I invite you to turn one more time in your Bibles this morning to the book of 1 Samuel. 1 Samuel, chapter 12. And we'll read a few verses there. One verse in chapter 16, and then one verse in Luke chapter 2. This is 1 Samuel, chapter 12, this morning. I'll pick up at verse 6. 1 Samuel 12, verse 6. And Samuel said to the people, The Lord is witness who appointed Moses and Aaron and brought your fathers up out of the land of Egypt. Now, therefore, stand still that I may plead with you before the Lord concerning all the righteous deeds of the Lord that he performed for you and for your fathers. When Jacob went into Egypt and the Egyptians oppressed them, then your fathers cried out to the lord and the lord sent moses and aaron who brought your fathers out of egypt and made them dwell in his place but they forgot the lord their god and he sold them in the hands hand of sisera commander of the army of hazar and into the hand of the philistines and into the hand of the king of moab and they fought against them then they cried out to the lord and said we've sinned because we have forsaken the lord and have served the bales on the Ashtoreth, but now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies that we may serve you. And the Lord sent Jerubbabel, and Barak, and Jephthah, and Samuel, and delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side, and you lived in safety. And when you saw that Nahash, the king of the Ammonites, came against you, you said to me, no, but a king shall reign over us, when the Lord your God was your king. And now behold, the king whom you have chosen, for whom you have asked, behold, the Lord has set a king over you. If you will fear the Lord and serve Him and obey His voice and not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, and if both of you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord, it will be well. But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you and your king. And now over at chapter 16, verse 1. Then the Lord said to Samuel, how long will you grieve over Saul since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and go, I will send you to Jesse, the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons. and now back to Luke chapter 1 at verse 30 and one verse actually two verses three four verses verse 30 and the angel said to her do not be afraid Mary for you have found favor with God and behold you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus he will be great and he will be called the son of the most high and the lord god will give to him the throne of his father david and he will reign over the house of jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no end we'll stop there uh only two of the gospels give any kind of extensive of treatment to the birth of Christ. And what I've always found interesting, and I don't know if you caught it in all the singing that we did this morning, is how much emphasis there is given on the fact that he is our king. The gospels make this so clear. The wise men run through Jerusalem asking, where is the king? Where is the king? And they bring gifts to the king, and they bow to the king what i just read there did you notice he will get have the throne of his father david and his kingdom there will be no end no end i don't know what kind of emotion that erases uh in us maybe it's difficult a little bit this concept of a king living in a democracy we really don't understand it. And we appreciate exactly, we don't really appreciate exactly what the Lord is telling us today when he announces to the world that he's given us his king, his king. But I want you to think with me just for a moment about how wonderful this gift is. I don't know if we've really thought about how wonderful the gift is. What has God really given to you today? What has God really blessed you with today do we really have a comprehension when peter would call it an indescribable gift i'm hoping in this service in a few minutes uh to impress upon your hearts the kindness of the lord to supply a king there's so much biblical history with the concept isn't there i mean really you can't come to the gospels and all this emphasis on throne and kings and here is the king you can't really appreciate that until you've had some kind of grasp of the old testament and everything that happened in the old testament and the request of israel for a king that was one of the darkest moments in israel's history when samuel was getting old and they didn't seem to be going anywhere and they were frustrated with how things were going and they came to samuel they didn't think his sons were fit and they asked samuel give us a king your sons are old they don't walk in your ways make us a king to judge us like all the other nations it wasn't wrong that they asked for a king but it's what was behind it we want to be like all the other nations we we want a king that'll ride out in front of us we want a king that will sit on a throne and we can see and and and and we can behold we want that we want a tangible king all the other nations have one look you can go and he'll even judge he'll sit on a throne and he'll make judgments and he'll he'll lead us but but we're not really feeling that much with the lord well samuel was so troubled by this he goes to the lord i've got to tell you something lord they're asking for a king and the lord replies back they've not rejected you they've rejected me they don't want me they don't want me to reign over them i think that's one of the most tragic moments in the entire old testament that they didn't want the Lord. And so chapter 12, what I read, and I wish I had time to read all that, but I don't. It was a kind of lawsuit. It was a court trial. Witnesses were called. Summon them up. Israel, what was the Lord like to you? I want you to think about that for a minute. What was the Lord like to you? God throughout history raised up all these deliverers for you. God was ruling you throughout the whole time. He raised up Moses and Aaron and he pulled you out of Egypt when they were hurting you, when they were harming you. He led you. He fought your battles. What do you mean you want a king? And he goes through the history of God's faithfulness