You're listening to audio from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. If you'd like to check out more information about our church and ministry, you can find us at faithchurchindy.com. Now, here's the teaching. Good morning. I am Jeff, one of the pastors here at Faith, and, glad that you are all here to worship with us this morning.

Let me ask, it is December 22nd, who is ready for Christmas? Who is prepared for Christmas? Yeah. That's fewer hands. Some of you I got an enthusiastic, yeah, first hour.

I think one guy was saying he had every all his presents wrapped and the house cleaned and everything. I volunteered him to come to our house and and help us get ready. And I got an amen from my wife. So, it is the last rush in a season that's supposed to be, you know, helping us focus and remember why we celebrated Christmas, a time that can often be kind of stressful. Anyone else?

Extra presents to buy and packages to wrap and homes to clean and treats to bake and things to organize and decorations to put up and, trees to decorate and, and all of it. And, I think a lot of us are feeling that pressure, at this time of year. I was coming towards church last week, trying to merge into one of the roundabouts around here. I was waiting, as cars were coming through the roundabout because you have to wait for them to go through first, but a guy behind me did not think that was a good way to get through the roundabout. And, he's waving and then laying on his horn at me and, gesturing with a one finger salute.

And, and I'm feeling this, and there's just something about car horns. Right? It's just like I can feel the stress rising up in me and the and the blood pressure elevating, and and and it's just like this jarring jangling noise. And and so I thought the best thing to do would be to add my car hawing noise to it too. And I gave him a wave back, but I was actually pointing at the yield sign over here.

Like, can't you see that yield sign? I gotta wait for these cars. So finally, we get through the roundabout, and this guy zips around me, and he had, you know, one of the food delivery service things on top of his car. So fine. He's in a hurry.

He's trying trying to deliver his thing to wherever, and I'm thinking, like, yeah, I got places to be to as well, buddy. How come my urgency doesn't matter in your urgency? And and it just it sort of brought together for me this whole idea of how much clash and conflict and and disharmony there is, not just at this time of year, but it seems like, for whatever reason, it gets amped up because of all the expectation and all the extra pressure we put on ourselves that we just end up experiencing a lot of stress and disunity and disconnection and conflict, which is actually, in a way, good news for us, because it's an opportunity for us in these moments we have together to look at this passage from Luke chapter 1 and hear about a harmony that God is inviting us into. That's a picture of what's going on in this passage in Luke chapter 1, that Christmas is God's invitation to the harmony that you long for. Now there's no singing going on specifically in this passage.

Although in your bibles, if you're there in page 10 18 or the black bible's in the seat underneath you or however you look at it, it's it's probably indented and set off a little because it's meant to be read or recognized as almost like a song. And and there's something about, harmony, at at this time of year, especially, that that is, well, a definition is, various components existing together without destroying one another. I think about that when we were raising a bunch of young kids in our house, and longing for harmony. A relationship characterized by a lack of conflict or agreement or an orderly or pleasing combination of elements. Christmas is about reorienting our lives, quieting our hearts to to hear, to see God, and a song of his love and care and mercy and purpose for our lives.

And all that jangling and disharmony and dissonance inside of us and all around us can actually help me here whether I'm singing in harmony with what god is doing or whether I'm just trying to shout my own song over him, over the other people around me. Christmas is God's invitation to the harmony that you long for. Now some musicians are here today. I know not everyone's a musician, but in in music, the melody is the dominant theme. The the main idea that that's being communicated, the the song.

And harmony is the addition of other sounds to further develop or deepen or expand that theme. And so disharmony is when we're out of step, when we're out of tune. We're not in agreement with the melody that's being sung. And the background of this passage in Luke that we're looking at today is, god has not been saying anything to his people for 400 years. There's been no prophecy, there's been no recorded word from the Lord for almost 400 years now.

And now all of a sudden God is doing something. God says he's going to enter the world in the person of his son who's going to be born to Mary, a virgin by the power of the Holy Spirit. And then he comes to this priest, Zechariah, and tells him, you and your wife, even though you have no children and you're old, you're going to have a child and he's going to be the one that's going to announce the way for my son. And Zechariah laughs like Sarah did when she got the same message, Abraham and Sarah back in the old testament, and God strikes him silent for 9 months. And finally, now in verse 67, when John, this baby that has been promised, finally arrives on the scene, God opens Zechariah's mouth.

And and it's this song that comes forth, this this song of beauty and worship about God's invitation to the harmony that you long for. And what I want us to see here today is, what is this song that God's singing? Why this idea of harmony and melody? And and why do we need it? And then how do we enter into it?

