The Countdown to Christmas...

As of today, there are only 21 days until Christmas. There are only 21 days left to make sure that all of your Christmas shopping is done. Only 21 days to prepare and plan for the big day that is Christmas Day. But you did not need me to remind you of that reality, did you? No, you did not need me to remind you that there was only 21 days until Christmas, because for the last several months, as a culture, we have been counting down to Christmas.  Since Labor Day weekend, when the first signs of Christmas trees and ornaments began to appear in stores, we have been counting down toward Christmas.

And the closer and closer we get to Christmas, the more we are reminded that Christmas is coming. There are more reminders in the form of Christmas ads on T.V. and radio. There are more reminders from family and friends. All around us, the countdown to Christmas continues to grow and gain momentum. And in the next several weeks, the countdown to Christmas will continue to grow in its frequency and intensity. And as the countdown to Christmas grows and gains momentum our anticipation for Christmas also grows doesn’t it? As the days until Christmas decrease, we find ourselves increasingly looking forward to Christmas Day, don’t we?

However, I want to pause from the growing intensity of this countdown to Christmas. I want us to take a minute to pull away from this countdown in order to ask a simple question. And that question is this: What are we counting down to?  What are we looking forward to this Christmas? What is the countdown to Christmas calling you to?

To ask the question another way, what is the first thing that comes into your mind as you consider the countdown to Christmas? What are the things that you just have to get done in these days leading up to Christmas, if Christmas is going to meet your expectations? What will make this Christmas season a success in your eyes? What would cause you to be disappointed this Christmas season? I mean, so often I hear people say “I just wish I had more time before Christmas arrived?” When it comes to needing more time during the countdown to Christmas, what would you do if you were able to have some more time? 

Now this growing intensity and anticipation that surrounds the countdown the Christmas is not a new phenomenon. The phenomenon that surrounds the countdown to Christmas has been around for centuries. If you happened to grow up in church or have been around church for a while, you are probably somewhat aware of the countdown the Christmas that occurs in church world. We even have a special name that we use to describe the countdown. In church world we refer to the countdown to Christmas as the Advent season. Now the word advent comes from the Latin word adventus which the means coming and refers to a time of waiting and preparing for the celebration of Christmas.

Yet, whether you call it Advent, or the Christmas season, or the holiday season; Whether you are a follower of Jesus; or whether you are here this morning and you don’t buy the whole Jesus, Bible church thing. Whether you are a regular attender of church or whether the only reason that you go to church is because someone agreed to buy you lunch if you came to church with them, we are all counting down to December 25^th.  But what are we counting down to? And what should we be counting down to?

To answer these questions, we are going to spend the countdown to Christmas in a series entitled “The Advent Conspiracy”. During the next four weeks, we are going to discover the answer to the question “what are we counting down to when it comes to Christmas?” During this series we are going to be looking at an account of Jesus life that is recorded for us in our Bibles called the gospel of Luke, which records what happened that first Christmas. As we go through this series, we are going to discover four different ways that we can get off track by focusing on what the culture calls us to when it comes to the countdown to Christmas. And as we go through this series, my hope and my prayer is that God would move in our heads, in our hands, and in our heart, to move us to a place where we are on track by focusing on what God calls us to when it comes to the countdown to Christmas.

Now, maybe you are not sure that you buy the whole Jesus, Bible, church thing and for you it is difficult to understand why followers of Jesus consider Christmas to be such a big deal. To understand why followers of Jesus believe that Christmas is such a big deal, we first need to understand a little bit of history. You see, around 4,000 years ago, God had made a promise to a man named Abraham, who was the person from which the Jewish people and culture descended from, that through one of his descendants all the nations would be blessed.

Then, 1,000 years after God had made His promise to Abraham, God had promised the Jewish nations most famous king, King David, that one of his descendants would be the Messiah. So the Jewish people were looking for the descendant of Abraham, from the line of David that would be the promised Messiah who would bring the Jewish people back to God and back to prominence in the world. The Jewish people were looking forward and counting the days until God would fulfill His promise to humanity. The Jewish people were engaged in a countdown to an unknown date in the future.

Then around 1000 years later, a little over 2,000 years ago, a young Jewish man, named Joseph and his fiancé named Mary, who was pregnant, traveled to Bethlehem in order to participate in a census that required every Jewish family to travel to their ancestral home town to register for the census so that they would be counted for tax purposes. Upon arriving in Bethlehem, Mary went into labor and delivered her first child, a son. But this child was not just any son; this child was the Son of God. This child was the fulfillment of God’s promise.

Tomorrow, we will look at an account of Jesus life called the gospel of Luke, where Luke records for us how God announced the fulfillment of His promise of the Messiah…