Sunday Service - Pursuing A Pursuing God (Matthew 2:1-12) - December 8, 2024

Sermon by Pastor Dave Miller:
Last week Pastor Ryan made a comment that stuck with me... Every Christmas might be someone’s first Christmas as a Christian. It made me realize that I maybe take elements of the Christmas story for granted. Each Christmas Eve for the last 26 years, we’ve read the Nativity story with our family from the Gospel of Luke. In those 26 years—I think about year 10—I asked if we could read the Nativity story from Revelation 12. I thought, “I’ve heard this story from Luke before, so let’s get a new perspective on it... Revelation tells this story from the perspective of the spiritual realm.” Well, now we’re back to reading it from Luke. This story of Jesus coming in the flesh will always be relevant... all of it will be relevant.

In this week’s Advent devotional from Good News of Great Joy we’re asked to think about Bethlehem’s supernatural star. Let’s use that star as an analogy. We look up for stars; we don’t look down for them. These wise men were looking up. They had been looking up for a loooong time… for generations. It’s because they were looking up that they found Christ and worshiped Him. Jesus deserves to be worshiped from the ends of the earth… every tribe tongue and nation. Redemptive history started long ago, in a garden. But this particular portion of the story takes us to the cosmos and right back to earth again.

The shepherds looked up at an angel; these wise men looked up at a star. Now, we as God’s children, look at God’s Word for direction—direction to know God and direction to know Him better. We also receive direction on how we are to relate to this fallen world. Let’s use the story of the wise men pursuing Jesus to admonish us to pursue Jesus. As we pursue Jesus, we should in turn be helping others pursue Him. Each one of us has someone behind us on the road of faith. This Christmas, let’s do what God has given us to do, in order to help our family and friends, our co-workers, our communities to know our Great Saviour.