sunday of 2023 fell in the gap between Christmas and New Year’s, which at
Hope Chapel usually means a thin room and a hard time staffing children’s ministry. Instead the
auditorium was full — no kids’ classes, all ages in one room, a lot of people back in town, and Ron
Parish, Hope’s second senior pastor, in the seats to honor Dan Davis, the founding pastor, whose
memorial was the following Saturday. Matt kept the message short on purpose and did not pad it. It
was one parable and one point.

The gift you cannot match

▶ 1:08:32

He started where everyone had just been: Christmas. You give someone a gift, and it is fine. The
one they give you is spectacular. And something in you goes quietly sideways about it. It really is
more
blessed to give than to receive — which is precisely why being out-given is uncomfortable. If
someone does you a large favor, you would like to return it, if only to close the file in your head.
You do not want them up on you.

That instinct, Matt said, is the one this parable goes after. “There is no way we will ever be able
to compare to his generosity,” he put it, “and we’re going to have to at some point relent and let him
be better than us” — which, for people who have served God a long time, is a difficult thing to
swallow.

1. The parable, and the math that offends

▶ 1:09:41

Before he read it he pushed the idea to its absurd end. Suppose there were a wing of heaven where
we made license plates to work the loan off — even there, he said, God would be giving away more the
whole time than we were paying back. “It’ll only be a growing problem.” You cannot out-earn a person
who keeps handing you the earnings.

▶ 1:10:15

He read straight through the hiring rounds — third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour — and then the last
batch, the men still standing in the marketplace at the eleventh hour, who give the only reason they
have. Not laziness. Nobody hired them. And when the wages are handed out, the order itself is a
choice: last first.

He stopped the reading to make sure the arithmetic was clear, because the arithmetic is the whole
thing. This is a twelve-hour workday. The men hired at the eleventh hour worked one hour of it. They
were paid a full denarius — the entire day’s wage. And notice what the foreman did not say: here is
the denarius, come back sometime and work off the other eleven hours. Nobody in this story is put on
a payment plan.

▶ 1:12:09

Which is why the men who had been there since dawn got their hopes up, and why anyone would. Twelve
hours at that rate should be twelve denarii. Debts paid, a good dinner, a night worth celebrating.
Matt’s point was not that their expectation was greedy. It was that their expectation was
normal. Anyone standing in that line does the same math.

▶ 1:13:26

2. Who, exactly, is grumbling

▶ 1:14:04

Matt walked the room through the parallels and was blunt that this is not one of the hard ones. The
master and the foreman are the Lord. The workers are people who serve him. The eleventh-hour hires are
the ones who came to faith late, or who simply did not work as hard as you did — and, he added, you
know precisely how hard you worked.

▶ 1:14:52

He deliberately did not name the grumblers yet. First he made the room say the ideal answer out
loud — what a free person says when the master pays whatever he pleases: “Yeah, Master, you do as you
please. We love when you do what you want.” That is the sentence. Hold it up next to whatever actually
rises in you, and you have the entire diagnostic.

▶ 1:15:38

The grumblers are the interesting part. Not because they are wicked, but because their complaint is
so reasonable. It does not feel fair. I gave my money, my time. I converted early in life — I could
have just done a deathbed confession. I serve the Lord. I just do not like that he was that generous
with those people. And you know who I’m talking about.

▶ 1:16:27

3. What it is like to be on the wrong side of a good man

▶ 1:17:22

To get at the scale of it, Matt ran a small ladder. Offend a wicked man and you will remember it:
charges filed, every cent repaid and then some, because you injured his dignity — and maybe he goes
easy if you beg enough. Offend a good man and he probably does not press charges; he may reasonably
ask you to pay back what you took. Then offend a godly man, “one whose desire and joy is to overlook
an offense.” For your curses he blesses. He gives away the thing you stole as though it had been yours
the whole time. He is strangely concerned for your reputation.

▶ 1:18:00

And here he turned Acts
20:35 back around on the room. A godly man is “someone who, like God, really believes it when he
says it’s better to give than to receive.” We read that verse as instructions issued to us — as if God
were saying, this part is for you, it does not apply to me. It applies to him first. He is the one who
finds giving better, and the parable is what that looks like when nothing restrains it.

