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After no messages from God or angels for well over 400 years, suddenly angels are showing up everywhere. An angel spoke to Zechariah in the Temple, an angel spoke to Mary in Nazareth, and in a dream an angel spoke to Joseph. Every time the angels speak, they bring the good news that the Messiah was coming. God was going to fulfill His promise and send the Messiah into the world. God was going to come and rescue His people. God was going to show up and be with His people. Emmanuel was on the way. This was all good news. In time, even Joseph saw this as good news.
Today’s message of the angel goes from good news to great joy and the message they share gives us three reasons why we can have Great Joy. The first reason is that the promised Messiah is no longer coming in the future, the Messiah is now here. Unto you is born THIS DAY. Today is the day. The Messiah has arrived. There is no more waiting, there is no more longing for God to step in and do something. God has done it and the Messiah is here. In fact, if they wanted to, people could go and see the child because He is lying in a manger in the city of Bethlehem.
This was great joy 2000 years ago, but it is still great joy today because God is still with us. The Messiah is still present with us. We won’t find Jesus as a baby in a manger, but as the living Christ at the right hand of God in heaven. But Jesus is also with us through the power of the Holy Spirit. While we might feel far from God and have a longing to see and hear God in our lives, the truth is that God is right here and God is willing to meet us right now. Jesus said that when he physically left this world that He was going to send His Spirit to lead us and guide us. We were not going to be left as orphans, Jesus would still be with us through the power of the Holy Spirit.
So for us today, there is no more waiting. While we are waiting for Christ to come again in glory, Christ is also right here and He is available to us right now. If we have hearts and lives open to receive Him, the dear Christ still enters in. There is no more waiting for Christ to come, Christ is here now. This is great joy.
The second way this angels’ message brought great joy was that they said that the Messiah had come for ALL PEOPLE. All people means all people. It means the rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, those who feel loved and those who feel forsaken, those who feel chosen and those who feel left out and cast out. It’s no accident that the message that all people were going to be included in the promise and work of God was given to a group of shepherds. These were men who most of the time felt like the Messiah would not have come for them.
While Shepherds did important work, they were considered outcasts and unworthy because their jobs made them ceremonially unclean. Working with sheep means getting your hands dirty and it wasn’t the dirt of the ground that was the problem. It was the blood and bodily fluids of the sheep and other animals that the shepherds had to work with that made them unclean. There were laws that said you had to purify yourself after you touched blood or dead animals before you could enter the Temple, worship God, or just be with other people, and the shepherds never had the time to go through a process of purification. They were considered unclean and cast out and so they would have been the last ones to consider themselves welcome in the presence of the Messiah - and yet they were included.
The shepherds had no idea that they were the only ones who got the message that night. In fact, they may have thought that other angels had gone to the kings, rulers, and religious leaders because those were the ones they would have assumed would have gotten that kind news. So at first they were just excited to be included, but think about how they must have felt when they arrived at the stable and saw Mary, Joseph, and the messiah lying in a manger?
Mary and Joseph would have told them that they were the only ones who came to see Jesus that night. There were no rulers, no kings, and no priests or religious leaders. Just them. As they left Jesus, the Messiah lying in the manger, they would have been talking about how they might have been the ONLY ones who were given this message. Now they were really rejoicing because it’s no longer that they had been included, they had been chosen. Great Joy.
Have you ever had a moment when you realized that no longer have you just been included, but you have been chosen? Most of us can probably remember the opposite of that. I remember being included in gym class (you had to participate) but being one of the last ones chosen. For 12 years I could only imagine what it must have been like to be some of the first ones chosen. To know that some captain saw you as the best and wanted you on their team - what a feeling that must have been. And then it happened. No, I wasn’t chosen first or even second in gym class.
It was my senior year and our yearbooks had just come out. I read through it, but not that closely and then someone said, Andy, do you see that you were nominated for something in the senior class awards? You know, those things like most likely to succeed, most athletic, best smile. Well, yes. I was nominated for “most sophisticated”. I didn’t win but it was just an honor to be nominated.
OK, my class didn’t know me well because I was anything but sophisticated, but hey, I was nominated for something. I was suddenly special. People knew my name and thought of me in a positive way. That’s what the shepherds must have experienced. Someone actually knew them and they had been nominated and chosen to get the news. They weren’t the last ones chosen, in fact, they were the first ones chosen. That night, they may have been the only ones chosen. This Messiah was for them. Great Joy.
The joy the shepherds experienced in being chosen was so great that they couldn’t contain it. They told everyone what they had seen and heard. They told everyone that the Messiah had come and that the Messiah was for all people. Everyone was included and everyone was wanted. That is still a message that needs to be shared today and we are the ones who need to share it. There are still too many people who feel uninvited, unwanted, and unwelcome by God and by God’s people. If we have been included, then we need to share the news that everyone is included and by coming to God we can experience great joy.
Who can you invite to come and experience the joy of Jesus? Who can you invite to Talleyrand on Friday or to worship on Christmas Eve? Who can you send a card to and say that you are thinking of them and remembering them and that they are loved? Reaching out to all people is one way we can spread Great Joy into all the world.
The third way the angels’ message brings joy isn’t so much in what they said but in who the angels chose to share it with - the shepherds. While the shepherds were seen as outcasts because of their job, their job was also one that connected them to the Messiah. The Messiah was to come from the line of David, who was a shepherd. The Messiah was going to save people and lead them into a better life, like Moses who led the people into the Promised Land, and who was a shepherd when God called him. God Himself is even described as a shepherd in Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. So the Messiah didn’t just come for shepherds, He came to be THE SHEPHERD, the good shepherd, and that in itself brings great joy in 3 specific ways.