How do we experience it? What is what is this idea of God singing or a melody that God is is crafting or singing over us. Because when we think of God, we may not normally think of song of God singing himself, but it's actually a a pretty consistent theme in the Bible. I mean, over a 100 times, at least, we're told to sing and shout with joy to the Lord. The Bible talks about people and animals and and the created order and angelic beings singing praise to God.

The Lord asked Job rhetorically, who laid the earth's cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? There's this beautiful picture in one of the old testament prophets, Zephaniah, where he says the lord exalts over you, over his people with loud singing. Both, c s Lewis and J. R. R.

Tolkien pictured God's act of creation as a song. Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia sings Narnia into existence. And Tolkien pictures, the the the god in in his mythology, giving the gift of music to the angelic beings who join him in the melody that he's created. And I think we get a picture of that here even in this song that Zechariah is singing. Look at look at what this song reflects.

Verse 68, blessed be the Lord God of Israel for he has visited and redeemed his people and raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant, David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from old. So what does this tell us about what God is like in in His work in the world? It's it's a song of blessing and rescue and faithfulness. It's a song of God's goodness and and flourishing and wholeness. Something apparently has gone wrong that we need saving from, and God has not left us to our own devices.

He's he's singing a song of rescue and help and redemption and and restoration over us to, verse 71. Save us from our enemies in the hand of all who hate us to show us the mercy promised to our fathers. God's message, God's song is one of kindness, mercy, and patient faithfulness, and goodness. And we need to hear that because that's that's not us. Right?

Christmas can be great, but it can also, leave us stressed out, harassed, frazzled. And our culture tells us that we'll be happy when all our needs are met, all our desires are satisfied, when there there's nothing that we lack, sort of like a a permanent vacation, right, or retirement. I mean, if you if you get to a certain age and you're fortunate enough to retire with enough money in the bank and enough health and enough family and friends around, that's it. That's the dream. Right?

If I could just follow my heart's desire and have everything that I want, then life would be good. The problem is living with 330 other 1000000 people who also think the same thing and when those desires don't line up together and they come into conflict with each other. A recent modern philosopher Charles Taylor wrote about, what he calls our age of authenticity. Each one of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity. And the goal of the age of authenticity is to find and live out one's own humanity against the conformity to a model from the outside by society, by previous generation, or by religious authority.

In other words, you know, listen to your heart, follow your bliss, do what makes you happy, and and no one and nothing can tell you that it's it's not right or it's not good for you. You you need to find your deepest self and express that to the world, and then the world should align itself to your self expression. Now you put all that together, and and you have a culture where I'm just trying to get to work and the guy behind me is mad because I'm hindering his self expression and his need to get where he needs to get. But he's hindering my need to get where I need to get without having people honk at me. And how do you resolve that?

It's not just external enemies that we need to be delivered from. Zechariah here is prophesying to be saved from our enemies in verse 71, in the hand of all who hate us, and he certainly would have had in mind the Romans and and, tyrannical kings that were placed over them. And that hasn't happened yet. We're still longing for a day when there will be justice and righteousness. But we do believe that Christmas is about God entering this world to save us from the greatest enemy we have, which is inside of us.

It's especially clear at at this time of year when, we've all got more to do than normal and really high expectations and less margin, and everyone just needs to get out of my way. And then everyone can be fine as long as you guys don't need to go shopping when I need to go shopping because you're causing disharmony. My wife, Amelia is a a wonderful gifted baker and and a very generous person. She usually gets together, with her 2 sisters about this time of year, and they do like a big sisters baking weekend where they all bring recipes and they all work together and they just produce dozens and dozens and dozens of cookies, which they then divide up and and give out to friends and family. Well, for various reasons this year, the girls weren't the ladies weren't able to get together.

And so Amelia did, well, essentially all the baking that the 3 sisters do all by herself. I think it was something like a 155 dozen cookies and probably about £15 of candied pecans. And, to say it's been a little messy and hectic at our house, is is a bit of an understatement. The other night, Amelia was up late doing some more last minute treats, for her coworkers because again, she's a very generous and thoughtful person. And she told me to go up to bed.

She would she would handle the rest of the stuff for that night. I'm generally the dishwasher, and, and I get to put the wax paper around the caramels. That's my job. So I go up to bed. Amelia didn't come up for another couple of hours only to find me still up reading.