▶ 1:18:40

And even that ladder runs out before it reaches God, who is off the scale entirely. Human analogies
get weird here, Matt conceded, because he is not just a better version of a guy. But the parable is
clear about the direction of the problem: his generosity is so extreme it comes off wrong. There is no
amount you can give back that will let you stand there and think, now that’s fair.

4. A bride, not a work crew

▶ 1:19:31

He turned to Revelation to show that none of this is God discharging an obligation. Look first at
how the city arrives — not as a worker in a newly issued uniform reporting for a shift, and not in
beggars’ clothes either.

▶ 1:21:42

Matt asked the room to read the list slowly and notice who benefits from each item. God dwelling
with people. Us being his people, as an end in itself. Him being our God. Tears wiped away, death
gone, mourning and crying and pain gone. At first glance every line of that is a favor done to us —
and yet the passage reads as his joy. He is not paying something off. He wants to.

▶ 1:22:27

Life, immortality, forgiveness, grace, dignity, relief, comfort — given freely, and not only to
people who gave their lives for him. Not only to martyrs. Matt did not soften this: God is lavish with
people you would not have picked. “Weird, scummy people. Creepy weirdos. People you don’t like at all —
you’re like, why are they here?” And then he put himself on the wrong end of it: if that is who makes
the cut, “I’m definitely in the owner’s box of heaven, because this guy is a scummy weirdo — at least
that’s how I remember him.” The joke has a hook in it. The people you are appraising are appraising
you.

Heritage — and sonship. The terms are entirely his to set, and the terms he sets are family.

5. The gift underneath all the other gifts

▶ 1:23:08

Jesus does talk about rewards for sacrifice — Matt was careful not to erase that. But there is
something that outranks every reward, every heavenly dwelling, every anointing, and it is the thing
that flattens the whole grumbling calculation.

Portion is an inheritance word. The real prize in heaven is God himself — intimacy with the Father —
and, as Matt said, that is “the thing that’s going to really mess with you.” It is also the spiritual
maturity he said plainly he would like to walk in:

▶ 1:23:47

▶ 1:24:26

He is generous with things — spouses, children, family, the air, the ground, even his own body,
physical and tangible and given away. But the largest gift is himself, which nothing we hand back can
approach. “And the weird thing is, he loves doing it.” That is the hardest part to hold, because human
generosity almost always keeps a receipt somewhere in the arrangement — you can pay me back later, or
you can come work off the other eleven hours sometime. The foreman never says it. Neither does God.
He is simply thrilled to do it.

6. Stop dolling yourself up first

▶ 1:25:08

Two groups needed this, Matt said, and they need it differently. Some of us need to stop grumbling —
to stop presenting the gospel grudgingly to people we do not particularly want saved, and to start
sharing it joyfully with people we know do not deserve it.

▶ 1:26:21

The others are the discouraged: people whose return on investment feels small, who do not want to go
back to God for grace and mercy and forgiveness again, because they already owe him big time.
It is the feeling of calling a friend for a favor, calling the same friend for another one, and being
crushed by having to dial. I have already given back so much less than he gave me, and I’m going to
ask for more? Matt’s answer was two words, said twice: “Yes you are. Yes you are.” And two things
will meet you when you do. Where else are you going to go. And he is glad you came.

▶ 1:26:59

So do not detour through a little self-help to make yourself presentable before you come back. Going
straight to him is a joy to him and an honor, because it says you actually believe how much he wants
you. This is the one whose invitation Jenny had already read to the room earlier in the service:
“come
to me, all who labor and are heavy laden” — the yoke is easy, and he calls himself gentle and lowly.
But I did that and failed again. Then the only question left is whether you are worried he has
run out.

▶ 1:27:32

Then he prayed it rather than restating it: “God, thank you for your generosity. I ask that you would
open up our eyes and our ears to see and hear what you are doing, and to glory and boast in you and your
generosity, by your Spirit, in Jesus’ name.” A concise service, on purpose — but nobody was hurried out.
The Heart Ministry teams were up front and glad to pray with anyone who wanted it, and the room was sent
out the old way: go in peace to love and serve the Lord. A fitting last word of the year from a church
that had just spent an hour thanking him for a year some of them were glad to see end.

