Christmas – Hope & Humility

(This is the text of a message I presented to the High-school youth group, Voltage, at Life Covenant Church on December 8, 2021.)

Thanks, Sam for allowing me to speak tonight, and thank you all for being here. Let’s pray. Lord let my words be worthy, so I can be your spokesman. Amen.

This is week 2 of our Christmas series. And tonight we’re going to talk about two aspects of Christmas that have always struck me as truly indicative of God’s character – hope and humility …

… and there’s some sharks. Because every good Christmas story has got some sharks.

Back in the summer of 1975, the movie Jaws came out. It was the first summer, must-see, blockbuster movie, and it made generations of people viscerally afraid of what they couldn’t see under the ocean.

The story is about a beach town, where a massive great-white shark is lurking just off-shore, waiting to devour unsuspecting swimmers. The shark terrorizes the town, and the townspeople decide they need to hunt down the shark and kill it.

And at a townhall meeting where they are discussing who’s going to kill the shark, a crusty old sea captain named Quint tells them he’ll do it because he hates sharks. So Quint, the chief of police, and a shark expert all set off on Quint’s boat to hunt down the great white.

One night while they are on the boat, the guys start talking. Turns out Quint was on the USS Indianapolis during World War II. And he tells his story in this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO60RohuARY

Now, I’ve seen Jaws many times, and I always thought Quint’s story was meant to ratchet up the tension; you know, another dramatic element in the story, to make you even more uneasy during an already scary movie, and bonus – it gave the backstory about why Quint hates sharks so much.

It wasn’t that long ago, I found out this story Quint tells about the USS Indianapolis … was real. He’s a fictional character but the story is true. The USS Indianapolis did in fact deliver the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, on a super-secret mission from the mainland US to a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

After the Indianapolis was sunk, imagine how bleak the situation was for the crew. The survivors were in the open ocean about 300 miles from the nearest land, facing the very real possibility no one was coming to rescue them because nobody knew where they were, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration and death.

Over the course of three and a half days, men eventually became so delirious, they would think there was food under the ocean’s surface and dive down, never to return. Others gave in to hallucinations and just swam off to some imagined island only to disappear.

And of course, there were the sharks – circling and attacking constantly, nipping at legs, ripping one man at a time out of a floating group of survivors, in spite of, as Quint said in the movie clip, all the screamin’ and hollerin’ and poundin.’ After three and a half days in the water, the remaining survivors’ prospects for rescue looked grim, and their hope was waning.

But then in the late afternoon, the survivors were spotted by a passing US aircraft, and a rescue effort was quickly mobilized. One of the ships steaming toward the survivors was the USS Doyle. It was churning at top speed, but still over an hour away, by that point in the pitch black of night.

The captain knew something needed to be done to instill hope in the men who were depending on them for survival, to let them know they were coming.

So, he ordered the ship’s 24-inch searchlight to be turned on and aimed into the sky, piercing the darkness for miles around. He wanted the survivors to see that light, dig deep, and hang on just a little longer until they arrived. In short, He wanted to give them hope.

Because, hope changes everything – our perspective, our attitude, our outlook. It infuses us with purpose. No matter what any of us are going through or enduring, hope does not provide immediate relief from whatever is causing us pain.

But hope allows us to endure through the suffering because we know there is something better to come. When the survivors saw the searchlight, they hadn’t been rescued yet. They were still in the water, and would be for a while longer.

But the captain’s plan worked. One of the survivors had assumed he and his group of men were doomed, but when he saw the beacon from the USS Doyle, he said “it was as though a light switched on in heaven … Fresh fire surged in the men, giving them a sudden burning desire to live.”

By now, you’re probably thinking, what happened to Christmas? I thought this was a Christmas message, Sean. What does this all have to do with Christmas?

Well, it’s this: Seven-hundred years before the first Christmas when Jesus was born, during an exceptionally dark time for God’s people, God provided a message of hope through the prophet Isaiah.

Isaiah predicted the future birth of a savior, a messiah – Jesus Christ. Isaiah wrote “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned …”

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given … And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:2,6, NIV).

With Jesus’s birth, God switched on, as it says in the Gospel of John, “the light of the world,” – his own version of a 24-inch searchlight in the dark – to give us something to look to for hope. John also says, whoever follows Jesus “… will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12, NIV). At Christmas, remember, the birth of Jesus is a beacon of hope for us all because he promises there is something better to come, if we believe and trust in him.