and always protecting his people and always providing for his people. And they said, and they shot back, no, but we want a king to reign over us. I can't get over that. Was the Lord hard on them? Was God cruel to them? How many armies did he scatter out in the wilderness? I mean, he even dropped food from heaven on their doorstep. He provided water to gush out of the rock. He plundered the mightiest nation on the earth for them. Oh, you know that's the great lie of the devil, right? The great lie of the devil is God is a cruel God. He's waiting to judge. He's waiting to get this over and put you in hell. That's the lie. God wants to make life hard on us. That's really the lie that comes out of the devil that we're cautioned and warned against. That our God is mean and that he's cruel. And the devil has won in some respect with many people, hasn't he? He's convinced them to believe that lie. And many stay away today because they think this God is going to make life hard on them. The truth was, God delivered them. The truth was, God loved them. The truth was, God had provided for them the whole way through. The truth was, God never forsook them once. That was the truth. We want a king, though. We want a king. So the Lord said, okay, I'll let you have one. But you need to know I'm still God. I'm not. I refuse to step out of being God. Your king needs to fear me. Your king needs to walk in my ways, and you need to walk in my ways. You can't just dump me off. Well, they got the People's Choice Award. Man, this guy was something. They got Saul. He was tall. He was a foot taller than everyone. I heard somebody describe Saul once, and they said if you could imagine Saul, he would have been a mixture of John F. Kennedy Jr. Who's the other one, they said? John F. Kennedy Jr., George Clooney, and LeBron James all wrapped up in one. This was the guy. How long did it last? Did you know in the very next chapter, the whole thing falls apart? Chapter 13, it's over. You say, what in the world happened? He rides out, this mighty king rides out to the victory, defeats the Philistines, and then he does a major death blow to his office. What was it? He offered up a sacrifice. He wasn't allowed to do that. He was not a priest. We tend to feel bad for Saul. But at that moment, Samuel comes and says, it's taken from you. This was not God's king. This was not the king of God's choosing. So what happened? The ultimate issue was he couldn't supply what the people needed. We think Saul's such a tragedy, we feel bad. No, no, no, wait. He had to be rejected. He couldn't supply what the people ultimately needed. So what does God do? Stop this. Enough of this, Samuel. Stop the weeping. Everyone's weeping over God's rejection of Saul. I want you to go to Bethlehem. And if you were to read through 1 Samuel 16, it's a fascinating account where Samuel begins to survey all the sons of this man named Jesse. And he goes through all the sons, and Samuel looks at the first one and says, that's got to be him, that's got to be him. The Lord says, no, no. And he goes right down the line, one son after another son after another son after another son. And finally, Samuel says, are there any left? Well, there's one little ruddy one out in the fields keeping sheep. Do you know what God was doing? He was beginning to teach Israel that he would answer their request for a king. And he was beginning to teach Israel, and he teaches us what that king would look like. And so throughout the entire Old Testament, you have all these passages that start to describe the king. Think about this, Isaiah 11. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, a branch from his root shall bear fruit, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, and the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, and his delight, this king, shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide disputes by what his ears hear. That was so important because when Samuel was choosing out of David's household, of Jesse's household, the Lord tells him, don't look at things how men look at things. Man looks outwardly, I look at the heart. With righteousness, he'll judge the poor. He will decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins. In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal or banner of the peoples of him, the nation shall inquire, and his resting place shall be glory. Micah. But you, O Bethlehem, Ephraim, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me, one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from old, from everlasting. When I read that, here's what comes to my mind this morning. God didn't have to do that. We have a long history of us treating him like a dog. You have a long history of us in the Garden of Eden running away from this God, trashing this God. And we make every excuse in our lives to get Him out. We really don't want Him. It's called rebellion. That's why we're in this mess we're in. It's called sin. Do you know that's the history of mankind's behavior to this God? We sit here today and we are so blessed. We say that. Thank you for your blessing. and we go through and we think well i've got family we're going to go around the family and we're going to we're going to be so full today we're going to be provided for today i wonder if the problem is we have so much that we don't see what we really need anymore he didn't have to send a deliverer he didn't have to send us a king if we had treated somebody like the way we treat the lord do you know how quickly that relationship would be over do you know how quickly you would walk away from somebody who treated you like this and now you kind of get a little bit of a glimpse of what a little bit of an understanding of what christmas is really all about it's the presentation of god's gift gift of a king that we asked for, but didn't want him. And he still said, I'm going to give them meat. God didn't have to do this. We all have turned away. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. These people wanted a king. They wanted a king to come down. They wanted a king to ride in front of them. They wanted a king they could see, they could touch, they could handle. Do you know Alexander the Great, why he was one of the greatest kings ever in history? he would ride out in front of his armies taking the hits. Whoever does that? And everyone would say, it inspired the army. The army got out and was ready to go. That's what we want. That's what we want. We want a king who's going to get out and get in the trenches and ride out in front of us and take the hits. I'll do that, says the Lord. Sit in my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Go down there. Shepherd my people Israel. Tell them Emmanuel is coming, God with them. Tell them comfort, comfort my people. Tell them I will fight for them. Tell them I'll win the real battle that needs to be won. Tell them I'll conquer their enemies. Tell them I'll fight the battle for them. The people's best choice award winner didn't make it out of the gates. Why? He had no ability to deliver them. Deliverance was much more than defeating physical armies. What kind of king did God send here to you? A king who, when he showed up, bypassed his own throne in Jerusalem. walked right past it, didn't sit there. Instead, he had somewhere else to go. Where is his whole life pictured as going? To the cross. His throne was the cross. He was on a mission. And when you open the Gospels, what you see is your king riding out in front of you. Doing what? Doing what for us? All the apostles would say, we touched him, we handled him, we saw him. In other words, God did something. He gave us the king. And guess what this king did? What Saul could never do. He went and became the sacrifice so that he would not only rule over your hearts and lives, but that he would love you enough to reconcile the great problem of all of our hearts into the hatred of God. That's what the history shows. So that when we come to the Gospels and we have the announcement, He will be great. He will be called the Son of the Highest and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of His kingdom there will be no end. His name shall be Jesus. For what reason? He will save His people from their sin. The star comes. And the star goes and these wise men see it and they think, well, where is this star going? We've seen the star. We need to follow the star. Where does it go? Right over Bethlehem. Just where Samuel was led years ago. And what happens? Right then and there, you have really a presentation of the king being anointed. I love the imagery of all of that because what essentially we have is the announcement that the king has come, God has sent him, the father sent his son to do what no earthly king could do and this eternal, only begotten son of God became one of us and went and remedied the dark problem of our heart so that we today would be engulfed in true light. and if you don't fully get it yet, think about the cross. When he's dying, they put up a sign. Behold your king. That's the Christmas message. Think of Isaiah said, he will judge not by what he sees. Aren't you thankful he doesn't judge like human kings judge? Aren't you thankful he judges in righteousness? aren't you thankful that everything he does when he came here he was humble and all he cared about was feeding his flock and loving his own and bringing them home and not losing one of those sheep david was out tending the sheep he was not going to lose one of the sheep heidelberg catechism says that this king does what guards us keeps us in the freedom that he's won for us pleads our cause continuously in heaven in our struggles and has promised one day to come back and get us and take us to be where he is forever in a kingdom that will never ever end that you won't have to lock your doors anymore at night and he's given you the holy spirit as a guarantee and i close with this thought here's what troubles me wise men are asking we've seen the star we know he has to be born where all the people get together herod says where's he going to be born they say Bethlehem none of them went out to see I don't get that I don't understand that and then in Luke you get a real picture of his entire life when they say and you know the well-known passage she gave birth to a firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn I think that's a whole picture of his life there was very little room for him in people's heart and i think today i what is the story i want to say masses and masses of people have come is that true well when we get there one day and we're in glory you're going to see multitudes that no man can number but as i see things in the darkness right now it sure seems that so many have turned from him and i come back to the gospel call this morning then for all of us. God so loved the world that He gave a gift, an indescribable gift, His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. I want all of us today, as we go home and we celebrate and we think about what we call Christmas, I want us today to think a lot about what God has truly given us and make sure we're not one of those who has tried to push the Lord out of our lives, who has really bought into the lie of the devil that he's a cruel and hard God when all the while the king came and said, come to me, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That's his gift to you. And so let's start with making sure today in this house that all of us have received the King. And then we can sing joy to the world as we tell the earth to receive her King. Amen. Heavenly Father, we praise you for providing your King to reign in Zion. Giving us a gift that's indescribable. When the sad history of the human race is rejection of you. What a privilege it is to have you over our lives. What a privilege it is that we get to come and bow to the name of Jesus, which every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that he's Lord. And we get to live under your gracious reign where you provide for us, where you love us, where you care for us, you shelter us, you feed us, you nourish us. I mean, we could go right down the line You've been like this to us all our lives. Just let us not be stiff-necked like Israel. And let us see with clarity today how wonderful this gift is. We praise you today for your indescribable gift. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.