▶ 0:49:55

It was raining on Christmas Eve morning, and Matt had gotten up in the dark assuming almost nobody would come. “I’m shocked at how many people are here,” he admitted from the platform — he had been bracing for the cardboard-cutout congregation of the COVID years. With a 5 p.m. service still ahead, he promised to be concise, and then kept the promise. What he preached in that short window was not a nativity text at all.

1. A parable that does not sound like Christmas

▶ 0:52:10

He opened in Luke 14, in the middle of a crowd following Jesus down a road.

“You might think that’s not the Christmas passage you could have chosen,” Matt said. “Just hang with me for a moment.”

▶ 0:53:37

The word hate is doing something specific, and it is not overturning the rest of what Jesus taught. This is the same teacher who said to love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, and who, when pressed on who counts as a neighbor, told a story about the most distant person in the room’s imagination (Luke 10:29–37). If a stranger on the Jericho road qualifies, so does your mother, your father, your spouse. Matt’s reading: this is shocking language, used on purpose, to convey a preference for Jesus so strong that it amounts to a refusal to let anyone come between you and him.

2. Count the cost — the tower and the war

▶ 0:54:21

Matt lingered on how funny that would be. A man with a foundation and no tower, being laughed at by everyone who walks past. And the reason abandoning the project is ridiculous is arithmetic: you lose the time you invested, you lose the money and the materials, and you still have no building. All that loss, nothing to show for it. Being sort of a disciple works out the same way.

▶ 0:56:17

Then the stakes climb from a building to a battle, and the demand widens from family to possessions.

3. One hundred percent — and what that says about him

▶ 0:57:32

So what has the passage taught? That God wants total commitment, not half. Matt guessed at the negotiation already running in the room: will he take ninety-eight percent? Ninety-five? “Just hold on,” he said. “Keep that pressure. It’s okay, keep the pressure.” The answer is no.

▶ 0:59:30

He knew exactly what that does to a room, and he named it before moving on. “The first thing is, you get kind of shocked and rattled, and it’s really easy to find places in your own life where you’ve not shown that kind of commitment — and so you might get stuck on your own failures.” The whole message turns on refusing to stop there: “If we have an opportunity to look past that and think about what this says about God, I think you’ll finally get encouraged.” Then, almost as an aside, the line that keeps the standard intact while he pivots: “Let’s not settle for ninety-eight percent.”

▶ 1:00:06

And then he turned the whole thing around, which is where the message actually lives. God’s standard for commitment reflects his own character before it describes ours. “It would be really hypocritical for him to tell us not to start something we can’t finish,” Matt said, “and then for him, having said that to us, to go around starting things he can’t finish.” Jesus is the one who called the half-built tower laughable. So take him at his word about himself: God did not lose his mind — when we look at the incarnation, we are looking at the beginning point of a great and wondrous act of redemption for a broken humanity, and the God who began it is not a God who abandons foundations.

4. Why Paul is so sure

▶ 1:00:56

Why is Paul sure? Matt named the self-flattering answer first: we get so us-focused that we assume it is because the church had the A-team on the job — “you got Peter, you got John, you got Paul. I guess we’re sure because we have our best men on the job.” He invited the room to laugh at that, on the grounds that Jesus had just invited them to laugh at things. The real answer is two letters over.

▶ 1:02:10

Matt had a warning attached to this. The teachings of the gospel get routinely divorced from the rest of the Bible by people who want a moralistic faith with Jesus’ sticker on it — as though the plan were, in his paraphrase: I tried with Israel, I tried under the judges, I tried with Moses, but this time we’re going to nail it, because I’m going to use extra-strong language. As though Paul’s confidence rested on the strength of man finally showing up. Previous generations were a disappointment, apparently — “I don’t know what was wrong with them, but us — do you feel it? You feel the strength?” Our faith rests on a God who is faithful and who has taken responsibility precisely where he knows we will fail.

▶ 1:04:27

Jesus is our righteousness. Jesus is our sanctification and our redemption. We do pour ourselves out in the greatest obedience we can muster, Matt said. But looking back, the boasting will all be in him. Even the ones who poured themselves out furthest — to the point of death and humiliation — would, if you asked them one at a time, boast in the faithfulness of the Lord.

5. Not a chore. His food.

▶ 1:05:46

There is still a way to hear all this wrongly: yes, he is faithful, but it is grit. It is discipline and mental fortitude. He is a man of his word. Somebody has to take out the trash. Matt went to a well in Samaria to close that door.