And that's when the argument happened. Because Amelia wanted me to rest and get a good night's sleep, and I wanted to stay up reading. And she was frustrated with me that I'd stayed up too late, and I was frustrated and resentful for her being frustrated and resentful for me for reading and staying up too late. And my theme was reading in bed at the end of the day to relax myself. That's not bad, but there can also be too much of a good thing.

Right? Amelia's theme, Amelia's melody was wanting your husband to get a good rest and getting frustrated when he's not singing your song. And I got frustrated when she wasn't singing my song, and and both of us had a song that we were directing and wanting the others to harmonize with. And it wasn't that the desires were necessarily wrong. It was just that sometimes they're not directed in the right way.

And sometimes we go about getting those desires met in ways that are running over other people or compromising things that we say we want to be kind of the theme of our lives, like love and joy and patience and forgiveness. The goal of Christianity is not really self denial in itself. It's finding ourselves in the fulfillment of our desires in Jesus. Christ has come into this world to to rescue us and and to retune our hearts to the melody that he created us to sing in pursuit of a of a deeper joy. Look again at how Zechariah talks about it.

That we would be saved in verse 71 from our enemies, from the hand of all who hate us, to show the mercy He promised to us, verse 74, that we being delivered, delivered not just from external enemies, but but from the selfishness and the self centeredness inside that we might serve him without fear and holiness and righteousness before him all our days. Now for some of you, the the radar starts going off when you hear things like righteousness and holiness. Right? Like, those are the religious words that mean narrow and constricting, and god's plan is to make me unhappy and say no to me. Holiness simply means consecrated, means set apart for a specific purpose.

And righteousness is fundamentally about saying, I'm I'm being reoriented to the right way. I'm I'm being taken off of a wrong path. I'm having my heart retuned and set so that it actually works together, like when we have people come in and tune the pianos. It's what righteousness means. It means God comes in and He redirects and and retunes us to to the right melody.

It's a reminder that you actually are made with a purpose, and your life does have a song to it. It has a theme. It it has a harmony that's uniquely you that will only be right when it's tuned to the melody that God has created you for. My wife and I, both have electric toothbrushes, and, they're both the same brand of toothbrush, but just different models. Like, mine's a few years older than hers, And they're exactly a half tone off from each other.

It's horrible. Yes. I could see any of you who are musical are grimacing. It's terrible. It's almost impossible to be in the bathroom together when we're both trying to brush our teeth because it's just there's a dissonance.

There's a dissonance there that that's reflected in our lives. And whether you have a beautiful singing voice, whether you can't carry a tune in a bucket, whether you have no idea what dissonance is, except that, you know, it just makes you wince when you hear it, We're made for singing. We're we're our hearts are made for singing. That's why the Bible doesn't just say, sing to the Lord with your voice, but make melody to Him in our hearts, that our lives are meant to be a song, that are a harmony shaped around the song that God has written for us. But all of our voices have become discordant, out of tune, dissonant, and and conflicting with one other and with God.

And everything doesn't work in harmony here. We all feel it. We all see it even in ourselves. And Zechariah is pointing us to the hope that we have, that that there is a God who has entered this world in the person of His Son to deliver us from our enemies and free us to serve Him without fear. Because God's message to you is not man, you've really screwed up, and I'm so ashamed and disappointed in you.

His message is, you're lost and I wanna bring you home. You're broken and you need help. You're sick and you need healing, and I'm going to give it to you. And the only way you can have it is to also lay down that desire, that inward bentness to write your own song and tell yourself that there's nothing wrong with the song that you wanna sing. I have a better song for you, and and I will make your life harmonize in beautiful ways.

What song is your life singing? What harmony are you adding to to the melody that God has created in this world, His song of love and joy and beauty and purpose and goodness? Christmas is an invitation to the harmony that you're longing for. So how do we respond to that? How do how do we join that?

How do we find it? Well, Zechariah is pointing us to to the one that John is pointing to In verses 76 and 77, he talks about his son John who's going to go before the Lord to prepare his way to give knowledge of salvation to people and the forgiveness of sins because of God's tender mercy, to give light to those who sit in the darkness, to guide our feet in the way of peace. That's what Jesus has come to do. That's why we celebrate Christmas, not not just a baby being born in a manger, but a baby born in a manger who's going to come and bring forgiveness by taking all of our brokenness and disharmony and dissonance on himself to give us his rightness, his harmony. And we can know that here and now, but we're not there yet.

We're not home yet. We we we are home in Christ, but we know there's more. We're here for a reason. We're not just here waiting for heaven to come to earth and and things to be made right. There is a world coming where there will be no more disunity and disharmony and dissonance, where justice and righteousness will reign, that the King is come, but He is coming again.

