The Gift Of Truth

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. This morning today we celebrate what is referred to as the 11th day of Christmas. It's affectionately referred to as Epiphany Eve Day and before your mind starts kind of wandering away to 11 pipers piping and partridges in pear trees, let me just share some information about tomorrow, January 6th, which is when the church celebrates this thing called Epiphany. But in saying that, in the eastern part of the Christian Church they'll actually be celebrating Christmas. While for us here in the West we'll celebrate two key events, the arrival of those guys called the Magi to present gifts to the child, now Jesus, and also our Lord's baptism. Now you might already know this, but the word epiphany means to reveal, it means to make manifest, like the words from the hymn Songs of Thankfulness and Praise, you can google it, where we sing these words manifested by the star to the sages from afar. So Epiphany celebrates how Jesus was revealed as the Savior of the world, not just the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but now it's the news of the angels who declared a Savior who would be for all the people Christ the Lord. Now I'm pretty sure that most of us have heard or at least have known about this song called We Three Kings of Orient Are, does that sound familiar? A couple nodding heads, I'm really kind of nervous about what I'm gonna say next now. It only has three things wrong with it, while we know there were three gifts there could have been more than three Magi or sages, obviously secondly they weren't kings, they also did not smoke cigars for any of you my age, and although they were from the east of Israel it wasn't the Orient, it was actually more like Persia. By the way, traditionally these three wise men were actually given names by the church, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, write those down there'll be a quiz later. Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, and they represented nations, Europe, Asia, Africa, again the point being we have a God who so loved the world, a God who so loved the world that he sent his only son our Savior Jesus, and the gifts that they presented were representative of the threefold office of our Lord Jesus, gold for a king, frankincense for a prophet, myrrh for a priest, Jesus is our prophet, our priest, and our king. Well let me share just a couple more things, Epiphany marks the end of Christmas, the Christmas season, and according to some traditions, go home, today is the day that your Christmas tree should come down. Some of you do that like the day after Christmas, I understand, and the Epiphany season runs from tomorrow January 6th until the beginning of the season of Lent, which happens on Ash Wednesday, which is March 5th this year, and of course there is that song about the 12 days of Christmas which purportedly was written to help children learn the basic truths of our Christian faith. Now I'm not going to get into that, you can Google that and try to figure that out on your own, but with saying all of that, the biblical count of the visit of the Magi is recorded, and do write this down take a look at it later, Matthew chapter 2 verses 1 through 12, Matthew 2 verses 1 through 12, which is set in the time after Jesus' birth, where he is referred to now not as a newborn infant, but now as a little child. I think you know the account, these sages, these Magi came from the east to Jerusalem, which was the capital city, looking for, in their words, the newborn King in order to worship him. I mean where would you go, where else would you go to find a newborn King than to the capital city of Israel, which is ruled by a guy, you may know him, his name is Herod the Great, and the text is amazing because it says, when Herod heard this news, it says that he was troubled and nervous, and you wouldn't know why he felt that way unless you know a little history about King Herod. You see Herod was born into a politically prosperous family, his dad was a ruler and from his childhood on the operative word was power, power. Herod was trained in how to get power, how to keep power, and then how to destroy anyone who threatened it. Having seen his own father poisoned and die at an early age, Herod also learned that power, that power is fragile, and you can lose it suddenly, so you've got to keep it no matter what the cost. Herod the Great was crowned as ruler of Israel at the age of 25, and the thing that marked his 30-year reign was bloodshed. At Herod's inaugural party he invited everyone that had anything to do with his father's death and had them executed. Throughout his career he destroyed people, in fact he killed his favorite wife of many wives, one of his mother-in-laws, a brother-in-law, and three of his own sons because he thought they were a threat to take his throne. So now with that background information brothers and si...