Matt offered two ways to hear that line. “One way of reading this is that Jesus is just using confusing religious language again — here he is, just talking some stuff that’s hard to understand.” The other is the one he meant: doing the Father’s will is not Jesus’ chore, it is his food, and he feeds on it. “Rescuing, saving, redeeming the lost and loving a broken humanity, revealing himself — this is totally what he loves doing.” Not follow-through because everyone is watching. Not a commitment honored out of stubbornness. Wanting.

6. He has seen human weakness before

▶ 1:07:10

This is where the message got personal and stayed funny at the same time. He began a work in you, Matt said, and if you are anything like him, he has had to restart it a few times. You may have even failed him — gasp. Which raises the fear underneath everything: maybe he is done with me. As if God had started a work, realized it was going to be more work than he bargained for, and decided to go find new people. As if he had never seen human weakness before, or as if it freaked him out. As if he had never met a generation of people who want to be faithful and struggle every day at it. As if this crowd, this decade, this particular screwy weirdo was finally the one that did him in — “he was tired in the ’80s, but man, these days, maybe he’ll have to retire, because y’all are so much work to him.”

▶ 1:09:18

Then he put the parable back on its feet, and it is worth hearing in his own words how silly he made it sound: “It’s laughable to start something that you can’t finish. What a ridiculous thing to do — like a king who just kind of goes off to war willy-nilly without even counting his people. Why would you just start kind of building a tower, you don’t even know how much money it’s going to take, you just did it — it’s like, oh, that’s a little more work than I thought it would be, well, let’s just leave that half tower.” So: do we really think Jesus has had the thought, being their shepherd is harder than I expected — I guess I didn’t count the cost of being this person’s Lord, I just sort of took on this giant church thing without thinking it through? Or the other version: that he will finish the work, but grudgingly, because it is a matter of public record now and quitting would look silly. “You may have given up every once in a while,” Matt said, “but he doesn’t start things he can’t finish. He doesn’t start things he’s not willing to finish.”

▶ 1:10:30

And then he ran it the other direction, which is the part that stings in a good way. Shepherding weak people is not the regrettable part of the job — it is the job. “This is totally his thing: shepherding weird, screwy people, people who want to be faithful and struggle with it. This is his thing. Why else would he have done it? Why did he make you?” He wants to be our God. He wants to be our shepherd. That is not a concession he made after reading the fine print.

▶ 1:11:14

And it is not only about you as an individual. It is the whole worldwide body of Christ, the thing we read the news about and worry over — the apostolic generation came and went, and now it’s up to us, and I don’t know if we have what it takes. We don’t. But the conclusion people draw from that — that Jesus is old and tired and unwilling or unable to finish what he started — describes us, not him.

The last word

▶ 1:12:06

“I don’t know where you are spiritually today, discouraged or encouraged,” Matt said, “but I know this: he’s totally amped about sanctifying and redeeming you. He never once gave up. His finger wasn’t on the eject button. Yours was. His wasn’t.” He is near, knocking at the door of your heart even now. He knows exactly how weak you are, and he is all the more willing to reveal himself to you anyway. He is not one bit tired, because he does not start things he will not finish.

▶ 1:12:48

He prayed it back in one sentence and sat down: “God, thank you for your faithfulness. Thank you that it is you that we trust and we lean on. And I ask that you would reveal yourself to us all over again, in your mercy and generosity.” Then the housekeeping — no kids’ classes next week, a truncated New Year’s Eve service, Heart Ministry teams up front — and the benediction that fit the morning better than he probably planned: go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

▶ 1:03:22

Lisette opened by saying how special it felt to be asked to speak during the
Christmas season, thanked Matt for the invitation, and then announced her subject with a shrug of
self-awareness: a message about Jesus. Surprise, surprise. What followed was less an argument than
an inventory — she had gone looking through Scripture and through sites she trusts, and found more
than a hundred references to the names of Christ. She warned the room up front that a lot of this
would be familiar, and that familiarity was not a defect. “Even the apostles often had the same
message.” If it feels like repetition, she said, then it is. Open your hearts and receive it
anyway.

She also asked people to actually use the Bibles in the pews, or the app on their phones,
because she wanted it clear that none of this was her opinion — and she told anyone who did not
know their way around the book not to be embarrassed. “We all start somewhere.”