And in the meantime, we serve the King and try to reflect the values of his kingdom. We we have been brought into our home in Christ, the community of his people to go out to bring that harmony and blessing, to to work for peace and righteousness for others. Jesus has come to tune our hearts to his melody so that we can reflect him to others. I was I was working at home yesterday afternoon. The doorbell rang.

I went out and opened it up to find our, neighbor's junior high age daughter standing there with about 4 of her friends, all in Christmas sweaters and, singing enthusiastically jingle bells. And, I as soon as I opened the door, they they start bursting out into song and and they're smiling and having fun, but, you know, anyone who is a teenager or who has been a teenager, at least in my experience, you remember that feeling of awkwardness and being self conscious, and is this okay? Is is he gonna go along? Is this gonna be weird? So I you know, you don't wanna just stand there doing nothing.

So I went out on the porch with him and started singing along. And, because I you know, I just decided a while ago, anytime I see kids, anytime I see teenagers doing something thoughtful or generous or kind, I wanna encourage them. I I I wanna acknowledge it. So I smiled, they came out on the porch and started singing, and and then they started going in to deck the halls. Not a song that I know really well and not a song that they knew really well.

I noticed that we weren't all in agreement about the key, or the tune, or the words, especially when it got to things like strike the harp and something, yuletide, pleasure, I, you know, whatever. It didn't matter though, right, because we were there, not even all singing the same song literally, but we were singing a song together of welcome and neighborliness and joy and blessing. And, man, to cap it all off, our neighbor's daughter hands me this little bag of sugar cookies that she'd made for us. I'm like, oh, wait. Wait.

Wait. So they, it was such a thoughtful act that I felt like I I gotta to it. And and again, fortunately, my wife, Amelia, has done so much baking lately. I knew we had some leftover caramels. You have to hit her up after this.

I'm not I'm not your source. I I went out and grabbed a handful of caramels and gave some to each of the girls and and just wanted to offer them, a thank you. I mean, it's it's a a beautiful little moment. Right? There's nothing, like, super spiritual or or no angels singing from heaven or anything, but there was something significant going on there.

There there was a even apart from the singing that was or wasn't on key, we were making a a melody, a harmony together of kindness and thoughtfulness and love and generosity and responding to the kindness that we had received by giving it out to others. That's the harmony that God is inviting us into. If you're a follower of Jesus, we come to Christ personally, but but we're not alone in this. You become part of a family of brothers and sisters. And we don't agree about everything, but we are hopefully trying to head together in the same direction and and march to the same big theme, even with all of our own unique harmonies that that we're adding to it.

We we are a people walking the way of Jesus together for the sake of people who are wandering without Him because there are people sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death. And if Jesus has given light to us and and we've been able to see the light, we get to go out now as God's people to reflect His light to others, to invite them to come in and find the light and add their voices to the song that that God is singing over us. As everyone who doesn't know Jesus is wandering, and we just keep bouncing against one another, Even those of us do know Jesus sometimes bounce against each other in painful, discordant ways. But Jesus has come that that we would have life, have true life, to have our song tuned to Him. Who or what is better off because of your presence in their lives, because of the harmony that you're adding to what God has done for them, how God wants them to know Him.

Is is what I'm doing, is my life developing, expressing, aligning with the melody that God has written, or am I writing my own song and demanding that everyone march to the tune I've written? You know, last week, Joey talked about us being blessed to be a blessing. We have all been recipients of God's incredible kindness and mercy and love and goodness. And as we see that, we're also meant to see that we're supposed to add harmony. We're supposed to bring blessing to spouses, to children, to parents, to neighbors, to coworkers, because you have a unique harmony to add to the melody that God has written.

It's a beautiful melody of life and joy and beauty and purpose and hope. Christmas is an invitation to the harmony that you're longing for. Let's pray. Father, thank you that Jesus has come into this world to bring peace so that we can now make music in our hearts and respond with gratitude and worship to the song that You are singing over us. Oh, Father, we pray that you would help us to add to your melody, and the harmony of the love and the gifts and the talents and and the relationships and the opportunities that you've entrusted to us, that our lives would make beautiful music to you.

Yes. As we sing, but even more as as we go from here to live and serve and encourage and bless others. Thank you that Jesus has come to save us and to give us peace and hope in life. Live in us, we pray, Jesus, by Your Spirit so that others might see You. We pray in Your name.

Amen.