Sermon 12/1/24
LORD Jesus Christ, as we await Your coming, we are filled with hope, knowing Your light will shine in the darkness. We embrace Your love as we wait anticipating Your peace, to fill our world. LORD we wait, with joy to celebrate Your birth, that we might be filled with Your life. We pray in Your holy name. Amen
Taking attendance, counting, recording names…one way or another, congregations take church attendance and for various reasons. People attending any given worship service may be asked to sign a pew register to indicate their attendance; smaller congregations simply count the number of people present. Some churches do so to encourage attendance. Other churches seek ways to increase that number. But the people of God are involved in counting one another and have been doing so, way before the birth of Christ.
The head count in the garden of Eden was easy– only two people — at least at first. The number of people on earth continued to grow until the time of Noah, when only eight people who remained faithful to the God—Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives. God spared Noah and his family when the flood engulfed the earth. Then after the flood, the world’s population increased again as people spread across the earth. It was when God chose Abraham, one man to set in motion His plan of salvation. Again the chosen ones were few in number—just Abraham, his wife and, eventually, their son Isaac. But God promised Abraham as many descendants as the stars of the sky or sands of the sea and Abraham believe the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness’” (Gen 15:5-6).
When God’s chosen people moved to Egypt to escape famine in Canaan at the time of Joseph, there were just seventy people to make up the family of Israel. Four centuries later, there were more than 600,000 Israelites who fled from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. And the Lord said to the Israelites, “Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the Lord Your God has made You as numerous as the stars of heaven” (Deut. 10:22). Once settled in the Promised Land, the kings of Israel always knew the number of available fighting men they had–and thus the counting continued.
Centuries later, the events surrounding the birth of Jesus began, appropriately enough, with a census. The story of Jesus’ birth in Luke’s gospel begins with the words, “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. and all went to be registered, each to his own town.” The Roman emperor wanted an accurate count of his subjects—for tax purposes. Joseph was of the family line of Israel’s great king David, so he and his betrothed wife Mary went to Bethlehem, the birthplace of David and Joseph’s ancestral hometown–went to be counted—one, two and when Mary’s son was born, three.
When Jesus began his public ministry, He chose twelve disciples. Scripture records his miracles and the numbers involved—the healing of ten lepers, only one of whom returned to give thanks. Two blind men called out for mercy and Jesus healed them. He took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed more than five thousand+ people. With seven loaves and a few fish he fed more than four thousand people. But then came the day for which Jesus was born, the day when Jesus himself was counted again, as the prophet had said, “He was numbered with the transgressors” (Is. 53:12)—three crosses, three victims, one, two, thr
The Lord Jesus was born in Bethlehem for us. He was numbered among the transgressors for us, because we so often count all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.
We count what we think is our money–really a gift from God, until we begin to trust those funds more than we trust God. We count Facebook friends and Twitter followers —now officially known as X, as we seek popularity and attention for ourselves.
We count cars and possessions, again gifts of God, until we place our ultimate trust in those possessions. For all the misplaced trust, the idol worship of possessions and popularity, for our self-centered worry about “Number One,” for all of these countless sins, Jesus allowed himself to be counted among criminals and nailed to a cross. Jesus carried our sins in his own body to the cross, suffering the penalty of death for those sins, the penalty that should have been ours.
It is for Jesus’ sake that God forgives our countless sins—each and every one of them—just one sacrifice for the sins of the world, for our sins.
After Jesus’ death on the cross, a new count began again. Day One, two, three. On the third day after his death, Jesus rose from the dead, conquering sin, death and the devil. Three enemies defeated for us so that we would be numbered with the saints in glory.
God chose you to be his own child. God’s registration, his census, took place long before the decree of Caesar Augustus. Scripture tells us that God chose us in Christ “before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4). Our names were “written before the foundation of the world in the Lamb’s book of life (Rev. 13:8). Because Jesus our Savior was born among us to save us, because he allowed himself to be numbered with the transgressors for our sake, one day we will stand before his throne among “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages … crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Rev. 7:9-10).
You and I will be there because we are redeemed by God’s grace only through faith in Jesus Christ, not because you have earned a place. You will stand among that countless multitude before the throne because Jesus, the Child of Bethlehem, earned a place for you there. You can count on it. Amen.