The name above every name

▶ 1:07:41

Before going further she settled something, leaning on the message Matt had preached the week
before: Jesus is not half God and half man. He is fully man and fully God. Which means, she said,
that when we talk about God we are talking about Jesus — and she would be saying the two words in
one breath all morning, deliberately.

Why that name, and what Joseph was told

▶ 1:09:08

Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, and it means Savior. It was also an
ordinary name — Lisette’s comparison was that it sat in that culture roughly where Carlos sits
among Latinos. God could have picked anything. He picked a common name that meant the right thing,
“because God doesn’t do anything on accident. Everything God does is with purpose.”

She could not read that passage without stopping on Joseph, who found out his betrothed was
pregnant and whose first instinct was to protect her from public shame. “In a world that likes to
degrade men — wow, there are some good men who follow the Lord.” But the man in the story is not
the point of the story. What was growing in Mary’s womb was not a mighty good man. And the meaning
of the name is a claim about him that does not expire: “Not was, is, always Savior. From the past,
to the present, to the future, for all eternity.”

A name you cannot put on like a sticker

▶ 1:11:56

Living in Texas, she said, you meet men named Jesus regularly. She told on her own son, who at
three had been taught all about the Lord and was then introduced to a family friend by that name —
and whose eyes went wide, because he thought he was meeting the one he had been hearing about. No,
honey. He just carries the name.

“It’s not like a sticker,” she said. You cannot slap the name on a person and have anything
change. The men she has known by that name have had good character; what they did not have was
what she called the substance of godship. And that substance is exactly what makes Jesus the one
who gives us morality — “he is the one who defines what is right and what is wrong, because he is
God.”

In the beginning

▶ 1:13:02

Then she sent everyone to the other end of the book, to the first sentence of the first chapter:
“In
the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” John’s opening words are not a
coincidence, she argued. He is reaching back and putting Jesus inside the creation account on
purpose. “He didn’t just appear in his mother’s womb. He always has existed.”

She read on into Isaiah, where the God who made the earth says
“I
am the Lord, and there is no other… I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right” — and
pointed out that this is the same voice, making the same claim about morality, centuries before the
manger.

The sequel we are living in

▶ 1:16:15

Here the message turned, and it is the turn that gives the notes their shape. The baby in
swaddling clothes moves her to tears, she said, and it is not the end of the account. He grew, he
loved, he healed, he shed his blood, he rose on the third day, and before he ascended he told his
followers it was good that he was going, because he would send the Holy Spirit.

Being, by her own admission, a science-fiction and Lord of the Rings geek, she reached for the
language of sequels — the ones people wait years for and did not know were coming. “The story of
God, this huge, amazing, big story, is not over. I would say we’re kind of living in this sequel.”
That is what Advent is: he has come, and he is coming again, and we are in the middle.

The names the prophets already gave him

▶ 1:18:55

The prophetic names, she said, are not souvenirs from the era in which they were spoken. They
describe someone still active. “I believe these prophetic names to be more than just for that time
that he was here on earth. It’s for us now.”

She stopped on Everlasting and turned it over — enduring through all time, eternal,
continuing indefinitely. And she noted, with real pleasure, that though Jesus came as a Jewish man,
what he came for was never confined to the Jew. It is for the Gentile. It is for all of humanity.

▶ 1:19:38

The congregation had sung about the desire of the nations that morning, and she wanted the phrase
unpacked. Not nations as borders on a map — people groups, everywhere on earth, and the thing they
all want is salvation. This is where she said she had cried while preparing. “Even those who don’t
believe are searching for a salvation.” Made in the image of God, people go looking for the thing
that is only in one place. And then the line that carries the whole message forward: “This desire
of the nations has come, and is coming again.”

Judgment is the justice of the Lord

▶ 1:21:46

She read
Isaiah
42:1 — “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my
Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations” — and then read it again in the King
James, for the poetry: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. This, she said, is
talking about Jesus.

“I think sometimes we think of judgment as scary,” she said, and allowed that if you are doing
things behind the scenes, a little apprehension is reasonable. But that is not what the promise is
about. “Judgment is the justice of our Lord. It is the salvation of God. And it’s a beautiful
thing.” Then she spoke directly to anyone in the room who had only come because a friend or family
member was there: “I want to tell you, Jesus is your salvation. He is the only way. Nothing else,
no one else, no other religion will free you — but Christ.” The thing every ethnicity on earth is
longing for, she said, is found in this one man who is fully God and fully human. “It’s
beautiful.”

