O Come, O Come Emmaunel

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Christmas carols, I don't know for you, but for me, there's not just childhood memories, but there's something when you put this message to song, it just really sinks into the heart even deeper. It really does sink into the heart deeper. So, we'll be studying here for the next four weeks different carols, and today we're going to start with one that's probably the most ancient one that is sung at this time of the year that I know of. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Do you know it? O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. It's an ancient song. In fact, it started in the 8th century AD. It's a Gregorian chant that would be sung. It's called an O antiphon because every verse, if you study it, starts with the letter O, and then it says O come, O come, and then it brings up a different name for Jesus, Emmanuel being the key one. And then, in the Middle Ages, I guess they would sing a verse, and then they'd have a psalm, and then they'd sing another verse and a psalm. If you've ever been in one of those cathedrals in Europe, you know how they echo and everything? The haunting beauty of something like that. But the fact that we get to sing this name, Emmanuel. Do you know what Emmanuel means, by the way? God with us. Can we say that together? God with us. I hope you think that's good news. We're going to get to that. Let's look at our lesson today. We're going to be studying Matthew chapter 1, verses 18 through 25. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke from the sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but he knew her not until she had given birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus. Let's pray. Lord God, this day, we ask you to come to us. We need you. We need you to come to us in a way that we can handle, too, Lord. Do not come in all your power and might right now. We cannot handle it. Do not come in just your pure, sheer beauty of your holiness, because we are not. Lord, that would destroy us, but come to us, Lord. Come to us in your mercy and grace. Come to us. Be with us, Emmanuel. And we pray for so many in our community and world who need you to come to them as Emmanuel, as a God who is with them and for them, and we know that's who you are at your heart, and we thank you for that. We pray this Christmas season somehow that we would show who you are, God with us, to all the people around us, God for us, that they would see through us that you have approached them and they can approach you and lay their lives at your feet and just worship you and receive you and all of your beauty and glory and wonder and might and power and, Lord, in all those ways. Come. Oh, come, Emmanuel. Amen. Okay. Well, I guess God, I have to preach now. Well, you might think Emmanuel is just a nice little word, and you might say, oh, that's sweet. But it's much more, I think, than what you realize. Emmanuel, that name, it's imminent. You've heard the word imminent before? Imminent. It's from the Hebrew for being close, and El is God's name. So God is right here, not far off and distant only. And I think that's really a powerful message. In fact, John MacArthur put it this way. If you could condense the entire truths of Christmas into only three words, these would be the words, God with us. But it goes even farther than that. Do you realize there are some people over the last couple thousand years in the Christian church who have actually studied and meditated on just this phrase, this one word, Emmanuel, and spent their entire lives on it, and at the end of their life, they still think they haven't done enough on that one word. One of them was John Wesley. Have you ever heard of him? He was a great preacher and a revivalist and a reformer, started the entire Wesleyan movement in the United States, and he said on his deathbed that of all the words that you could say, the best of all possible words is this, God with us. Okay? I'm curious. How many of you have ever prayed a G...