Through belief in Jesus, God offers hope, a reason to hang on when it is the darkest, and gives us the ability to focus on the future: our eternal future in heaven. The Bible says, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.” (2 Cor 4:17-18, NLT)

So, hope enables us to put fear and doubt and suffering in long-term perspective. All that stuff that threatens to chew us up and tear us down is painful, even excruciating at times, but God promises it is brief compared to eternity. God only promises complete and total relief once we get to heaven. Then He will personally wipe away every tear; there won’t be any more death, or sorrow, or crying, or pain (Rev. 21:4). Until then, he promises to be with us and strengthen us so we can endure.

As a personal example, my mom fervently believes in Jesus and is very active in her church. Brings her so much joy. But she has had chronic back pain as far back as I can remember, and for the past 20 years or so she’s been wrestling with depression.

Once she truly put her hope in Jesus as her savior about a decade ago, none of that changed. She still hurts physically and emotionally. But once she asked Jesus to be an active part of her life, her demeanor brightened, her spirit lifted, she became more positive. Because she now understands that Jesus accepts her for who she is, and forgives her for all she’s ever done, and ever will do, wrong, and especially that this is not all there is, which means all the hurt is temporary.

Hope did not diminish that hurt, but it did put it into perspective for her, and enables her to endure and keep going. She knows Jesus is on her side.

Whatever your hurts are; whatever is nipping at you; whatever is trying to drag you under; if you feel like you’re adrift; if you feel like you’re just barely hanging on, I think Christmas is for you, because it is a reminder that Jesus is on our side, and serves a reminder that Jesus is God’s beacon of hope.

The second aspect of God’s character that is evident at Christmas is humility.This is the part of Christmas that truly blows my mind. God, the all-powerful, all-knowing spirit, humbled himself to become human, so he could wade directly into all this pain and suffering we experience every stinking day, and rescue us by giving us the chance to spend eternity with him in heaven.

No other faith makes that claim because … it’s nuts. Crazy. God choosing to become human is like a human choosing to become a single-cell organism.

Consider this contrast. According to the creation account in the Book of Genesis, in the NIV translation, God spoke – no hand waving, no practice rounds, no straining or sweating as he made things – He just spoke:

•        13 words to create about 1,800,000,000 cubic miles of sky;

•        16 words to form approximately 57,500,000 square miles of land and 139,400,000 square miles of ocean;

•        25 words to craft roughly 321,000 species of plants;

•        20 words to make about 31,300 species of fish and 10,000 species of birds, and

•        25 words to fashion approximately 1,264,000 land-based animal species and millions of species of insects (Genesis 1:6-24 and Wikipedia).

So, if you’re keeping track, that’s 99 total words to create everything on earth. But my favorite part of the Creation story is the very footnote-esque statement during Day 4 of creation: “He also made the stars” (Genesis 1:16).

Five simple words that refer to, oh, about 400,000,000,000 (billion) stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and possibly 100 sextillion stars in the entire universe. That’s the number 1 followed by 23 zeros.

 

Those five words are an unbelievably humble understatement that does not do any kind of justice to his mind-boggling power. And yet when God chose to come here, he could’ve just appeared in the town square, flashed a few lightning bolts around to demonstrate his power, and used a big-booming voice saying “Here am I!” to draw attention to himself. If he showed up today, you’d expect him to be holding press-conferences, posting millions of selfies all over social media, getting his own YouTube deal. But he didn’t, and wouldn’t. Because that is not the nature of God.

On that first Christmas day, God, who spoke the universe into existence, demonstrated complete and utter humility by becoming a helpless, defenseless, totally dependent … baby.

And if that weren’t humble enough, the Bible says many times that he came to earth to be a servant. Not a king in the classic sense, where he bosses everyone around and serves him. Not a macho, rugged, tough guy, kicking butt and taking names. No. God became a servant for all so everyone can see his true nature.

What does that say about him?  

And what more does it say about him that some 30 years later, in the ultimate act of humility, Jesus allowed himself to be put to death in our place to make us right with God, so we could have hope for a future in heaven for eternity with him?

Ultimately, Jesus displayed his true power through his resurrection from the dead. He’s alive. And he promises that if we believe in him, we too can tap into that power and live forever in heaven. And that’s, ultimately, what our hope is all about.

Every Christmas, it seems like there’s a sextillion things to remember and keep track of that pulling you in different directions. But I hope you remember this: the birth of Jesus is a beacon of hope, and it’s a reminder of how completely God humbled himself to step out of eternity and come here in the flesh provide us with that hope.

Amen. Let’s pray …