He has a plan, even when it makes no sense to us

▶ 1:23:15

From there she brought it back to the season. Advent is this waiting: we remember who came, and
we remember that we are awaiting his second coming, because that is what Scripture tells us. And
the ground under the waiting is the thing she had spent the whole message establishing — his
character and his nature are true. “Remember what I said earlier. He is not a God who acts just on
a whim. Everything he does is on purpose. He has a plan.” Then the hard clause, the one that makes
it a real claim rather than a comfortable one: “Even if it doesn’t make sense to us, he has a
plan.”

Surrender is the part she is still learning

▶ 1:24:15

She was candid about the part she still finds hard. If everything has been done, then the only
thing left to her is surrender — and, she admitted, “that seems kind of hard sometimes.” His
purposes can be glorified through her as she yields to him, which is not a transaction she has
mastered so much as one she is still learning. “This is the crazy thing that I’m still trying to
accept in my own life.” The relief in it, she said, is also the difficulty in it: there is nothing
left for her to do, because he has done it all. But the Lord can teach you, and teach me, how to
surrender to his godship.

▶ 1:25:02

Three more names in a single passage — faithful witness, firstborn of the dead, ruler of kings
on earth — and then the one that answers the whole message: who is, and who was, and who is to
come.

▶ 1:27:19

Then a pop quiz, with the children’s handmade name cards on the walls as an open cheat sheet:
who is Jesus? The room called them out — Light of the World, Lion of Judah, Immanuel, Good
Shepherd, King of Kings, El Shaddai, Yahweh. She was reading off the walls too, and said so. There
are over a hundred, she reminded them; keep going. She left four more references for people to
write down —
Acts 4:12,
Ephesians 1:21,
Philippians 2:7,
Matthew 12:18 —
and said the quiet part about why any of it matters: “It’s important for us to study, to remember,
to carry in our hearts, not just in our heads. Let what’s in our head pierce our hearts and
transform us.” What the Old Testament said about who he is, fulfilled in the New — that, she said,
is what carries us through.

She called it a really short message, which it was, and then gave it its point in two sentences.
“Jesus is the name above all names. We gather in this building, gather at home in small groups,
because of who he is.” Her encouragement for the Christmas season was to cling to the character and
nature of a good God who saves — and she would not let the tense slip even here: “He didn’t just
save. He continues to save.”

An anchor, and the greatest gift

▶ 1:28:04

The closing charge was shorter still. Whatever calamity, whatever decision, whatever heartache
or joy or change is in front of you — “remember first who he is, and let it steady you, let it
guide you, let it be your anchor.” And no matter how old we get in Christ, no matter how many
years we have walked with him: “let’s always go back to the foundation of what the word of God
says.”

Lindsay, she said — waving her up in front of everyone — had found ornaments printed with the
names of Christ while the team was putting the decorations together. They were waiting on the white
tree in the foyer, one per person, adults taking them for the children too, and not because a piece
of card has any power but as something to look at and remember by. The one in her hand said
Bridegroom. There were gifts as well, and Lindsay had made a point of them being for
everyone, not only visitors. “The greatest gift, as we know, is Christ the Lord — who came, and who
is coming again.”

She closed in prayer, and the prayer was the message compressed: thanking God that he is good,
that he is kind, that he is holy, and naming what puts everything else in proportion — “You didn’t
have to do it, but you did it.” She thanked him that when he left the earth he sent the Holy Spirit
to sustain and keep and help us, that he is coming again, and that one day “we will see you face to
face, we will be able to behold you with our very eyes.” Let that be our joy and our hope; let that
be what sustains us. Then she invited anyone who needed prayer to come forward and have the prayer
team pray with them.

▶ 1:30:51

Matt introduced this one as “a borderline good idea sermon,” and he was honest about the risk: a decent share of the room has never run into the controversy he was about to spend twenty-five minutes on, and by God’s grace never will. But it is growing on the internet, some of the preachers pushing it are people Hope Chapel folks listen to, and a few people have quietly wondered whether they should leave the baby out of the manger this year. So he took it on, and kept it short.