#1. Psalm 23 tells us that the good shepherd will guide us to places of provision, safety, and life.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
The Messiah came to lead us to places where we can have fullness and life. Jesus will lead us to green pastures where we can eat our fill and be satisfied. He will lead us to still waters where we can drink and be refreshed. Green pastures and still waters are places of peace and security. The Messiah didn’t come to just open a door to heaven, the Messiah came to make life here and now better.
Whatever it is we may feel we lack or need, God can provide. As the good shepherd, God still wants to meet our needs, bring us peace, and give us a sense of confidence and assurance that all will be well. Jesus can meet all our needs and supply us with everything God wants for us but we have to be willing to follow and trust the good shepherd. If we will, there can be great joy.
#2 A good shepherd also knows His sheep and His sheep know Him. Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” John 10:14, Not knowing a lot about shepherds, we may miss the great joy that comes in knowing this.
A shepherd really had to know his sheep. He had to walk among them and know their strengths and weaknesses in order to keep them safe. He had to know which ones might wander out after food or linger in the water. The shepherd had to spend time speaking to them so that they would know his voice and be willing to follow it. A shepherd had to take the time to get to know his sheep and God knows us. As our good shepherd, Jesus knows us. He walks with us. He knows what we have been through, the good and the bad, and is still by our side. The Bible says God knows everything about us, even the number of hairs on your head, and still loves us.
There is great joy in knowing that God knows us fully and still loves us. God knows our times of doubt and discouragement when we struggle to believe. God knows when we aren’t walking faithfully and struggling to do what we know is right. God knows us fully and still loves us completely. In fact the Bible says that there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love. It is unconditional and complete, which means God is always there and God’s presence doesn’t bring shame or guilt, it brings freedom and joy. Great Joy.
#3 A good shepherd brings great joy because the shepherd is committed to his sheep and loves them so much that he is willing to lay down his life for them. Jesus said,
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd… and I lay down my life for the sheep. John 10:11-15
God, as a good shepherd, sent Jesus to be the shepherd who would lay down His life for the sheep. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16. That everlasting life is a gift given to us because Jesus laid down His life for us. Jesus took on the penalty for our sin when He died on the cross. He died our death and then He fought our enemy Satan. We know Jesus defeated Satan and destroyed sin and death because on the third day Jesus rose from the grave. Jesus literally laid down His life for us so that we might not die but live.
All of death has been swallowed up in victory, the victory of Jesus Christ. This is great joy because we couldn’t get this victory on our own. We couldn’t defeat sin and death on our own. On our own, we would be devoured by the evil one, but we aren’t on our own, we have a shepherd who not only fights for us but who has won the victory for us. This is great joy! We aren’t defenseless, we aren’t defeated, we aren’t dead in our sin - we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us and came to be our good shepherd.
The message of the angel was great joy to the shepherds. All the waiting was over and the Messiah had come. And the Messiah hadn’t just come to the in crowd, the wealthy and well connected, the rulers and religious leaders, He came for them and for all people. They were not just remembered and included but they had actually been chosen. Great joy.
The angels’ message to a group of shepherds was also great joy because it told the world that the Messiah was Himself to be a shepherd. A good shepherd who would lead people into the abundance and fullness of life, a shepherd who would fully know His sheep and love them unconditionally, and a shepherd who would lay down His life to save them. The Messiah coming as our good shepherd brings great joy/
Jesus is right here and ready to meet us right now. There is no waiting. There is no going home to get cleaned up, no changes that need to be made before we can meet Him, Christ is here for us and for all people. You might not feel worthy or wanted, but Jesus is ready to receive you. You might feel you have fallen too far or failed too often for God to love you or save you, but Jesus came as the Messiah for all people, that includes us, all of us.
And Jesus is here to be our good shepherd. He will lead us into all the fullness of life. He knows us so well that He knows what we need and is willing to help us, provide for us, and sustain us as you wait for God’s work to be completed. God knows us fully and loves us completely and He has died for us. Christ took on our sin and died our death so that we might be forgiven and know the joy of salvation. All of this, all of this is great joy.
Next Steps
The Angels’ Message of Great Joy!
This week, reread all the messages of the angels.
Luke 1:5-25, Luke 1:26-38, Matthew 1:18-25, Luke 2:-14
● What common themes do you see?
● What difference do you see?
● How is this week's angels’ message different from the others?
“THIS DAY”
The angels tell the shepherds that the Messiah is now here.
● How do you experience the living Christ today?
● What practices can help you experience Jesus every day in the new year
● Read John 14:15-31. Jesus said he would not leave us orphans but through the Holy Spirit God would be with us. How do you see the Holy Spirit at work in your life and in the world? What questions do you have about the Holy Spirit? Ask God for answers.
“ALL PEOPLE”
Christ came for all people.
● When have you felt invited but not chosen?
● When have you experienced the joy of being known and wanted?
● How can you help others feel welcome and wanted?
● Who can you share this great joy with this week?
“THE SHEPHERDS”
Jesus as a good shepherd tells us three things.
1. Jesus will lead us into all the fullness of life. Psalm 23
2. Jesus knows us and loves us still. Matthew 6:25-34
3. Jesus lays down his life for us. John 10:1-18
When and how did Jesus do these things?
How does Jesus do this for you today?