1. The objection, stated fairly

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The concern — Matt’s word for it was “concern trolling” — is that a nativity scene containing an actual baby Jesus breaks the second commandment. Same objection gets aimed at The Chosen and at The Passion of the Christ. Rather than caricature it, he went and listened to the people making it and then laid out their reasoning as strongly as he could.

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It starts at Exodus 20:1–3 — I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, you shall have no other gods before me. Monotheism. Then the next lines:

The load-bearing phrase for the objection is any likeness. That is why it does not help to say the figurine is painted rather than carved, or that a television series is not a statue. Matt also noted, in passing, that “you shall not bow down to them or serve them” reads as a separate thought from “do not make them” — and that the threat and the promise in verses 5 and 6 are a contrast, iniquity visited on three or four generations while they are still hating, steadfast love shown to thousands.

His own answer, he said, did not need to be creative. The church argued this out and settled it at a council in AD 787 that both East and West still recognize, and that council did not merely permit an image of Christ. It said having one is good.

2. Two answers that do not work

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The first bad answer: that’s only his humanity, not his divinity. Matt warned the room off it hard. When God the Son became man the union was perfect. “It’s not like Jesus had a God day and then a man day where he went to the salon,” he said. There were no God moments and man moments. You cannot take a little knife and separate the two — there is a nerdy word for trying, Nestorianism, after a man named Nestorius.

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The second bad answer: “sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” True — we are not Theocratic Israelites. But it persuades no one, because the obvious comeback is that you still don’t murder people. And the comeback is fair, because it exposes a lazy way of reading the Bible. Go back to Genesis 9:6, long before Moses: to shed blood unlawfully is to destroy someone who bears God’s image. There is a deep theological why underneath that command, and every person — rich, poor, beautiful, weird — carries immense value to God. So the question for the second commandment is the same question. What is the why?

3. The why behind the commandment

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The list runs on exhaustively — animals, birds, creeping things, fish. Two things come out of it. First, don’t just make stuff up and call it Yahweh. That is exactly what happened with the golden calf: nobody said “this is calf guy.” They said this is the God who brought you out of Egypt. Getting the name right does not license inventing the rest. Second, you did not see me, so do not fill in the blanks with your imagination. Don’t condescend God’s glory down to something you can grasp — our god is cunning like a snake, so we give him a snake’s head; our god is strong like a bull, so we make a cow.

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Then Deuteronomy 12:1–3 sharpens it. Tear down the altars, break the pillars, burn the Asherim — “because you shall not worship the Lord your God in that way.” Not: do not worship those gods. That was the first commandment. This is: do not worship me the way they worship theirs.

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So point one: God gets to be in charge of how he is worshiped. You might think that as long as you have the right God you should be free to honor him however you like, but God evidently cares that his people not learn things about him through false worship that are not true of him, or that demean his glory and leave everyone with an inferior view of him. Keep that in mind, Matt said, because it is the reason the whole argument is about to flip.

4. The Jesus sticker

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Before the flip, he pressed the danger where it actually lives for us. We are perfectly capable of adopting an approach to God from the culture around us and slapping a Jesus sticker on it. Moralism, for instance — pick your poison, the rule-follower version or the sweet-pea kindness version — and then call legalism or niceness the way of Jesus. Or treating the Bible as a handbook of dos and don’ts, which misses the heart of it entirely: you search the Scriptures thinking that in them you have life, and it is they that bear witness about me. We live-action role play as Old Testament Israelites, zoom in on one legal command, and behave as if Christ’s fulfillment of every promise means nothing to us.

5. We did not make this up

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Here is the turn. The heart of the command was don’t invent me and you don’t know what I look like. Well — God the Son taking human flesh is not something we invented. It was his idea and his plan. And if it seems humiliating to depict him as a person, Matt said, slow down: “Whoa, whoa, whoa — it was an act of humility for him to really do it. That’s the real act of humility. You want to see something humbling, it’s the actual Lord of glory becoming a baby — and you’ve seen a baby, right?” He did not take on fake humanity. “He didn’t wear a fake rubber-glove human-looking suit while not actually embracing real humanity. He became an actual baby, and you know what those look like.” So run the command’s own test on the manger: did we make up the incarnation, and do we know what humans look like?

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He didn’t appear like flesh, Matt pressed — he became flesh, in reality. At Horeb they saw no form. Here, John says we have seen — the same note John sounds again when he writes about what he has heard, seen with his eyes and touched with his hands. When the Pharisees picked up rocks, were they squinting into an impenetrable cloud? “No. What they saw was what they thought was just a man pretending to be God — but they saw him. You better believe it.” And when he healed people, he touched them with human hands, actual real fingers. If you want to retreat to “but the figurine doesn’t look exactly like him” — “did anybody say this was a photo? It’s not a photo. We’re depicting something.”

Image, Matt pointed out, is the word icon. And the payoff of it is not abstract but physical, and he let himself enjoy it: “We could see him, we could touch him — we weirdo sinners, yeah, we could touch him. We could hug him. We could share a meal with him. We could look at him.” That is also why the ancient church did not flinch at depicting Father, Son and Spirit together, often giving the Father features borrowed from the Son — because Philip asked to be shown the Father and got “have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

6. Not art, not worship — theology

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This is where Matt doubled back to dismiss the third weak answer, the one that concedes too much: it’s okay as long as you’re not worshiping it. “No, it’s not just barely okay. This is super duper awesome.” A nativity scene with a baby in it is not primarily art — though he allowed that Hope’s is pretty artful — and it is not worship. It is theology: a standing insistence that God the Son took real flesh, that it really happened, that it was witnessed, “and you could have seen it if you were there. You could have touched him. You could have gone to the stable if you were with the shepherds and looked at crying baby Jesus, or sleeping baby Jesus.” It wasn’t an illusion. It wasn’t pretend. He really did it.

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Antichrist, he noted, is not primarily “Bill Gates or something in the future, going to take over the world with his robots.” At its core it is opposition to the message that God the Son took flesh. And that opposition is not hypothetical — it has been the house style of a good deal of Continental European theology for two centuries: the Bible as a nice book of stories, “a map to ideas and meanings,” where it doesn’t much matter whether Jesus was really born or died or was resurrected so long as you get the concept — dying to self, finding life. It uses all the same words. “That is not Christianity. You might think it’s really close because it uses a lot of the same words, but it’s not. We cannot have a separation of the man from the message, because Jesus Christ, God-man made man, is the message… you cannot separate the guy from the gospel. You can’t separate the person from the preaching.”

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So to anyone who quietly saw this on Facebook and thought, maybe I’ll put out the nativity but hold back baby Jesus, maybe I shouldn’t watch The Chosen, maybe it’s from the devil: “Let those other people’s legalistic problems be theirs. You pray for them with sympathy, but you don’t need to adopt that.” Put the baby out. And to anyone drifting toward a Christ-concept Christianity, he offered what he called a wonderful invitation to repent. “There is no such thing as a Christless Christianity. This is not Boy Scouts, folks. This is not a Boy Scout troop that happens to have a speech every Sunday morning. We’re not a philanthropy club. We’re actually kind of culty about this Jesus fellow.” And the stakes are structural, not stylistic: “if you take that out, or you start undermining it, or concern trolling it, you undermine the very foundation of our faith — and at that point, what is this? What is any of this?”

7. He never gave it back

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He had already prayed and closed — thanking God “for your humility, the fact that you came to embrace humanity in real life,” asking him to “fill our hearts with great faith and joy over the incarnation, and help us see that as a lens through which we see everything else” — when he came back for one more thing, and it was worth the awkward order. Jesus did not shed his humanity at the cross like nasty stuff he couldn’t wait to be rid of. “He was resurrected from the dead a man. He’s a resurrected man. In fact, his physical resurrected body is on the throne in heaven. He’s not going to, like, unhuman.” There is nothing nasty or gross about humanity as such, and no future in the hope of shedding it to become a ghost — if we share in a death like his, we will certainly share in a resurrection like his, and remain glorified, resurrected humans, as he is.

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Which let him name the thing plainly, one last time. Strip the movement of its modern packaging and what is left is old: “ancient Bizarro Nestorianism, ancient weird problematizing of the God-man-made-flesh message. It’s just the antichrist stuff.” That diagnosis is severe, and the instruction that follows it is deliberately gentle — even if it’s a preacher you really like, “you know what, just pray for that guy. That’s his issue, that’s not my issue.” Then the last words before the Heart Ministry teams came forward, which are the whole sermon compressed into one sentence: “Thanks be to God that God the Son became real human flesh — and still is, to this day.”